Land of No Rain (4 page)

It wasn’t long into your relationship with her that you got married. After that you lived in as much harmony as is possible for two bodies, two spirits from two different backgrounds under a single roof. You were living your present, that moment when you met her. This is true. You never thought about the fact that you were not the first man in her life, because she too was not the first woman in your life. What mattered to you was that you should have nothing in common with that young revolutionary who had sold out as soon as he went back to his country. You would analyse with her the contradiction between the principles and behaviour displayed by the revolutionaries in our region. As though reciting from a sacred text, you attributed this to the fact that objective circumstances were not yet ripe and that ingrained traditions vigorously resisted new ideas. But this was only what you said at the start of your relationship, before you got married. You liked that. You praised what she said without reservation. You endorsed her arguments and her conclusions about the double standards of intellectuals. In fact you would even go a step further. You seemed to be in complete agreement on these matters. After living under the same roof you changed somewhat. You changed gradually. You no longer wanted to take part in these discussions. On such issues you were terser, less enthusiastic, less effusive than before. She was more lucid than you, and she remained so. It was you who still preserved inside you areas shrouded in darkness that, with the passage of time, you surrounded with barbed wire.

*  *  *

In your final years in the City of Red and Grey, you had the impression that she had the upper hand in the household. It was an impression rooted in traditional attitudes that you hadn’t completely shaken off, but it was not necessarily the reality of the situation. Having studied sociology in that same city, she had found a good full-time job in an organisation that dealt with immigrants. You had a sporadic income. You helped set up a magazine – along with others who had escaped from your part of the world with their writing skills and their ideas (and with their skins) – as a platform for freedom, to expose the corruption and despotism of the forces in control there, but you left the magazine after it was co-opted. With their vast amounts of money or their pistols with silencers, those forces penetrated countries of refuge and asylum to bring to heel those who had strayed from the flock, those who had fled the hell at home. Some gave in under the pressure of making ends meet, while others said with derision, ‘If that’s how it is, why don’t we work with the very source instead of with its agents?’ That magazine was almost the last of the publications to join the choir in which the fugitives from hell raggedly sang the infernal national anthem, turning sour milk, as the proverb goes, into cottage cheese. Needless to say, you stopped working at the magazine and started to write here and there, leaving one failed project in order to embark on another. Which made you even more reclusive.

When she was going over, for some reason, some of her old stories about her young revolutionary husband, she would ask you whether the subject bothered you. With just one or two words or a shake of the head you would say no. She didn’t like that. She thought it showed that you weren’t interested in her, not that you believed that her right to her own past was non-negotiable and required no apologies. Because there was nothing she needed to be embarrassed about or apologise for. Her suggestion that you weren’t interested would annoy you. But was it without basis? Did it occur to you to analyse the components of your alleged position? It didn’t. You seemed to be afraid to go deeper into the subject, in case you might be included among those comrades that the great revolutionary once likened to radishes – red only on the outside.

Your marriage wasn’t bad. You didn’t completely fail to live up to the adjustments, concessions and promises required when two people live under the same roof, but nonetheless you sometimes felt, or dreamt, that you were still the adolescent you once were. You saw yourself as a young man with long hair and a droopy moustache, running through the stations on a radio that would fit in the palm of your hand, in search of those heart-rending songs that were popular in the prime of your youth. That feeling, or dream, did not last long: your wife’s voice, reminding you that this or that needed doing, brought you back to the fact that you were with her, to the conjugal bond and its obligations. And then you’re a solid man. That’s how you appear to those who see you, or how you would like others to see you. Beauty unsettles you. You get excited. You cry. But that doesn’t last long either. You don’t have any obvious tendency to become addicted to anything. And you thought your wife had no doubts about you, was in fact immune to narrow feelings of jealousy, until a certain piece of paper crossed your path.

A colleague of your wife’s and the colleague’s husband, local people, had invited you to spend the weekend with them in a town in the south where they had a country house. You had visited the town and the area several times. It was famous for its old castle, which reminded you of similar castles in the world you came from, and it was warmer than the City of Red and Grey. You used to go there ‘to free inspiration from its bottle’, as you put it. It was an offhand rhetorical phrase, but of your own making. You would sit on a wooden bench by a small river with sheep bleating on the banks, their tails like dogs’ tails, not like the famous fat-tailed sheep of your country. You would sit there like a fisherman waiting for a bite, with the big castle in front of you and the little rippling river running by your side. You did write, but as for ‘freeing inspiration from its bottle’, that’s a different matter.

You and your wife took the train, through long dark tunnels and across deep green pastures where you saw cows with their heads to the ground, heavy louring clouds, and horses wrapped in blankets like mules. The people in that country don’t meet their guests at stations or airports, as they do in your country. Your wife’s colleague didn’t live far from the station: a fifteen-minute walk or less. You walked down a long street lined with identical terraced houses with red tiled roofs and marked with numbers. Your wife suddenly bent down and picked up a piece of paper from the ground. You don’t know what made her do that, because she didn’t usually stare at the ground, as you have long been in the habit of doing, looking for things that have fallen from people’s pockets. It must have been your bad luck that made her pick up this piece of paper, or maybe something else. The piece of paper was old. That was obvious from its appearance – the creases and the lined paper. You saw your wife shiver silently after opening it up and reading some lines. When she looked at you out of the corner of her eye, you realised it had something to do with you. ‘What’s up?’ you asked. She didn’t say anything. She thrust the piece of paper at you. The handwriting was similar to your own, which unconsciously imitates a hand you knew well. It was a love letter but you had no idea where or when it was written. The handwriting was very like yours, and your wife knew the name of the woman to whom it was addressed and something of what had happened between you and her. It was an old affair, from the distant past. Nonetheless you had always tried to avoid talking about it with your wife, not because she was jealous of a woman who now had another life far away, but maybe because of your reserved nature, even though you could be talkative when you were interested and in a good mood.

You can control when you speak out and when you hold your tongue, but how can you control what you say in your sleep? In the dreams and nightmares you have. Those long rambling monologues that your wife sometimes wakes up to, and then she strokes your head so tenderly.

How could it have happened?

The letter quoted a short poem in traditional metre from your book
Tilka allati,
or
That Which
, and the poem included clear references to your first love. In those days you hadn’t yet had a book published in Hamiya, and
Tilka allati
didn’t contain a single poem in traditional metre. And after you fled your country you gave up writing in traditional metre because the jaunty rhythms and the artificial diction made you sick. In prose and narrative you began to discover latent poetical possibilities and a freedom of expression that were hard to find in poems of a genre dominated by big issues, poems full of slogans, polemics and angry ranting.

Although your wife maintained her composure she wasn’t convinced by your arguments or by the evidence you started to lay out: first, the fact that there was no signature on the letter; second, that names and even handwriting can be alike; and third, that
Tilka allati
didn’t contain any poems in traditional metre. Finally, after you ran out of arguments, you said, ‘Even if we suppose the poem is mine, that’s not evidence that I wrote the letter. People have a right to quote a poem, even one by an obscure poet.’

Without telling you, your wife seemed to think that your first love might also have moved to your last country of exile. You knew your hunch was on the right track because married couples, after living together for a while, can read their partners’ thoughts even as they take shape in their minds. Your brother Shihab had also called to tell you about rumours that a general amnesty for convicted fugitives was imminent (such rumours came and went and then reappeared without anyone knowing who started them or how true they were). Before ending the call he had told you that your wife had called him to ask how they were and that among other things she had asked about Roula, your first love. Your wife was dumbfounded when she found out that Roula had never left your country and that in that hot and arid place she had three or four children. Although the weekend in that country town passed well enough, afterwards you noticed that the papers piled on the table in your study were not as tidy as they had been, your pockets had been turned out, and your wife was all ears whenever you spoke with anyone on the phone, especially in your native language.

One can’t be unlucky all the time.

That would be against the nature of things.

That person they call Sharara,

The epitome of pessimism and bad luck,

Even he strikes lucky some of the time.

You and your wife were listening to a serious radio station. You rarely watched television, because the obtrusive pictures left no room for imagination. There was a programme on about how the things we lose or throw away, such as papers, books, watches and pens, can come back to haunt us. The subject of the programme hit a sore spot, as they say. It frightened you. You tried to change the station. You were worried its revelations might corroborate the evidence against you. But your wife, who knew intuitively what was going on in your head, insisted on listening to the end. The presenter was interviewing a middle-aged woman. You gathered this from her voice and from the events that came up in the programme. Judging by the rustling that you heard, similar to the sound of someone handling papers, the interviewer seemed to be showing her something. ‘Is this your handwriting?’ he asked her. It took some time before the woman said, ‘Yes, it’s my handwriting.’ The interviewer said, ‘I’m showing you some pages, just at random, but can you remember when and where you wrote them?’

There was another silence. Then the woman spoke, with something like a sigh. ‘My God, it’s a long time ago. I don’t know how long.’ You found out that the pages he had shown her had been torn out of a diary she had written during an affair with a resistance leader in a city the name of which you didn’t catch. The city was besieged and then occupied, when the woman was a student in her twenties. She was in love with the field commander in the city. When the city fell under occupation, she didn’t leave the city, unlike some of the other foreign students there, but stayed alongside the resistance fighter. But the emotions that arise in such circumstances apparently do not remain unchanged. The occupation forces were driven out of the city and the field commander became prominent in society, famous for his heroic exploits. The young woman went back to her country to arrange to move back and live with him, but the former commander sent her a letter telling her that he was now having a relationship with another woman. ‘Sorry, our relationship was more a matter of humanitarian and political solidarity than of love.’ That’s what he wrote. The effect of the letter was devastating. She didn’t know what to do. Her first reaction was to throw her diary, in which she had recorded private and public moments related to the field commander and the resistance, into the waste-paper basket.

You didn’t learn anything about the young woman’s anguish, because she didn’t speak of it. It seemed that little of her pain remained, so long after the wound. But you did find out how the memory came back to her. The diary had been found by the programme producers, who would retrieve people’s lost or forgotten moments. That was the special feature of this radio programme, which was popular among men and women with little to celebrate or regret. Time generally ensures that such feelings fade away.

In the flea markets common in that country, shoppers such as you can find personal possessions such as underwear, pictures, diaries and medals from the world wars: amazing things. Amazing to you at least, for whom such possessions are personal and intimate and should not end up being desecrated in that way. It was in such a market that the producers had come across the woman’s diary. As for how the diary, thrown in the rubbish in a moment of anger, had reached the flea market, that’s another story, but it shows that what for us is a final act might be the beginning for someone else, and that our decisions about the fate of something do not necessarily come to pass. It seems that everything has another life even when it’s thrown in the rubbish bin. Anyway, what matters is that the producers had tracked down the woman through the address written on the inside cover of the diary. That detail didn’t surprise you because you know that people in that country can be born and die, generation after generation, in a house with the same address, in a neighbourhood where the long streets lined with houses do not change. Even the trees are not uprooted or replaced unless a storm blows them down or they are attacked by deadly insects, some of which, they say, arrive on immigrant ships.