He thought of the song “Wounded Heart” by Muhammad Abdu as she offered him his first kiss. After that he felt the town was different. He started to notice lots of things as he drove around. He noticed the girls in the streets, looked up at the trees, contemplated the neon signs, and he’d share a joke with the shopkeepers, read the papers, and buy magazines. He looked for books of folk poetry, and he listened to the latest songs and took in the words rather than just humming along to the tune as he had done before.
They drowned together in a bottomless sea of passion, and wandered down roads and streets and alleys. She kept on her black scarf and veil in the public thoroughfares and took them off whenever they sneaked, like two thieves of the night, into a side alley so she could steal a kiss from him. When she tried to do it on a main road that was full of shops, under the pretext that it was empty and the middle of the night, he had refused out of caution, even though her left hand insisted on going to its usual place.
Her body was clamoring now and had ripened like a piece of fruit. She led him one night to a deserted place on the outskirts of town. He pulled the taxi up to the end of a quiet, dusty lane in one of the newer quarters and turned the lights off, and she suddenly turned toward him. She wrapped her arms around him, then pulled him toward her in her seat and made him taste the full measure of her sadness, loneliness, and crushing isolation. He was like a young, wild animal that doesn’t know the way through the gates of the forest. He felt her tentatively, curiously, full of desire, and she showed him the way, patient and tender, leading him by the hand like one would do for another who does not know, helping him until he understood his goal, and reached full pleasure. “You will marry me,” she told him. “I will marry you,” he said. He loved her so much, and she was addicted to his love. They enjoyed the pleasure many times, until one day she wept with him like a little bird at the slaughter. “The fruit of our love is growing in my womb,” she told him. He was perturbed and promised her they would resolve the matter as soon as possible. After he had explained to his family his desire to marry, he mentioned her family’s name. They laughed for a long time. His mother assured him she would look for a suitable bride, but he objected. “You are a son of the tribe,” they told him. “You are a purebred, a son of free men. How can you marry a woman with no origin or breeding?” And when they noticed his insistence, his brother threatened to kill him, and waved the shotgun in his face, “Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about that common woman.”
The invalid father did not notice the swollen belly, and the mother, with her fading sight, did not or could not make out the growing womb sheltered beneath the wide housedresses. The fetus played lightheartedly while the woman’s heart fluttered with terror. She spent the whole night waiting for the accursed telephone, which maintained a perpetual silence. She tried to find a way to contact him so he could help her out of this dilemma, so that together they could bury this secret forever, but he had left nothing. There was no trace of him. She wept the whole night long, cursing the telephone, tribes, and taxis; the streets, lust, and love; the souk, the shops, and the baggy red blouse; she cursed “Wounded Heart,” all songs and folk poems.
After her belly had grown even rounder she decided to phone a childhood friend from primary and middle school days, and together look for an urgent solution to this scandalous predicament, even if it would mean her demise and her parents left with no one to support them. How many times she thought of crossing the highway so a speeding car could run her down; it wouldn’t even matter if it were a taxi with a ping-pong ball covered in brightly colored sequins dangling from the rearview mirror. “Anything to put an end to this interminable nightmare.”
She went with her friend, as the contractions started, to an old woman in al-Adul, a poor, working-class district. The old woman’s driver, her partner in those operations, picked them up in a neutral place they had described to him over the phone. After she had given birth to a little boy with olive skin, the old woman placed him with his afterbirth and accompanying blood in a banana crate, prepared for that purpose, lined with a torn plastic bag. The driver covered the crate with an ample piece of cloth and casually carried it away. Off he went, after midnight, winding his way through streets and alleys until he entered al-Sadd al-Gharbi neighborhood, drove past the laundry with its neon sign switched off, the central stores, and into the square in front of the Ibn al-Zubair mosque. There he stopped the white sedan in the still night and got out, peering furtively as he did so down the alleys that led onto the square. He opened the backdoor and lifted out the banana crate covered in the old-fashioned, dark red prayer cloth, placed it against the wall of the mosque, and then sped off down the empty predawn main roads.
Turad did not read these details in the green file he found in the bus station. He was reading official documents, but then he got lost for a while in the realm of his imagination before ending with a long, deep sigh as he whispered to himself: You poor thing, dear foundling Nasir. Was your father, the taxi driver who owned the Cressida, called Abdulilah? Was your mother in the wide red blouse and the skirt with the black and honey-colored flowers called Salha? Did you have to spend the first night of your life in the street, and lose your eye when wild cats came out of the darkness to attack you, taking you for a piece of quivering red meat? Why weren’t you inside a modern house with the fiery red flowers of the bougainvillea pouring over the wall? Why didn’t you spend your first years driving around in a taxi, babbling to your mother and father? Damn the tribes and their evil customs. What good have the tribes done for me, Nasir my friend? Nothing. They said I was defective because I was without an ear, yet before that my reputation and courage had preceded me into the desert wilderness. This father of yours, my foundling, abandoned you, and ran out of your mother’s life for the sake of the tribe. His lover’s heart did not even flinch when your mother, who did not belong to a tribe, wept. He did not listen to her trembling young body when it taught him how to love and showed him new life, when he had been a boorish and uncouth brute who knew nothing of the world except Suad Hosni’s smile, her half-closed eyes, and her hair pulled back like a horse’s tail.
Stolen Manhood
“YOU’VE LOST YOUR EAR, MAN, BUT THE real problem is when someone loses his life and his future, his happiness and his stability.” Amm Tawfiq fell silent as he sat on the high reed chair in the Café Emperor just outside of town. He took a long puff on his sheesha, and Turad listened to the bubbling of the water in the glass bowl at the bottom of the pipe. It was as if the sheesha were chuckling at them, mocking both of their fates.
“Do you know that the days on the ship were easier than these days now? After we pulled away from Sawaken, we spent days on the open sea. We put on the ihram pilgrim clothes before we reached the port. And I told you about that Eritrean man who pushed me on my face in the toilet and did it with me. I learned that everyone can do it with you dozens of times a day, in different ways, and with different meanings!”
Amm Tawfiq breathed a long sigh, but not a single tear dripped from his eye, lest it slide down the skin of his face, which hardly differed from the hide of an ancient and decrepit crocodile. It was as if there were no more tears in the lakes at the corners of his eyes, or if there were, then no longer enough time for him to weep. He was chatting late one summer evening, and since many of the café’s patrons had already left, his swarming woes were uninterrupted except by the meanderings of the Indian waiter, whom they both called Yaqub because of the enormous resemblance they thought he bore to the goalkeeper for al-Tadamun and the national squad.
In his mind’s eye Amm Tawfiq could still see, like some distant hazy dream, the bustle of an old port that ships could scarcely reach because the waters were so shallow. The boats would drop anchor more than two hundred yards from the jetty, and then the porters would jump into sailing skiffs and, with belts of leather or cloth tied around their waists, vigorously shove the animals down the smooth gangplank, which stretched down from the deck
of the ship without steps. The sheep slid down, bleating loudly, accompanied by crates, sealed and stamped, carried by the porters, some filled with leather goods and folk remedies imported from Kurdufan, others full of spices and Indian sandalwood that was sold in the Shindi market. There were smaller boxes, too, but they were heavy and firmly locked, filled with Ethiopian gold from the Shindi market. And there were slaves: women, children, and men in their white ihram, driven into a line on the deck of the African Moon after she had been unloaded, who had been brought up from the hold to be transferred into the sailing skiffs. The little boats navigated their ways uneasily through the channels and coral reefs, until they reached more treacherous bits near the coast, where their cargoes were unloaded onto small dhows that slipped quietly and effortlessly up to the old customs dock. A group of men stood there. One of them held a ledger and had a black hat on his head. Other porters began to carry the merchandise from the small sailing boats onto the quay and, after the customs men had walked around and inspected them, from there to trucks with wooden sides. Slaves alighted from the last three vessels—men, women, and children wearing their ihram. They were ordered into a long line, which was soon broken up into small groups. At one end there were three children whose ages ranged between eight and eleven. One of them was called Hasan, but that would be changed to Tawfiq, which means “good fortune.” His good fortune would head back out to sea, never to return; anguish and misfortune would follow him like his shadow for the rest of his life. When he walked it would move after him as if it were whipping him, and when he stopped to take his breath, misfortune would stop with him, clinging to him like preordained fate.
Voices and commotion mingled with the singing of the porters as they hurried down the gangplanks, their backs bent under the crates and sacks. From the edge of the port came men in short white thobes with belts around their waists and red turbans on their heads. They split up to look at the groups of slaves, and one of them headed toward the three black children. He looked at them through his small, sharp eyes. His beard was carefully trimmed. He told them he was the pilgrim guide. Then he hurried them along in front of him with a fat man who had enormous wobbling breasts, and who sputtered for breath as he tried to keep up with the three black children and the pilgrim guide. Outside, the sky was clear blue, and two huge trucks stood in the dusty street, one with brightly colored wooden sides. As they approached the vehicles the man with the sagging breasts yelled, “Yo, Rizg!” A huge man in his thirties peered out from the back of one of the trucks. He had a long drooping mustache. He extended his long arm to one of the children, and in one swift move heaved him up into the middle of the truck. In no time at all the three of them were inside.
Through the colored wooden slats on the side of the truck, Hasan—or Tawfiq—watched the fat man as he paid two pieces of silver to the pilgrim guide and climbed into the truck next to the driver. The pilgrim disappeared and the truck moved off, swaying heavily as it lumbered down the narrow alley between the decorated high walls and protruding wooden balconies of the houses. Some had roashans, ornately carved and covered in fine latticework, jutting out a little into the street, behind which women sang as they hung out their laundry. From one of the casements, wisps of smoke spiraled into the sky where a man and woman shared a sheesha and spied on the street below through the gaps in the woodwork.
At last the truck reached the end of an alley in the quarter of al-Mazlum, an old name that means “he who has been severely wronged.” A minaret stood on the corner, and, after a number of desperate attempts from the driver, the truck turned right into a small square and came to a standstill. Through the slats in the side of the truck, Hasan (or Tawfiq) could make out some children skipping after the truck and singing a song he could hardly understand. The fat man stepped into the square and shooed the children away. A woman’s voice, drawing out the words like music, came from one of the roashans: “Mohamaaaaad, Hasaaaaan, up here now!” The kids scattered in all directions. The huge man with the mustache opened the back door of the truck and pushed the black children out into the street, where they bounced around like rubber balls. Little Hasan, who was to become Tawfiq, ended up flat on his face, and he sniffed the strange smell of the dust. He pulled himself to his feet in terror and ran after the other two youngsters across a narrow alleyway and into the doorway of one of the tall buildings, with the fat man and his pendulous breasts and the huge man with his flowing mustache and his sleeves rolled up over his burly arms in close pursuit.
The house with its five floors was amazing; the three youngsters were forever stopping, dazzled by the building and its passageways and stairs, its sofas and carpets, and its spacious lobby, which led into the main sitting room decorated with carved panels and expensive furniture. At the far end of the sitting room, two parallel stone stairways led to the upper floors, and to the left of the stairways was the door leading to the servants’ bedroom and a bathroom and a storeroom. And in the far corner was the servants’ staircase, narrow and dark.
“The huge man with the mustache”—and now Tawfiq takes up the story—“pushed us along with his bare arms until he shoved us into the storeroom, which was full of sacks and crates and tins of zinc. It resembled a narrow corridor and was crammed with spare things. I don’t know why they put us there the first night and bolted the door behind us. Maybe it was because the storeroom was the only room without any windows, so we couldn’t escape.
“The fat man gave us new names, after he had asked us our real names and said, ‘No. Those names are no good.’ He pointed at me: ‘Your name’s Tawfiq’; pointing at the others he said, ‘and you are Anbar, and you are Jawhar.’ We nodded in agreement. He looked into Anbar’s eyes for a while and lifted his face with the tips of his fingers as he pondered a scar over his left eyebrow, the trace of a deep wound that had not completely healed. He drew closer, and with his finger pushed up Anbar’s left eyelid and stared into his yellow eye. He grabbed Anbar’s lower lip, pulling it down and looking at his teeth. Then he patted him twice on the back, and after he had gone off he sent us each a quarter loaf of bread, which we gobbled up with trembling hands we were so hungry. That night I didn’t fall asleep until it was nearly dawn. I slept standing up because the room was so narrow, and in the morning I woke up to the smell of Anbar’s excrement. He couldn’t hold it in and had to do it squatting there like a stray dog in a space he’d made between two sacks.
“The next day I was on my own. The fat man and the man with the mustache came in with a black woman who looked to be middle-aged. She was saying, ‘Ma sha’allah, what lovely young men they are!’ She rubbed our bare heads and inspected our backs and shoulders. She had a red scarf wrapped around her head and a gold ornament piercing her nose. From her wide mouth, which was full of gold teeth, came a strange odor that I later learned was the smell of dayrman tooth sticks. ‘By God, they’re excellent, Abu Yahya,’ she said to the fat man, and from that moment I knew his name. They took Jawhar and Anbar to the bathroom. The woman went in with them, carrying two clean thobes, two white ghutras, and some towels. They locked me in the storeroom. I thought that Jawhar and Anbar would stay in one of the many rooms in the house, but I never saw them again.
“Her name was Umm al-Khayr, Mother of Goodness, and she was the housekeeper. I don’t know where she stayed, but when I woke up from the stupor she looked after me like my mother. Ah, what a time it was! We don’t know what ruler controls this world or what ruler makes a mess of it. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I remember the face of the man who came into my room with a pair of glasses perched on his thick nose and secured by a black cord behind his ears. He had a metal case with him. It was small and weird looking, red, like he had brought it from Hell. It had pictures of minarets and domes and trees engraved on it. As the man opened the small black lock, Umm al-Khayr stood behind him next to the door. Her two eyes looked sad as she said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Tawfiq my boy. The barber’s going to shave your head.’ There were all kinds of tools in
the bag: razor blades, cotton, white gauze, a bottle of cologne, a piece of Abu Anz soap, some matches and metal cones, and lots of other things I can’t remember. What I can remember, though, are his hairy hands as he set out his tools with well-practiced precision. He slipped the razor blade into the lip of the shaver and quickly started to cut off my hair. Umm al-Khayr had disappeared off into the house. When my hair had fallen for the first time in this strange town, the man with the glasses tore off a small piece of cotton, rolled it into a ball between his fingers without looking at me, soaked it in a yellow liquid, and stuck it up my nostrils. A strong pungent smell sneaked directly up into my head, and I saw the walls begin to move. The man’s face went all misty and seemed to hover around the room as if he were a genie. After that I couldn’t see anything in front of me. I was so drugged I couldn’t feel a thing, even though I could sense there was something going on lower down, between my thighs. All I could see was the Nile and the forests and the huts and Umm Kidada and Shindi and Umm Durman and Port Sudan and Sawaken, and my mother and my uncle, Fadlallah Adam, and his wife, Bakhita Osman, and Idris al-Sayyid the cripple and his wife, al-Sabr Zayn. I saw the faces of the slave traders, one after the other, in al-Bitana and Kurdufan and Bahr al-Ghazal and Bantio and al-Fasher. I saw my mother washing me on the banks of the Nile one spring day with other women around her washing their few clothes. I saw my mother moving away and me tying two planks of wood together and pushing them out into the water and leaping on top of them like the mischievous child I was. I saw myself floating north up the river, and then I saw myself on the same two wooden planks bouncing over the waves out into the Red Sea heading east. After two or three days, maybe more, I awoke from the coma. I was laid out on a sponge mattress covered in a striped blue sheet. Next to me was a jug of water, cotton, and some Mercurochrome. I tried to get up, but I immediately felt incredibly dizzy, and my head fell back onto the crushed feather pillow. The point of one of the feathers pricked my neck like a needle. I lifted my hand and felt the pillow as I dreamed about all those feathers. I wanted to plant them in my arms and fly away, far away, into the west, until I was over the Nile. I tried to move but I felt a terrible pain in my bladder. Umm al-Khayr came in. She had the gold ornament in her nose and one of her rare smiles. I didn’t know if she was Mother of Goodness or Mother of Evil. ‘Welcome back, Tawfiq, my boy,’ and she took a bottle from between my thighs where yellow urine had collected.
Wolves of the Crescent Moon Page 5
