A House Without Windows

For Cyra
—
our dazzling beam of love

The message, the rain, and the divine light come through my window

Falling into my house from my origins

Hell is that house without a window

True religion, O servant of God, is creating a window

Do not raise your ax to every nook, come

Raise your ax to frame a window

Do you not know that sunlight

Is only the image of the sun that appears beyond her veil?

— RUMI, MASNAVI III, 2403–2406

I SUPPOSE THIS BLOODY MESS MIGHT PARTLY BE MY FAULT. HOW
could it not be? I lived with the man. I salted the food to his taste. I scrubbed the dead skin off his back. I made him feel like a husband should.

He did a few things for me, too. He would sing to me, something between a song and an apology, whenever I was most upset. I could never stay mad then. Something about the way his eyebrows danced or the way his head bobbed . . . he was like ice to my hot moods. I would curl up against him just to feel his breath tickle the back of my neck.

To think that it all would come to an end just a few feet from where we'd lain together as husband and wife. And only steps away from where unholy blood had been spilled before. Our little yard with a rosebush in one corner and a clothesline running across it—it has been the theater of much gore in the last year. I question the sanity of the roses that still dare to bloom there.

Those roses are deep red and would look lovely on a grave. Is that an odd thought?

I think most wives imagine their husbands dying—either out of dread or out of anticipation. It's an inevitability. Why not guess at how or when it might happen?

I'd imagined my husband dying a million different ways: as an old man with his children at his bedside, shot in the head by insurgents,
keeled over with his hands on his unticking chest, struck by lightning on his way to somewhere he shouldn't have been going. The lightning was always my favorite. Allah, forgive me for my colorful imagination. I blame my mother for that lovely bit of inheritance. Lightning would have been easier on everyone—a shocking and poetic little bolt from the heavens. It would have hurt, but only for an instant.

I hate to watch anything suffer.

No, I never imagined my husband dying the way he did, but what's a wife to do? Thunderstorms don't show up when you need them.

Since I was a young woman I've managed to hold myself together by stringing words into rhyme, creating order and rhythm in my head when there was none to be found in my world. Even now, in this miserable state, my mind turns a verse.

My full height, my beloved husband never did see

Because the fool dared turn his back on me.