بخش 92

Aladdin

KONYA, APRIL 1248

Blowing hot and cold, changing my mind every passing minute as to how I should behave toward others, three weeks after Shams’s death, I finally mustered the courage to go and talk to my father. I found him in the library, sitting alone by the firelight, as still as an alabaster statue, shadows leaping across his face.

“Father, can I talk to you?” I asked.

Slowly, hazily, as if swimming back to the shore from a sea of reveries, he looked at me and said nothing.

“Father, I know you think I have a role in Shams’s death, but let me assure you—”

All of a sudden, my father raised his finger, interrupting my words. “Between you and me, son of mine, words have dried up. I have nothing to hear from you and nothing to tell you in return,” he pronounced.

“Please don’t say that. Let me explain,” I begged, my voice shaking. “I swear to God. It wasn’t me. I know the people who did it, but it wasn’t me.”

“My son,” my father interjected again, the sorrow draining out of him, replaced by the chilling calmness of someone who has finally accepted a terrible truth, “you say it wasn’t you, but there is blood on your hem.” I flinched and instantly checked the ends of my robe. Could it be true? Was there blood on me from that evening? I inspected my hem, and then my sleeves, hands, and fingernails. It all seemed clean. When I raised my head again, I came eye to eye with my father and only then understood the little trap that he had set for me.

By inadvertently checking my hem for blood, I had given myself away.

It is true. I did join them in the tavern that evening. I am the one who told the killer that Shams had the habit of meditating every night in the courtyard. And later that night, when Shams was talking to his killer under the rain, I was one of the six men eavesdropping by the garden wall. And when we decided that we should attack, because there was no going back and the killer was taking things too slowly, I showed them the way into our courtyard. But that’s it. I stopped there. I didn’t take part in the fight. It was Baybars who attacked, and Irshad and others helped him. And when they panicked, Jackal Head did the rest.

Later on, I lived that moment over and over in my mind so many times that it is hard to tell what part is real and what part a figment of my imagination. Once or twice I conjured a memory of Shams escaping from our hands into the pitch-black night, and the image was so vivid I almost believed it.

Though he is gone, there are traces of him everywhere. Dance, poetry, music, and all the things that I thought would vanish once he was gone have stayed firmly planted in our lives. My father has become a poet. Shams was right. When one of the jars was broken, so was the other jar.

My father had always been a loving man. He embraced people of all faiths. He was kind toward not only Muslims but also Christians, Jews, and even pagans. After Shams came into his life, his circle of love became so vast it included even the most fallen of society—prostitutes, drunks, and beggars, the scum of the scum.

I believe he could even love Shams’s killers.

There was, and still is, only one person he could not manage to love: his son.