A River Dies of Thirst (4 page)

But they kidnapped its mother

so it ran short of water

and died, slowly, of thirst.

A huge metal snake coils around us, swallowing up the little walls that separate our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. A snake that does not move in a straight line, to avoid resembling us as we look straight on. It twists and turns, a nightmare of cement segments reinforced with pliant metal, making it easy for it to move into the fragmented bits of land and beds of mint that are left to us. A snake eager to lay its eggs between our inhalations and exhalations so that we say for once, because we are nearly choking to death, ‘We are the strangers.’ When we look in our mirrors all we see is the snake making for the backs of our necks, but with a bit of effort we can see what is above it: a sky yawning with boredom at the architects adorning it with guns and flags. And at night we see it twinkling with stars, which gaze at us with affection. We also see what lies behind the snake wall: the watchmen in the ghetto, frightened of what we’re doing behind the little walls we still have left. We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

The killer looks at the spectre of the dead man, not into his eyes, without regret. He says to those around him: ‘Don’t blame me. I’m afraid. I killed because I’m afraid, and I’ll kill again because I’m afraid.’ Some of those present, accustomed to favouring psychological analysis over the laws of justice, say: ‘He is defending himself.’ Others, admirers of the idea that progress is superior to morality, say: ‘Justice emanates from the generosity of power. The victim should apologise for the trauma he has caused the killer.’ Scholars of the distinction between life and reality say: ‘If this ordinary event had taken place anywhere but here, in this holy land, would we have even known the victim’s name? Let us then turn our attention to comforting the frightened man.’ When they went down the road of sympathising with the killer, some foreign tourists passing by asked them: ‘What has the child done wrong?’ They answered: ‘He will grow up and frighten the frightened man’s son.’ ‘What has the woman done wrong?’ They said: ‘She will give birth to a memory.’ ‘What has the tree done wrong?’ They said: ‘A green bird will appear from it.’ And they shouted: ‘Fear, not justice, is the basis of power.’ The spectre of the dead man appeared to them from a cloudless sky and when they opened fire on him they did not see a single drop of blood, and they were afraid.

I walked on my heart, as if my heart

were a road, or a pavement, or air

and my heart said: ‘I have tired of identifying

with things, when space has broken into pieces

and I have tired of your question: “Where shall we go

when there’s no land there, and no sky?”

And you obey me. Give me an order

direct me to do what you want’

So I said to my heart: ‘I have forgotten you since we set off

with you as my reason, and me the one speaking

Rebel against me as much as you can, and run

for there’s nothing behind us except what’s behind.’

Low pressure area. Northwesterly winds, heavy showers. Grey wrinkled sea. Tall cypresses. Today the autumn clouds let thirty martyrs fall in the north of Gaza, among them two women taking part in a demonstration to demand a share of hope for their kind. Clear skies. Calm blue sea. Northerly winds. Good visibility. But the autumn clouds – the symbolic name for killing – wipe out an entire family, made up of seventeen lives. The news searches for their names under the rubble. Apart from that, abnormal life appears to be running its normal course. The Devil still boasts of his long quarrel with God. Individuals, if they wake up alive, can still say ‘Good morning,’ then go off to their normal jobs: burying the dead. They don’t know if they will return safely to what remains of houses encircled by bulldozers and tanks and smashed cypress trees. Life is so indifferent it seems to be no more than a rough draft of some stubborn urge to have one’s presence registered: equal rights with jackals to enjoy a safe cave. But we have a difficult mission to perform: mediation between God and the Devil to get them to call a brief truce so that we can bury our martyrs.

‘Nobody will ever defeat me, or be defeated by me,’ said the masked security man, charged with some obscure task. He fired into the air and said: ‘Only the bullet should know who my enemy is.’ The air responded with a similar bullet. The unemployed passers-by weren’t interested in what went on in the mind of a masked security man, out of work like them, but he was seeking his own private war since he hadn’t found a peace to defend. He looked at the sky and it was high and clear. As he didn’t like poetry he couldn’t see the sky as a mirror of the sea. He was hungry, and his hunger increased when he smelled falafel, and he felt his gun despised him. He fired up at the sky in case a bunch of grapes might fall on him from paradise. He was answered by a bullet, which kindled his suppressed enthusiasm for a fight. He rushed forth into an imaginary war and said: ‘At last I’ve found work. This is war.’ He fired on another masked security man, hit his imaginary enemy and received a trifling wound to his leg. When he returned home to the camp, leaning on his rifle, he found the house crowded with mourners and smiled because he thought they thought he had been martyred. He said: ‘I’m not dead!’ When they informed him that he had killed his brother, he looked contemptuously at his gun and said: ‘I’m going to sell it to buy a shroud worthy of my brother.’

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others

We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner

We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan’s gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial

We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer’s belly

We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details

We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful!’

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets

We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception

We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

Because nobody ever arrives on time, and because waiting is like sitting on a hot tin roof, he put his watch back twenty minutes. In this way he made the torment of waiting easier to bear, and forgot about it. But since he cheated time he hasn’t been on time for anything. He sits on his suitcase in the station waiting for a train that never comes, without realising that it went exactly on time, and it was he who was late. He goes back home disappointed. He opens his suitcase and returns its contents to the drawers like anyone coming back from a trip. Then he asks himself angrily: ‘Why don’t people respect time?’ When death knocks on his door, asking permission to enter, he reproaches it, saying: ‘Why are you twenty minutes early?’ He hides in the bathroom, and does not open the door to it, as if he had died in the bathroom!

Azure space, high and wide and washed with light. If a small cloud appears like a soap bubble, it dissolves at once into a forgotten poem. Circular space borne on towering forest trees and seagulls’ wings, or on a camel litter, remembered by pilgrims to the holy land. Vast space perfectly formed and coloured, so perfect I am afraid of a forest fire, an attack on the seagulls, an assault on a prophet’s wife, some random breach in the order of things. And I am afraid of writing a cadenced poem on such a delicate surface.

The actor climbed up on stage with the sound technician: ‘One, two, three. Stop! We’ll try the sound again: One, two, three, stop! Would you prefer a bit more echo?’ He said: ‘I don’t know. Do whatever you want!’ The auditorium was completely empty, hundreds of wooden seats staring at him, silent as a communal grave, urging him to leave or to join them. He preferred the second option, chose a seat in the middle of the front row and went to sleep. The director woke him up for the final run through. He went up on stage and improvised a long section, as he liked the idea of addressing empty seats and no one applauding him but the director. Then he improvised another section without a hitch. In the evening, when the auditorium was full and the curtain went up, he stood there confident in the silence. He looked at the front row and remembered himself sitting there and grew confused. He forgot the written text, and the improvised text evaporated into thin air. He forgot the audience and made do with repeating the sound test: ‘One, two, three.’ He repeated ‘One, two, three’ until he fainted and the theatre resounded with applause.

If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general. If war is an accident on the motorway, then the living have a duty to vote: we will choose the donkey. But the living did not go to the ballot box, not because the snow was falling in big flakes, but because a sudden paralysis afflicted the city’s inhabitants, and when they opened their windows they saw spiders spinning their webs in the snow and went blind. When they tried to hear what was going on, storms arose, whose wild sounds were unfamiliar to them, and they went deaf. The astrologers said: ‘It is the chaos of existence at the door of the last judgement.’ Luckily or unluckily for us, foreign historians, experts on our destinies and our oral history, were not here, so we don’t know what happened to us!

It is nothingness leading us to nothing

We gazed at nothingness searching for its meanings

and were stripped of nothingness by something resembling nothingness

and missed the absurdity of nothingness

for it is more attractive than something that makes us into things

The slave loves an oppressor

because venerating nothingness in an idol deifies it

and he hates it

if his awe encounters something

he thinks is visible and ordinary

So the slave loves a tyrant like him

appearing from another nothing

thus nothingness is begotten by another nothing

What is this nothingness, master of reinvention

multifaceted, tyrannical, overweening, unctuous

a joker? What is this nothingness?

Perhaps it is a spiritual illness

or a hidden energy

or, perhaps, a satirist experienced

in describing our condition.

I was on my way to nowhere in particular, a gentle drizzle making me slightly damp, when an apple with no resemblance to Newton’s apple fell on me from the clouds. I reached out my hand to pick it up and could neither feel nor see it. I stared up at the clouds and saw tufts of cotton wool driven northwards by the wind, away from the water tanks crouched on the roofs of the buildings. The light poured brightly down onto the asphalt, spreading out gleefully in the absence of pedestrians and cars, and perhaps laughing at my uneven progress. Where is the apple that fell on me? I wondered. Maybe my imagination, which is independent from me, picked it up and ran off with it. I said: ‘I will follow it to the house where we live together in adjoining rooms.’ There on the table I found a sheet of paper on which was written, in green ink, one line: ‘An apple fell on me from the clouds,’ and I knew my imagination was a faithful hunting dog.

Solitude is good training for being self-reliant. He writes the phrase and looks at the ceiling. Then he adds: To be alone . . . to be able to be alone is an educational experience. Solitude is choosing a sort of pain, training to conjugate the verbs of the heart with the freedom of the self-sufficient, or being more or less detached from your exterior self and forced to plunge inside yourself without a parachute. You sit on your own, like an idea unencumbered by argumentation, not trying to guess the content of the dialogue between outside and in. Solitude is a filter, not a mirror. You throw what is in your left hand into your right, and nothing changes in this gesture of transition from non-thought to non-meaning. But this harmless nonsense isn’t getting us anywhere: and what if I were alone? Solitude is the choice of someone with an abundance of possibilities – the choice of the free. When you are bored and fed up, you say: If I were someone else I would abandon this blank sheet of paper and set out to imitate a Japanese novel whose writer climbs to the top of a mountain to see what the birds of prey have done to his dead ancestors. Maybe he is still writing, and his dead are still dying. But I lack the expertise and the metaphysical toughness. And you say: If I were someone else, as I am now, I would go down into the bottom of the valley where a girl is arousing her suppressed desire with a rough fig leaf and grabbing at her panties, but I lack the narrative skill and daring required to write pornography.

The critics kill me sometimes:

they want a particular poem

a particular metaphor

and if I stray up a side road

they say: ‘He has betrayed the road’

And if I find eloquence in grass

they say: ‘He has abandoned the steadfastness of the holm oak’

And if I see the rose in spring as yellow

they ask: ‘Where is the blood of the homeland in its petals?’

And if I write: ‘It is the butterfly my youngest sister