Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,78
Cher Ami,
Say not that your heart is broken. With all that I have seen and felt and known, I hold, even still, that the heart is the singular miracle God gave to each of us—an organ that heals itself. A wizened old hekime in the harem once told me that the human heart is the size of a fist. Yet the heart is much bigger on the inside, not bound by its physical form.
And so, may I humbly advise you to do the thing I have tried to do all these long years since the night in the desert when I watched as my beloved was struck down by Pasha’s sword. Let this love you profess for me be enclosed in a small chamber in your heart. Seal it. Open the door to it no more. And there let it live, evergreen, but not consuming. Perhaps one day, it will fade from your memory entire when rosier cheeks and lips occupy your imagination and enter into your embrace.
When the poet and I alighted on English shores, I knew I could not remain with him. Indeed, the very sight of him served as a cruel reminder of the last night I spent in the warmth of my land’s sun and the clear, devastating beauty of her starry nights. Though he offered himself to me, proposed a life where neither of us were bound to the other, and a comfortable life it might have been while he lived, I refused to accept it. I did not escape one gilded cage at so high a price to simply enter another.
Begging his leave, I secured companionship with a kindly, older French woman of diminished noble birth, but wealthy enough to be a patron of the arts, a lover of the Orient. And thus I came to France all those years ago, not merely to forget, but to try and live without regret in my heart—to build a life on my own terms.
In this, you have helped me, perhaps unknowingly. Your friendship, your encouragement, your amiable nature brought me a sense of comfort and returned a part of my own self to me. And for that I shall remain eternally grateful.
Yet now I must ask that we sever our connection permanently for your own good. For I know myself. What you seek from me, I cannot give. I know what I ask of you. I do not ask it lightly.
Forever yours in friendship,
I let the letter fall to the table. In Byron’s poem, the Giaour kills the Pasha to avenge Leila’s sack death. That’s the story the Delacroix paintings tell, too.
But if this is real, it’s all turned upside down. Leila survived. She had to watch helplessly while the Pasha killed her lover. Then she fled to England with Lord Byron. And then here to Paris to try and make a life for herself. Byron wrote a fantasy, an opium-induced fable because he thought his fiction was the better story.
He was wrong.
Leila
Before I slip past this world, I am seized and tossed in a whirling tempest of water and air that leaves me gasping for breath as the ocean enters my lungs one moment and is wrenched out of me the next.
It ends with a thud. Pain surges through my body.
I am on land—the sack in tattered shreds around me, and my hands unbound, bleeding. I sit up, trembling, coughing, spitting out water. I unsheathe my yataghan, miraculously still at my waist, and cut through the ropes at my feet. I untie the gag from around my mouth. My lungs and nostrils burn. I turn back to a sea that is illuminated from below by a cerulean light. Si’la leans into the waves and whispers and drops an opal into the churning water that calms at her command. The blue light fades.
I turn to look for Si’la, my mouth open to scream, but no sound comes out. A horse gallops toward me. I squint into the darkness. I rise and hold my yataghan aloft. The rider stops short; his horse snorts and brays.
The poet dismounts and reaches out his hand. “You need to come with me now.”