Carnival

by Rawi Hage

I can’t remember the exact name. I believe it has something to do with a lotus, or was it Confucius. I passed my test fair and square. I looked behind me, hoping to see Lucian again.

  Lucian will be back. Finish your juice . . . You know, my brother was a genius as a kid. Sometimes he thinks he’s a fortune teller, and sometimes a contortionist. I say it is this town that drives everyone crazy. You’re from here?

  No. I mean, I’ve been here long enough.

  So you’ve lived through a few Carnivals.

  Yes, many.

  It may be good for business but it’s bad for my brother’s head. When they start setting up for the Carnival, he goes back to his fantasies. The rest of the year he barely speaks. What story did he tell you this time? Was it about his escape from the hospital or the story of fighting the beast? That’s his favourite.

  The hospital story, I said. I have to go.

  Well, thank you for your help, and here is the fare.

  Thank you for the juice, I said.

  Just then Lucian showed up, elated and restless. He moved back and forth around the pool table. Cyprian took off his jacket and handed it to his brother.

  Here, Lucian, show the taxi driver your escape trick.

  Lucian took his brother’s jacket and wrapped himself inside it. He crossed his arms and moved his upper body from right to left, back and forth, back and forth, exactly as if he were trying to liberate himself from a straitjacket.

  It saddened me and I left.

  ACT TWO

  AISHA

  AFTER THE BEARDED lady’s death, I left her flat and walked, aimless and alone in this new land. It seemed that nothing chained me to the cages of this world anymore. Even wanderers cease to march one day. I walked towards the carnival tents and passed between their arcades and games. I picked up a gun and I shot the floating wooden ducks, and then I filled the clown’s mouth with water from my pistol until the balloons filled and burst with sounds of loss and laughter. I walked with a book in my pocket and a hat on my head, and I won every game and marched with a few stuffed animals who hung from my shoulders and consoled me. I picked up another gun, but before I aimed at the bull’s eye, the man inside the booth asked me if I was looking for a job.

  Maybe, I said.

  I see that you know the game.

  Yes, I know.

  Grow up around the tents?

  I nodded.

  You can help me for the season, he said.

  I agreed.

  No need to pocket anything, he said. I will pay you fairly.

  We both nodded because we knew that the games were rigged and that whoever worked inside these cages would steal first and fight or take flight later.

  And that is how I met Otto. He was working the cage and he hired me.

  At night, we shared a tent. When it got dark, he would dress up, take a pickup truck, and leave for the city. He never asked me to come. And I never asked where he went. I would open the stand and he would sleep until the afternoon.

  Once, early in the morning, I stepped out of the tent and walked towards the bonfire to prepare a coffee and salvage a piece of bread. I saw a woman sitting next to the fire with a blanket on her shoulders and her hair filled with beads.

  I nodded to her. She nodded back and we both looked in silence at the coals glowing from beneath the ashes.

  You must be Fly, she said.

  Yes, I replied.

  I am Otto’s friend Aisha.

  A beautiful name, I said.

  She smiled. Otto tells me that you are a reader.

  Otto noticed.

  Otto likes you. You two have more in common than you think. Do you know where he goes every night?

  Never asked, I said.

  He comes to my place. He sits and he works until early in the morning.

  What kind of work?

  Activism. She said this and nothing more.

  I made coffee and gave her a cup, and before I left, she said to me, Take good care of yourself, Fly. I am sure we will meet again.

  WINTER CAME AND the tents came down and the stuffed animals hibernated and the guns ceased to pop and the water clowns closed their mouths for the season, and as I rolled my last shirt into my bag, Otto asked me, Do you have a place to stay?

  I will walk for now and decide later.

  Aisha told me to tell you that we could lodge you for a while, he said.

  When we arrived in Aisha’s neighbourhood, Otto pointed out the apartment building. We carried our bags up the stairs.

  Aisha kissed me and said, It is a small place but we will make do. You guys relax and catch me later. Otto, are you helping tonight?

  He nodded.

  Fly, you are welcome to come and help too, Aisha said. The ladies at the centre would be happy to see you. And she winked at me, smiled, and left.

  Otto rolled a joint and passed it to me. Have you smoked before?

  Yeah, I said.

  Started at an early age?

  Yeah, I said, and took a long puff and held the smoke in my chest.

  Otto put on a jazz LP, then he opened the cupboard and took out a bottle of vodka. Here, comrade, he said, this glass is for you. Jazz and vodka, the fuel of resistance.

  In the evening we walked down the street to a school, and Otto told me that Aisha was a social worker and that, two nights each week, she volunteered in a soup kitchen. In the basement of the school, I saw her in an apron serving food to a line of adults and children. The children were loud and their voices echoed against the low ceiling and the wide floor. Some were running in circles, others were fighting over toys, and the rest sat at little tables and ate in silence and with big appetites. Otto knew many people and he introduced me around. He then took two aprons, hung one around my neck, and tied the other around his waist, and we both stood behind tables and served food.

  Aisha kept smiling at me and she passed behind me and touched my back and said that the servers ate last, and then, in a lower voice, she added, It is all you can eat. And the ladies behind us laughed and repeated, All you can eat.

  I STAYED WITH Otto and Aisha for a few months. They never complained and never asked me to leave. Otto worked on his causes. I would hear him typing through the night. He alternated between the couch and Aisha’s bed, and I would sleep in the small room behind the kitchen. Aisha and I exchanged book titles; she was also a reader, like the rest of us. On my birthday, she bought me a cake and a book of short stories by Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks. And then I blew out a few candles and she turned up the music and invited me to dance.

  Aisha and I did the rub-up dance and she held me from behind and rubbed her thighs against my buttocks, and then we switched and I did the same. And Otto sat at the table with a faint smile on his face and drank vodka and watched us dance, his face full of melancholy.

  And Aisha called to Otto, Come on lover, step down, show us your moves.

  And Otto stood up and danced and Aisha laughed again.

  ONCE WHEN OTTO was away, I lay in bed and lowered my zipper and reached for my erection and started to fantasize and pound, and then the door opened and Aisha came in. She saw me and said, No need to be alone, move over, and she took off her shirt and lay her hand on my chest and kissed my neck. After we were done, a fear came to me and a sense of shame and sadness made me want to cry. I said to Aisha, Otto will be here any minute.

  She replied, Otto won’t mind. Just lock the door and come back to bed and everything will be fine.

  MARY

  EVERY DAY, I choose a book or two from the massive collection in my apartment and take them with me in my taxi. I may have neglected to tell you that my apartment is filled with books, towers of books stretching up in all directions. When a woman enters my house, a tunnel of books welcomes her, a carnival of heroes bounces from every corner, and I lead her str
aight through the welcoming applause of writers and mice.

  I sit on books, sleep on them, breathe them. I arrange them by character, the colour of their skies, and the circumference of their authors’ heads. For instance, James Joyce, because of the size of his skull, is located at the entrance. As for Rousseau, he comes towards the end, right at the window, and that is for two reasons. First, his slim head size, and yes, that is indeed in accordance with my own empirical measurements (to use the British norms of philosophy), and second, because of his ever-constant need to relieve himself and to be close to nature. There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian thinking.

  In short, I have a system that defies every methodology of documentation ever made or conceived. A library that contains the world, as the blind Argentinean would say. A true mystery that I keep to myself and share only with the likes of Mary, the lover of books.

  One night I met Mary in the utmost embarrassing circumstances. Mary, sweet Mary, innocent Mary, Marrrrry, my Mary . . . she took a ride with her husband in my taxi.

  I was working the university side of town, where young college girls chew gum and hail rides to the dancing clubs. On Thursday nights, they come bouncing out in their tight miniskirts and squeeze themselves into the back seat, all talking at the same time, all sharing the same pack of gum. They block my rearview mirror with the redness of their lips, the magnitude of their ever-expanding tropics of hair. At red lights, they all stop their ruminations and strike seductive poses at the reflections of the store windows along the sides of the streets. And the leader of the pack usually sits next to the driver, calling me Mr. Taxi, inquiring about my wasted life, laughing at the clown figurines that occupy my dashboard like drunk toy soldiers in colourful hats. The irritating popping of their chewing gum, the giggling of the chorus in the back, all this shames my tragic path through the busiest street in town, chanting, You will be stuck on Lenaia Street, Sophocles! You will be stuck with these tarty little monkeys giving oral birth to balloons in the shape of apocalyptic nuclear mushroom clouds.

  It makes me want to fly as I sit stranded, wishing for a titanic bubble to lift and raise the car up and take us above this street of loud music, past the parade of teenaged boys driving with hands that dangle in the manner of caged animals, their menacing eyes scouring the long thighs above spiked heels.

  Mary had sweet legs and thick glasses and she was crying when her man forced himself into my cab beside her. The first thing I said to her was, Is everything okay, ma’am? And her man looked at me in the mirror and said, Yes, everything is okay. Just drive, driver.

  To where? I asked.

  Take Highway 18 for now, and then I will show you the way.

  When a woman cries in my boat, I turn into a sad infant and then a lover of the high, far seas, a daring buccaneer. On these seas, the lower decks of merchants’ ships are filled with slaves and captured women. And I heard the whips from behind me lashing at Mary.

  All you care about is your damn books, the man was saying. I need to go out, I need to see people. Books, books, fuck books. You spend all your time reading. And you have nothing to say to my friends, nothing to say to me. You sit there with your passive air of superiority. I am tired of this, do you understand?

  I looked in my mirror and saw Mary crying. And when the man started to shout in her face and gesture with ominous hands, I pulled the car over to the side of the road. We had reached the edge of the city and were about to enter the suburbs with their flat houses and little gardens. And that is when I grabbed my thick feathered stick from beneath the seat and opened my door and opened his door and grabbed the hater of books by the sleeve, then by the collar, and I pulled him out of my car and pushed him down onto the pavement. I lifted my stick in the air and it fluttered in my hand and against the wind like a menacing bird quaking warnings not to cross, not to enter my rescuing arc, and I closed the doors and drove Mary away. It was raining that night; for days it hadn’t stopped raining. And I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw Mary’s husband defeated under the rain. And I thought, not all animals should have been saved from the deluge. Some should have drowned, without a doubt.

  Mary, sweet Mary, had no place to go to. So I suggested we go to my house.

  I don’t know you, she said.

  Mary, sweet Mary, I said, you have the same name as my mother the trapeze artist. I’ll offer you my bed and my books. The neighbours are all quiet at this hour; you will go to sleep among the pages of history. Have no fear. I’ll shelter you and then I’ll drive away. I’ll leave you with many heroes, I’ll tear up the pages with villains’ names, I’ll let the old Spaniard on the skinny horse protect you from the swirling of menacing windmills and evil knights. I’ll send Sancho here for some Chinese and hot sauce from around the corner. And Mary, sweet Mary, please watch your head as you step in; the bookshelves are low and the spiders’ abodes can easily break.

  When Mary entered my apartment, she barely made it past the first shelf. She smiled and looked and turned pages of books that sprang from the ceiling of the complaining student beneath me, multiplied and tilted sideways by the eastern wind that blew from the Arabic and Persian section (I put them on the same shelves for the obvious historical reasons). Books fell like rain from above, books opened and closed like butterflies’ thighs. Books, she said. Look at all these books! And she laughed and walked among the garden of books, and then we took off our fig leaves and made love in the corner, where verses from heaven touched our bare, cracked asses that hopped and bounced like invading horses in holy lands. We flew out of the city and we landed on the page where Moses split the sea and the Jews marched between those suspended mountains of water, hovering, humming on both sides, and the poor expelled merchants wondered if Moses knew what the fuck he was doing. What if his hand got tired and he accidentally dropped his magic cane, or got distracted by a wet desert ass, or lost his sandals, or what if that lush single malt of a God changed his mind again and the fucking Red Sea closed in on them with its menstrual red liquid? There wouldn’t be any of them left. And a goy brother from New York, who was holding a big apple in his hand and who was in it for the ride, was heard saying: I hope the motherfucker, that basket river-floater, fucker of Pharaoh’s sisters and butcher of Baal the bull god, doesn’t fuck it up. And then, as the sea parted, the man from the hood declared, What happened? Shit, I ain’t crossing, fuck. Look how muddy the bottom is, full of crabs going sideways and jelly creatures and shit . . . our sandals will get tangled in all the algae . . . this lunatic of a fucker is taking us through a quagmire to claim a few olive trees and a herd of goats. Fuck it, I’ll just go back and apply for Egyptian citizenship and become a cosmopolitan landed immigrant, I’ll sell papyrus on the sidewalk, drive a chariot for hire, or work on them pyramids, yo.

  When I was about to go back to my car beneath the building, Mary asked me to stay.

  She cried all night and I read poetry to her from a collection that I swiftly pulled from under my mattress. I climbed the walls and, at the risk of sending everything crumbling down on our heads, reached for funny passages in books. I read to her from Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude and she laughed at the character of the uncle, the drunken train operator who rides his train round and round his garden. But then Mary became sad at the passage where books are pulped and destroyed and, like Hrabal, who failed to save all those characters from the stomping of the pulp machine, we went and opened many cans of beer and drank all night and then we kissed, read, and cried until the Kleenex box next to my bed was nearly empty. So I went down to my car and reached for the box on my dashboard and I noticed that the meter was still running. I stopped it and said to myself, One day, I’ll make her husband pay for this.

  LINDA

  MARY LEFT THE next afternoon, and I got in my car and drove downtown. There was a traffic jam because of a crane blocking the way. A man was tying up a banner that said WELCOME T
O THE BEST CARNIVAL IN THE WORLD. It is that time of year, said a taxi driver whose car was stuck next to mine, and then he asked me if he could get through because he was late for a house call. I let him pass, but then I saw him pick up the first customer on the street.

  It is that time of the year when everyone in this city becomes covered in slimy greed, and the whole market, where the Carnival takes place, becomes a frenzy for the seasonal sellers, the fishers of coins from kids’ pockets, the suppliers of intoxicating barrels. Here come the thieves, the hooligans, the charlatans, the sausage makers, and the walking dolls! Let’s not forget the walking dolls . . .

  At eight in the evening, I picked up two out-of-towners, typical beer-bingeing sports fans come to watch their team play in a foreign land. These empty-headed chicken-wing eaters are all the same. When they win, they get trashed and celebrate on the streets, shouting with joy, We won! But when their team loses, they need to fuck something, or someone, so they shout, Where are the whores? Take me to the whores!

  So I told them I would take them to the Corner, as the red-light district here is called.

  I drove to the block where my friend Linda usually stands and I spotted her right away. I rolled down my window and called to her, saying, Ms. Pleasure, please, this way. She recognized me, winked at me, and leaned in to deliver her opening phrase, which included the words you boys, looking, and fun.

  Linda looked appealing in her contained, voluptuous way. She was on the plump side, and her thighs stretched and squeezed within the peripheries of a leopard-print skirt that just managed to contain it all. Her pointy heels made her thighs look longer and her shoulders wider. And with her large cleavage, her wavy black hair, and her Spaniard’s eyes, round as two big black olives, she looked like she had burst from a place where gypsies had met Arabs and fucked and done the stomp dance for a few centuries.

  She opened the passenger door and sat in the front next to me, talking to the boys behind. One of them asked if she had a friend who could join them. Just around the corner, sweetheart, Linda said and smiled. So I drove there. And we stopped. She called her friend over, and a woman came and leaned in the back window. She was a bit rundown, missing a few teeth from either her pimp’s repetitive punches or the toll of heroin use through the years. No good, said the boys in the back. Let’s find another one.