Wolves of the Crescent Moon

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

  “You go back now, little Nasir. The real son’s arrived. You can go, pseudoson, offspring of cats and stray dogs, you can go to Hell. It will be big enough for you, whether it has three doors, or seven, or twenty-one. Hell will contain your grief and your lost childhood.

  “After years of pruning branches and cutting grass, of sadness and boredom, the royal decree proclaiming the emancipation of the slaves was issued. So I didn’t die in the shade of a tree like the old gardener Marzuq. I had to walk out of the palace gate carrying the deed of my freedom and wander about the streets and alleyways without owning my daily bread, or possessing any skill or trade from which to make my living. I was no good at anything, except that I could drive a car, but I was too old for that; or I could cut trees in Riyadh, and trim her long sadness.

  “All I had preserved in my decrepit memory were the nights of a distant, half-forgotten childhood. I looked at the streets and saw only the banks of the Nile. The smells of the car exhaust were the smell of the river birds. I heard the hum of the engines and the beep of the horns as a distant song. I heard the voices of forgotten singers. I don’t know why I suddenly remembered them so clearly. Khalil Farah was singing, and Surur and Kuruma and others. One of their voices rose above the rest in a wonderful sad solo:

  Darling, write to me

  And I’ll write to you

  About my news and yours

  My news is longing and desire

  I spend the night with sighs and moans

  And remember our sitting on the hill

  Holding the cup of love to each other’s lips

  I smile at you and you smile back

  To the strains of the flute

  And I my love

  All my life I’ll sing to you.

  “The voice grew gradually louder, and the streets of the city seemed empty and unfamiliar. I could hear the voice, and see…see the women dancing, their succulent bodies swaying, see the men’s faces glowing, dancing with them. Aaaah, Ya Tawfiq, what was it that brought you here?

  “After staggering around the streets and shopping centers for two days, I went back to the palace and asked if I could stay temporarily while I sorted out a job that would keep me together in those dark oppressive days. That wasn’t emancipation! What freedom could I enjoy after my whole life had gone by without a career, or a wife and children to keep me company in my loneliness and isolation? I was like a bird who doesn’t fly away when the cage door is opened for him. It is not because he doesn’t understand freedom, or that his wings are incapable of flight. No, that’s not it at all. He is wiser and more intelligent than that. He has learned in the cage that seeds and water come to him. How can he provide for himself outside the cage if he has never learned how to before?

  “One morning I decided to leave the palace for good. I went out through the gate that Abu Loza had spent more than two years guarding before he was also kicked out—sorry, I mean, before ‘his services were no longer required.’ I thought I’d get a job as a porter on the docks, but when I went there I found the place full of Asian workers. I left and told myself I’d get a job as a sales assistant, but I wasn’t qualified: I didn’t have a clean, fair, Lebanese face to entice female customers into the clothes shops or the perfume and cosmetics stalls. I thought about working as a laborer, a builder, or a tiler, but I wouldn’t be able to compete with the Pakistanis, nor would I be accepted by them. I decided to look for a building and work as a doorman. That’s what I decided, and I worked for a year and a half before the owner sold the building. The new owner got rid of me—sorry, my ‘services were no longer required’—after he hired a cheap Bangladeshi worker to take my place.

  “After that I got a job through a Sudanese friend who worked as an accountant in a ministry. I started off as a messenger, and then became the coffee boy. I spent years dragging my heavy body around the offices, bearing a silence and a deep secret inside me, which I never divulged to anyone.

  “I wasn’t like Turad the Bedouin fellow who got himself entangled in all kinds of buffoonery with some of the low-life staff. I always put up a barrier between myself and them, even though most of them did call me Amm Tawfiq, perhaps out of consideration for my age, or my silence, which I think perplexed them a little.

  “The first time he came into the room where I prepared the coffee, he shook my hand and said, ‘I’m Turad, the new messenger in financial administration.’ I welcomed him with an impassive face, but then after he visited me in my room in al-Murabba district, I began to feel that his features were not unfamiliar, as if we’d had a laugh together or shared a joke once a long time ago. After many questions about life and the jobs we’d done, I knew who he was the moment he said, ‘I worked as a soldier, not a soldier exactly, but I was a guard at some big shot’s palace gate.’

  “I suddenly yelled, ‘Abu Loza!’ and embraced him heartily. Although he seemed unmoved, and didn’t share my joy in finding a friend, he provided me with some company in my lonely, miserable life.

  “Over many nights I told him my story from the time we had scattered and fled from the slave drivers, then fell into their hands again and moved around with them, passing through the Shindi market, Barbar, and the port of Sawaken on the Red Sea. I told him about my life in the quarter of al-Mazlum, being sold to Abu Yahya al-Halawani, and my castration. I recounted my working for the perfume-seller and his daughter, Khairiya, traveling here, and then working in the palaces as a servant, driver, and gardener. Turad, or Abu Loza, listened to me in amazement. Then he sadly told me the tale of his courageous exploits as a proud highwayman, how he fell in with his dear friend Nahar, and how the guards of a hajj caravan caught them. I wondered how people undertaking the pilgrimage could commit such atrocities. What kind of hajj were they hoping to make? They took me from my mother’s arms, kidnapped me, and brought me to this country on the pretext of the hajj. You, Turad, lost your friend Nahar, and your ear, which caused you such pain and heartache, thanks to pilgrims going on the hajj. Would they perform a sincere hajj, free from obscenity and iniquity, to return to their homes as pure as the day their mothers bore them, with their sins forgiven and their efforts acknowledged? What effort would they be thanked for after they broke our spirits and stole our manhood? Tell me now, Ya Turad, finish off your story. Let’s while away the Riyadh night with stories and sad memories, while the city sleeps like a fat old woman.”

  The Heroism of the Wolf

  TURAD LOOKED AROUND THE WAITING room for the owner of the green file. How did a file containing official papers find its way here? he asked himself. How did it leave the shelves and filing cabinets of the government department dealing with the case? Was this person, Nasir Abdulilah, the same Nasir that Amm Tawfiq talked about? It must be him. Didn’t I just read in his diary that they took him from the orphanage to live inside a palace and to be their son? Didn’t he talk about a black driver called Tawfiq who drove a lime green Rolls-Royce? Why don’t I remember him from the time I worked as a guard at the palace gate? Could he have come after me or before me? I don’t know. Anxious thoughts went around and around in the mind of this Bedouin fleeing from the violence of the city. In the desert you can see your enemy in front of you, he thought, and you can take him on in a fair contest. But the curse of the city, which is no different from Hell, is that you struggle against unknown enemies, enemies you can’t see with your naked eye. Can we struggle against the firewood of Hell that devours us whether we are decent or wicked? I don’t think so.

  In that same waiting room Turad pursued his memories, like a puppy chasing its wagging tail. The scene of the two of them, him and Nahar, was still before his eyes, buried up to their necks in the gloomy Nafud desert. It occurred to him that the red swathes of sand, made even redder by the setting sun, were no different from the vermilion pits of Hell.

  The drops of sweat trickling through their hair and down their necks were not for fear that they might die of thirst while they stood buried in the remorseless sand, but rather because they sensed
that the moment of vengeance had arrived. Why not? For the signs were appearing gradually, from the shafallah bushes that crept around them but did not give a damn about their fate, to the wind, which did not keep their human scent to itself but intentionally cast it abroad to every wild beast in the wilderness. All that remained now was for the beasts to appear. They would not protect them from afar, nor contemplate the spectacle of their awesome strength and courage, but feast upon their warm and waiting flesh.

  Here is the hoary wolf trotting down from the rocky outcrop overlooking the Shafallah Trail, sweeping the ground with his muzzle for the smell of man that drifts out tantalizingly over the sand. How many times had that wolf accompanied Turad on his forages and battles, and nights spent by the ghada fire, as he roasted the game he’d caught with his own hands? The wolf would spend the evening close by him, and then, when Nahar tossed him a piece of the prey, he’d pick it up in his teeth and hurry off into the night, only to reappear the next morning.

  This time Turad’s hands wouldn’t be lighting the fire. They wouldn’t be turning the meat as it cooked, or tossing the wolf his share. This time Turad was a prisoner with no right to defend himself, like one tied to the tent pole as words of rebuke rained down onto his face, his chest, and his stomach—onto every part of his body. All he could do was spit out blood, sadness, and bitter defeat.

  The wolf came. Nahar whispered in undisguised terror and a broken voice. The wolf was a few steps away, walking like a blind man led by the sense of smell. When he saw their heads protruding above the cruel sand, he moved his body back a little and lowered his head toward the ground, as if he wished to conceal himself from his prey. He observed them for a moment before moving forward, his belly almost touching the sand. He froze awhile in front of Nahar, and looked into his eyes, a keen, cruel look; he did not avert his glare for a second. Suddenly he pounced and struck with his front leg. Nahar screamed as he pulled his face away. The wolf moved in with fangs unleashed like death and tore at him. Nahar howled as he struggled to move his face from the wolf’s onslaught. He howled till the sand turned pale, and the acacia trees wept far away, and the shafallah bushes closed their eyes and shrunk back in shame, and the sand tried to release its grip on their bodies, but there was no time to free them from a starving desert wolf.

  Portions of Nahar’s plump face began to disappear. The wolf tore away his left cheek and then bit off his nose amid screams that uprooted the desert trees with grief. His shouting caused the pastures, the water holes and ravines, and the wadis to pray for him. The awshaz trees spread their branches toward the heavens in supplication. The lizards and scorpions, and the birds hovering in the sky and sleeping in their rocky nests, beseeched for intercession, but heaven did not stir, for it was immersed in a profound and overflowing slumber.

  The moment the wolf devoured Nahar’s mouth and lips, and snatched the tip of his tongue, the sacred screaming stopped. When the beast removed the windpipe with his incisors, Nahar’s head slumped heavily to one side like a ripe fruit hanging ponderously from a branch, and then fell lifeless and discarded. But his spirit flew howling through the desert night, striking the trees, sand, and rocks, weeping, pursuing the caravans, travelers, and hajjis, questioning them, pulling the tails of the camels, surrounding the men, and weeping. Upward toward the distant heavens his soul soared, screaming at the smiling sleeping stars, extinguishing their glow with its hands. The stars were no longer lanterns adorning the night sky. Nahar’s soul had put them out as it fled across the wilderness and through the heavens revealed in their nakedness.

  With his oppressive hunger sated, the wolf circled the remains of Nahar while Turad, terrified, gushed sweat from his head. Turad had decided inside himself not to scream or howl or utter a single word. What would be the point? He closed his eyes and tried to sow composure in his heart. The wolf heaved his sluggish body around Turad while Turad waited, eyes shut tight, for a blow to take off his face, a swipe with a cruel razor-sharp claw, the bite of teeth with points like spears.

  During that wait, while Turad’s eyes were closed, he smelled the wolf right next to him, he felt the breath from its nostrils as it sniffed his face, and he felt its soft fur touch his neck just above the level of the sand. Slowly, cautiously, Turad opened his eyes and saw the wolf’s head nestled on the ground just under his chin as it dozed, resting as one does who has just emerged from a long and taxing battle.

  For a moment his eyes remained lowered toward the grave-faced wolf that hovered on the boundary between sleep and wakefulness. Then he stared up at the distant sky, muttering prayers of fear, hope, and dread. He waited a long time for the moment of perdition, for the wolf slumbered on, the exhaustion having sapped his strength. He could not get the image of Nahar out of his mind, as his face ducked and dodged the vicious onslaught of the wolf ’s incisors. His howling and screaming and terrible weeping still echoed in Turad’s ears. Sadness and grief welled up in his heart, and tears amassed deep inside him, rose up into his throat, and formed into a flood beneath his eyelids. Turad struggled to contain them so as not to wake the sleeping wolf, but he could not hold out, and just before midnight the water began to gather in his eyes. He tried to imprison it inside the duct, tried excruciatingly to prevent the trembling tear from tumbling from his eye, but…

  It was a decisive and terrible moment when the tear emerged. Slipping from his eye, it moved slowly down the side of his nose, slid over his dry cheek, and trickled around the edge of his mustache before it dripped suddenly, tantalizingly, onto the wolf’s face. The beast awoke with a start and bared his teeth like shining swords. In a flash he had torn off Turad’s left ear from the root and was chewing it in his mouth. Then he rose to his feet and withdrew a few paces into the night.

  Turad’s unexpected scream as the wolf snatched his left ear roused the animals and the scorpions and the snakes in the sand. The noise was enough to send the sated wolf on its way, nonchalantly munching the plucked ear like a rose in the hand of a frivolous and playful youth.

  The wolf would not be gone forever. He simply had departed into the desert night to search out a place suitable for a vigilant and vicious wolf to take a nap. As soon as the whiteness of dawn appeared in the east, he would bounce down from his rocky outcrop and head back toward Shafallah Trail to kick off his day with a meal fit for the king of the wild lands, master of the ravines and wadis.

  I spent the whole night shifting my body inside the sand, bending my wrists in an effort to free them from the rope with which the dogs had bound them. Those dogs of the hajj go to Mecca to pray when they don’t possess even the decency or generosity of spirit to pardon or forgive. Aaah, I wish they’d killed us with their swords, or shot us and spared us the grisly torture. “We don’t want to stain our hands with their blood when it is our intention to perform the pilgrimage,” the emir of the caravan had said. What pilgrimage, when you put us slowly to death after unimaginable torment? The whole night I fought to free myself. The one who had tied me up had been in a hurry after he had spent so long on Nahar. He had tied Nahar up tightly, but the caravan was about to move off, so he tied my hands hastily as he pushed me into the hole and shoveled in the sand. Just before dawn I had freed my hands from the rope. I began to squirm about in the pit and, slowly but surely, I began to extricate myself. As the sun emerged to light up a new day, my entire right arm was already on top of the sand, and it was only a matter of moments before I had my whole body out.

  I swear to Allah, I longed to see that wolf. If he’d shown up at that moment I’d have jumped on him, dragged him to the ground, and ripped his liver out. I’d have made a piss pot out of his hide, and used it every time I felt the urge. These thoughts ran through Turad’s mind as he walked toward the tribes that knew him, but they did not acknowledge him and refused to believe his story. His missing ear became cause for amusement among them, and the brunt of their jokes.

  That was the beginning of a life of humiliation. They insulted his dignity, his fearlessness, and
his manhood. He abandoned the desert altogether and left its pastures and plains that he loved, and the trees and caves that had sheltered him and loved him back. He went into the city, whose secrets and machinations he did not know, for he was used to seeing a clearly defined enemy in front of him with whom he could join in combat like a real man. He worked as a laborer, and as a builder on the palaces at al-Marba, and then he really degraded himself, working side by side with the city’s riffraff. After that he became a soldier and regained some of his self-esteem, working as a guard, first at a bank, until the bank hired a private security firm and he lost his job, and then as a guard at the entrance to a palace before he was dismissed. Then he tried begging, but at that point all he really wanted to do was go back to the desert and take by force with his right hand everything he wanted. “It’s nobler to be a thief or a highwayman than to be a beggar,” he said to himself.

  After he’d experienced life wandering the streets, he tried to compete with the Indian and Bangladeshi car washers. He was ashamed to wash cars outside shopping malls, and he thought a parking lot at a ministry would be more respectable. As he splashed the tires of a black BMW with soapy water and scrubbed them with his brush, he glanced at the building from time to time and thought, If I were the minister of hajj, I’d search out the emirs of all the hajj caravans who’ve been along the Shafallah Trail, the Narrow Trail, and the Thorny Trail, and all the other routes, and I’d bury them alive in the sand. If I were the hajj minister I’d locate all the captains who’ve been involved in the trade in human beings like Tawfiq, Jawhar, Anbar, and others, and who’ve sold them like animals, and I’d drown them in the Red Sea.