Land of No Rain (16 page)

Young Younis was walking beside you like an undersized shadow when you went into the diwan. You saw the sofas, the chairs and the wooden coffee-tables, some of them inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The room evoked old voices, the smells of coffee with cardamom, lemonade with rose water and incense brought from distant climes. Your father’s calligraphies were still staring down from the walls, some words legible and others illegible.

You remembered that you very much liked one of his works in particular; it was a design that bore the last half of a line of verse and read:
Souls yearn for you for eternity
. Your father had written it in the
thuluth
style, which was one of his favourites and in which he designed notable masterpieces.

His books were still in the wooden bookcase, looking down on you with their spines of gilt leather. The only new thing in the diwan was a black-and-white picture of him, taken by the Grandson’s private photographer, showing him in his workshop, engrossed in writing a large inscription in Kufic script.

When young Younis saw you looking at the picture, he said, ‘That’s your father, right?’

‘That’s right,’ you said.

‘You’re Younis, and I’m Younis, right?’

‘That’s right, and there’s a third one too, apart from us,’ you said.

‘Where’s he?’ he said.

‘It’s hard to see him,’ you said.

‘He’s a ghost, you mean?’

‘Maybe.’

With his round eyes, young Younis looked at the photograph and said, ‘My father put it here. It used to be downstairs.’

You know this picture well. It never used to hang in the diwan but, as young Younis said, in the workshop that took up the cellar of the summer house. Your father was wearing a khaki shirt and trousers, which were common in Hamiya, in fact the standard work clothes there. The military differed from the others in that they had ranks and regimental badges, but not in the colour of their clothes. Your father wasn’t a military man but at work he used to wear this uniform, without badges to show his rank or the service he belonged to. He wasn’t looking at the photographer, in fact he didn’t even seem to be aware of his presence. His right hand was holding a wooden pencil. His head and body were bent over, his eyes looking at the spot where the pencil rested on the sheet of paper. His shoulders were thin and hunched and slightly tense. Fragile, engrossed in his letters, he seemed to be in a trance. You could see the Kufic writing, as intricate as a maze, but it was hard to read it in the picture.

Your father wrote few words in his designs. Despite his devoutness, he wasn’t inclined to use Quranic verses, common sayings of the Prophet or long sentences. Some of his designs consisted of a single letter, such as
nun
,
ba
,
kaf
or
alif
, with a little decoration such as foliage in the empty spaces. Even with the ancient poems that he loved, many of which he knew by heart, he seldom put a whole line in one of his designs. Maybe he wanted to leave it to the eye of the beholder to wander in the void. As if to be incomplete was the way things really were.
Kullu man alayhi faanin
, ‘Everyone upon it is ephemeral’,
one of them read. You hadn’t known how to read this early design of your father’s. Especially the word
faanin
,
‘ephemeral’. It wasn’t until you grew up that you realised it was connected with the word
fanaa
, ‘transcendence’. You remember that he refused to write in full that famous line of Mutanabbi’s, starting
To the extent that people are resolute
, when he wrote the inscription on the triumphal arch at the entrance to Hamiya. In the face of opposition from the Grandson’s aides, he broke the inscription off after the first seven words. If it had been his choice, he would not have written even those words, which he considered, as far as you remember from a discussion that took place in the Thursday salon, to be pretentious and boastful, a sycophantic suggestion by the Grandson’s retinue. You were surprised how little decoration and foliage there was in the calligraphies that hung on the walls of the diwan. Apparently the empty space that calligraphers avoid, either for fear of a void or because they lack ingenuity, did not frighten your father. In fact the empty space so evident in some of his works may have been quite deliberate. It had a presence that was clear and unsettling at the same time. You had seen most of these designs before but you had never thought about this aspect. During your long absence and in your wanderings through numerous countries you had seen the work of many calligraphers, most of whom resort to decorative foliage and filling in the background of the design or the inscription itself in a way that diverts the eye. You don’t recall many of your father’s opinions on the art of calligraphy, but you imagine he would have seen excessive decoration as aesthetic padding that distracted from contemplation of the secret hidden in the letter or the word. Calligraphy in its absolute union with the letter and the word, which were united in their turn in a higher secret, was what mattered to him, and besides that, manual craftsmanship. Perhaps that explains why your father preferred to be called a calligrapher rather than an artist. Maybe he saw in art a creativity and playfulness that he did not believe in. Creation was for God. As for playing with letters and words that had conveyed countless inexhaustible connotations over hundreds of years, by his standards that was an adolescent folly that humanity had not grown out of. Such talk might have been aimed at you. His criticism of you was along these lines and you knew this, and you would answer him in the same manner. But playing with words that say one thing and mean something else delighted your father and encouraged him to bring the best of them out of his lexical treasure trove. You were his favourite partner in this chess game of words and meaning.

It was young Younis who took you down to the cellar where your father had spent long hours in summer mixing inks, sharpening pencils, boiling tea, rubbing pieces of paper with organic substances or writing, often with a single stroke of his pen, a large letter in a design he was working on. Breathing fitfully, you went down the twelve steps that you knew by heart. Young Younis had gone ahead and was waiting for you at the cellar door. He stood upright and stuck out his chest, with his firm hands locked behind his back, like a soldier on parade.

Like the diwan, the cellar had been left as it was, as if your father, wearing his khaki shirt and trousers, might come in at any moment, after taking off his snow-white gown and his embroidered black cloak in his bedroom, keeping only his white skullcap on. You felt that strongly. You could almost hear his breathing as he came down the twelve steps to the cellar. You could smell the faint scent of musk, the smell of his trimmed beard after Friday prayers. There were several designs, complete or incomplete, on the cellar walls, on the workbench and on the bookshelves. On the edge of the workbench there was a round ashtray made of brass and engraved with five-petalled flowers, with four grooves around the rim to hold cigarettes, and a dark green patch in the base.

You noticed that under the bench there was a pair of green plastic slippers that he apparently used when he was washing before prayers or when moving around the cellar. You took off your sandals and put the slippers on. They were your size. You remembered that you, your father and your brother Sanad all took the same size: 43. You remembered your brother, who had moved to the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. You used to filch his favourite shoes when the male hormones started to kick in. He would go crazy when he had an appointment and couldn’t find his shoes. He knew you had got to them first and he would have to change his trousers to match the colour of the only other shoes that were available.

While you gazed around at your father’s workshop, at his tools and his relics, young Younis was standing upright, his hands behind his back, in front of a large design in Kufic script in a corner near the entrance to the cellar. It was the same design that could be seen in the photograph hanging in the diwan. Framed in a perfect square, it was severely geometric and appeared to be formed of pixels, as in today’s digital images.

You had seen the design before but hadn’t noticed the maze, in which he had tried out two gradations of turquoise. You thought it was just a geometrical game. Your father, who did not usually play with calligraphy, wanted to play, to try out the surprising possibilities that playing would reveal, or to combine calligraphy and the graphic design for which he faulted your brother Sanad. He was not one of those who used Kufic much, but even when he did it wasn’t in this geometric style that looked as though it were computer-generated. The precision with which your father had executed his Kufic design was amazing. It was in the form of a maze, but a geometric maze based on the uprights and right angles of the letters. Young Younis, who turned towards you when he sensed you standing behind him, knew something you did not know, or had not paid any attention to. With his firm little hand he pointed towards the picture and said, ‘Can you read it?’ His question took you by surprise. Can I in fact read it, you wondered. The way the letters were interlocked, in a starkly geometrical structure, made it difficult if not impossible, and you repeated the same question to him. ‘Can you read it?’ you joked (were you really joking?). ‘I can,’ he said. ‘Very well, read it,’ you said. ‘Lift me up,’ he said. You hesitated a moment. You were just about to have a coughing fit, but you held it back. You brought your father’s chair from behind his desk. Young Younis stood on it. He pointed his little hand to an empty space between two blocks of writing in the upper middle of the design and said, ‘That’s where we go in.’ Then to an empty space on the left-hand side and said, ‘And that’s where we come out.’ ‘Clear enough,’ I told my nephew. ‘That’s the way in and that’s the way out, but you haven’t read what’s written.’ ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Where we go in it’s the word
diiq
and we come out at
faraj
, and the longest path between the entrance and the exit is through the word
hayra
. Do you know what
hayra
means, Uncle?’ ‘I know,’ I said.

What young Younis said threw light on mysterious aspects of your father’s design. The words and lines emerged from a state of occultation to one of epiphany, as the Sufis say, and what you thought was playing really was playing, but playing by someone who, in an intricate and abstruse manner, was writing the elements of some redemptive talisman. The starting point of the design was the word
diiq
, ‘anguish’. You managed to work out the interlocking letters after young Younis pronounced them. The end point was the word
faraj
, ‘relief’. Then the word
hayra
, ‘uncertainty’. But in the middle was a fourth word that young Younis didn’t say, a word that offered a shorter way out of the maze. You made out the letter
sin
and then the
a
at the end of the word. The two dots were next to the
a
, not on top of it. Then you saw an open rectangle with another identical rectangle right underneath it. It was the letter
kaf
. Then it was clear to you that the fourth word, which offered a shorter way out of the maze, was
sakiina
, ‘peace of mind’.

IX

You told your relatives you didn’t want the whole world to know you were back. Your brother Shihab, now the head of the family, objected and said that custom required throwing a party to celebrate your return. You rejected the idea with a vehemence that hurt his feelings. Then you tried to ease the situation by saying you were exhausted from the journey and uneasy after so many years away, and you wanted to rest among them a while before they held the party, to which you would invite those closest to you and your old friends that remained. You calmed things down with this compromise, which postponed the challenge of meeting people you no longer knew and to whom you did not have much to say. But this wish of yours was not entirely honoured. You deduced this from the fact that certain people started passing in front of your house, people who hadn’t passed by very often since you escaped, since your brother Sanad went away and your father died. That’s what young Younis told you, reporting a conversation between his father and mother. So one of them had leaked the news of your return.

Sitting in the diwan, you told your brother Shihab that the news of your arrival was no longer a secret and apparently there were people who had heard. Shihab, who seemed emotionally cold on the outside, said that no such thing had happened. Someone might have seen you and recognised you when you went to visit your parents’ graves. Then he said it didn’t matter because people were no longer as you had known them, and you were mistaken if you thought that the bonds between people here did not break in the same way as anywhere else. But what you heard from young Younis was true, or that’s what the remains of your vanity led you to believe. On the third or fourth day after your return, from the balcony that overlooks Muntazah Street, you saw Roula walking along bolt upright, wearing a black dress that reached to below the knee, with two children beside her and a third jaunting along behind her. Your heart beat so hard you thought they must have heard it throughout the house. In the pit of your lungs you felt a coughing fit coming on. You held it down with the palm of your hand. None of the adults were near by. There was young Younis telling you about his school and his knowledge of foreign literature, while you were watching the sun slowly set on a horizon flecked with red. When Roula was level with your house she looked up at the balcony. She saw you. But you don’t know whether she recognised you because she shielded her eyes with her right hand against the remaining rays of a sun that was still strong. Young Younis was reciting a famous foreign poem that compares life to a stage. You interrupted him and said, ‘Do you see that woman?’ You pointed at her. You told him, ‘Go and call her. Tell her your mother wants to see her urgently.’ Young Younis shot off like an arrow across the large balcony on the third floor and down the side stairs. He disappeared and then reappeared in front of the arched gateway. Then you saw him in the street. He seemed to be calling Roula, because she stopped. Then you saw them talking and young Younis’s hand pointing to the house, not to the balcony where a middle-aged tiger lay in ambush for her with his memories. You went down to the kitchen on the second floor of the house. You called your brother Shihab, who was there with his wife and some of your sisters, smoking almost non-stop, imitating your father in the way he left his cigarette burning in the left corner of his mouth. You took him aside and told him what had happened. You told him, ‘It happened suddenly, so now try to find a solution.’ You went to your room. You changed the pyjamas you were wearing for a shirt and trousers. You stood in front of the mirror. You combed your hair quickly. You put some light cologne on your face, similar to the 555 brand that was popular before you escaped. In front of the mirror your nervousness was obvious. Your face showed signs of two conflicting emotions, each one pulling in a different direction, as though two separate epochs were trying to dictate their terms to you. You didn’t notice that your right eyelash twitched several times. You weren’t aware that your hand, which was still holding the comb, was shaking. You put the comb on the dressing table and it made a sound as if it had fallen from a height. You opened your bag, where most of your clothes remained, not yet hung on hangers. From a plastic container for medicines, you took out a packet. You opened it and swallowed a tablet. You felt the tablet slide slowly down your throat. You went back to the mirror. You stood stock still in front of it. Did you want to make sure you looked right for the occasion? Or to see the map that the years, your travels, trials and tribulations had etched on your face? Whatever the reason, you said to yourself, ‘I’m not the only one who’s changed, whose hair has turned grey, who has wrinkles starting to spread across his face, who has puffy bags under his eyes. I’m not the only one who’s been battered by fate, whose tattered sails have been blown to distant shores by winds and storms. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. She must have changed too, because from the balcony she looked like her picture in the newspaper when she received the Medal of Duty from the Grandson.’ Apparently you hadn’t been standing in front of the mirror for long when young Younis burst into the room, panting.