She had taken on one of her favorite forms, he noted, an elegant Arabian Mau, a red tabby with long legs and perfectly oval paws. Better than the owl, the old man thought, putting down his tiny cup of sweet mint tea and, first taking one from its colorful tin, lighting an Egyptian cigarette.
She was always coming and going, at all times of the day and night! She had always done that, in Damascus, in Constantinople, in Beirut, and now in New York City.
“The lines between demons and jinn are much blurred so sayeth the learned”, Jamal al-Hakim, now known as Jamal the bookseller, morosely thought to himself for the thousandth time. Slowly, he drew in the tobacco smoke and then just as slowly released it from his nose and mouth. The old man sighed as he sat in his chair behind the counter, smoking and thinking about the similarities and differences between angels and demons, and, of course, between jinn and man; and thinking as well about the strange life he had led, wandering from country to country and city to city, until finally washing up onto the shores of the new world, as if shipwrecked. Which in a way he was, he supposed.
It was raining, again. An unusually cold September rain, accompanied by an occasional clap of thunder. Water streamed down the store front’s windows and fell onto the pedestrians, as they hurried along the walk fronting his lower Manhattan bookshop. The screech and clang of passing trolleys along with the beeping and chugging of the gasoline-powered automobiles driving up and down Washington Street filtered into the old Syrian’s shadow-filled shop. The wall clock chimed five times. Soon it would be time to lock up and go back upstairs to his apartment. Their apartment.
He and Laila had moved to this immigrant neighborhood, “Little Syria”, more than a decade ago. She had demanded they leave their comfortable home in Damascus to live in this horrible land of infidels. Jamal hated the hustle and bustle of this American metropolis, the noise, the smoke, the lack of respect for his age, his lineage, his knowledge, his religion.
“Why?”, he had asked but also knowing what she would say because it was what she always said when she wanted to leave and move on.
“To study.“
It had always been that way. Her decision. He had never married, had never had children, had never really practiced his healing arts; but rather had followed the jinn, like a dog his mistress, like a mindless automaton. He had never wanted for money, for somehow, from somewhere, Laila always had gold, or silver, or jewels that could be sold to support them. And they had lived comfortably, more than comfortably, truth be told.
He coughed and coughed again, then spat into a handkerchief, glancing at the reddish sputum, he grimaced and put the soiled piece of silk back into his coat pocket. Then, after a moment, he took another deep drag from his cigarette and played, absent-mindedly, with the big gold and opal ring on the middle finger of his left hand. She had given it to him the first day they had met and he had never taken it off, not once.
It was in Jerusalem. He had been a handsome young man of nineteen, with broad shoulders and snapping black eyes, and a profile that would have made a Greek god envious. It had been more than fifty years ago, Shaban, 1276 using the Hijri calendar; 1860 by western measurement. He smiled sadly, remembering.
He had been visiting his uncle, his mother’s brother, a wealthy merchant before he left for Constantinople to study medicine at the famous Sahn-i Seman Medrese. The school originally built by Sulieman the Magnificent.
She was, as she was now, small and voluptuous, with delicate hands and feet, and dusky skin and dark auburn hair, almost the color of chestnuts, like those found in certain parts of Anatolia and said to have been planted by the soldiers of Alexander the Great. She had smelled of cinnamon and myrrh; and possessed those strange yellow eyes that glowed as if lit by an internal fire, particularly in the evening, near sundown. He had always known she was a jinn and not a human woman. He had been lost, enthralled, bewitched, even at the beginning.
Jamal looked down at the counter and noticed the pile of books on the corner. Laila’s of course. Reaching he pulled them closer. Two by someone named Einstein both in German, a third printed in English titled Radio-activity by Ernest Rutherford, and a newly published tome entitled On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules by Niels Bohr. The old man grimaced. He was fluent in Ottoman Turk, Arabic, and French. And, after living in America he could hold a conversation and read a newspaper in English. Laila on the other hand…He took another drag of his cigarette and coughed
Jamal had absolutely no understanding of what the contents of these books were about. It had always been this way with the jinn. Even when he was a young man studying medicine in Constantinople, Laila would return to their apartment with tomes both ancient and new and from as wide a variety of libraries as the Imperial School of Naval Engineering, the Muhendishane-i Bahr-i Humayn, on the one hand, to the Beyanzit Devlet Kutuphanesi, located in Beyazit Square in the Fatih district, on the other.
And they all, it seemed, had something to do with what he could only describe as abstractions, in other words, mathematics, in all its forms and shapes, from ancient times to present day, from Babylonian astronomy to…what was that book about, poking at one of the codices in front of him, oh yes, he mused, something called radio-activity. The old man stubbed out his cigarette and immediately selected another and lit it.
Of course, early in their relationship, he had asked what she was looking for, what she was trying to learn. But her answers had never made any sense. She spoke in riddles and used words and ideas he did not understand; although several times she had mentioned the Jam-e Jahan nama, the seven ringed Cup of Jamshid, the cup that had been the subject of so many Persian poems and stories, said to be filled with the elixir of immortality and used in scrying.
He knew some of those stories. The cup was said to have been discovered in ancient Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, in long-ago times and it was believed that all seven heavens of the universe could be observed by looking into it. But what those stories had to do with algebra and geometry and something called “the calculus” he had no idea. And when he had tried to press Laila upon this topic she had just laughed and changed the subject. Sighing, the old man put down his cigarette in a silver ashtray and closed his eyes.
Sometime later he awoke, with a start, glancing at the wall clock he saw that it was almost seven. He must have nodded off in his chair. Slowly he stood and walked toward the shop’s front door, taking a large key from his vest pocket as he did so. After locking the door and flipping the cardboard sign in the window to show that he was closed, he turned off the light switch for the front of the store and walked back to its rear, his slippers making a soft swishing sound on the wooden floor.
The silk pillow was now empty; Laila must have gone upstairs. At the top of the steps, he turned right and into the main living area. The room was unusually large, unnaturally so, for a city tenement building and the walls and ceiling were much ornamented. Colorful oriental rugs covered the floor. A raised divan ran along three sides of the room covered here and there with silk and brightly colored chintz cloth, edged in crochet and lace. In one of the room’s corner was a narghile, a bubble pipe; in two others, lamps; and in the fourth, on a stand, a silver case filled with the Qur’an. It was as if a piece of the Levant had somehow magically found its way into Manhattan.
Jamal sat and within a moment Laila entered, as exotically youthful and beautiful as ever. This evening she wore a red-colored thobe embroidered, he noted, with the motifs and colors from the Horan region of Greater Syria. In her hands, she held a long metal hash pipe which she held out to Jamal. He leaned over and took it and then watched her as she lit it for him with a taper.
That night for the evening meal she served one of his favorite dishes, Damascene fette, with grilled almonds and clarified sheep butter.
It was after they had eaten but were still sitting around the scamla, with the remains of their repast on its silver platter resting on the small wooden stool, that she told him she was leaving.
“I am too old to move again,” he complained.
“I know, dear friend,” she replied. “But you will not be going with me.”
He looked up, startled.
“I will not be leaving for a month or so, however,” she continued. “You will have passed by then,” she ended slowly.
“Passed?” His voice quavered.
“Yes, Jamal.” Laila looked at him calmly, her yellow eyes strangely aglow. “Your time has come, old friend. Your passing is soon. Very soon.”
Jamal sat staring intently at the beautiful young female in front of him. Then after a long moment, he sighed and said. “You’re sure?”
She only nodded, saying nothing.
He slowly looked around the room, then down at his hands, then finally at Laila once again, his dark old eyes glistening wetly with silent tears.
“Inshallah,” he said softly. As Allah wills it.
