“We wish to treat his schizophrenia,” I explained as I attempted to show with my very posture how serious we were. With hands clasped behind my back, I looked the man straight in the eye, although Joseph Ifranji had adopted a loafer’s classic pose. He had removed his broken sunglasses and begun to stare with lustful eyes at a brown girl who was about twenty and appeared to be a Southerner attracted by the all-encompassing curiosity.
“Treat him?” Hajj al-Bayt asked.
I had paid no attention to his strange name; in other circumstances I would have been immensely interested and would have considered using this name for a character that would resemble him, because I had never before heard of a man named Hajj al-Bayt. I would never have thought that anyone had this name – and that’s exactly what happened when I blindly wrote down the name Nishan. I had been enchanted by my sweet discovery, even though it now seemed that I actually hadn’t discovered it. The imam’s voice had become a rabble-rouser’s. He raised his hands on high, revealing the stubble of white armpit hair that had been plucked, and started off, as if in a pulpit, “Why should you treat him? In exchange for what? Suhayla Ahmadu went mad years before he did and ate dogs and cats. No one treated her. Nurayn Hamidayn, a proper tailor, went insane and walked naked in the street, shaking his genitals, but no one treated him. This young man, Murtaja, was studying at the university and went mad. Now he declares confidently that he is Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia – and that in his head are a billion pages on which the entire world is written. Yet we haven’t heard of anyone trying to treat him.”
Murtaja was barefoot, his gray shirt had lost its buttons, and the hems of his shorts were frayed. He paced back and forth, speaking nonstop while gazing down at the ground. At that moment he was reciting a random page from the Wikipedia of his unbalanced mind. It was devoted to Nasnusa, a creature that ate human flesh and that had defeated the mighty Roman army in the Battle of Wadi al-Hikma. Murtaja walked by Ifranji without looking up. He paused, stopped his recitation of the entry for Nasnusa, and verbally attacked the Southerner, who was still trying to court the brown girl, with an entry devoted to passion and passionate lovers, beginning a year before the Nativity.
A writer’s persona seized hold of me briefly as I recognized that this peripheral neighborhood was a trove for creative writing. I might return here to build a corrugated metal hovel where I would live for a time while I wrote about the entire district.
This would not be out of character for me, because I am used to wading into adventures without thinking twice when writing flames in me or illuminates me with its green light. I once lived in a comparable district and served time in prison; I went into business with a woman named Amina Sarmadu to distill liquor from sorghum and dates when I wanted to write a novel that featured a female vendor of these locally brewed beverages.
Unfortunately, the writer’s persona did not linger in my mind for long. It self-destructed when Hajj al-Bayt continued bombastically, “You haven’t told me why you’re interested in Nishan. First of all: who are you? Nishan we know. We know about his insanity that comes and goes. We even know how dangerous he can be. For us, though, he is not a big problem. Either help us achieve a better standard of living or leave us in peace.”
I was about to interrupt to clarify the situation for this man, who seemed capable of understanding my motivations if I explained them more fully, when an old geezer started shouting. He wore a patched green loin cloth and was leaning on the shoulder of a girl of about seven. She might have been his granddaughter or that of any other sheikh his age, because I know that in these districts, paternity isn’t limited to one’s actual father – men play father to their own children and all the other kids.
“God is most great! Down with the villains! Down with the traitors! Glory and honor to the people of the fatherland!”
This ill-timed cry from the elderly man, who was as old as Abd al-Qawi but lacked the Shadow’s wisdom and talent, was a senile outburst with consequences that I had not wanted or expected when I set out in search of Nishan Hamza. We hadn’t come as villains and weren’t enemies of the state. An enemy of the proletariat does not come searching for one of them.
I realized then that I found myself in a serious crisis that was growing more dangerous with every passing moment.
Why had I listened at all to Nishan Hamza? Why had I brought him, eyes closed and bewildered, into my spiritual mother’s home and allowed him to speak? Why hadn’t I acted like some damn writer who creates ivory towers for himself and recruits an arrogant guard force to repel problems like Nishan – without the author having to know about it? I could have signed a copy of the novel for him at the Social Harmony Club and laughed or felt sad for a few moments or fled to my car – without waiting for him. He would never have come across me when I was alone, and at any other time the people surrounding me would have stopped him from ending my life. In fact, I myself could easily have escaped from him but hadn’t.
“Allahu Akbar! Down with all who betray the people!”
Voices assailed us as the ring around us tightened threateningly. Then the imam, Hajj al-Bayt, whether on purpose or because he had no other choice, finally sided with us and used his voice at its maximum strength to stop the mayhem. He made it clear that we intended no harm to anyone in Wadi al-Hikma and that we were benevolent souls who actually had come to treat a son of the district. He could have said this at first, when harmony reigned supreme, but hadn’t. He could have prolonged that harmony, but hadn’t.
The angry talk eventually calmed in response to the imam’s appeal, and the circle began to loosen. Selling resumed from rags spread on the ground, and buying perked up too. Hajj al-Bayt, the imam, insisted on accompanying us in person on our expedition to track down Nishan.
We didn’t find him in his shack, which contained a worn-out mat, a dirty dammur cotton pillow from which soiled stuffing protruded, a number of tunics and turbans that were tossed here and there, and many books. These must have been law books for his legal studies, which had been suspended. I also glimpsed some ragdolls and shuddered.
We didn’t discover him at any of the construction sites teeming with workers, even though he had occasionally worked as a day laborer. That ceased, however, when he was no longer able to work.
The indefatigable Hajj al-Bayt climbed out of my car whenever it came to a stop. He would enter a house and pop back out. Finally he was obliged to accompany us to an outlying section of the district with seven mud-brick houses, which he said were filthy and of bad repute. Ethiopian women lived there, and he didn’t know whether Nishan visited them or not. Our fugitive, however, wasn’t there either.
Finally we discovered him on an abandoned section of railroad track. In the past, this line had carried passengers and freight from the port to the capital, but fast, modern, paved roads had rendered it obsolete.
Nishan had reached one of the extreme stages of his schizophrenia. He was wearing the torn uniform of a general and drilling seven adolescent boys. Apparently to punish them for being mutinous soldiers who had fled from a battle, he had lined them up, single file. Their posture in the line showed that they thought the whole affair was a big joke.
Suddenly, as we approached, Nishan abandoned his military reserve and threw a boy to the ground and knelt on his belly. He and the boy were yelling, but the other boys continued to mock him. Joseph Ifranji, Hajj al-Bayt, and I rushed to them and helped the teenagers lift Nishan from the boy’s belly. We threw him in the back seat of the car. Joseph Ifranji bound Nishan’s feet and hands with a stout rope he pulled from beneath his seat, trussing him up brilliantly. Ifranji repeated, “I knew I would need you, rope. Thanks, Rope!”
Nishan yielded more completely than I would ever have imagined possible. At critical moments like this he seemed incapable of inspiring a novel or of transmitting one by telepathy. He also seemed a lover unlikely to have captivated an educated nurse. He did not seem to be an ordinary Wadi al-Hikma loafer who bought supplies fro
m a carpet spread on the ground.
As we were preparing to depart with our disturbed catch, I asked Hajj al-Bayt, “Doesn’t Nishan have some family members or relatives here?”
“No,” he replied. “Not here – but there are definitely some elsewhere. He used to have a relative here named Zakariya, a truck driver who hauled brick and gravel to construction sites. He disappeared last year, and people say he married an Ethiopian girl and went with her to her country.”
He had a relative who drove a truck? My God! I had included him as a character in Hunger’s Hopes too – the trucker who calmed Nishan down when he became hysterical. He would tie him up with ropes whenever he sensed that Nishan was becoming dangerous.
Hajj al-Bayt asked me, “Where are you taking him?”
“To a psychiatric hospital,” I replied as we departed.
By then day had ebbed away, and a desolate, depressing night was preparing to claim Wadi al-Hikma.
– 9 –
I sat in the office of Dr Shakir, the head of al-Nakhil Private Psychiatric Hospital. Three buttons had popped off my shirt and my hair had become disheveled during our struggle with Nishan. I smelled embarrassingly rank from sweat and was in a hurry to return home to attend to myself physically and mentally and restore to myself some of the dignity that had evaporated in a struggle I should have avoided. The only link between this conflict and myself was a silly story called Hunger’s Hopes.
I had begun to hate the novel intensely. I hoped that no further copies would be sold and that its distribution would be limited to the copies already sold. If I could find a way to collect all the remaining copies from the warehouses, I would. The Shadow had asserted with total confidence and arrogance that Nishan had sent it to me and himself fiddled with the parts that did not correspond to his life. That made me merely the recipient; I had received this catastrophe and made things considerably worse. The Shadow, however, had ignored many things, such as my style, which hasn’t changed from one story to another. He had ignored my technique, which I claim to have invented, of playing around with sections and chronology. I put one step in the place of another that originally preceded it and delay the arrival of one word out of respect for another. These are all my own tricks that I am sure could not have turned up in a telepathic text. The Shadow was swayed by his relationship with Father Matthew and by his claim that the play wasn’t one he had created. I, for my part, was still wavering and unable to reach any conclusion, whether sagacious or fallacious.
What I had written down had actually happened. I had simply added a future I wanted to happen. Had Nishan been responsible for the entire story, there would have been no possibility of the character dying of glandular cancer. He was timorous and did not want to die. That was patently clear.
I realized that I was attempting to analyze matters that defied analysis and was thus taxing my mind pointlessly. The psychiatrist opposite me was elegant and rather handsome, even though he was getting on in years. Dr Shakir was a longtime friend, a classmate from secondary school. In my opinion, he could have had a successful career as a singer. He had encouraged us to listen to songs and had occasionally sung himself. He drew satirical caricatures, but only a few people knew about this talent.
When we brought Nishan from Wadi al-Hikma to the hospital, he was in no state to be lodged in an ordinary house overnight in anticipation of an examination by a specialist in the morning. We transported him in the car – tormented and rather disgusting. He struggled against the rope’s constraints, attempted to escape, succeeding to some degree and frightening Ifranji, who now doubted his prior conviction that he could guard Nishan and serve as his paid caregiver.
I watched as Ifranji, this self-styled conqueror of the jinn and heart-throb of Daldona, turned in alarm, scratching his skimpy beard with dirty fingers. I heard him tell me I needed to speed up. Then, in his own special whisper, in a barely audible voice, he lauded the torn rag he had stretched out on every night in the Aisha Market, before I had tracked him down and hired him for this nightmare.
Ifranji’s demeanor suggested that he would bow out of this assignment, and I didn’t want to pressure him further, in order to prevent him from fleeing my embrace. I needed him for many services. It crossed my mind at that moment that I should give him the rental house and tell him candidly that it would be for Nishan, once he was cured.
When I first hired Ifranji, I had not told him about the telepathy tale that had shaken me and led to my involvement with Nishan Hamza, because I knew he would never fathom a cursed mystery like this. He knew me as a former math teacher in the school where he had once worked as an errand boy; he had quit when I did. He knew I was currently a writer with no day job, but his limited cultural background and his defective knowledge of the language in which I write had prevented him from reading any of my works. In fact, I doubt he would have read them even if he had been fully literate and fluent in Arabic.
At the time I had told him, “I’m performing my duty as a human being on behalf of an individual whose family I know.” For his part, he had only asked about Nishan’s syndrome and his mercurial personality.
We brought Nishan – or NHN as I thought of him, because his lengthy name had started to oppress and depress me whenever I uttered it or even thought about it – to the hospital. He was still tormented by his symptoms and struggling with Ifranji’s strong rope. He was also cursing at a mutinous soldier in the army he had created on the abandoned railroad line, a lazy wastrel of a fly that wouldn’t let him sleep, and a damned boy named Adula, who called him with a feminine voice and wouldn’t stop. Even the drowsiest eyes turned to look when we passed on the streets or stopped at a red light. En route I told Dr Shakir by phone about Nishan’s tragedy and mine. His understanding of schizophrenia was keen, but he did not wish to wade into a discussion with me about telepathy, either because he considered it an urban myth or because he didn’t understand it.
Nishan was received at the door of the hospital the way non compos mentis patients usually are. They used strong leather straps to fasten him to a clean stretcher and then carried him to an isolated room, where not even a trifling fly was allowed access without written permission.
I observed him stretched out on a white metal bed with his wrists manacled or lying on the table next to him. I watched him as he calmed down and fell asleep. Occasional snot dripped from his nose, but his insane slobbering had stopped. Then, if a dream toyed with him, it was inevitably a rosy one that featured his departed but beloved Ranim or a rowdy courtroom with defendants and witnesses at whom he barked instructions, because he was the judge.
Joseph Ifranji, who had clipped his shades to his shirt pocket once night fell, roamed the hospital in search of nurses who had left the South. He hoped to detain them long enough for some fleeting romance, as he informed me. I gave him several pounds and offered him a choice between sleeping in the small rental house or returning to the Aisha Market where he usually lived, loitered, and hugged Daldona, daughter of the jinn. He chose the house – not because he thought it superior, as he informed me, but because his jinni lover was out of town for the time being. She had traveled with her family to a desert resort where they spent their summer holidays each year.
By my lights, this Ifranji is a unique character and deserves – with his broken Arabic and the tales he tells without cracking a smile or laughing – to be the protagonist of a novel. I have already mentioned that I once appropriated his character. That was, unfortunately, buried in an abandoned manuscript that I believe will never see the light of day. I was happy to rediscover him, and the fact that he had named his son after a tree that he had heard about by chance in the market inspired many paragraphs that I could use in future works. This, however, wasn’t the time for writing. First, someone needed to crack the multifaceted riddle that was NHN.
I asked Dr Shakir, who had filled his fancy pipe with tobacco but not lit it, for his personal analysis of Nishan’s condition and whether he could be cured and become
a judge as he hoped.
I was searching for a cigarette to light but found none in my pocket. The doctor set his pipe on the table and replied without any of the circumspection that is common in such situations, “It’s true that his schizophrenia is seasonal and intermittent and that when he takes Risperdal or Haloperidol regularly, all his symptoms disappear. But he’s unfit to be a judge, a court official, or even a humble court messenger.”
I felt that his opinion was a fatal blow to Nishan’s ambitions. The question of studying law was moot; it would be a long time before he became a normal human being and escaped from the death that awaited him at the end of my novel.
Once I returned to my house, I realized that I had been so caught up in the succession of untoward events that I hadn’t slept even momentarily for two days. I discovered that my mobile phone had been turned off most of the time since I left the home of Malikat al-Dar, my spiritual mother, accompanied by Nishan. I had only thought of turning it on during the minutes I spoke to Dr Shakir. I had turned it off again afterwards. There would certainly be dozens of calls and text messages; the callers and message-senders would have no idea what had happened to me or would happen.
A number of my friends would certainly have wondered what my secret reason was for turning off my phone. Some of them would surely have thought I had traveled again, after spending no more than a day in my homeland – without informing anyone. When I realized that some might have thought I had died, leaving my decomposing corpse in my house, I feared they might try to track me down in any manner they could think of. Just as I expected, when I turned on my phone, I found more than twenty messages. Most were from literary colleagues, and a number of these concerned the meeting they had had today at the working-class coffeehouse called al-Muzira, where we usually met. There was also a message from a journalist with a local newspaper, because I had scheduled a long interview with him for today about my detestable novel Hunger’s Hopes. I had stood him up. I doubted that I would keep any future appointments concerning that novel.
Telepathy Page 7
