Then as if an internal band of minstrels created music for him, he began reciting the tale of a poor boy who had the divine face of angels and the stunning body of wrestlers. But his eyes were not rimmed by lashes and were too large for his face, eyes a livid purple that penetrated the souls of the populace and forced them to reveal their most intimate love stories, in hope he would find his lost love in their tales. He read their minds from near and far, whether they spoke or not, and learned that his beloved had abandoned their small town. He could not handle the enormity of his loss, could not sleep at night, nor eat or rest during the day as he prayed for a normal vision that would not betray the enviable love lives of others.

One morning, the One-Eyed Rabbi, who visited once a week to comfort the boy, found him lying faceup in his garden on a patch of dried grass. His wide-open eyes stared intensely at the sun. He was dead.

An outcry rose from the hakims in town. They wanted to perform an autopsy to discover what gave the boy those enormous eyes and that intense color and gaze. Since the boy had no relatives to protest the dissecting of his body, soon a gathering of acclaimed doctors assembled at the morgue.

They cut the boy’s chest and stomach open. They shrank back in horror. Some mysterious disease had ravaged the boy’s organs, leaving behind a feverish and inflamed heart.

No book of medicine explained what had plagued the boy. But the One-Eyed Rabbi knew. The enormity of his lost love had consumed him.

A sigh lodged in Gold Dust’s throat. She felt a great affinity to the boy. Then she realized Soleiman was that boy. Suddenly, he was too far away. “Come closer,” she whispered.

He danced toward her, closer to the curtains, to the gauzed inset, to the shrine behind where she sat. Genuflected. Extended both hands. His playful fingers skipped about the inset, stroked the imprint beyond the curtains, the outline of her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, traced, and worshiped, asserting himself with greater assurance.

She did not dare release her sigh. Did he smell her presence, feel her warmth, hear her heart? Did he realize he stroked her face through the gauze inset, that she felt his breath? Why had he shared his story? Did his gaze rip the curtains and penetrate her thoughts? Her brave acrobat, in a few moments, had revealed more than the king with whom she had had a daughter, more than her mother, who had shut out the past—no childhood tales, no recalling of family events, left her with only dull memories to trace her past.

“Marvelous!” she cried, his presence obliterating all fear.

He withdrew.

Forgetting the infirmity of her bones, she tried to create music. Her bones refused, but it did not matter. Hope had stirred her marrow.