Land of No Rain (15 page)

VIII

You were embarrassed by the two strange words and by the time you found out what they meant you were already at odds with your father. It embarrassed you that children used the words to identify your area and the street junctions, saying, for example, ‘At the Nakuja Abad corner’, or, ‘After the Nakuja Abad house’, or even worse when they called you the Nakuji in jest, a nickname that sounded obscene in the local language. The words, written over the gateway to your summer house in a Persian script, made you angry. Why had your father chosen them, rather than any of the usual formulas written at the entrances to houses in the neighbourhood? Why did he make a point of embarrassing you and your brothers in front of your local friends with this gibberish?

Some of the houses in the neighbourhood had inscriptions at their gates, with words such as ‘The home of Captain Hassan Rafie’ or ‘This is by the Grace of God’, or ‘God is the Light of Heaven and Earth’. But not Nakuja Abad. Nothing like that. Your father also differed from the other men in the neighbourhood by wearing a small white cotton skullcap that covered half his head, and by having a beard, which started to turn grey early and was neatly trimmed. He was tall and slim and had a cigarette permanently in the left corner of his mouth, while with his right hand he penned words that leaned against each other like dominoes, or slumped flirtatiously like women in beds of love, or craned their necks like gazelles listening for the footsteps of predators, or that were as convoluted as a labyrinth or a viper in a bunch of grapes.

Of course your problem with your father wasn’t only over these two words, or other similarly incomprehensible words, or your aversion to the Thursday salons. In fact it was your choices, or to be more precise your behaviour, that caused him to seethe with a rage that, when it reached boiling point, would explode in an outburst no one would have expected from a quiet man who was almost ascetically devoted to his workshop. You especially remember three times when your father completely lost his temper. Once when the Hamiya disciplinary council punished you, along with Khalaf and Salem, for stealing papers for the secondary school exams, when your father was summoned to appear before the council. A second time when you were caught red-handed with the banned book
The State and Revolution
. And the third time when Roula’s father complained to him about your relationship with his daughter . . . There was also the inauspicious moment when the attempt was made to assassinate the Grandson. But that time he didn’t explode, or rather you didn’t see him explode, because you weren’t there. After that critical juncture in your life, you never saw your father again. You escaped abroad. But you learnt that the incident left him deeply saddened and drove him into further seclusion. Because after the incident the Hamiya leadership dispensed with his services and put him under covert surveillance, and the elite and the media lost interest in him and his works. But that probably didn’t upset your father, who had never sought publicity and was devoted to his work. What upset him, and what saddened him for years, was his disappointment that you had turned out to be the opposite of him in almost everything, and the fact that you were not close by. How could he not feel that he would never see you again? You think it was this rather than anything else that pained him, because in spite of everything, although you contested his religion, his authority and his taste in poetry, you know your father loved you. In fact, he loved in you your spirit of rebellion and inquiry and feared for the consequences it would have for you. You can be sure he reserved a special dash of paternal affection just for you. You don’t know exactly why; perhaps because you were the only child who argued with him and challenged him, while your brothers obeyed him or were in awe of his prestige.

After you escaped, you and your father did correspond sporadically. Perhaps because the postal authorities were monitoring the letters, he never mentioned the Grandson incident or any of your radical disagreements: your hard-left politics, your writing of modern poetry instead of classical poems in the traditional format, which he said was essential to any proper poetry, the way you ridiculed religious beliefs, and so on. Instead he would tell you what was news at home and in the family and with relatives: who had married, who had died, what appliances or furniture had been added to the house, sometimes about a book he had read or an idea he was working on. Because of his emotionally reserved nature and his allusive style, you had to infer by interpretation and reading between the lines that he missed you, or was disappointed in you, or that you had left a void in the house. Being near or distant was a metaphysical matter, as far as your father was concerned, or that’s what you concluded from what he said and from the quotations he would copy out. You thought about that at length after, in one of his letters, he quoted a fragment written by, you think, the tenth-century Sufi mystic al-Niffari. He began his letter by writing about your brother Sanad’s plan to go to the Land of Palm Trees and Oil, before suddenly breaking off and writing a line across the middle of the page with a broader stroke (he clearly used one of his brushes and not a normal ink pen): ‘Farness is made known by nearness, and nearness is made known by spiritual existence.’ Then he went back to talking about your brother, who wanted to try his luck working and living in that country, to which some Hamiya people had started to rush after torrents of oil gushed out there.

Although metaphor was not unfamiliar in your life and your writing, your father baffled you with such fragments, which would spring from the unknown into letters that were meant to convey greetings and small talk. This was one of your problems with him: having to reinterpret a saying or a story that may not have had a meaning, in your opinion, other than the obvious one. You usually failed to relate to his metaphors or the subtext of his words, not because of some mental deficiency, as you sometimes thought, or because you are hostile to metaphors, but because you believed that reality was the proper reference point for testing words and things; that facts have an aspect that must be seen and touched, and that humanity’s heaven and hell are on this earth, not in some other place. Because oppression, exploitation, injustice, and the monopolisation of power and wealth are man-made cre­­ations, and mankind will give them up only at the end of a struggle that should not hesitate to use force if necessary: violence to counter violence in order to set up a human paradise on earth. The flower is here, so let’s dance here. That’s what you also learned from your secret organisation’s literature, and what you blindly believed.

Later, when you became less rigid in your ideas and doubts started to impinge, you read about a calligrapher who went into ecstasies and had visions – a description that reminded you somewhat of your father. The writer described the calligrapher as writing in three types of script: the first he alone could read, the second he and others could read, while neither he nor anyone else could read the third. By that time you had discovered the meaning of the two words your father had inscribed on the arched gateway of your summer house. It wasn’t he who told you what they meant; you had read a chapter on Suhrawardi, the mystic who was executed, in a book devoted to troubled personalities. Suhrawardi apparently coined a Persian phrase with the meaning ‘nowhere place’ or ‘nowhere country’ – Nakuja Abad.

In
The Chant of the Wing of Gabriel
,
a book by Suhrawardi, the observer asks the sage where he comes from. The sage points to his brothers, who are lined up among those who had arrived before him, and says, ‘We come to you from Nakuja Abad.’

This strange linguistic coinage also made you think of
The City of Where
, the title of a renowned book by a poet from the city of Sindbad who, like his ancient forebears, crossed tame seas and dark seas, and went missing on the steppes of distant continents.

The truth is that your room had not been turned into a guest room after you left, as you wrote, even if your family did sometimes use it to put up passing guests. Such guests became fewer and fewer and eventually stopped coming with the passage of time. Your relics were still there: your books that filled a corner to one side, your bachelor’s degree certificate hanging in a glass frame, a photograph of you with Khalaf and Salem in khaki clothes and wide-brimmed hats, holding terrified rabbits on a hunting trip (there was another person of your age at the edge of the picture, who might have been Wahid), a transistor radio the size of a large hand with a dark-blue leather cover that had withstood the ravages of time, an oak desk with a silver rack in the middle, holding letters and identity documents between two semicircular plates of glass. Next to it stood an empty glass vase with a lotus flower design and on the base some faint writing that probably indicated where it was made.

You no longer know how or why you acquired most of the books and you were surprised at the names of some of the authors, which you might as well never have heard of. Apart from pulling
A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me
out from among the books, you didn’t go near your other things. You left them staring at you, confronting you like the contents of an abandoned museum.

You were like someone postponing an inevitable confrontation for a later occasion.

In addition to the woollen mattress your mother had upholstered for you with her own hands, which had since turned to dust, there were three mattresses lying along the sides of the room. On your first night back you slept on the mattress that was printed with red anemones in an endlessly repeating pattern. You slept as you had never slept before. You forgot to take one of the sleeping pills you usually take before going to bed, which nonetheless do not always ward off the nightly visitations of insomnia. You slept without a sleeping pill. You slept long, without coughing, without dreams to disturb or comfort you, until mid-morning, when you were invaded in your bed by the sound of the children and the smell of coffee. You washed your face and brushed your teeth. You combed what’s left of your hair. You went to the big kitchen your father designed for the family to gather at mealtimes, so that the women of the family could chat and discuss domestic matters and your brothers could take refuge from receiving your father’s unexpected guests. It’s both a kitchen and a family room, with one corner spread with carpets and cushions on the ground and one corner with a dining table and chairs that are rarely used. The whole family was waiting for you in the kitchen, except your brother Sanad, who lives with his family in the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. The brothers and sisters who were children when you escaped now had wives and husbands, sons and daughters so numerous and so close in age that it was hard for you to remember their faces and their names. Your brother Shihab, the third male born to your mother’s fertile womb, has named his second son Younis. That was a courtesy that greatly touched you. That was your first morning in the house and among family members, and it was filled with familiar images and smells after an absence that had lasted twenty years.

Younis hovered around you, nine or ten years old with round eyes. He showed you something in the kitchen cupboards, named the plants and the house things as if he were renaming the species that had survived the great flood. ‘This is snapdragon,’ he told you. ‘This is basil. This is geranium. This is my grandmother’s prayer rug. That’s my grandfather’s favourite cup. These are eggplants. This is ghee. Do you like ghee, Uncle?’

After taking you on a verbal tour of the things in the house, he said, ‘It’s better here, right?’

You stroked his short-cropped hair, which reminded you of your own hair when you were his age, and smiled at him. In return he gave you a bigger smile.

The real reception room, or what you call the diwan, hasn’t changed. It’s on the ground floor, right next to the front door of the house. It’s a traditional architectural layout, meant to keep the guests, especially outsiders, away from the interior of the house and from the intimate spaces reserved for the family and their closest relatives.

The members of your family use all the floors and most of the rooms in the house, which is built of black volcanic stone (except for the arched gateway which is made of dusty white stone), but the diwan, which is rectangular, seems to have preserved the smells and spectres of the past. As though it hasn’t been used for ages. After your father died, it was no longer the venue for the Thursday salons that witnessed lengthy discussions about Ibn Muqla the Abbasid vizier and his pioneering work in the field of calligraphy, the additional contributions of Ishaq Ibn al-Nadim, the innovations of Ibn al-Bawwab, and the contemporary work of Hamid al-Amadi and al-Dirani. The participants would bandy about the names of calligraphers, Sufis and poets, ancient and modern, questioning or casting doubt on what others were saying. Your father’s knowing words would modestly decide the matter, because he was the arbiter and ultimate authority among his friends, especially on questions of calligraphy and Sufism, which in his case arose from both a passion and a deep inner commitment, and meant more than merely repeating dry rules and metaphysical abstractions. They didn’t talk only about calligraphers and the various ways they made their letters twist and turn, stretch and double back. They might also talk about the heresy trial of Ibn Hanbal and the crucifixion of al-Hallaj, the murder of Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi’s views on the unity of existence, al-Niffari’s books
The Stations
and
The Addresses
, and then jump centuries forward to Taha Hussein and his scepticism about pre-Islamic poetry and the argument about his controversial ideas. (Apart from Taha Hussein, you didn’t know most of these names.) Sometimes your father would force you to attend these Thursday salons and you would hover between boredom and drowsiness among men who seemed to you to have just emerged from the Middle Ages. The subjects he discussed with his friends did not interest you, the names they mentioned were not familiar and the music they listened to and nodded their heads to, either in rapture or absent-mindedly, left you quite cold, especially the music in which the lines were repeated again and again, turning on themselves, like whirling dervishes, with irritating monotony. Your father’s Thursday salons, which you were forced to attend in the long summer holidays, were like torture sessions for your restless body and for your spirit, which was adrift in a domain very far from their own world with its clouds of dust from the golden ages. You would rather play with your friends, fight in the back streets, sharpen knives, chase everything that moved on the face of the earth or, when you grew older, go to cafés and meet poets and young writers who were interested, like you, in modern literature.