Budayeen Nights Read online

  “A dream,” muttered the imam. “The Prophet, may blessings be on his name and peace, didst offer no absolution for murder provoked only by dreams.”

  A woman in the crowd cried out, “But she is only twelve years old!”

  The imam turned and pushed his way through the rabble.

  “Sergeant,” said the qadi, “this young girl is now in your custody. The Straight Path makes our duty clear.”

  The police officer nodded and stepped forward. He bound the young girl’s wrists and pushed her forward through the alley. The crowd of fellahin parted to make way for them. The sergeant led Jehan to a small, dank cell until she might have a hearing. A panel of religious elders would judge her according to Shari’a, the contemporary code of laws derived from the ancient and noble Qur’ân.

  Jehan did not suffer in her noxious cell. A lifetime in the Budayeen had made her familiar with deprivation. She waited patiently for whatever outcome Allah intended.

  She did not wait long. She was given another brief hearing, during which the council asked her many of the same questions the imam had asked. She answered them all without hesitation. Her judges were saddened but compelled to render their verdict. They gave her an opportunity to change her statement, but she refused. At last the senior member of the panel stood to face her. “O young one,” he said in the most reluctant of voices, “The Prophet, blessings be on his name and peace, said, ‘Whoso slayeth a believer, his reward is Hell forever.’ And elsewhere, ‘Who killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he killed all mankind.’ Therefore, if he whom you slew had purposed corruption upon you, your act would have been justified. Yet you deny this. You rely on your dreams, your visions. Such insubstantial defense cannot persuade this council otherwise than that you are guilty. You must pay the penalty even as it is written. It shall be exacted tomorrow morning just before sunrise.”

  Jehan’s expression did not change. She said nothing. Of her many visions, she had witnessed this particular scene before also. Sometimes, as now, she was condemned; sometimes she was freed. That evening she ate a good meal, a better meal than most she had taken before in her life of poverty. She slept the night, and she was ready when the civil and religious officials came for her in the morning. An imam of great repute spoke to her at length, but Jehan did not listen carefully. The remaining acts and motions of her life seemed mechanically ordered, and she did not pay great heed to them. She followed where she was led, she responded dully when pressed for a reply, and she climbed the platform set up in the courtyard of the great Shimaal Mosque.

  “Dost thou feel regret?” asked the imam, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  Jehan was made to kneel with her head on the block. She shrugged. “No,” she said.

  “Dost thou feel anger, O my daughter?”

  “No.”

  “Then mayest Allah in His mercy grant thee peace.” The imam stepped away. Jehan had no view of the headsman, but she heard the collective sigh of the onlookers as the great axe lifted high in the first faint rays of dawn, and then the blade fell.

  Jehan shuddered in the alley. Watching her death always made her exceptionally uneasy. The hour wasn’t much later; the fifth and final call to prayer had sounded not long before, and now it was night. The celebration continued around her more intensely than before. That her intended deed might end on the headsman’s block did not deter her. She grasped the knife tightly, wishing that time would pass more swiftly, and she thought of other things.

  By the end of May 1925, they were settled in a hotel on the tiny island of Helgoland some fifty miles from the German coast. Jehan relaxed in a comfortably furnished room. The landlady made her husband put Heisenberg and Jehan’s luggage in the best and most expensive room. Heisenberg had every hope of ridding himself of his allergic afflictions. He also intended to make some sense of the opaque melding of theories and counter-theories put forward by his colleagues back in Gottingen. Meanwhile, the landlady gave Jehan a grim and glowering look at their every meeting but said nothing. The Herr Doktor himself was too preoccupied to care for anything as trivial as propriety, morals, the reputation of this Helgoland retreat, or Jehan’s peace of mind. If anyone raised eyebrows over the arrangement, Heisenberg certainly was blithely unaware; he walked around as if he were insensible to everything but the pollen count and the occasional sheer cliffs over which he sometimes came close to tumbling.

  Jehan was mindful of the old woman’s disapproval. Jehan, however, had lived a full, harsh life in her twenty-six years, and a raised eyebrow rated very low on her list of things to be concerned about. She had seen too many people abandoned to starvation, too many people dispossessed and reduced to beggary, too many outsiders slain in the name of Allah, too many maimed or beheaded through the convoluted workings of Islamic justice. All these years Jehan had kept her father’s bloodied dagger, packed now somewhere beneath her Shetland wool sweaters, and still as deadly as ever.

  Heisenberg’s health improved on the island, and there was a beautiful view of the sea from their room. His mood brightened quickly. One morning, while walking along the shoreline with him, Jehan read a passage from the glorious Qur’ân. “This surah is called The Earthquake,’ “she said. “‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. When Earth is shaken with her final earthquake, and Earth yields up her burdens and man saith: What aileth her? That day she will relate her chronicles, because thy Lord inspireth her. That day mankind will issue forth in separate groups to be shown their deeds. And whoso doeth good an atom’s weight will see it then. And whoso doeth ill an atom’s weight will see it then.’ “

  And Jehan wept, knowing that however much good she might do, it could never outweigh the wrongs she had already performed.

  But Heisenberg only stared out over the gray, tumbling waves of the ocean. He did not listen closely to the sacred verses, yet a few of Jehan’s words struck him. ‘“And whoso doeth good an atom’s weight will see it then,’” he said, emphasizing the single word. There was a small, hesitant smile quivering at the corners of his mouth. Jehan put her arm around him to comfort him because he seemed chilled, and she led him back to the hotel. The weather had turned colder and the air was misty with sea spray; together they listened to the cries of the herring gulls as the birds dived for fish or hovered screeching over the strip of beach. Jehan thought of what she’d read, of the end of the world. Heisenberg thought only of its beginning, and its still closely guarded secrets.

  They liked their daily, peaceful walk about the island. Now, more than ever before, Jehan carried with her a copy of the Qur’ân, and she often read short verses to him. So different from the biblical literature he’d heard all his life, Heisenberg let the Islamic scriptures pass without comment. Yet it seemed to him that certain specific images offered their meanings to him alone.

  Jehan saw at last that he was feeling well. Heisenberg took up again full time the tangled knot that was the current state of quantum physics. It was both his vocation and his means of relaxation. He told Jehan the best scientific minds in the world were frantically working to cobble together a slipshod mathematical model, one that might account for all the observed data. Whatever approach they tried, the data would not fit together. He, however, would find the key; he was that confident. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d do it but, of course, he hadn’t yet really applied himself thoroughly to the question.

  Jehan was not amused. She read to him: ‘“Hast thou not seen those who pretend that they believe in that which is revealed unto thee and that which was revealed before thee, how they would go for judgment in their disputes to false deities when they have been ordered to abjure them? Satan would lead them all astray.’”

  Heisenberg laughed heartily. “Your Allah isn’t just talking about Gottingen there,” he said. “He’s got Bohr in mind, too, and Einstein in Berlin.”

  Jehan frowned at his impiety. It was the irreverence and ignorant ridicule of the kafir, the unbe
liever. She wondered if the old religion that had never truly had any claim on her was yet still part of her. She wondered how she’d feel after all these years, walking the narrow, crowded, clangorous ways of the Budayeen again. “You mustn’t speak that way,” she said at last.

  “Hmm?” said Heisenberg. He had already forgotten what he’d said to her.

  “Look out there,” said Jehan. “What do you see?”

  “The ocean,” said Heisenberg. “Waves.”

  “Allah created those waves. What do you know about that?”

  “I could determine their frequency,” said the scientist. “I could measure their amplitude.”

  “Measure!” cried Jehan. Her own long years of scientific study were suddenly overshadowed by an imagined insult to her heritage. “Look here,” she demanded. “A handful of sand. Allah created this sand. What do you know about it?”

  Heisenberg couldn’t see what Jehan was trying to tell him. “With the proper instruments,” he said, a little afraid of offending her, “in the proper setting, I could take any single grain of sand and tell you—“His words broke off suddenly. He got to his feet slowly, like an old man. He looked first at the sea, then down at the shore, then back out at the water. “Waves,” he murmured, “particles, it makes no difference. All that counts is what we can actually measure. We can’t measure Bohr’s orbits, because they don’t really exist! So the spectral lines we see are caused by transitions between two states. Pairs of states, yes; but that will mean an entirely new form of mathematical expression just to describe them, referencing tables listing every possible—“

  “Werner.” Jehan knew that he was now lost to her.

  “Just the computations alone will take days, if not weeks.”

  “Werner, listen to me. This island is so small, you can throw a stone from one end to the other. I’m not going to sit on this freezing beach or up on your bleak and dreary cliff while you make your brilliant breakthrough, whatever it is. I’m saying goodbye.”

  “What? Jehan?” Heisenberg blinked and returned to the tangible world.

  She couldn’t face him any longer. She was pouring one handful of sand through the fingers of her other hand. It came suddenly to her mind then: If you had no water to perform the necessary ablution before prayer in the direction of Makkah, you were permitted to wash with clean sand instead. She began to weep. She couldn’t hear what Heisenberg was saying to her—if indeed he was.

  It was a couple hours later in the alley now, and it was getting even colder. Jehan wrapped herself in her robe and paced back and forth. She’d had visions of this particular night for four years, glimpses of the possible ways that it might conclude. Sometimes the young man saw her in the alley shortly after dawn, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes she killed him, sometimes she didn’t. And, of course, there was the open question of whether her actions would lead to her freedom or to her execution.

  When she’d had the first vision, she hadn’t known what was happening or what she was seeing. She knew only the fear and the pain and the terror. The boy threw her roughly to the ground, ripped her clothing, and raped her. Then the vision passed. Jehan told no one about it; her family would have thought her insane. About three months later, the vision returned; only this time it was different in subtle ways. She was in the alley as before, but this time she smiled and gestured to the boy, inviting him. He smiled in return and followed her deeper into the alley. When he put his hand on her shoulder, she drew her father’s dagger and plunged it into the boy’s belly. That was as much as the vision showed her then. It terrified her even more than had the rape scene.

  As time passed, the visions took on other forms. She was certain now that she was not always watching her future, the future, but rather a future, each as likely to come to pass as the others. Not all the visions could possibly be true. In some of them, she saw herself living into her old age in the city, right here in this filthy quarter of the Budayeen. In others, she moved about strange places that didn’t seem Islamic at all, and she spoke languages definitely not Arabic. She did not know if these conflicting visions were trying to tell her or warn her of something. Jehan prayed to know which of these versions she must actually live through. Soon after, as if to reward her for her faith, she began to have less violent visions: She could look into the future a short way and find lost objects, or warn against unlucky travel plans, or predict the rise and fall of crop prices. The neighbors, at first amused, began to be afraid of her. Jehan’s mother counselled her never to speak of these “dreams” to anyone, or else Jehan might be locked away in some horrible institution. Jehan never told her father about her visions, because Jehan never told her father about anything. In that family, as in the others of the Budayeen—and the rest of the city, for that matter—the father did not concern himself very much with his daughters. His sons were his pride, and he had three strong sons whom he firmly believed would someday vastly increase the Ashufi prestige and wealth. Jehan knew he was wrong, because she’d already seen what would become of the sons—two would be killed in wars against the Jews; the third would be a coward, a weakling, and a fugitive in the United States. But Jehan said nothing.

  A vision: It was just past dawn. The young man—whose name Jehan never learned—was walking down the stone-paved street toward her alley. Jehan knew it without even peering out. She took a deep breath. She walked a few steps toward the street, looked left, and caught his eyes. She made a brief gesture, turned her back, and went deeper into the shadowy seclusion of the alley. She was certain that he would follow her. Her stomach ached and rumbled, and she was shaking with nervous exhaustion. When the young man put his hand on her shoulder, murmuring indecent suggestions, her hand crept toward the concealed knife, but she did not grasp it. He threw her down roughly, clawed off her clothing, and raped her. Then he left her there. She was almost paralyzed, crying and cursing on the wet, foul-smelling stones. She was found some time later by two women who took her to a doctor. Their worst fears were confirmed: Her honor had been ravaged irredeemably. Her life was effectively over, in the sense of becoming a normal adult female in that Islamic community. One of the women returned to Jehan’s house with her, to tell the news to Jehan’s mother, who must still tell Jehan’s father. Jehan hid in the room she shared with her sisters. She heard the violent breaking of furniture and shrill obscenity of her father. There was nothing more to be done. Jehan did not know the name of her assailant. She was ruined, less than worthless. A young woman no longer a virgin could command no bride price. All those years of supporting a worthless daughter in the hopes of recovering the investment in the marriage contract—all vanished now. It was no surprise that Jehan’s father felt betrayed and the father of a witless creature. There was no sympathy for Jehan; the actual story, whatever it might be, could not alter the facts. She had only the weeping of her sisters and her mother. From that morning on, Jehan was permanently repudiated and cast out from her house. Jehan’s father and three brothers would not even look at her or offer her their farewells.

  The years passed ever more quickly. Jehan became a woman of the streets. For a time, because of her youth and beauty, she earned a good living. Then as the decades left their unalterable blemishes upon her, she found it difficult even to earn enough for a meal and a room to sleep in. She grew older, more bitter, and filled with self-loathing. Did she hate her father and the rest of her family? No, her fate had been fixed by the will of Allah, however impossible it was for her to comprehend it, or else by her own timidity in the single moment of choice and destiny in the alley so many years before. She could not say. Whatever the answer, she could not benefit now from either insight or wisdom. Her life was as it was, according to the inscrutable designs of Allah the Merciful. Her understanding was not required.

  Eventually she was found dead, haggard and starved, and her corpse was contorted and huddled for warmth coincidentally in the same alley where the young man had so carelessly despoiled any chance Jehan had for happiness in this world. After
she died, there was no one to mourn her. Perhaps Allah the Beneficent took pity on her, showing mercy to her who had received little enough mercy from her neighbors while she lived among them. It had always been a cold place for Jehan.

  For a while estranged from Heisenberg, Jehan worked with Erwin Sehrodinger in Zurich. At first Schrödinger’s ideas confused her because they went against many of Heisenberg’s basic assumptions. For the time being, Heisenberg rejected any simple picture of what the atom was like, any model at all. Sehrodinger, older and more conservative than the Gottingen group, wanted to explain quantum phenomena without new mathematics and elusive imagery. He treated the electron as a wave function, but a different sort of wave than de Broglie’s. The properties of waves in the physical world were well known and without ambiguity. Yet when Sehrodinger calculated how a change in energy level affected his electron wave, his solutions didn’t agree with observed data.

  “What am I overlooking?” he asked.

  Jehan shook her head. “Where I was born they say, ‘Don’t pour away the water in your canteen because of a mirage.’ “

  Schrödinger rubbed his weary eyes. He glanced down at the sheaf of papers he held. “How can I tell if this water is worth keeping or something that belongs in a sewer?”

  Jehan had no reply to that, and Schrödinger set his work aside, unsatisfied. A few months later several papers showed that after taking into account the relativistic effects, Schrödinger’s calculations agreed remarkably well with experimental results after all.

  Schrödinger was pleased. “I hoped all along to find a way to drag Born and Heisenberg back to classical physics,” he said. “I knew in my heart that quantum physics would prove to be a sane world, not a realm populated by phantoms and governed by ghost forces.”

  “It seems unreal to me now,” said Jehan. “If you say the electron is a wave, you are saying it is a phantom. In the ocean, it is the water that is the wave. As for sound, it is the air that carries the wave. What exists to be a wave in your equations?”