Until My Heart Is at Peace

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

I saw her, and in that first instant I was certain it was she, no one else. Her radiance, her beauty, the pull of my own feeling toward her. Yet a doubt crept in, stealthy and insistent, seeping into me like a whisper. It soaked my thoughts and awakened in me a thousand questions. How desperately a reaper of disappointments longs for a heart at peace. How often misfortune has ensnared me, how many times fate has turned its shield against my face. How many falls, how many wounds of love, how many endings have I endured.

I had seen her with both my eyes the first time. She dazzled me and rekindled in me a spirit thought long gone. Hope returned after failure and despair. Yet still a misgiving prowled inside me. Perhaps my eyes were tired. I looked again and again, rubbing them hard with my fingers and palms.

I asked myself: Was what I saw truly real?

Truth replied: It was what you saw.

And still, something in me pulled without name or shape. Was it weakness, confusion, disorder? I feared illusion, feared a mirage. My soul yearned to believe after so much waiting, after so much loss. Astonishment I could hardly trust. I had to verify, to be sure, twice over.

And after the second look my eyes proclaimed: She, it is she. I soared on wings of joy above the clouds. But a compulsive whisper slithered in through a crack, and a tremor of fear crept into me and said: To fall from above the clouds is to be slain without escape.

I told myself I would not leave a door ajar, nor a shadow of confusion to unsettle the mother of all senses. I had to investigate, seal every crack and crevice, and be free of every fear and doubt. My bewilderment consumed me.

“O Umm Sharif, scatter the haze that has pulled me between Axum and Marib.”

O Umm Sharif, I am heavy with a burden vast as a mountain. I want to cut my doubt with certainty. I pleaded with her, begged her to speak at length of what she had seen, of what had reached her ears, and to lift from my understanding any veil of possible confusion.

She made me understand it was she, none other. She, she, she—the truth of what I had seen. She, and not her sister. The elder was married, the younger still a child.

Umm Sharif unfolded her descriptions while I busied myself matching them, weighing her words against what my eyes had witnessed. Then I began describing, and she echoed each detail twice, affirming again and again: She, it is she whom you saw.

The gloom on my face broke into the glow of radiant suns. Everything in me began to shine, to celebrate. Who could contain me now? My joy swelled larger than myself, larger than all existence. And yet still inside me an echo roamed, a haunting urging me to magnify the truth. The heart, so hungry for passion, must be reassured, must rest. My heart had lived through heaps and galaxies of heavy disappointments. All doubt dissolves in truth. This was how I thought, when even the universe seemed too small for the vastness of my joy.

On the third day I went to my aunt, my aunt Umm ‘Abdu Farid, the very one who caught me from my mother’s womb and held me up to this world. I asked her to visit the girl, to read for me the book of her details, to verify what I had seen. That day she was staying in a house near the girl’s. I gave her the descriptions, all I had heard and seen. She returned confirming the confirmed, and then she said: A verse of beauty, a miracle time rarely grants.

I listened with a thousand ears and a thousand throbs of longing. I could not stop asking. I seemed like a child in nursery, mouth agape, dazed with wonder. At times I repeated the question like a fool. Ah, my helplessness! And when she had emptied her store of words, I would plead for her to go on, not to finish. I wanted to plunge into hearing until I was intoxicated, intoxicated as if what I heard were a lawful sweetness, permitted upon permitted.

I would implore her to speak more, to speak beyond speaking if she could, to pour forth without tiring. I broke into a sweat and felt a sharper shame when she sent me a half-smile as I asked about the girl’s breasts. I must have looked like an infant, not yet weaned. I remained transfixed on her mouth as she spoke of the one I loved, clinging to her lips like church bells, my thirst for knowing more endless, without a place to rest.

A week passed and was complete, its Saturday, its Friday. I drowned in the dream more than I slept, until the dream itself grew vaster than a galaxy, engulfing me a thousand times each day. After a week I sent a messenger to complete what I had begun. But the girl’s mother delayed, wishing first to ask about me, lest she risk. And so I had to wait, forced to wait, compelled, a man without choice, not a hero.

* * *