New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

Wiggegh torna atgged at tezied.4

  You’re not a child we’re waiting to see grow up.

  You’re not a sick man we’re waiting to see recover.

  A group of boys answered this call and chanted the cruel refrain, dancing along behind the thin lad. The other group stood frozen, glancing back and forth between their naughty playmates and the bird that crouched on the tent. Many of them expected to see him recoil and shrink back as the racket made by the boys reached a crescendo and their voices grew even louder to match the agonizing rhythm.

  4

  Around noon the bird twitched, edged up a little higher, and spread out his right wing and right leg as if stretching. Then he unfolded his left wing and held it extended over his left leg for a time. He pulled himself erect and straightened his very tall frame—his scrawny body supported by two even scrawnier legs. His long beak, which was thrust forward, was longer than his legs.

  In the crowd of boys, a voice exclaimed, “This isn’t an abil-bil.”

  The boy whose tent the bird had chosen retorted: “Are you adult enough to know all the kinds of birds?”

  Another voice called out, “He’s right. This is some other bird, an unknown species.”

  The tall, lanky boy intervened, “Whether he’s an abil-bil or some other bird, he’s certainly old, and old birds bring bad luck to camps.”

  The bird flapped his wings and beat the air listlessly and desperately. He held his wings extended for a moment and then emitted a strange cry, a muffled squawk, before fluttering his wings and attempting to fly. He rose barely a foot into the air with a ponderousness, slowness, and awkwardness that did not match his meager body. He fluttered his wings with all the ponderousness, slowness, and awkwardness of chickens that rebel heroically against their nature, experiment with disavowing their origins, and take flight, becoming callow citizens of the heavens.

  The bird headed toward Retem Valley, covering some distance. Then he fell, descending to the earth like a chicken. He fell ignominiously, in a manner ill-befitting a bird. He plummeted but never stopped beating the air with his large wings, which were lustrous but marked by feebleness and blackness. He touched the ground with his feet, and his toes scratched grooves into the earth for a long distance. The children pursued him, and he ran clumsily from them like a crow. He ran as if favoring his right leg and the left one as well. When the boys closed in on him, he rose again some inches into the air before falling back to earth. He landed in an embarrassing way, and his noble beak sank into the dirt. He wrested it from the furrow, from disgrace, and beat the air with it to shake off the dust and humiliation. In his tired, languid eyes the boys saw the gleam and moisture of tears.

  Then the lanky lad said meanly, “Didn’t I tell you he’s old?”

  5

  The sun was starting to set, and shadows were stretching toward the East. The North was liberal with moist breezes, and the heat’s scattered remnants were retreating with the passing of the siesta hour. So people were emerging from their tents, and the nobles sought refuge in the shade of their homes to debate, wrangle, and enjoy the evening shade and the Northern breezes.

  The leader also resorted to the shade of the tent.

  He sat on an old leather mat that time’s tongue had licked, stripping it of all its hair. He began to amuse himself. In his lap he placed a piece of barley bread, which he started to crumble in his hands, throwing morsels to the bird, which proceeded to bend over these crumbs, languidly and nonchalantly plucking up bits, as if eating not because he was hungry but because he too wanted to amuse himself. The leader murmured, “You’re really old. You’re so old that your advanced age was obvious even to the youngsters.” The leader had rescued the elderly bird from the hands of those wretches some days earlier. He had gone to Retem Valley at noon and found the bird running in a ridiculous fashion, desperately fluttering in an attempt to liberate itself from the earth, from the burden of the earth, from the sovereignty of the earth—but to no avail! Creatures when they become senile, when they grow old and become weak and incapacitated, find the earth waiting for them, find that the earth is their destiny, that the earth is their eternal homeland, their last resort, even if these creatures are celestial beings, even if these creatures are one of the sky’s communities like the birds! If the earth weren’t so greedy, if the earth weren’t so ignoble, if the earth weren’t so wise, it wouldn’t have been able to find on its surface any dust from which to create creatures. What is the dust of the earth if not the bones of past creatures and the graves of the dead who in antiquity became food for the earth? How can this wise mother create a being that strives if she does not sustain herself? In ancient times, didn’t the people of the desert produce the body of the desert? This is the sign. The senile bird was a sign. An aged being weighs heavily on the earth, because she attracts him, pulling him to her. She tells him, “Your return is approaching. The time when you are destined to return to my belly is nigh. I have lavished food on you while you were alive. Today you must draw near and prepare to provide nourishment for those who come after you.” The creature is afflicted with terror. The bird was afflicted with terror, because he sensed an unaccustomed weakness and a mysterious force that was drawing him to the lowest possible level. His wings betrayed him, his body failed him, and the sky drew farther away from him, because he did not know that the sky itself, his homeland the sky, was also incapable of changing a single symbol in destiny’s Law. It had handed him over to destiny, which was ramming him downward, executing the harsh dictate to return him to the earth.

  He heard the youngsters discussing old age, using the word “amghar” more than once,5 and did not know whether they were talking about the bird or him.

  6

  The diviner approached, and they discussed, again, the beauty of old age and the nobility latent in every sorrow.

  The diviner squatted down beside the leader and pursued the mirage into the wasteland, following it till it swallowed the horizon and turned into tongues of diaphanous flame. He picked up a pebble and threw it toward the bird. Then he, as he usually did, made straight for his point from the farthest reaches of the earth. “I’ve never seen another bird so tame around people from day one.”

  The leader tossed out some scraps of barley bread, but the bird felt dispirited and became increasingly downcast. He cowered and gazed at the bread crumbs without any interest. Then he closed his eyes and hid his head between his wings. The leader said, “He was forced to act this way against his will. He acts tame because he is alone, deserted, and lost—lost like us. Moreover, don’t forget that he’s old. The secret lies in his advanced age. Old age is ugly. Does the Law discuss anything uglier than old age?”

  The diviner smiled. He circled the topic and hovered around the point, although he continued to explore the ends of the earth. “I fear that what the Law says about old age disagrees with my master’s statement.”

  “I know you will lead me to the ancient kingdom to tell me about the beauty of sorrow once again. Or am I wrong?”

  “You’re right, Master. But I don’t derive my views about old age and sorrow only from the satchel of the Law. Our forefathers were the first to pass down this maxim. It is the forefathers who said that the sorrow of old age is noble and that there’s nothing more beautiful in the desert than a sorrowful person. Didn’t my master disapprove of the guffaws of the masses? Didn’t my master expel Ababa from the council a few days ago when an audible laugh escaped from him? Did my master do that out of respect for the Law of Dignity or from fear of the Law of Wisdom?”

  “But don’t you consider the sorrow you discuss to be the end’s shadow? Don’t you think it is death’s specter?”

  “If it weren’t the end’s shadow, we wouldn’t discover in it beauty’s shadow. If it weren’t death’s specter, we wouldn’t see in it nobility’s specter. The secret is always in death.”

  “Why do desert people sing the praises of the end? Why did the forefathers bequeath to us a complete Law in praise of d
eath?”

  “Because they, Master, learned from experience that there is nothing so worthy of worship as death. They worshiped it not because it is the desert’s only truth and not because it is the only antidote with which they treated the ills of yearning and the pains of the desert, but the secret, Master, is in their longing for the secret, because death is a secret, and they longed for nothing so much as they longed for the secret.”

  The leader tossed out some crumbs and shook off his lap. He followed the effusion of the mirage in the wasteland. He said, “Do you mean they worshiped death, wishing for death, because it would disclose to them the secret of the Spirit World?”

  “Now my master is drawing close to the secret.”

  “But how would it help them to discover the secret after it was too late?”

  “The truth, Master, the truth! Truth is the consolation.”

  “Don’t you think it stupid for man to seek death so he can know for certain that beyond the gloom he will meet a god?”

  “Do you want them to be satisfied with life in these dead boundaries? Isn’t that more heroic than life in the boundaries of the mute desert?”

  “I want them to be satisfied with what they’ve been granted. I want them to be satisfied with life within the boundaries of life.”

  “Does my master want a life without truth?”

  “Why do you all persist in looking for truth in the Spirit World?”

  “Because, Master, that’s the only place that truth exists. The only truth, Master, is in the Spirit World.”

  “How harsh that is!”

  The leader picked up a pebble and muttered, “How harsh that is.” Throwing the pebble aside, he continued, “Let’s return to the bird. I heard the lads say he doesn’t belong to the tribe of abil-bil birds.”

  The diviner descended from his heights and approached the source. From his pocket he drew snares to bag the point. “Whether the bird is an abil-bil or another similar species, according to the Law it is a messenger.”

  The leader fell silent. So the diviner continued setting his traps. “The birds have begun to migrate. Since this bird refused to migrate, that is a bad omen, Master.”

  The leader’s eye gleamed with a smile. Did the leader smile because he had discovered the site of the trap? Did he smile because he had realized that the sole reason for the diviner’s visit was to continue the previous day’s discussion about the need to migrate? He asked, “How can you expect him to migrate when he’s old? How can you expect him to fly when the earth has tethered him with chains and his wings are broken?”

  “The bird is a migratory creature, and a migratory creature must migrate, even if he is old, because he will contravene his nature and contravene the law of things if he doesn’t. Migration is his destiny, Master.”

  “But old age cripples the body, addles the mind, and tethers the poor creature to the earth with iron chains. So how can it explore the sky and join the celestial caravan? Search your Law for another path for it; don’t ask the poor creature to oppose the will of our mother, the desert.”

  The diviner took another step closer to the site and struck his hands together. He said, “O God of the desert! Does my master think that the bird is this senile? Doesn’t my master see that the bird has refused to fly not because he can’t fly but because he is carrying a prophecy to the encampment?”

  Their eyes met. The two men faced off at the mysterious site. They circled round the source that is the only destination for the community of diviners when they embark on their quests. It is a shadowy spring, a melancholy source they refer to in their arcane jargon as a sign.

  The diviner saw that the leader had discovered the site and shouted, “Old age is truly a noble homeland, Master, but it’s an ailment that does not yet threaten my master’s body.”

  The leader turned his eyes far away. He smiled and returned to the wasteland, to the playful mirage in the wasteland. He smiled for a long time. He smiled because he had discovered the diviner’s secret, his secret reason for visiting. He had known the diviner would arrive shortly. He had known the diviner would come as a messenger from the Council of Wisdom. He had known that they would not let the matter drop easily. He had known that they would come to him individually and in groups, evenings and nights. He had known that they would not oppose him on any matter, but also that they would not yield easily, especially when the matter related to a dictate of the Law, especially when the matter related to a practice that had helped mold them since they were born and had become a religion for them, especially when the matter related to migration. He had excused them, understanding that they were right to struggle desperately to obey a command they had inherited from their grandfathers and had read in their laws, a dictate that had coursed through their blood till it became their life. But he knew as well that they did not know in which land he stood, in which desert he had found himself during recent years, and what it means for a man to discover overnight that everything he has done in life is lost, that everything he should not have done is what he has done in life, and that what he has not done, he will never be able to do, because his time is disappearing faster than he expected, what he thought was life, what he had depended on, had ended before it began, had ended at the time he had planned to begin, indeed, even before he planned to begin. He was discovering that life had passed in the hour he was preparing to begin life—what trivial people call life. Now they wanted him to move about like in the old days. They wanted him to stock up on poems of longing, to set his sights on the stern, shadowy, indifferent horizon and rush off, to dart away toward the horizon in search of what lay beyond the horizon, to hurry off toward the horizon in search of the lost oasis that he knew he would never find. He was duty-bound to hope it existed if he wanted to continue playing, because this was the basis of the game. Whenever the horizon disclosed a void—an expanse, another horizon even less forgiving, even more murky, even more cunningly indifferent—he fought back the lump in his throat, cursed Wantahet both privately and publicly,6 and diverted himself with songs of grief, because the nomad contents himself with the Waw he finds in poetry once he discovers that this perfect oasis does not exist on earth. But old age mocks every deception and sees what all nomads fail to see. It sees what the diviner does not see. It sees what the Law itself does not see. This is the secret of old age. This is the secret of the sorrow that the diviner saw in the old man’s eye and called beautiful.

  ______________

  4. In Tamasheq in the original Arabic.

  5. Tamasheq for shaykh, old man, leader, or grandfather.

  6. The Jenny Master, a trickster figure in Tuareg lore and a passionate advocate for nomadism and for the she-ass—not the camel.

  III

  THE DEPARTURE

  Nature likes continual creation and continual destruction, because nature is not fit to create anything that can be depended on.

  Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

  1

  But they did not know his secret; they did not understand why he contended with the rugged terrain every day to descend to Retem Valley. They did not know why he isolated himself there from morning to noon. They did not know because they had not heard the song; they had not been delighted by the Unknown’s anthem that hid in the groves of retem trees. If they had known, if they had heard, they would have realized that the leader would not reject being uprooted, would not refuse to order the people to move on and separate from their mother, the earth, merely because old age was drawing him to this place the way that the bird from the flock was drawn to the earth of the encampment. If they had heard, they would have realized that the leader would never have contravened the Law of past generations even if feebleness bound him with the strongest chains of iron. If they had heard, they would have realized that the matter involved a secret greater than decrepitude, stronger than a feeling of feebleness, and more profound than the disappointment with which anyone who reaches an advanced age and discovers that the pa
th that previously swallowed his ancestors is the same abyss, the same gloom, and the same forgetfulness that awaits him.

  He heard it for the first time a few days after they arrived in this land. He descended into the virgin valley, where the bottomlands were covered with a band of smooth sand marked by attractive folds reminiscent of the earliest days of creation when the original grandfather left his kingdom and ventured into the wasteland for the first time. Into this sandy expanse retem trees had raced each other, but rocky borders had crowded them out of the adjoining tract, depositing in the areas at the foot of the mountains swords cloaked with polished stones that time’s torrents had burnished till they gleamed in the sun’s rays. Trees had found no place to expand there. So they had turned back on themselves, massed together, and created in the valley bottom thick groves reminiscent of date palms in oases when they encircle springs of water, interlace, cohere, and cluster together as if to hide the spring from inquiring eyes, as if hiding the spring from people for fear they will envy this treasure. To the crest of upper branches of these groves come birds, doves, to build splendid nests. They lay eggs in the nests, sit on those eggs, and sing their monotonous melodies during the siesta hour.

  In the retem grove he heard the bird’s song as well.

  Unlike the doves’ songs, it wasn’t at all monotonous. Unlike the doves’ songs, it wasn’t monotone or monochrome. Unlike the doves’ songs, it wasn’t boring.

  In this song, the bird’s voice modulated, there were multiple rhythms, parts rose and fell, the lament grew ever more intense, and the tune became purer and mixed with the wail of the wind in the crests of the retem trees, altering the ballad. Then the breeze died down and the lamento calmed, but the sorrowful sweetness, the sweet sorrow, never left the song. Indeed, the tune became more sorrowful and increasingly sweet and delightful. Then all the jinn in his breast awoke. They listened, reveled, and entered ecstatic trances, carrying him off through time to return to him what time had taken. They didn’t restore to him the harsh, lethal memory that lights a fire in the heart but never brings back what has passed away. Instead they spirited him off to a space where space does not exist. Then he found himself in a time where time does not exist; a space that has not yet become space and a time that has not yet developed into time. So he saw … saw what he had always tried to see. He saw what the desert had hidden from him. He saw what time had snatched from him. So he wept. He wept like a child. He wept because only a child sees nothing disgraceful about weeping. He wept because he had retrieved his lost childhood, which he had thought time and old age would never return to him. The bird fell silent, but the man did not return to the valley, to the desert, to space, to time. He remained in the world of the jinn for a period. He stayed suspended in a void devoid of all the characteristics of the void, hovering in space lacking the special qualities of space, soaring in a time that gave birth to no one and that swallowed no one, because it was a time that had not yet been born.