My eyes opened wide in amazement and I said, ‘But my mother gave birth to me without a father.’
‘No boy or girl is born without a father, and I am your father, the Imam,’ he said.
‘I have never seen you before, and I do not know you at all. My father is God and I am Bint Allah,’ I said.
‘Be silent, and may your tongue be cut out of your mouth,’ he said angrily. ‘God Almighty was neither begot nor doth he beget children.’ His voice came from somewhere deep within him as though he was sleeping. He waved an invisible hand in the air and spoke with a voice that could barely be heard. ‘I am tired of the desires of this world’, he said, ‘and the only thing I long for now is to open the skull of this woman and crush her brain so that, like all the ideal women, she will become an invisible body possessing nothing else except a womb.’ Before his eyes he still had the image of himself which he used to see in the mirror before she changed him with her magic into a sheep ready to be sacrificed for the Big Feast, and in his ears still echoed the same voice he used to hear delivering his speech, the words mingling with the sound of rockets soaring up into the sky as he stood high up on the platform surrounded by his supporters in Hizb Allah twisting and turning in a belly dance to express their joy, and by the members of Hizb al-Shaitan shouting out their slogans as loudly as they could. He bent his head downwards from the sky to the earth, shifting his look away from the heavens, for he felt that God would support him for all time and that the Devil was also on his side, so why should he fear those whom he knew he could count on not to resist his desires? His eyes were occupied moving from one face to the other, searching all the time, and each one of those standing in the crowd was trying to push his neighbour, to occupy a place closer to the Imam, but his face was turned away from their struggling lines, and his look kept sweeping the back rows of the crowd, trying to find a thin pale face and eyes the colour of the black of night. Who is he, or who is she, a man or a woman, a human body or a floating spirit? He closed his eyes to sleep but realized that he had been asleep all the time in a sleep deeper than that of a tortoise, and nothing could awaken him any more, neither the sound of shots being fired nor the explosions of rockets in the sky.
The Great Writer
I stood in the first row under the bright lights near the Imam. The acclamations of the crowd resounded in my ears and the rockets of the Feast kept bursting in the sky with a crackling noise. Nothing separates me from the throne except the body of the Chief of Security on my right and the body of the Leader of the Official Opposition on my left. I stand between them like an axis held by a rope on either side. If the right rope slackens I lean my head towards the left, and if the left rope tautens I give way with my neck and let my body lean towards the right. I stand holding my back upright, wearing the new suit I bought for the Feast. It is made of the most expensive imported wool and its colour is the dark brown of burnt coffee grains, an indication of my attachment to the right, but I wear a red necktie to show my sympathy with the left. I hold my pen between my fingers by the middle like a stick, keep one foot on the ground midway between Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan, and balance myself on it in a position of stable equilibrium, taking care not to allow it to be shifted from its place.
Even if the earth should tremble with an earthquake I will never shift my foot from its place, for once a man has managed to get a foothold in the front row he should never let go, even if the sky collapses over the earth and even if the face of the Imam falls off his head and rolls on the ground, for there are an innumerable number of feet and there is not enough space, so that if a foot moves another foot will immediately take its place. Each foot presses up against the heel of the foot in front, and each elbow presses into the belly which is beside it like a nail burying itself in wood. But I stand firmly in my place without any movement to one side or the other, balancing my head squarely on my body and keeping my body perpendicular to the ground with my face looking in the direction of the Imam, while the face of the Imam looks in a direction opposite to mine.
He never looks at me, but I am always looking at him, yet at school things were the opposite way round, for he used to sit in class with his eyes fastened on me while I kept my face turned in the other direction all the time. I was top of my class and he came out somewhere at the bottom, and if I went anywhere he always followed behind. God Almighty, you are the one who alone is able to change all things. You have made it so that he goes before me now, but I swear by Thy name that in my heart I neither rebel nor protest against this calamity, for we must be grateful even for the harm which You do to us, although it is my firm belief, O God, that You do only good, for it is Satan alone who creates evil. Yet I pray that You will have mercy on me for such blasphemy, for You are the only creator and no one except You can create anything. But why, O God, reveal the secrets of Your might through the weakest of your creatures? Why give authority to those who are incapable of thinking, and deprive those who think of all authority? This indeed is a great calamity and brings with it much evil. But the evil which is brought upon us by God is a test of our belief, and we can only accept His will and obey Him. Has not God Himself said: And We shall curse you with evil, for the good of this earth brings temptation? Yet if evil comes from Satan it is our duty to resist it, but how can we tell whether it has come from God or from Satan? Verily I swear, O God, that I do not stand in the way of Your wisdom, for no one except You, O great changer of things, can make evil out of good and out of evil, good.
In the past I had a strong body and a weak spirit, but now I have matured and my body has weakened, but my spirit has soared up to the heavens. My legal wife no longer reads what I write and she refuses to respect the Law of Obedience or the Shari’a and keeps arguing with me about things sacred. She insists that she has a head on her shoulders and that her head is as good as mine, and this heresy is something the like of which I never heard of with my previous wives, whether legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. Not one of them dared to raise her voice higher than mine, and if she laughed she would hide her mouth behind her hand and ask God for His mercy. If I beat her according to the rules of chastisement in Shari’a she never complained, and if I slipped out of bed to go to my mistress, she pretended to be asleep, and if asleep went into a deeper sleep. But this last wife of mine keeps her eyes wide open, and the black of her eyes is so black that it looks darker than the face of the Devil. When she laughs she throws her head back with such abandon that even I am unable to retreat with my head that far, and her laughter is more spontaneous, much more full of joy than mine, so that it rings out, peal after peal, as though she is emptying all the air which has accumulated in her belly and her lungs. It makes me feel that inside me are pockets of stagnant air which, despite all my efforts to rid myself of them, have remained enclosed since my childhood. When she laughs her voice provokes more jealousy in me than it does desire, so I leave her lying naked on her bed and rush off to my mistress, who tries in vain to revive my virility, feigning to give herself up to me in complete abandon as though I was killing her under me little by little.
My wife insists that all this is a sign of maturity, a new spiritual strength, the death of the body and the revival of the mind. But I disagree with her completely and say that it is nothing else than a loss of faith in religion and of belief in a moral code; it is all the women who have lost all shame, all sense of decency. At this she makes a snorting noise and turns on her side, giving me her back and looking up at the ceiling with her eyes tightly closed. I lie there for a few moments, then get up and put on my trousers. When I go back to bed my wife is no longer there, so I lie down alone, staring at the ceiling.
On the wall in front of me hangs a picture of my father in a frame. His face looks like mine. It is round and full of flesh, with a ruddy complexion indicating health or a tendency to blush with shyness. He has a straight serious nose like mine, which proves that he is my father and that my mother was faithful to him. His head rises straight up from his body,
leaning neither to the right nor to the left, in the exact stance that my head tends to take. Son, the best line is moderation. Avoid extremes, he used to say, and yet, where my mother was concerned, he forgot all moderation. She beat him at night and he beat her in the day, and yet he would say, ‘Where women are concerned, son, you have to thrash them every day or else expect them to beat you all the way, for we are adorers or adored and there is no middle line to take.’ But my mother was wont to say, ‘Son, where men are concerned, we women are either wives whom they respect but don’t desire, or mistresses whom they desire but don’t respect, and there is no middle way.’ And as soon as she had said this I could see a grey cloud creep over her face.
She slept with her face to the wall and my father slept with his face to God, while I curled up like an embryo in its womb lying in the space between the two. Every night I listened to my father’s voice reading from God’s book before he went to sleep, reciting the Verse of the Seat three times to chase away devils and evil spirits. When he felt his lids become heavy he pushed the book of God close up to the black pistol he kept under his pillow. His father had given it to him as a present for the Big Feast when he was still a child, and whenever he heard a dog bark his hand moved up to the butt of the pistol hidden under the pillow, but if the gland of the Devil started to rise at the lower part of his belly his right hand crept towards it while his left hand found its way under my mother’s nightgown to her body. My mother had only to see the gleam of the pistol appear for a moment from under the pillow and she would start to undress with a twisting movement under the bed covers. Yet, before she went to bed she would mutter under her breath, asking God for his mercy and protection against the evil and temptations of the Devil. She would do her ablutions five times with water and soap, kneel to God in prayer seven times, and wrap her head carefully in a veil, and once she had closed her eyes she fell into the deep sleep of the pious and the pure.
I too slept the deep sleep of a child, seeing nothing and hearing nothing except ghosts and evil spirits. Fear would creep towards me from every side, moving in on me like cold air, so I would keep still in my place in the middle of the bed, moving neither to the right nor to the left, trying not to touch my father or my mother. I feared both of them and with fear stole hatred in under the bed covers, penetrating my body so that no matter how warmly my mother embraced me I continued to avoid the slightest contact with her, and no matter how much warm affection my father showed me I continued not to love him.
My father was the leader of a religious cult, and he used to make amulets for women while they sat with him in the dark of night. It was an occupation which his father had bequeathed him so that through religion he could make the profits he had failed to make by breeding chickens and rabbits. He used to attach the words of God around the women’s necks and decorate the amulet with a blue bead hanging from a thread. Then he would return home carrying meat and vegetables from the market, but in his pockets he brought back piastres which smelt of the women’s sweat.
I would close the door on myself to study my lessons, and when the examinations drew close I would remember God, prostrating myself before Him three times with every prayer and imploring Him to help me pass, and God responded to me each time, and so year after year I moved up from class to class.
Thus I lived, passing from one success to the other, not knowing the meaning of failure even once. Writer after writer dropped into oblivion, but I survived by the side of the Imam, untouched. I continued to write without stop, never reading what I wrote, content to see my picture framed in its box every morning. I spent each day like a short span of life between one dream and the next, and spent each night moving from one level of sleep to the other as I sat with the Imam through the night, drinking toast after toast to our old friendship. Then we stole out together at a late hour to the House of Joy. During festivities and celebrations I stood beside him, listening to his speech as he stammered through it with the sun above his head like the open eye of heaven radiating the colours of the rainbow, while all around the crowds shouted out their acclamations, my mind thinking that in this wide world of ours there must be some will more powerful than that of Satan to have made me join Hizb Allah and shout in unison with their voices, ‘Long live the Imam.’
As I stood beneath the lights I looked around me, searching everywhere for this will which was higher than mine, knowing not where it came from, knowing only that it lay outside my own being, perhaps falling from the dome of the sky or rising from the depths of the earth, or from the streets and alleys and lanes, or from the tomb-like houses enveloped in smoke, or from the broken looks of those who plough the earth, or from the faces of children covered in flies with their voices twittering like birds, or from the flags flying high on the day of defeat, or from the rockets soaring up in the sky in celebration of the Feast. I stood near the Imam with my foot planted firmly on the ground, for I feared that if I made the slightest movement my place would be lost. I could see the sun like a wide-open eye watching our souls from on high, and when the face of the Imam fell to the ground the sky did not change, and the earth did not change, and the acclamations of the crowd went on unchanged, and the rockets still burst with colourful tails, and I still lay near him with my face to the ground as though I had not seen a thing throughout, not seen that the Imam remained the same, that the new Imam was the old one, for even if the body had changed the face was the same, and he still lay on the ground close to where I lay. I could see a transparent cloud float like a mist before my eyes and I could feel dust go up my nose. My head was no longer held well-balanced on my body, and my body was no longer in a straight line with my head, and my foot had been pushed aside and its place taken by another foot, and my eyes peered from under my lids, first to the left, then to the right, but there was no trace of any of the members of Hizb Allah or Hizb al-Shaitan, nor was there any trace of the body of the Imam.
There I lay alone on the ground, and the sun looked down on me with its flaming eye, and the earth under my body was cool, and the voice of my father echoed in my ears like the voice of the Imam, and I looked in his direction all the time, but he turned his face away to the other side, and failure ran through my veins and made my body cry. I closed my eyes, preparing for eternal rest, breathed in the dust with slow breaths, dying without haste. Around my neck hung the key of Paradise, but I had plenty of time to savour the joys of the Garden of Eden, and my mind occupied itself with the images of the seventy-seven nymphs, some of whom were fair and some of whom were dark, and I was at a loss how to choose from them my heart’s desire. The taste of death was in my mouth, a slowly dissolving bitterness flavoured with a sharp tang of pleasure. I drank it down sip by sip like wine, bitter at the beginning, sweet at the end. I laughed in a loud voice, letting myself go, at last overcoming my inhibitions, driving the air out of my chest and my belly, my voice ringing out in my ears for the first time more spontaneous than that of my last wife. There was no longer any stagnant air from the days of my childhood held back deep down inside me, nor any feeling of jealousy, nor any desires. I had partaken from the pleasures of this world to the point of satiety and now I had become indifferent, and on my face there remained nothing but an angelic smile.
They took him to his last wife in a tinselled box. His name was printed on the outside in big letters, and there was a large picture of him framed in gold. On his face was a virtuous smile, and the picture continued to live in her memory, for it revealed to her the inner sadness in the heart of her late husband. Deep inside her she remembered it as proof of his sensitivity, of his capacity for great sadness, despite the fact that during their life together she had heard him laugh and jest all the time, and although in every encounter, as soon as she put her arms around him he slipped through them like a fish. In his absence sadness had brought them together just like love had done before, and year after year went by but she still continued to remember him, and year after year, whenever they met she wound her arms around him, but each time,
like a fish, he immediately slipped out of her embrace. She tried to hold on to him, but in vain. Her hands would come out of the sea empty, and all that remained behind was his picture in a frame and his words printed in the newspapers, words which neither he nor she nor anybody else except the Imam read. At night she would notice him lying on his back with wide-open eyes staring at his child with an expression of doubt, for the nose was neither his, nor his father’s, nor his grandfather’s. He caught hold of the little nose with a firm grip, as though he was holding in his hand the ultimate proof of her unfaithfulness to him, and the child would open his eyes so wide that they seemed to express all the fear in the world, then noticing his father’s eyes gleaming in the dark like the Devil, he would shut them as tight as he could. One night he heard his father ask, ‘Whose son is he?’, and he heard his mother answer, ‘The son of love.’ Though still a child he understood that this man was not his father. He closed his eyes, happy at this thought, and slept peacefully until morning.
The Fall of the Imam Page 14
