Samarkand (40 page)

As he left me, the journalist complimented me on the quality of
my account and took my address in order to get in touch with me later. Then I looked all around, and called out louder and
louder. Shireen was no longer there. I decided not to move from the spot where she had left me so that she would be able to
find me again. I waited for an hour, for two hours. The quay gradually emptied.

Where should I look? First of all I went to the office of White Star, the company to which the
Titanic
belonged. Then I checked all the hotels where the survivors had been lodged for the night. However, yet again I found no
sign of my wife. I returned to the quays. They were deserted.

Then I decided to set off for the only place whose address she knew, and where, once she had calmed down, she would know to
find me: my house in Annapolis.

I waited for some sign of Shireen for a long time, but she never came. She did not write to me. No one mentioned her name
any more in front of me.

Today I wonder: Did she exist? Was she anything other than the fruit of my oriental obsessions? At night, in the solitude
of my overlarge bedroom, when doubt rises up in me, when my memory clouds over and I feel my reason waver, I get up and turn
on all the lights. I rush and take out the letters of yesteryear which I pretend to open as if I had just received them. I
breathe in their perfume and re-read some pages; the very coldness of the letters’ tone comforts me, and gives me the illusion
that I am experiencing anew the birth of love. Then alone, and soothed, I put them in order and dive back into the dark, ready
to give myself over without fright to the dazzling sights of the past: a phrase uttered in a Constantinople sitting-room,
two sleepless nights in Tabriz, a brazier in the winter in Zarganda. And this scene from our last trip: we had gone up on
to the walkway, into a dark and deserted corner where we had exchanged a long kiss. In order to take her face in my hands,
I had placed the manuscript flat on a bollard. When she noticed it, Shireen burst out laughing. She stepped away from me and
with a theatrical gesture she shouted to the sky:

‘The
Rubaiyaat
on the
Titanic!
The flower of the Orient borne
by the jewel of the Occident! Khayyam, if you could only see what a beautiful moment has been granted to us!’