Land of No Rain (3 page)

I am Younis al-Khattat, and the man who has returned is me twenty years ago. I’d been waiting for ages for the opportunity that arose that night when we got talking, on the balcony of our house, amid bouts of coughing and sweating that made me feel sorry for him, though I suppressed my sympathy. I didn’t tell him a story as he’d expected. I spoke after he’d finished telling his own story, about the other man who had the same name as him and who practised the same profession. He wanted that story to be a metaphor for, or a counterpart to, my story about him. But he chose the wrong beginning with that story, which struck me as a little feeble, the way he invented someone who happened to share his pseudonym and of whose existence he wasn’t previously aware. Besides, knowing that the other guy existed didn’t change the course of his life. It was just a random coincidence of the kind that keeps happening to people without becoming a pattern or amounting to anything of consequence. I told him that his story was not enough to say that things were quits. I made fun of the poems in which he mourned his father and mother, and those in which he alluded to Roula. I said, ‘Which pavement were you hanging around on when your father was found dead in his studio, with a cigarette butt in the left corner of his mouth? In which bar or café were you boozing or sipping a cup of coffee while the cancer ate away at your mother in Hamiya’s public hospital?’ I also said that no words, however remorseful or apologetic, could make up for the way his mother had gazed westward, the direction she thought had swallowed him up for ever. I also told him that Roula had not betrayed him and Khalaf had not deceived him. I reminded him of Muhsin’s suicide. I told him that comrade Hanan had died, that Hala had married a businessman and Hasib had disappeared. I told him that Tom Thumb was the head of a smuggling gang and that Salman, his first poetry teacher, had become an evangelical preacher who toured the country towns and villages. I mentioned names that surprised him and others that he remembered straight away. I showed him a toughness that he wasn’t expecting. I played devil’s advocate with him. He had to hear a voice other than the voices of his brothers and sisters saying how much they had missed him, although they had coped in his absence. Their reminiscences and hearty laughs were all genuine but it’s also true that life here had moved on, detached from him, without the need for his existence, because life doesn’t wait for anyone and it doesn’t stop when one person gets off. This is a simple fact known to the ignorant and the learned alike. I’m amazed how it escaped him. Roula waited as long as she could. Men were courting her, men who wanted a wife or companion, but she kept turning them down. She offered many excuses and reasons, some of which were convincing and others less so. Khalaf stood by her throughout. He did not hide his relationship with his fugitive friend. He did not dissociate himself from him, although that was not easy for a security man in Hamiya.

He has to know the truth and no one is better placed than me to tell him. If a drop of my blood still runs in his veins he’ll know I’m the only person who didn’t lie to him or humour him, because how can one lie to oneself? Of course, there are people who do, people who deceive themselves, but I think that one decisive moment face to face with one’s self is enough to show one the truth. There are others who didn’t lie to him either: Salem, for example, at least when the conscious half of his brain was able to receive the right signal and he knew who was speaking to him. Wahid brought back memories of a bunch of youthful pranks. And his brother Shihab is rude enough to tell him things he might not like. He believes Shihab. If he wasn’t so rude, Shihab would be a copy of his father.

He looked into a mirror and asked me if he had changed much. I said, ‘Of course you’ve changed. Everyone changes, what else do you expect?’ But out of compassion I did not tell him that the people who were waiting for him at the airport did not recognise him at first. All his family were there, except his late father, his mother and his elder brother, who lives in the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. And when he came through customs pushing his trolley with his suitcase and some plastic bags he almost passed them by without them recognising him. They didn’t believe he was the same person who had once been as tall and elegant as a rattan cane. The torch of the movement. The one on whose shoulders all the world’s devils liked to play. Cheerful. Noisy. Cruel and compassionate. It’s true they had seen his picture in magazines and newspapers, but pictures are one thing and reality is something else. With their expectant eyes they saw what the hammers of time had wrought on his face, his shoulders, his frame and the movement of his hands. They heard his cough, which he tried to cover with a pocket handkerchief that he carried in his hand. His languor was evident, and his helplessness looked deeply ingrained. But members of his family told him he looked younger and healthier than he did in the pictures. It wasn’t true. What mattered to them was that he had returned, not how or in what shape. They colluded, without any overt agreement, in ignoring anything that might spoil the pleasure of his happy return, while for him it was hard enough coming to terms with the shock. Their collusion worked, for a while. He went along with it readily. The City of Red and Grey came to his mind by way of comparison between here and there, in terms of behaviour, orderliness and development, and strangely the comparison usually ended in favour of the last place on his long journey – the City of Red and Grey that he had just left, with his frame bowed and his pocket handkerchief covered in red stains.

That was in the daytime, surrounded by listeners with the intense curiosity of provincials. At night it was a different matter. The whole night was his, the night when his cough and his insomnia never failed to start on time, along with the random disconnected images that crossed his mind. No one can stop the machine of memory from working. Nothing has been invented, as far as he knows, that can tame memory, make it work on demand. Even I, with my few exaggerated memories, cannot fend off attacks by the most unpleasant of them.

*  *  *

One afternoon his brother Shihab took them for a drive in his father’s old Land Rover, which for years they had used for hunting trips. He thought it a good omen that the vehicle, which he used to call the mechanical steed, was still in use, but he was surprised to find that the civilian airport, which used to be on the outskirts of the city, was now part of the suburbs. He looked out of the car window at the passing scenes but found no reference in his memory: the mansions, the tourist resorts, the big malls, the temporary encampments of people displaced by the blood and fire sweeping the country next door, the vast advertising hoardings for five or six mobile phone companies – written with outrageous spelling mistakes – the glass towers crowned by enormous dishes, the children and old people offering seasonal fruit and vegetables from plastic crates, the shanty towns built of corrugated iron and cardboard, teeming with children and the unemployed. He was filled with a kind of aesthetic numbness at such eyesores and at the renowned establishments that had made the fields of wheat and corn, the groves of pine and juniper trees, a distant memory. He recalled a famous local song that spoke of how the country girls walked around carrying water jars on their heads in the afternoon. He told himself that even the songs failed the test: it was hard to listen to them now that the things they described had changed. He was surprised when the car skidded on the edge of a roundabout in the centre of which stood a large statue of Hamiya’s eagle. The venerable bird looked old, scarcely able to spread the vast wings that used to cast their fearsome shadow over the country. The only familiar landmark that the car passed was this old statue. He suspected his memory was at fault. His brother Shihab smoked throughout the journey, leaving his returning brother to see and compare in silence the new reality with the images he remembered. He asked Shihab if all these buildings had existed before. Shihab told him that most of them were new and that the ring road meant that people going in this direction were spared the trouble of driving through the downtown area, which was congested with cars and pedestrians. But as soon as the Land Rover started to emerge from the built-up labyrinth around the airport, with its chaos and its shabbiness, the space opened out in front of them. The endless desert showed its yellow face and he managed to catch blurred glimpses of shepherds, wrapped as usual in their heavy cloaks.

II

Once you were a poet. Apparently you no longer know what poetry is or how it’s written. Now you write articles and biographies, without parting company with poetry’s uncertain, hesitant attitude towards the world. Some of what you write is personal, and some of it public, though it’s hard for you to differentiate between the two. You don’t categorise what you write. You just write, but you believe that, besides biographies, you are writing poetical articles. This is not a category that’s recognised on the literary scene, and it’s hard to persuade people that it exists, so you don’t speak about it openly. The truth is you don’t care what it’s called. In the prime of your youth you cared. You and others fought battles over form and content and the link between poetry, reality and the reader. But you no longer do that, now that you harbour doubts. Now you believe that categorising and pigeon-holing don’t achieve anything. That they’re just labels. Your problem is that whenever you write something you rush it into print, especially when you’re working on newspapers and magazines, which, for those who don’t know, are machines that never stop turning, churning out thin gruel and rich cream in equal measure. You’re hasty. Haste is a trait that’s ingrained in you. Despite all your attempts to take it easy and slow down, you can’t change. You see it as a genetic defect that you have to live with. You write in a hurry. You publish what you write without any prior plan or any clear concept or vision of where your writing is leading. But when you reread everything you have written, one piece after another, you can see a common thread, or a mysterious pointer, always pointing in the same direction, even though the pieces were written at different times and under the sway of different emotions. Only then do you get a sense of that obscure something that drives you on towards the lights that flicker in the distance. Then you regret rushing into print, not rushing into writing, and you say to yourself, ‘If only I had sat on what I wrote before publishing it.’ (Despite your long waiting in exile, patience is your deadly enemy.) Perhaps that way you could have come up with a work that had organic unity, or a harmonious sequence in which one part led to the rest, without interruptions, gaps or jumps. But no way! Only after it was too late did that kind of prudence or farsightedness descend on you from the ethereal heights. But that’s all in the past and nothing can be done about it. Now the situation is different.

*  *  *

Behind a window overlooking the street, as you watch a bird tracking prey you cannot see, you’ve started to write your last book. The book of all your books. You’ve decided to take a different approach this time. Because this time is different: there’s no newspaper or magazine waiting for you to throw it a piece of your flesh (an extreme metaphor for words, which you often used without realising what it meant; you just liked the sound of it). You’ve decided to set your writing free from the dates, parenthetical clauses, digressions and proper names that usually weigh it down. For a long time you saw the latter as essential props, before you discovered that their solidity was deceptive. You’ve resolved to ignore them or replace them with description. You have a rationale in your head for this plan: you want to free yourself from them. But you’re not sure about the validity of this reason, because it’s hard to free oneself from names. It’s also hard to free oneself of chronic habits, favourite words and obsessive ideas.

Apparently things don’t disappear completely. They don’t vanish for ever. It’s like the scientific principle I once read about in class, that matter doesn’t disappear, it just changes from one state to another.

*  *  *

You’re a man familiar with life under the roof of matrimony, a roof that rests on the twin pillars of patience and promises.

Remember that.

The boat on which you left the City of Siege and War sailed to the Island of the Sun. There you met a young sociologist who had rebelled against her family and, like you, had fallen under the spell of ideas about replacing the corrupt old world with a new world where everyone would be equal. That’s the echo of an old way of speaking, which many people today consider to be intellectual naivety, even though its red banners once fluttered on the skyline. The Island of the Sun teemed with refugees, people fleeing the City of Siege and War. On that island, its humped form like that of a giant tropical tortoise, there were political activists, guerrilla fighters and arms dealers, diplomats and spies, poets and writers, artists, newspaper and magazine editors and printers, wanderers, adventurers, profiteers and purveyors of lies, cooks and prostitutes, musicians and singers – a vast throng tossed there by the cycle of successive wars that raged. Then came the thousand-day siege and the occupation. You met her at a seminar on the lessons to be drawn from what was happening in the City of Siege and War. She was talking about the double standard that intellectuals apply towards women – how they speak about them in the world at large and how they treat them at home. They ask women to liberate themselves and rebel, but they keep a close eye on their wives, sisters and daughters. What she said was strong and measured, without emotion or histrionics, despite her tremulous tone.

You liked what she said; in fact you liked her. You met several times. You were famous, to some extent, within a narrow clique of intellectuals – a poet and activist from a country ruled by a military dynasty of men with ginger hair. So it wasn’t hard to introduce yourself. At first you were surprised that a young woman from a country so isolated from its surroundings would rebel and throw herself into public affairs, would run away and cross borders, through dusty towns, along dry riverbeds, to settle in a city that was vulnerable to wars and sieges. She was rather pretty, attractive in fact. She didn’t wear make-up and rarely used perfume. That made her more attractive in your view, along of course with the intelligence that shone in her eyes. After two or three meetings you knew part of her story. She had been married, briefly, to a young revolutionary from her own country. They had met while studying in the City of Red and Grey and fallen in love. In their case love and ideology went hand in hand. In their meetings, far from the eyes of family and the traditions of their country, ideas and books were just as present as emotions and sex. That was rare among the young people of their country, which had been indoctrinated by a strict religious sect. They married. But the marriage did not last long, because the young revolutionary quickly changed. Her differentness, which he had liked abroad, began to trouble him back at home. Then it began to annoy him. Then it started to keep him awake at night: her smoking, the way she crossed her legs on an evening out or at a family gathering, her lack of interest in dressing up, the way she was so candid with her opinions, the way she objected to any word or deed she didn’t like, the clarity of her ideas and her conduct, her interest in public affairs. In short, her attempt to pursue what they believed in and what they had done abroad, and her uncompromising attitude towards the conventions of their country. The marriage ended in a divorce that no one favoured, even those closest to her. She was on assignment when she came to the City of Siege and War for the first time. It amazed her that there should be a city in the region that was so open-minded, so pluralistic, with such a lively social life despite the occasional outbreaks of gunfire. She said this was the city where she dreamed of living, and she came again to settle, running away to join the forces of the revolution, which put up posters of its martyrs and leaders on the approaches to the city, with slogans promising a new world.