One bleak, bloodclotted early morning, at the hour when the grey threat of dawn drenches the world in the ghostlike eeriness that lies between sleeping and waking, I saw myself in a dream, dead and naked, wrapped in a white funeral shroud, my memory travelling for the last time along the paths on which a long and merciless life had taken me.

And there, my departed consciousness crystallizing into a moment of supreme pain, I found myself at a street market in The Hague. The city, enfolded in Shukriya's shadow and borne by it entirely, was a life-like mirage of the city I had known twenty five years ago, and I was walking through the Schilderswijk up to Hobbemaplein, where this great and sacred woman had lived. My heart had recognised in her its guide. I had become her disciple the instant our eyes met. This heart of mine, guided by the strange destiny God decrees for the believers, had located and revealed her in her occultation and our love for each other was the greatest achievement of our faith. If ever I have met a person whose manner and personality resembled that of the prophet, it was this woman, and it was for this reason that the last expression of my existence, or rather the last memory of it, would bring me back to that far-off corner of the world where we had met. But since she and I were an inseparable whole, there was no need for searching, nor was there a need for reunion, since we had never and could not possibly have been separated. The world before her and after her was an illusion. She was my moment in it, the only moment that could have any meaning, the prism through which I perceived reality.

Yet, here I was, Majnoun following Leila's caravan, from one world into the other, from East to South, from South to West. 

Walking the streets, my eyes fell on a woman in her thirties who was selling fish. Her features seemed ageless and exhibited an odd mixture of stern concentration and vacantness. Busily listening and responding to customers' demands, she took their money, wrapped the fish in shreds of old newspapers and handed them their change, addressing them when necessary in a heavily-accented, austere Dutch. I would not have noticed her but for the surprising jungle-red dye of her nails, which seemed strangely out of place in this environment, but even more so it seemed out of character in a woman of her disposition. This made me cast a searching glance at her face, which was framed by a coarse, peasant-like scarf. Unexpectedly, she caught my look and held it, with an intense and startled expression. Her face, her eyes, her movements betrayed a vanquished beauty, which once, not too long ago, must have been remarkable. 

Its traces were still alive, like in a faded painting, and their echo would probably endure until the end of her days but its essence had surrendered itself to the blunt, resilient bleakness characteristic of a life spent surviving.

Survival kills. It saps one's energy and leaves you with nothing. Looking at her at the moment I did, I was happy that all that lay behind me. But there was something in her gaze that took me back to another place, another time again, when I was young and not dead at all. The baffling thing was that she seemed to understand, to follow the train of my thoughts, that it seemed to be the same with her. 

Unsmiling but with infinite tenderness ('Tenderness', I marveled, but yes, it was unmistakeably that), she looked up, her lips half-parted, and she said the most improbable thing: Kan ya makan fi qaddim az-zaman - there was and there wasn't a place in times of yore... Her accent and the cadences of her voice sounded intimately familiar.

"Habiba?"

She replied with a characteristic nod of her head that resembled the gesture of a Japanese bow. "Who else..."

Habiba had been the girl betrothed to me in accordance with the old custom that was followed in the days of our youth. From the time she was a girl I had been her destiny, and she was trained for the purpose of being my wife. 

Travel and committment to ideas that could not but cast customs such as this into doubt (the old story) had estranged me from her, despite the presence of an extraordinary element within the ordinary traditional framework of this arrangement, which was the degree to which this young girl had transcended her conditions in the relentless pursuit of a knowledge that would emancipate her, a ploy to which I was an essential accessory, and the existence of an understanding established through the continual exchange of secret messages. 

What had caused our breakup was a postal error, a misdelivered letter sent during my sojourn in The Hague, in which the time and details of our future marriage were discussed. The letter never reached its intended recipient, who was therefore unable to respond to the questions raised, which I readily interpreted as a change of mind on the part of the bridal party, while she, expecting such a letter at the appointed time, was quick to attribute its absence to a failed delivery. The miscommunication that ensued, however, had opened up a rift between us that resulted in the parting of our ways because it had revealed the hidden currents of our minds. Resisting all attempts at reconciliation which her people undertook on various occasions, Habiba had withdrawn her presence from my life with a fierceness that surprised everyone, taking our secret letters with her in a final, irredeemable gesture of disowning our bond. 

 

"What are you doing here?", I asked her.

"I'm selling fish", she replied.

"Fish..."

'Wallahi", she confirmed, emphasising the obvious.

"And have you been doing this", I asked, "for long?"

"For as long as you remember."

The strangeness of the statement made me repeat it. 

To this she nodded with that gesture of hers.

"I'm a salesgirl, as you perhaps remember. I used to sell oranges back home."

"How could I not remember!"

"Well, she said, "when I came here, I changed my line and went into selling fish, for this is a country built on water, and already the water is beginning to demand its return."

"All life on Earth is built on water", I replied, "Water accounts for 60% of our bodies, and the movement of life is from the water to the land, and back and forth in eternal cycles of cause and effect."

"Perhaps that is what makes life so fluid", she said. "Ah yes", she went on, "I learnt all these things in the courses I took. There was a time when I was tireless in my pursuit of knowledge."

"To which I am a witness", I interjected, for this was the quality I had admired most in her.

"I didn't do badly then, did I?", she said with a fleeting smile which brought back for a moment the Habiba I had known.

"Back in the days I thought that knowledge would open the world for me", she continued, "But my pursuit of it lost its meaning when I lost you. I had forgotten my station, you see. I was an orange seller, daughter of an orange seller. The ease with which you abandoned me, and the reason why you did so, brought it all back to me."

"I have wronged you, Habiba, I know. All my life I have been tormented by the realisation of it."

"No, Sheikh", she replied mildly, "May I still call you Sheikh as we did back then? To us, you were the Sheikh, and to me, a girl with an unsophisticated mind as I was, and this you know only too well, for this was the part of me you objected to, you were love. No. You didn't wrong me. You merely couldn't bring yourself to believe in me. But you did all you could. When my girlish heart drove me back to your house, you were already married, and you didn't hesitate to offer me your hand in marriage again as a second wife, to honour the promise we had given each other. It was my fault. I had not become who I was, or who I then believe myself to be, to become your second wife. That's all. Blame me for it, please, and don't go on blaming yourself. You always did what you had to do. It was the fate Allah had decreed."

"You don't mean that", I said.

"No", she replied, "I don't."

Jungle-red were her nails. Her eyes were candles half-consumed. Her hands, lithe, solid and efficient, as the were diving into the fish like the slim beaks of seagulls, were the most eloquent part of her.

I wondered how much effort must go into removing the nail paint every evening so as to keep her prayers valid.

"What is it that brought you here?", I asked again.

"Death", she replied with a smile. "It may take you take you by surprise, but I too am dead."

"How did you die?", I enquired.

"By drowning."

"Well", she explained, "when I parted ways with you, I went back into selling oranges, and eventually I got married to someone who was no better and no worse than others, for that is every orange seller's fate. He too had his crazy dreams. He believed that selling fish in Holland one could make a better living than selling oranges back home. He had nothing much to build on but he thought that once we had crossed the sea everything would magically fall into place, and so he borrowed money from every corner to get us on a boat, hoping one day to be able to pay it back. I didn't believe in all that, for I had already tasted the realities of life, which had given me a more realistic take on things. I dare say I knew we were headed for failure - but he was my husband, and I had to go along with his plans. Our boat capsized a few kilometres ahead of the shore and we drowned, in international waters if my estimation isn't mistaken. The boat was a ragged little thing, calculated to drown, and hardly able to support the load of all the misery it carried. Drowning is better for business than us making it to the shore. It absolves the connection people of all responsibilities. It was a senseless way to die. It was a death guided by despair, for you cannot make a dream real by simply ignoring the facts of life. But my husband's fate must become mine, and so I am here selling fish in wistful remembrance of the times when I was selling oranges back home."

"Your story makes it all worse", I exclaimed, covering my face with my palm.

"One does not grieve the dead", she replied, "Let me assure you again, you are not to be blamed. For if things had been different, how could you have met Shukriya? How could your life have found its meaning in the truth she imparted to you, and which I couldn't have taught you, however much I had wished I could? But do tell me about her, let me be, if it isn't asking too much, a witness to the essence of your soul and a compassionate mirror of its pain, even if -forgive me!- I cannot make you a witness to mine."

"In life, you would have cut my throat rather than allow me to speak to you of another woman."

At this, she broke into a smile for the first time. "I can't have been as bad as that! But what was I then but a young female orange seller in love...", and she recited the words of Farokhzad's poem:

 

I don't repent.

Darling, speak to me

of another me

with the same lovesick eyes

whom you'll find again in the

cold streets of night.

And think of me in her sad

kiss

on the sweet lines beneath

your eyes.

 

"It may be held against me", I said, "that I have fallen in love with my spiritual guide."

"No", objected Habiba, "do not repent! For this is what the poem says. Repentance would belittle your feelings. It would belie the meaning of all that passed between you and her. It would turn the reality of both you and her upside down. The moment when you forced her to confess her feelings. The letters written in blood. Her tears on receiving them. Her pleas that there was nothing to prove, for she knew. Repentance would kill all that. It would stain the sanctity of this love."

"A love I had to abandon in order to protect her, and her children. The formalities of her talaq had not been completed, the last repetition of the formula had not been spoken, and when the day they were meant to be her husband made amends and claimed her back, announcing his imminent return to their home, there was nothing to be done about it. This suddenly rendered our love illegitimate. But, well, perhaps not suddenly. I wasn't within my right to have claimed the heart of a woman whose talaq had not been completed, and after that the nine months of 'iddah. I had endangered her without justification", I sighed.

"Ah", Habiba shook her head, "lives there a man or a woman who could hope to pass Judgement on the strength of their merits? What would happen to someone who sought to justify himself? That you know well, oh Sheikh, or would you claim not to know? Perfection lies in that which is beyond justification, beyond approval and beyond condemnation. You loved. And so did she. How many people can say that of themselves?"

"Yet, I fear for her, and I have feared for her all my life, for there were witnesses to our attachment, and her children will have missed me and asked questions that would give us away."

"The attachment between teacher and disciple is always deep. It naturally expresses itself in metaphors of love. And since you were both to each other, how much deeper must your attachment have been. That would surprise no one."

"Yes, Habiba", I said, "like your attachment to me..."

"Let us leave that aside", she replied.

"But there is that uncertainty, which never lets go of me ---" I looked to the ground. 

"Life, my lost Sheikh, my lost love", sighed Habiba, "is always uncertain." "You are a polished jewel," she said with involuntary warmth, out of memory or out of compassion, "and your brilliance will always touch my heart. But it cuts deep when it touches, and it offers no redemption from itself or its scars. You got to live with it, and so do we who are its victims."

 

Back in the days, during my first weeks in The Hague, when I had only just arrived to the Netherlands in order to work with an international company there, I was looking for the nearest mosque to attend the Friday prayer. Not knowing the way, I asked the first person who was recongisable as a Muslim for directions, and that person happened to be a graceful woman in hijab, tastefully complemented with an elegantly cut long dress, who, at first glance, I took to be Sudanese, and it was Shukriya. She said that though the place wasn't far, it would be hard to explain the somewhat complex route I had to take from here, for which reason it would seem more helpful to take me there in person. We would have to get the tram and travel a few stops, she explained, and so we went to the tram station across the road. I thanked her profoundly for her kindness and expressed my regret for the inconvenience I must be causing her in making such claims on her time. She shook her head, saying: "Al Muslim akhu-l-Muslim. We are brother and sister in faith. As it has pleased God to lead you to me in your search for a house of worship, it is my privilege to guide you there. It's a blessing."

Though this was by no means an unexpected reaction, the easy kindness of her manner touched my heart like the warm ray of a light I had never quite seen or felt in such stark purity, or received with such comfort. 

When the tram arrived, there was only one free seat, which she invited me to take. I in turn urged her to take the seat herself instead, which she firmly refused. 

"Bismillah", I repeated my invitation with renewed emphasis. Again, she objected.

"By Allah: how could I be seated when my kind sister is standing?!", I insisted. 

"Allah is my witness that I will not be seated while my brother is standing", she replied. 

Since all persuasion failed, we both remained standing. 

At the next stop one of the passengers who had occupied the seat next to the empty one got out and we both sat down with a smile. 

In a curious way, we were both struck by the impression (it would seem to me, in fact, to be more correct to say the realisation) that we were no strangers to each other, and indeed our conversation flowed as if we had known all our lives, for there was between us the ease of recognition which exists between kindred spirits, or between people whose paths Providence has inextricably linked. 

After a few stops, we had reached our destination. She led me to the mosque, and we went inside to attend the Friday prayer. From that moment on, each was a permanent presence in the other's life. 

Do not ask me how it is possible that two lives merge in this way at the first moment of their encounter, and the one a woman and the other a man. For all laws apply only within the relativity of their own respective setting, and I have no answer other than the one I have given. Faith and custom induced no reservedness in us but brought us closer, aiding our mutual recognition. 

 

          My mind went back to the evening that separated me from Shukriya, like a sharp            

         and lethal cut. I had spent the night over a late meal in the company of Elena at the 

         Öz Aydınlar.

Elena, wayward daughter of a famous rabbi from Crimea and early precursor of the reconstructionist school, was my closest friend during the years I spent in the Netherlands. Many a night had been passed in timeless, meditative conversation over kebabs with pilaf, tobacco and sweet aromatic tea at places like this. Conversations only she and I could have had, for no other two people, it seems to me, have ever had as deep a knowledge of each other as had Elena and I. 

The Öz Aydınlar was a favourite haunt of mine, a coffee shop cum restaurant run by Kurds from Turkey and Iraq. 

Elena, with a strong Orientalist streak to her personality, was naturally at home in surroundings such as this and with people such as me. The absence of physical attraction between us gave our friendship a depth that was nourished by the natural affinity between the female and the male without compromising it, and hence a profundity of mutual recognition that excluded any form of pretence, insincerity or cautious personal distance. We were the guardians of each other's secrets, and smoking and talking, we held each other's gaze without embarrassment. 

No other man and no other woman may ever have shared such confidences as were shared between us in those days.

"You and Shukriya -- ", she said, "it seems inconceivable that you should be separated. If ever there were two people born for each other, it is you and her. If you were Rumi, she would be Shams of Tebriz; if you were Shlomo, she would be Shulamit - the Song of Songs: that's you and her."

I nodded quietly, my eyes closed in pain. "Yes."

She too knew Shukriya. It was through me they had met, and Elena too had been captivated by the charisma of her warm and radiant personality, with its unique blend of natural modesty and unassailable, confident strength. To be free is to be like her. And to have her peculiar, unquestionable freedom is to be sovereign in the true st sense of the word. The fascination she exercised on us both lay not least in this realisation. For freedom, in its core, seems so very difficult to define. To Elena, freedom as a woman meant the sovereignty that lies, to her, in being able to separate physical involvement from emotional commitment, and to me it meant solitude, and to us both, in this way, it meant independence. But Shukriya, who was inherently free, gave the concept much deeper reality. 

 

One evening, on one of those visits to her house that had become a fixture in my life at this time to eventually become my central memory of life itself, I found her speaking on the phone. Her mother had left with the children to buy a few necessities for the upcoming weekend, and Shukriya, on hearing the bell ring in the way that signalled my visit, for I used a particular pattern to identify myself, quickly put down the receiver, opened the door and as quickly resumed her conversation on the telephone. Hearing the echo of a male voice from the other end of the line, I shot a suspicious look at her, which she comfortably ignored. She was speaking in her native tongue, which I could not very well understand, and as the conversation dragged on, my distrust turned into a jealous rage. My gaze was locked on her. Her refusing to be intimidated only increased my anger. When she finally said her salams and hung up, I addressed her in an icy voice: "Who are you talking to?"

"At this moment", she replied, "I am talking to you. But I am wondering whether you will have the kindness to greet me first, as you have entered my home."

"I am asking you a question", I replied coldly. 

"Very well", she smiled, "so the greeting will fall to me." "As-salamu 'alaikum", she said with a polite little bow.

"Who were you talking to?!", I demanded, my voice rising.

"Have you then not come in peace?", asked Shukriya.

"Who?", I shouted again.

With a regretful shrug she said: "Ah, truly, today you haven't come in peace. You have come to my house only to ask me this remarkable question. Is that all?"

There was no irony in her tone. Her questions and statements were spoken in a calm, clinical manner. 

"Will you answer my question?", I demanded.

"Though I am under no obligation to, I have no objection to doing so. Only, how can I have a conversation with one who intrudes on me without offering a salam? Entering someone's home without a salam is an act of aggression. Perhaps I ought to get ready to defend myself?"

"As-salam 'alaikum", I conceded.

"Wa 'alaikum as-salam wa rahmatu-llah", she smiled, "Ahlan wa sahlan!"

"Thank you", I replied, "may I now address my question to you?"

'Very well", she said, "But may I also point out to you that you are asking a question you have no right to ask. I'm no child. I'm no daughter of yours, and I'm no one's property. My life, my phone calls and my decisions whom to talk to and who not to talk to are between myself and Allah, and in this I will  be answerable to Him alone. Well, I wonder, if you permit me a personal remark, how you have come to love a woman whom you so obviously cannot trust. But, certainly, if you care to know, I have been speaking to my father. He called from back home. This was the first time in six months that he has been able to get the line working, so there was no way of cutting the call short, even if I may have wished to, seeing your impatience."

This was the first time I had encountered the full force of her personality. No woman had ever talked to me like this. But she possessed a natural authority that was more than a match for the assertiveness of any man, which is often enough a pretension, a given based on assumed rather than actual authority and unaccustomed to dealing with resistance. At the same time, her manner never lost grace or compassion, and it is this which rendered her feminine strength a superior forte. 

"I'm sorry, Shukriya", I apologised, "it wasn't my intention to offend you. But does not my love for you give me a right to be jealous?"

"Jealous!", she exclaimed, "No. What is jealousy but a prison of distrust? What is it but a hidden accusation, a stealthy slander whispered at night, disguised as love or reason? In those whose hearts are governed by jealousy, jealousy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the end. Rights...what are the rights of one person over the other? Allah gives a woman the right to the purity of her name, and jealousy is an assault on that. 

But we both know the harams, the halals, the makru's of this life, and if we don't, Allah is witness to it. And the realities that lie at their core, and the truth that lies within the forms our lives take, and that which lies beyond these - who is its guardian, tell me? Who? Jealousy? Suspicion? Prejudice? Who judges who, my love? Has my hand ever touched yours? Have you ever seen my hair unveiled in your presence? Yet, you think me capable of giving to another what I must withhold from you? Withhold, as if I didn't know desire! For I am not yet released from this marriage of mine, for the last knot of the bond that ties my hands is not yet severed. If I am respecting these boundaries, it is not for him, nor for you, nor for people and their gossip but for Him in whose hands my soul lies and to whom we all are beholden. Nothing and nobody else could make me honour these bonds which have become an injustice and an oppression. I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I have a mother and three young children to look after, whose life and welfare, as it is, are my responsibility alone. Is all that nothing but a smokescreen for a woman who seeks adventure? How would I make time for that, I ask you. But if I have displeased you, please forgive me. That was never my intention. In hurting you I would only be hurting myself."

I had hit a nerve, and she wouldn't let me off easily, not before all that was to be said had been said, once and for all.

"It is I who has to ask your forgiveness', I ventured, feeling that there wasn't a trace of that brilliance Habiba had mentioned in me, finding myself to be a blunt stone and no polished diamond at all. "Please, do forgive me, Shukriya."

She waved it aside. "There's nothing to forgive." 

And no more was said about it. Not then and not ever. But I had understood, and what I had seen then has stayed with me and endured.

 

"The true law", she had once said, "does not bind save by the bond of love, which is knowledge become realisation. Realisation of the law that is born with us and of which we are born. The ultimate consequence of such realisation is devotion. And the ultimate consequence of devotion is you and I, and that which exists between us is its ultimate expression. Nobody could plant it into a heart which has not seen what our hearts have seen. No force in the world could make us feel a love for which our hearts are not ready. For there is no love without knowledge.There is no devotion without an intimate acquaintance with that towards which devotion is aimed. There may be duties. There may be the conventions of a life lived among people, for it is the human fate to live among humans. But all these are a web of veils which are meaningless without the essence they conceal in order to make its presence known."

"And what is that essence?", I asked.

"Nakedness", she replied, "it is the nakedness of our existence, the inconcealability of flesh, sinew and bone. The nakedness of the butterfly in the flame."

"Yes", said I who had been naked in death, "It is the starkness of need that lies at the essence of things. Need which knows nothing but its own acuteness. The awareness of all that exists, exists only in the awareness of need: life in its emergence, its perishing, its needborn ambition, its pain."

'Have some sesame tea with saffron", she replied, "and let us smile in the presence of this day."

And this moment contained the dancing, compassionate dark flames of her pupils, the pearl-like white in which they were encased, the flowing of her hair, the soft curve of her lips, the fragrant dark rose flesh that was her skin, the bird-winged waves of her breath in its inaudible rising and falling, her ocean and her skies, and the folds of her hijab.

And when the dark days came, I sought to preserve the memory of her eyes. Calm, smiling stars in a sky that filled with rain clouds.

"Now the time has come for love to be true ", I said in a firm voice, when the day had arrived that forced these words unto my lips, unexpectedly and without the benefit of a warning, out of the heart of a butterfly that must now seek the flame. "The lover must sacrifice everything for the beloved, even love itself."

"Let me be the sacrifice", she pleaded, "I pleaded with my father. I pleaded with all who might hear a woman's plea. But I wasn't heard. He is the father of your children, they say, he has a right over you, which is the right of marriage, the right of the family. I, however, cannot choose a life without you. I shall break his bond and pay the price. The life that awaits me now would be death anyway."

I shook my head.

"Hayyati", I said, "hayyat galbi, it is I who must be the sacrifice. That you know well. Think of the children! Think of yourself! You know what the price would be, and I cannot let you pay it. There isn't a way for us now."

 

"I don't understand you", Elena said in that night at the Öz Aydınlar. "Did you ever read Aitmatov's book, 'Jamila'?"

"We all read it", I replied.

"Then you should know the answer. If you love her you must fight for her. A woman has the freedom to choose! And hasn't she told you what her choice would be?!"

There was anger in her eyes, as she said this, and she spoke with a passion greater than I had ever seen in her.

I shook my head.

"Freedom is of no help here."

"What is, then?", she challenged.

"Nothing", I replied, matter-of-fact.

"How can you speak that way?!"

"Because I know the custom. How would I fight a battle whose victim can only be her? No matter what happens, she would pay with her blood. No, sister, my love has the loyalty to protect her from that. We both will die, each in their own way, but life will go on. Integrity will be preserved, and that way her childrens' and her own safety will honourably be assured. As for the butterfly, it is born to seek the flame. We aren't brought into this world to be happy. We are born to suffer and in our suffering to bear witness to God, who will know Himself through our pain. Through our need, through our sacrifice the mirror will reflect the essence of which this world is made, for no other reason than to recognise itself in that reflection. No matter whether that meets our understanding or our bewilderment. Either is of no consequence, save in that need needs the awareness of need and pain needs the awareness of pain."

She kindled a cigarette, listening with increasing attention. 

"And then what?", she asked, her heart still retaining a tinge of nervous dissatisfaction, mitigated though it was by a vague, smoky sense of recognition. 

"And then the sheer quantity of self-aware pain might result in a new and different quality in the order of things, perhaps, albeit never one free of pain."

"What is pain then but the response to an unresolved contradiction? Its manifestation in awareness..."

"Yes, sister. Yes. That is why it is not to be denied. Nor is it to be feared, for there is no point in fearing what cannot be helped. The day we are born is the day we are beginning to die, and we all will embrace death when it comes, as we will embrace anything else that is incumbent on us and cannot be escaped, neither by exercising an autonomous will, which will always fall short of self-sufficiency, nor by freedom of choice, which will fall short of opportunity in conditions where no choices exist."

"You make it sound reasonable", Elena mused, "Yet, I remember you as the author of these lines: 'For I am drunk with my love/and reason shall not overtake it'."

"Yes", I said with a short laugh, "I am drunk with my love and shall be so as long as I live. I scorn the excuse of reason as a justification to tolerate the unacceptable. But you will remember Brecht's story about Mr Keuner's encounter with a mighty man who asked him whether he wished to be his servant. Without a word, Mr Keuner started serving him until the powerful man died and then answered: 'No'. Reason had forced him upon a certain course, as you see, but it hasn't broken him. It hasn't changed his attitude towards things in themselves, and in the end the power that limited him was gone and he had lived to outlast it. His outlook now became self-explanatory and his 'no' prevailed as the ultimate answer."

"Ah, well", said Elena, "you've thought it all out. Of course, I should have known you well enough not to have assumed you to be acting in this way or that without there being a whole philosophy behind it. So your love will live and become self-evident and prevail as the ultimate answer. As in" -and here she paused for a moment, smiling at the emergence in her mind of a concept that surpised and pleased her- "as in tikkun ha ahava. So be it then, yedid nefesh. Janem dost - so be it."

Knowing her and the demonstratively casual nature of the relationships she engaged in (the astonishingly high emotional costs of which I had learnt to appreciate by observing, from the perspective of a confidant, her troubled love life) I couldn't help wondering at the passion the question of love and its fulfilment aroused in her.

"You are then", I mused, "a believer in love."

"Who ever told you I wasn't", she smiled, "But the secret is that one who has known love cannot mistake anything else for it, nor could she settle for anything less. And - as Heraclitus puts it, you cannot step into the same river twice." She sighed. "I can tell you that I have known it and lost him through whom I knew it in years so tender that a lifetime lies now between today and then. He was young too but older than I. He was a soldier who went to serve abroad and was killed there by the hand of an assassin in circumstances unknown. His was a classified case. That is all I know about it. He was love to me, and his memory is love and there is no living man able to compete with that, and that settles it for me."

I nodded and she smiled again, looking up at me with a gleam of warm irony in her glance as she stated in conclusion: "A faithful lover, after all. There's my secret revealed."

I flashed a broad smile in response and, growing thoughtful, ventured: "The river stays the same. Its source is the same there has always been and always will be. What changes is the one who would step into it, or wouldn't. Yet, if you may not step again into the same river, who knows - the same river, now become another, might again step into you."

She would not dismiss the possibility out of hand. But she did not think it a probable course of events. My suggestion, however, proved to be a true premonition, all the same, even if the tragic of the circumstances would have made one wish otherwise. For she did find love again, at a time most unexpected and with a man most unlikely. But love, once it came, incided into her universe with devastating power and, bearing no denial nor allowing for hesitation due to an inner sense of urgency the source of which was then still beyond any rational grasp, shaped it in its image. And that image would be the last I remember of her.

 

He was a teacher of hers in an IT course. One wouldn't have called him attractive. In fact, one would have called him anything but that. But he responded to a quality in her that needed responding. He was the answer to a deeper need and the conductor of that calling. He was what nobody else could have been to her, then or ever.

"I never believed it could happen again", she reflected when we met at the Öz Aydınlar for her to tell me the news, "for me to have loved and awaken to love again..."

She was startled, nervous, soul-searching still, for she had been caught unawares. "He is everything I was n o t looking for."

True enough. In terms of taste and disposition, a European would seem cast against type, as it were, and he was a Dutchman at that. Yet, things had begun to take their course, and that she knew and felt beyond doubt. 

 

‌A few weeks before their wedding, a steady and increasing pain hard to put down to any specific cause forced him to seek medical advice, only to be told that, while a few more months of life might be gained if all means of therapy were exhausted and a strict, careful regimen were followed, the disease that manifested itself in his condition was cancer in its final stages. Metastases had progressed to a degree that precluded surgery, and all that could be hoped for was a slowing down of the process. He took the news with a calm, resigned air, as if it were confirmation of the expected, if unspoken, rather than the devastating blow of a terrible surprise. It was this and the gratitude for Elena's devoted, reassuring presence that helped him maintain an equilibrium which rendered the last weeks of his life happy, if one dares to call it so, and part with life in gratitude and without regrets. His was the mellowed, smiling, yet sanguine, melancholia of a flower perishing with the last breath of the summer, and in spite of all efforts, he did not live to the wedding day. And his wife, the friend of my soul, though she lived, perished with him, and in this way things came full circle. 

 

I never had word from her in all the years since but I knew and understood that there was nothing but to respect her silence, which was a departure from the world we had shared into a future known to her and God alone. In that future, in that life to come for her, she would not -could not- be the woman I had known. 

 

"But you", said Habiba, "have remained the same..." It was a statement as much as it was a question. 

"The same", I smiled, "only dead. And in me all these things which seem to have happened so long ago that not many witnesses are left to remember them, have remained present and tactile. They are the voice that speaks in me to make the truth of their memory outlast the narrator's self, upon which they are projected, which in function is nothing but the stream of their articulation, and their interpretation cannot be my work but only their own. But I am faithful to their memory, as I am to yours, and faithful in the search for all that can be grasped and seen in all that is experienced and felt, like the canvas eagerly and unwittingly receives the reality of the subjects painted on it. And this being as it is, let it be so and let these be, let us say, my last words." 

 

And my weight became light, and the self I saw dead dissolved into a luminous stream, and the tear that was shed was a tear of joy, and into the stream I ascended and was absorbed, until not a thought connected me with that which lay behind any more. 

 

I came to with a start, with the force of an electric shock, as my heart caught up with its lost beat, and my soul, which demanded to cling to the freedom of the light was cast back into the dark, and the tear that was shed now was a tear of pain.

 

 

 

 

*Translation of Forugh Farokhzad's poem by Sholeh Wolpé (Wolpé, Sholeh: Sin – Selected Poems by Forugh Farokhzad, University of Arkansas Press, ISBN 10: 1557289484, 2010)