Land of No Rain (2 page)

There had been a time when faces from all corners of the world had cut a path along the city’s narrow pavements and down the underground tunnels, when young men and women had embraced with a physical freedom that was sometimes embarrassing, when buskers had played music, sometimes cheerful and sometimes sad, in front of the big shops and at the entrances to the gloomy netherworld, in this grey-skied Babel crowned with the gold of the colonial era. It never occurred to you, even in your worst nightmares, that this city would descend into ruin and see the reappearance of primitive weapons, obsolete symbols and emotions you thought you had left behind in your long journey.

In the great square and the cobbled streets that radiated out from it in all directions, the desolation reminded you of an old film of the area, deserted after some disaster you don’t recall. But you do remember the hero of the film running through the empty streets, crossing the bridge with the two stone towers, entering one building and emerging from another, being ambushed by a wild gang, getting away and being on the run throughout the film. It’s as if the film was a terrible warning, except that in reality, but not in the film, people were moving about – some wearing masks on their faces and gloves on their hands, covering anything that would give away their colour, their features or their identity. Masked against the raging storm of fear and danger. Was it similar to what happened in the City of Siege and War? No. Maybe. You don’t know, because your nightmares have merged with reality. Your ability to judge has diminished. You can no longer be sure. Time has dissolved, and the events and the faces have merged together.

*  *  *

So you’ve returned. It’s been twenty years since you fled Hamiya. Of course, you don’t need anyone to remind you how many years it’s been, but you believe, as you put it during casual conversation on the balcony of your family’s house, between coughing fits, that time has unexpectedly played a cruel trick on you – how is it that things that should have disappeared have survived, while many faces have lost their details? That’s just a roundabout way of talking about time, because instead of saying
time
, you said
things
and
faces
. But the name doesn’t change anything, because time, as you know (do you really know?), does not defer to hopes, however fervent they might be, nor to resolutions, even if they are as firm as steel. Time has its own ways, direct or cunning, of achieving its purposes, and it never fails to hit the mark. No glancing blows, or blows outside the line. Time is also a train that does not prefer any particular station, even if it lingers here or hastens there. Maybe you can’t hear its whistle till it’s left, but its effects are visible on faces, on hands, in the way people stand and in the pictures hanging on the walls. The people who waited for you saw the whole map of your long journey on your face. Twenty years is not a number. In fact, in a case such as yours, it might be a life that has run its course. But do you know what’s good about it? That the days roll on, impervious, for everyone. They hone, erode and level everything they touch. Even your double, the person you used to be, the one who was frozen in his twenties by some mysterious disease, knows what that means.

*  *  *

Once upon a time you were considered a hero, or a conspirator. A brave young man who either – in the eyes of some abroad – took part in a heroic act, or whose head – in the eyes of others here – had been poisoned by imported ideas and who was implicated in a reckless act. You and your double, the man you used to be, both paid the price for what you did. While he survived as a ghost or a freak, growing no older and no younger, preserving a name and a life that had been nipped in the bud, you had to tramp the pavements and face the cold – battered by winds that blew your tattered sail far away. Now that matters have changed, the names and the acts balance out on the scales of insubstantial oblivion. You’re no longer a hero or a conspirator. Just an old man, half forgotten, coming back after twenty years of struggle, pursuing ideas that did not bring about much change in your country, and perhaps nowhere else either. Your double, the person you used to be, was tough on you. He seemed to have been waiting for this chance for a long time. In his head he had a long list of simmering questions. He cornered you. He crossed his arms over his chest, in the same old boyish way, and stood in front of you like a stubborn inquisitor. Apparently the interrogation you underwent at the National Security Agency wasn’t enough for him, even if the sentence against you had lapsed because of a general amnesty that included even those who had been given tougher sentences. When you arrived at the airport they let you leave with your relatives. They knew what had happened, of course, and they showed understanding for your situation, but they asked you to ‘drop in’ on them when you were ready. Your friend Salem, the former National Security officer, from the half of his memory that is still functioning, told you that in the NSA they never destroy a file, however old it is or however many officials come and go. ‘Because the NSA is a memory that never grows old or forgets,’ he said, like someone mouthing a text he has learnt by heart. You went to the star-shaped headquarters, that stone building you know so well, which from a distance used to look like a spaceship just landed from another planet. You were surprised at the change in the surroundings, where no one used to venture and where even birds dared not fly overhead. Now there were carts selling food, people authenticating documents, vendors selling cold drinks, petitioners and people who wrote official letters for a living, people of different ages, variously dressed, all stationed in front of the NSA building. You underwent the interrogation, twenty years late. They didn’t call it an interrogation; they just said, ‘Come and have a cup of coffee with us.’ You were not tetchy, as you often are. You were cold, even remote – I might almost say prudent – as though it were all about someone other than you. There was nothing new that you could add to the thick files piled in front of the three young, nameless officers, who were dressed in almost identical civilian clothes. You laughed when you saw the small pile. You were about to have a coughing fit. The officer who seemed to have the highest rank asked, ‘Why do you laugh?’ ‘Have I committed all that?’ you asked, pointing at the files heaped on the table. You knew that trick. You’d come across it in the Organisation, in psychological training to handle interrogation. It’s to make you feel they know every single detail about you and your doings. It’s here in these files, you can’t deny it! You thought to yourself, ‘It looks like these guys have preserved something of the traditions of the past.’ But still, you knew they had plenty on you. Your disguise had not misled them for long. They found you out shortly after you took refuge in the City Overlooking the Sea. They had eyes and ears there. That didn’t surprise you. You know the NSA was active in that city, which was a playground for numerous similar agencies. It may even have been the most active. There were also suspicions that there were infiltrators, despite the filters that new recruits had to pass through before they acquired membership of the Organisation. Penetration is to be expected in clandestine work. It can’t be avoided entirely. Political activists in Hamiya knew that when it came to bugging, surveillance, interrogation, propaganda and psychological warfare techniques the NSA was more advanced than its counterparts in neighbouring countries. Inside the star-shaped stone building, a place with almost no windows or balconies, perched alone on the edge of the wasteland, there were specialists in psychology, in reading between the lines, in propagating rumours and exposing disguises. The NSA had interrogators who did not use traditional methods for extracting confessions and information from political activists. They relied on cunning modern techniques they had acquired abroad. Penetration was inevitable, but the NSA spread rumours that exaggerated the extent of it, in order to keep the opposition forces off balance and make them have doubts about themselves.

Some people suspected that your friend Mahmoud had been a plant. You hadn’t suspected him. You knew how he tended to seek the limelight, to stand out and compete. But you didn’t suspect him. You defended him as much as you could. You offered arguments and evidence in his favour, such as the fact that Mahmoud knew about the poultry farm where you were hiding before you escaped abroad. If he had been a plant he would have given you away. Those who suspected Mahmoud told you this wasn’t proof. It could have been the opposite – to give you that impression, while he went on working for them abroad. You remembered that argument about Mahmoud at one of the coffee sessions in the NSA, when the interrogators referred to the apartment that you’d lived in briefly, in the City Overlooking the Sea, and the weapons that were in it and the maps for the operation in which they stormed the Hamiyan embassy in some Asian capital. They described the apartment in detail and its location in the maze of lanes, which floor it was on, what the door handle was made of, the number of rooms, and the colour of the curtains. You remembered the man in charge of ‘external operations’ in the Organisation, who had put you up in that apartment. You had a fleeting memory of meeting him in a local coffee shop. You remembered his white face with sharp features and blondish hair, but when he laughed, for whatever reason you don’t now recall, you could see his decaying teeth. While one of the young interrogators was talking about the apartment, you were thinking about how the external operations boss had always avoided laughing, in fact had almost refrained from smiling, probably because of his teeth. You thought to yourself that he must have had a complex about them. You have your own complex – you have a slight squint in your left eye, so you can’t look straight at the person you’re talking to. You’ve devised a studied turn of the head, so that both your eyes are directed at the person. You’ve tested the manoeuvre dozens of times in front of the mirror until you’ve mastered it. Your feelings about your cross-eyes only changed when the woman you loved said how fetching they were. Except for Mahmoud, you don’t remember anyone visiting you in the temporary apartment. Oh yes, you do. There was that girl you met in some bar in the city. Mahmoud was with you too. You don’t know how you ended up walking into that bar. You wanted a drink and you went into more than one bar in an area that was almost deserted because of the war. You had a drink here and a drink there. In that dimly lit bar, which reminded both of you of one you used to frequent in Hamiya, you found some girls smoking sullenly at the wooden counter, as dark as the bar itself. You don’t remember how many there were, four or five. There were two down-at-heel men drinking and smoking, pensively, as though in another world. When you went into the bar – you were two tall young men, one with long hair and a droopy moustache, the other with short hair and a trimmed moustache – a tremor ran through the dark-skinned girls. You ordered beer. You wanted to round off your bar crawl, the first you’d had in this city, with a cold beer. You sat at a wooden table with long benches along either side, rather like a school desk. Two women came up flirtatiously and asked to join you for a drink. You didn’t object. The one sitting next to you was older than you. In her thirties, you guessed. She could tell from your strong accent that you were a foreigner. She asked you where you were from, and you told her. That was your first mistake, or rather the second, because for security reasons your instructions were to avoid dubious contacts such as these. Out of drunkenness or desire, or both, you took her back to that apartment and slept with her. You’re almost smiling to yourself now as you remember how clever she was at pretending to be aroused and enjoying it, which was convincing at the time. You gave her some money and she left. That was your third mistake. Was it her? You thought about it, but no. She hadn’t sought you out. It was you who’d staggered into that dark bar. You’re no longer interested in who the informer was. You had nothing to do with the embassy-storming operation. For a start you weren’t close to the external operations department. It’s true that, like others, you underwent military training, but you didn’t work in the military wing. Your work in the Organisation was in the public relations and mobilisation department. When the external operations boss put you up in that apartment, it was at least a year after the embassy operation and its aftermath. The aim of the operation was apparently not to kill anyone but only to hold the ambassador hostage and exchange him for some prisoners from the Organisation. No one knows exactly who opened fire first: the ambassador’s bodyguards or one of the gunmen. Whoever had fired the first shot, the operation ended in a bloodbath. The ambassador, two of his bodyguards and three of the gunmen were killed. The support team was arrested but they did not stay long in prison because the external operations department of the Organisation, in collusion with a friendly country, abducted the ambassador of the Asian country in the capital of that country, and he was exchanged for the support team. You told them you had nothing to do with the operation, and the one who seemed to have the highest rank said they knew that, but they wanted to hear your version of it. He also said it was a procedural matter because all the sentences had been dropped. It was just a matter of closing the files! You told him that the external operations chief in the Organisation had disappeared while crossing the border of a state sympathetic towards you, and there was no trace of him. In the tone of someone who knows everything, he said they knew that and it had happened ten years ago. All you could do was ask him, with a trace of sarcasm, why he didn’t ask the secretary-general of the Organisation, who had returned to the country before you. The officer who seemed to be the most senior of the three concurred. ‘We’ve already asked him,’ he said, in the same sarcastic tone. ‘In fact we’ve asked all your comrades who’ve returned.’

*  *  *