Land of No Rain (7 page)

But it was striking that his comments on the nature of your work with the Organisation and on the rigidity of your theories had started only a short time before he suddenly decided to go home, and then only cautiously. He had started talking philosophically, in a decadent liberal tone in your opinion, about the relativity of evil. Comparing two evils: the regime and what he called the overwhelming tide of obscurantism. Within the Organisation you hadn’t taken a clear position on the fact that the religious forces were vocal in the country and that some wings of that movement had turned to violence. You stuck to your class-based analysis of the regime, of the forces that had a real interest in change and the role of the revolutionary vanguard in bringing it about. You pointed out confusedly that what was happening in your country was a struggle within the bourgeois class itself. The right was attacking the right. But the thrust of your propaganda remained focused on the regime, which you held responsible for the conflict, for the violence and the bloodshed that was taking place. You said it was the natural outcome of its decision to use the religious forces to wage war on the left. You observed what was happening in Hamiya towards the end of the Grandson’s reign with a certain vengeful satisfaction. What you didn’t say in your statements, you discussed in your closed meetings: if the regime was weakened by the religious forces, was it in the interests of the forces of change or not? Your comrades were close to unanimous that in the end what was happening would work in their interests, because in your opinion the religious forces did not have a sustainable agenda. They were part of the forces of the past, and history could repeat itself only in the form of farce. By weakening the regime and shaking its foundations, these ahistorical forces would help put history on the right track, whether they wanted to or not. But it was a remark by the theorist of the Organisation that became proverbial, when he likened the religious forces to the ox that ploughs the land and prepares it for those who plant the seeds: the ox that pulls the plough of history. Then, as if he had had a sudden inspiration, he said: ‘Let the ox do the work!’ That phrase became an unofficial slogan. You didn’t like the metaphor. You thought it smacked of opportunism in disguise, but you didn’t say that, perhaps because the issue wasn’t fully clear to you, perhaps because you were taken by surprise by the sudden change in the relationship between the religious forces and the regime. But you were not comfortable with what followed: the beginnings of a flirtation between the Organisation and the religious forces, to confront the regime. On that your position was unambiguous, passionate in fact. You argued for the need to stand firm at equal distance from the regime and from the religious forces. You said that tactics should not part company with strategy, and that it was liberal deviationism to say that the end justifies the means. But all this happened after Mahmoud had gone back to Hamiya. To be fair, you should remember what Mahmoud had said at the meeting where the theorist of the Organisation came up with the ox metaphor. He had ridiculed the slogan ‘Let the ox do the work’ and said the ox would turn its horns on everyone. Now you’re wondering whether what he did was make an ideological and political choice in favour of one evil over another, or whether on the Island of the Sun, the last place you had been together, Mahmoud had met one of the Hamiya officials who had come to the island for tourism and shopping; and the bargaining had started there. You don’t know and you didn’t ask him. But you could find no other convincing explanation for how he had managed to enter the country without being sent back, because he was one of a small minority of people that had tried to go home and not been re-deported by the border guards. Hamiya’s policy in this regard was inflexible: not to let back fugitives even if they were wanted men, to leave them like stray dogs barking in the streets. This was the exact expression current in the official media when referring to opponents of the regime who were active abroad. The expression ‘stray dogs’ rarely meant actual dogs. Anyone who heard the expression on the radio or read it in the newspapers understood immediately what was meant.

*  *  *

Hamiya may be the only country in the world that does not arrest fugitive dissidents when they try to come home. Instead, it sends them back where they came from. This has created several diplomatic crises with neighbouring states as well as with other more distant countries. It once happened that a group from an organisation similar to your own left the airport on the Island of the Sun to go home, and the airport authorities in Hamiya put them back on the plane that brought them. The authorities on the island wouldn’t let them back in and put them on the first plane back to Hamiya, and the guards at Hamiya airport sent them back to the island again. The authorities on the island contacted Hamiya, but the contacts failed to secure assurances that the group of returnees would be let in. Human rights groups condemned Hamiya’s conduct. Statements were issued demanding that Hamiya let its dissident nationals come home, especially as some of them had wives and children. The appeals and protests fell on deaf ears in Hamiya, which forced the Island of the Sun to accept the group, who were kicked around between planes and airports until another country agreed to take them.

Many people know that this strange arrangement, unique to Hamiya among all the countries in the world, is the brainchild of the security-obsessed adviser, who is said to be a relic of a vanished empire, a man who does not appear at any public functions and whose photograph is not published in the newspapers; so shadowy a man that some people doubt he even exists. But those who are confident that he does exist assert that he was the man closest to the ear of the Grandson and that it was he who suggested this despicable procedure, which is a punishment harsher than the humiliations of imprisonment. The Hamiya authorities do not explain the procedure. They neither admit it nor deny it. But the most plausible explanation for it can be derived from the phrase, almost a slogan, that recurs in the official media:
Let them rot abroad.

*  *  *

In his usual friendly way Mahmoud said, ‘Let’s go and have a coffee outside. Don’t you know a good café where we can sit?’ ‘Sure,’ you told him.

The cultural complex where the exhibition was being held lies on the riverside. Nearby there are several cafés and bars. It was afternoon. The great river that divides the city in two twists and turns like the body of a giant snake. Dark. Mysterious. On its surface floats the detritus of human society – empty bottles and cigarette ends, just as the city’s famous poet described it. Men and women cross in both directions, carrying umbrellas as a precaution against rain that might fall at any moment, their eyes fixed before their feet, oblivious of everything around them. You noticed that while speaking to you Mahmoud was ogling passing women in a way that violated the norms of behaviour in the City of Red and Grey. This is a habit that people coming from your world are forced to abandon grudgingly after staying for some time, because almost no one in the city stares at anyone, let alone casts lecherous glances at the breasts and bottoms of passing women. It’s even worse for a man to look back at a woman who has already walked past him. This is wholly improper. When you see someone do that, you can bet he’s a newcomer to the city, and you rarely lose your bet. That doesn’t mean it’s a virtuous city, because vice also exists, with its own market and customers. Vice is a packaged commodity: there are people who buy it and people who sell it. When you first analysed this you attributed it to capitalism itself, which commodifies everything, including the human body and human desires. Then you were uncertain how to categorise it, and in the end you saw it as a mixture of commodification and irremediable human defects. You don’t deny that in the city you saw types of perversion you had never heard of before. Don’t panic, it wasn’t first-hand experience, but in the magazines displayed on the uppermost racks in newspaper shops (which you would sometimes peek into). From browsing nervously through these magazines, you learnt that there were devotees of feet, of shoes, of underwear and body odours, and that there were people who were turned on only by handcuffs, whips, canes and slave chains. Do you remember the Conservative member of parliament who was found hanging from a tree in a public garden, in women’s underwear? People on their way early to work came across him hanging there, in lingerie, a conservative who advocated maintaining values and family cohesion. That made you wonder. Then you remember another strange incident that happened to you personally, but not here. It might not have been perverse but it seemed strange, and at the time you didn’t find any explanation for it. Anyway, you hadn’t come across it before. It involved a young widow, the wife of a colleague killed in the City of Siege and War. You had gone to her apartment to pay your condolences. You were surprised how the situation changed so quickly. From patting her on the shoulder, to putting your hand on hers to comfort her, to hugging her firmly, and then with desire, then with passionate kisses, and taking off her black mourning clothes and scattering them across the small sitting room. It wasn’t the sudden surge of carnal desire that struck you as strange at the time but the words she used. In her husky voice, she asked you to have sex with her in the most explicit and vulgar terms. After frantic sex, and perhaps because of the vulgarity, which stemmed from a moment when you were both emotionally confused and carried away by raw instincts, she started to cry, almost hysterically. Sex without any preliminaries whatsoever. Unconsciously you were both swept away in its raging torrent. As she apologised, between copious sobs, you reassured her that it didn’t matter. ‘Please don’t get a bad impression of me,’ she said. She kept repeating this phrase until you left. Just as, in the heat of erotic excitement, she had repeatedly asked you to have sex with her in words that would ordinarily sound crude. This spontaneous erotic encounter with your colleague’s widow was not the end of the story. When you again felt the urge to taste the unfamiliar fruit that unexpectedly hung within your reach, you went back to her. In fact you never forgot the strange squealing noises she made, nor the vulgar words she used. It excited you to go back to her, specifically the vulgarities of which you silently disapproved when you heard them for the first time.

As quick as a flash your memory came up with a much older reminiscence. One that was even stranger. From the depths of your memory there floated to the surface the image of an officer in Hamiya who, on a visit to the City Overlooking the Sea before a series of wars broke out, paid a prostitute three hundred pounds to piss in front of him just so he could see the yellow liquid pour out between her legs, or, as he put it, to see how women differ from men when they piss.

But all that is one thing, and the norms of public behaviour in the City of Red and Grey are something else. Call it politeness, aloofness or social hypocrisy. The appellation doesn’t change the fact that staring at people and intruding on their private business are not approved of in this noisy Babel, where faces from all over the world ebb and flow, where people babble a hundred and one languages in the streets, bars and underground tunnels, in this conurbation that is tangible and abstract, simple and complicated at the same time.

*  *  *

You and Mahmoud walked past a group of young men and women who were standing in front of a fast-food restaurant, eating sandwiches and laughing together with infectious good humour. They had clearly come out of one of the offices nearby. Mahmoud pointed to the group and asked you, ‘How’s the invasion going?’ At first you didn’t understand. You hardly noticed the crude gesture he made with his hand but after a while you understood what his words meant and where they came from. He was referring to a famous remark by a fictional hero who came from your world: ‘I came as an invader into your very homes.’ For a moment you thought about the virility implied in this remark by the character, who turned his bed into a field of battle where symbols, natural impulses and eternal opposites fought it out: white and black, lust and revenge, sand and water, superiority and inferiority, Othello and Desdemona, strength and weakness, penis and vagina, hot and cold, Muhammad and Christ. An endless chain of binaries that met only across a chasm. An eternal relationship of collision and confrontation. In your opinion the causes lay in the nature of exploitation, not in human nature itself. East is not always East and West is not always West. They are not two parallel tracks that never meet. The world is more complicated than a railway line.

Is invading a bed, you wondered, the same as invading a territory? Is a penis like an occupier? You were not unfamiliar with the practice of likening occupation to sexual assault, to ravishment, because in your language you do compare the occupation of territory to rape. In this respect you may be unique among nations. You don’t know of any other language that treats occupation as the equivalent of sexual violation. But, because of the drop of poison that the real invader had injected into the veins of history, the hero of the novel did not give free rein to his vengeful virility in front of the monuments to empire or in the corridors of power where the fate of nations was decided, but rather in the beds of the women who landed on him like flies. Landed on him like flies! You almost laughed when you remembered that phrase. Someone had used this tacky analogy when writing in praise of the fictional hero’s invasions. Clearly the person who wrote that, or dreamt it up in his sexually repressed imagination, had never set foot in the City of Red and Grey. You had not seen women landing like flies on men from your world, or on anyone else. Did that ever happen in the past? When a face like yours was not often seen in the city, before such faces had become everyday objects, so to speak? Days when the East really was amber and incense, a metaphor for gallantry and ardent desire, to an imagination shaped by the tales of travellers and of people seeking a pristine world of wilderness and outlandish languages. Was there really such a legend among the people here? I have heard something of it: the echo of the legend even reverberated in your country among young men who had never left Hamiya.