The speed with which human relations materialized and dissipated amazed Ella more than ever, and yet she tried not to pass judgment on other people anymore. If there was one thing she had learned from her correspondence with Aziz, it was that the more she remained calm and composed, the more her children shared with her. Once she had stopped running after them, they had stopped running away from her. Somehow things were working more smoothly and closer to her liking than in the times when she had tirelessly tried to help and repair.
And to think she was doing nothing to achieve this result! Instead of seeing her role in the house as some sort of glue, the invisible yet central bond that held everyone together, she had become a silent spectator. She watched events unfold and days waft by, not necessarily coldly or indifferently but with visible detachment. She had discovered that once she accepted that she didn’t have to stress herself about things she had no control over, another self emerged from inside—one who was wiser, calmer, and far more sensible.
“The fifth element,” she muttered to herself several times during the day. “Just accept the void!”
It didn’t take long for her husband to notice there was something strange about her, something so not Ella. Was this why all of a sudden he wanted to spend more time with her? He came home earlier these days, and Ella suspected he had not been seeing other women for a while.
“Honey, are you all right?” David asked repeatedly.
“I am right as rain,” she answered, smiling back each time. It was as if her withdrawal into a calm, private space of her own stripped away the polite decorum behind which her marriage had slept undisturbed for many years. Now that the pretenses between them were gone, she could see their defects and mistakes in all their nakedness. She had stopped pretending. And she had a feeling David was about to do the same.
Over breakfasts and dinners, they talked about the day’s events in composed, adult voices, as though discussing the annual return on their stock investments. Then they remained silent, acknowledging the blunt fact that they didn’t have much else to talk about. Not anymore.
Sometimes she caught her husband looking at her intently, waiting for her to say something, almost anything. Ella sensed if she asked him about his affairs, he would gladly have come clean. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
In the past she used to feign ignorance in order not to rock the boat of her marriage. Now, however, she stopped acting as if she didn’t know what he’d been doing when he was away. She made it clear that she did know and that she was uninterested. It was precisely this new aloofness that scared her husband. Ella could understand him, because deep inside it scared her, too.
A month ago if David had taken even a tiny step to improve their marriage, she would have felt grateful. Any attempt on his part would have delighted her. Not anymore. Now she suspected that her life wasn’t real enough. How had she arrived at this point? How had the fulfilled mother of three discovered her own despondency? More important, if she was unhappy, as she once told Jeannette she was, why was she not doing the things unhappy people did all the time? No crying on the bathroom floor, no sobbing into the kitchen sink, no melancholic long walks away from the house, no throwing things at the walls … nothing.
A strange calm had descended upon Ella. She felt more stable than she’d ever been, even as she was swiftly gliding away from the life she’d known. In the morning she looked into the mirror long and hard to see if there was a visible change in her face. Did she look younger? Prettier? Or perhaps more full of life? She couldn’t see any difference. Nothing had changed, and yet nothing was the same anymore.
Kerra
KONYA, MAY 5, 1245
Branches that once sagged under the weight of snow are now blossoming outside our window, and still Shams of Tabriz is with us. During this time I have watched my husband turn into a different man, every day drifting a bit further from me and his family. In the beginning I thought they would soon get bored with each other, but no such thing occurred. If anything, they have become more attached. When together, either they are strangely silent or they talk in an incessant murmur interspersed with peals of laughter, making me wonder why they never run out of words. After each conversation with Shams, Rumi walks around a transformed man, detached and absorbed, as if intoxicated by a substance I can neither taste nor see.
The bond that unites them is a nest for two, where there is no room for a third person. They nod, smile, chuckle, or frown in the same way and at the same time, exchanging long, meaningful glances between words. Even their moods seem to depend on each other. Some days they are calmer than a lullaby, eating nothing, saying nothing, whereas other days they whirl around with such euphoria that they both resemble madmen. Either way, I cannot recognize my husband anymore. The man I have been married to for more than eight years now, the man whose children I have raised as if they were my own and with whom I had a baby, has turned into a stranger. The only time I feel close to him is when he is in deep sleep. Many nights over the past weeks, I have lain awake listening to the rhythm of his breathing, feeling the soft whisper of his breath on my skin and the comfort of his heart beating in my ear, just to remind myself that he is still the man I married.