Local history buffs say she arrived from the south and entered Waw at twilight, through the Oases Gate. Her timing fed the conviction that this visitor had no ties of kinship with the desert’s people and was instead a she-jinni and the daughter of the Spirit World, because the tribe normally considered guests arriving at twilight to be jinn cloaked in human garb. The inhabitants of the oasis had inherited from their forefathers beliefs affirming that every creature that stirs at those frightening moments just before sunset is kin to the Spirit World’s inhabitants.
She appeared alone, and no woman had ever arrived in the settlements of the oasis in this way before. By coming alone, she lent credence to the assertion, based on the soundest authority, that she was related to the noblest jinn. Unlike all the foreign women who had journeyed there before her, she was not accompanied by a spouse or relatives or attended by slaves or female servants.
She arrived on the back of a fearsome, short, well-nourished, large-mouthed, thick-haired camel with a crazed look in its eyes. Children joked about its appearance and repeated in unison that it was a jinni’s steed bearing the daughter of the jinn.
On the behemoth’s back was fastened a howdah that astonished everyone who saw it. The frame was composed of polished ribs bound together. Experts affirmed that these were cut from the tusks of an elephant slain by an ignoble hand. Woven around the arches of these curved beams were animal skins. Coverings of colorful, pure linen, which was decorated with embroidery of tiny beads of many hues, were braided around sheaths. Small white beads adorned the dark linen hangings and red ones embellished braided strips brightened by light colors. Thus the whole construction had been transformed into an extraordinarily beautiful masterpiece around which children hovered while the women gathered to inspect it. The men’s eyes were refreshed as they admired and contemplated it, trading compliments for it. They eventually agreed that the ensemble was a verse of poetry and not a howdah at all.
Skeptics were quick to find in the howdah’s beauty new evidence for their claim about the visitor’s lineage. On peering beneath the saddle to scrutinize this marvel, they discovered that the howdah was attached to the body of the fearsome behemoth by leather belts that had dried into its skin after encircling the belly, thus making it impossible to remove the howdah, which had adhered to the camel’s back, becoming one with its flesh, as if it were an extension of the hump on which it sat. The behemoth puffed out its jowls and cast furious glances from its angry eyes at the curiosity seekers, as if it were a hostile jinni. Then it went off to graze in the woods of the southern sector, without the howdah ever leaving its hump.
2
They scrutinized her figure the moment she dismounted. She had a heavenly build, a firm body, and a relatively slender torso. Her complexion was pure, untouched by the darkness of the southern tribes, and the features of her face had a sweet charm. She had bright red cheeks, and a mysterious, delicate smile glittered in her green eyes. She was clad in a flowing blue gown, and the inhabitants of the oasis immediately noticed her silence.
They stepped forward to meet her and caused her frightening camel to kneel. They showered her with the sweet compliments customarily reserved for nobles and leaders, but she did not respond to their greeting with even a word. Instead she granted the throngs surrounding her an enigmatic glance. She smiled at the children in a sibylline way desert people find only among the female jinn.
She did not favor them with this smile for long.
The stern look they had noticed when she arrived returned to her enchanting green eyes along with the sad expression so typical of wanderers and foreigners. Her pupils retained the hint of her smile, but the gleam was extinguished as a painful reserve settled over her eyes, which lost none of their beauty as a result of this change. In fact, their seductive look was reinforced. Mystery flashed from them, their enchantment increased, and beauty’s tyranny became more complete.
At this moment, people heard that voice.
It was a voice never before heard in the desert.
People were at a loss when they tried to think of a comparable sound. It was likened to the rustling of a calm breeze through retem boughs. It was said to be a strange, muffled wail. Others declared that it resembled more closely the groan of misfortunes.
The painful moan began as faintly as the distant drone of a fly. Then it drew nearer and grew louder and mightier until it filled every ear. People’s breasts were convulsed by worries they had never before experienced. Mystics were inflamed by the sweetest forms of longing, and tears flooded all eyes. The oasis shook, cavaliers reeled, and hearts felt drained. Some became so intoxicated that they fell from the roofs of their homes. In musically induced ecstasy, men and women began writhing in ditches. Some were so overcome by grief that they drew their swords and stabbed themselves. Another group lost their minds; they sang a little and then went insane.
The melodies of the beautiful woman, who communicated only through song, were lethal.
3
They embraced the she-jinni.
They erected tents for her out in the open and slaughtered animals for feasts. The women of the tribes gathered around her, and at evening parties female poets sang for her the refrains of eternally lost souls. Old women kept her company at celebrations of the full moon. She would furtively cast a grateful look at people and then gaze off into a maze of emptiness while summoning to her chest the lethal voice that would almost have destroyed the tribe’s mounted warriors had the temple’s woman diviner not directed the tribe’s nobles to use drums to drown out the melody. A troupe of young women cradling wooden drums with skin heads surrounded the foreigner’s daughter, who paid no attention to the commotion till the girls’ fingers began to beat the drums so loudly that the plaza resounded. Then the pounding drums cut short the tongues’ clamor and swallowed the breasts’ growls.
The planets, however, went down different alleys, and the stars swiftly changed places and entered ill-omened houses. The diviners’ blind eyes saw Saturn slip over to dwell in Pisces’s tower and Venus leave her territories to station herself in Scorpio’s home. So the open spaces were flooded with the cunning of the celestial bodies, and iniquity lodged in the oasis’s settlements. Then people were awakened by a wail that rocked their buildings’ pillars and hearts were penetrated by a desolation they had never known before. Once more male poets began to stab themselves and female poets threw themselves off the tops of walls. This occurred because the foreigners’ daughter had been insulted; the horizons resounded with this calamity’s wail.
4
During the first days it was said that—thrilled by the she-jinni’s beauty—a stranger, whom the oasis had recently welcomed, had sought her out late one dark night, hoping to be alone with her. Later, however, sages acquitted the sons of foreigners of this deed, saying that eyewitnesses had seen a scion of the nobles shoot past in the gloom, fleeing after calling for relief from his calamities.
Shortly thereafter, lips whispered to each other that more than one man had intruded on the beauty’s tent, that one love-struck man had slipped in beside the girl in her bedchamber before the other and had begun to pour into her ear the type of lie that the tribe’s cavaliers customarily poured into the ear of any object of their affection, because they felt certain that lying is love’s talisman and that passion is a treasure attainable only by prevarication. The foreigner’s daughter, however, was rankled by this intrusion and jumped up in alarm. Then the second suitor arrived and lay down in another corner of her bedchamber. When the new arrival discovered the presence of a rival, he attacked. They exchanged insults and drew their swords. The she-jinni’s terror increased and she found herself obliged to avail herself of her fatal voice. So she sang her moaning lament.
The identities of the two rivals might have remained a secret forever had people not noticed that the two most prominent nobles in the oasis were confined to their residences. Thus Aghulli missed the council, and the hero Ahallum did not attend either. So the sages se
nt someone in search of them, but they both sent their apologies, alleging an unforeseen illness. When the council’s members visited in order to reassure themselves, they found that Aghulli had fastened an imposing bandage around his left wrist and that the hero had wrapped his neck with thick cloths, which he attempted to conceal beneath his veil. The matter might have remained merely conjectures concocted by the imaginations of the populace, who were unable to enjoy life without novel rumors and imagination’s embellishments, had the nobles of the oasis not noticed the frigidity between the two rivals, who had recently been close friends. They now avoided each other. When they did meet and were obliged by the laws of the council to converse, they spoke with an antipathy not lost on discerning individuals. Earnest folk (who always spoke wisely in the tribes’ settlements although no one paid any attention to them) said, “When strife flares between two friends, we don’t need to search for some distant secret, because a beautiful woman, like a serpent that bites and immediately spews out its venom, will be positioned nearby.”
5
Confusion prevailed and wails resounded within the walls of the oasis.
Women howled behind the mute sibyl, and girls and boys cried aloud. The most intellectually resolute participated too by lamenting and weeping for a long time.
Despite the enormous uproar, the she-jinni’s voice soared above the houses with the wings of a bird, descended from the heavens like a revelation, and swallowed the crowd’s voices. It overcame the disorder and was clearly audible, pure, comprehensible, and painful, invoking some undisclosed calamity, presaging seduction, death, and a quest for a distant objective.
In every corner and space people rubbed shoulders, and folks congregated in the temple plaza. The streets were packed, and citizens flooded down the alleyways till the market was jammed. They spread through every open space as far as the bare ground by the well and the heights of the fields adjoining the Oases Gate.
The council convened, and the hostile glances that the two rivals exchanged while they continually wiped away tears did not escape clever people, who were sobbing too. The most steadfast men in the council were content to hold back their tears and sob privately. They carried in the venerable elder on a litter woven from fronds and leafless palm branches. One of the slaves stepped forward and picked up the frail body, which he deposited at the center of the council as if it were a heap of straw. Emmamma immediately sat up and straightened his elegant veil, which was dyed a gleaming blue. After glancing at everyone with his small eyes, he proceeded to stare off into space before swaying and releasing the lengthy moan that could only have emerged from the chest of a creature who had craved the life of eternity and had long been liberated from his painful existence among men. This sigh of other homelands was a balm for those suffering from the thrusts of the jinn’s songs. Later the nobles claimed that Emmamma had demonstrated greater fortitude than they not because of any mysterious power but because old age had deafened and protected him against the tune that poisoned the bodies of the impudent and flattened the strongest men of the tribe. Others went further, saying that the secret lay in the origin of his moan; Emmamma won because he had procured his song from the land where the mute woman had obtained her lethal tune.
On that day, Emmamma spoke with a tongue the heavens plucked from each of the elders, because those who possessed a tongue were resisting the affliction and had lost their minds. He terminated a debate for which people had no strength by saying, “Raise the matter of the woman intruder with the temple’s virgin. Or, have you forgotten that we only resort to that place to appeal for someone to speak to us intelligently when afflictions have deprived us of the intellect’s grace?”
Everyone groaned tearfully, and the council’s messenger advanced, weeping, toward Emmamma.
6
That day Imaswan Wandarran performed a feat recounted for generations and celebrated by female poets in their songs.
They said he had been monitoring the situation from the start, searching for a stratagem that would allow him to counter the threat. So he hastened to a trencher and made dough from flour while trembling with dread, desire, and longing like all the other warriors. Then he stopped up his ears with bits of this dough. Thus the sound and his fever were diminished. The voice did not vanish forever, but he chanted ballads to overpower the song of seduction and to slay the melody. He carried the bowl to the alleys, where people were swarming and wails and roars resounded. He hastened to the warriors and began to shove dough in their ears to restore them to their senses. He found the herald shouting and calling for the nobles to convene a council. So he thrust dough in his ears and rushed forward to rescue as many as he could. He collected a group of warriors and forced his way through the crazed throngs, proceeding till he reached the weeping soprano’s tent. He assaulted the mute woman and gagged her mouth with a piece of linen. Then people attacked him, but the warriors defended him against the mob and expelled the she-jinni from the settlements of the oasis. People threw stones at him, spat after him, brandished swords, staffs, and knives in his face, but he was able to take the female intruder far away.
The messenger returned with the female diviner’s admonition. With tears in his eyes, he read the piece of leather: “The leader sends you the good news that the civil disturbance has been buried, the danger has ceased, and the tribe is no longer in need of counsel.” The nobles did not understand this report until they learned what Imaswan Wandarran had accomplished. Listening carefully, they discovered that the voice hovering over their heads had fallen silent.
7
Informed sources related that eventually people of every age and race trailed after the woman, following her down ravines and over the elevated ridges to the north. Once the burden was removed, the affliction dispersed, and people awoke from their intoxication. Survivors then followed the trail, searching for their kith and kin, but found that everyone who had accompanied the accursed woman had died of thirst and disorientation. As for the she-jinni, they never found any trace of her.
THE PUPPET
1
In the blacksmiths’ market, he gestured to Aghulli that he wanted a word with him in private.
They silently traversed the alleys leading to the temple plaza, where they saw a throng of nobles standing in a circle and debating with a wariness born of respect for ceremony. The two men avoided the group and went off to the east. They walked along in silence until they reached the secluded area leading to the fields that lay beyond the spring.
There the hero spoke for the first time, “I wanted to share with you what the commoners are saying.”
Aghulli smiled enigmatically and rolled a smooth stone with his elegant sandal. He perused the tracks on the patch of earth: human tracks and those of animals as well. Camels’ hoofprints were superimposed on human footprints, and human feet had trampled camels’ hoofprints. Reptiles crawling through the nights’ gloom had attempted to erase the tracks of both people and beasts. Mice had come to swipe grains of barley from the camels’ droppings, and dung beetles had rolled dung to their lairs.
The smile in Aghulli’s eyes grew more enigmatic. The hero Ahallum spoke. “They came to me yesterday for the third time, repeating what they told me the first time.”
He stopped. Aghulli did not respond, and so the hero paused a moment before saying, “They said they want to have a leader, like all the other tribes.”
He fell silent. Aghulli also clung to the stillness, and their footsteps sounded twice as loud. Their breathing resembled the Qibli’s roar.1 They covered some more distance and entered the thicket of date palms adjoining the spring’s boundaries. Then Aghulli spoke for the first time, “Aren’t they content with the tomb’s leadership?”
“They said they want a leader who walks on two feet.”
“Have they observed in leaders who walk on two feet any wisdom greater than that of our leader who rests in the temple’s tomb?”
“Who can convince the populace? What tongue can debate with the
masses? In the past I thought that heroism was demonstrated by the sword’s blade. But in recent years I have started to question this conviction. I have begun to see that true heroism is not achieved by the sword. Persuading the gullible to proceed down the path of wisdom is an incomparably greater form of heroism.”
“How determined do they sound?”
“They not only sound determined but act obstinate.”
“I don’t like this!”
“If you want me to be candid, I’ll tell you that I not only found their conduct to be obstinate but detected in their language the whiff of a conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy?”
“Yes. They debate with merchants, experts, and strangers by night and then pound on the doors of noblemen by day, making heretical suggestions.”
“You’re right. Abandoning the leader’s way seems ill-omened.”
“Worst of all, people won’t continue on the path declared by prophecy much longer.”
“You’re right. In this campaign is concealed a conspiracy that seeks to lead members of the tribe from the true path and send them back to the land of earthly rulers who walk on two feet.”
“For this reason I wanted to consult you before expressing an opinion in the council of nobles.”
“You’ve done well, because they wouldn’t have come to you had they not given up on me.”
The hero stopped and gazed at his companion with genuine astonishment. He was silent for a time. Finally he cried out, “Really?”
Aghulli bowed his head. He perused the secret signs in the tracks of the mice, dung beetles, and lizards. Then he said, “They spoke for a long time and numbed my head with arguments they had dredged up somewhere. They said that people who spring from the earth need an earthly leader, while people of the heavens need a heavenly one. They said that the Law will never pardon the council the error it committed in choosing a creature who had become a heavenly person and appointing him commander over the earth’s communities. They said that the sons of the heavens were created to assume responsibility for those in the heavens, not for those who struggle on their feet in the desert’s desolation. They said … they said a lot and favored me with arguments I almost believed.”
The Puppet (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 2
