The Fall of the Imam (11 page)

As I knelt in prayer they hit me in the back. They always struck me from behind, and when I turned around to face them they quickly disappeared. They never looked me in the face. Before I fell to the ground, wounded in the back, I said to myself, ‘My belly was full of the fruit of love when I kneeled on the ground to pray,’ but I heard the Chief of Security say, ‘Love does not exist, only the fruit of sin.’

On the night of the Big Feast, while the drums were beating and the pipes were blowing in celebration of victory, they came upon her body where it lay on the way leading from her house to the front, just where the hill starts to climb midway between the river and the sea. She was lying on her back, and her eyes, wide open and black, looked up at the sky steadfastly. Her face was still and the world was still, as though everything had stopped to look at her there where she lay. Not a hair moved on her head in the night breeze, not a tremor touched the down on the edge of her nose or over her neck. Under the moon her skin, which was as brown as silt, had turned pure white, like that of a maiden in Paradise or a mermaid rising from the sea. Nothing covered her naked body, neither robe nor blouse nor slip. Her nakedness was stark, complete, so revealing of every detail that in death it seemed to speak of sin. For what woman, living or dead, would go stark naked like that? If she took off her veil, she would still keep her robe, and if she took off her robe she would still keep her blouse, and if she took off everything she would still wear a slip.

But there she lay on her back, as naked as a newborn babe, with her face looking up at the heavens and her brow, like her breast, pure and gentle and serene. But her nipple was hard and erect, definitely black, and between her legs was a deep wound, a gash in the flesh which she did with her hand. At least that was what they said. And since she was hiding her wound, it could only mean she had wounded herself. In other words, she had killed herself. And since it is God alone who gives us life, it is God alone who has the right to kill, to take it back. Therefore to kill oneself is to rebel against the will of God. To kill oneself is a crime. But that was not all. Had she not been found completely naked? Her crime was therefore a double crime, that of killing oneself and that of being naked, for nakedness was a crime, no doubt. Thus she had committed two crimes, to which they added a third, the crime of being an orphan without father or mother. And now that she was dead nothing was left of her except a name composed of three names kept inside a blue folder in the Security Department with an empty line for her father and an empty line for her grandfather and a line in which was written the third name inherited from her mother. Opposite each of her three names were registered the three crimes she had committed: killing, being an orphan, and dying naked.

It was the night of the Big Feast. A whole year had circled round the earth, making the Feast of the Sacrifice coincide with the Day of Great Victory and giving the people a double occasion to celebrate. So they gathered under the street lamps and sat cross-legged on the ground pushed up against one another. Their features were grey, their faces thin, the bones of their heads almost bare of flesh, their sharp noses prominent. From their mouths they blew out smoke and words, and below the bushy whiskers on their upper lips moved in and out with a coughing sound. Then, gulping down smoke and coughs and words, they closed their mouths and were silent for some time. But tiring of the silence after a while, they sneezed once or twice, peered at the sky cautiously to make sure that all was well, and started to tell stories about kings and gods, and devils and djinns.

One of them said, ‘Fellows, remember the good old days when we used to worship the sun and the God of Floods?’

Another commented, ‘Yes, verily, Allah is witness that the God of Floods gave us no peace until we satisfied Him with a virgin girl. He did not like women who were married or widows or women whose husbands had divorced them.’

Still another said, ‘What cunning he has, fellows.’

A fourth one commented, ‘All Gods were like that. The soldiers used to go searching from one peasant’s house to the other looking for a virgin girl to take away. The girls would hide on top of the mud oven or under the dry fodder or in the buffalo shed. But the God would remain full of wrath until he had been satisfied with the blood of a virgin.’

Then someone else added, ‘Not even King Shahrayar at his mightiest was like that.’

A man who had been silent till then said, ‘Why speak only of King Shahrayar? All kings are like that.’

Upon which they gulped down their words, their smoke and their saliva with the air, and throwing cautious looks at the door of the Security Department, lapsed into a deep silence, with their bodies reclining and their weight carried on their elbows, digging a small pit in the ground as the days went by. A column of ants crawled slowly towards the pit, misled by their queen leader, for the colour of the elbows made them look as though they were part of the ground on which they rested. But alerted at the last moment that something was wrong and that the elbow could shift its position and squash their bodies, the queen changed her direction and circled round the pointed tip of the elbow where it rested in the hole, and at once the line of ants deviated to one side to make a perfect semicircle before resuming its slow march in a straight line.

The dark pupils of the men fastened themselves intently on the slow columns of ants swarming over the ground like an army. They struck one palm against the other in great amazement as though they were witnessing something extraordinary, and sucked at their lips noisily to emphasize the astonishment that had seized hold of them. An army of ants led by a queen, by a female! This was certainly the reason for which God had condemned the ants to crawl over their bellies for all time. They kissed their palms, then the back of their hands, in gratitude to Allah for not having made them ants, though they were never able to advance in a straight line even under threat of a big stick held high in the hand of a guard, and even though their leader was a man and not a woman. They sneezed and coughed, arranged small packs of tobacco neatly under the funnel of their smoking pipes, and shifted the weight of their bodies carefully from one elbow to the other. The sound of rockets being fired, the acclamations of the crowds, and the lilt of patriotic songs kept echoing in their ears, reminding them that they were supposed to be celebrating both the Feast of the Sacrifice and Victory Day together.

But the year circled round the earth once more, and this time they found themselves celebrating the birthday of the Imam on the same day. Thus they had the signal privilege of witnessing three glorious events all being celebrated at the same time, and when they realized all the glory and joy that was theirs, since they were celebrating the Big Feast of the Sacrifice, the Day of Great Victory, and the Birthday of their One and Only Imam together, the night seemed to cast its heavy blanket over their eyes. Their lids became heavy with sleep, their hearts became as heavy as stone, and the embers of their smoking pipes went out. They remembered those among them who had died in the war, or who had been lost and had neither died nor returned from where they went. They remembered those among them who had had a left hand and a right foot cut off, the men and women who had been stoned to death, or put in jail and concentration camps. They remembered the mutilated of the war, the martyrs and the handicapped. They remembered those who had died of radiation as they drank their morning milk, and those who were alive but were going to a certain death by order of the great Mawlanah.

They inhaled the last whiff from their pipes as the last shred of tobacco was burnt, and the last ember went out. They swallowed their last words with the bitter taste in their mouths, letting them go down their gullets on an empty stomach, preparing to go to bed without food. And just before dropping into a coma-like sleep, they discovered that their bodies had not been reclining on their elbows, neither right nor left, nor had they been held upright by the legs on which they stood, nor been supported by the seats on which they sat; and that in fact they had been neither reclining nor standing nor sitting as they had thought, but crawling on their bellies, zigzagging from one side to the other, unlike ants which tend to move in a straight line, pushing a way through for themselves, making pits with their elbows in each other’s bellies as they fought their way with hands and feet. They discovered that each of them kept straining his neck to see what was happening at the beginning of the column, so that his head almost mounted on the head of whoever was in front of him, yet no one could get a glimpse of anything at all because the column, extending to where the sky and earth met, kept twisting like the spiral of a spring. The black pupils in their eyes were going round and round in a strange panic, and noises seemed to mingle in their ears, so that they could no longer distinguish between the acclamations of the crowd and the crackling noise of rockets, or between the screams of people and their hallelujahs.

But all of a sudden they opened their eyes and, gradually coming back to themselves, they realized that it was the Big Feast, and that they were wearing new shoes with iron hooves, which made a clinking noise as they walked in the streets. The Imam had decreed that a bonus be distributed to them on this occasion and that at the end of the month their pay be adjusted to the rise in the cost of living. They marched in rows, one after the other, on their way to acclaim the Leader, and as each row passed the tread of their feet could be heard, yet the columns in which they marched continued to waver like a swarm of ants advancing without a queen. Their eyes kept shooting glances around them, looking for God as though they were unable to find Him. ‘Where art thou, O God of the heavens and the earth?’ And, at the spot where the hill starts to rise upwards between the river and the sea, they halted, looked around them as though they had never been to the place before, and a gasp of wonderment could be heard rising from their compact mass, for there she lay on the ground, her back to the earth, her face to the sky, her eyes wide open and densely black. They nodded their turbaned heads and said, ‘There is no God but Allah, praise be to Him. She has died God’s death, for it is God alone who makes it so that people die.’

But one of them said, ‘This is not God’s death. I know who killed her and the killer is not God.’

They were seized with fear, and from deep inside prayed that God have mercy on them for what the man had said, since no one dies except by the hand of God, and holding their breath they stared at the heavens as though God had a hand that could be seen up there above their heads. But seized once more with fear at this new heresy, for God, unlike man, hath neither tongue nor hand, they kneeled, bowing their heads low to the ground. Then, sitting up cross-legged, they moved their heads close together and whispered to one another in hushed tones before lifting their eyes up once more to the heavens in silent prayer: God have mercy on us. After which they all started shouting, ‘Glory to God, to our country and to the Imam!’ ‘The smallest doubt is a great sin,’ they said to one another. ‘No one dies except by the will of God.’ Then, crying out in one voice, ‘There is no God but Allah!’, they buried her deep in the ground.

But her heart continued to beat. Three days her heart continued to beat after she died, they said, and for seven days her spirit wandered around the spot where she lay. Then, on the eighth day, her spirit left her grave and started to move towards the elevated piece of land between the river and the sea. They swore by God Almighty that they had seen her with their very eyes, walking on her own two legs, moving at her usual quick pace with her head held upright and her dog Marzouk behind her. They said, however, that nobody had been able to look into her face, and that they had only seen her from behind, but they swore by Allah, their land, and the Imam three times that it was certainly her and nobody else, and that her spirit had risen from the grave to take revenge on them, so much so that they were unable to stop themselves from trembling all the time.

Fear dwelt inside them day and night and refused to give them a moment’s respite. Nothing was able to keep it away, not even the covers under which they slept, nor the long robes in which they dressed. Fear followed them everywhere, even to the toilet rooms or behind the closed doors of their homes, for they thought she could pass through anything, could see them wherever they went and yet remain invisible herself, so that if one of them slipped out of the bed of his wife to go to that of another woman she would see him, and if a man took off his clothes and remained naked she would see him, and if one of them put his hand in the pocket of another she would see him, and if a man put his hand on his male organ while he slept she would see him. They now feared her just as much as they feared God, and when they slept she appeared to them as God, for none of them had the feeling that he was innocent. Each one of them had picked up a stone and thrown it at her. Their lids were heavy with sleep and their hearts were heavy with guilt, and at night when they slept they huddled close up to each other, for they were afraid to sleep alone or to open a door and go out alone in the night.

The only two who escaped this fear were her mother and her dog Marzouk, for neither of them had ever caused her the slightest harm. So her mother continued to wait for her in the dark of the night, standing where she always stood, steadfast as a rock, with her hands clasped over her bosom and her face lifted up to the sky. At her feet lay Marzouk curled up like a child, his face pale and thin, and the corners of his eyes seemed to shine as though each of them hid a frozen tear. He held his ears erect, straining himself eagerly to hear her footsteps before she came in sight. His neck was stretched, his nose pointing up to catch her smell amongst the myriad odours of the universe. His eyes were trying to discern the shine of her eyes amongst the myriad stars in the endless heavens, and before she had the time to come in sight he ran up to her, lifting himself on his hind legs, reached up like a child for its mother’s bosom, then drying his eyes on the tail of her robe, listened to her panting breath as she ran through the night, gazing at the fine thread of blood as it trickled down her body, and at the deep, deep wound in her back.