But perhaps sleep is better for the two of us, Ella thought. If only we could fall asleep together. She longed for an easy, unperturbed slumber no less magical than Sleeping Beauty’s, one hundred years of absolute numbness to ease this pain.
In a little while, the call to prayer came to an end, its echoes drifting away on retreating waves. After the last note faded, the world felt strangely safe, but unbearably silent. It had been a year since they’d been together. One year of love and awareness. Most of the time, Aziz had been well enough to keep traveling with Ella, but in the past two weeks his health had deteriorated visibly.
Ella watched him go back to sleep, his face serene and so very dear. Her mind filled with anxieties. She sighed deeply and walked out of the room. She passed through corridors where all the walls had been painted shades of green and entered wards where she saw patients, old and young, men and women, some recovering, others failing. She tried not to mind the inquisitive gaze of the people, but her blond hair and blue eyes made her foreignness incandescent. She had never felt so out of place anywhere before. But then Ella had never been much of a traveler.
A few minutes later, she was sitting by the water fountain in the hospital’s small, pleasant garden. In the middle of the fountain, there was a statue of a little angel, and at the bottom of it a few silver coins shone, each bearing somebody’s secret wish. She groped in her pockets for a coin but couldn’t find anything there other than scribbled notes and half a granola bar. As her gaze fell upon the garden, she saw some pebbles ahead. Smooth, black, and shiny. She picked one of them up, closed her eyes, and tossed it into the fountain, her lips murmuring a wish she already knew would not be realized. The pebble hit the wall of the fountain and bounced aside, falling right into the lap of the stone angel.
If Aziz were here, Ella thought, he would have seen it as a sign.
When she walked back half an hour later, she found a doctor and a young, head-scarved nurse in the room and the bedsheet pulled over Aziz’s head.
He had passed away.
Aziz was buried in Konya, following in the footsteps of his beloved Rumi.
Ella took care of all the preparations, trying to plan every little detail but also trusting that God would help her with the ones she couldn’t handle. First she arranged the spot where he would be buried—under a huge magnolia tree in an old Muslim cemetery. Then she found Sufi musicians who agreed to play the ney and sent an e-mail to Aziz’s friends everywhere, inviting them to the funeral. To her delight, quite a number of them were able to come, from as far away as Cape Town, St. Petersburg, Murshidabad, and São Paulo. Among them were photographers like him, as well as scholars, journalists, writers, dancers, sculptors, businessmen, farmers, housewives, and Aziz’s adopted children.
It was a warm, joyful ceremony, attended by people of all faiths. They celebrated his death, as they knew he would have wanted. Children played happily and unattended. A Mexican poet distributed pan de los muertos, and an old Scottish friend of Aziz’s sprinkled rose petals on everyone, raining over them like confetti, each and every one a colorful testimony that death was not something to be afraid of. One of the locals, a hunched old Muslim man who watched the whole scene with a wide grin and gimlet eyes, said this must have been the craziest funeral Konya had ever witnessed, except for the funeral of Mawlana centuries ago.
Two days after the funeral, finally alone, Ella wandered the city, watching the families walk past her, merchants in their shops, and street vendors eager to sell her something, anything. People stared at this American woman walking in their midst with her eyes swollen from crying. She was a complete stranger here, a complete stranger everywhere.
Back in the hotel, before she checked out and headed to the airport, Ella took off her jacket and put on a fluffy, peach-colored angora sweater. A color too meek and docile for a woman who’s trying to be neither, she thought. Then she called Jeannette, who was the only one of her three children who had supported her in her decision to follow her heart. Orly and Avi were still not speaking to their mother.
“Mom! How are you?” Jeannette asked, her voice full of warmth.
Ella leaned forward into empty space and smiled as if her daughter were standing right across from her. Then she said in an almost inaudible voice, “Aziz is dead.”
“Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry.”
There was a brief lull as they both contemplated what to say. It was Jeannette who broke the silence. “Mom, will you be coming home now?”
Ella tipped her head in thought. In her daughter’s question, she heard another unstated question. Would she be going back to Northampton to her husband and stopping the divorce process, which had already turned into a maze of mutual resentments and accusations? What was she going to do now? She didn’t have any money, and she didn’t have a job. But she could always give private lessons in English, work for a magazine, or who knows, be a good fiction editor one day.