My breasts have been feeling very tender for the last few weeks and this is the second month in a row that I have not menstruated. I am pregnant once again. Selim’s child will be born in seven months’ time. It will be as old as the next century.
Summer is over. Tomorrow we return to Istanbul.
APPENDIX
When those offended souls had told their story,
I bowed my head and kept it bowed until
the poet said, “What are you thinking of?”
When finally I spoke, I sighed, “Alas,
all those sweet thoughts, and oh, how much desiring
brought these two down into this agony.”
And then I turned to them and tried to speak;
I said, “Francesca, the torment that you suffer
brings painful tears of pity to my eyes.
But tell me, in that time of your sweet sighing
how, and by what signs, did love allow you
to recognise your dubious desires?”
And she to me: “There is no greater pain
than to remember, in our present grief,
past happiness (as well your teacher knows)!
But if your great desire is to learn
the very root of such a love as ours,
I shall tell you, but in words of flowing tears.
One day we read, to pass the time away,
of Lancelot, of how he fell in love;
we were alone, innocent of suspicion.
Time and again our eyes were brought together
by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.
To the moment of one line alone we yielded:
it was when we read about those longed-for lips
now being kissed by such a famous lover,
that this one (who shall never leave my side)
then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did.
Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.” And all the while
the one of the two spirits spoke these words,
the other wept, in such a way that pity
blurred my senses; I swooned as though to die,
and fell to Hell’s floor as a body, dead, falls.
Translation by Mark Musa from
The Divine Comedy, courtesy of Penguin Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tariq Ali is a novelist, journalist, and filmmaker. His many books include The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity; Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq; Conversations with Edward Said; Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties; and the novels of the Islam Quintet. He is the coauthor of On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation and an editor of the New Left Review, and he writes for the London Review of Books and the Guardian. Ali lives in London.