We finished the apple tart and ice cream. Feeling relaxed, I stretched my legs out a little. Imran noticed my red shoes, and said their color intrigued him. They were made of leather, I told him. Natural skin. Then there was silence. Kuhl went back to her notebook and I exchanged a few words with the Polish waitress. She told me she was studying biology and had worked as a window cleaner and child minder to pay her university fees. Her dream was to stay on in Western Europe, she said.
Imran spoke up suddenly. “Those shoes! As if they are made from the skins of oppressed peoples.”
I stared at his glossy brown shoes. I didn’t say anything. I was remembering his plastic wardrobe opposite the bead curtain. I imagined the shirts slapping against each other inside, like flags caught in a strong gust of wind, but one whose effects were nevertheless invisible, as though it were a whirlwind welling up only inside me. Hearing the sound of the shirts flapping in the wind sent me to the sea, to the slap of sails on never-ending voyages, to a lost ship raising the flag in Love in the Time of Cholera to the swirling and eddying of the ocean, sea shanties, the whale in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, the glint of strange and far-off stars. I tugged at my spirit, which was stumbling over the buttons of Imran’s shirts in his wardrobe, getting tangled up in Kuhl’s spirit on the way and stumbling over it as well.
Kuhl was bursting with tenderness, but it looked to me like Imran was trying to fend off her affection in self-defense. He always tries to keep a distance between himself and others, I thought. Not because he believed he was better than they were, but because he was wary of them. Wherever he landed, he seemed to create around himself an aura of opacity and silence, keeping everyone a fierce arm’s length away. Kuhl broke open the aura, and forced this unyielding arm—which still showed the traces of the glowing iron spike, the father’s hateful anger—to encircle her. But her route to this arm scarred by the seal of cruelty was a tough and rocky one. Even now, with the first anniversary of their secret marriage approaching, waves of doubt about whether this devotion was real and lasting, since he had never known the like—or alternatively, known fears about its very strength—would crest and break over him, sweeping him somewhere far away.
Imran was not inattentive to others. In fact, he paid more attention, and cared more, than people thought. They believed that his apparent indifference to others meant he cared only about his studies. In fact, his was a profound curiosity about people. But it was a curiosity he kept concealed, or at least camouflaged. It was a curiosity that extended to me.
He was clever—he could even be sly—but he was not out to deceive anyone. Kuhl recognized his pure intentions, as I did, too. It was just that he was so tightly swathed in the winding cloths of a terrible, frightening childhood. The cringing affection of an abased mother had not been able to protect him from all of that humiliation. Her powerlessness had only intensified it.
In his village, everything was made from dried mud. Houses, livestock enclosures, the walls around every field, the primary school. Even the emaciated animals were covered with splatters of dried mud. The one structure built of stone was the imam’s shrine. From its hidden inner chamber the expected Mahdi was to emerge. This savior would flood the world with justice, for it had become a world of tyranny. No one knew exactly where in the shrine the vault sat. Imran started going there every night. He lifted the worn-out carpets and inspected the stone floor. He put his ear to every inch of the place, knocking and tapping the walls, but the shrine never revealed the secret of its vault.
On Laylat al-Qadr, he saw a light coming through the cracks in the floor, and he heard the sound of weeping. He put out his hands in the darkness—the hands of a young man, burned and scarred by the father’s iron spikes. He tried to jiggle the stones, and then to push them. They slid open, and there was the vault. Imran squeezed himself into it easily and dropped lightly, like a bird landing gently on the ground. The vault was paved in silver. He saw the seated imam, poised on one pan of an enormous scale, balanced by an equivalent weight in gold. He was wearing a white robe embroidered with gold threads and a tall cap studded with carnelian. Imran stood before him, and the imam put out his hand, diamond and ruby rings on his fingers. The hand touched the burn marks left by the hot iron skewer, and the wounds left by the leather whip scourging Imran’s body. The imam ordered his followers to catch the young man’s tears in a worked silver bowl. When the imam dipped his hand in the bowl, the tears turned into pearls, which his acolytes then dropped into Imran’s pockets. They lit his way out with torches. The door to the vault closed. It did not open again.