Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

"Welcome welcome," the Doctor said, and urged her towards the sofa with a gesture of one long, slender hand the color of melted chocolate. But she would not let herself sit, not yet.

On the table there was a bowl made of hammered copper, and into this the Doctor emptied the three bright-red apples from the string bag-she thought of Snow White and the Wicked Stepmother-and then went out through a doorless archway into another room, from where she heard him filling a kettle with water. She stood in the silence, feeling the slow, dull beating of her heart. She was not thinking anything, or not in words, anyway. It was the strangest thing she had experienced in her life so far, just being here, in that room, with that exotic perfume in the air, and the look of everything somehow different from anything she was accustomed to. If Billy had walked in the door this minute she would hardly have known who he was. She felt no touch of worry or alarm. In fact, she had never felt so far from danger. In the street outside the wind soughed, and vague shadows of leaves moved before her on the far wall. She was trembling, she realized, trembling with excitement and a strange sort of expectant happiness that somehow had something to do with the deep-red color of the blanket on the sofa and the cushions on the dark-red floor and those three unreally perfect, glossy apples in the copper dish, each one reflecting on its cheek an identical gleaming spot of light from the window.

The room beyond the arch was a little kitchen, with badly painted cupboards and an old stone sink and a Baby Belling stove, on which the Doctor boiled the kettle and made herbal tea in a green metal pot that was not round but boat-shaped, a bit like Sinbad's lamp, with a long, curving spout and swirling designs cut into the metal all over. This time she accepted his invitation to sit and arranged herself carefully on the sofa with her knees pressed tight together and her hands clasped in her lap. The Doctor, with marvelous grace and effortlessness, folded himself rapidly downwards, like a corkscrew going into a cork, until he was sitting tailor-fashion on one of the cushions by the table. He poured the almost colorless tea into two dainty little painted cups. She waited for him to offer milk and sugar but then realized that of course this was not that kind of tea, and even though she had not said anything to show up her ignorance she blushed anyway, and hoped he would not notice.

They began to talk, and before she knew it she was telling him all sorts of things about herself, things she would never have told anyone else. First she talked about her family and her life in the Flats, or a version of it-she was careful not to say what the Flats were called or where they were, exactly, in case he might know what they were like, for they had an awful reputation, one that people who had never had to live there made jokes about all the time-and managed to give the impression that they were old and quite grand, grand as the ones on Mespil Road that she often passed by when she went for walks on her own at the weekends. She told him too about the stolen bicycle when she was little and how she had knocked out Tommy Goggin's tooth, and that was certainly not the sort of thing that would happen on Mespil Road. She was even going to tell him what her father used to do to her when she was a little girl, what he had made her promise would be "our own little secret," but stopped just in time, shocked at herself. How could she talk like this to a total stranger? Thinking of her Da and all that she got a wobbly feeling in the pit of her stomach, and despite the spicy perfume in the air and the fragrance of the tea, she was sure she smelled distinctly for a second the very smell Da always used to have, of coal dust and fags and sweat, and she had to stop herself giving a shiver.

But what was she doing here, anyway, she asked herself as she sipped the bittersweet tea, what did she think she was at, sitting on this red blanket in this strange man's room on an ordinary autumn afternoon? Only the afternoon was not ordinary, she knew that. She knew, in fact, that she would think of this forever after as one of the most momentous days of her life, more momentous even than the day she was married.

She stopped talking then, thinking she had said quite enough about herself for the moment, and waited to see what he in return would reveal about himself and his life. But he told her little, or little that she could get a real grasp of, anyway, it sounded so strange. He had been born in Austria, he said, the son of an Austrian psychoanalyst and a maharajah's daughter who had been sent from India to be the psychoanalyst's pupil but had fallen in love with him. As she listened to this she felt, despite herself, a small qualm of doubt; though he spoke matter-of-factly, seeming not to be concerned whether she believed him or not, there was something in his tone that did not sound to her entirely, well, natural. She caught him watching her, too, with what looked to her like a speculative gleam in those black-brown eyes of his, and she wondered if he was testing her gullibility or, indeed, if he might be laughing at her. But she could not believe that he would lie, and she did not mind even if he was making fun of her, which was strange, for if there was one thing that usually she would not stand for it was being made a mockery of. Later, she would come to see that this was how he was with everyone and everything, that for him there was nothing that did not have its playful side, and he taught her, or at least he tried to teach her-she had never been good at getting jokes-that being solemn was the same as being sad, and that God wanted us only to be happy.

He explained to her that he was a Sufi. She did not know what that was, or even how to spell it. She assumed at first it was the name of the tribe or-what was the word?-the caste that he came from, or at least that his mother came from, in India. But no, it was a religion, it seemed, or a kind of a religion. He explained that the name was a version of the Arab word saaf , meaning pure. Sufism was based on the secret teachings of the Prophet Muhammad-at that name he bowed his head and muttered something, a prayer, she assumed, in a guttural language that sounded as if he was clearing his throat-who had lived almost fourteen hundred years ago, and who was as great a teacher as Jesus. The Prophet had been sent by God as "a mercy to all the world," he explained, and always talked to people in a way they could understand. Since most people are simple, he had put his teachings into simple words, but he had other doctrines, too, mystical and difficult, that were meant for only the wisest ones, the initiates. It was on these teachings that the Sufis had founded their religion. The Sufis had started out in Baghdad-she had seen that picture, The Thief of Baghdad , but thought she should not mention it-and their teachings had spread throughout the world, and today there were Sufis everywhere, he said, in all countries.

He talked for a long time, quietly, gravely, not looking at her but gazing dreamily before him, and from the way he spoke-chanting, it was more like-he might have been thinking aloud, or repeating something he had said many times before, in many other places. She was reminded of a priest giving a sermon, but he was not like a priest, or not like the priests she was used to, at any rate, with their smelly black clothes and badly shaved chins and haunted, resentful eyes. The doctor was, quite simply, beautiful. It was a word she would never have thought of applying to a man, until now. He told her so many things, and said so many names-Ali somebody Talib, and El-Ghazali, and Omar Khayyám, whom at least she had heard of, and ones that were almost funny, like Al-Biruni, and Rumi, and Saadi of Shiraz-that soon her head was spinning. He instructed her that Sufis believe that all people must try to cleanse themselves of low human instincts and approach God through stages, maqaam , and states of mind, haal . He pronounced these and other exotic words very clearly and carefully, so that she would remember them, but most of them she immediately forgot. However, there were two words that she knew she would remember, and these were shaykh , which is the sage, and murid , the student or apprentice who places himself under the guidance and care of the shaykh . As she listened to him talk about the love that must exist between these two, the teacher and his pupil, that feeling she had felt when she had first entered the room glowed in her more strongly than ever. It was a sort of-she did not know how to describe it to herself-a sort of calm excitement, if such a thing was possible; excitement, and heat, and a sense of happy yearning. Yes, yearning-but for what?