“You shouldn’t think so poorly of us.”
“I also fear that our comrade may have gotten ahead of me and thought ill of our master who reclines in the tomb, if he thinks that the leader of eternity deserves the title of poet merely because he amused himself with some vile verses in his youth.”
“The fact is that I have almost lost my way again….”
“I was trying to say that our leader was a true poet. I mean he wasn’t a poet because he recited couplets about passionate love or some other inane subject; he was a poet greater than all the others whom desert tribes have known, because he dandled in his heart a treasure named ‘nobility.’”
“It won’t be difficult for us to find among the people a poet who hides in his heart this quality that you call a treasure.”
“Far from it!”
“What do you mean?”
“I fear we will never be able to.”
“Is it reasonable for us to lack a single noble person in all these dwellings?”
“What I really fear is talking constantly with two different tongues.”
Their comrade fell silent, and stillness pervaded the meeting.
Outside, in a place near the temple’s walls, a muffled, evil, hoarse chortle echoed, immediately reminding listeners of the ignoble laughter that passersby commonly heard when they approached the mysterious scarecrow placed in the fields.
3
“If leadership is so hazardous and dangerous, then our only choice is to go with the slumbering leader.”
Amasis the Younger, out of all the council members, was the man most inclined to yield and most cautious about speaking his mind. So his peers were astonished on each of the infrequent occasions when he allowed himself to leave the redoubt of silence to divulge a diffident opinion to them.
Astonishment washed over them on this day too, and they exchanged meaningful looks. The silence, however, did not last long because this notion provoked a reaction from the chief merchant, who snapped at his colleague’s face: “I find it odd that you did not discern this idea’s danger before allowing it to spill from your tongue.”
“Danger?”
“The gravest danger! Did you, like many others, think me stupid the day I relied on the support of the masses to impose on the council the choice of a puppet who stumbles over the earth on two feet?”
“Actually, I still find it odd that you should have been the first to request a puppet who stumbles on two feet yesterday but today come to threaten us with how dangerous it is to sit on the throne of leadership.”
“What I did yesterday was motivated by a desire to advance commerce, to advance the life of this oasis. What I am saying today about sovereignty stems from a fear that you will all suffer the same fate as Aggulli. Do you find fault with this?”
“No one is finding fault, but it isn’t hard for someone listening to all of you argue to realize that the easiest alternative is for us to rely on the rock of the tomb and to seek a prophecy as we did in the past and as our ancestors did before us.”
“I wasn’t discussing leadership to scare you. I sincerely wished to call your attention to a secret quality that the Spirit World has placed in sovereignty, ever since people first found a sovereign over their heads.”
“No one questions your intentions, but it’s hard for anyone to accept the label ‘murderer.’”
The man with two veils cast him a disparaging look and said sarcastically, “Although I admit you were the last to plant the blade in the victim’s heart, I fear that your hesitation won’t wipe the dead man’s blood from your hands.”
The hero interjected, “We must stop this. We didn’t come to discuss something we did with a single hand to rescue the life of the oasis.”
The chief merchant raised his voice argumentatively: “Why are voices raised in the council in an attempt to send us back today to a place we left yesterday, if our objective truly is advancing the life of the oasis?”
Ah’llum asked, “To what place is our colleague referring?”
“Doesn’t our friend wish us to give up and revert to the old way?”
“We all believe that an oasis without a governor is like a headless body. We all know that commerce without a master is like a herd without a herdsman, because we have become entrepreneurs—like all the other residents of the oasis. But we must find a way to escape from our dilemma. Why don’t you finally say which of us you think is best qualified to become the governor?”
Awaiting a reply, they directed heads wrapped in veils toward their colleague, but the chief merchant’s eyes fled to the ceiling, and his right hand repeatedly massaged his left wrist. Then, with the cryptic phrasing of a diviner attempting to discern a prophecy in the void, he said, “I fear the best plan would be to confer leadership on someone who is not present with us now.”
Imaswan Wandarran clapped his hands together and shouted, “Lately riddles seem destined to become our language.”
Ah’llum, however, gestured for him not to be hasty. Like someone sighting the bearer of glad tidings in the distance, he told the chief merchant: “Not so fast! Slow down! I think I have found the talisman’s key. I bet you’re referring to the venerable elder. Am I right?”
A smile glinted in the eyes of the man with two veils, and rubbing his hands together jubilantly he returned from his journey to the ceiling. “You’re right. I actually didn’t mean any other creature.”
The council members exchanged glances that were a confused mixture of anxiety and astonishment. Ah’llum entered the fray with a solemn question: “Are you mocking us?”
Fiddling with his hands, the chief merchant replied frigidly, “Mocking you never once crossed my mind.”
“But … but I’m sure you realize that the venerable elder has had no foothold in our world for a very long time.”
“A person without a foothold in our world is the most appropriate creature to head our world.”
“Are you mocking us?”
“Have you forgotten that I once said in this council that our mistake lay in continuing to treat commanders in chief like creatures of our world, when everything shows that they become creatures of another type, tracing their descent to alternative homelands, the day they consent to don the mantles of leadership?”
“Emmamma has quit all homelands. Emmamma has lived on the borders of the Spirit World for a long time. How can someone who has taken the Spirit World for a homeland become our governor? How can we convince people that this is right? How can we deflect their scorn? How can we shield ourselves against their anger?”
“This is the goal. The aim is for us to allow people of eternity to enjoy their absence in eternity and to leave the affairs of this world to people of the world.”
“What are you saying?”
“Only a person who has traversed a long stage in the Unknown can realize that our world is a game inside a game.”
“Won’t you proceed a stage further so we may understand the talisman’s allusion?”
“I’m saying that the venerable elder Emmamma is the only creature who will not contest sovereignty with us—not because he isn’t interested in the earth’s thrones but because he exists outside the physical world.”
“Ha, ha, ha … I admit this is a sordid plan!”
“This will shield us from the error we committed the day we made Aggulli our leader, and repeating mistakes is a foul deed that ill befits the people’s sages.”
“Bravo! Bravo! Now the council can cheer with me, because thanks to this judicious plan, we won’t merely obviate a matter that has caused us trouble all this time, we will also be able to say that we’ve achieved an epiphany.”
He turned to face the council, gazing happily, comprehensively, and childishly at its members. Then he shouted, “Rejoice at the good news: from today forward you, collectively, are the governor. Ha, ha…. Each of you from today on is a leader. We’ll grant the title to the venerable elder, because that poor man won’t need anything but the title.
We’ll retain the amulet and divide up the booty. What a plan! What a scheme! Ha, ha…. I admit once more that you are a grander schemer than all the others. But … but, why weren’t we able to hit upon this division of power before?”
He continued to guffaw as the edge of his lower veil slipped down. The linen revealed an ugly mouth that looked like a female bosom. On top, it was bounded by a bushy mustache streaked with gray. Below, it was besieged by the jungles of a bushy, very gray beard. Anyone who saw this mouth understood the secret reason for the desert people’s invention of this wrapped veil, which became their trademark among all the tribes.
He extended a trembling hand to hide a crack the Law had reckoned tantamount to genitalia even before people came to see it as disgraceful.
He shouted again, “Send at once for the venerable elder!”
4
The venerable elder is said to have adopted a litter for a bed long before old age vanquished him and he was no longer able to walk. So he had become the first to recline on a wooden frame supported by the necks of slaves.
Apparently this invention aroused the admiration of the noblemen and the lords of commerce in the oasis, because they adopted it from him and competed with each other to accessorize it with rows of lucky charms, other amulets designed to ward off evil, wild animal skins imported from the southern forestlands and adorned with symbols of gods, magical designs, and celestial bodies outlined with colored beads. The nobles climbed onto these wooden frames and had slaves and mamluks carry them on their shoulders as they toured the alleys, markets, fields, and plazas to flaunt what they owned. Such opulent litters put to shame the venerable elder’s meager, bare sticks, which had been crisscrossed into a lattice by admirers’ hands and covered with a glabrous old goatskin mat. Thus Emmamma’s convoy no longer attracted the attention of passersby or sparked curiosity in the breasts of the masses, as it once had, when their eyes spotted this load transported on the heads of two dark, bare-shouldered mamluks of different heights.
Even when the sorcerers’ prophecies came true and the inhabitants of the oasis saw with their own eyes the unfolding of those phases this coterie believe are a gambit concealed in the life of each person who is destined to live a long time so that he may be born a second time, and when people witnessed the transformation in the venerable elder’s body (which sprouted black hair and teeth with a gleam, whiteness, and soundness that rivaled those of boys and which shed its pathetic skin that resembled a mass of palm-fiber rope or wrappings made from acacia bark, sloughing it off the way a serpent sloughs off its scales for a new skin that seems so alive it resembles the temptation leaping from belles’ faces), this glorious birth, this “second birth” as sorcerers call it, could not persuade Emmamma to descend from his mobile throne and to dismount from his glorious litter, which was supported by the necks of sturdy men. His refusal to walk was not because of the custom that turned free men into slaves and not because he thought himself more entitled to the throne that he had created one day than copycats who had adopted it and then had soon started competing with each other to adorn it the way women’s hands adorn the bride’s face on her wedding night—even boasting that they owned it and bragging to people about its beauty the way they vaunted their possessions and children.
The slaves, instead, reported a different view from their master. They said Emmamma would not abandon the stretcher—which had become his bed, house, homeland, and bride by night and day—until this second birth also provided him with the energy of a boy who can hop through the open countryside on one foot. The set of poles represented for him—at that time when he had absented himself from time and retreated into eternity’s tenebrous obscurities—the sepulcher of everlasting solitude. A man who has a natural propensity for generously making sacrificial offerings can forget everything and sacrifice everything but does not forget the person who consoled him in a time of trial and does not sacrifice the prop that has protected him from his fear of chaos in a time of forgetfulness.
The citizens did not understand the allusions of the venerable elder’s language, nor did they ever comprehend the ring of pain in his immortal moan. Similarly, on that day they did not understand his cryptic prophecy, which he released to the face of the oasis after returning from the realms of the Unknown: “I wish I had never seen you. I wish I had never known you and never known your world. I wish I had never lost my world. I wish I had never returned. I wish I had never been born. I wish I had never been born. I wish I had never been born.” Inquisitive minds asked him which birth he was referring to: “Today’s birth or yesterday’s?” His only reply was his time-honored, distressing groan, the secret meaning of which no one could ever decipher—neither in the generations living in the time of his first birth nor in the subsequent generations who were contemporaries of his second birth.
The nobles were the only ones who did not acknowledge any rebirth for the venerable elder.
The nobles described second birth as a superstition and qualified it with the adjective “purported,” to disparage the masses’ claims and to mock the exaggerations of people whose thirst for a prodigy was never quenched and who concocted one canard after the other.
The nobles said that the body’s transformation, the skin’s change, the growth of teeth or hair (or any other such phenomenon), which were characteristics they often found in desert trees and in species of camel, were no proof of a man’s rebirth—as the coteries of sorcerers had claimed. Because they frequented the venerable elder more than anyone else, and as time passed learned his secret better than anyone else, they were able to assert today, too, that the venerable elder had not returned from exile in the everlasting, had not migrated from the nook of forgetfulness, had not fallen back even one step into the world of human beings, and that his phrase—which many tongues repeated and in which simpletons detected a prophecy that expressed disgust at the horror of a return after an absence—was a phrase that might be heard from the mouth of a crazed person, the throat of a feverish man transported by a trance, or the breast of a poet overcome by yearning.
The elders said that the real treasure was the intellect and that they were the men who had repeatedly conversed with Emmamma and had attempted to find in him the purported rebirth that commoners discussed but had never harvested from his tongue any trace of a rebirth of his intellect. They were justified, therefore, in ignoring the masses’ claims just as they always ignored their rumors and other assertions, and had grown used to ignoring the venerable elder’s distressing moans over the past years, leaving him in the corner as an ornament and protective amulet for the council—as they always said.
When citizens inquired about the secret of the venerable elder’s recovery of his sense of sight (a sense that those who knew him personally asserted he had never lost), the elders responded to the question with a question: “If Emmamma has recovered his sense of sight thanks to the purported rebirth, why hasn’t he regained his sense of hearing too?”
5
“Today the council is entitled to convey glad tidings to a person who has always been an amulet for the council’s head,” Imaswan Wandarran bellowed into the venerable elder’s ear and then leaned back to sit erect. He snuck a glance at the man with two veils and then finally heard the response of the scion of eternity: “Oo … oo … oo … oo … ooh….”
He groaned for a long time and swayed right and left as he customarily did when a powerful sorrow overwhelmed him. Then he proceeded to release a moan of multiple pains, repeating it with the intoxication of the possessed till it slipped out of the council, circulated through the crannies, and descended to the realms. Then the Spirit World lodged it in the expanse of the homelands. The moan finally rose into the void—heartrendingly, feverishly, piercingly, like every ancient tune.
The moan departed, but its echo lingered in the air. Then the frail body lying in a heap on the rows of poles responded to the echo with a shudder like that of people dancing ecstatically.
Imaswan looked at all his
colleagues in turn and then leaned toward his neighbor’s ear to elucidate the significance of the message: “Today the council can boast to the other tribes about the selection of our master to head the council. So may we hear from his mouth a thought about this puny gift?”
“Hey … ey … ey … ey … ey….”
Imaswan exchanged a look with the council members and then leaned back toward the scrawny body that time had consumed till it resembled a sheaf of straw. He thrust his mouth to Emmamma’s ear till his lips touched the venerable elder’s veil, from which desert suns had sucked the blue color till it faded, vanished, and turned a melancholy white.
He shouted in a repulsive voice: “Do I understand from this cry that our master endorses the council’s choice?”
“Ah … ah … ah … ah … ah … ah … ah … ah….”
The cry became a genuine song—like the opening of the grief-filled ballads that the tribes’ women poets call asahagh. Then the wasted body began to rock to the cry’s beat.
Imaswan watched him with despair. Then he retreated. From the precincts of the council a voice rose: “Our master is tiring himself.”
The peers looked up to find standing above them a dark giant whose black tunic’s sleeves revealed muscular arms on which lingered the murky glow that gleams on the skins of intensely black lizards. In this spectral giant the noblemen recognized the mamluk who bore the venerable elder’s stretcher and who always walked at the front while his shorter partner always walked at the rear. It was said that Emmamma had established this rule ages ago to keep his head raised high and thus allow him to watch the ebb and flow of creatures with his sharp, beady eyes, which the ghoul of time had vanquished—along with every other part of him.
In response to people’s questioning looks, the giant explained, “My master will never hear.”
Ah’llum taunted him with a sarcastic question: “Didn’t the rabble fill our ears with the legend of his rebirth?”
“My master hears when he wants to; he doesn’t hear when he doesn’t want to.”
“What are you saying, wretch?”
The Scarecrow (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 4
