Heart of the Night Read Free Page A

that you can now interpret and explain.”
    He replied, “Do not think you know the world half as well as I know it.”
    “Is that so?”
    “I am a sea of knowledge and I say that without boasting.”
    “But you do not differentiate between truth and fiction.”
    He explained, “There is no ‘truth and fiction,’ but different kinds of truths that vary depending on the phases of life and the quality of the system that helps us become aware of them. Legends are truths like the truths of nature, mathematics, and history. Each one has its spiritual system. Let me give you an example. One day my mother took me to visit my father’s tomb, located in an open area among the tombs of the poor. She addressed him, saying, ‘Your wife and son greet you and ask God to have mercy on you, most beloved and generous person. I complain to you about my loneliness and my misery. Pray God for us, oh beloved.’ I then stuck my ear to the wall of the tomb and heard moaning and words that I repeated to my mother. She told me, ‘You are blessed to the Day of Judgment.’”
    “What did your father tell you?” I asked.
    He replied, “You are not qualified to believe me and therefore I won’t tell you.”
    I had a feeling he was covering up his playfulness with an appearance of harsh seriousness, or that he wanted to surround his legend with an appropriate atmosphere to satisfy his heart’s nostalgia.I mumbled, “For every learned man there is someone more learned than him.”
    “Our world was alive, throbbing with desires, feelings, and dreams. It was a mixture of seriousness and joking, joy and sadness; and all—humans, jinn, animals, and inanimate objects—equally shared in relationships of understanding.”
    “But do you understand all that?” I asked.
    “Completely, passionately, and doggedly.”
    “Weren’t you overcome with fear?”
    “Sometimes, but I soon acquired tools of defense and attack and became the master of the world. One evening I was playing with the lemons spread around the water jugs on the windowsill, when I suddenly saw the head of a being level with the window, looking at me from the street. His eyes were alight in the dark and his legs were planted in the ground. I was troubled and moved away, falling on my back. My scream ripped the silence of the night. I later learned that the encounter between a human and a jinn should not take place in this manner. My mother told me that it was high time I memorized the Samadiya. As for the jinn of our house, those that lived in the storeroom, they were inclined to joking and were incapable of any serious harm. They were in the habit of mixing cheese with honey or hiding the clarified butter for their own use. Sometimes they extinguished the light of the lamp carried by people at night. Their worst jokes, however, consisted of changing dreams into nightmares.”
    “Can you give me an id ea about how they looked?” I asked.
    “No, you are not predisposed to believe,” he said. “Moreover, the jinn disappear from a person’s life at the end of the time of the legend. He quickly forgets them and even denies their existence, though he encounters them daily in new images of human beings. In such situations they commit serious evil and cause great harm. You insist that the jinn are a mere superstition. On the other hand, I had the good luck of seeing the holy light on Laylat al-Qadr, the night of destiny, while sitting on my mother’s lap looking at the sky! A window opened and out of it came a bright light that dimmed the light of the stars.”
    I laughed and told him, “It is said that only those who are destined for a life of happiness see the light on Laylat al-Qadr.”
    He laughed as well. “Touché! You beat me this time, but only to an extent. It is true that I am the example of extreme wretchedness, but what counts is how all this will end. The end is still unknown and I might find the answer in paradise. I happen to have a long history with paradise.