The Silence and the Roar (7 page)

The car raced off like a shot, leaving streaked tire marks on the asphalt. I looked up and spotted the same eyes watching what was going on before the women and children retreated further inside. What is it this morning? I asked myself. I’m already mixed up with the Comrades, now military security too?

The roar from the television sets grew louder as the masses began to shout with intense enthusiasm for some reason or another. The announcer nearly broke out in tears from all the emotion. I felt bad for not being at my mother’s or at Lama’s watching what was happening. By the way, I haven’t had a television ever since I gave mine to one of my friends as a wedding present. I don’t regret that at all. I got rid of it because I got bored with all the marches and the Leader’s speeches, with everything they show nonstop.

I walked toward the streets that were clogged with the masses and that divide the city in two. I had to get over to the other side where Lama lives. With every step I took the roar in the atmosphere grew louder. It was the very same roar I heard coming from everyone’s television. I think the sudden shouting of the masses was due to the Leader’s surprise appearance. He would often come out to greet the people unexpectedly, sending them into a bizarre tizzy.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself
. Why had the military security officer said that? In order to answer that question, let me tell you a bit about myself before I get to Lama’s.

Lama and I love each other but we have not got married yet. Even though we both want to, Lama is still tied up with the consequences of her previous marriage. Her husband, a businessman, refuses to finalize their divorce despite the fact that they have been separated for many years. One time he went on a business trip to Asia. When he came back Lama had a dream that caused her to wake up in a panic. She dreamt he had not been on a business trip at all but had gone on a honeymoon with a second wife whom he had married in secret and who was actually his
personal secretary. In her dream, he and his secretary were having a beautiful honeymoon on a Spanish beach. When Lama woke up, though, she found him deep asleep next to her, exhausted from the sex they had just had. She found it curious that he had not been up for it at first (despite his long absence and her caresses that I know are amazing and can make iron weep), but after several attempts she finally wore both of them down. Apparently the sex disoriented her and helped her subconscious mind discover the reason why, by driving her to have that dream. Naked, she got out of bed and searched his pockets for his passport. On a page that was covered with entry and exit stamps she found a Spanish visa. The Spanish exit stamp was for the day he had returned home and the same night they had had sex. That night she slept on the couch in the living room and in the morning she confronted him with what she had discovered. He denied it at first but eventually confessed that he actually had married his secretary, pleading that he had had no choice in the matter because she was the niece of a senior Party Comrade and marrying her was going to help him take care of business affairs more quickly, instead of getting bogged down in routine, denial and delay.

Lama was not going to let a second wife share her husband. Anyway, her husband had betrayed her, stabbed her in the back. She grew to hate him, which made it impossible for her to live under the same roof with him, and so she went to live with her family for a while until she finally bought a flat on a quiet side street on the other side of town using money she had saved in a private bank account. During the same year in which Lama was liberated, my father
died, and I moved out to live in my own flat (which my mother had bought for me). That was when the anger of the government came crashing down upon me.

At one point during that year, while I was in the studio getting ready to record my weekly literary program on Channel One, the producer’s assistant came in and handed me a scrap of paper from the station’s administration asking me to stop recording at once and to come immediately to a meeting with the director of cultural programming, who handed me another piece of paper, which he had received by fax from one of the security services and which criticized my program because I had not mentioned the Leader recently. As I slowly read the note I felt myself approaching a crossroads. I sipped my cup of coffee and smoked in order to buy myself some time. I had to look out for my daily bread but at the same time my reputation as an independent writer was on the line. My program discussed recently published books and for each episode I would meet a writer to talk about his or her new book. The program also used to hold short-story and poetry contests, earning the respect of writers and viewers alike because of my insistence on integrity and on applying standards with precision and neutrality.

I asked the programming director what he thought I should do and he proposed holding a contest for stories and poetry about the Leader and his accomplishments. I refused. Straight away and without asking why he asked me to hand in my resignation, claiming that every television program, no matter what, should be true to the principles and the person of the Leader. I wrote out my
resignation, signed it and handed it over to the station’s administration. Then I went back down to the studio. As I said goodbye to the director and the technicians I received a phone call from the administration informing me that, pursuant to my request, they had accepted my resignation. They didn’t stop there, though; they wanted me to give up journalism and literature altogether. Misfortunes and obstacles fell down on me once they decided to stop mentioning my name or my works in all the national media. Later a directive was sent to the censorship committees with the order not to approve any new publication of mine, not even if it were a children’s book. Finally they expelled me from the writers’ and journalists’ union, claiming I owed two years’ worth of back dues. They ordered some Comrade writers to attack my books and slander me personally, calling me the “unpatriotic” writer because I had insulted the Inspirer of the Nation and the Compass of Humanity, as they put it. It came to my attention that one of the writers—Comrades all—who had been brought together for a conference on some national holiday or another got up and shouted for my downfall. Some of his colleagues joined in, spasmodically shouting,
Down! Down! Down!

And so I was brought down. But I won Lama, who started to hate the Comrades and love their victims because her husband had stabbed her in the back by secretly marrying one of their nieces just to serve his business interests. Lama and I had met at the house of a poet friend of mine, one who had also refused to write poems glorifying the Leader, by the way, and so was blacklisted too. When Lama walked
in I felt as though the two of us had come to our mutual poet friend’s house precisely in order to meet. We talked alone in the corner. She asked me what was new and told me how she used to watch my television show and that she read one of my books. When I told her I had stopped writing, she grew intrigued and launched a barrage of questions to find out exactly why I had stopped. At that point she asked me to walk her home and we ended up strolling for two hours, talking about everything except her problems. I could feel her sympathy for me. The next day I visited my poet friend again to ask him about her and he told me the story of her businessman husband and his secretary, the Party Comrade’s niece.

Her husband resisted getting a divorce because he claimed to still love her so much that he would even be willing to divorce the secretary if she would come back to him. Lama refused and told him that she was in love with me and that we were planning to get married just as soon as the divorce went through. The fire of jealousy was ignited inside him and he became more and more stubborn. One day he phoned to tell me he wanted to meet. We had coffee in a hotel coffee shop and I tried to persuade him to end the matter amicably, that this was in everyone’s best interests, but in return he threatened me by saying that he could orchestrate a terrible situation for me with the regime if I did not stay away from his wife. He was hinting at his second wife’s uncle’s influence but I scoffed and said, “Fuck you, and fuck the Party.” He warned me that I would pay dearly for what I had just said and took off. When I told Lama what had happened
she laughed for a long time and I laughed too. To this day, whenever we’re together, we still laugh whenever the Party is mentioned.

Actually the security services summoned me more than once for questioning about the insult I had directed toward the Party. I confessed to uttering that word but said that I hated having to use it and that I only said it because the businessman had provoked me. The businessman had filed an ambiguous report, citing the insult without clarifying whether I had directed it at the Leader personally or just the Party in general. The security services became very interested in this dust-up: Had I meant just the Party or both the Leader and the Party together? There’s a difference, of course. Insulting the Leader can land a person in prison for twenty years whereas insulting the Party is no major crime. I insisted that I had meant the Party alone because the secretary’s uncle is an influential delegate. The second time I reported to see them at nine a.m., and I waited for hours on end until an interrogator came to deal with me. As soon as one investigator finished up they would transfer me to another. Every one of them would add his signature to the file because they all had to investigate the matter individually from start to finish. They would ask me, “How can an intellectual and a writer use such a word?” The funny thing about the whole situation was that the word got repeated so many times at headquarters they started calling me “Mr. Fuck” and every investigator who looked into the subject became “Inspector Fuck.” One time an investigator asked me how to spell the word, whether it was written with a “c” or with a “k.”

I apologize to the reader for repeating this word but “Fuck-Gate” really wore me out, the obvious hilarity notwithstanding. I would go see Lama as soon as I left the
mukhabarat
building. My poor dear would be waiting for me by the window, on tenterhooks, exposing herself to the blazing sunlight. As soon as she saw me coming she would hurry to open the door and hold me for fifteen minutes, trembling. When I finally managed to peel myself away from her, I would take her to bed and undress her. Once we were spent Lama would calmly take me to the bathroom, giggling, and I would let her wash my body because she loved doing that so much. In the end we would head back to bed soaking wet so I could tell her all about what had happened to me there and we would have a good laugh about it.

We used to take revenge on our situation through laughter but laughter is accursed chattering that only exposes us and gets us into uncomfortable situations. One time we were at a wake for a friend of ours, a writer, who had passed away after a long battle with illness. Lama and I went because we felt, justifiably so, how horrible it was to lose this friend whom Lama had visited at his house every day in order to help care for him. Like a nurse she would wipe his body down with cologne, change his clothes and bedsheets and feed him by hand. When the illness got really bad we were forced to move him to the public hospital, where Lama insisted on staying with him, sleeping on chairs in the waiting room; she would wake up and find herself covered in tears. When he died I had to stay with her to calm her down. She was not strong enough to keep herself from
crying. This woman would often cry at the mere sight of a miserable cat but her mood turned around 180 degrees at the wake the writers’ union held on the occasion of the
arbaeen
of our friend the writer.

The Leader’s father was killed at the age of eighty-two when his private plane was returning to the homeland after a vacation in Monte Carlo and crashed. It was a horrible accident that shook the entire nation and brought unhappiness upon its citizens; music and comedy were banned from the media and every meeting had to begin with a standing moment of silence in order to honor the soul of “the old man.” At the wake, the Lieutenant Colonel came up to the front and asked everyone to stand for a moment of silence (everybody assumed he was asking us to stand in order to honor the soul of our beloved friend and writer so we all got up before he could even finish his sentence) and intoned, “to honor the soul of the Leader’s father.”

We had just stood up when we realized we were standing out of respect for the soul of the Leader’s father and not the soul of our friend. I got upset and glowered. As the minute turned into several minutes and the matter did not seem to concern the Leader, I could tell, even with my eyes shut, that Lama was beginning to vibrate. I assumed she was crying but when I looked over I saw she was trying to keep herself from laughing. She was red in the face and shaking and had covered her mouth with her hand. The virus of laughter spread to me too and I started to suck hard on the inner walls of my mouth until I suppressed it. Luckily the moment of silence only lasted 180 seconds. Once we were asked to be seated Lama kneeled down
between the rows of chairs to avoid blurting out that wave of laughter that had washed over her. Thankfully the situation ended well.

The speakers started taking their turns up at the dais, praising the departed, his humanity, his good manners and his spirit. But they added something else as well, claiming that the departed had been a devoted Party member. They must have mentioned the Party a dozen times and every time she heard the Party mentioned Lama would cover her mouth and drop her head and shake, and I would immediately follow her lead and do the same. Remembering that word, she would think about how the mention of it had brought me in to be questioned at the security branch. We had to leave before the wake was over because when Lama gets giggly nobody can stop her from laughing. In fact, as soon as we walked out the door she burst out laughing as the people watched us in bewilderment.

I hope the reader now understands why the military security agent said what I have been told hundreds of times over the past five years:
You ought to be ashamed of yourself
. Some people use the word treasonous to describe me, just as that Comrade did more than two hours ago, when I dared to stand up for the young man as they beat him senseless. They may tell me I’m a traitor but I’m not ashamed for refusing to stage a contest for short stories and poetry about the Leader on my television show or for telling Lama’s ex-husband “Fuck the Party.”