Telepathy (16 page)

I didn't intend to cast aspersions on Hajj al-Bayt, but they headed his way despite my intentions.

Finally, where had Nishan gone when he fled from al-Nakhil Hospital?

Really – where had he gone?

This was what I had not been able to ascertain. There didn't seem to be any possibility of finding out.

I deferred my suspicions for a time and began, motivated only by boredom and despair, to flip through the brown notebook that contained Shu‘ayb Zuhri's collected stories – all of them, or so he said. Filled with the small, deliberate script characteristic of adolescent girls, the notebook was heavy and chockfull.

I read:

Giraffe

They placed her in a little cage in a crowded zoo. When they looked for her a number of days later they found her suckling the little cage with her tits.

As Wakeful as an Ant

A beggar asked me one day: “Can you sleep without giving a beggar alms?”

I replied, “Have no fear. I'm as wakeful as an ant.”

Contradiction

Near the Republican Palace I came upon contradictory opinions. I listened to some of them and my destiny changed.

Love

My true love asks, “What need is there for your talk about hearts – so long as you don't pay the dowry
and don't marry me?” I replied that she's the one who concludes the marriage.

I quickly lost interest, because I didn't understand the point of these stories, which seemed to be mere arrangements of words, devoid of any pulse or narrative tension that would attract a reader. I started searching for the story “Worst City – Failed State”, from which the title of the collection was taken, thinking it might have some deeper significance. I finally found it halfway through the notebook. I was caught off guard when I discovered nothing but the title and a hundred question marks beneath it. These constituted the whole story.

– 
15
 –

I don't know when my suspicions regarding Nishan Hamza Nishan overpowered me with even greater audacity and completely seized control of me, but it most probably happened a number of days after the demise of Linda the Shadow. Her muscular dystrophy overwhelmed her respiration and had finally arrested it.

This was no easy blow to bear. It had been days and perhaps months since my portrait had been torn to pieces. I was reassembling its parts in my mind and restoring their beauty, whenever I had time alone.

Abd al-Qawi the Shadow delivered the news himself, one afternoon when I was drowning in the seas of my everyday life. After ending my self-imposed isolation, I was sitting by myself in a coffeehouse waiting for a literary critic I had promised to meet. I was thinking about everything and nothing in particular when I was surprised by a telephone call; despite my forebodings, I took the call.

He said, “Come help us bury your favorite reader, Writer. Linda has died.”

Then he hung up.

His voice was choked this time, the voice of a truly old man who was repulsed by the words on his lips. I imagined
that it had required enormous effort just to speak in that choking voice instead of being strangled by the ropes of expressions that fathers typically use when they lose their sons or daughters.

I was unable to drive my car or even approach it. I left it where it was parked and took a taxi that pulled up suddenly beside me without my hailing it. I was surprised to find that the driver, who was more or less a young man and wore local garb and whose lower lip bulged with a wad of tobacco, knew me. He had stopped because he recognized me, at a time when cab drivers had become arrogant and wouldn't stop for anyone.

This driver didn't know me as a writer but as a former math teacher who had taught him in middle school. He had not forgotten that I had mistreated him more than anyone else in his life. I had punished him non-stop for extreme inattention and incomprehension of lessons. Because of me, he had been forced to drop out of school and to work at a great number of humiliating jobs, until he ended up as a cabbie. He related to me all my errors: giving him detention in the classroom for many hours while his classmates whispered together, pulling him by his ear in front of the other pupils, calling him a shoeshine boy hundreds of times. My mind caught some of this but not all while a rude song blasted from the vehicle's player: “He fed me noodles when I didn't have a penny and said to me: ‘Sleep, dear.'” I was forced to apologize to him in a feeble voice – totally unlike the harsh voices of teachers – for my severity, which
I had thought was in his best interest. I honestly didn't remember all the forms of punishment that he rattled off and don't think they would have come naturally to me even when I was a teacher. The taxi driver accepted my apology good-naturedly and deposited me in front of the cemetery. The driver refused point blank to accept his fare, repeating, “By God Almighty, your fare is dedicated to the deceased woman. We are God's and to Him we return.”

We buried the distinguished reader in al-Salatin Cemetery, an old cemetery on a neglected road on the outskirts of the city. It enjoys a prestigious reputation, and its history dates back to the era of the former kingdoms. It is said that the daughter of the last sultan of the Kingdom of Funj was buried there, but it certainly didn't give that impression. There was nothing except pebbles, dry dirt, and some straggly shrubs, which revived during the rainy season and looked dead during a drought. The Shadow had chosen this cemetery himself, despite his suffering. I knew that he loved it and had spent a number of months living in a shack near it, entering it several times a day to help people bury their dead so he could write a play that focused on the dead. The play, “The Sultan's Hand,” was performed in the late 1970s. I attended it when I was still a teenager and not at all tuned in to art and writing.

The loss was obviously great, and the funeral was crowded with many people I knew and many I didn't. I saw Sonia al-Zuwayni, the Moroccan proprietor
of hair salons, swathed in mourning black; I wouldn't have suspected that she knew the Shadow well enough to share in the family's sorrow in this manner. I also observed Professor Hazaz, the reflexologist, as nimble as ever, but his face looked a little different. The glamorous star Mustafa Khalifa was there, along with a number of poets, novelists, and dramatists, as well as the retired female vocalist Zakiya the Nightingale. The Shadow told me once, when he was in a good mood, that they had loved each other madly. A young writer with bushy hair, who had published a novel called
Futile Yearning
two years earlier, approached me and told me in a whisper that the deceased woman had spoken to him by telephone and discussed his talent and his novel enthusiastically, asking him to write more novels because he had a distinctive style. He admitted that when he heard her tremulous, breathy, languid, inspirational voice he had never imagined she was a girl who was fighting to survive.

So I wasn't the only person whose writing Linda had fallen in love with and I wasn't the only man who had sketched a dazzling portrait of The Reader. Perhaps he was also recalling her on drab nights. I happened to be the one who had seen his portrait ripped to shreds.

When I was most deeply immersed in the prevailing atmosphere of tragic loss, I spotted Najma. I tried to avert my face from her eyes as best I could but failed. It was the same new Najma who had updated herself as part of a
plan to achieve motherhood without bothering with the preliminaries; she had not reverted to her former classic self. She was walking in Linda's funeral procession, after decking herself out, applying cosmetics, and allowing her hair, which she had dyed blonde this time, to extend enticingly beyond her light headscarf. She actually looked more like a girl in a bridal procession than someone at a funeral.

I suddenly found Najma beside me, very close to me, and almost touching me – in spite of the oppressive burden of the tragedy – while men's eyes, which could brush aside every other distraction, collided with her and me. I felt agitated. She asked, “Why are you ignoring me, Master? Why haven't you returned my calls?”

I didn't know how to respond. I had made a firm decision not to reply to her calls. My feelings had instituted that policy and my humane tendency, which no doubt is shared by most other people, had confirmed it. I almost blurted out, “Why would I answer a girl who is a calamity?” All the same, I was afraid she might collapse or become hysterical in this mournful place and at a time when an outburst would be totally inappropriate. I knew from personal experience that personalities like hers were capable of creating any type of spectacle for no reason at all. So I said, “I haven't found the time. I've been absurdly busy.”

She replied, after, I imagined, carefully filling her sentence with traps before she uttered it. “I was contacting you to
tell you what I thought of three of your novels that I have recently read. You're a brilliant writer, and your friendship makes me very happy as does your advice, which will help my writing in the future.”

She didn't mention the name of the three novels she had read. I swear she hadn't read more than half a page out of my thousands of pages of works. Had we not been at a funeral, I would have asked her about the books and inundated her with questions about characters and events and what she derived from reading the novels. Of course I wouldn't do that, and she knew this perfectly well, because she could see my misery and that of the real people with whom she was saying farewell to Linda the Shadow.

They had begun the funeral rituals when Najma left me, after pressuring me to meet her soon. Now I was able to breathe, to weep silently, and to extend my hand to help lower Linda into the great beyond and to try to support the Shadow to keep him from falling, despite his heroic composure, which I sensed was very fragile and could shatter at any moment. I was listening without much interest to a sermon delivered deliberately and expertly by a man of sterling faith, when I noticed Luqman the Shadow, or Loco with a Shadow, run up from the distance. He was short and plump, and his hair was in cornrows. He wore yellow, reflective glasses, jeans that were ripped at the knees, and a T-shirt adorned with a color portrait of the late singer Michael Jackson.

Evening had fallen when Loco arrived. Notwithstanding his long period of exile and his appearance, which didn't fit our society, he retained his sense of solidity with our community and had come when he learned that his sister had died.

– 
16
 –

I have mentioned that my suspicions began to get the better of me, especially when Nishan Hamza disappeared from my life and from the city's hustle and bustle, apparently once and for all.

I began brooding seriously on some aspects of his story that didn't seem to add up. These were matters I had overlooked because of my extreme agitation following Nishan's surprising and upsetting appearance at the Social Harmony Club and his subsequent recital of my novel or most of my novel at the home of Malikat al-Dar, my spiritual mother. My bewilderment had continued for a number of months as this puzzle staggered on without any resolution.

I realized that the soldier Asil Muqado, who had tried to overthrow the government and, in the novel, had been executed but in real life, according to Nishan, had fled to Chad, would be known to the public in this country. Since my birth I had experienced all its periods of upheaval and its peaceful and troubled times, yet I had never before heard of a rebellion spearheaded by a soldier called Asil Muqado.

I delved deeper into my memory and reviewed all the military rebellions that had clawed on the walls of previous regimes or had actually torn them down, from the nation's
independence to the present day. I uncovered Colonel Musa Gad al-Karim's rebellion, which only lasted two days before collapsing; Lieutenant General Fadl Allah Zayn al-Kamal's rebellion, which lasted for a number of months but ended bloodily; Samih, the teenager who occupied the broadcasting building one day to win a bet with his girlfriend; Sergeant Kaka Kuku, who came from Jebel Nuba in the west and advocated separation of the Nubians from the Arabs; and even Sabata al-Hazli's rebellion, which was conducted with wooden weapons by a lunatic from al-Qama'ir District as he guffawed. But I didn't come across a rebellion led by Asil in any corner of my memory.

I telephoned some journalists and political analysts skilled in investigating the country's conditions and in blowing them out of all proportion if necessary. They confirmed to me emphatically that our national history lacked any insurrection of this stripe carried out by a soldier of Chadian heritage – unless the rebels had been very close to the authorities, who then might have hushed up the unpleasantness to safeguard their own reputation.

So the point remained a bit murky, and I resolved to try to shed light on it if I could find anyone to assist me.

At this time I also discovered that I had concentrated so exclusively on Nishan during those days that I had neglected to verify the existence of a real nurse named Yaqutah who had worked in the psychiatric hospital and then had migrated to newly liberated Libya under a different name. I would not need to investigate her relationship to a former patient named Nishan Hamza, because
the mere existence of a nurse by this name – even if she wasn't still working at the hospital – would give the damn text some legitimacy as being true-to-life.

I entered the government psychiatric hospital with a physician I knew who had offered to assist me. The shabby old building, which dated back to the colonial era, continued to serve the same purpose of embracing indigent mental patients, even if its embrace now was foul and frigid and devoid of any emotional warmth. Once inside I discovered, to my astonishment, someone I knew, a man I would never have dreamed would end up with chains shackled to his ankles, especially not in such a place. He was stumbling around the courtyard with difficulty in the midst of dozens of befuddled people. Tough guards were scattered among the nurses, and security officers in blue uniforms were also stationed there. I shouted incredulously, “Ifranji! Joseph!”