Chapter 24 Solomon the drunk

Before the commotion I was snoozing peacefully with my back to the tavern wall, and then the racket outside made me nearly jump out of my skin.

"What's going on?" I screamed as my eyes snapped open. "Did the Mongols attack us?"

There was a ripple of laughter. I turned around and found several other customers making fun of me. Dirty bastards!

"Don't you worry, old drunk!" yelled Hristos, the tavern owner. "No Mongols coming after you. It's Rumi passing by with an army of admirers."

I went to the window and looked out. Sure enough, there they were—an excited procession of disciples and admirers repeatedly chanting, "God is great! God is great!" In the middle of it all was the erect figure of Rumi, mounted on a white horse, radiating strength and confidence. I opened the window, ducked my head out, and watched them. Moving at a pace no faster than a snail's, the procession came very near. In fact, some of the crowd were so close that I could easily have touched a few heads. Suddenly I had a brilliant idea. I was going to snatch off some people's turbans!

I grabbed the wooden back scratcher that belongs to Hristos. Holding the window open with one hand and the scratcher in the other, I leaned forward, managing to reach the turban of a man in the crowd. I was just about to pull the turban off when another man inadvertently looked up and saw me.

"Selamun aleykum," I saluted, smiling from ear to ear.

"A Muslim in a tavern! Shame on you!" the man roared. "Don't you know wine is the handiwork of Satan?"

I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could make a sound, something sharp whizzed by my head. I realized in sheer horror that it was a stone. If I hadn't ducked at the last second, it would have cracked my skull. Instead it had shot through the open window, landing on the table of the Persian merchant sitting behind me. Too tipsy to comprehend what had happened, the merchant held the stone in his hand, examining it as if it were an obscure message from the skies.

"Suleiman, close that window and go back to your table!" Hristos bellowed, his voice hoarse with worry.

"Did you see what happened?" I said as I staggered back toward my table. "Someone hurled a stone at me. They could have killed me!"

Hristos raised an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, but what were you expecting? Don't you know there are people who don't want to see a Muslim in a tavern? And here you are displaying yourself, reeking of alcohol, your nose glowing like a red lantern."

"S-so what?" I stuttered. "Am I not a human being?"

Hristos patted me on the shoulder as if to say, Don't be so touchy.

"You know, this is exactly why I abhor religion. All sorts of them! Religious people are so confident of

having God by their side that they think they are superior to everyone else," I said.

Hristos did not respond. He was a religious man, but also a skilled tavern owner who knew how to soothe an incensed customer. He brought me another carafe of red wine and watched me as I guzzled it. Outside, a wild wind blew, slamming shut the windows and scattering dry leaves left and right. For a

moment we stood still, listening carefully, as if there were a melody to be heard.

"I don't understand why wine was forbidden in this world but promised in heaven," I said. "If it's as

bad as they claim, why would they serve it in paradise?"

"Questions, questions ..." Hristos murmured as he threw his hands up. "You are always full of

questions. Do you have to question everything?"

"Of course I do. That's why we were given a brain, don't you think?"

"Solomon, I have known you for a long time. You are not just any customer to me. You are my friend.

And I worry about you."

"I'll be fine—" I said, but Hristos interrupted me.

"You are a good man, but your tongue is as sharp as a dagger. That's what worries me. There are all

sorts of people in Konya. And it's no secret that some of them don't think highly of a Muslim who has taken to drink. You need to learn to be careful in public. Hide your ways, and watch what you say."

I grinned. "May we top off this speech with a poem from Khayyám?"

Hristos heaved a sigh, but the Persian merchant who had overheard me exclaimed cheerfully, "Yes, we want a poem from Khayyám."

Other customers joined in, giving me a big round of applause. Motivated and slightly provoked, I jumped onto a table and began to recite:

"Did God set grapes a-growing, do you think, And at the same time make it a sin to drink?"

The Persian merchant yelled, "Of course not! That wouldn't make any sense!"

"Give thanks to Him who foreordained it thus— Surely He loves to hear the glasses clink!"

If there was one thing these many years of drinking had taught me, it was that different people drank differently. I knew people who drank gallons every night, and all they did was get merry, sing songs, and then doze off. But then there were others who turned into monsters with a few drops. If the same drink made some merry and tipsy and others wicked and aggressive, shouldn't we hold the drinkers responsible instead of the drink?

"Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why; Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where."

Another round of applause followed. Even Hristos joined the excitement. In the Jewish quarter of Konya, in a tavern owned by a Christian, we, a mixed bunch of wine lovers of all faiths, raised our glasses and toasted together, hard though it was to believe, to a God who could love and forgive us even when we ourselves clearly failed to do so.

NORTHAMPTON, MAY 31, 2008

"Better safe than sorry," said the Web site. "Check his shirts for lipstick stains, see if he comes home smelling of unfamiliar perfumes."

This was the first time Ella Rubinstein had taken an online test, titled "How to Tell If Your Husband Is Cheating on You!" Although she found the questions tacky, by now she knew that life itself could occasionally feel like one big cliché.

In spite of her final test score, Ella didn't want to confront David on this matter. She still had not asked him where he'd been on the nights he hadn't come home. These days she spent most of her time reading Sweet Blasphemy, using the novel as an excuse to cover up her silence. Her mind was so distracted that it was taking her longer than usual to finish the book. Still, she was enjoying the story, and with every new rule of Shams's she mulled her life over.

When the children were around, she acted normal. They acted normal. However, the moment she and David were alone, she caught her husband looking at her curiously, as if wondering what kind of wife would avoid asking her husband where he'd spent the night. But the truth was that Ella didn't want a piece of information she wouldn't know how to handle. The less she knew about her husband's flings, the less they would occupy her mind, she thought. It was true what they say about ignorance. It was bliss.

The only time that bliss had been disrupted was last Christmas, when a survey from a local hotel arrived in their mailbox, addressed directly to David. Customer service wanted to know whether he was happy with his stays. Ella left the letter on the table, on top of a pile of mail, and that evening she watched him take the letter out of the opened envelope and read it.

"Ah, a guest evaluation form! The last thing I needed," David said, managing a half smile for her. "We held a dental conference there last year. They must have included all the participants on their customer list."

She believed him. At least the part of her that didn't like to rock the boat did. The other part of her was cynical and distrustful. It was that same part that the next day found the hotel's number and dialed it, just to hear what she already knew: Neither this year nor the one before had they ever hosted a dental conference.

Deep inside, Ella blamed herself. She hadn't aged well, and she'd gained considerable weight over the last six years. With every new pound, her sexual drive had declined a bit further. The cooking classes rendered it more difficult to shed the extra pounds, though there were women in her group who cooked more often, and better, and still remained half her size.

When she looked back at her life, she realized that rebellion had never suited her. She had never smoked weed with boys behind closed doors, gotten kicked out of bars, used morning-after pills, thrown fits, or lied to her mother. Never cut class. Never had teen sex. All around her, girls her age were having abortions or putting their out-of-wedlock babies up for adoption, while she observed their stories as though watching a TV program on famine in Ethiopia. It saddened Ella that such tragedies were unfolding in the world, but the truth was that she never saw herself as sharing the same universe with those unfortunate ones.

She had never been a party girl, not even as a teenager. She preferred to sit at home and read a good book on a Friday night rather than whoop it up with strangers at some wild party.

"Why can't you be like Ella?" the mothers in the neighborhood asked their daughters. "See, she never

gets herself in trouble."

While their mothers adored her, the kids themselves saw her as a nerd with no sense of humor. No

wonder she wasn't very popular in high school. Once a classmate told her, "You know what your problem is? You take life so seriously. You're fucking boring!"

She listened carefully and said she would think about that.

Even her hairstyle hadn't changed much over the years—long, straight, honey-blond hair that she pulled into an unrelenting bun or braided down her back. She wore little makeup, just a touch of reddish brown lipstick and a moss green eyeliner, which according to her daughter did more to hide than to bring out the gray-blue of her eyes. In any event, she never managed to draw two perfectly curved lines with the eyeliner and often went out with the line on one eyelid looking thicker than that on the other.

Ella suspected that there must be something wrong with her. She was either too intrusive and pushy (with regard to Jeannette's marriage plans) or too passive and docile (with regard to her husband's flings). There was an Ella-the-control-freak and an Ella-the-hopelessly-meek. She could never tell which one was about to emerge, or when.

And then there was a third Ella, observing everything quietly, waiting for her time to come. It was this Ella who told her she was calm to the point of numbness but that underneath there was a strangled self, harboring a fast freshet of anger and rebellion. If she kept going like this, the third Ella warned, she was bound to explode someday. It was just a matter of time.

Contemplating these issues on the last day of May, Ella did something she hadn't done in a long while. She prayed. She asked God to either provide her with a love that would absorb her whole being or else make her tough and careless enough not to mind the absence of love in her life.

"Whichever one You choose, please be quick," she added as an afterthought. "You might have forgotten, but I'm already forty. And as You can see, I don't carry my years well."