Quicksand Tales
Page 8
I hoppe that you’re fine, and I want that you have spend a very nice Time on the desert. For me it was really a very nice Time With You and I want to see You another Time here in Douz. my best greetings. I want for a Fax from you.
your, friend,
Mansour
We imagine Mansour queuing at the fax office in his village and wonder who translated for him. It doesn’t feel like Mohammed’s style. We send back our greetings in large simple English. I post photographs to his address.
Hello Keeeg
I hope that you are fine with your husband jonathan. Good life to you Both. I can’t forget you but thse days I have trouble in my life, because one of my camels are dead days a go now and to work with one is like nothing because the Agency prefer all the time people they have two or more camels. and also I don’t have enough money to buy a camel. this is my problem now. but you are all the time in the mind and in the heart. Good luck for you Both. Have a good time. Write to me Very Soon.
Your friend
Mansour
Which camel? What does a camel die of? How can a camel just die like that? A rotten fist punches into the haloed memory of a sacrosanct time. From the back of my mind comes a devastating description of the death of a camel in The Alexandria Quartet . . . something dreadful about its foot and its terrible screaming? I try to look it up but can’t find it. I feel uneasy. I thought camels were tough. This is an awful fax.
‘Do you think it’s true?’ I ask Jonathan.
‘I don’t know,’ he grimaces.
Stupid of me to have sectioned the desert off from the rest of the world. Everything dies, after all, or spirals down the plug. Mansour, his camels, our seven days, I had tethered them up in my cielo balloon. This is a spoiling blow, unbidden, the other side of our experience with the place, and probably, realistically, the side most intrinsic to it. We worry for Mansour. He isn’t the go-getting type like Mohammed; we cannot see how he would fit in with the modern world easily, with its demands, or its sense of efficiency. He has a wonky eye. He is more comfortable in the ways of the past than the future. He frightens tourists. He’d frightened us. He had become a friend with whom we couldn’t even share a language, but he had struck something essential. I seem to have invested a lack of my own into my vision of kinship with Mansour.
Dear Mansour
We are very sad to hear of the death of your camel. How did it happen? This must be a tragedy for you. We would like to help you with your trouble in some way. Please can you give us the whole picture so we can try to help? How much is a new camel? How much money do you have towards a camel? We send you all our good wishes and we will be in contact very soon.
Your friends
Keggie and Jonathan
We send another fax, to the director of the agency, to ask what has happened, and the following day receive a reply.
Dear Mrs
After your mail, took information about Mansour’s Camels.
It seems to be the truth. The price of a camel is between: 800 and 1,000 DT. We cannot say more. It is a personal question. Hoping to see you once more in our desert,
Best regards
Mr P. Douz
Dear Keeg
Hello, I hope you are fine. About the camel, I have just 300 DT. I hope see you anther time in Douz. you are welcome.
Sincerely yours
Mansour
‘How much is 750 dinah?’ I ask Jonathan.
We check it out, 750 dinah plus commission plus charges costs £394.59. It is not much of a dilemma: Tunisian dinah in our world, in our lives, will soon be forgotten, lost and gained times over.
Dear Mansour
Thank you for your fax. If a camel costs 800–1,000 DT and you have 300 DT, then we will find 750 DT to help you. You now have to send us the details of a bank where we can transfer the money to you. Go and ask the bank in Douz and tell us where to telex the money. When you find a camel, tell us and we will send the money to the bank. Make sure the camel is friendly.
With best wishes
Keggie and Jonathan
Dear Keeg
Hello, I thank yo for your fax. About the information that you ask for:
I have bought a camel, that cost 1050 DT, it is a nice camel. My compte nember and address bank you will founded it in the second fax for this day. I hope that all be right.
Best wishes
Mansour
‘That was quick,’ Jonathan says.
‘Yes,’ I shrug. ‘God knows . . .’
Dear Mansour
We have made a transfer for 750 DT to your account. It will take one week to arrive in Douz. With your 300 DT this will pay for your camel. We ask you three things:
1. Please give the camel a name.
2. Please never let anyone harm the camel, or eat it.
3. Please send us some photographs of the camel.
We hope the camel will be good to you (and you good to the camel!) We are very happy you have two camels again and we wish you peace and happiness.
‘You can’t write “don’t eat the camel”!’
‘Why?’
‘Why would he eat the camel?’
‘He told us. They eat camels. When they’re finished they eat them.’
‘If you give him the camel you have to give him the camel.’
‘I know. But too late. I’ve sent it.’
Dear Keegi, Hello
How are you? I hope fine, I must thank you very well, because I just receive your money, thank you very much. I was in a big problem and you solve it thanks dear Keeg. Dear Keeg, please choose the new name for my new camel and I will have a big pleaseure if you can acccept invitation all come here To Tunisia and Douz to pass a trip in the Sahara With my camal and me. You must be the first to get on my camel and I will pay all the trip, Dear Keegi, I hope that you accept, I want to thank you who help me.
I will send for you photos of my camal. All my familly thanks you very well,
BIG KISSES
Mansour
‘Big kisses? I think he has a new translator,’ Jonathan says.
We wonder who is writing the faxes from Mansour. I suppose he addresses me because he must realise I write the letters, even though I sign them from us both. We choose the name Lily for Mansour’s camel, after the newly-born daughter of friends. We send drawing books and crayons for Mansour’s children.
Dear Mansour
Hello! How are you? Thank you for your fax. We are pleased to be lucky enough to help you get your camel. We are thinking of a name. Is the camel a female camel? How about Lily? If she is female we hope she will have many babies so that you will one day have a big caravanserai. We look forward to seeing you and riding your camel. Maybe next year.
Your offer is very kind and we look forward to coming to Tunisia again, and to meeting your family. Please say hello to Mohammed for us.
Our best wishes
Keggie and Jonathan
Hello, Keegi
We are fine and we hope that you also be fine. I and photographer, we will take photos of my camel (it’s male) and my family, the name that you give to my camal ‘Lily’ is a nice name I love it, thanks. Also my children’s was admire this name, now it’s a official name for my camel. A day We (you and me) Will make a trip in Sahara With Lily it’s a pleasure for me to be with you and visit Sahara. I feel so tired these days, because my wife was leave me, and I educate only my children and in ten days they will return in school. We are aspecting you and we hope seeing you quikly. Me and my family will be very happy to seeing you again because you are welcome at any time but just tell me when you will arrive to meet you in the airport. Please Keegi confirm me your arrive, I aspect you answer.
Bye, kiss
Mansour
‘You and me,’ quotes Jonathan, ‘bye, kiss?’
‘Hm.’
Again, we wonder who is writing the faxes for Mansour, yet in the post he has sent us three photographs of a fine white male camel. Mansour proudly holds the camel, his three children are perche
d on top. He is scrubbed up, Western style, wearing a blue buttoned shirt, jeans with a belt. We hardly recognise him. Of course, we wanted a picture of him in the desert with his white djellaba and keffiyeh. We can see he has gone to a huge effort to get this photograph for us.
At Christmas we send presents for his children, stuffed toys, colouring books. On 1 January the fax machine grinds into action.
Dear Keeg
I you wish good annee. I have vecu a problem because my son Fathi have a accident in the house it be fall of roof of my house the night of christmas, the two foot be break, it have make a operation surgical have the hospital this operation be have the sum of 3500 DT maintenant I must pay the hospital but I be not this sum for that I be oblige to sell my camel which be my only means of travail. j’espere that you can we visit at me in my family je you wish a nouelle year full of joy. I think seriously to buy my camals to pay the doctor, how make operation for my child . . . after that immigrate to Libya; I am forced to do this solution and leave Douz and my familly. If you want to visit Douz, tell me I will stand you. I think you for present for my family sent by post, my children was very happy. thank you and hope to see you nearly. Je you wish a novelle year full of joy.
Your friend
Mansour
I was going to end the story here. Yet although we read this fax with a sinking heart it did not alter our affection for Mansour. We could understand. And then again, we had no way of understanding. We were just tourists on a bridge between cultures. We had already wondered about the translators helping Mansour, so we took the easy path and allowed a silence to fall.
Six weeks later the fax machine sprang into action again. ‘My son feels good and my camels also, my work, everything is good,’ reported Mansour, and we sent our love back in return.
At night, when I look at the stars, I sometimes think of Mansour. In the desert, cross-legged, his face copper in the light of the fire, a loaf of unleavened bread rising beneath the sand at his feet, his white keffiyeh so startling against the midnight sky. A tiny dot on the globe in the vast ocean of sand. And I wonder what became of him in all that has happened since in the Arab Spring that began so very close by.
THE ARROGANT POEM
Well . . . (Never start a story like this, and beware of parentheses, they draw far too much attention to themselves, apparently.)
I had been reading a lot of advice about ‘writing’ in books like The Art of Fiction (John Gardner) and The Art of Fiction (David Lodge); oddly these are the only ones I can find right at this moment on my bookshelf, but I remember accumulating various how-to books and practical guides about writing because that was what I really wanted to do. I had become the type of artist who when visiting a gallery spent longer in the bookshop across the road than looking at the art. For a start, writing was transportable; you didn’t need a studio, or much equipment, you didn’t constantly need to replenish (expensive) supplies, or frame the end result, or transport it, or store it. And a book cost under a tenner, cheap enough for anyone to buy. Nor did you have to go to a gallery to read it. You could take a book to bed and enter another world, like stepping into C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe, into a world that could last for weeks, in a kind of one-to-one whispering, not the paltry few minutes one usually got being jostled along in an exhibition in front of a wall. I wanted to create the same heart-roar that I felt when I read things that lit up my interior world. I had been making art for years, but it was words, the eternal combustion of them, that gave me the giddy pilot-thrill of distant horizons. So I scoured articles and interviews with authors, searching for the Holy Grail, for the Secret (short-cut, more like), that would teach me about beginnings and endings and plot and structure and dialogue and character. There were a lot of dos and don’ts, with examples: ‘get in, get out’ (Raymond Carver), not what I’m doing here, obviously; ‘unbloat your plot’ (Colum McCann); ‘never open a book with weather’ (Elmore Leonard); ‘keep your exclamation marks under control’ (Elmore Leonard again!); ‘do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide’ (Roddy Doyle). The good thing about all these rules was that you were also allowed to break them.
So the toiling began. But in secret. Because I wasn’t a writer, and apart from anything else, having avoided most of my school education, my spelling wasn’t great, nor did I excel at grammar, in grammar, with grammar. When I should have been in my studio drawing or making up gesso, or thinking about my next exhibition, I was in fact not doing that at all; I was filling up notebooks with poems and phrases and stories and fitting the sounds of words together in ways I liked. Exercise books and jotters accumulated my scribblings – vital, I was convinced, for some future moment: ‘cheeks as cool as cabbages’, for instance; or ‘feral moon spires of trees’, whatever on earth they were. I looked west to America, to William Carlos Williams and Susan Howe and Charles Olson, and then back again to Samuel Beckett. I began to go to poetry workshops. I joined one poetry group in Kentish Town where we were given practical exercises, the first of which was in alliteration.
Astonishingly, in the ten or fifteen minutes we were allocated, as the competitive sweat broke out on my brow, I came up with a poem about wishbones. ‘I have collected a kilo of wishbones, nearly,’ it began. I mention this because it was an encouraging moment, for murmurings of approval gently ricocheted around the room, and I even felt a little bit pleased with myself.
Which is why I am now flicking through old notebooks and reams of typed pages searching for it, and the longer I can’t find it, the more brilliant it becomes. ‘Their bony bridged sternums’ was in there somewhere, and ‘linked like lures of lotto’, and ‘short straws’, because it was some kind of metaphor for luck and hope, but also lucklessness, with the irony that the chooks whose wish-bones they were had been roasted. But of course now I want it, it’s not surfacing, which makes me really want to find it, so I am rummaging frantically through my drawers of scraps, I am trying to remember it but I can only resurrect snatches: ‘each sucked spatula / gripped by finger and fumb’. Now, because I can’t find the poem about the wishbones, it has taken on mythic status, and the murmurings of approval in Kentish Town have become gasps of admiration. And now I can’t concentrate on anything else until I find the sodding poem. My whole shed gets a workover. I am completely sidetracked, for this wishbone poem is not even the poem I am supposed to be writing about. Nor is this: a tragic poem about a male parrot preening his feathers in the forests of Brazil, inspired by a radio report of a scientist, one Dr Cavas, closely monitoring the last known Spix’s macaw in the wild, which had paired with a female blue-winged macaw. ‘I am Spix Macaw / a solitary male / Oblivious to this fact and that . . .’ I see I have just chopped it up willy nilly with line breaks of which I had absolutely no understanding. The parrot bows and flicks his wings, because love is in the air, but does not know, of course, how much hope is pinned upon the match, which ‘could be enough to put a parrot off’. Alas, it did not turn out well for poor Dr Cavas, for both love birds disappeared; with them, the last wild Spix’s macaw.
Flick, flick. I check the same drawer for a third time, but no wishbone poem; a story of a menopausal woman who puts a robin’s egg in her mouth then swallows it; a story (typed on a Stone-Age manual typewriter with corrections xxx’d out) which begins, ‘Deep, deep in the bowels of the earth, at the end of a very long cave, a mile from where the great seas batter the giant cliffs . . .’ I have no memory of this story about a dragon who, due to his religious custom, takes his name from not just his mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, but a thousand generations before him, which amounts to more than a million names, which could be one way to fill a book, but luckily this dragon shortens his name to Humphrey. These sundry pages and torn scraps – ‘It bites with stolen teeth’ (I have no idea either) – are my vain attempts to plough my new furrow; but still the wishbone poem is nowhere to be seen.
The Kentish Town poetry worksh
op had spurred me on, but each week the gruelling chore of having to listen to everyone else’s poems, turn by turn around the room, with each week each poem getting longer and longer . . . well, it wasn’t long before I gave up going.
Instead I bought poetry and writing journals (which I barely read) in which there were competitions you could enter, with prize money. £200, £500, £3,000! Imagine! The Biscuit International Short Story Award was £15,000! There was Artesian, Ambit, Carillon, Mslexia, Mud Luscious. I bought them all, paid my entry fees to the competitions and sent off my poems and stories. Into the thickening fog.
I never heard a thing from any of them. It was then that I came across one poetry magazine, Quartos, which offered a critique of the poem you entered into their competition, if you paid an extra £25 on top of your entry fee. By this time the encouraging murmurings for my wishbone poem seemed a long way back, and I longed to know if anything I wrote did anything at all. I selected my finest. A Beckettian (warning, warning) poem about trying to create a homunculus. I read it aloud and I liked the sounds of the hushing, and I liked the pictures and the hinting of things, and I liked the way it ended. And I liked its title too, ‘A Ghost Story’. So I wrote out my cheque and I sent my poem off.
I waited. I imagined a real poet or a poetry critic reading my poem. Quite a long time later the envelope, addressed to me in my own handwriting, fell through the letterbox. Inside, there was a single-page generic critique form, with my poem stapled to the back.
My reference number was 566/P, which meant Quartos must have had at least 566 other twenty-five quids, and one can probably assume that mine was not the last, so maybe they’d had double that. A thousand hopeful wannabe poets out there, waiting for their critique forms. Yet I could already see my critique had scarcely been filled in: the first six sections were completely blank. As I read the form my cheeks flushed with embarrassment and my chest burned hot with confusion.