by Jamal Naji
He smiled at her and said, “Tell me what you see, no matter what it is, and you will have whatever you want, no matter how much it is.”
She nodded her head calmly.
“Your wealth will increase in heaps and piles, and God will open for you the doors of an obscure and enticing business venture that will bring you riches beyond compare, and those people who seek you out and who envy you will also grow in number.”
“That’s what all the fortune-tellers and astrologers say,” he said in a haughty tone.
She sighed and continued on as if she hadn’t heard him. “But you will experience a difficult year. The heavens that have been otherwise preoccupied and have left you alone all the days of your life, are going to pounce on you in your coming days and do as they please, interfering in your life in order to uphold the fate that awaits you.”
Then she cupped her palm behind her left ear and said, tenderly, “I can almost hear the sound of fate’s hoofs galloping across the plains of your coming days. You must take heed against this year, sir. It is the year of your sorrow.”
Then the expression on her face made her look like she was seeing the events of his future unfold before her very eyes.
“There is only one person in this world who is of your own flesh and blood: your son, who is lost out there somewhere in God’s forsaken universe. But he will appear to you, pained by the silent fire that has been burning within him for a very long time, a fire buried deep inside him. I can nearly hear his cries reverberating in the heavens with my own ears. He will appear to you because your death will come at his hands.”
The Basha let out a listless laugh. “I have no children. My wife cannot conceive. But I wish I did have a son, even if my death were to come at his hands!”
She continued, showing no sign of his words having had the slightest effect on her. “Sir, you must seek out and find this son before he comes for you.”
What surprised me was the way the smile vanished from the Basha’s face, leaving behind the look of someone who believed the prediction would come true.
“And what else do you see in my future?”
“This son of yours is very bold. Nothing can hold him back and blood will not deter him from getting what he wants. He is living in a different era than yours, sir.”
The Basha and Uroub exchanged glances I couldn’t interpret. I felt there was some sort of unspoken dialogue transpiring between them.
“And where is this son?” he asked.
She raised her palms to the heavens in a prayer-like gesture and then answered, “Heaven has closed its doors, but I thank God, the Hidden One, the Noble One, for opening my heart and allowing me to see what I have seen of your future.”
Then she repeated what she had said but with more emphasis this time. “Do not forget, sir. You must find this son before he finds you.”
He looked at me, then at her. He rose from his seat and paced back and forth with his hands clasped behind his back as he spoke to her. “OK. Let’s suppose that what you say is true and that what you predict will happen happens. Is there any way to change this fate?”
She answered, after letting out a sigh, “I am but one of God’s weak servants, sir. I have no power to alter the fates or to approach their impenetrable fortresses.”
She was silent for a moment and then added, “Our great sage and source of all authority in India, Harsha al-Hakim, is the only one who can answer your question for you. He is the only one who is able to speak directly to the fates and can attempt to traverse their fortresses by his works. Who knows? Perhaps they will turn their great locks and open their gates to you.”
The Basha stood there in all his greatness, not moving. He looked pale and worried. As for me, I felt I’d made the biggest mistake of my life bringing Uroub to this occasion. I feigned a smile and said, “Mr Basha, sir, this whole matter is nothing more than an unlikely surprise I prepared for you on your birthday. Don’t forget that men such as yourself determine the course of fate. You’re outside the realm of fortunes and fortune-telling.”
But the sudden look he gave me silenced me at once. I knew when I should be quiet in the presence of that man who now seemed very different from the man I had known before.
Samah Shahadeh
Ever since I was a small child and even as I have reached the age of fifty-seven, I have always enjoyed listening to astrologers and fortune-tellers.
I cannot resist the possibility of knowing the future, even if it comes through fortune-tellers.
But I’m afraid of the way they look into my eyes when they talk, as if creeping right inside my brain. And I’m also afraid of the timbre of their voices, which inspires a mysterious feeling of
awe.
My mother knew astrologers and fortune-tellers in Beirut, Cairo, Marrakesh, Athens, Budapest, and other cities. More than once during my childhood she brought me with her on trips to those cities, and every time she insisted on having her fortune read – and mine, too.
None of those fortune-tellers were right except for one we met in Budapest a quarter century ago who had only one eye. He told her that one of her spinster sisters was going to get married within a year, and it actually happened. My aunt got married about seven months after we got back, at the age of forty-three.
My father – may God give him a long life – never believed in astrologers or fortune-tellers or soothsayers. He used to call them “soul foxes” and would comment on my mother’s tendency to be swept away by them, telling her, “Fine. Go ahead and listen to them if it’s going to improve your mood.”
In my case, none of the fortune-tellers’ predictions ever came completely true, only partially true. But I would cling to those bits and pieces nevertheless because there were things I was able to know before they happened, no matter how insignificant they were.
I asked Uroub to interpret a worrisome dream I had the night before she came to our house. In the dream I saw a wall in our garden. It broke open and a cat jumped out from inside.
“And she shakes her head, right?” Uroub said, completing the dream for me.
“Yes,” I said, surprised.
“What color was it?” she asked.
“Gray,” I answered.
“You are going to find out about a secret that has been kept from you for many years and it will have a major effect on your life in the future.”
Totally bewildered, I asked, “How did you know what I saw in my dream?”
“How I knew is not important, madame. The important thing is the cat came back to life.”
“What is this secret that I will discover?” I asked her. “I have no secrets and my husband is completely open to me, like the palm of my hand.”
“Every creature has its hidden things. Even the moon has a side we don’t see.”
When she read my palm, she told me it was one in a long chain of palms on which riches poured down in torrents for decades, and the rain was still soaking me and soaking my husband along with me.
I remembered that Fawaz had nothing when he married me. Thanks to my father and his care and attention, Fawaz became a wealthy and influential man, and a Basha.
“And what about the gray cat?” I asked.
“Most likely it was not gray.”
“I remember it well. It was gray,” I said.
“All cats look gray at night, madame.”
I noticed afterwards that all cats do look gray at night, no matter what color they are.
Sari Abu Amineh
I must bear the fallout of the surprise I prepared for the Basha, who became a completely different person overnight. The image of him in my mind turned into a double-image after that. I would recall how he was after his meeting with Uroub, but then, with pain, remember his other image whenever I discussed with him some topic or project that had preceded his meeting with Uroub.
The Ba
sha believed in the tangible things in life. That’s how I’ve known him to be since starting to work for him. He had an analytical mind. (Uroub said that, too!) But sometimes he would ask me to read his horoscope in the newspapers. A few times I accompanied him on trips to Europe and Asia and occasionally he would seek out fortune-tellers to have them do readings for him. He told me he picked up an interest in them from his wife, Mrs Samah, the daughter of the Grand Basha Nayef Shahadeh, whose daily cigar, I discovered, cost 100 dinars.
There was an obscure space between Samah’s father and Fawaz Basha. A space I was never able to decipher, despite all the faith and good graces bestowed on me by both men.
But the Basha’s interest in fortune-tellers had begun only ten years earlier, during a visit to the Acropolis Museum in Athens where he met a fortune-teller with flowing hair and sagging breasts who spoke to him in her weary voice. “Luck will be in your favor in a competition between you and a high-ranking man, because he will be the one to take the seat, not you.”
“How can luck be in my favor if he is the one who takes the seat and not me?” he asked her.
“It’s a different seat than the one you have in mind,” she answered.
Some of what she said ended up coming true. A currency trader and importer of Swiss gold who was competing with one of the Basha’s companies got in a car crash with a truck while driving between Zurich and Basel on a business trip. He was sent back to Amman and he’s been in a wheelchair ever since.
When the Basha heard what happened to that man he said to me in amazement, “That is the seat the Acropolis fortune-teller predicted!”
After that he had his fortune read a lot, but none of the predictions came true, so his interest in them waned.
But after meeting Uroub, he changed. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes and hadn’t been personally involved in it, I would never have believed that Basha Fawaz, after all the lies and nonsense he’d heard before, would believe a fortune-teller who’d breezed into town to tell him that his birthday and astrological sign were wrong, that he had a son, and that that son was going to bring about his demise.
The following week, after finishing one of those closed-door meetings of his – the kind he only allows people who are directly involved in to attend while their drivers and attendants wait for them outside – he called me and asked me to come to his office right away.
I felt that the Basha’s life was brimming with secrets. Maybe I needed to peruse all the pages of his past and his present; I needed to gather up all the keys that could open the locked rooms of his life.
But that was precisely what could not happen.
For he was – as far as I knew – much too smart to allow all the keys giving access to his world to be gathered in one place.
Fifteen minutes after his call, I arrived at his office. He sat me down beside him.
He told me to find a woman by the name of Muntaha al-Rayyeh. He recalled that she used to live in the Swayleh area north of Amman. She had worked for one of his companies thirty years earlier, and he’d slept with her at the time.
“Give me a few days,” I said. “I’ll have a full report on her for you.”
He looked directly into my eyes and said, “You do not seem surprised. Did you know about my relationship with this woman?”
“Of course not, Basha, sir, but these things happen with men all the time.”
He finally broke his stare. Then he instructed me to establish whether that woman, Muntaha al-Rayyeh, had gotten pregnant from him or not, and if I happened to run into her and it appeared he did indeed have an illegitimate child from her, then I should find out where this son was, what his name was, and try to meet him, get a picture of him, and probe him, probe his thoughts, find out if he knew who his real father was.
But before all that, I was to make preparations for a trip I would be accompanying him on to India to meet the sage Harsha al-Hakim, who dwelled in the Maharashtra mountains, near the Arabian Sea.
Samah Shahadeh
I asked Fawaz what Uroub had said to him. He grinned so wide I could see all his white teeth and his pink gums below his mustache, too. “You know fortune-tellers are full of lies.”
I had seen that grin once before, about thirty years earlier, and at the time it stirred up in me many unanswered questions. He had come back from Paris missing me tremendously; he tore off my clothes the moment he arrived. He made love to me with the vigor and fire of a young man, after having been away from me for ten days. When he was finished, he got up and walked to the bathroom and I could see two long scratches down his back. When I asked him about them, he smiled, and I could see his teeth and his gums, which were much healthier and pinker back then. He told me that the Turkish masseur from the hotel fitness center was extremely thorough and scrubbed him with loofah and pumice.
That same grin that had been etched in my memory thirty years ago reappeared when I asked him what Uroub had said to him.
He had spent quite some time alone with her and Sari in his office before coming back to join his guests at the party.
It was possible she said something to him worth being concerned about.
“And what lies did she tell you, exactly?” I asked.
“She said I was going to die at the hands of a thirty-year-old man.”
I was startled. “We should look to God to know our future, not to her. How dare she?”
He smiled. “I told you it was a bunch of lies.”
I grumbled. “But I think she got to the truth about your astrological sign. Haven’t I told you before that you’re more like a Leo than a Cancer?”
He answered with a single word: “Maybe.”
I asked Sari what Uroub had said to Fawaz and he told me he hadn’t been able to hear her, because he was too busy taking care of party matters and the needs of the guests that night.
Sari was the one person who was never too busy for things having to do with the Basha.
Sari Abu Amineh
On our way from Amman to Mumbai, at an altitude of 30,000 feet above sea level and after gulping down two glasses of wine, the Basha said, “I told you before, what Uroub said about my having an illegitimate son might be true. Isn’t that enough to make me think the part about my demise might also be true?”
Trying to appease him, I said, “But Basha, she might not have gotten pregnant from you.”
He responded very quickly, “A man who can’t control himself in bed knows the consequences of going all the way with a woman; and it’s even worse for a man who tends to come quickly. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”
“Even in this case,” I said, “not every act of intercourse leads to conception. You only slept with her one time as far as I understand it.”
He sighed. “It was a few times. And my intuition tells me it’s not as you’re suggesting. And I always trust my intuition.” Then he peered into my face and gave a wide wine-stained smile. “Do you believe in fate?”
“Not really,” I answered. “But I live in constant fear of it.”
I felt the depth of the anxiety that was oppressing him, as though what I’d done in bringing Uroub was analogous to someone wanting to apply kohl to the eyelids and gouging out the eyeballs in the process.
I said, “It could just be a prediction that happened to coincide with a truth you were hiding all along.”
“And what she said about my sign could also be true,” he said with conviction, “most likely is true.”
He was speaking like someone who had finally caught on to something he’d failed to grasp for years, so he grabbed it tightly and showed no sign of relinquishing it.
We arrived at Mumbai airport in the morning. It was hot, humid, and sticky, and I got the feeling that sounds had a different rhythm to them there than in the other cities I’d traveled to. It was the sound of commotion with an underlying and nearly con
stant high-speed din.
An hour after we arrived, we took off in an Air India plane to the city of Aurangabad. It was an old and noisy plane with no distinction between first class and tourist class except that they supplied us with newspapers and magazines.
In Aurangabad we stayed in a hotel with lush green courtyards called the Lemon Tree Hotel. We dropped our luggage in our rooms and then set out for the Ajanta Temples, which took us fifty minutes to reach in the Jeep we picked up at the hotel car rental office.
The road trip gave me the fright of my life. My heart pounded in my chest like a trapped bird. The driver of the Jeep was obsessed with speed, and with the incessant Hindi songs that stopped only after the Basha spoke sternly to him in English. And that was not all. He was also quite adventurous with his driving, swerving around corners and hairpin turns on those mountainous roads on the precipice of deep valleys. Despite all our attempts to convince him we were not in a hurry and that in any case he would be waiting for us while we went on our visit so he could take us back to the hotel, that olive-skinned driver with the shiny black hair parted down the middle didn’t take heed.
We reached the stone-carved Ajanta Temples, and I felt the presence of a terrifying silence in that place, despite the numerous Indian and foreign visitors who had come to see the rows of striped temples chiseled into the foot of the mountain. Something compelled me to silent contemplation. Even the Basha looked humbled and weak in that awesome place.
But the Ajanta Temples were not our final destination. We were headed to the abode of the sage Harsha al-Hakim, which was located on a hilltop three valleys and two rocky hills south of the temples.
The driver handed us over to a tall lanky tour guide who worked in the area, and then he disappeared inside the temples to wait until we came back.
We were surprised to discover that reaching the sage’s headquarters required a forty-minute walk, and we had thought the road would be paved or at least level, but all we found were narrow paths winding through the mountains and valleys.
