Status Updates From Layli and Majnun

With these words, Majnun lay down his head on the earth and embraced the gravestone with both arms, pressing his body against it with all the force he could muster. His lips moved once more, then with the words, 'You, my love... the soul left his body.

'Maker of all things created! I implore thee in the name of everything which thou hast chosen: relieve me of this burden. Let me go where my love dwells. Free me from this cruel existence and, in the other world, cure me of my torment here.'

Thus the caravan moved through the desert. The sand wept with Majnun, the mountains echoed his mourning songs, his lament struck sparks from the thorn-bushes in the gorges and the stones of the steppe glowed with the colour of his blood.

And who am I—so far from you, yet near?
A singing beggar! Layla, do you hear?
Freed from life's drudgery, my loneliness,
Sorrow and grief for me spell happiness.
And thirsty in the painstream of delight,
I drown. Child of the sun, I starve at night.
Though parted our two loving souls combine,
For mine is all your own and yours is mine.

How changed you are! Your fate was clouded, disturbed like sand on a desert path; suddenly you have fallen still, like the water in the depth of a well. Yet, even if you are hidden from my eyes, my heart can see you and will never lose you. Even if your form has vanished—your sufferings here will endure through eternity.

When death had closed her lips, the mother's grief was boundless. She pressed her face against Layla's forehead and her tears glinted and sparkled like a cluster of stars on the extinct moon.

'When I am dead, dress me like a bride. Make me beautiful. As a salve for my eyes, take dust from Majnun's path. Prepare indigo from his sorrow, sprinkle the rose-water of his tears on my head and veil me in the scent of his grief. I want to be clad in a blood-red garment, for I am a blood-witness like the martyrs. Red is the colour of the feast! Is not death my feast?

Mother, oh my dear mother, how does it happen that a gazelle kid imbibes poison with its mother's milk? I am fading away and what has my life been? I have suffered so much in secret that now I must talk. Before my soul escapes, the grief in my heart breaks open the seal on my lips.I must draw back the curtain and then I shall go. My beloved, for whom I have lived and for whom I die, is far away. Listen to me, mother!

Autumn had come. In the garden, the leaves were falling like drops of blood. The warmth of the sun escaped from rivers and lakes, the face of the landscape became sere and yellow. The flowers shed the colour and brilliance of their garments. Ready to depart, the narcissus tied its bundle, The jasmin's silver lost its precious gleam and the rose-petals became a book of mourning.

Was it really possible, then, to steal a glance at paradise while living on on earth? Could a small particle of eternity break the chain of hours?

Look, I know of a garden, where palm trees, as dense as a forest, will protect you from prying eyes. There will be nothing above but the wheeling expanse of the sky, nothing beneath but a carpet of living green.... Come! Spring awaits you there and the key of your fate!

'And you: would it not also make you happy to see her? Could you not once break the fetters of separation, recite verses which would bring peace to her heart, re-live what has become memory, re-awaken what belongs to the past?

'Ruling in the realm of love, may your life endure as long as love itself. I am sent by Layla, whose beauty is one of the wonders of the world. She values her bond with you higher than her life. How long is it since she has seen your face, or heard your voice! She wishes to see you, so that eye can look into eye, if only for the passing of a breath.

Accept these as a present; go, fetch Majnun and bring him here. Then arrange a secret meeting in this garden. I only want to see him, to look at him, one single glance into the light! And perhaps, who knows, he will recite a few of his lines for me, two or three only, which no one else has yet heard; perhaps when I listen to them the tangled skein in my soul will be unravelled."

When the girl heard this, she became a reed sounding the melody of lost love.
'How I wish that I could be with him in his adversity! But our sufferings are not alike. It is I, not he, who is caught like a Joseph in the pit. Majnun is free, walking over the mountain peaks where I cannot follow him out of my valley—yet I will see him!

But one night, which was as black a Moor, Layla managed to escape from the tent. She sensed that this was not an ordinary night! Where was she to go? She did not know; in the darkness she blindly followed a voice in her heart which led her to the edge of a palm grove where two paths crossed—
Who knows, suggested the voice, perhaps, as you want it so badly, you will again receive word from him here. And so it was.

He in his wilderness could be as free and as mad as he liked; she had always been a prisoner, first her father's, then her husband's. A prisoner, courted, loved and spoiled—but did that ease her fate? Her husband obeyed, never touching her, but he lived in hope and laid siege to her with his tenderness, siege enclosing her in the walled city of his love.

You yourself are the grain of sand; you are your own prisoner. Break your cage, break free from yourself, free from humanity; learn that what you thought was real is not so in reality. Follow Nizami: burn but your own treasure, like a candle—then the world, your sovereign, will become your slave.

For how long then do you want to deceive yourself? For how long will you refuse to see yourself as you are and as you will be? Each grain of sand takes its own length and breadth as the measure of the world; yet, beside a mountain range it is as nothing.

For one brief moment he had hit the trail of men like a flash of lightning—then he vanished again like a cloud driven by the wind....
What is human life after all? Whether it endures for a brief spell or or longer even if it could last a thousand years, take it as a breath of air merging into eternity. From the beginning, life bears death's signature; they are brothers in the secret play of their eyes.

No—even now he was only a guest. Nothing, no one could hold him. His home was here no longer, his friends had become strangers. He tore himself away from their hands, his eyes leaping ahead of his steps into the mountains where only his animals awaited him; there was space for his heart to suffer from one rim of the sky to the other.