Najma had also texted me and wanted me to call her the moment I received her message. She had not, however, mentioned why she was contacting me. She had left that vague. The message that most gripped me, though, was from Linda, the daughter of Abd al-Qawi the Shadow – or the Shadow’s shadow, as I thought of her. Linda was a strange girl. I had never seen her in person, although I had been in her father’s residence dozens of times over a period of many years, even before she was born. I had never seen her at a lecture, cultural event, performance of one of her father’s plays, or in the market or a gloomy or brilliant alley anywhere in the world. When her name came up or she was mentioned in passing, the Shadow spoke of her proudly. He was the one who had given her my cell number which she had used to forge a strong telephone friendship with me. She shared with me opinions she had formed about works she read by many different writers and about all my works, which she said she enjoyed reading. She also discussed her own projects, which included a novel she called Two Wheels and Body Parts. She had been busy writing this for the past two years, and eventually it would be published. She had not told me what her novel was about, and I had never asked. I repeatedly invited her to the lectures I gave or to parties I was attending, but she had always declined without offering a convincing reason.
Her voice on the telephone was quite distinctive. It was the voice of a girl dreaming or discussing the remnants of a dream she was clinging to, hoping it wouldn’t escape. Some sentences were fresh and succulent. Half her words were clear and half somewhat hard to grasp. There was a delicate breathiness to her speech, and the hint of a laugh resonated through it from time to time.
In fact, Linda the Shadow had frequently whetted my imagination. I had attempted to picture her, based on what I knew about her. I had come up with a mental portrait of her as a girl of twenty or thereabouts, slender, with lively eyes, soft skin, and full, black hair trimmed with colorful ribbons. Her head swayed gently when she walked. I felt an odd curiosity to verify my portrait and said to the Shadow one evening when we sat in his house, trying to make my words seem innocent and unpremeditated, “Master, Linda is a cultural icon. She reads everything I write and offers me her frank opinion even about works by other authors. Why doesn’t she participate in our cultural activities or at least come occassionally to sit with us and join our conversations?’
I noticed his expression changed slightly, as if he had not liked what he heard or had indigestion. Then he replied, “What a lovely idea, Writer! Linda actually is a perceptive scholar. Her problem is that she cannot handle other people.”
Then his narrow eyes drilled into my face, and he added, “It should suffice for her to converse with you by phone. Isn’t that so? You know what she thinks of your works and of ones by other authors. I don’t think you want to marry her – isn’t that so?”
Thinking that I had caused trouble by asking about Linda, I moved our conversation in a direction that I knew the Shadow would relish enough to erase any problem or discomfort. I started discussing his play A Day in the Lantimaru Garden, which was a brilliant dramatic fantasy about an imaginary day spent with a dinosaur in a garden called Lantimaru, somewhere beyond the Earth’s sphere.
I mentioned that Linda’s message had attracted my feverish attention. Long and eloquently phrased, it discussed Hunger’s Hopes, which she had just finished reading, in a delightful fashion. She asked me about the ending: “Did you have to torture Nishan Hamza so excruciatingly? You could have aimed a treacherous bullet from an unknown assailant to strike him in the neck or run over him with a speeding car when he was crossing a street paved with death.”
In an essay that I wrote about anxious reading, published a year and a half ago in a newspaper, and posted on a website that I write for occasionally, I discussed the mechanics of producing a novel and of receiving it. I said a writer works with limits he determines with help from scrupulous observers. These include his talent, knowledge, and expertise, and an internal overseer that forms in his mind and that supersedes it. Thus he writes without looking at anything. If something happens and his thinking becomes confused or miscarries for some reason, this will never be a false step. He observes this miscarriage, and his vision extends forward, as he attempts to set his other thoughts on their own two feet. Consequently, Nishan Hamza, or NHN, must die of glandular cancer. Any other outcome a reader suggests would stem from temporary sympathy for the character, not from profound digging in the dirt of writing.
Linda was an excellent reader – there was no doubt about that. The overly literary sentences describing the hero’s death must have infuriated her. My ending was unexpected, because the invalid doesn’t die of complications of his schizophrenia. Her suggestion, however, was well off the mark.
I replied quickly to her message, realizing that she might be waiting up to receive my response. I clarified my thinking for her and directed her attention to my essay for further guidance.
Another text message really made me laugh. It was from Joseph Ifranji, who must have loaded his phone with credit when I gave him money. He had written in his idiosyncratic English: “My lover Daldona return back from the desert. She discovered the rented house and now with me in the bed.”
I can at this point add something to what I have always asserted. Whenever I have observed Ifranji, listened to him in person, received his texts, or heard his voice on my phone, I have been certain that thanks to him I possess a living novel that is growing in my life and that will emerge as an actual novel one day.
The final serious message was from a friend who works in the Ministry of the Interior, in the division dealing with identity cards. Quite early today, before I went to see Abd al-Qawi the Shadow, I had sent him an email with some brief information about Nishan. His reply confirmed that the man’s statements tallied with his files and that the ID he carried had actually been issued more than seven years ago.
Now all I had to do was to keep tabs on this schizophrenic in al-Nakhil Hospital and focus on part of my life that I had neglected for the last two days. I turned off my phone again without calling Najma to find out what she wanted. Accompanied by my insomnia, I strode into my bedroom, where insomnia gradually faded away. The next morning when I awoke I discovered that I had slept soundly without tossing and turning or brooding. I smelled food cooking and heard the vacuum cleaner vibrating the floor of my house. Umm Salama was here, resolutely tidying up my unruly bachelor life.
I sat down at my table and turned on my computer. I went to Facebook to see what had been added during my brief absence, because there was always something new. I read with little interest the commentary on my last entry, which was the word “telepathy”. By quickly perusing the new photos Najma had posted that morning, I discovered a love poem, which was fragmentary and monstrous, from an admirer who called himself “The Afflicted Moon”. I also found an article by me about the rise to power of religious factions – the reasons for them and their implications; it had appeared on the op-ed page of one of the newspapers.
The Virtuous Sister’s page, which I thought of as the treasure-trove page, was full of booby traps, and the number of visitors had increased significantly from the day before. The Anti-Christ was lamenting the delay in the end of the world. The Mobile Charger was bewailing the scarcity of electricity. The person claiming to be “The Yearning, Choking Sheikh” had posted a new love poem that was not available to everyone; again he requested an email. The fellow who referred to himself as “Dead Man” had written: “We are God’s and to Him we return.”
The Virtuous Sister’s friends were fighting ferociously among themselves, and she appeared only as a full stop, a delicate question mark, or not at all. She had removed her picture in a black veil and replaced it with one showing her wearing the same type of niqab but in gray.
My personal email account was overflowing with messages; I didn’t open them because I was afraid they might bring new crises. I already was dealing with a crisis with consequences I hadn’t been able to handle.
I turned off the computer and grabbed my copy of Hunger’s Hopes, quickly turning to the page after the one that had been folded over. There I read about the mental hospital, an injected tranquilizer, and an intravenous drip that induced a tranquil state. I read about Yaqutah the nurse who worked in the hospital and who couldn’t keep herself from crying at work for the patient she had been fond of for a year and still was attached to. She didn’t know if this was true love or merely human sympathy that had grown in her and she could not shake off. I read about the flood of feelings in the filthy ward, which housed multiple patients with a variety of mental ailments. They were shouting, screaming, weeping, laughing, and attempting in rare moments of lucidity to escape from the intense surveillance and allow their savage illnesses the freedom to cross-pollinate in the streets.
By the end of the page, Nishan had begun to recover, becoming more lucid. He was able to remember Wadi al-Hikma and his beloved nurse’s face. His normal excuses were able to form in his mind, and he would definitely share them with everyone he had exposed to the fallout from his delirium, wherever he had acted out of control.
Nishan’s bout of insanity and confinement to a hospital were true to life, but Yaqutah, the nurse who had emigrated and changed her name to Ranim, was missing. The real hospital was clean, not filthy, and people with many types of mental illnesses were not crowded together in one ward. Nishan was actually lying in a clean room in a private hospital, and I was definitely paying for all his expenses. Even if Dr Shakir was a friend and very accommodating and sympathetic, the language of the bottom line supplanted all other tongues.
I had no intention of visiting Nishan that day or any other unless there was a sudden change in his condition. I was content with what I had done for him to date and felt no need for a visit. The most that I would try to do in the future was to wait for his complete cure and release from the hospital. Then I would attempt to have him checked for glandular cancer – to determine whether he actually had it or whether the real-life version of the text rectified this part as it had many other passages.
I sensed that my life had become unsettled and that what had happened in just two days was unprecedented during all the years of my adult life, part of which I had spent teaching math and part of which I had killed myself writing those asinine novels. If I asked myself now what actual profit a novel like Hunger’s Hopes could achieve, balanced against its enormous losses, I would say I had actually made no profit at all. I was on the verge of going stark raving mad myself and tearing up my two remaining copies of the novel. I regained control of myself only when one of them was about to be shredded.
I would not allow a crisis like this to cause me to abandon writing quite so easily. To become a writer I had abandoned a profession that was not merely respectable but also somewhat equitable in terms of providing me a living wage and a woman whom I loved and who loved me. In retrospect, teaching may have been the better option when the choice was presented as between house and the lady of the house - and writing.
I turned on my phone in order to reclaim my normal day and in keeping with my latest decision. I was surprised by the noisy rings of Najma’s call even before my phone was fully on.
– 10 –
The sight before me now was totally unfamiliar. I sensed I was confronting a different girl from the Najma I had met back in the days of “The Neighbors’ Goat” and during the subsequent period of quarrels and reconciliation, of brief meetings I felt she had rehearsed in advance. This young woman exuded grace – from her stylish clothes and splendid smile to the glances of a precisely delineated femininity, which I had never, ever, expected from her.
That morning Dr Shakir had phoned me to say that Nishan had improved considerably but would need to remain for a number of additional days under medical supervision. Then he would be able to return to his normal life. In brief, there was no need for me to interrupt my busy schedule to come see him.
That was what I had decided with total satisfaction to do before the doctor called. Joseph Ifranji had also informed me by the “single ring” or, as I referred to it, the “I need you but have no credit” method, that living in the rental house in a working-class neighborhood had greatly helped his nerves. He was hoping that his wife, Ashul, would return with their son, Mahogany, from the new state of South Sudan to share his delightful dwelling. Daldona, his jinni girlfriend from the Aisha Market, had become angry for no reason at all and left him. He didn’t think she would return, not even if he went back to the torn rag in that clamorous market. He added that he had met some neighbors who were pleasant and companionable, including a drunkard with a fine singing voice, a woman who made excellent syrup-soaked zalabiya doughnuts, and a professional demonstrator against the ruling elite; he was usually in prison or about to be returned there. The activist’s name was Sallum, but in the district his nickname was Beauty Spot. He, Joseph Ifranji, was seriously considering changing his name to Beauty Spot so he would be known as Beauty Spot Ifranji, because he was deeply impressed by this stalwart man. I laughed wholeheartedly and told him that Beauty Spot Ifranji would be a troublesome, offensive name ill-suited to the miserable life he was leading. In fact, the authorities might arrest him for it and deport him to his country. I knew that Ifranji would never be convinced. He had long been accustomed to changing his name as circumstances arose only to return later to his original name. He was once Joseph Mandela and then Joseph Bin Laden, along with other names I no longer recalled. During what was approximately the hour left before I was to meet Najma, I leafed through a book on the science of the paranormal, searching for something that would help me solve the riddle posed by Nishan and Hunger’s Hopes. Unfortunately I found nothing significant. It was an unpretentious recital of Sufi miracles, such as crossing the sea without boats, being physically present in two different places at the same time, and turning plain water into milk, without any explanation of the mechanics of these feats. I abandoned that book with the intention of searching for another more useful one and left for my appointment with Najma.
Najma had arrived before me and was waiting for me, seated at a comfortable table in the Juwana Café in the affluent Al-Riyadh neighborhood. She wore a light blue blouse – in a modern style, for the first time – and a black satin skirt. Her gray silk headscarf matched her outfit, and many changes were visible on her face. She had applied eye shadow and eyelash extensions, and plucked her eyebrows till they were as narrow as a thread.
She was, in brief, a modern girl – something she hadn’t wanted to be throughout those past years – and a dutiful slave to fashion.
I found myself gazing at her even before I greeted her. My conjectures raced breathlessly to explore her psychological depths, wishing to guess what had happened and what might happen now.
Without reflecting whether it was an appropriate question, I asked, “What’s happened? Why have you changed so suddenly?”
She tilted her head slightly to the left in a familiar and deliberately flirtatious movement that women frequently resort to, but did not smile. She replied, “I want to become a mother.”
My next question also popped out without any reflection or consideration of whether it was suitable. “Have you married? Who is it? Your friend Tulumba?”
She choked up, no doubt about it, and frowned severely. “Would I marry someone like Tulumba? Are you serious? In any case, Tulumba has passed into God’s care, may God have mercy on his soul.”
I was as thunderstruck as if she had mentioned one of my relatives or friends. “Has Hamid Tulumba really died?”
“Yes . . . Six months ago, in one of those traffic accidents we witness every day. So the novel he was writing for my life was lost.”
I didn’t know what to say when this supercilious girl was supercilious even about a tragedy and spoke of her wretched lover’s death as if she were discussing the death of a repulsive cockroach in a corner of her kitchen. What had interested her about his existence was how he was “writing” a rol
e for her as a legendary beloved, even as she progressed step by step through an ordinary life. She had been seeking inspiration from the pages that his life created for a silly, boring novel, one I doubt she could have written. Otherwise, why had she once asked me to write it?
I began wrestling with myself about whether I should remain there with her to investigate her newfound femininity and the causes for it or return to my own life and purify it of this cruelty by mourning for a miserable boy. I hadn’t really known Tulumba well, but I could imagine the life he might have lived had he loved a girl other than Najma.
At that moment Tulumba won out, and I rose while the coffee the elegant waiter had brought was still hot and untouched. Najma, however, grasped my hand entreatingly, and I sensed then that her hand belied her persona. This was a tender woman’s hand. She said, “Please sit down. Please, Master.”
I sat back down, disgruntled, and she began to speak at once. “Forget the past, Master. Tell me frankly: Why didn’t you remarry after your divorce seven years ago?”
This was an unexpected question, and the girl had prepped herself on my biography. I had dozens of answers I could regurgitate. I could tell her, for example, that marriage is antithetical to creative writing or – more accurately – is injurious to it. I could say that a creator who is preoccupied by the thrust of creation cannot exert a comparable thrust on behalf of his family. I could inform her that the presence of books in a conjugal home is comparable to the presence of land mines in a small field: they may explode and create chaos, provoking quarrels any day. I could say that my life belonged to me and that I cared for it; it allowed me to roam when I occasionally needed to in order to produce a manuscript.
But I said nothing of the kind. I gripped the staff by the middle merely to learn what was passing through her cruel mind and what her new femininity concealed. I don’t know; I simply wasn’t thinking. “The failure of the first experiment perhaps caused me to avoid repeating it.”
Telepathy Page 8
