The Fall of the Imam (18 page)
He sat in front of her sucking her bones, cracking them like sticks of sugar cane and extracting the marrow from the inside, with his tongue and lips. She watched him as she would watch a sheep fattened for the Big Feast enter the butcher’s shop, his eyes sinking into their sockets with fear, for in his eyes there was nothing but fear, a terrible fear. No matter how much he ate he was never satisfied, and no matter how much he protected himself with all sorts of things he never felt secure. She handed him bone after bone, then gave him the shoulder blade followed by the rump and the spleen. His belly was full, swollen like a goat skin, but she continued to hand him one piece after the other until she heard the sound of an explosion and his face fell to the ground. His eyes opened wide with surprise as though he could not believe what was happening, and she said to him in a bantering tone, ‘It begins as a game and ends in ruin.’ Then she leapt away, light-footed as a doe, with her dog running close behind her.
In the dark of night my hand groped for her and she took hold of it between her teeth, sharp as the teeth of a cat, and I said to her, ‘You are my little cat, just as my previous wife Katie was, who ran away from me and went overseas with her old lover, leaving me alone in the other world.’
‘I am not your little cat,’ she said.
‘If you are not a cat,’ I said, ‘you certainly belong to a breed of tigers.’
Then she bit so hard on my hand that she cut it off from the arm, and as her teeth went through it I felt pleasure with the pain, so I gave her my other hand and again she sank her teeth into it and cut it off from my arm. ‘This is no game,’ I said, giving her my right leg. She held it between her teeth for a moment, then cut it off, and when I opened my eyes as I lay with my face buried in the ground I saw her standing in front of me and recognized her at once, with her thin, pale face and the big black eyes, big enough to conceal the crimes of our whole world.
I said to her, ‘You are Bint Allah. Why hide yourself behind another face and inside another body?’ But she said nothing and stood there completely silent, and I thought that this silence meant that she was thinking much more than is permissible in Shari’a, for woman was created from a twisted rib and is lacking in both faith and mind. I tried to step closer to her and make sure that the face I saw in front of me was really that of Bint Allah, but I discovered that I had only one leg and was not standing on the ground, so I started to crawl on my belly towards her while she stood there, unmoving and silent. And I said to myself: She is certainly a sorceress and has sprayed me with water from a tin cup while I slept and turned me into a lizard or a sheep. But she did not have the face of a sorceress. In her eyes I noticed a dark glimmer like the eyes of devils and evil spirits so I recited the Verse of the Seat several times to chase her away, but she stood there as firm as a rock, her lips sealed in a silence within silence, and the silence seemed to vibrate in my ears like the inarticulate turmoil of the dying. I stretched out my hand towards her, wanting her to take hold of it, but when I looked at it I saw my whole arm disappear. Then, when I moved one leg to step closer to her, it, in its turn, disappeared, and soon after my whole body melted into thin air, taking with it all my desires, so that nothing was left of me. Then I said to her, ‘Hold my hand in yours, my child, for I am tired of this world and indifferent to all things. I no longer want anything except to hear you call me father.’
My eyes opened wide in amazement and I said, ‘But my mother gave birth to me without a father.’
‘No boy or girl is born without a father, and I am your father, the Imam,’ he said.
‘I have never seen you before, and I do not know you at all. My father is God and I am Bint Allah,’ I said.
‘Be silent, and may your tongue be cut out of your mouth,’ he said angrily. ‘God Almighty was neither begot nor doth he beget children.’ His voice came from somewhere deep within him as though he was sleeping. He waved an invisible hand in the air and spoke with a voice that could barely be heard. ‘I am tired of the desires of this world’, he said, ‘and the only thing I long for now is to open the skull of this woman and crush her brain so that, like all the ideal women, she will become an invisible body possessing nothing else except a womb.’ Before his eyes he still had the image of himself which he used to see in the mirror before she changed him with her magic into a sheep ready to be sacrificed for the Big Feast, and in his ears still echoed the same voice he used to hear delivering his speech, the words mingling with the sound of rockets soaring up into the sky as he stood high up on the platform surrounded by his supporters in Hizb Allah twisting and turning in a belly dance to express their joy, and by the members of Hizb al-Shaitan shouting out their slogans as loudly as they could. He bent his head downwards from the sky to the earth, shifting his look away from the heavens, for he felt that God would support him for all time and that the Devil was also on his side, so why should he fear those whom he knew he could count on not to resist his desires? His eyes were occupied moving from one face to the other, searching all the time, and each one of those standing in the crowd was trying to push his neighbour, to occupy a place closer to the Imam, but his face was turned away from their struggling lines, and his look kept sweeping the back rows of the crowd, trying to find a thin pale face and eyes the colour of the black of night. Who is he, or who is she, a man or a woman, a human body or a floating spirit? He closed his eyes to sleep but realized that he had been asleep all the time in a sleep deeper than that of a tortoise, and nothing could awaken him any more, neither the sound of shots being fired nor the explosions of rockets in the sky.
I stood in the first row under the bright lights near the Imam. The acclamations of the crowd resounded in my ears and the rockets of the Feast kept bursting in the sky with a crackling noise. Nothing separates me from the throne except the body of the Chief of Security on my right and the body of the Leader of the Official Opposition on my left. I stand between them like an axis held by a rope on either side. If the right rope slackens I lean my head towards the left, and if the left rope tautens I give way with my neck and let my body lean towards the right. I stand holding my back upright, wearing the new suit I bought for the Feast. It is made of the most expensive imported wool and its colour is the dark brown of burnt coffee grains, an indication of my attachment to the right, but I wear a red necktie to show my sympathy with the left. I hold my pen between my fingers by the middle like a stick, keep one foot on the ground midway between Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan, and balance myself on it in a position of stable equilibrium, taking care not to allow it to be shifted from its place.
Even if the earth should tremble with an earthquake I will never shift my foot from its place, for once a man has managed to get a foothold in the front row he should never let go, even if the sky collapses over the earth and even if the face of the Imam falls off his head and rolls on the ground, for there are an innumerable number of feet and there is not enough space, so that if a foot moves another foot will immediately take its place. Each foot presses up against the heel of the foot in front, and each elbow presses into the belly which is beside it like a nail burying itself in wood. But I stand firmly in my place without any movement to one side or the other, balancing my head squarely on my body and keeping my body perpendicular to the ground with my face looking in the direction of the Imam, while the face of the Imam looks in a direction opposite to mine.
He never looks at me, but I am always looking at him, yet at school things were the opposite way round, for he used to sit in class with his eyes fastened on me while I kept my face turned in the other direction all the time. I was top of my class and he came out somewhere at the bottom, and if I went anywhere he always followed behind. God Almighty, you are the one who alone is able to change all things. You have made it so that he goes before me now, but I swear by Thy name that in my heart I neither rebel nor protest against this calamity, for we must be grateful even for the harm which You do to us, although it is my firm belief, O God, that You do only good, for it is Satan alone who creates evil. Yet I pray that You will have mercy on me for such blasphemy, for You are the only creator and no one except You can create anything. But why, O God, reveal the secrets of Your might through the weakest of your creatures? Why give authority to those who are incapable of thinking, and deprive those who think of all authority? This indeed is a great calamity and brings with it much evil. But the evil which is brought upon us by God is a test of our belief, and we can only accept His will and obey Him. Has not God Himself said: And We shall curse you with evil, for the good of this earth brings temptation? Yet if evil comes from Satan it is our duty to resist it, but how can we tell whether it has come from God or from Satan? Verily I swear, O God, that I do not stand in the way of Your wisdom, for no one except You, O great changer of things, can make evil out of good and out of evil, good.
In the past I had a strong body and a weak spirit, but now I have matured and my body has weakened, but my spirit has soared up to the heavens. My legal wife no longer reads what I write and she refuses to respect the Law of Obedience or the Shari’a and keeps arguing with me about things sacred. She insists that she has a head on her shoulders and that her head is as good as mine, and this heresy is something the like of which I never heard of with my previous wives, whether legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. Not one of them dared to raise her voice higher than mine, and if she laughed she would hide her mouth behind her hand and ask God for His mercy. If I beat her according to the rules of chastisement in Shari’a she never complained, and if I slipped out of bed to go to my mistress, she pretended to be asleep, and if asleep went into a deeper sleep. But this last wife of mine keeps her eyes wide open, and the black of her eyes is so black that it looks darker than the face of the Devil. When she laughs she throws her head back with such abandon that even I am unable to retreat with my head that far, and her laughter is more spontaneous, much more full of joy than mine, so that it rings out, peal after peal, as though she is emptying all the air which has accumulated in her belly and her lungs. It makes me feel that inside me are pockets of stagnant air which, despite all my efforts to rid myself of them, have remained enclosed since my childhood. When she laughs her voice provokes more jealousy in me than it does desire, so I leave her lying naked on her bed and rush off to my mistress, who tries in vain to revive my virility, feigning to give herself up to me in complete abandon as though I was killing her under me little by little.
My wife insists that all this is a sign of maturity, a new spiritual strength, the death of the body and the revival of the mind. But I disagree with her completely and say that it is nothing else than a loss of faith in religion and of belief in a moral code; it is all the women who have lost all shame, all sense of decency. At this she makes a snorting noise and turns on her side, giving me her back and looking up at the ceiling with her eyes tightly closed. I lie there for a few moments, then get up and put on my trousers. When I go back to bed my wife is no longer there, so I lie down alone, staring at the ceiling.
On the wall in front of me hangs a picture of my father in a frame. His face looks like mine. It is round and full of flesh, with a ruddy complexion indicating health or a tendency to blush with shyness. He has a straight serious nose like mine, which proves that he is my father and that my mother was faithful to him. His head rises straight up from his body, leaning neither to the right nor to the left, in the exact stance that my head tends to take. Son, the best line is moderation. Avoid extremes, he used to say, and yet, where my mother was concerned, he forgot all moderation. She beat him at night and he beat her in the day, and yet he would say, ‘Where women are concerned, son, you have to thrash them every day or else expect them to beat you all the way, for we are adorers or adored and there is no middle line to take.’ But my mother was wont to say, ‘Son, where men are concerned, we women are either wives whom they respect but don’t desire, or mistresses whom they desire but don’t respect, and there is no middle way.’ And as soon as she had said this I could see a grey cloud creep over her face.
She slept with her face to the wall and my father slept with his face to God, while I curled up like an embryo in its womb lying in the space between the two. Every night I listened to my father’s voice reading from God’s book before he went to sleep, reciting the Verse of the Seat three times to chase away devils and evil spirits. When he felt his lids become heavy he pushed the book of God close up to the black pistol he kept under his pillow. His father had given it to him as a present for the Big Feast when he was still a child, and whenever he heard a dog bark his hand moved up to the butt of the pistol hidden under the pillow, but if the gland of the Devil started to rise at the lower part of his belly his right hand crept towards it while his left hand found its way under my mother’s nightgown to her body. My mother had only to see the gleam of the pistol appear for a moment from under the pillow and she would start to undress with a twisting movement under the bed covers. Yet, before she went to bed she would mutter under her breath, asking God for his mercy and protection against the evil and temptations of the Devil. She would do her ablutions five times with water and soap, kneel to God in prayer seven times, and wrap her head carefully in a veil, and once she had closed her eyes she fell into the deep sleep of the pious and the pure.
