Land of No Rain (22 page)

Many years ago, when he was the same age and height as the boy who was sometimes holding his hand, sometimes letting it go, he used to walk along these streets, jumping from wall to wall with a stick in his hand. He used to read books about chivalry and the agonies of love under lamp-posts, and comb his hair with a quiff. There were fewer streets then than there are now, but they were tidier. As was apparent from his uncertain gait, he didn’t know which street to take after the big junction that divided our district into four equal sections, the junction for which the house that people called Nakuja Abad, after the two words inscribed on the arch outside, was a major landmark. He was looking at the child, and the child realised he was confused. The child pointed towards the west. They crossed the last street he knew and then he left young Younis in charge. He was silent, and so was the boy. From one street to the next, young Younis said, ‘This way, Uncle.’ Then he would fall silent again. He followed in the footsteps of the boy, who led him by the shortest route, like the word
sakiina
in the maze of his father’s Kufic design. I’m sure he gave up trying to recognise the small streets, because the goods in the shops along the way had mostly changed. The new goods met needs that were unknown in the past. Perhaps he noticed that these same goods, with the same names, in the same packets or tins of the same colour, were now available everywhere: an alternative form of internationalism that splashed its brands across towns and villages, across oceans and continents, transcending languages and local distinctions, an internationalism of magic merchandise that floats across the face of the earth.

When he decided to make this visit, he didn’t say to me, ‘Hey Younis, let’s go,’ as he did when he visited his friend Salem, who had had a tumour removed from his brain several years ago and lost a considerable part of his memory. His old friend had recognised him briefly, then a moment later asked him who he was. He had also suggested we visit another friend called Wahid, who owns a workshop making metal parts. He’s the person who appears in the photograph of the hunting expedition with Khalaf and Salem, the one he didn’t recognise at first. He spent longer than I expected with this friend of his. As soon as the man saw him, he said, ‘I didn’t know that when we daubed horseshit on the governor’s car it would become an epic chapter in your book
Hamiya and the Bridg
e!’ Then, after that quickfire opening, his friend the metal man laughed, revealing teeth decayed by sweet tea and tobacco. The man who had come back to his birthplace also laughed heartily. This was the first carefree laugh I had heard from him since he came back. He laughed until he broke into a protracted coughing fit from deep in his lungs and almost fainted. He likes Wahid. He likes him as much as he liked Khalaf, because they both had reserves of goodwill and loyalty that were impervious to change and unlikely to run out, as if these traits were inseparable parts of their temperament. Something organic that they were born with and would die with. Like hands, heads, noses, hearts and arteries. These two childhood friends of his had not opened a book since they left middle school. Is it books that corrupt, that change and alter deep-rooted nature?

This time he didn’t say to me, ‘Hey, Younis, let’s go.’ He took young Younis with him. He asked the boy, ‘Do you know where they are?’ Without needing to ask his uncle what he meant, the boy said, ‘I know. I visit them every Friday and recite the first chapter of the Quran at their graves.’

The cemetery they finally reached hadn’t existed before. He didn’t recognise it. He knew the old one, which was now in the middle of their neighbourhood. Perhaps he thought that in his time there were fewer dead. Death really had been less familiar, less ordinary than it is today. It was a rare event that brought the whole neighbourhood together. The night after a death was frightening for children, and especially for him. What troubled him most was abandoning the dead after the burial. That communal severance from someone who was alive a few hours earlier. Complete severance. Disengagement. Leaving the body in a hole covered with soil. The worst part is what awaits the dead after that communal severance. An interrogation in which the two angels leave no stone unturned. Various forms of torture if the dead has been undutiful to his parents or has neglected his prayers or fasting. I think he thought of that, because I thought of it, and as long as I thought of it, he must have thought of it too. I began to feel exactly what he felt as soon as he surveyed the large dusty cemetery with its wire fence. The caretaker came out of a wooden hut at the entrance when he saw them pushing the metal gate with the annoying squeak. Young Younis pointed inside the cemetery. When the caretaker shook his head and waved his hands he realised the man couldn’t speak. It was clear that the caretaker knew the boy. The sign language that the child used and the caretaker’s response certainly looked primitive to the returnee. In the City of Red and Grey, where the person who was me twenty years ago had lived, there had clearly been great progress in sign language. And, of course, even among the deaf there are educated people and illiterates. The caretaker of our cemetery, with his tattered scarf thrown any old how round his neck, might count as a sign-language illiterate. But why would the deaf caretaker of a cemetery, in a place at the mercy of relentless dust, need words beyond those he exchanged with the child? Those few primitive gestures were enough for him to know what the child said, or more precisely what he meant.

The man who had come home couldn’t understand the system on which the cemetery was based. The graves, some of them made of earth raised a little above ground level and others on which the family of the dead had had concrete platforms built, took up all the space available. They were cheek by jowl, like the houses in the neighbourhood. But the burials were apparently in chronological order, from the oldest to the most recent. He thought about how the cemetery had become a copy of the very neighbourhoods where he ran through the lanes in his childhood and that remained almost as they were in the past, with the difference that curved aluminium dishes had sprouted on the roofs of houses, like desert mushrooms after abundant rainfall.

At last the boy reached the grave, three steps ahead of his uncle. As soon as his little feet touched the ground in the cemetery, he tried not to step on any of the tightly packed graves, as if picking his way between the arms and legs of a sleeping body he was frightened of awakening from its sacred slumber. The grave was like all the graves around it. Apart from the stone marker, the only thing that distinguished it was an olive tree that received regular doses of water. It was luxuriant. Green, despite the dust that inevitably coated its leaves and branches. In comparison with the olive tree, the other cemetery plants seemed to be yellowing or wilting under a determined sun.

The boy, three paces ahead, looked back with round eyes that said, ‘We’ve arrived!’ Then he raised his open hands to the sides of his face and started to mumble. The man who had come home told himself that the boy had been taught the same lessons he had been taught when he was young.

Time can repeat itself.

People can repeat themselves, one way or another.

He noticed that some wild plants with small bright red flowers had sprouted on the grave. Their thin roots had spread inside it. He also noticed that the words inscribed on the tombstone in familiar
thuluth
script were slightly faded, but he could easily read these words:
Here Lies the Late Fatima . . . May She Rest in Peace
. His mother’s voice rang in his ears. He remembered that phrase she would use whenever she saw him put a blanket around his shoulders to join his friends for a night out she didn’t approve of: ‘You’ll have a blanket around your shoulders, like a nomad, for the rest of your life.’ He remembered what his mother said about devils dancing around him. About his bottom, which wouldn’t stay still when he was sitting down, as if he were sitting on a spike or hot coals. Sometimes his mother would sing songs addressed to the birds. He remembered part of a song in which she asked the birds to bring her news of absent loved ones. He didn’t know which absent loved ones. Because he hadn’t left the nest yet, and Sanad hadn’t gone off to the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. He thought that confiding in birds was just a singing tradition his mother had heard from others. Like the introductory lament over abandoned encampments in ancient Arabic poetry. Because in our world birds are associated with travel, perhaps with letters too, and people in our country love to be maudlin for no obvious reason. He remembered other birds, his father’s birds, or rather the birds in his books or in his imagination. He had heard the story about them from his father, before reading it later. The birds in which his mother confided had nothing in common with his father’s birds. But one thing, as usual, reminds you of something else. That’s how wily the memory is, and also one of its disadvantages. At one of those miserable Thursday sessions he heard his father tell his friends the story of the thirty birds and their journey to find themselves a king on Mount Qaf. It was the hoopoe who told the birds where they might find the bird king called the Simorgh: ‘He’s close to us, and we are far from him. His throne is at the top of a tree that’s too tall to see, and no tongue ceases to repeat his name. He is surrounded by a thousand veils, some of light and others of darkness, and no one in creation can grasp his essence!’ But the rigours of the journey, which the hoopoe had understated, frightened off the bird that sang, the bird that boasted of its feathers and the bird that relied on its strength, and they all backed out. The birds that agreed to undertake the impossible journey were the least known and the most insignificant in the bird kingdom. Only thirty birds arrive, exhausted and featherless, at Mount Qaf. But the Simorgh, the venerable king of the birds, turns out to be none other than the birds themselves. When the thirty birds look at the Simorgh, he turns out to be the group of thirty birds, and when the birds look at themselves they see the Simorgh.

The sun hung perpendicularly above the grave. An imperious sun that reminded him of the sun he had known here in the old days. He heard the flapping of wings. He looked towards the eastern edge of the cemetery and saw a bird of prey ready to swoop. Beyond the rickety wire fence a spiral of dust was rising into the bare sky and threatening to approach. He noticed that when he heard the flapping of the predator’s wings the boy looked in the same direction and saw the spiral of dust. ‘We should be going, Uncle,’ young Younis said. His uncle didn’t answer. He looked at the tombstone and reread the words, carved in black in
thuluth
style:
Here Lies the Late . . .
He looked around the grave. There was no space. No room for another grave. There were graves side by side, without markers. No trees, just some withered weeds. Young Younis stepped towards the cemetery gate where the caretaker, his tattered scarf thrown around his neck, stood looking at them. I had a strong sense that the man who had come home was thinking about himself, about his name, or rather his two names. Which of them would be carved on his tombstone? He looked around, as if looking for someone he could not see but whose presence he sensed. His gaze settled on the east. He coughed violently and spat out blood, lots of blood.

The caretaker was still standing at the ready, his head protected by his scarf from a sun that was starting to grow fiercer. Young Younis had reached the gate. He saw him stop at the entrance. The caretaker went up to the boy and started to talk to him with his hands. As he came up to them young Younis said, ‘Uncle, give him something.’ The man who had come home automatically put his hand in his trouser pocket and found a large silver coin, which he handed to the caretaker. The caretaker examined the large silver coin. He turned it over in his hand and then gave it back, a look of disgust on his face. He withdrew his right hand sharply. The man who had come back looked at the coin the caretaker had returned. It had been struck to commemorate the silver jubilee of the Grandson’s accession.

Elias Khoury's Introduction: The Split Ego and the Hollows of Time

 

 

In London, where I now live disguised as an imaginary person, on the run from my mother's prophecy in which my original name rings as a terrifying memory (‘Yahya, your soul will never know rest,' she said), it's hard to lie on the sloping tile roof of one's house and count the stars that have abandoned their positions.

 

With this passage Amjad Nasser ends the first poem in his latest collection,
Life as a Disrupted Narrative
. What's fascinating in this collection is how deeply he explores the lyricism of narrative, in that the poetry takes shape from the colourings of life, mixed with legend, and from the capacity of the moment to be so condensed that it becomes a compression of time.

The aim of this introduction is not to analyse a book of poetry that holds a special place on the map of contemporary Arabic poetry. But Amjad Nasser was mistaken when he believed that the best person to introduce his first novel to the reader would be a novelist, because the secret that no one believes when I reveal it is that what fascinates me in literature is the ability of words to compress time. Only poetry does that. That's why Scheherazade resorted to interlacing her magical stories with poetry, to reinforce the sense, as if the words of poetry are a nail we hammer into the wall of time. That's why novelists since Cervantes have turned narration into successive poetical moments, so that the story can absorb the pulse of things and their secret whispers.

When I reread
Life as a Disrupted Narrative
, I realised that it was only a matter of time before Amjad Nasser came to the novel, because the poet who has filled the gaps in time with poems must come round to writing time. And time is deceptive and slow, however rapid its capricious changes may be. We only have to reread his poem
A Young Woman in Costa Coffee
to discover that the story we will read in this book started there, when the young woman walked out of the poem and sat down in front of the poet to tell us about ‘the poem that thought about another poem and then wrote it'.