“It sounds so sad,” I murmured.
Suddenly he had no more words inside him. There was nothing else to talk about. Grabbing my arm, he pushed me onto the bed and pulled off my robe. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice hoarse, and his smell was a repugnant mixture of cannabis, sweat, and hunger. He entered me in one harsh, abrasive thrust. I tried to move aside and relax my thighs to lessen the pain, but he pressed both hands on my bosom with such force that it was impossible to budge. He kept rocking back and forth even long after he came inside me, like a string puppet that was manipulated by unseen hands and could not possibly stop. Clearly dissatisfied, he kept moving with such roughness that I feared he was going to get hard again, but then suddenly it all came to an end. Still on top of me, he looked at my face with pure hatred, as if the body that had aroused him a moment ago now disgusted him.
“Put something on,” he ordered as he rolled aside.
I put on my robe, watching out of the corner of my eye as he popped more cannabis into his mouth. “From now on, I want you to be my mistress,” he said with his jaw jutting out.
It wasn’t all that uncommon for clients to come up with such demands. I knew how to handle these delicate situations, giving the client the false impression that I would love to be his mistress and serve solely him, but for that to happen he had to spend a lot of money and make the patron happy first. But today I didn’t feel like pretending.
“I can’t be your mistress,” I said. “I am going to leave this place very soon.”
Baybars guffawed as if this were the funniest thing he had ever heard. “You can’t do that,” he said with certainty.
I knew I shouldn’t be quarreling with him, but I couldn’t help it. “You and I are not that different. We both have done things in the past that we deeply regret. But you have been made a security guard, thanks to your uncle’s position. I have no uncle backing me, you see.”
Baybars’s face became wooden, and his eyes, cold and distant up till now, suddenly widened with fury. Dashing forward, he grabbed me by the hair. “I was nice to you, wasn’t I?” he growled. “Who do you think you are?”
I opened my mouth to say something, but a sharp stab of pain silenced me. Baybars punched me in the face and pushed me against the wall.
It wasn’t the first time. I had been beaten by clients before but never this badly.
I fell on the floor, and then Baybars started to kick me hard in the ribs and legs while hurling insults at me. It was then and there that I had the strangest experience. As I cringed in pain, my body crushed under the weight of each blow, my soul—or what felt like it—separated from my body, turning itself into a kite, light and free.
Soon I was floating in the ether. As if thrown into a peaceful vacuum where there was nothing to resist and nowhere to go, I simply hovered. I passed over recently harvested wheat fields, where the wind fluttered the head scarves of peasant girls and at night, fireflies glinted here and there like fairy lights. It felt like falling, except falling upward into the bottomless sky.
Was I dying? If this was what death was like, it wasn’t terrifying at all. My worries diminished. I had tumbled into a place of absolute lightness and purity, a magic zone where nothing could pull me down. And suddenly I realized I was living my fear and, to my surprise, it wasn’t frightful. Wasn’t it because of the fear of being harmed that I had been scared to leave the brothel all this time? If I could manage not to be scared of death, I realized with an expanding heart, I could leave this rat hole.
Shams of Tabriz was right. The only filth was the filth inside. I shut my eyes and imagined this other me, pristine and penitent and looking much younger, walking out of the brothel and into a new life. Glowing with youth and confidence, this was what my face would have looked like if only I’d experienced security and love in my life. The vision was so alluring and so very real, despite the blood before my eyes and the throbbing in my ribs, that I couldn’t help smiling.
Kimya
KONYA, JANUARY 1246
Blushing and sweating slightly, I mustered the courage to talk to Shams of Tabriz. I had been meaning to ask him about the deepest reading of the Qur’an, but for weeks I hadn’t had a chance. Though we lived under the same roof, our paths never crossed. But this morning as I was sweeping the courtyard, Shams appeared next to me, alone and in the mood to chat. And this time not only did I manage to talk with him longer, but I also managed to look him in the eye.
“How is it going, dear Kimya?” he asked jovially.
I couldn’t help noticing that Shams looked dazed, as if he had just woken up from sleep, or else another vision. I knew he had been having visions, lately more often than ever, and by now I had learned to read the signs. Each time he had a vision, his face became pale and his eyes dreamy.