There was a Chinese alcoholic named Yanyan, who had a room near mine in the Kuala Lumpur hotel where I stayed. He would knock on the door of my room every night for no apparent reason. I had made him an entrepreneur visiting a country that lacked the wherewithal for drunkenness. I depicted him undergoing the distressing complications of alcohol withdrawal. Now I would leave him dangling as well.
I closed the folder of my thoughts and entered the world of Facebook in an attempt to forget what was happening around me. I stumbled upon Najma’s traces. She had switched out her personal photo for one that showed her without a headscarf and with her hair permed. She had written a number of lines about her event with Professor Hazaz. As usual there were hundreds of likes and comments. Some of her friends criticized her for not inviting them to the event. I added my “like” and wrote: “What a splendid evening!” I quickly clicked on another page which seemed like a treasure to me, of a girl calling herself Nariman. That might actually be her name or perhaps it was a fantasy nom de web for a world that was both open and frequently conservative. On her page she had assembled friends who could never have assembled in real life. Among those friends were bearded and turbaned men who had fallen head over heels for the temptation she represented. They referred to her as “Virtuous Sister” and competed with each other to describe qualities of which they were ignorant and to write what they referred to as chaste love poetry about the eyes in the picture posted showing a girl wearing a niqab that revealed only her eyes. She wrote verses, discussions, and aphorisms and advocated virtue as well. Her friends included enigmas like Bird Milk Vendor, the Anti-Christ, Mobile Charger, Tartura Sorceress of the Happy Home, Wounding Breeze, and I’m the Chameleon. Many wrote silly remarks, discussed their frustrations, or were content to add a swift “like”.
I read a new poem by someone calling himself Sheikh Ma‘ruf. It celebrated the large eyes on a face that was radiant even when covered. There was a pressing call from a person – Love-Struck Rural Guy – for her to remove the veil from her picture and simply wear a headscarf to show her piety or to send him an altered photo in a personal email because he had a surprise for her. Since a clear picture of a Kerry Cleaning Machine was at the center of the page for no apparent reason, someone had written: “We need that to clean our hearts.”
I smiled and left this unfamiliar atmosphere. I returned to my own page and wrote: “Telepathy.” I didn’t expect any comments. I closed the page on that strange world, filled with everything a novelist needs.
Suddenly I remembered the folded page in Hunger’s Hopes – page 120 – and began to rummage through my shelves for the novel, now that the state of neutrality that had seized hold of me after midnight had lifted. I was sure I still had a number of copies somewhere but couldn’t think where I had put them. I searched my living room, where most of my books were shelved, with mounting anxiety. Then I moved to the two rooms I use as branch libraries. I discovered all the works I have written, even those I have dropped from my vita and never mention in statements or interviews. I didn’t find my most recent novel, although I had to have at least one copy of it. Perhaps I had given all the copies to my friends. Perhaps I had put them some place I couldn’t remember. Perhaps I was daydreaming and had never written a novel called Hunger’s Hopes. I finished my search of the house, looking even in my bedroom where only my slumber or insomnia intrude, although I was certain it wouldn’t be there. I went outside to search the car, where I triumphantly found two copies in the boot.
I lit a cigarette and impatiently opened the book to Nishan’s page. I began to read noncommittally, like any neutral person without a vested interest in the topic. I wanted to check where Nishan actually was, even though I could almost recall the entire novel and could replay it in my mind, as I had at the Social Harmony Club. He himself had told me where to find him in the novel.
I read:
For the second year in a row, something happened to Nishan Hamza during August, which was hot and humid despite an occasional, autumnal cloudburst, to shake his stability and ambition. It was after Nishan filed his application for admission to the national university, just when it seemed that he would be admitted and that his ambition to study law and become a judge would be realized. Many of his acquaintances and neighbors in that neglected district had mocked his desire, asking, “Why law school, Nishan?”
He had replied with a laugh, “In order to prosecute Sahla the hairdresser for oiling women’s hair.”
In the district, people were organizing a number of voluntary campaigns at the same time. One set out to spruce up the district at the behest of residents who knew nothing about sprucing up besides the words. A campaign against disturbing the public order was led by Mas‘ud the Nurse, who was without doubt the greatest threat to public order in the district. They entrusted to Nishan the leadership of a third, exceptional campaign against envy.
But who was there to envy in this impoverished place? What was there to envy among people who were alike even with regard to constipation and diarrhea and to the way they were ground between the jaws of misery and hunger?
“Just lead it, Nishan.”
He led the campaign but discovered – as the low, mud-brick houses or the dwellings made of random scraps of corrugated metal did too – that everyone in the district was envious and envied. One man envied another his tunic, which was washed and starched, while someone else envied the first man his shorts, which didn’t have a single rip or patch. One fellow envied a beggar his mellifluous voice that attracted almsgivers, but the beggar envied him his full head of hair. One woman envied her neighbor for being able to light a cook-fire that day, and the neighbor envied her for having a son who was taking enlistment exams and might become a soldier.
Nishan was engrossed in this campaign, which he directed without excitement or passion. Together with members of his team, he strove to sift people’s souls thoroughly to remove envious feelings from his district’s residents forever.
No one would ever envy anyone else there again. If the existence of such a feeling proved inevitable, it should be one-sided – all the residents might be envied by strangers who didn’t and wouldn’t live in the district.
During the past year Nishan had experienced some unusual symptoms that simple people attributed to jinn they said were breeding inside him. Some people who healed with amulets attempted to evict this tribe of jinn but failed. When he became truly dangerous and started making ragdolls packed with explosives and lobbing them at pedestrians in the capital’s congested streets, he was arrested and ended up tied to a worn-out bed in a psychiatric hospital, where he was treated with injections of tranquilizers and electric shock therapy. There he fell in love with a nurse named Yaqutah, who came from a background comparable to his. Her tribe had African roots like his. This nurse lavished care on him, told him about herself, and allowed him to say whatever he wanted to her without interruption. Nishan seemed to make a full recovery and after his release strove to maintain contact with the woman who had befriended him during his delirium and fever. He visited her at the hospital, watched for her on the roads she traversed, and rode public buses with her, conversing with her all the way. She frequently loaned him money that he was unable to refuse.
Now that he was able to love freely, he was considering marriage, the way a normal person would, conducting himself in his neighborhood circumspectly, and spearheading the campaign against envy. Eventually his symptoms returned, though, and he became agitated, suffered from nightmares, heard voices calling him, and searched for means to hurt other people to ensure that he himself would be hurt. At moments when he was thinking clearly, he wept alone in a tumble-down, corrugated metal house, on the streets, or in any dusty nook he found to rest.
The page with the folded corner ended with a clear convergence between real and fictitious elements. I interpreted it the way any reader would: as an SOS tossed into my life’s waters, muddying them.
Night had ended and the morning’s raw materials wer
e in evidence: the sounds of vendors selling bread and milk door-to-door, of school pupils, of car horns, and of strident jackhammers. I retreated to my bedroom, to which I brought insomnia and grief, and tried to avoid thinking – but failed.
– 7 –
At eight a.m. sharp, not feeling sleepy in the slightest, I installed myself at the home of my old friend Abd al-Qawi Jum‘a, who was commonly known as “the Shadow”. He lived in an excellent house, constructed of bricks painted a gleaming gray, in an upscale district called Al-Zahra, near the airport.
Abd al-Qawi the Shadow, who was eighty-nine, was an actor, lyricist, and playwright. He hadn’t aged, and the fountain of his creativity had never stopped gushing. He became famous for stirring songs he composed in critical periods of the nation’s history and for his satirical and lachrymose plays. His drama Straw Blood, which he produced in the mid-1980s at the National Youth Theatre, where it ran for an entire year, was a masterpiece that people have never forgotten. Nine years ago he dramatized my third novel, Well Secret, under that same name. At the time it enjoyed an excellent reception.
I needed to consult the Shadow and draw on the experience of a master and the wisdom of a sheikh regarding the topic that had robbed me of sleep; I knew it would keep me awake nights and prevent me from reading or writing till I resolved it.
I broached the topic of Nishan Hamza Nishan, the man I had unconsciously written up in Hunger’s Hopes, with the Shadow directly, without lengthy preambles. I was obliged to drink his bitter coffee and to share his breakfast, which consisted of two boiled eggs, with no salt or spices. I also had to drink a glass of sour orange juice that I knew for certain would give me indigestion and create acid reflux in my esophagus. I was also forced to participate in his exercises that were designed to strengthen his core abdominals and that he ran through without showing any sign of fatigue or panting while he was stretched out beside me. He thumped me roughly on my belly every time I slacked off because I was tired.
Once we finally finished his obligatory morning routine, as he referred to it, and he allowed me to breathe normally and light a cigarette, the Shadow seemed intrigued by the case. He asked me to repeat my tale in fluent literary language as if it were one of my novels. I didn’t understand why he requested this and couldn’t comply, because for me writing a novel is a type of insanity I cannot perform in the presence of an observer, not even that of a creative genius like the Shadow. In any case, though, I repeated the story.
“You know,” he observed, “this tale reminds me of my old play “An Elderly Demon in the Republican Palace,” which landed me in prison at the end of the 1950s. Writer, do you remember that play?”
Actually I didn’t remember it and had never before heard it mentioned as one of his plays or by another author. This was quite simply because I had not been born then and did not remember it being published in book form.
Without thinking and without sensing that a trap had been set for me, I said to humor an old man’s youthful memory, “Yes . . . yes. I remember it most definitely.”
As his eyes sparkled gleefully, he said in a sharp but not offensive tone, “You certainly do remember it because you laughed when you watched it in your mother’s belly. You clapped loudly at the end of the performance.”
I felt a bit embarrassed and wanted to apologize by explaining my conduct as having been caused by preoccupation with Nishan and by my eagerness to hear his take on this conundrum. The Shadow, however, did not allow me to do this. He waved his hand before my face, just as I was about to apologize, and continued, “It’s not your fault . . . That great play, which was the first text the dictatorship brazenly criticized throughout the entire country, which shook people’s confidence in their rulers, and which sparked a vanguard of street protests and even unrest in government circles, was one I absolutely did not write myself. Matthew, an Anglican priest, sent it to me in twenty-six consecutive dreams. I would awake each day and write down what had come to me in the dream without addition or deletion. Don’t be surprised that Nishan has sent you his story and that he – not you – fiddled with some of its details. Do you understand now that this matter is ordinary, not astonishing?”
I suddenly felt that the Shadow had moved beyond the vigor of youth and graduated to the crustiness of old age. I was about to express my opinion when to my surprise I sensed that even if he had just made up the tale, the circumstances were parallel. As I mentioned, I had never heard of that play and – now that I think of it – am sure I had never heard of Father Matthew either. I don’t know whether a real person was imitating a real situation or whether this was a playwright’s invention.
I asked, “What’s the relationship between the stories of Matthew and of Nishan Hamza Nishan?”
I absolutely hadn’t recorded dreams and had been conscious throughout my creative hysteria, observing my normal rituals – both admirable and vile – while I wrote Hunger’s Hopes. I have noted that it flowed forth with no impediment worth mentioning. Perhaps that was the nature of the similarity between the dream Abd al-Qawi Jum‘a could remember and the forgotten dream that insinuated itself into my mind while I was writing.
Abd al-Qawi the Shadow had risen from his recumbent position on the rope bed and stepped youthfully into a room that he used as an office and that overlooked the courtyard where we were sitting. As he left, he told me that an idea had struck him, even though it was before his scheduled writing time, which normally began at ten. He would just jot the idea down quickly and return. What astonished me about the Shadow was how entirely convinced he was that he was brilliant and world-renowned and the master of whatever situation he found himself in (or didn’t). Consequently, he was treating me now, despite my age and fame, as if I were a novice who was wasting his time. I always remind myself when I meet with him that he is much older than I am and was a luminous star when I was merely a myopic toddler who could write nothing besides his own name. Though it’s true that I haven’t been influenced by him and haven’t written drama or poetry while he hasn’t written a novel, all the same I consider him my master and the master of my whole generation.
Half a minute later he returned shouting, “I found inches of dust in my office, and the sentence flew away. I’ll remember it later when they clean the office . . . Linda! Ni‘ma! . . . Dust makes thinking impossible.”
He resumed his recumbent position on the rope cot. It was droopy, and some of the ropes had pulled loose. I was smoking, and my question may have been waiting at the tip of my tongue. Then it leapt out: “You didn’t tell me how Matthew’s and Nishan Hamza’s stories are related. Did the priest sign his name? Did he know the characters, live with them, and then send them in the dream?”
“No . . . I really didn’t expect this question from you, Writer. What is the relationship between a Christian cleric and a dictatorship? How could he play himself in a story criticizing the dictatorship? I said that he composed a play about the dictatorship in his mind and sent it to me so I could write it down on paper. He was in telepathic communication with me, without either of us realizing that, and this is exactly how Nishan Hamza communicated with you. The difference is that Father Matthew wasn’t personally involved with the fate of the characters; it made no difference to him whether the Republican Palace collapsed on the heads of the people working there. Nishan, however, came to you to change his destiny. You wrote in your novel that he dies of glandular cancer, and he doesn’t want to die. He can live with schizophrenia and deal with it, since he won’t die from it. But he’s terrified of dying of cancer and is begging you to help him. Do you understand now?”
I understood some things, but other matters still escaped my comprehension. I told myself but not the Shadow this.
Why hadn’t Father Matthew tried to record his play on paper himself, since he was the author? Why had Nishan tampered with details of his own story? Why hadn’t he ended it with schizophrenia since he feared dying? There were no answers to these questions, which even lacked a framework of l
ogic within which they could be answered.
Another question that I considered extremely important was now smoldering at the tip of my tongue: “How did you know it was Father Matthew who sent you that play telepathically rather than someone else? How did you establish that?”
Abd al-Qawi the Shadow laughed till his tight core abdominals quivered, and he raised himself from his recumbent position to sit upright on the bed. He was barefoot and his feet were slender but had some ugly scabs. He reached for the coffeemaker to pour each of us a cup, but found it empty.
He replied, “This is a secret I won’t share with you. I haven’t disclosed it to anyone. I promised Father Matthew fifty years ago I wouldn’t tell anyone. Just two days ago I visited his grave and renewed my vow. What I want you to do is to show as much concern for your co-author as you possibly can. I took a special interest in the priest until he died. I actively supported him, because he added to my vita the important distinction of serving as a political prisoner.”
I selected – from what I sensed would prove an endless chain – a final question: “Did you attempt to figure out how all that transpired? Did you arrive at a theory that explains his telepathic communication with you?”
Telepathy Page 5
