“In the political arena, sir, the very worst disaster to affect a man is to die before other people.”
I pushed my turban back from my forehead. “Who is there,” I asked, “who doesn’t die before others?”
“By ‘other people’ I mean enemies and those who oppose one’s ideas and initiatives. I have no doubt that my father felt that his death was one such ignominious defeat.”
I started fidgeting as a way of showing that I was about to leave the tavern, but the young man begged me to stay.
“Can’t you stay here with a son of the people?” he asked. “What I’ve just told you is merely ephemeral nonsense. But what is more important then anything else is about to appear before our very eyes. Please stay with me for a while so you can watch and listen.”
As long as the possibility of anonymity was still there, I had little choice. Furthermore the wine had not yet reduced him to incoherence.
There was suddenly a total silence in the tavern, even though it was packed with customers and filled with pipe smoke. The silence was broken by a singer behind a curtain whose nightingale voice was accompanied by the strings of a lute. The words of the song were Persian, from the Ruba‘iyat of ‘Umar al-Khayyam. My companion leaned over and told me that he was Persian on his late mother’s side. Sipping his wine and sucking on his pipe, he kept swaying from side to side as the music inspired him.
For sure, I told myself, this invisible woman’s lovely voice merits a place in the haven of passion, amid cascades of flowing delight. In such a sound resides the very definition of the ideal of sweet-tempered refinement. It has an enormous power to attract the spirit of the listener to life and the pursuit of beauty; of that there can be no doubt. The voice is warm and lush, dispensing beauty all around it. One can swear an oath that the owner of that voice is a paragon of beauty and an authority. In addition to those thoughts and in spite of my normal piety and Maliki beliefs, I allowed myself to be inspired by the passions of the moment in this space that seemed like some secret nocturnal garden. In my mind I pictured the singer’s body in all its painting, white-hot nakedness. I could envision the very breath of her, the breath of youth, a captivating breath, one that had only to come into contact with wilting bodies in order to restore them. The soul that it entered was purged of all accumulated dross and misery. . I allowed myself to chase after ever-regenerating fantasies. All my efforts at dispelling them, curses aimed at the duplicity of the devil and other temptations, were completely in vain.
My companion kept closing his eyes or staring fixedly into the void, mouthing blissful sighs at the sound of the singer’s voice as she borrowed shapes and colors from the vocabulary of passion and tenderness. At this point the singer stopped for a while to recover her breath, and the lute played a solo.
“When it comes to the realm of politics,” my companion said, “I have neither pass nor transit visa. I’m a child of the people. Even so, revered pilgrim, there’s still life to be lived; there are perfumes, women, and melodies. But for the nightclub, life on earth would be unbearable. It provides a refuge for those who are lost and badly done by. Here I can distract myself from time’s onslaughts and ever increasing despair.”
For a moment he stopped his litany of misery, but then he picked up again. “If only you could see the body of our singer tonight, sir, you would be as convinced as I am that, by comparison, politics is a sick joke. A pox on Timur Lang and all enemies of beauty.”
He downed the rest of his cup. “Don’t you agree with me, sir,” he went on, “that with this particular singer the Ruba ‘iyat of ‘Umar al-Khayyam are as ravishing as can be? With her, the sounds emerge from her throat like so many pearls scattered around, like light upon light! With her the Ruba ‘iyat can teach me the alphabet of life and death; they prompt me to garner pleasure without delay. Pleasure comes from the very pulse of existence, the pulse whose impetus is the very moment itself.”
The singer resumed her performance, and the tavern once again fell into an emotive silence. The whole place seemed to be swaying to and fro like a boat being tossed by waves, sleepy and intoxicated. I clung to my cup of coffee, avoiding as far as possible the probing stares of the revelers. By now I was getting very impatient and made every effort to be as inconspicuous as possible.
“Is it true, I wonder,” asked my companion, “that this singer and all other young beauties like her will one day be food for worms?”
Then he whispered in my ear, “You’re not really my companion, coffee-drinker, but rest assured that the only thing I’m drowning in my glass is my anxieties. Apart from that small slip, my hands are clean. They’ve never slapped anyone’s face or been sullied by the blood of either human or animal. O Lord, I associate no one with You. Your radiant essence I adore only through Your bounty and forgiveness.”
And, as the singer brought her song to a close, he joined in:
No pearls of righteousness do I enlace,
Nor sweep the desert of sin off my face.
And other voices inside the tavern sang with them:
Yet since I never counted one as two,
I do not quite despair of heavenly grace.
The curtain was now pulled back accompanied by a storm of applause. Wonder of wonders, I now discovered that the singer was not a woman at all, but a flat-chested boy with short hair.
“Don’t be shocked, revered pilgrim,” my companion said, “to discover that the singer is a transvestite. It’s the singing and atmosphere that matter, not gender. But since you’re such an astute judge, tell me, by God, what do you think of the Ruba‘iyat’s eternal wisdom?”
I had to say something by way of reply, albeit briefly. “The genius of al-Khayyam,” I replied, “lies in his uncanny ability to eradicate the contradiction between intellect and levity. His poetic talent is directly connected to his knowledge of algebra and astronomy. That’s why his Ruba‘iyat, at least in the translated version I have read, have a mathematical pattern that addresses itself to the spirit in the rhythm of ‘To God alone belongs the power and might.’ That way the passionate heat of their verse becomes cool and serene.”
“Bravo, Master, bravo!”
“As for the ribald verses in the Ruba‘iyat, I just swallow them like sour fruit and beg God for forgiveness.”
“You can say such wonderful things when you are completely sober! Power to you, liberal and broad-minded sage that you are! Now take a look at the flute player going up on stage. She’s a genuine female, no question.”
The woman now sitting on the chair, with a flute held between her fingers and its aperture to her lips, was indeed a woman; her clothes were those of a female, as was her stature and hair. Even so, I told myself that God alone knows the contents of people’s hearts. What was most important was the perfect harmony between flute and player, so much so that you could imagine the one fusing with the other. Melody thus turns into a source of plaintive longing. A short while later, she was joined on stage by a drummer, violinist, and lute player. The lute player tuned his instrument to the right key, and they started playing. They were singing this muwashshaha:
Fresh are my wounds and the blood is splattered.
My killer, dear brother, cavorts in the desert.
They said: We will avenge you, but I replied: This is yet worse.
The wounder shall heal me; that is a better plan.
My companion unleashed a series of ribald sighs, then asked me what I thought. “This song is one of the best Eastern muwashshahat,” I replied. “The poetry flows well, and the basit meter is properly used. Strophes and rhymes are flawless. But the performance is only average: it needs more instruments and better voices.”