“No . . .” the Shadow replied sharply. “I didn’t feel I needed to.”
A brown-complexioned girl with small breasts and short hair, which was massed on the crown of her head, appeared from inside the house. She was presumably either a maid or a family member. Carrying a feather duster, she headed to the room the Shadow used as an office. I had entered that room dozens of times. In my early days I had scouted what he was reading, having a look at the books lying around with pages turned down or folded. I occasionally borrowed a book that appealed to me, without asking permission, and then either returned it or not. Last year when we were sitting in his office, he handed me a short story written out by hand on glossy paper. He said it was by a young woman and asked me for my candid opinion of it.
I had taken the piece of paper and, glancing at it, discovered that it was supercilious Najma’s story “The Neighbors’ Goat”. She must have brought it to him after she was angered by my negative opinion of it. I read it again carefully while he watched.
Then I observed, “Not fully cooked and lacks a lot of the requisite spices.”
“Right,” the Shadow responded as his old man’s face glowed with a smile. “That’s my opinion too. But that’s not what I told the author. I’m not in the habit of expressing blunt opinions to women – not even when they write about manicures, shampoo, and Wella beauty products.”
“So how do you avoid the potholes of their insistence on hearing your opinion? Do you flatter them?”
Abd al-Qawi the Shadow laughed, revealing teeth that were uniformly white and shiny. He must have a full set of dentures; no teeth, not even ones borrowed from jackals or hyenas, remain a bright, gleaming white and completely uniform on both jaws up to the age of eighty-nine. The memory may retain its contents and the body, with daily exercise, may stay fit, but teeth, which are crude grinding machines, cannot remain that solid.
The Shadow responded, “I manifest naughty senility toward them: the tongue’s twaddle, my hands’ gestures, and my eyes’ lasciviousness. Then they leave me never to return.”
I had laughed as I pictured that poor girl, who loved her story and came to present it to an expert, only to be confronted by an old man flirting in a way she would never have imagined. I could picture Najma in that situation and felt like laughing some more.
“What about male authors? How do you deal with them?”
“I vanquish them by chattering on about a past that I invent from whole cloth and about my frustration with writing. They don’t knock on my door again after that.”
The brown girl emerged from the room; the feather duster in her hand was all red now. She must have used it to remove the dust that had caused the adventitious sentence to fly out of the Shadow’s head. He would enter his office now to begin his daily writing, which I knew would continue till three p.m. It was almost ten a.m., and I would not leave him time to feel anxious or to glance at his watch. I thanked him for his help, although he really hadn’t helped me much. He hadn’t told me anything that I had not already told myself in even greater detail when I considered Nishan’s enigma: that this was an SOS from a fearful man who was awaiting a response from me.
As I headed toward the door, I asked, “Should I send you a copy of Hunger’s Hopes? I’ve been preoccupied and haven’t sent you your copy. I know you haven’t read it yet.”
“No need for that,” he replied. “I borrowed my daughter Linda’s copy after she read it. She’ll certainly discuss it with you.”
He lifted the pillow he had been leaning on, and a copy of the novel with its covers ripped off lay there. A sliver of wood that served as a bookmark poked from it. He did not ask me to sign it for his daughter, Linda. This was one of my great complaints about the Shadow – that he did not acknowledge the practice of signing books. He accepted unsigned copies of books and never signed published copies of his plays for anyone.
I traversed the streets of the Zahra District, driving slowly while I read the numerous signboards, which had multiplied in an astonishing way in the last few years. They advertised liposuction clinics, modern dental clinics that offered dentures with Hollywood-actress smiles, hair salons that listed services including blow-drying, perms, and coloring, tinsmiths, barbers, attorneys, legal accountants, and purveyors of conjugal happiness crèmes and pomades that grew lost hair. One clinic was devoted to the care of Akita dogs, bull terriers, and bulldogs. Another offered compressed oxygen technology for diabetics’ injuries. It occurred to me that the entire country was selling something. I didn’t know, though, who could be consuming all this – certainly not Nishan Hamza or the other inhabitants of his peripheral district, which had been settled by migrants, watchmen, and low-paid laborers. They would never buy a crème for conjugal happiness or a pomade to re-grow hair.
I found myself forced to think about Nishan again, after having forgotten him for some minutes. I brooded about ways that my secluded life would need to change and about how I was to handle adopting this lunatic.
Did I feel guilty for having “written” him?
I didn’t know; it would have been unfair to expect me to feel guilty when I hadn’t stolen anyone’s particular characteristics. Something uncanny had organized it all and guided everything. I had released a novel that would neither enrich me nor add a new meteor or thrilling satellite to the universe.
Suddenly I caught sight of Professor Hazaz, the reflexology specialist whose lecture at the Social Harmony Club had so bored me that I had walked out only to be confronted by Nishan. Professor Hazaz, who was wearing a light green shirt and black trousers, climbed out of a late-model car – a red American Hummer – and glided swiftly into a white five-story building halfway down the main street. I looked up and down, taking in the whole building, and noticed a large sign on which was inscribed in elegant, sinuous letters: “Dr Sabir Hazaz, Specialist in Reflexology Medicine.”
I smiled in spite of myself on seeing the skill of a simple masseur – like Musamih, who drove a Mitsubishi Rosa bus for the public transport authority and who was one of Malikat al-Dar’s sons-in-law, and even by Umm Salama, who cooked and cleaned for me – practiced by this “Reflexologist” who drove an expensive Hummer, a brand that was virtually nonexistent in the country. On the other hand, an author who summoned and corralled ideas in his mind, where he reconfigured them before depositing them onto the pages of a difficult novel, might only too easily find himself entering prison or taking a one-way ride in a hearse.
I really did not envy Hazaz. The comparison between us was extraneous but inevitable for me at a moment when I was deciding whether I should continue to be a writer – plagued by the lunatic Nishan and other catastrophes – or return to my former career as a teacher of mathematics, the simplest principles of which I had forgotten and would be forced to review. I remembered that a man who used to manage an investment firm had once informed me that he loved my writing and wished to help me create a large and dependable income. All I had to do was shell out a small sum that I would watch grow before my very eyes; I wouldn’t believe it once I was transformed from a mere writer with limited resources into a wealthy capitalist. I handed over to him whatever I could spare for five years and waited. It came as a grim surprise to me when the investment firm folded suddenly, its proprietor vanished, and I discovered that its former offices were an institute where some woman taught exotic dancing.
I noted the Reflexology Clinic’s address in my agitated mind to remember it should I need to visit for some reason, and then quit the Zahra District and its environs.
My destination was exceedingly odd for a person like me. I was heading to the working-class Aisha Market, on the capital’s eastern edge, to search for Joseph Ifranji, a Southerner who had separated from the South when it separated from the North, even though all the other members of his family had migrated to the new nation. He had worked as a messenger in the school where I once taught. Now he was worthily unemployed in the Aisha Market, where he was attempting to enter commerce by any door
he thought open, since he could not enter the world of middlemen through upscale revolving doors. I wanted Ifranji to be part of the changes I was introducing into my life. In fact, I wanted to hire him to handle my headache’s ground zero by taking full charge of Nishan Hamza. I didn’t think he would object. Indeed, this was an opportunity not to be sniffed at. Seen from Ifranji’s perspective, the job would offer him a chance to relax, even if his companion would be a lunatic who had died in my novel and who in real life was threatened with death.
I had given up teaching more than twelve years earlier. Back then, Joseph Ifranji had been a slender-kneed boy who loved to run, to hunt plump birds, and to scale houses to collect trinkets. I had last seen him six weeks earlier when he had informed me that his wife, Ashul, had left, taking their son, whom he had named Mahogany in honor of a tree he had never seen. He had heard the name by chance while making his rounds in the market. His wife had deserted him for the new nation. Now his son was certainly eating clods of dirt in a fatherland that had yet to achieve its dream. It was hardly out of the question that the child would die of malaria, sleeping sickness, or any other of many ailments. I had cheered him up considerably that day by giving him five pounds. I had also informed him – even though I rarely tell anyone – that I had based a character partly on him in a work I had started years ago but had never finished. Now it was one of the texts I refer to as abandoned. Ifranji had seemed neither happy nor disappointed and had shown no curiosity about the character I based on him. Instead, he demanded ten more pounds and departed, wearing a soiled, wrinkled shirt and sandals that were torn in more than one place.
– 8 –
We entered Wadi al-Hikma after more than an hour and a half of slow, awkward driving through anarchy and unbearable traffic jams. A truck driver who had “All Days Are One, My Love” painted on the back of his vehicle abused me with crazed persistence and cursed me vilely. Countless beggars weaved through the hubbub, heedless of the danger. Vendors hawked cheap pens, tissues, and dirty cloth bags insistently. The homeless boys who clog the capital’s streets rubbed filthy rags on car windows and demanded payment for their services.
The day was fading away. In another hour, night would have set up camp with its pains and suspicions. Ifranji was on my right, rebellious and anxious but eager for this assignment that he didn’t really understand, even though I had sketched it out for him. During the hours he spent with me in the Aisha Market and the Nu‘man Real Estate Office, where I had rented a small, unpretentious house, and during the ride in my car, he had conjured up myriad characters. These included a bodyguard, an intensive care nurse, an alert watchman in an hour of danger. He would need to play all these roles while he looked after Nishan in order to allow me first to find him treatment for his schizophrenia and then to research how probable it was that he would eventually contract glandular cancer.
The tale of Nishan’s telepathic communication with me and of his transmission of the novel no longer concerned me much – not at present anyway. I did not want to busy my mind with searching for its causes and how it had happened. Recalling it all yesterday had exhausted me.
What I wanted, quite seriously, was to counteract the arid destiny I had written and attempt to adorn it with some verdure, even if it proved obstinate and insisted on remaining dry. I wanted to perform what I considered my imperative duty, while stepping away from my career as a novelist whose works are distributed nationally and internationally, in order to be an ordinary person who would sweep his neighbor’s courtyard if he found it dirty, milk a goat for an elderly woman with shaky hands, or carry a small child on his back while crossing a street bristling with traffic accidents. I thought this would not be out of character for me, because I have a benevolent personality and in the past repeatedly performed such chores. It was just that at this time, I needed to change my life’s pattern to allow this character to succeed.
I first considered bringing Nishan to live in my house and placing beds for him and Joseph Ifranji in one of the library rooms. In that way I would be only steps away from the headache’s epicenter. I changed my mind, however, when clear thinking supplanted my emotional reaction and I realized that the situation did not really warrant this. How could I know the consequences of having two strangers live with me, one of whom was insane and likely to die young – if my novel was accurate – while the other carried a troubled history on his back? I once wrote a novel about the ploys of desperate people whom I united in a single cohort by either putting them in prison or shutting them up in a room and allowing them to conspire together. I had distinct characters, who would never have met in real life, live for a month in a single house. The result was that the earth’s gravest treacheries occurred in that house.
So I decided to rent a small retreat. That much had happened. What would happen next was for Nishan to move there and for Ifranji to abandon the rag he slept on in the Aisha Market and move in as well. If some crisis occurred, it wouldn’t be in my house and wouldn’t concern me. If Nishan rebelled against Ifranji, that rebellion wouldn’t reach me and wouldn’t affect me.
I developed my plans without consulting Nishan, because I felt sure that a person who begged for assistance telepathically would accept a volunteer’s helping hand. Moreover, he hadn’t merely sent the message, he had come once he was free of the symptoms of schizophrenia to greet me in person and narrate his life story in a balanced and orderly manner, right up to the moment he went into convulsions and appeared to be in serious danger.
At this stage the important question was whether Nishan would pose a threat to Ifranji.
Wasn’t there some possibility he might kill him? In that event, I would regret not merely a novel I had written but blood I had played a part in shedding. I explained this possible threat to Ifranji forthrightly as he sat beside me while we were entering Wadi al-Hikma – after ordering him gruffly to take off the old, broken pair of sunglasses he was wearing, because I wanted to see and assess the reaction in his eyes.
He responded with a laugh, “No problem! The old Aisha Market, after the shoppers leave and the gates are closed, fills with jinn who appear toward the end of the night. The guards slip away then, and many’s the time I’ve fought off vicious jinnis and won.” He said he was friends with all the families of jinn living there. He also had an extraordinarily beautiful jinni sweetheart named Daldona, who loved him and slept with him on the cloth every night. When I stopped the car near a group of people to ask for Nishan, since I had forgotten the location of his house – or rather his shack – Ifranji added, “This madman, Nishan, won’t be any more savage than the jinni named Sherlock, and I cut off his ears and castrated him when he wanted to seduce my girlfriend, Daldona.”
I laughed – I needed that laugh – and decided to allow matters to proceed according to my plan. I would not scrap or change a thing – at least not for now.
We climbed out of my car near a group of people standing in front of some carpets spread on the bare ground. Men with diverse miens and of different ages were selling food: bitter black bread, bones with no meat on them, and a few questionable-looking vegetables. The smell of decomposing fish was pervasive. Three women were selling tea and coffee nearby. Everything came to a halt suddenly: the vendors’ cries, the importunate bargaining sessions, and the rude courting directed at nubile girls by uncouth tongues. Genuine and insolent curiosity surrounded us as a narrow cordon formed, and a number of children holding small rocks and arrows, supposedly for hunting small birds, approached. But I couldn’t see a single green tree – or any tree at all – and where there are no trees there are no birds. Some women whose inquisitiveness had overwhelmed them drew nearer, along with men who resembled Nishan so closely that if I had added lunacy to their résumés and provided them with lit cigarettes and copies of Hunger’s Hopes, they would all have become Nishan in that novel.
I was approached by a bearded man of about fifty. He was relatively clean and wore garments made of unbleached dammur cotton as well as a
white turban. He accosted me directly and said that his name was Hajj al-Bayt (or Pilgrim of the Holy House) and that he was the imam of the only mosque in the district.
He pointed to a patch of ground to my left; there wasn’t any actual building, only a section of bare land outlined by horizontal rows of mud bricks and pebbles. Inside were spread old kilim carpets with frayed edges. The pulpit seemed to be some old pieces of wood arranged like a dais. He asked me why we were in Wadi al-Hikma and if we were important government representatives who wanted to bring joy to residents’ hearts with good news. They had, it seemed, been waiting for the arrival of water and electrical service for some time and yearned to receive titles to the tracts on which they lived.
Ifranji and I aroused suspicion because we obviously didn’t belong there. I doubt that the hand of a government that brings delight to hearts is long enough to extend to such a district. The hand that will arrive is the other one, the brutal hand that tears down cardboard and corrugated metal shacks and evicts residents to points unknown. I told the man that we weren’t from the government and brought no news. We were merely looking for Nishan Hamza Nishan, who lived there, for an important matter.
“Nishan Hamza Nishan? This is odd. No one has asked for him for a long time. Do you know him?” he asked. “What do you want with him?”
He seemed to think our mission eccentric, and the group that clustered around us ever more tightly did too. The skeletons of unfinished houses, the shacks of corrugated metal and the little piles of human excrement in the empty lots of a district that totally lacked storm sewers left me incredulous. No one would actually request a lunatic distinguished only by his poverty in such a poor district. A novelist who had received seventy folded pages from this man telepathically was fully justified, however, in making such a request on behalf of his conscience. The novelist’s conscience made the request, not the novelist.
Telepathy Page 6
