Free The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black Page B

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 anddifficult, 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?
     
It was only afterwards that she came fully to realize just howextraordinary had been that hour she had spent with him—how extraordinary, that is, that she had gone there at all, and had sat there all that time, listening to him. She had always been impulsive—everyone said it about her, even her Auntie Irene, though she managed to make it sound like a big fault—but this was something different. She had been drawn to Dr. Kreutz out of need. What that need was, or how she had known that he was the one who