“But you are: You’re an escapist, and nothing more. I don’t blame you, though. Trying to escape is a natural reaction to what you’ve been through. I won’t be unfair to you.”
“You won’t be unfair to me?”
“When I see the blows fate has dealt you, I can understand your escapism. Trying to escape isn’t stupid in any case, Khalid. In fact, sometimes it’s a very courageous thing to do. Just think, and remember that.”
The Saturnine pushed the blanket aside and stood up. He opened the curtain, and the noonday light flooded over me. He opened the window and stood contemplating the street, the houses, and the minaret. It seemed that a new poem was seeping into his veins, and that he was trying to hold on to it so that it couldn’t get away. I found myself standing behind him and saying, “Let me hear the poem, and it won’t get away from you.”
He smiled and shook his head. He said, “My poem is a firstborn female. If I divulge her, I’ll lose her.” Though I didn’t know why, the phrase “I’ll lose her” disturbed me, and two big tears came rolling down my cheeks. They made their way downward until the Saturnine caught them in his palms. Our eyes met. He said, “Loss, Khalid. This nebulous entity haunts us relentlessly. It’s from this, Khalid, that we’re trying to escape. Don’t you agree?”
I was astounded by the way he had put his finger on the wounds in my soul. It was as though I were sprawled out on the past and scrutinizing memory’s wounds. I nodded. Then I burst into sobs, resting my head on his shoulder. I thought I had cried enough over the course of the years I had already lived. But crying is a kind of frenzy that comes over me whenever I remember loss. I wonder how much I’ve lost over the course of this frantic journey, and what I’ve let go to waste?
Stories were awakened within me like an unhealed wound. The Saturnine’s eyes were fixed on my lips as I spoke. “Loss has chosen us, my Poet, and we’ve been poured into life against our wills. Where shall I begin, Friend, when all the stories are so intertwined? This noonday blaze is nothing compared to the fires of a heart covered with burns that never heal. Shall I say that the loss began with my mother’s breast? Shall I confess to you something as embarrassing as that? It’s truly embarrassing to admit that I still pine for my mother’s milk, which I never even tasted. I pine for it like mad. And I wonder why loss chose to make its beginning with my mother’s milk. I was her firstborn, and she was weak and exhausted after giving birth. That’s what she’s told me, anyway, and she had no milk in her breasts. She would put me to her breast and I would try for several minutes to get milk out of it. Then I would let go of it and start bawling. She’d give me the other breast, and the same thing would happen. On the second day my mother concluded that her milk would never come in, and she started preparing formula for me. The strange thing about it is that I accepted the formula readily. Imagine, my dear Saturnine: I was born with the willingness to settle for half-solutions! I should have rejected the formula. If I had, I would have grown up to be someone who accepts nothing but complete, radical solutions. I should have died rather than settle for that milk. This may seem crazy and naïve to you. You might say, ‘How could a day-old baby decide to reject alternatives? How could he prefer death over life simply because he hasn’t found milk in his mother’s breast?’ My friend, those who are born to change the course of history are born with the ability to reject mere substitutes. More importantly, their mothers don’t offer them substitutes on the second day of their lives. In other words, our mothers are the ones who help us to become submissive. Believe me: I don’t feel I belong to her, but she feels guilty toward me, and tries to make that loss up to me. The loss of my mother’s milk was the ultimate loss. I don’t feel I belong to real life, either. Instead, I feel I belong to nothingness and perdition. True life is proving oneself, and proving the absolute truth that refuses to be phony or to retreat, even by a hair’s breath. Surrendering even once when you shouldn’t is enough to exclude you from that truth. Loss and I were born together, so don’t blame me if I cling to the homeland and sing its praises wherever I go. The only thing people like me can do is cling to the memory of the homeland. This is how we make up for having lost the love of homelands, which can only be given by pure mothers’ breasts.”
This loss is what caused my isolation as a little boy. It made me into a child that cared nothing for the world around him. The place I was in might be filled with commotion and loud noise, but I would be in my own little world, talking to myself, drawing pictures of my heroes, talking to them, and bonding with them. I wouldn’t pay any attention to someone calling me, no matter how many times the call was repeated. But it wasn’t intentional. Maybe it was a flight that emerged from the subconscious, or rage over the milk that had dried up instead of becoming mine, or an absorption in the search for what I had lost. When I walked I would bump into whatever was in my path, the result being that either I injured the object, or the object injured me. Look at this head. Count with me the number of scars on it! I’ll bet there are at least ten. These are witnesses to how distracted I was. As for the drinking glasses, the dishes, and the furniture that collided with my feet and broke, there are more than I can remember. You know? My mother used to call me ‘the klutz’ because I was constantly distracted, getting hurt, and breaking the furniture. I don’t remember when I started being aware of the things around me, or when I heard someone call me ‘the klutz’ for the last time. All I remember is that trying to escape was part of my experience until the last moments of childhood.
“Little by little, manhood blossomed inside me, and I found myself fleeing into fantasies of the elusive female. I couldn’t seem to face the memory of the loss I’d suffered. At the same time, I couldn’t forget it. I noticed this based on the girls I chose to fantasize about. I disliked pretty girls. My gaze was drawn instead to girls of less than average beauty, and sometimes outright homely ones. I felt a kind of psychological affinity for them, and I would fall in love with them without a moment’s hesitation. Abir herself wasn’t beautiful. I’m recalling her now, with her dark face and scrawny figure. And I wonder if her attachment to me was based on the fact that I had been interested in her, whereas she’d been ignored by others? My Saturnine friend, it was that first surrender that gave rise to this flight and alienation from things that are bright and glittering. It’s drawn me to things that are out of the way and excluded from the circles of others’ interests. Do you understand?
“The breast, Saturnine, was the first thing that attracted me to females. This entity that my mother wasn’t able to keep me close to for two whole years . . . this entity became the first thing I looked at whenever I encountered any female during the early days of my adolescence. Without thinking, my eyes would fall directly on it. Crazy relationships developed between me and breasts, some of them confrontational, and others so full of tender affection that I would be dying to touch them the first time I saw them. I was about to lose my mind. After all, I was running away from having lost them in the first place, but my steps were leading me to them. So what was I supposed to do? Tell me: What was I supposed to do? I’ll tell you what I did: I ran away from them. I tried my best to turn my view of them into something spiritual and profound, far removed from the physical reality. I would think about the heart concealed behind them. I would think about the blood surging through them. I would imagine the network of blood vessels inside them. I tried my best to avert my gaze from that extraordinary roundness and those wildly enticing curves. This helped me somewhat, as did the repeated altercations with my father, to avoid thinking about all those breasts scattered here and there. I can’t be entirely sure of what I’m about to say, but I think it’s probably true that my need to run away from breasts was one of the most important factors in my decision to become religious. I don’t deny that that phase changed a lot of things in my life. It distanced me from fantasies about breasts. It may even have driven them away for good, although it also caused my family to be quite upset with me.
“How did I become
religious? This question must be on your mind. I’ve told you how running away from the breasts I encountered everywhere was, to some extent, what prompted me to become religious. But would this alone have been enough to impel me to make a decision this serious, and to embark on a critical phase that would have such a huge impact on my life? You might say that running away gave me the necessary will to make the decision to become religious, and that the factors that came into play later completed the process. Basically, the change started right after I’d finished tenth grade and was entering my last two years of high school. During those days, Bakhit Zahir Bakhit reached an advanced stage of alcoholism. He began spending most of his time outside the normal human state of mental equilibrium. Conflicts quickly escalated, becoming huge mountains that hindered any sort of mutual understanding. One time I stopped him from beating my mother. I stood between them and said, ‘You’re not going to hit her any more.’ He glared at me. He took out a cigarette and lit it. Then he took a drag and blew the smoke in my face. With a smirk he said, ‘You won’t stop me. I’m your father. Understand?’”
“‘I don’t understand!’ I screamed. ‘Now get away from her!’
“I turned to face my mother. She looked tearful, her eyes blood-red. I said to her, ‘It’s your mistake. You should never have given up your rights and given in to his insults and abuse. From now on I’m going to stand up to his attacks. I’m going to stop him. He’ll never hurt you again as long as I live!’
“Just then I felt something stinging the back of my neck, as though a fire had been lit there. I turned around, and to my shock and amazement I discovered—would you believe it?—that my father had put his cigarette out on the back of my neck! To this day, I wonder how could he have done that. He put it out in my heart, that’s where. That sense of loss that had grown out of constant fleeing really did drive me to become religious. I made my way into a new era, and I thought it was the end of running away.”
With flaming eyes that stirred up storms from the depths of pain to the heights of sorrow, the Saturnine said, “Your new era was the beginning of a new flight, only in a different direction. You’ve never stopped running away for a moment, traveler. You haven’t stopped. All you’ve been . . .”
I couldn’t hear the rest of his words. My eyes were drowning in tears, and things before me were covered with raging water that had taken on a dazzling whiteness. My sobs grew so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else. I cried till I was all cried out, or until I was hidden from the fragments of memory. By the time I quieted down and the water dried up, the curtain had been drawn slightly, rays of sunlight were filtering onto the floor of the room, and a breeze was blowing in through the open window and brushing my face. The Saturnine had left when he saw the tears, or when he was surprised by the poem’s first-born female, gently and without occasion withdrawing himself, as I was accustomed to his doing. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the last words the Saturnine had spoken.
The Sanctity of the Dead
What happened wasn’t terribly sad. But remembering it always scatters me into sorrow’s wide-open spaces, like a cloud wandering lost on a summer day. Where are you, my rain? The earth is thirsty, I’m burning with longing for her. Whenever I remember my father, my steps lead me toward his grave. I pass the mud houses and the palm trees and head to that shady place set aside for our graves. I don’t know why, but every time I come in through the cemetery gate, I look around in search of my own grave. Where do you suppose these people would bury me if I died today? Don’t we have the right to choose our own graves?
Whenever they remind Walad Sulaymi of the grave, he says, “O Lord, make things easy for us, and give us a grave to be buried in when we die rather than letting our remains be scattered out in the open. O Lord, do not let people be harmed or troubled by our corpses after we die!” My goodness, Walad Sulaymi, my goodness! Are you really that worried about these people? Do they have that much sway over your consciousness?
I search among the graves. I try to choose a nice place for myself, where I’ll be comfortable. I don’t want a wall near me, and I don’t want females. I want you to bury me here, next to this Christ’s-thorn tree, so that its roots can soak up my blood and feed on my bones. Then I’ll sprout up as a Christ’s thorn tree, and woe to you if you pick the fruits of the tree that fed on me! You’ll be afflicted by the curse. What if I told the people of the village, “Reserve this plot for my grave”? Sa‘id Dhab‘a would be sure to accuse me of blasphemy. No, I won’t tell anybody about the place where I’d like to be buried, since if I did, they would ruin it for me. I’ll keep it a secret, and put it in my will.
At the western end of the cemetery, my father rests in peace, I think. Enjoy your rest, Father. You’ve won your sanctity, and now you’re sinless in our eyes. We mention your good deeds with reverence, and all your bad deeds—when we mention them inadvertently—become mere jokes: “Remember? He was teasing you one day and put out a cigarette on your neck. May he rest in peace. His way of teasing was a bit heavy-handed. Ha ha ha!” You’re such idiots. You’re weaklings in the face of death, O countrymen of mine. Real weaklings. When you see it you tremble: “Pardon me, Mr. Death. Did you say the man had become one of your followers? If so, then we relinquish all our rights, and we wouldn’t think of being disrespectful. He has the same sanctity you do, sir. He has whatever you have.”
I stood in front of the grave. Grass had sprouted on it, and its headstone was covered with dust. I wiped it off with my hand. “Bakhit Zahir Bakhit: He deserved a longer life, but sometimes Death is in a hurry.” I was amazed at myself. How could I have written such a thing and put it on his gravestone? It seems just the opposite to me now. It was my father who had been in a hurry, and who had taken off running in Death’s direction.
During his final days he had been drinking with unparalleled voracity. He was hardly ever sober, and he’d started chain-smoking. The doctors’ previous warnings had made the truth crystal clear to him: “There’s nothing left of your liver, and your esophageal varices are sure to kill you unless you help us.” The family curse is that its members don’t give a damn about anything. They know their problems inside and out. The bitter truth is obvious to them. Yet they don’t lift a finger to save themselves. It’s like what happens when a man walks all night long, then falls asleep from sheer exhaustion. The next morning he wakes up and finds himself lying on a railroad track. He hears a train approaching in the distance, but he doesn’t feel like moving his body. He says, “I’m all tired out from my long trip, and the train’s still a long way off. When it gets closer I’ll do something.” Nothing’s stopping him; he just doesn’t consider it the right time to act. As he waits, he hears the train approaching. Then, just when the time comes for him to act, he’s overcome by drowsiness, and the train runs over him. This curse has afflicted every single one of us. How many things are there that, if we had just moved an inch or two forward, we could have gained instead of lost? But my father was the biggest loser of us all. After all, he lost his life. Bakhit Zahir Bakhit was punishing all of us. He used to absent himself from consciousness of his own free will. Maybe he thought he could act at the right moment. But it’s always at the last moment that the man lying on the railroad track ends up falling asleep.
Two days before his demise, we’d had a disagreement over this very thing, namely, what we were both doing. I had come into the meeting room, where I found him enveloped in a cloud of smoke. Empty bottles filled the place. I sat down across from him.
“One question keeps bothering me: Who are you punishing? Everything you’re doing, as I see it, hurts you alone. This excessive drinking is killing you alone. So what are you doing?”
He laughed at my question and asked, “And you, with this religiosity of yours, who are you punishing?”
I was truly astounded. I didn’t understand his question, or so I thought. He puffed on his cigarette and said, “Do I seem unkempt and scattered to you?”
“It’s good that you know yourself, and that you see what an extremist you are.”
“I think we’re both guilty of the same extremism. The only difference between us is that one of us went right, and the other went left. But the result is the same, son. We’re both destroying ourselves.”
My God! He was still insisting that I was an extremist. I tried to object by throwing my hands in the air. But he went on talking, cutting off any attempt I made to speak.
“Believe me, Khalid. We’re from a family that has no sense of moderation. I’ve pondered our whole family line. I’ve investigated the lives of our ancestors. All of us are afflicted with this same disease. No matter what direction we take, we end up going too far. I know what you want to say: You want to tell me that because I’m far from religion, I don’t understand it, and that I do it an injustice with my arbitrary opinions. Well, you lived among us for years without caring about pigeonholing people. As far as you were concerned, anybody who prayed was a believer, and anybody who didn’t pray was just negligent. That’s what we tacitly agreed on, isn’t it? But now you’ve turned religious, and you’re a different creature. Every person you see in the street has to adhere to specific standards in order for you to approve of him. Your grandfather prays, but he keeps his robe too long. You ignore the fact that he prays and only pay attention to his robe, which you don’t approve of. In your opinion, he’s beyond the pale.”
I stopped him, overcome with rage. “You have no right to accuse me of being an extremist just because I’m careful to apply the God-given plan for living. Who are you to oppose God’s plan?”
“Who said I was opposed to God’s plan? All I’m opposed to is your way of understanding the plan.”
“It isn’t only my understanding of it. But because the plan’s requirements don’t suit your fancy, you accuse us of not understanding it correctly. Who gives you the right to cast doubt on our understanding?”
Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs Page 10
