Land of No Rain (13 page)

How many times do you have to change?

How many times do you have to come across what you’re looking for, and when you find it, it’s not it?

A year earlier you had read a book that spoke of rain and sadness and impossible love. You remember the rain more than anything else. Heavy rain would fall on you steadily as you were walking down a side street to your house in Hamiya. You would arrive drenched and your family couldn’t understand where the water had come from when the air was so dry. You came back from the café after you don’t know how long and said to Hannawi, as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted two minutes earlier, ‘Tell me more about the author of this book. Is he in the city of Sindbad?’ He said he was probably there, because he never left the shade of the palm trees. ‘I’d like to see him one day,’ you said. ‘Maybe you’ll see him,’ he said. Then he added, ‘What matters is the book, not the author.’

*  *  *

These memories came back to you as you leafed through the book, which had stood in your old library as if you had left it there the day before. Memories of the Black Iris café came back too, and of Umara Street and of the apartment where you lived with Hannawi; memories of Hamed Alwan (who was killed years ago in a mysterious car accident) laughing his raucous laugh, and of the mission you were assigned, to convey a secret message to the leadership of the Organisation abroad; and memories of how you changed the company you kept whenever you met a group of people closer to your changing interests. You saw yourself as a slim young man with long hair, a tight shirt and flared trousers, driving through towns and villages and across the desert in a taxi every part of which was red hot – the body, the windows and even the door handles. Then you remembered the street where you had stayed in a small hotel and the room where a large ceiling fan had stirred the viscous air with an audible groan. And the three days you had spent there, waiting for a messenger from the founder of your organisation to take the message you had carried in a secret compartment in one of your high-heeled boots, then how you slipped out into the street when you could no longer bear the boredom, the fierce sunlight that hit you as soon as you left the hotel, and the bookshop you went into at the end of the street.

In one of your boots was a secret message of unknown content, and in your head were poems with a subdued tone that your father, a reader of the classics, would not have considered poetry worthy of the name. Printed on the cover of his book, the picture of your favourite poet, who rarely gave interviews to newspapers or magazines, was etched in your mind.

You asked the man who seemed to be the owner of the bookshop about your favourite poet, and he said that he was in the city but that he didn’t know him personally. Then he added with a smile, as though colluding in a secret, ‘A new book of his has come out!’ He went into the dark depths of the bookshop and came back bearing a book with a black cover on which was written in a common newspaper-style
naskh
script:
A Star for a Future Evening
. It was about one o’clock. You were the only customer on that scorching August afternoon. The shopkeeper invited you to have a glass of tea. He went out into the shimmering heat of the street and came back dripping with sweat. Behind him came a boy dressed in a long white apron with permanent tea stains, carrying a small silver tray with two delicate glasses decorated with Persian miniatures. The bookshop owner, with the same conspiratorial smile, asked if he could try one of your cigarettes. You were smoking a cigarette made of your country’s best tobacco, a cigarette called Alexander after the Greek commander who passed through your country, or nearby. The bookshop owner took a deep puff, held it down, then slowly exhaled. He told you he had obtained a packet of these cigarettes from a student from your country who was studying there and that he liked them very much. Then, with a trace of contempt that annoyed you, he said, ‘How is it that you, an upstart country, can make cigarettes that are much better than our cigarettes, which taste like sawdust?’ You didn’t answer him. You told him you were interested in the author of the book. He pointed to a wooden newspaper rack near the entrance and said, ‘He writes for that newspaper.’ There were many newspapers in the wooden rack, and you couldn’t tell which one the shopkeeper was pointing at. He stood up and brought over a newspaper with a red logo that included a hammer and sickle. You examined the newspaper, which had very few pages. It looked different from the other papers. But there was nothing in it by your favourite poet. The shopkeeper said he did write for it, but not every day. Then he said he didn’t know which day he wrote, but he definitely did write for it. You were in a hurry to leave. You wanted to go to the hotel to read
A Star for a Future Evening
. You also wanted to buy the newspaper, but, with a note of caution he hadn’t shown until then, the shopkeeper said, ‘You’re a stranger in this city. I wouldn’t advise you to carry the newspaper with you.’ You said, ‘But it’s not a secret newspaper, is it?’ ‘It’s not underground,’ he said, ‘because here I am selling it with the other papers, but . . .’ (he looked around him and lowered his voice) ‘but there are people who monitor those who buy it.’

You left the newspaper, based on the shopkeeper’s advice, especially as you were on a secret mission in the city, and besides there was nothing in it by your favourite poet. You thought how strange it all was: the founder of your organisation was living as a political refugee in a country that monitors people who buy a newspaper! You said to yourself: ‘What’s the difference between the city of Sindbad and Hamiya?’ You didn’t bother too much about the idea. You had something more important in mind. You rapidly retraced your steps, under a sun that melted the asphalt, to your hotel that faced a small bronze statue standing in the middle of the street in complete isolation.
A Star for a Future Evening
was an extension of the first book you had read by the author. You started reading passages of it aloud, then repeating them, unconcerned that the messenger was late in coming to collect the message folded inside the secret compartment in one of the boots you had thrown on the ground next to the bed.

You didn’t see the poet on that visit. But you took this book of his back to Hannawi, who thought it less important than
A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me
. You disappeared for some time, you and Hannawi, and you turned up again by chance in the city that would see a long war and a total siege that lasted a thousand days. You didn’t forget the poet despite the bullets that flew past. You said to your friend Hannawi, ‘I’ll go and see him.’ You did go, but by plane this time, and you saw the owner of the bookshop.

You had brought him a carton of the foreign cigarettes and some local arak. ‘Ah, you?’ he said.‘Yes, me and not me,’ you said.‘You seem rather different, but what are these riddles: me and not me?’ he said.‘That’s another story,’ you told him.

You found out that your favourite poet hadn’t had a new book published, that he was no longer writing for that newspaper and that he was working in ‘the palm laboratories’ amid pollen dust and hybrid seedlings. You went and saw him. He was taller than you expected, thin, with a moustache streaked with grey. He was biting on a pipe that had gone out and he took it out of his mouth from time to time to look into the bowl. You never saw him light it or put any tobacco in it. You thought that the gesture of taking the pipe out, looking into it and then putting it back between his lips, or rather his clenched teeth, was a deliberate device to avoid talking with you. Your favourite poet didn’t talk much. He wasn’t what you had expected or how you would have liked him to be. He didn’t believe you had come specially to see him, from a city at constant war, where the airport was rarely open. He didn’t say that, but you sensed his mistrust deep down. You imagined, because he was under surveillance, that he had doubts about the nature of your visit, even though you weren’t from his country and had nothing to do with its politics. The author of
A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me
seemed distracted, remote, listless, although you recited one of his poems to him from memory. He may have thought your visit was a trap to draw him out of the cocoon that he had closed tight around himself. You would find out later that such suspicions were a trait deeply ingrained in the city of Sindbad. The succession of military brutes that ruled the country had planted eavesdropping devices almost everywhere and had persuaded children to spy on their parents. His poetry had a magic that was more powerful than his wary personality and what he said, half of which he mumbled. But you understood him nonetheless. You understood that he had put his best into the words he wrote and not into the words he spoke, and this does happen.

VII

Hamiya came first, but once the stone wall had been built it wasn’t long before the first shop opened in the downtown area. This detail is important: apart from that, society vouches for the rest of the details, which are hard to enumerate. Your father knows how the covered market began. Before that there were shops scattered here and there, built out of concrete blocks that were not commonly used at the time. He also knows the owner of the covered market, which was named after the man. You used to make forays into that shady, tunnel-like, half-dark market, which was hardly wide enough for someone going in to squeeze past someone coming out (so much so that men and women sometimes contrived to meet there, in the knowledge that they could safely come into close contact in a way that outside the market would have been scandalous enough to merit a flogging). Close to the gateway to the covered market, the Black Iris café began as a wooden stall selling tea and coffee. The stone building was built later on the same spot. You heard this detail from your father, because you knew the café only when it was already thriving.

It was the first café you sat in as a young man. You would read there. Smoke. You’ll never forget the metal board with the name ‘Mr Ihsan al-Shatti’ written in a modern
naskh
script. You and your peers all thought that Ihsan was only a woman’s name, but then you discovered it could apply to both males and females. And here was the proof: Mr Ihsan al-Shatti, whom you knew as a man of medium height, stout, with a white face and short soft hair parted to the right and streaked with grey. He shaved once or twice a week and always wore a white shirt and tightly fitted black trousers. He was helped in the café by his son Taysir, who was four or five years older than you. To be free of the misery of school and school books, you would have liked to be Taysir. His age. With his freedom to smoke. His ability to buy a cinema ticket from his own money. To work all day alongside his tolerant, easy-going father. Your father wasn’t cranky or irascible. But when it came to studying and learning he was stricter than his chess partner, Mr Shatti.

The café was still in the same place. It’s true it had grown shabbier, but the metal board, penned by your father, was still at the entrance, coated with soot from the exhaust pipes of vehicles and the emissions of small workshops that were holding out against the ravages of modernisation. There was no sign of Mr Ihsan al-Shatti. There was a man of about the same height, the same stoutness and the same complexion, with the same hairstyle. It was Taysir. He saw you, stared at you a while, but did not seem to recognise you.

When you were living in a rough neighbourhood at the edge of the downtown area, your father used to sit in this café after finishing work. In summer he would have a mint tea, in winter tea with cinnamon and ginger. He would take a break from his pens and inks and from the phantoms of a thousand calligraphers in his head, or play chess with Mr Shatti. During work hours he would order his coffees and teas from the café, for himself and his many guests, sometimes delegating you for this task if Hassan the office boy had work outside. Your father would repeat his orders to you item by item. He knew your head was always somewhere else, ready to respond to any invitation to play or take part in ‘devilry’, as he put it. Mr Shatti would see you rushing about, ready to take off, and would repeat his standard phrase without the slightest variation: ‘How’s the young calligrapher?’

Like anywhere that’s full of life, the downtown area grew crowded, even clogged, with people, with traffic and smells. In spite of everything, in spite of rampant modernisation, of time riding roughshod over the old, and the growing divide between rich and poor among the local people, it still formed the guts of the town and the stem from which the other districts extended like tentacles into the surrounding plains and valleys, in all directions except the east, which was left to the eerie desert. The function of this downtown area had not changed, but the faces and the appearances of those who frequented it may have changed. This is what you noticed when you were hanging around among the crowds there after you went back. You also noticed that the people you still know here rarely go there, now that fancier and more modern shopping areas have sprung up in places far from the crowds. You noticed with surprise that there were large numbers of foreign tourists, who are usually drawn to narrow streets crowded with pedestrians and goods, with strong scents and the street cries of people selling spices, vegetables and fruit. There weren’t any tourists before. At least, you don’t remember there being any. It hadn’t occurred to you to wonder about that at the time. Perhaps because the Hamiya authorities imposed restrictions on tourism, just as they imposed restrictions on travel abroad, or perhaps because in those days the place didn’t yet have a past that was disappearing. Now there were many tourists, most of them from faraway countries. You could see the amazement on their faces when they saw that local goods were still on sale, in a world where commodities and other things have been standardised and individuality is the exclusive preserve of museums and antique shops.