“I’m not stupid,” David said. “I checked your e-mail account and read your messages with that man.”
“You did what?” Ella exclaimed.
Ignoring the question, his face contorted with the weight of what he was about to announce, David said, “I don’t blame you, Ella. I deserve it. I neglected you, and you looked for compassion elsewhere.”
Ella lowered her gaze to her glass. The wine had a charming color—a deep, dark ruby. For a second she thought she glimpsed specks of iridescent sparkle on its surface, like a trail of lights guiding her. And perhaps there was a trail. It all felt surreal.
Now David paused, deciding how best, or whether, to reveal what he had in mind. “I’m ready to forgive you and leave this behind,” he finally remarked.
There were many things Ella wanted to say at that moment, poignant and mocking, tense and dramatic, but she chose the easiest one. With gleaming eyes, she asked, “What about your affairs? Are you also going to leave them behind?”
The waitress arrived then with their orders. Ella and David sat back and watched her leave the plates on the table and refill the glasses with exaggerated politeness. When she finally left, David flicked his eyes up toward Ella and asked, “So is this what this was about? Was it for revenge?”
“No,” Ella said, shaking her head in disappointment. “This is not about revenge. It never was.”
“Then what is it about?”
Ella clasped her hands, feeling as if everything and everyone in the restaurant—the customers, the waiters, the cooks, and even the tropical fish in the fish tank—had stopped to hear what she was going to say.
“It is about love,” she said at last. “I love Aziz.”
Ella expected her husband to roll with laughter. But when she finally found the courage to look him in the eye, there was only horror on his face, quickly replaced by the expression of someone who was trying to solve a problem with minimal damage. Suddenly she had a moment of knowing. “Love” was a serious word, loaded and quite unusual, for her—a woman who had said so many negative things about love in the past.
“We have three kids,” David said, his voice trailing off.
“Yes, and I love them very much,” Ella said with a slump in her shoulders. “But I also love Aziz—”
“Stop using that word,” David interjected. He took a big gulp from his glass before he spoke again. “I made major mistakes, but I never stopped loving you, Ella. And I have never loved anyone else. We can both learn from our mistakes. For my part I can promise you that the same thing won’t happen again. You don’t need to go out and look for love anymore.”
“I didn’t go out and seek love,” Ella muttered, more to herself than to him. “Rumi says we don’t need to hunt for love outside ourselves. All we need to do is to eliminate the barriers inside that keep us away from love.”
“Oh, my God! What’s come over you? This isn’t you! Stop being so romantic, will you? Come back to your old self,” David snapped, then added, “Please!”
Ella furrowed her brow and inspected her nails as if there were something about them troubling her. In truth, she’d remembered another moment in time when she herself had said virtually the same words to her daughter. She felt as if a circle had been completed. Nodding her head slowly, she put her napkin aside.
“Can we please go now?” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
That night they slept in separate beds. And early in the morning, the first thing Ella did was write a letter to Aziz.
The Zealot
KONYA, FEBRUARY 1246
“Batten down the hatches! Sheikh Yassin! Sheikh Yassin! Did you hear the scandal?” Abdullah, the father of one of my students, exclaimed as he approached me on the street. “Rumi was seen in a tavern in the Jewish quarter yesterday!”
“Yes, I heard about that,” I said, “but I wasn’t surprised. The man has a Christian wife, and his best friend is a heretic. What did you expect?”
Abdullah nodded gravely. “I guess you are right. We should have seen it coming.”
A number of passersby gathered around us, overhearing our conversation. Somebody suggested that Rumi should not be allowed to preach in the Great Mosque anymore. Not until he apologized publicly. I agreed. Being late for my class in the madrassa, I then left them to their talk and hurried off.
I had always suspected that Rumi had a dark side ready to float up to the surface someday. But even I hadn’t expected him to take to the bottle. It was utterly disgusting. People say Shams is the primary reason for the downfall of Rumi, and if he weren’t around, Rumi would go back to normal. But I hold a different view. Not that I doubt that Shams is an evil man—he is—or that he doesn’t have a bad influence on Rumi—he does—but the question is, why can’t Shams lead other scholars astray, such as me? At the end of the day, those two are alike in more ways than people are willing to recognize.