“Master, with your permission, I have come to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage. This is the reason for our call.”
Now the Shadow sat straight up on the edge of his wooden bed. He placed his head in his hands, looking like any father caught off guard by an unexpected suitor for his daughter. I assumed that he was weighing the implications of accepting or rejecting my offer. At that moment I realized the faux pas I had committed. I hadn’t factored in my status and age – or my fame, which surpassed that of the Shadow and of all the members of his generation. It struck me that climactic moments occur in real life as well as in writing. I had been engrossed in the conundrum of Hunger’s Hopes and hadn’t liberated myself from it just to plunge into a new riddle. At that instant I wished I could turn back the clock a minute, back to when my mouth was closed and my tongue wasn’t spitting out outrageous proposals.
I was beyond the age when it would be seemly to sit smiling next to a woman decked out as a bride together on a pair of velvet chairs for a wedding party or to dance dizzily at the center of a circle of well-wishers. Many details had defeated me, and now I was awaiting a major rout – expulsion from the Shadow’s home and friendship.
I turned to reassure myself with the expression of my suspicious brother, Muzaffar, but didn’t find him. He had doubtless fled the scene.
The Shadow didn’t throw me out. When he stood up and placed his feet in his black slippers, he did not appear to be planning to do that. He replied with a despondency I had never heard in his voice before. “Fine, Writer. You aspire to become part of the family. Let us go inside together and consult the girl to see whether she will accept or not. Please come with me.”
I replied in a faint voice, “You go, Master, and I’ll wait for you.”
“No,” he replied decisively.
I trailed after him, feeling a little agitated. We entered the door by which I had seen the girl with slim breasts and short, curly hair exit and enter. Dr Hazaz had also emerged from it.
The Shadow led me with noticeable feebleness down the narrow hallway, which had rooms on either side. The paint was peeling off the white walls and some inexpensive works of art had been hung here and there. One of these was a copy of a painting by the Italian painter Giovanni Boldini and portrayed a young girl embracing a cat with thick fur. Another, which symbolized nature’s wrath, was by the Ethiopian painter Simhan Zamzam, who had lived and died without achieving any recognition.
We stopped at the end of the hall, in front of a closed door. The Shadow did not knock. Instead he opened it cautiously and asked me to enter.
I was in a rather small room that was painted rose. Its walls were decorated with many objets d’art made from gold and silver embroidery on pasteboard. The skin of an animal – perhaps a jackal or a fox – hung on the wall opposite us. Several rose-colored wardrobes were placed in the corners, and a broad table covered with books also held what seemed to be a late-model cell phone. The bed in the center of the room was also painted rose.
The lighting was extremely dim, but I saw the girl who was lying on the bed and gasped.
This was by no means the woman I had sketched in my mind. She did not resemble any portrait a lover would try to draw. She was not even suitable for the fantastic imagery of dreams gone awry. Simply put, Linda the Shadow was a tragic girl with misshapen limbs and looked like a ragdoll. She was surrounded by medical apparatus and breathed oxygen from a gauze mask over her face. I remembered how distant her voice sounded; I had described it as a voice rising from a dream or the remnants of a dream. I remembered her intermittent, gasping breaths and understood that this was the halting respiration of a person struggling to stay alive, not the breathiness of a portrait pausing to inspire seduction. Feeling dizzy and weak-eyed, I twisted my face toward the door. I stumbled out, and the Shadow followed me. I heard his voice from very far away: “This is Linda, Renowned Author. She suffers from Becker’s Muscular Dystrophy, which is caused by mutations in the genes and affects remote muscles first and gradually progresses to the patient’s respiration and stops it. We discovered her condition when she was two years old. She has struggled together with us to learn and to educate herself. She does not have much longer to live now. Do you understand why she hasn’t come to talk to you face-to-face, Writer? Do you understand why she hasn’t spoken with you by telephone recently?”
Yes, I understood. I could have understood even better if the Shadow had begun to weep in front of me or had allowed me to weep to my heart’s content in his house. I looked at him. His face was rigid, and his features seemed chiseled from stone. In his eyes were what I imagined to be the larvae of tears his severity had killed.
– 14 –
I cannot describe the drab days that I spent, feeling more emotionless even than the days when I first couldn’t sleep because of the riddle of Nishan and Hunger’s Hopes. This wasn’t because I had lost Linda Abd al-Qawi the Shadow, who would have been – had I been in love with her as a real person – a woman who inevitably would have tidied up my house and my insipid life, filling both with flowers and aromatic plants. I wasn’t actually in love with her but with the portrait I had sketched determinedly in my mind and then insisted on seeing in what turned out to be her devastated form.
My feelings were absent without leave because of my compassion for Linda. This was the compassion that bursts forth when we witness an obvious tragedy that is hard to take and that forces us to blame it and curse it as we stand by unable to fight it, to destroy it, or to transform its debris into joy.
I began to wish the tragedy would stop battering the Diligent Reader and allow her at least to pant, to change the pitch of her voice while it sought to create, to allow her half-closed eyes to relish books and her limp hands to grasp a mobile phone and dial a number.
Nishan Hamza no longer interested me: whether he lived or died or wrote a hundred novels comparable to Hunger’s Hopes and transmitted them via his tedious, silly telepathy. The ending I had endeavored to learn no longer interested me nearly as much as the end, which I didn’t want to learn about, of someone like Linda, whom I had out of excessive egoism wanted for my wife . . . when all she aspired to was to continue living.
I was terribly alarmed whenever my phone rang, expecting it would be the stern, arrogant Shadow with the larvae of tears buried alive in his eyes, calling to inform me of his daughter’s passing. I would check the number and feel relief that it wasn’t the Shadow’s or that of any of his acquaintances. At times I would answer the phone and at other times I would rebel against replying. During those futile days I attempted to diminish my isolation a little to keep myself from joining Nishan and becoming a resident in al-Nakhil Private Hospital.
I began to frequent coffeehouses I had previously patronized, with friends or readers who had a claim to my friendship because of all the times I had encountered them in my life. Occasionally I would talk excessively and laugh pointlessly. I knew for certain that I was expending all my feigned delight outside my house, because seclusion would scatter any harbingers of delight that tried to burst forth.
Many people spoke to me by phone. Najma rang me a number of times but I didn’t answer her. I went on her Facebook page during a moment of relaxation but was surprised to find that she had unfriended me. Even so I was able to read her page’s contents without being able to comment. There was a new picture of her, wearing a red track suit and Adidas shoes. She announced that she would be presenting a new lecture featuring Isa Warif as her guest. He was the cultured, world-class runner who had carried the Olympic torch on one of its stages. “He will discuss the organization of health and sports and grant us hope of living healthily and dying of anything except illness.” This time the lecture was being held in the Elegance Health Club in the center of the city. She was on its board of directors.
There were no new posts of her sentiments or atrocious stories, and I didn’t find any of the flash essays she customarily put on the page and that earned hundreds of “likes”.<
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The truth was that it didn’t matter to me whether she unfriended me or put my picture on her homepage. I don’t know why I had entered the page and why I followed the progress of a girl I had categorized as a disaster since we first met. Our meeting in the Juwana Café had reinforced that categorization. She ought to be part of a past that had departed, leaving behind no memories worth recalling.
The girl who manufactured a tragedy and danced to its funereal dirges, who had plotted maternity with a pen on paper, sans emotion, might obtain it and might not, but the only flame she would light in the mind of a novelist would be the silly fire pits he earnestly attempts to keep from igniting in his writing. Many people, as usual, had posted “likes”, and many had commented profusely on her fiery red outfit. No one had posted even a terse greeting for the world-class runner who had carried the Olympic torch.
What I term “fictitious deceit” occurs if faces and emotions are different when an author’s pen writes in a vast expanse as opposed to a back alley or street. I had known – and the miserable petition writer had too – that this entire online fictitious following meant no more to Najma than a pesky gnat she could easily annihilate whenever she wanted.
I still felt languid, even after reading Najma’s page, and with the same languor clicked on my own page, where I posted a poem about death in a number of couplets and attributed it to a fictitious Mexican poet. I called the poem “The Imminent Death of a Reader” and identified the poet as Sebastian Ablino. I didn’t wait to see if anyone would “like” it or post a comment and proceeded to the page of “The Virtuous Sister” Nariman, merely to distract myself, nothing more.
Her page was flaming that day, perhaps more than ever before. New names had joined forces to heat it up: Shaved Mustache, Mullah Umar, The Only Man who Loves Veiled Women, A Refugee to Your Eyes, and a woman who called herself “Help!” On every post on the page she wrote: “Help! Help me!”
There was a romantic poem from The Yearning Sheikh, who said it was one of his choicest poems and that he was publishing it for the first time in response to popular demand, even though no one had actually wept or implored him to publish this poem. In short, he was posting it merely because he wanted to.
Poetry boils in my sad heart,
Inscribing poems on the brow,
And beneath the face veil are the ashes of a face,
But the splendor of the buried secret,
Even if the feelings are veiled,
I will certainly read.
When Nariman appears, we are joyous.
When she vanishes, you find we feel lost.
Her presence seems a call to love
And to dreams that appear clear but are not explicit.
Were it not for my beard and white hair,
I would repeat my poems endlessly.
No one had marked this poem with a “like” except The Yearning Sheikh himself. It was followed by what I imagined was a tepid “like” that had slipped from the sarcastic fingers of The Virtuous Sister. Someone named Student of Religious Science had accused the Sheikh of succumbing to temptation and of always being on a suspect page. The Sheikh had responded that Romantic poetry had never been forbidden, provided it was chaste and designed only to display one’s talent. Addressing this Student of Religious Science, he asked, “If this is a seductive page, why are you on it?”
I tried to smile but couldn’t. I directed my imagination for a number of minutes toward that putative Nariman. I imagined her once as a girl who had a desiccated heart and dangled excessive seduction in the path of innocent individuals whom she carefully chose. Then I changed my mind and imagined Nariman as a wastrel boy composing, for eventual release, a scandalous book in which these evedentiary, incriminating trifles would be featured.
I finally quit the site when my languor disappeared, and the torn picture of Linda the Shadow jumped piece by piece before me.
I had made a huge error when I gave my cell phone number to Shu‘ayb Zuhri, the young man from Wadi al-Hikma who wrote the story that was totally unrelated to Cervantes. My phone was busy most of the day with Zuhri’s damn messages, which contained flash stories that I was supposed to read and comment on. I didn’t have the strength even to peruse a traffic sign while I was driving, but the writer’s insistence finally moved me to cast a few quick glances at his stories. I discovered a story called “Whisper”, which read: “I whispered to the cloud, and the cloud heard my whisper.” Another story, which was named “The Outcast” read: “I found our neighbors’ dog in a district dozens of kilometers from ours. I asked her, ‘Why are you here, bitch?’ She replied, ‘It’s not because one of your neighbors cast me out of their house, even though they don’t have food for breakfast, lunch, or supper.’”
I started to reply to this inanity with a comment even more inane but refrained at the last moment. It wouldn’t hurt me to deceive a fantasist and let time teach him wisdom, just as it had taught me. Perhaps he would grow up one day. I wrote him: “Astonishing, Zuhri. You’re on the right track.”
One morning my doorbell rang while Umm Salama was putting the house in order with her muddled, lame management. That day she was peeved because one of her adolescent sons had seen a new mobile phone – a Samsung Galaxy Note – which would allow him to maintain continuous, secret communication with his guy friends and perhaps even with some girls he knew through free chat apps like Firebird and WhatsApp. He had threatened to leave home and live on the streets sniffing gasoline if she didn’t get it for him. I promised to obtain this phone for her two sons, feeling I couldn’t believe I had made such a promise when my income, although it came from various sources, wasn’t large enough to satisfy the ambitions of adolescent boys who had never realized that they had been born of the womb of a mother who struggled to support them.
I opened the door myself, surprised to find that someone was knocking on my door, on which no one usually ever knocked. I was stunned to see the lad Shu‘ayb Zuhri before me, wearing a broad straw hat and a gray necktie inside out. I noticed that the tie’s brand name was Shashu, which I had never heard of before. He had a cigarette butt in his mouth and carried a thick brown notebook. The person beside him looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him at that precise moment.
How had Zuhri found my house? Who had directed him to the gate of my secluded hideaway, which he had desecrated so simply?
I was thinking this over, and my mind was severely distressed. Zuhri’s damn stories had filled my old Nokia phone’s memory. I would erase them, and they would immediately be restocked. I hadn’t paid much attention to them recently, after I grew used to them. Now, however, I felt upset because from today forward my house stood defenseless.
“How did you find your way here?” I asked Zuhri as I attempted to show that I wasn’t suffering from cramps, heartburn, or a surge in blood pressure.
Zuhri was quite composed, as perfect as a disaster. His companion – who was about sixty-five I guessed from the appearance of his face, his still eyes, and his scruffy beard – was searching for something in his pockets, perhaps a cigarette or a pouch of tobacco, I wasn’t sure.
Zuhri replied, “Normal, very normal. Since you live in this country, anyone who wants to will be able to find you without any difficulty. You should live at the North Pole or in Australia if you really want to isolate yourself from other people,” he added with the worst smile anyone has ever beamed my way. In the process, his cigarette slipped from his mouth and fell to the ground.
I cursed his smile privately with epithets I rarely use in public and at the same time remembered his companion. He was, by God, Asim Ajib, who was known as Asim Revolution, a former Communist. Asim had spent a considerable number of years in the prisons of successive regimes. He wrote impassioned poetry that, in the past, he used to distribute to students in the universities in secret handbills. I had heard recently that he founded or was attempting to found a publishing house, after renouncing Communism and its gloom. I hadn’t seen him for more
than twenty years.
“Asim Revolution?” I cried out in disbelief.
The man held out his hand to greet me and, in a voice that tobacco abuse had stripped of all its identifying features, replied, “Asim Ajib. The revolutionary age has ended.”
I opened the door all the way and invited them in.
I didn’t know what could have linked a former Communist with a poor, obscure short story writer who lived in a construction zone. I could not imagine why they would be visiting me at home, unless the nascent publishing house was the missing link. By God, I didn’t want to think that Zuhri’s stories would be published. This was another crisis set to hang itself around my neck; I could see myself being asked to write an introduction for the stories. I cursed Hunger’s Hopes as I always do now when I sink into a new quagmire.
We sat in the library – the living room. It was crammed with books and contained excellent leather armchairs. My visitors’ eyes widened as they scanned the books, almost melting them. “All these books?” Zuhri remarked.
“Have you really read all of them?” asked Asim Revolution, who had risen from his chair. He reached out and plucked from its resting place on a shelf A Tale of Love and Darkness by the Israeli author Amos Oz. It was massive, and the rest of the books on the shelf, which had been leaning against it, rocked when he pulled it out.
“Amos Oz? I haven’t heard of him. Is he Jewish?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. It wasn’t my problem that he hadn’t heard of him. Zuhri stood up and seized a copy of one of the cheap novels that are given to me on one of my trips. I had only read two pages of this book.
The time I spent in the company of the two intruders, Zuhri and Asim Revolution, was foul and fatuous. I didn’t offer them so much as a glass of water. They attempted to prolong their stay with periods of silence and interrupted sentences, which they repeated at times, while I tried to abbreviate it with a boorishness I rarely resort to but can turn on in trying times.
Telepathy Page 11
