I hope I haven’t bored you with such a long letter.
Love,
Aziz
Desert Rose the Harlot
KONYA, JANUARY 1246
Barring me from much these days, ever since the scandal I caused at the mosque, the patron doesn’t let me go anywhere. I am grounded forever. But it doesn’t upset me. The truth is, I haven’t been feeling much of anything lately.
Every morning the face that greets me in the mirror looks paler. I don’t comb my hair or pinch my cheeks to redden them anymore. The other girls constantly complain about my bad looks, saying that it keeps the customers away. They may be right. Which is why I was quite surprised when the other day I was told that a particular client insisted on seeing me.
To my horror, it turned out to be Baybars.
As soon as we were alone in the room, I asked, “What is a security guard like you doing here?”
“Well, my coming to a brothel is no more bizarre than a harlot going to a mosque,” he said, his voice heavy with insinuation.
“I am sure you would have loved to lynch me that day,” I said. “I owe my life to Shams of Tabriz.”
“Don’t mention that revolting name. That guy is a heretic!”
“No, he is not!” I don’t know what came over me, but I heard myself say, “Since that day Shams of Tabriz has come to see me many times.”
“Hah! A dervish in a brothel!” Baybars snorted. “Why am I not surprised?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like that at all.”
I had never told this to anyone else before and had no idea why I was telling Baybars now, but Shams had been visiting me every week for the past several months. How he managed to sneak inside without being seen by the others, especially by the patron, was beyond my comprehension. Anyone else would assume that it was with the aid of black magic. But I knew it wasn’t that. He was a good man, Shams. A man of faith. And he had special talents. Other than my mother back in my childhood, Shams was the only person who treated me with unconditional compassion. He had taught me not to be despondent, no matter what. Whenever I told him there was no way someone like me could shed the past, he would remind me of one of his rules: The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals.
Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.
If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
Shams always told me, “You see, the present moment is all there is and all that there ever will be. When you grasp this truth, you’ll have nothing to fear anymore. Then you can walk out of this brothel for good.”
Baybars was watching my face carefully. When he looked at me, his right eye looked off to the side. It felt as if there were another person in the room with us, someone I couldn’t see. He scared me.
Realizing that it would be best not to talk about Shams anymore, I served him a pitcher of beer, which he drank in a hurry.
“So what is your specialty?” Baybars asked after he guzzled his second beer. “Don’t you girls each have a talent? Can you belly dance?”
I told him I didn’t have such talents and whatever gift I had in the past was gone now, as I was suffering from an unknown illness. The boss would have killed me if she heard me say such things to a client, but I didn’t care. The truth was, I secretly hoped Baybars would spend the night with another girl.
But, to my disappointment, Baybars shrugged and said he didn’t care. Then he took out his pouch, spilled a reddish brown substance from it into his palm, and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly. “Do you want some?” he asked.
I shook my head. I knew what it was.
“You don’t know what you are missing.” He grinned as he reclined on the bed, drifting away from his own body into a stupor of cannabis.
That evening, high on beer and cannabis, Baybars bragged about the terrible things he had seen on the battlefields. Even though Genghis Khan was dead and his flesh decomposed, his ghost still accompanied the Mongol armies, Baybars said. Egged on by the ghost, the Mongol army was attacking caravans, plundering villages, and massacring women and men alike. He told me about the veil of silence, as soft and peaceful as a blanket on a cold winter night, that descended upon a battlefield after hundreds had been killed and wounded, and dozens more were about to give up their last breath.
“The silence that follows a massive disaster is the most peaceful sound you can hear on the surface of the world,” he said, his voice slurring.