82   Gaia, Queen of Ants

saw that the mermaid had come to join him under the fig tree, praying
awkwardly for her son. The disgust already born in him from her artificial
answers again infuriated the dervish, but in the moonshade under the fig
tree, the scent of her body, so near, overcame that disgust. He touched the
mermaid’s body with his hand and caressed her smooth skin and asked,
“So, you have come?”
“Yes, and what of it?” she answered him.
“Will you stay with me?”
Now he was asking the questions, now he was the one who found
himself constrained by doubt, and for that reason, the mermaid seemed to
understand his questioning mood; and what was to happen next, between
them, in the sea and there under the nighttime shelter of the fig leaves,
took on a completely different aspect, because as he was buried in doubt,
the mermaid doubted, too, and that must have been why she cautiously
touched the dervish’s legs and asked, “Do you mean it?”
It was not the dervish’s heart but his legs, so accustomed to their own
dimensions, that unexpectedly ached at the crossing of this boundary, and
with the caution of a clerk drawing up the accounts, he asked, “What if,
instead of my legs, I give you my two arms?”
“No. That is unacceptable.”
“Both my arms and an eye?”
“No, only the legs.”
“Both eyes.”
“Only the legs!”
“All right, just this one leg, for half the love . . .”
Such a laughable, meaningless offer. Swatting that very leg with her
strong tail, the mermaid moved swiftly to the sea, and there her sisters
were busy loving each other, the choppy surface of the black water glow-
ing with their golden scales.
The dervish was at ease with his own shame. The shame was now
irrevocably mixed up in the pit of doubt. Now he returned one more time
to pray again to the Loving Spirit who, in his everlasting exile, had always
been free of shame; and the dervish paused, for ten cool minutes, behind
a sand dune, and then at once, as he emerged, he walked back to the sea.