My Name is Adam

by Elias Khoury

  “Then he said, ‘Why do you choose to dwell in this room and not the others?’

  “She said, ‘I prefer it because all my belongings are here, and I find whatever I need within easy reach.’

  “He said, ‘And these Damascene coffers, what do you put in them?’

  “She said, ‘I put my things in them, sir.’

  “He said, ‘Give me one of these coffers.’

  “She said, ‘They are all yours, Commander of the Faithful.’

  “He said, ‘I don’t want them all. I want just one.’

  “She said, ‘Take whichever you want.’

  “He said, ‘This one I’m sitting on.’

  “She said, ‘Take another. That one has things in it that I need.’

  “He said, ‘I don’t want another.’

  “She said, ‘Take it, Commander of the Faithful.’

  “Then he summoned the servants and ordered them to pick it up, which they did, and they took it to his audience chamber. Next, he summoned his slaves, and ordered them to dig a deep well shaft there, the carpet was moved aside, and a well was dug until it reached water.

  “Then he called for the coffer to be brought and addressed it, ‘You there! A report has reached us. If it is true, we have now enshrouded you and buried all trace of you until the end of time, and if it is false, we have buried nothing but a wooden box, and what could matter less?’

  “The coffer was tossed into the well, earth poured on top of it, the ground leveled, the carpet put back in place, and Caliph al-Walid sat upon it. From then until this day, no trace of Waddah has been found.”

  This text poses numerous questions. However, what keeps me awake at night is one: why did Waddah remain silent in his coffer; why didn’t he call out and ask for mercy?

  This is the question that makes me want to convert this manuscript into a novel. My novel will lead to the coffer, like Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, which led its heroes to the tank of a water truck so that it could ask them “Why?” Kanafani’s question came from outside the tank but mine will be part of the gloom inside it, where the darkness of the soul mixes with the darkness of the world. Likewise, I won’t ask any questions of my poet, who has now become my friend. What he experienced went beyond question and answer. The four-dimensional experience of love, death, the death of love, and love of death that Waddah lived leaves me companionless before the eloquence of silence and death and makes me incapable of pulling his story in the direction of a clear meaning, political or moral, the way Kanafani did with his heroes.

  Before getting to the scene in which the poet is carried off live in the coffer of his love, which has now come to resemble a coffin, however, I would like to consider the story’s other protagonists – Al-Walid, Umm al-Banin, and the slave who was killed.

  As far as the slave and his fate are concerned, it was part and parcel of the customs of the day in that the deaths of slaves, like their lives, were meaningless outside the framework of their relationships with their masters. The slave lives and dies according to the same logic, and when he learns a secret to which he has no right to be privy, it is his fate to die.

  The slave in this story is simply a tool to link the plot to its climax, meaning its ending. That is his function. In my novel, however, I shall delete him, so as to turn the story of the coffer into a progress, one that began with a night of lovemaking in the room where the coffer was and where the caliph sensed something was amiss and that continued up to the moment when he felt he had to go to the room, where he would see, with his own two eyes, the end of Waddah’s garment poking out from his hiding place inside the coffer.

  Deletion of the slave will, however, complicate the issue and, logically, should lead to the slaying of Umm al-Banin as well, as it is difficult if not impossible to have the caliph see with his own eyes the evidence of his wife’s betrayal and be satisfied with killing only her lover. That is why there has to be a witness whose testimony may, on the one hand, be doubted, and yet, on the other, is easy to kill off without consequences.

  The existence of the slave opens the field to the possibility of doubt as to the veracity of his testimony and, at the same time, allows the king, whose heart had been ignited by jealousy with a love that had, he knew not how, disoriented him, to pardon Umm al-Banin and make do with the slaying of her lover, or the story of the slaying of her lover.

  Al-Walid owned countless slave girls, and love had never been part of the lexicon of his life. A woman was a body that constituted an extension of his sexual desires. Umm al-Banin, on the other hand, his wife and the mother of his children, held a twofold meaning for him – that of the mother, whom he wished to see surrounded by the sanctities of motherhood, and that of the body, which, on rare occasions, became part of the female body in general, though holding a special excitement for him owing to her shyness and her drowsiness. When he had sex with her in the room that held the coffer, she took him aback with her moaning and her words. He emerged confused by an ambiguous sensation, to which he refused to give the name of love. Then, when he thought about it, he remembered the verses of Waddah that were on everyone’s lips and tongue, and felt jealous because he imagined that the woman must have been thinking of her poet while with him.

  Al-Walid spoke the truth when he said to the coffer, “You in there! We’ve heard a tale about you. If it’s true, we have now buried all tales about you and wiped all trace of you from the face of the earth, and if it’s a lie, there’s nothing wrong with our burying a wooden box.” The caliph had made up his mind not to believe the slave even though he believed him, because he had, at the same time, made up his mind to bury what the chroniclers and the people were whispering about Waddah’s love for his wife.

  Burying the coffer was, for the caliph, a symbolic act by which he hoped to kill the story and bury it in earth and water.

  And it is here, at the moment of its killing, that the story will claim its victory. The tyrannical monarch has authority over slaves and objects. He can kill people and lay waste to the land. But when he tries to kill a story, he turns into a minor character within it and loses his power and freedom of action.

  If the king hadn’t buried the coffer, Waddah’s story would have remained just a part of the tapestry of countless stories about poets who rhapsodized over the wives of kings and noblemen and whose stories end at that point, and it would have had no special significance. The jealousy, however, that ignited in the caliph’s heart, and the love that it gave rise to, made him do what none before had done, and instead of killing the story, he became part of it. The strange thing is that the monarch’s love for Umm al-Banin evaporated the very moment that he buried the coffer. As the ancient Arabs used to say, “Only death can erase love.”

  As to Umm al-Banin, who gave up her poetic name of Rawd and went back to being just a near-forgotten wife of the caliph, two tales are told of her: the first says the woman went on with her life in the palace and decided to forget, and that she turned to religion and never asked the caliph about her buried coffer. In this version, the author of the Songs relates (quoting Ibn al-Kalbi) that “Umm al-Banin never saw anything in the face of al-Walid that gave any clue as to the matter, up to the day that death parted them.”

  In another version, the woman experienced torments. When Ghadira told her how al-Walid had buried the coffer and what he’d said as he did so, she fainted.

  Life started to lose all its savor. She prayed and asked for forgiveness but felt that her prayers were going nowhere, as though the heavens had closed their doors to the words of a woman destroyed by sorrow and guilt. The poet’s death demolished her life.

  Ghadira reported that her mistress constantly felt as though she were suffocating. She said the air had become as solid as rock and she couldn’t breathe rock. She would open her mouth, begging for air, but there was no air. She began to be surrounded by emptiness: she would look and not see, weep with
out tears. She told Ghadira that her bowels had dried out and that all she hoped for from life was the angel of death.

  Did she go to the caliph’s audience chamber one night when it was empty and when she felt her end approaching, because, as it is said, she wanted to embrace with her own death the death of her poet, or did she throw herself on the floor of the chamber and commit suicide?

  Neither the Songs nor any of the other ancient books that recount the story of Waddah al-Yaman speak of the woman’s suicide, for the woman is of no interest to the chroniclers once the poet has died – and here lies a defect in this story that I have to correct, for I cannot accept that the woman (in this case the caliph’s wife and poet’s mistress) was merely a tool that permitted the transmission of Waddah’s story as the tale of a man who was buried alive with his story. I shall, therefore, as a postscript to my novel, attempt to recover and write the story of the queen’s suicide.

  Unfortunately, though, however much the heroes may multiply, the stories concentrate, in the end, on just one. I shall, therefore, be obliged, despite my intense interest in the queen’s end, to focus on the poet. Writing has to take a specific point of view. Despite their importance, incidents similar to the queen’s suicide are to be found in many novels and plays, while the method by which Waddah met his death is unique and is what allows the text to approach what we may call the essence of the meaning of love.

  Said the chronicler: “Waddah was shivering in the coffer. The queen had told him she thought the slave had seen her as she was closing the lid of the box and had noticed the end of his garment. She’d said she’d refused to give him a gemstone from the necklace because she was certain he would blackmail her: no slave had ever before raised his eyes to look at her, so why else would he dare to do so? How would she have been able to deal with him afterward if she’d given in to his demand? She said too that he’d never have the courage to reveal her secret because he wouldn’t by so doing kill her, he’d kill only her lover, and would, indeed, bring destruction upon himself as well.”

  Waddah said she’d been wrong, and she asked him to lower his voice. He said the cat was out of the bag because the slave would tell his fellow slaves before telling the caliph, or while he was on his way to him.

  She told him to shut up.

  He tried to open the lid of the coffer but she locked it and told him, “No. You have to stay in there.”

  He tried to persuade her to flee the place, but he knew that was impossible in daylight and it was only midday. He knew as well that this woman of his poems would never leave the palace because she was the heroine of the story and she had to behave the way heroines are supposed to.

  It was then that Waddah understood that the woman would become a story and realized that he’d lost two women and two stories. When he arrived at the outskirts of the third story, he realized that he’d lost himself too.

  Said the chronicler: “When Umm al-Banin heard the caliph’s footsteps, she stood in front of the mirror that was on the wall close to the coffer and combed her hair. When he drew close to her and put his hand on her shoulder, she flinched, before turning and saying, ‘How did my lord enter? You scared me!’

  “‘You’re scared of me?’ asked the caliph.

  “‘All your subjects live in awe of you, master, and I am but one of your slaves.’”

  The king observed the lie and the betrayal, but the calm of the avenger descended upon him, and he asked her why she liked that room more than her other ones. Then he asked her about the three Damascene coffers in the same room. Then he asked her about the necklace he’d sent with the slave. After he’d heard her answers, silence reigned. Waddah was curled up on his right side in the coffer waiting for the end. The poet imagined a scene in which the lid opened and he saw the caliph’s beard shaking with anger and the drawn sword in his hand as he ordered him to come out.

  The poet visualized death as a sword, eyes like sparking flints and a woman curled up in the corner of the room, and he decided to die like a true knight. He would come out with head held high and announce that he was requesting his lord think of him as a martyr to love.

  The lid of the coffer remained, however, closed. He heard the caliph asking her for it, and a cold sweat started to bathe his eyes. Time stopped, as though the movement of the planets in the heavens had slowed, as though the darkness of the coffer had turned day into night.

  He waited for the hands that would take hold of him but they did not come. Instead, he heard a whispering, the droplets of sweat in his eyes drew things in blurry shapes, and the thought came to him that death appears to the dying in the shape of little white crowns covering everything.

  He heard footsteps and began to feel himself rise. He clung with his body to the bottom of the coffer so that he wouldn’t roll about and decided to lie on his back and suddenly grasped why it’s best to lay a corpse flat on its back on a wooden stretcher, after it has been washed and wrapped in its shroud: so it doesn’t fall off before reaching its final destination.

  The numbness rose from his legs to his shoulders, and he felt the touch of the oak against his arms. The wood was smooth and silky, and something like ants came out of it and spread throughout the coffer. His heart started to beat hard, its sound growing louder, and the coffer swayed as though this beating, which had transformed his fear into a stifled scream, was about to cause it to drop. He told his heart to be silent. He put out his hand and grasped his heart and made it go silent, but the throbbing moved to his ears and sounds coming from the outside lost their meaning.

  They put the coffer on the ground, and he heard the voice of the caliph ordering his slaves to dig, so he understood that he was about to be buried alive. He closed his eyes and surrendered to a drowsy torpor.

  The time that elapsed between the start of the digging and his hearing the king’s voice whispering to the coffer was no less than half an hour, but it passed in what seemed like seconds. Only death is like love in its ability to reduce time, and to produce the illusion of standing still even as it passes.

  The caliph’s voice reached him softly, interspersed with hissing high notes: “You in there! A report has reached us. If it is true, we have now enshrouded you and buried you and all your works until the end of time” – and the poet decided to die.

  The whole story lies here.

  Did Waddah die choking on water because he’d decided to protect the story?

  The man realized that he couldn’t escape death, so became suddenly calm. His body stopped sweating, the trembling that had afflicted him from the moment he had heard the king’s footsteps stilled, the little crowns that had filled his eyes disappeared, and he saw the darkness that surrounded him. He became aware of the water that was creeping through the wood toward him. He curled up on himself like a fetus and the life within him began to be choked off.

  In that moment of serenity, facing surrender to the darkness of death, Waddah decided to remain silent, like “a sheep that is driven to the slaughter and never opens its mouth,” as the prophet says. He decided to be Rawd’s sheep because he wanted to protect his beloved with his silence, for any sign that he was inside the coffer would lead to her death.

  He knew he would die whatever happened and understood that the only way to protect the story of his love was to suppress the instinct for life inside him.

  Or did he die enshrouded in silence because he became filled with strange feelings that made him indifferent to the cruelty of his death?

  Waddah had no idea when it had begun. Of course, we can always simplify matters and suppose that the monarch’s visit to the room with the coffer threw the poet off kilter, which is true: he’d felt that he was just a small footnote, not only to the life of that woman who had made him her prisoner and a prisoner of her palace, but to life itself. True, he’d been convinced by her argument that he should forget that rahimo! that she uttered, and at the same time he’d tried to set asi
de the idea that he was a prisoner, and isolated, and had lost his poetry, which was written for one person only: Rawd. He’d persuaded himself that his coffer was not a grave for his poetry, as poetry was communication, union with the beloved is the ultimate goal of all communication, and his poetry had become his way of achieving union with the beloved. Everyone had forgotten him, and the chroniclers had stopped passing on the most beautiful of his verses, the ones he had written in Syria (which is why we find only the early poems in his collected works, and why the books fail to list him as a major poet), but he’d been happy: what he’d written had become a second body for the beloved.

  Suddenly, however, he’d felt as though he were suffocating. Ten days before his death, he stopped making love. Umm al-Banin spent most of her time with him but he lost first his words and then his desire. The woman didn’t say anything to him. She respected his silence and his distractedness, but persisted in using the perfume that he liked and would kiss him when she arrived and when she left, feeling the taste of his cold lips and saying nothing.

  The moment the coffer rose into the air, Waddah realized that the evaporation of his love had robbed his life of its meaning, and that the death of love is death.

  He did not think about anything. He surrendered to the torpor of the end and became aware that death is not, as they claim, the price of love, the end of love.

  At that hour, called “the fearsome hour” because it contains within it man’s terror at the end of everything, the poet felt no fear. He didn’t hope that the lid of the coffer would open and let in the fresh air. He forgot that during his stay in the palace with the queen and the long periods he’d spent in the coffer, he’d felt that his chest was shrinking and his lungs shriveling and that the moment he was let out, and before asking for water, he would open his mouth to drink in the air.