Wolves of the Crescent Moon

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  “But you saw the fat,” interrupted Turad. “So why did you run up to the fire?”

  “No, we didn’t. We didn’t see a thing. There was lots of smoke. It was everywhere. No one could see anything. Anyway, one of the men uncovered his face, and he looked like he was from the Ja’aly tribe. His eyes were yellow and his nose a little flat. Next to him walked a strange-looking man who I learned later was a Bedouin from Arabia. They inspected us very carefully, with the Ja’aly paying particular attention as he looked us up and down, and walked around the women to examine them from front and behind. Then he started to divide us into groups. I was a boy, slim and good-looking, and he put me with three other boys whose facial hair still hadn’t sprouted. He pointed to us, and I heard him say, ‘Those are fivers.’”

  “What’s a fiver?” asked Turad.

  “If you measure him from his ankle to his earlobe he’s five spans.”

  Automatically Turad felt for his left ear. Amm Tawfiq noticed him. “If he has an ear missing,” he said, “they measure him on the other side.” They both had a good laugh.

  “By the way, you must tell me the story of your ear when I’ve finished. Right then, when they had divided us up into groups, they tied each group together and drove us along in front of them. Two Ja’alys walked in front as guides, and behind the Bedouin strangers were more Ja’alys, and on all sides we were surrounded by men with rifles. Those strangers were being protected by the Ja’aly tribe from attacks by bands of thieves until they arrived safely back at their ship. They took us for miles through forest and jungle, down into valleys, and up over highlands, and whenever we stumbled or fell they’d kick us or whip us with a switch of plaited leather. We walked eastward for days on end, until finally we climbed up into some mountains. They took us into a cave through a dark narrow entrance, but once we were inside it opened up. It was their secret hideout, and there they gathered around thirty slaves.”

  “Why didn’t you escape?” asked Turad, urging him on. Tawfiq poured some tea, which appeared to have gone cold from the sound it made and the froth that formed at the rim of the glass.

  “Before I was caught I had heard about the son of Halima from al-Qatina. The slave traders had taken him to al-Fasher. He managed to get away without them noticing and escaped to the police station at Umm Kidada. They returned him to his mother. But the men who captured him were only a small band, and they weren’t armed or well organized. I mean, it wasn’t a proper expedition. And I’ve just told you how Bakhit was killed when he tried to run away.”

  Turad nodded his head in agreement and sipped his tea with a grave expression in his eyes as he took the left-hand side of his ghutra and threw it over his right shoulder.

  “Anyway, the next day they took us to Shindi, and by the time we reached Barbar our number had dwindled. Two of us dropped dead on the way. I don’t know where the others disappeared to. They might have sold them at the Shindi market to recoup the cost of the expedition, and so they could pay the Ja’alys who had protected them as they moved through the country. We left Barbar with a huge herd of sheep and headed for Sawaken on the coast. They put us on a medium-sized boat with sacks of corn and sealed chests in the cargo hold down below. It was almost pitch-black. They herded the sheep from Barbar onto the deck. The boat pulled away from the port of Sawaken, and we set sail. It was hajj season, about a month and a half before the hajj itself. We spent long days and nights at sea. Some nights we would hear muffled noises in the distance. It was the sound of the foreign patrol boats as they shined their prying spotlights onto passing boats. They were observing ships and steamers on the Red Sea. But as soon as the white man approached with his shining torches to inspect the boat’s cargo, the smell of animal dung from the deck would overwhelm him. He’d pull back, give the crew the thumbs up, and our boat would continue on its way.

  “During the Red Sea days some of the sailors hung yellow flags over the railings above the cabin. The skipper would say a word to one of the guys, and he would take the flag, shimmy up the mast, and unfurl it. We then realized it was a really huge banner, which could be seen from miles away. The boy would tie it firmly to the mast, then attach it with ropes to the prow. The banner would billow and thrash in the wind and make a noise like the sound of a whip lashing a slave’s back. That yellow sign would make the foreign patrol boats avoid the boat and not stop it for inspection, for in seafaring terms the yellow flag means the boat is infested with the plague.

  “After we had spent days in the pen below deck, four men came down the steps to us. One of them was a black man, Eritrean I think. They handed us ihram clothes for the hajj. They had been used before, and they were dirty. I did not know how to put the wrap around my waist. The Eritrean took me into the toilet. I almost tripped over the piles of ropes and hooks as he dragged me by the wrist, and I held the ihram in my other hand. He was cursing me in a language I couldn’t understand, and his face was dark and angry. Before he tied the wrap he began to fiddle with my ass with his huge hand, then he grabbed the back of my neck and pushed me over, and that’s when I felt his cock like a hashaab. Do you know what a hashaab is?”

  Turad shook his head from side to side as if he didn’t understand anything of Tawfiq’s difficult dialect.

  “Not to worry,” Tawfiq went on. “A hashaab is a rock-hard plant. We used to extract gum from it in Kusti and al-Qadarif. Anyway, I couldn’t scream or cry. All I did was clean myself up after he’d finished. I tied the wrap around my waist and went out after him into the cargo hold. He rushed up the stairs onto the deck, and I never set eyes on him again.”

  Official Documents

  AFTER TURAD HAD CONTEMPLATED THE names of the towns displayed on the screen, he realized that towns were no different from anything else he had known in his life. They were just towns, one very much like the next, with nothing to distinguish it from the others; like the faces of the teachers at the night school where he had learned to read and write; like the shapes of the cars he used to wash, all set out in lines in the ministry parking lot; like the redundant faces of the ministry staff, from the minister to the archive clerk; like women’s black abbayas; like streets; like the ornate china coffee cups on the shelf in the tea and coffee room; like everything in this country.

  He turned his weary body, leaving the screen behind him, but then looked around again at the first city at the top of the list and said to himself, I’ll go to Arar. Surely it can’t be much different from Hell. The best thing about it is that it’s right on the border of Hell, one step and I’ll be in another country. I’m not looking for Heaven, or Paradise, or even an easy life. All I want is a place where people will respect me, not abuse me or treat me like a dog. I ran away from my own folk because of the tribe. I ran away from the palace, and from the parking lot, and from the ministry, and now at last I’m trying to run away from Hell. He said this, then walked toward the ticket counter, praying to Allah as he did so to spare himself the evil of eternal Hell, and to limit his torment to just this one Hell he was living in now.

  “One way to Arar, please.”

  He took the ticket and placed it carefully in his top pocket, and gripping the green file under his armpit, he made for the seats at the far end of the waiting room. He selected an isolated chair, with the window behind it looking out onto the street, sat down, and put the green file on his lap. He ensured his shmagh was well wrapped, opened the file from the right, and began to read:

  INCIDENT REPORT

  Today, Friday the 13th of Muharram 1398 AH, at exactly four a.m., a newborn baby was discovered near the mosque of Abdullah Ibn al-Zubair in the al-Sadd al-Gharbi district. The baby has a mutilated face; one of its eyes has been removed. It had been placed in a banana crate and was wrapped in a white cotton sheet. The discovery was made by Mr. Muhammad al-Daw, who described how he found the baby lying among its afterbirth in the crate. He took the baby to his home nearby, where he cleaned it, cut the umbilical cord, and then informed the police. May Allah bear witness to wh
at we have said herein.

  Signatures of witnesses

  Turad looked carefully at the name of the police department, and at the emblem and branch name at the top right-hand side of the paper. He tried to decipher the spidery handwritten signatures of the witnesses. He then turned over the page, read the title, and moved down the page:

  MEDICAL REPORT

  SYMPTOMS: The baby’s left hip is dislocated. In addition, severe damage suffered to the tissue surrounding the right eye socket as a result of the traumatic loss of the eye. The baby is also suffering from hepatitis and dehydration.

  TREATMENT: The case needs to be kept in the hospital for ten days and followed up six months after discharge.

  Medical Center Specialist Duty Manager

  Turad turned the page slowly but did not notice the baby’s name. He was too busy looking at the sentence “severe damage suffered to the tissue surrounding the right eye socket as a result of the traumatic loss of the eye.”

  Dear God, Turad thought to himself, how could a newborn baby lose its eye? There is no power and strength but in Allah. Why wasn’t he in a cradle with his mother rocking him, singing him lullabies until he fell asleep? His bed was a banana crate, his room a street next to the Ibn al-Zubair mosque. His name is…he has no name, no date of birth, no mother and father, no brothers and sisters, no family, no home, no country. Damn this godforsaken country. This baby has grown up in Hell like me. He’s living with us, Tawfiq and me, right now with this uncertainty. Turad went back to the first page and looked for the date of birth. He thought for a moment—he’d be about twenty—then thought, You’ve still got a long way to go before you’re finished, you poor bastard, before you die and leave behind this insufferable Hell.

  He turned the pages. One caught his eye, and he looked at it closely:

  NAMING RECORD

  Upon consulting the list of official names for newborn males and the list of names for mothers—both the original in our possession and the copy held at the hospital of the medical complex—the name selected for the newborn male is Nasir Abdulilah Hasan Abdullah. The name selected from the list of mothers’ names is Salha Abdulrahman Ahmad. It has therefore been decided to name the newborn male, file no: 921/1398, as above, Nasir Abdulilah Hasan Abdullah, and to name his mother Salha Abdulrahman Ahmad.

  Register signed by…

  Can you imagine having a completely made-up name? That chance alone had wished your name to be Turad and not Matrud or Mas’ud because that’s where they stopped on the official list of names and gave you an arbitrary name? Imagine that your father and grandfather and mother all had made-up names, that you were given a made-up life, like a hero in a film or novel. The name is nothing like people’s real names in this infernal city. It stretches out like a wild endless track, like a dark corridor in which you can’t see anything, not even your hand. There’s no goddamn definite article at the end, not like the well-known families in our country. You are a nonentity, undefined, with no known father or mother. How can you be made definite, Nasir, if you are indefinite? True, my name is Turad, Hunter, even though I am the one who is hunted. And true, my name ends with the name of a famous tribe from the desert heartland of Najd, and true, I was a professional highwayman before my left ear was ripped off. I wish my health would help me now to steal and rob in the vast wilderness in broad daylight, not like they do here, in the dark, between office walls and behind closed doors. But I am like you in every respect. We are both lost in this strange and unfamiliar city.

  What I’m saying to you, young Nasir, is that I’d rather have a thousand definite articles chopped off my name. I’d rather have this whole tribe’s name cut off and thrown into Hell than to have lost my ear. Do you know the most unpleasant feeling is sensing the person sitting next to me staring stupidly at my ear if I forget to cover it with the edge of my shmagh? Bastards! That’s my missing ear. There, take it and piss on it! Just go to Hell and leave me alone.

  The science teacher at the Ihsan Night School told us that hearing is the first sense that links the newborn baby to the world. In my case it was the one sense that cast me out from the world. For it I lost my health and vigor, my self-confidence, my family, my clan, and my job—everything. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it’d lost me my life. I don’t remember the first thing I heard in my earliest days, but it wouldn’t be anything other than the voice of my mother, the sheep bleating as they returned at sunset, or the running wind as it blew up the sand and beat against our tent.

  The difference between us, Nasir, is that you lost your eye because of your ear, and I lost my ear because of my eye. My eye watered one still desert night, and my ear was whisked away, hot on the heels of that tear. As for you, your eye was snatched thanks to that infernal sense of hearing. If only your mother, Salha (as they named her), hadn’t led astray your father, Abdulilah (the name they invented), and he hadn’t succumbed to her soft, honeyed voice on the phone, then slept with her until you were conceived. You found yourself thrown just before dawn in a banana crate by the Ibn al-Zubair mosque, where you lost your right eye; maybe a dog or a hungry stray cat gnawed at it in the city night. All you could do was scream and cry just as I, one savage night in the desert, could do nothing but weep as my left ear was snatched away for a tear. Ah, Ya Turad, if only you’d held back that tear, your ear would still be in its place.

  ANNOUNCEMENT OF BIRTH

  Name of child: Nasir

  Sex: male

  Dead/alive alive

  Place of Birth: General Medical Complex

  Date of Birth Ah: 1/7/1398

  Date of Birth Ad:…

  Time of Birth:…

  Name of Father: Abdulilah Hasan Abdullah

  Nationality: Saudi

  Religion: Muslim

  Profession: Civil servant

  Name of Mother: Salha Abdulrahman Ahmad

  Nationality: Saudi

  Religion: Muslim

  Just look at that for a coincidence! You’ve got only one eye and me one ear. You don’t know your mother or father, and I don’t know any other country than this Hell. The difference is that I hide the stump of my deformed ear with my ghutra or shmagh, whereas I imagine it would be quite difficult for you to hide your missing eye, Nasir. There’s someone conspiring against us, Nasir, until the Day of Judgment. They stole your eye so you couldn’t see, and now you spend your whole life asking and thinking about nothing except how you’re going to hide it from people. They severed my ear so I can’t hear, and I spend my life humiliated and insulted, concealing the shame of my injury.

  Don’t worry about it, my friend. If I saw you I’d suggest the perfect solution. Wear sunglasses. That way no one would see your eye. Always keep them on, even when you go to sleep. You see the world black when you’re awake; why shouldn’t you see black dreams when you’re asleep?

  If I saw you, Nasir without the definite article, unacknowledged nonentity, I’d tell you the stories of Tawfiq the Slave, who knew his mother but wasn’t sure who his father was. He says lots of people bought his mother from the slave market, and most of them slept with her, though he doesn’t know which one’s vicious sperm grabbed his mother’s egg. Was it her master, Ahmad al-Hajj Abu Bakr, whom she ran away from in the end, or was it one of the slave traders? Was it a trader in the slave market, or another of her owners?

  If you only knew what Tawfiq the Slave lost. You and I, an eye and an ear, but him…

  Turad laughed audibly, and one of the travelers sitting nearby shot him a worried and suspicious glance. Turad fell silent, and his thoughts scattered as he tried to look sane. It would be easy enough for them to pick him up and throw him into a mental institution. No one would ask after him. No one had asked after him for years. He had turned into a solitary desert plant, struggling against wind and drought and desolation. He wasn’t even worth as much as a little shafallah bush, which could at least offer a lost camel the chance to exercise its teeth, or aid a Bedouin on a bitter night with fuel for a fire to war
m his body. He was no longer any use to man nor beast except as an object of ridicule. He thought about working as a public or private clown. To be in a public place teasing a laugh out of women and children would be contrary to his Bedouin code. But to be a private clown in a palace would earn him plenty of money, which he could spend curing the nervous breakdown he was going to have. He wondered how he would be able to do something like that after he had spent so many years keeping his missing ear a secret. He had concealed it from curious eyes with his shmagh or ghutra while he worked at the ministry. Sometimes he wore the winter hat with the woolen ear pieces, even on blazing hot summer days, when he worked as a gate guard at the huge palace.

  A Long Fight

  MY MOTHER, KHAZNA, USED TO PAY MORE attention to me than to my two brothers. They considered me a courageous warrior, afraid of nothing. I loved the desert night and befriended the wolves. I would walk the crest of the dune while the wolf trotted along some distance away, keeping a wolfish eye on me but not thinking to attack. I would clock him with my wolf eye and not think to kill or harm him. I did not possess a weapon. I never liked carrying one. My weapons in those days were a courageous heart, sharp eyes like a hawk measuring up his prey, and my bare hands; with them I would bring down the animals I hunted or stole in the night. Why did I steal at night? Was it because I was afraid of horsemen, travelers, and caravans? Not at all. But I did not want to have to kill someone to defend myself, my plunder, or my property. For, yes, those things belonged to me. I had earned them with my wit, intelligence, and courage. I had outsmarted those who owned but didn’t deserve them.