Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (33 page)

“Stay with us,” the boy suggested to me. “Why should you leave in the rain?”

The woman laughed when she saw how I blushed.

One morning, at the break of dawn, the enemy attacked and drove us out of our tents. Surprised, we offered weak resistance. We barely managed to gather our weapons and essentials, and fled over the plain in our white undergarments, our arms full of the meager possessions of soldiers. We stopped only when the sun was full and when there was no longer anyone behind us.

The enemy took our positions around the inn. They dug trenches and waited for us each time without fear.

We pushed them back to the bank of the river only seven days later, and occupied the positions around the inn again.

Then two of our soldiers came out of the house; the sudden attack had caught them in the inn, or they had taken shelter there, and they had spent all of the seven harrowing days hiding there, while the enemy roamed in and around the inn. The woman had fed them.

We were grateful to her up until they told us that she had also slept with the enemy soldiers.

There was a silence.

I requested from our commanders that the boy and his blind grandmother be taken in a cart to some neighboring village.

“And mother?” the boy asked.

“She’ll come later.”

They shot her as soon as the cart became a tiny speck on the vast plain.

He must have found out what happened to his mother, and his little song about the attic must have turned more bitter.

I remembered the boy and his fear as I sat in my room and returned in my thoughts to my own childhood.

There had also been an attic in my house. I would sit hunched on an old, discarded saddle, alone in that world of useless objects that lost their original forms and took on new ones according to the time of day and my moods, according to the varying shades of light, which transformed them,
according to the sorrow or happiness within me. Riding out on the saddle to meet the desire for something to happen, something from my hazy childhood visions, which changed without rhyme or reason, unreal, just like the objects in the half-darkness of the attic.

That attic helped form me, as had innumerable other places and circumstances, encounters, and people. I developed in thousands of changes, and it always seemed to me that all of my former self disappeared with each new change, that it was lost in the mists of time that had passed and were now insignificant. But then, again and again, unexpectedly, I would find traces of everything that had been, like uncovered artifacts, like my own fossil strata; although they were old and unsightly, they became dear and beautiful. That rediscovered, recovered part of me, which was more than a memory, was beautified and returned from unreachable distances by time, which joined me with it. Thus, it had a twofold existence, as a part of my present personality, and as a memory. As the present, and as a beginning.

In that attic, learning about myself, where I sought solitude and a refuge from the open expanses of my homeland (though I loved it more than my own mother), I often thought about the golden bird of my grandmother’s tales. I did not know what that golden bird was, but as I listened to the rain falling down on the shingle roof and the open shutters banging in the wind, as innumerable eyes peered from the corners, I would imagine finding my own golden bird, like the hero from my grandmother’s sparkling tales, knowing that thus, in some strange, inexplicable fashion, happiness is achieved.

Later I forgot about that bird, which was conceived in inexperience. Life dispersed the daydreams of youth, which were possible in fiery, unhindered imagination, in the freedom of endless wishing. But it appeared again, as if to mock me, when I felt the worst.

Once upon a time there was a boy, in his father’s house,
above a river, who dreamed golden dreams, because he knew nothing about life.

And there was another boy, in an inn, on a plain, who thought about the golden bird. They murdered his mother—she was a sinner—and drove him out into the world.

We were four brothers, and each of us sought his golden bird of happiness. One died in war, one of consumption, one was murdered in the fortress. I am no longer searching for mine.

Where are the golden birds of human dreams? Which countless seas and rugged mountains does one have to cross to reach them? Does this profound desire of childish irrationality appear for sure only as a sad sign embroidered on kerchiefs and morocco bindings of useless books?

I tried to read Abu Faraj, I forced myself, with little desire to do so, without any inner need. I wanted to hear someone else’s thoughts, and not just my own.

I opened the book, picking a passage at random, and came across a tale about Alexander the Great. The emperor, as the story went, received as a gift some wondrous glass dishes. He liked the gifts very much, but smashed them all nonetheless. “Why? Are they not beautiful?” he was asked. “Precisely because of that,” he answered. “They are so beautiful that it would be hard for me to lose them. And with time they would break, one by one. And I would be sorrier than I am now.”

The tale was naive but it still astonished me. Its lesson was bitter: one should renounce everything he might ever begin to love, because loss and disappointment are inevitable. We must renounce love in order not to lose it. We must destroy our love so that it will not be destroyed by others. We must renounce every attachment, because of the possibility of regret.

This thought is cruelly hopeless. We cannot destroy everything we love; there will always be the possibility that others will destroy it for us.

Why are books considered to be clever if they are bitter?

No one’s wisdom could have helped me. I wanted rather to return to my beginnings. I did that without effort or compulsion. I was not searching for anything; it sought and found itself on its own.

It rained for days on end; the rain drummed maliciously on the tiles of the tekke’s old roof. The horizon was dark, unclear. In the attic above my head invisible feet scurried back and forth. There was a beam that hit you in the head, a wind that banged the shutters, and a mouse that peered from the corner. There was a childhood that watched from the darkness with sad eyes.

For a moment I succeeded in thinking like that distant, lonely boy, to feel his feelings and to fear his fears. Everything was a beautiful secret; everything had only a future or endless duration; everything was surrounded by vibrant reflections, profound happiness or profound sorrow. These were not events, but moods: sometimes they came on their own, like a breeze, like quiet twilight, like an indistinct glittering, like intoxication. Or disjointed images appeared—faces that in a split second flared in the darkness, someone’s laughter on a sunny morning, the moon’s reflection on a quiet river, a knotty tree at a bend in the road. I did not even sense that those particles of my earlier life existed within me, nor did I know why they lingered for so long. Was it possible that at one time they had meant a lot to me (that was why they had been ingrained in my memory), but were later put aside, like old toys? I had forgotten about my former self, sunken in time; now broken remnants and wreckage were floating to the surface.

I was all of that, fragmented, consisting entirely of pieces, reflections and shimmers. I consisted entirely of accidents, unknown reasons, of a purpose that had existed and been put aside. And now I no longer knew what I was in that chaos.

I began to resemble a sleepwalker.

I sat up late at night, motionless, with a candle lit on each
side of the room, to eliminate the darkness. Calm, quiet, like the night around me, like the world at night, I watched the black windowpane that separated me from the darkness, and the gray walls that separated me from everything, not daring to look anywhere else, as if the walls would split asunder during a single short moment of inattention. Without getting up, without moving from the corner where I sat, so that I had the entire room in front of me, I listened to the driving rain, the gurgling of the flooded wooden gutter, the pigeons scratching with their legs and their sleepy cooing. And all those silent noises became part of a night that would not pass, part of a world that was not alive.

I was no longer looking for reasons, for a whole, for uninterrupted continuities.

At the end of everything that I had been trying to determine, to link, and give a sense to, there was a long, black night, and waters that were constantly rising.

And the boy from the plain was also there, like a painful symbol.

I had found him later and taken him into the madrasah and into the tekke. We barely recognized each other; our souls had changed so much.

His grandmother had died and he was alone in the world. He was a shepherd in the village where they had left him, an orphan whose mother had perished in the war, leaving her dubious merits in his memory. And a black burden in his soul.

He resembled a marsh flower transplanted into hills, a grasshopper whose wings had been torn off by children. He resembled a boy from the plain whose freedom from care had been taken away by people. Everything was his, his face, his body, and his voice, but it was not him.

I will never forget how he sat facing me, on a rock, lifeless, dumb, distant, without a trace of the birdlike joy that had once radiated from him, without sorrow even, without anything, shattered. You’ll be with me, I’ll take care of you,
you’ll go to school, I said, although I wanted to shout: Laugh, run after a butterfly, speak of the pigeon that flutters over your dreams. But he never spoke about anything again.

Now, while it rained, while in the emptiness that had opened up in front of me I clutched like a drowning man at my childhood, at my books, at phantoms, he would enter my room quietly. Sometimes I even caught him in front of the door, when it seemed to me that the silence had changed.

He would stand by the wall, speechless.

“Sit, Mullah-Yusuf.”

“That’s all right.”

“What do you want?”

“Do you need me to copy something?”

“No.”

He would stay a little longer. We did not know how to talk, it was awkward for both of us, and he would leave without a word.

I am not really sure what it was that came between us, which bonds still tied us together, and which painful tensions kept us apart. I had loved him once, and he had loved me, but now we looked at each other with lifeless eyes. What tied us to each other was the plain, before the tragedy, and the joy that had shone on that time like sunlight. And yet we continually reminded each other that joy can never last for very long.

He never spoke about his childhood, the plain, or the inn, but whenever he looked at me I thought I saw the memory of his mother’s death in his eyes. As if I had been inseparably linked with his most painful recollection. Maybe he had forgotten what actually happened, and thought that I was guilty as well, since I was no different from the others. Once I tried to explain to him, but he interrupted me, frightened: “I know.”

He did not allow anyone to approach that forbidden part of him, or to disturb the gloomy order that he had created within himself. And so, we drifted farther and farther apart,
secretly resentful; he because of his suspicion, rancor, and misfortune, and I because of his ingratitude.

Hassan made up with his father. He spoke jokingly of how he had gained a guardian, a mother-in-law, and a spoiled child all in the same man, but he gushed with joy. He made an agreement with his father to turn both of their portions of the estate into a
wakf,*
for the salvation of their souls and for their memory, for the benefit of poor people and the homeless. He ran around all day long, taking care of business concerning the contract and legal documents, looking for a man suitable to be caretaker, someone honest, intelligent, and skillful. If there is such a man, he said laughing. I was not sure whether he was happier that he had made up with his father or that such an estate had slipped through the fingers of his brother-in-law, Aini-effendi. “If his heart doesn’t burst,” he would say cheerfully, “then it’s made of stone.”

He bought the copy of the Koran that Mullah-Yusuf had been working on, as a gift for his father. Yusuf did not want to take any money, but Hassan’s reasons were convincing:

“One doesn’t give away two years of work easily.”

“What’ll I do with the money?”

“Give it to someone who needs it.”

He marveled at Yusuf’s Koran: “He’s an artist, Sheikh- Ahmed, but you keep silent and hide him; you’re afraid that they might take him away from you. He reminds me of the famous Muberid.
³
Maybe his work is even more beautiful. More passionate, more sincere. Have you heard about Muberid, Mullah-Yusuf?”

“No.”

“He became rich and respected with the same talent that you have. And no one in our kasaba has ever heard about you. Not even those who come to the tekke. Our people take their talents to Constantinople or Egypt, and others bring us back stories about them. We don’t know how to do anything, we don’t care, or we don’t trust ourselves.”

“Glory in this place is modest, no matter what the reason,” I said, refusing to submit to his reproach. “I wanted to send him to Constantinople, but he didn’t agree.”

The young man became flustered, as he had the first time, but with less fear than before.

“I do it for myself,” he said softly. “And I didn’t even wonder whether it’s any good or not.”

Hassan laughed: “If your words are sincere, I should stand up in your honor.”

He watched the youth as he walked away, flustered by this praise.

“There are still shy and sensitive men in the world, my friend. Don’t you think it’s strange?”

“They’ll always be around.”

“Thank God. There are too many of us who don’t even know what that is anymore. We should preserve such people, as seeds. It seems that you’re not very interested in him,” he added unexpectedly.

“He’s quiet, closed.”

“Shy, quiet, closed. May Allah help him.”

“Why?”

“Your dervish trade is strange. You sell words, which people buy out of fear or habit. He doesn’t want to, or doesn’t know how to sell words. He can’t even sell silence. Or talent. And he doesn’t care about success. What, then, does he care about?”