My beloved, thou whom I hold most sacred, I can hardly believe that I see thee approaching, calmly and confidently, without a glance to the right or to the left. Yet I could not possibly mistake thy shadow. I recognize thy gait, and the sound of thy footsteps. Even if they didst rob me of my sight would I recognize thee. My memory would never mistake thy scent. I smell it even now. Thou needest not light anything. Enter quickly and quench my longing. Do not stop, I pray thee, to take the candle out of thy pocket. Forsooth, thou hast set my spirit ablaze. Enter quickly. Come. . . . Come . . . !
Spirits That Are Bound to Meet
“I hadn’t been intending to come. I told the Saturnine poet, too. But I did come.”
His eyes were twinkling beautifully in spite of all his efforts to look serious. The dim lights, the perfume, and his marvelous presence immersed me in a luscious craving. His fingers rested on his thighs. If only he would reach out and wrap his fingers gently around my hands, or even squeeze them with the same violent passion I was feeling myself. Breaking my silence for the first time since meeting him, I asked, “Why weren’t you intending to come?” My lips trembled with fear.
He looked at me, smiling. “I told the Saturnine poet, too. I hadn’t spoken to you for years, even in broad daylight. So how was I supposed to come see you in your house at dawn? It would be an incredibly impulsive thing to do.” He focused his gaze on me as though he were examining me down to the last detail. His gaze went straight through me. He stripped me naked with his eyes.
“But you did come,” I told him.
He took a deep breath and looked into my eyes. Then he said, “A strange call summoned me and guided my steps. I went to sleep after a discussion with the Saturnine poet. I dreamed I was in the middle of a heaving swarm of people. Everyone was screaming and shouting without noticing that the others were there. It was as though every one of them, thinking he was alone in the place, was being whipped mercilessly by beings he couldn’t see. They would cry out at the tops of their lungs, sometimes pleading for mercy and sometimes for help. But when they cried out, they never mentioned the name of the person from whom they were seeking mercy or help, as though the person being addressed had no place in their memory. All they seemed to know were pronouns: “Hey you, stop torturing me!” or “Hey you all, stop torturing me!” They would scream as though the beings they were addressing had started beating them more violently. Then they would seek out someone to rescue them, saying, ‘Where are you? Please help me!’ or ‘Where are you all? Save me from them!’ Meanwhile, they just went on suffering. So they repeated their pleas for their tormentors to stop beating them. Everyone in that place was experiencing the same thing. Yet each of them thought he was the only one suffering. So I said to myself, ‘Pain must have distracted them so completely from the people around them that they don’t see anything.’ Then came your voice. It was as if you had heard what I had said to myself, that ‘in spite of their self-absorption, they still ask each other for help.’ In spite of all the screaming, your voice was right behind me. In fact, I could feel the sting of your breath on my neck. I turned to look at you, and I was amazed. You had the same face you’d had as a little girl when you used to pick fights with me, but your body had taken the form of a snow-white mare. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘What happened? What do you mean?’ you replied. ‘Your body is the body of a mare.’ ‘And so is yours. Look at your legs. Don’t you see that you’re standing on four legs?’
“At that moment I became aware of myself. I was standing on four legs that looked exactly like yours. You laughed in the same way that used to make me so mad when we were little. Then you took off running ahead of me, saying, ‘Follow me!’ I followed you, but I was afraid I would collide with the crowds of people gathered there, so I slowed down. Your voice came, saying, ‘Don’t slow down, and don’t stop. None of the people you see has any existence in reality. Your eyes manufacture them, that’s all.’ I shouted back, ‘If they’re a creation of my eyes, then how can you see them?’ Your reply was, ‘Don’t you know yet? Follow me, and you’ll discover the truth. Follow me, and you’ll discover the truth. Follow me, and you’ll discover the truth.’
“The same invitation kept repeating itself until I woke up a little while ago. So I took the candle and came to you. This isn’t the first time I’ve been haunted by strange dreams. But whenever I tell anyone about one of my dreams he says, ‘They’re nonsense.’ Either that, or he says, ‘You have these dreams because you think so much about these things, and your unconscious mind tells you about it at night.’ But does that make sense? None of these dreams has any truth to it. All these different lives are nothing but foolish talk. I suspect they’re messages in an advanced, refined language that we only come to understand very late. Dreams are narrative passages that have been woven together with a mastery far greater than what we’re accustomed to. Most of the time we can’t make sense of these stories. We can’t enter the dream worlds and discover what lies beyond their texts. It’s an extremely complex narrative. I liken what happens with our dreams to what happens when people read a text so sophisticated that it’s decades ahead of its time. They think it’s either trivial or too complicated. But in either case, they marginalize it completely until, after some time has passed, history reveals how wonderful the text really was. And here we have the same thing: Time alone can make sense of the dream. This is what I’m beginning to conclude. In any case, here I am: I’ve followed you. So, where is the truth?”
He sighed, looking at me with laughing eyes. I smiled, and felt a couple of tears well up in my eyes. I didn’t know what feeling was uppermost for me just then. I couldn’t identify anything with precision. The lines were all tangled up in my mind. The time, the place, the lighting, the atmosphere, the apprehension and fear, the joy, the sorrow, the suppressed desire—all these things were at work in my mind and making my tear ducts work overtime. He reached out and caught the two tears on his fingers. He smiled at me. “What’s wrong? Are you all right? What are you feeling?”
I remained silent for several minutes. Meanwhile, he stared thoughtfully at his fingers after tingeing them with my tears. I said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. I’ve waited for it for more than five years. Whenever I thought about our meeting, I would picture its details in a different way. I made lots of changes in the details of the time, the place, and, more importantly, all the words I’d planned to say. As time passed and I experienced new things, I would sum them up in words that I was preparing to say to you when we met. So the words accumulated inside me. The scenes, the places, the events, the impressions, the people who had engraved their images inside me—I kept them all for you, to tell you and no one else about them. All the poetry that creates an outlet for language, all the stories that hunt down human existence, I let float inside me until I could see you and begin writing, reciting, and singing to you. You’re the only audience, the only reader I want. So many things inside this heart have been waiting for you. But now that you’re here with me, I feel totally helpless. All the lines are tangled up. I’m in a state of mind that’s totally bizarre. Things are in front of me. I see them. I touch them. They overwhelm me. But I can’t speak. I’m filled with all sorts of laughter. There’s a delectable joy that I feel. An urge to cry like a baby. I recall all the details of my journey behind you. Childhood comes to me panting with the scenes that brought us together. I try to hold on to even one of those countless scenes so that I can start the conversation. But I can’t. A shudder goes through my spirit, since you won’t be here long. How can I bring Time to a halt?”
My lips were quivering, and my voice was raspy. Several times as I spoke, his fingers passed over my cheeks to take on the color of my tears. He nodded as if in agreement with what I was saying. He whispered, “I think I understand what you’re going through.”
I stopped crying and looked at him, waiting to hear what he would say. He remained silent for several minutes, looking me over from head to toe. Th
en he said, “Where is the scar from that fracture I left in your head?”
I laughed. It was as though he had drawn in the reins of the scene and placed them in my hand, saying, “Here you are . . . talk!”
“I thought you’d forgotten about it,” I said. “I don’t know why you resorted to violence with me at that moment! I just liked the ball you had in your hand.”
Laughing, he said, “I myself don’t understand why I pushed you into the wall when you asked me for it. Maybe it’s because I was angry with you over things that had happened before. What’s the scar like?”
I brought my head up to the light and parted the hair near the crown of my head. I ran my fingers over the scar and showed it to him. “See? You marred my beauty!”
He laughed again, placing his fingers on the scar. I got goose bumps all over. I wished he would never take his fingers away. However, he did so before I’d whispered a word.
“What is it that you want?” he asked. He gave me a serious look that carried me back to that heated part of our childhood relationship, the side of it that had been marked by stubbornness and relentless rivalry. I don’t deny that I felt the same old exasperation that I had felt when he would provoke me as a little girl.
“And do you know what you want?” I replied. “Did you know everything you wanted earlier in your life?”
His face suddenly clouded over with a sorrow that mingled with the lights in the place, and his features turned somber. He hung his head in silence.
Again I asked, “Do you know what you want? Did you know everything you wanted earlier in your life?”
He looked into my eyes, saying, “What am I supposed to say now? A person might mistakenly imagine that he knows what he wants. But sometimes he discovers that the very opposite is the case. When we used to play as children, I always liked the game where we pretended to be grownups. A boy would pair up with a girl, and the two of them would announce, ‘We’ll be the first family.’ Another boy and girl would be the second family. Then we would start playing.
The girls would pretend to cook and do laundry, and the boys would pretend to go to work. A little while later we would come back and pretend to have lunch. Then we would exchange visits just the way big people did. We thought that adults’ lives, with their stability and routines, were the ultimate dream existence. Whenever anybody asked us what we dreamed of doing, we would say, ‘Growing up, working, getting married and having children.’ When I was in grade school I hoped to be the first student in our village to go as far as middle school. But when that happened, I didn’t feel as happy as I had expected to. I hoped to get into the university, too. But that also stopped making me happy. I was dying to get a good job so that I could depend on myself and not have somebody watching my every move. But when I finally achieved the complete freedom I had wanted so badly, I was bored to tears. Everything becomes ordinary in the end. Isn’t that enough to make you sick of this life? Yet I go on living. Sometimes I comfort myself with the thought that this accumulation of human experiences and the enjoyment I experience with every moment that passes makes me all the more determined to stay the course, weave dreams, and strive to achieve them, even if I feel bored after making them come true. We all feel bored in the end. But older people will tell younger people, ‘I know, little one, how bored you feel. But believe me, I’ve got more arrows in my quiver than you do. I’ve tried more things than you have, experienced more than you have. No one can explain to you what all that experience means. You have explain it to yourself, and only you can do that. At the end of the road there’s boredom and weariness, but before that end point is where all the enjoyment is to be found. More specifically, you’ll find it between the first step you take along the path and the point right before the finish line.’ I think I want to know the path and experience all its details.”
“And where does love fit into all this?” I asked. “Do you think that the enjoyment of love comes along the way rather than at the end?”
“I don’t know exactly,” he replied. “Many people say that the enjoyment of love comes only along the way, and that it begins to lose its meaning when we reach the end point. There are also quite a few people who say that love crystallizes to become more beautiful, and that it continues even after that point. Love is always the exception to human rules. Do you notice that you’ve been leading me away from my question, namely: What do you want?”
I drew up close to him. “I want you. I want you.”
He laughed giddily. “So that you can get bored with me later on?”
“In order to experience the enjoyment of being on the way. I’m not so interested in endings. That’s first. And second, don’t forget that love is always the exception to human rules.”
Khalid got up and made two circuits of the room. He came back and sat down in front of me, pondering me the entire time. Then, slowly, like someone who is arranging his words with the greatest of care, he whispered, “I think what you’re asking for is difficult to achieve. Before you came along, love broke me as nothing else in my life ever has. So, any decision I make in relation to a female at this time may end up being wrong.”
I stopped him. “I’m not demanding that you make any decision. Don’t lump me together with other females. I didn’t plan all this out to make you fall in love with me and marry me. I wanted you to be close to me so that you could alleviate the meaninglessness I feel. I wanted you to break the monotony and subservience in our lives, to rebel against this barbaric separation between us. Why should I be prevented from coming to your house and sitting with you for an hour or so? Why should you be prevented from going with me to the ravine to tell me about the rocks there? They’ve placed such excessive restrictions on us that we can only dream of things which, to others, are quite normal. Other people dream of building a structure that touches the clouds, while we dream of the adventure of rebelling against the authority of customs so that a female can meet with a male without fear. Isn’t it destructive for so much of your energy to be devoted to all these ideas for the simple reason that your society has deprived you of a natural thing that other societies consider perfectly normal?”
“Our rebellion against them might fail,” he said.
I said, “I’m going to remind you of something you used to say at the university. You used to say that the first rebel’s success isn’t to be measured by whether he personally achieves what he’s aiming for. Rather, it’s to be measured by the fire he lights in people’s hearts and minds, the way he moves them to action. When this happens, it’s the people who come after him who achieve his aims. The first rebel’s success is measured by the army of rebels who come after him, and that army’s victory is nothing but a second victory for him. This is what you wrote in an article that I know by heart now, and that scores of university students memorized after you. If it weren’t for your words, the student demonstrations against the university administration wouldn’t have been victorious. So we’ll carry on with our rebellion. We may not achieve victory ourselves. In fact, we probably won’t. But, believe me, after us will come others who will carry on with the rebellion and arrive at the hoped-for finish line.”
He said, “Won’t you regret what you’re saying some day?”
“I’ll never regret it,” I said. “It’s enough for you to walk the same path next to me. Believe me.” A couple of tears welled up in my eyes. With trembling fingers I touched his lips. He kissed my fingers. Our fingers interlocked and I moved up close to him. Then I let my head fall on his shoulder. He kissed my head. He ran his fingers over the scar and kissed it. He moved his lips over my face until he made contact with my lips. Our lips embraced madly, and I was swallowed up in a delicious stupor. Then suddenly, we heard the tapping sound that generally came right before the call to prayer as the two muezzins checked to make sure the microphone was working. We jumped apart in a bizarre fright.
WALAD SULAYMI
The Strange Dawn
I concluded that Jam‘an must be sick today,
since the only voice I heard sounding the dawn call to prayer this morning was Ubayd al-Dik’s. Every morning when I wake up to the sound of the tapping on the microphone before the call to prayer, I open my eyes and go floating with al-Dik’s voice through the kingdom of God. Then, before the middle of the call to prayer, I grab both ends of the pillow, and the moment Jam‘an starts his part of the call to prayer, I press them over my ears. I don’t do this to avoid hearing the rest of the call to prayer—perish the thought! It’s just that Jam‘an’s voice could go right through a wall, and I want to reduce its impact with the pillow so as not to stress my ears at the start of the day. As usual, I grabbed the ends of the pillow and waited. But then Ubayd al-Dik finished the call to prayer and relieved my ears. I thought about this as I was performing ablutions.
In keeping with my usual custom, I went to the mosque by the road that passes between the two rows of houses. On my way there, I saw someone hurrying out the back door to Abu Ayda’s house. He didn’t seem to have seen me, and I decided to walk behind him at a distance to see whether I could recognize him. I walked fast, taking cover behind the walls of the houses. He was panting. Little by little I began, to my horror, to suspect that this person was Khalid. The details I was able to make out in the darkness pointed to this conclusion. When he went down the other road that leads to their house, and that doesn’t directly face the minaret, I knew it was Khalid. I recognized his back and his shoulders. I became even more certain when I saw him go in the back door to their house. And, in the light that shone from inside the house when he went in the door, it appeared that the neck of his robe was unbuttoned. His body was drenched with sweat, and he was panting heavily.
As I turned and hurried back toward the mosque so as not to miss the prayer, I was quite preoccupied with this peculiar event. Life is truly strange. Khalid hadn’t seemed the slightest bit interested in Ayda. I had never noticed him showing any interest in Abu Ayda, or in looking over at their balcony. Had he gotten to know the girl at the university? Had Khalid decided to begin having adventures? And if that was the case, couldn’t he have found a better place for his adventures than the village, and this particular person’s house? My God, it’s a small world! Zahir will be horrified when he hears about it.
Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs Page 14