Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (6 page)

The moonlight shone frail and silken, and the tombstones in the graveyards gleamed warmly white. Broken night whispered between the houses as young people moved excitedly in the streets and courtyards. Giggling, a distant song, and murmurs were heard, and it seemed that on this Saint George’s Eve the whole kasaba trembled in fever. Suddenly, for no reason, I felt separated from all of it. Fear crept into me unnoticed, and everything around me began to acquire strange proportions—the people and their movements, the kasaba itself no longer seemed familiar. I had never seen them like this before, I had not known that the world could become so disfigured in a day, in an hour, in a moment—as if some demon’s blood had begun to boil and no one could calm it. I saw townspeople in couples, heard them, they were behind every fence, every gate, every wall. Their laughter, talk, and glances were not like on other days; their voices were muffled and heavy. A scream cut through the darkness, like lightning in an impending storm. The air was permeated with sin, the night full of it. On this night witches would fly cackling above rooftops wet with the milk of the moonlight, and no one would retain his senses. People would burn with passion and fury, with madness and the need to destroy themselves, all of them in a single moment—where would I turn then? I would have to pray, to seek mercy from God for all of those sinners, or for punishment, to bring them to their senses. Anger came over me like a fit of fever. Is everything we do really useless? Is the word of God that we preach made of mute clay, or are their ears simply deaf to it? Is the true faith in them so weak, like a rotted fence trampled under a stampede of wild passions?

From behind the fences one could hear the torrid voices of girls who were putting lovage
²
and red-colored eggs in cauldrons full of water, so they could wash themselves at the break of dawn. They believed in the spells of flowers and the night, like savages.

Shame on you, I said to those behind the wooden fence,
shame on you. In whose faith do you believe? To which devils are you surrendering yourselves?

It would have been useless to do or say anything that night, a night more frenzied than others. At midnight those girls would go to water mills and bathe naked in the mist sprayed by the water-wheels. At that time devils would rise up from their lairs, and their hairy hands would slap the girls on their wet thighs, which gleamed in the moonlight.

Go home, I said to the unruly young men who were approaching. Tomorrow is Saint George’s Day, an infidel holiday, it is not ours. Do not commit sin!

But it was all the same to them, all the same to the kasaba, no one could take this night away from them.

There was an old right to sin on the eve of Saint George’s Day. They kept it without regard to the faith, even in spite of it. They defiled themselves during these twenty-four hours full of the lustful scent of lovage and love, of lovage that smells sinfully of women and love that smells of the lovage of women’s thighs. In this span of day and night sin spewed from the sealed bellows of desire, lavishly, as if spilled from a giant bucket. A strange, ancient time is lumbering behind us, stronger than we are, showing itself in a rebellion of the body, which, although short-lived, is remembered until the following rebellion, thus perpetuating itself. Everything else is an illusion, everything else that might occur between these primal victories of sin. But the trouble is not so much in lustfulness as it is in this foreign evil that has lasted for ages, stronger than the true faith. What have we done, what have we achieved, what have we torn down, and what have we built? Are we not struggling in vain against these instincts, which are stronger than anything offered by reason? Are the things that we promise in exchange for an earthly, primal rampage not too arid and unattractive? How can we resist the allure of these ancient calls? Will our distant, savage ancestors vanquish us and return us to their age? I wanted nothing more than for my
apprehension to be worse than the truth, but I was afraid that the vision of my anguished soul was clearer than that of my brothers, who were more concerned with this world than with the other. I accuse no one, O Lord, you know everything. Be merciful to me, to them, and to all sinners.

I remembered that night. Even if nothing else had happened, I would have remembered it for the heat with which it choked me and for the emptiness that the passion of these people carved inside me. But it was God’s will that this night should be different from others, that on this night some event would split my life in two, as at a carefully prearranged meeting, and that it would separate me from all I had been for forty peaceful years.

I made my way back to the tekke, lost in thought, dejected. Perhaps I was the only unhappy man in the kasaba that night, exhausted by the turmoil of those altered streets, by the subdued moonlight, by fears that had been revived without reason, by an uncertainty the world had thrust upon me. It was as if I were passing between burning houses, and the quiet, sleepy tekke appeared like a desired refuge, whose massive walls would return me to a silence that I needed and to a peace that would not fill me with disgust. I would recite the
yasin,*
and that prayer would calm my shivering soul, which was suffering more than was pleasing to God. For a true believer must never fall into despair and faintheartedness. But I, a sinner, was so fainthearted that I kept forgetting the cause for distress that I had discovered on the way back, and had to invoke it with a conscious effort, so that my anxiety would have something to hold onto. I wanted stubborn, heathen sin to be the single cause of my distress, so I could leave any others in the darkness.

I did not need to chase witches through the streets that night, I did not care about the sins of others. I had wanted to turn my thoughts from my brother and from the temptation that had been put before me. But all I accomplished was to come back anxious and bitter.

On other nights I would often stand in the moonlight above the river, letting vague desires and the quiet flickers of my memory overcome me. I knew when that was allowed to me—whenever I felt a serene calm that did not portend a storm. But when I sensed even a hint of commotion, I would confine myself to the four walls of my room and force myself to follow the hard, familiar path of prayer. There is something intimately protective in it, as there is in old heirlooms that become a harmless part of our very selves. Those prayers are a recognized and accepted solace; they soothe and deaden any dangerous thoughts that might emerge in us against our will. We trust them unquestioningly, and place our weakness under the protection of their ancient strength. Thus we belittle our human worries and nightmares through the habit of measuring them against eternity, and by putting them into such an inferior position we reduce them to insignificant proportions.

That night I could not stay in the garden. I needed to isolate myself, to forget, but everything rose up there, like a challenge. The moonlight was chilling, and seemed to reek of sulphur. The scent of flowers was too strong, irritating. They should have been torn out and trampled down, so that only thistle and barren ground would remain, a graveyard without any markers, which would not remind anyone of anything, so that an abstract human thought would be all that was left, lacking images and scents, lacking any connection to the things around us. Even the river should have been stopped so that its scornful gurgling would cease, and the birds in the treetops and under the eaves should have had their necks wrung, so that their senseless twittering would end. All the water mills where the naked girls bathed should have been torn down, all the streets closed, and the gates nailed shut, all life silenced by force, to prevent evil from sprouting.

O God, bring me to my senses.

I had never thought about people and life with such
senseless fury. I became frightened. Where did the wish to annihilate everything come from?

I wanted to go into my room, I had to, but I lacked the strength to do so. The night, which I hated, was stronger than I, and held me back with a strange power. Yet when I surrendered I felt that it calmed me. It overcame me with the mild violence of its soft sounds, drowsy and important only to themselves, with a shimmering darkness that quivered in barely perceptible motions, with its strange shadows and forms, with scents that penetrated deep into my blood and became a part of myself. Everything smelled of a life that is woven out of little voices and movements into something powerful, more powerful than anything I might have wished for. It was inseparable from me, the same as my very self, which was still undiscovered and yet desirous of discovery. I forgot that the moonlight had been so chilling a moment before, and how it had reeked of sulphur. That had merely been my fear of it. Now the fear was gone, and there was a peaceful light above me and the world, a trace of something in me, of something that might have been and had been, something that would be if I continued in this empty state, with neither defense nor protection since the floodgate of my habits, consciousness, and will had been opened. Or else unknown desires would burst out of the dark cellars of my blood. It would be too late when they came out; I would no longer be able to believe that they had died or been tamed, and I would never again be what I had been. And it seemed to me that I did not have the power to hold those desires back, to return them to their dark confinement. I did not even want that. Their true nature was not clear to me, I knew only that they were very powerful. They were certainly not innocent, or they would not have gone into hiding.

In that moment of weakness and expectation, which I wished would last longer, God saved me from near destruction. I say God, because chance could never have been so
punctual, so calculatedly attentive as to come exactly in the elusively small span of time when those unknown forces began to grow—unknown and still unillumined by my inner light, but already massing and half-free. Afterward, as I spoke with
Mullah*
-Yusuf, I was glad they had not broken away, although I was sorry that I had not been able to see their essence. For that reason I was shaken inside. But I had learned to conceal myself in front of others.

He approached quietly, I heard him only when the gravel crunched beneath his cautious feet and his hushed breath singed my skin. I knew who it was immediately, without even turning around, since no one else could step so silently. He had adopted a cautious gait too early in life.

“Have I disturbed you in your meditation?”

“No.”

Even his voice was quiet and disguised, although clumsily—birds still sang in it. His eyes also betrayed him, bright and restless as they were.

I asked him nothing, he needed to tell it himself. He had agreed not to keep any personal secrets other than those that no man could learn. The order of the tekke was strict, and I would have remembered it if he did not say where he had been for so long.

“I was in the Sinan Tekke.
³
Abdullah-effendi was discussing cognition.”

“Abdullah-effendi is a mystic. He belongs to the Bayramiyya order.”
⁴

“I know.”

“What did he say?”

“He spoke about cognition.”

“Is that all you know? Don’t you remember anything?”

“I remember the verses he interpreted.”

“Whose verses?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me hear.”

“Ahriman
⁵
knows not

The secret of God’s unity.

Ask Asaf,
⁶
he knows.

Can a sparrow swallow the mouthful of the Anka-bird?
⁷

‘Can a single jug take in

The waters of a great sea?’”

“Those are the verses of Ibn Arabi.
⁸
They say that the perception of God’s wisdom is possible only for the chosen, only for a few.”

“And what remains for us?”

“To comprehend what we can. If a sparrow cannot swallow the mouthful of the Anka-bird, it will still eat as much as it can. You cannot scoop up the whole sea with a jug, but whatever you scoop up is also the sea.”

I began my fickle refutation of Ibn Arabi’s mysticism hastily, passionately, and with pleasure, realizing maybe for the first time that the heavens and the secrets of the universe, that the secrets of death and existence were the most convenient region into which one could escape from the cares of this world. If they did not exist, one would need to invent them as a refuge.

But this young man was not a suitable interlocutor. People in fact talk most often for their own sake, and with a need to hear the echo of their words. And he stood before me, with his face illuminated by the moonlight so clearly that its every feature was visible. He stood obediently, he could not leave until I released him, but his thoughts left without him, only God knew where to or how far away. I could not hold them back, and they left his body there to express the due obedience with its empty presence. Verses and mysticism and cognition were so far from his thoughts and from the capability of his understanding that he surely listened with his eyes only, watching the movements of my lips. It would have made more sense for me to shout words into an empty well, at least then their echo would have come back. He did not even try to understand. He had not listened to verses in the Sinan Tekke for very long.

He was inexperienced. He exposed himself to the moonlight; he still did not know how to hide himself with darkness and feigned expressions. His eyes were wide open, as if he were listening, but the gleam of something he had seen earlier bore witness against him, said that he was not listening to me, betrayed him. What was in them? What image or recollection, what word still resounded, what sleepy memory, what sin? The pallor of the moonlight had not extinguished the healthy color of his cheeks, which were shaded by the manly features of a young peasant, ripe for marriage, and by the strength of his robust blood. What did he seek in the silence of this holy place, in the hard shackles of a dervish order? He was of this world, of this Saint George’s Eve, of this illuminated, tepid darkness, which summons us to sin. The scent of lovage was on him; he brought it on his hands, in his breath, he was pervaded by the spell of the intoxicated streets. He had heard the capercaillie’s mating call, and had been deafened by it. Maybe the pulse of another young body’s blood still beat in his numb palm. A flame, barely controlled, shot out of the ovals of his eyes. He had been defiled by this pagan night, soiled, singed, illuminated, purged. On this evening he should have been put under seven locks, so he would not be consumed by his own flame or the flames of others. The silence and solitude of the tekke would suffocate him; why did he not return into the night and remain what he was? It would be hard for him to wait out the distant dawn; this evening was filled with the scent of lovage; something was happening, something was terrible. The moon would not set for long; under the water mills and yew trees sparkling droplets of water would fly through the thick light, which was full of intoxicating shadows. The moon would shine all night long, the moon would beckon all night long. I needed to leave with him, or alone, to leave and wander, to leave and never come back, to leave and die, to leave and live, on this night that remained even as all else was lost.