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the favour of meeting the great
qadi
, the Imam Abu Taher. His favours permitted me to devote myself to these works.’
    That night, when he went back toward the belvedere which was serving him as a house, Khayyam did not take a lamp with him,
     telling himself that it was too late to read or write. However, his path was only faintly illuminated by the moon, a frail
     crescent at the end of the month of
shawwal
. As he walked further from the
qadi’s
villa, he had to grope his way along. He tripped more than once, held on to the bushes and took the grim caress of a weeping
     willow full in the face.
    He had hardly reached his room when he heard a voice of sweet reproach. ‘I was expecting you earlier.’
    Had he thought about this woman so much that he now believed he could hear her? As he stood in front of the door, which he
     slowlyclosed, he tried to make out a silhouette. In vain, for only the voice broke through again, audible yet hazy.
    ‘You are keeping quiet. You refuse to believe that a woman could dare to force her way into your room like this. In the palace
     our eyes met and lit up, but the Khan was there as well as the
qadi
and the court and you averted your eyes. Like so many men, you chose not to stop. What good is it to defy fate, what good
     is it to attract the wrath of a prince just for a woman, a widow who can only bring you as a dowry a sharp tongue and a dubious
     reputation?’
    Omar felt restrained by some mysterious power and could neither move nor loosen his lips.
    ‘You are saying nothing,’ commented Jahan with gentle irony. ‘Oh well, I’ll go on speaking on my own, and anyway I am the
     only one who has made the move so far. When you left the court, I asked after you and learned where you live. I gave out that
     I was going to stay with a cousin who is married to a rich Samarkand merchant. Ordinarily when I move about with the court,
     I go and sleep with the harem where I have some friends who appreciate my company. They devour the stories I being them. They
     do not see me as a rival as they know that I have no desire to be a wife to the Khan. I could have seduced him, but I have
     spent too much time with kings’ spouses for such a fate to tempt me. Life, for me, is so much more important than men! As
     long as I am someone else’s wife, or no one’s, the sovereign loves to show me off in his
diwan
with my verses and my laughter. If ever he dreamt of marrying me, he would start by locking me up.’
    Emerging with difficulty from his torpor, Omar had grasped nothing of Jahan’s words, and, when he decided to utter his first
     words, he was speaking less to her than to himself, or to a shade:
    ‘How often, as an adolescent, or later, have I received a look or a smile. At night I would dream that that look became corporeal,
     turned into flesh, a woman, a dazzling sight in the dark. Suddenly, in the dark of this night, in this unreal pavilion, in
     this unreal city, you are here – a beautiful woman, a poetess moreover, and available.’
    She laughed.
    ‘Available! How do you know? You have not even touched me,you have not seen me, and doubtless you will not see me since I shall depart well before the sun chases me away.’
    In the dense darkness there was a disorderly rustle of silk and a whiff of perfume. Omar held his breath, his body was aroused.
     He could not help asking with the naïveté of a schoolboy:
    ‘Are you still wearing your veil?’
    ‘The only veil I am wearing is the night.’

CHAPTER 6
    A woman and a man. The anonymous painter imagined them in profile, stretched out and intertwined. He took away the walls of
     the pavilion, gave them a bed of grass with a border of roses and made a silvery brook flow at their feet. He gave Jahan the
     shapely breasts of a Hindu deity. Omar caresses her hair with one hand and holds a goblet in the other.
    Every day at the palace their paths would cross, but they avoided looking at each other lest they give themselves away.