flat street, that juncture where two dimensions meet—like an incomplete corner. I simply reached down and took his hand. We hurried. Hurry was essential. It was from my desperate fear for his safety that the idea of real hurry was born.
And then I knew the depth of my heart. It matched the height of Capella the Goat Star. I knew my own essence, which was to love this boy with all my spirit, and all my mind, and all my heart, and in knowing this love I would know God beyond myself but within me as sure as the stars sprinkled the sky above me because what is inner is also outer.
Amen.
That is my story. This is the end of the story that swooped me up in its wings.
But it is not the end of what happened. When we left the bloody wall, he seemed both to know and not to know that his mother was gone. The boy was very young, but he knew his name. He told me his father was French, and from that he had been named Pierre, but he used his mother’s last name because his father had left them (though his mother said he was a good man), so his name in its entirety was Pierre Saad.
I told him that I had come to the city to learn the mystic ways of the Sufi. He asked me how I had found him, and I told him how I’d followed a star and found him.
He asked me which star, because dawn was just breaking and we could still see a few bright points in the gray sky above the edge of the city.
And I answered it was the star named for my goat, who had just turned into a cow.
When he laughed and squeezed my hand exactly the way a boy should who is sharing a secret with his father, I knew that he was a boy who would find joy in his life.
You may ask me, Did your boy who must be a man now find joy?
And I will say the path is not always straight. On its own—not just through our hesitations—it twists and turns. I would tell you he found joy and lost it. He keeps his own joy in his child, now a grown woman but not married and who may or may not marry because she is married to her work. My son has also found joy in his work. Like me, he loves images.
He understands images to be the mediators between what is mortal and what is divine, what has form and what is real beyond any shape or form. The image is not the betrayer, as some Muslims think; it is the gate. My son is not a Sufi; he is a scientist. But he is a good scientist; he knows he does not study reality; he knows that he and his colleagues only work to construct a picture of reality. He has told me this many times so that I do not worry about him.
But I do worry about him. Violence has visited his life twice to take from him those who are dearest to him. His mother and then his wife were taken from him by those who would lock religion in a box bound with metal. Patterns sometimes run in threes, and it may happen again. I only hope he does not lose his daughter, because she is the future that rightly belonged to both his mother and his wife. Finally I hope only that my son remains safe and alive till I am not. I hope that in the afterlife I do not ache with anxiety about his safety or his happiness. I wish him protection. Beyond that I wish that joy may visit my son named Pierre Saad again.
Voices braid together to tell a story. Sometimes one section disappears behind another. How many strands are there, and where do they come from and how does one story disappear or emerge unexpectedly?
Pierre Saad trusted his father and took his hand because his father was accompanied by Hathor the Cow, the goddess of beauty, and the little orphaned boy believed in the truth of beauty that depends on imagination. The Sufi father taught the boy as he grew that the text is always open to new interpretations because story conjures images, and pictures partaking of the infinite transcend both space and time. Pierre Saad wanted to read the earth—pictures left in caves when humans were