by Ryad Girod
I seek out Mansour’s eyes from within this crowd that roils like a turbulent river, which I attempt to make my way back up, against the current … I pass one shoulder and then another, one head and then another, only to find myself the same distance away from my friend. I seek his eyes as if they had the power to pull me out of there. I seek his eyes because they have the power to reduce distances in the same way as when I was laboriously climbing the dune where he, Mansour, still rested, sitting lightly, and, while I continued to toil away, to sink into the goldenness of the sand, he offered up his eyes to me. Luminous. While I struggled for breath and tried to attract his attention, he turned his gaze on me like he was holding out a hand, at once open and closed … he sent me a look that seemed to have been interrupted in its wandering … while I dug myself deeper and my fingers clutched in vain at the sand that continuously gave way, while I continued to labor away at climbing that interminable dune, more than half of which still remained before I would reach Mansour, then half of that distance followed by another half then half again and another half and so on into infinity … He had looked at me, then he had stood up on that dune, like a star stretching out, and had made from that straight line a curve, a circle, or maybe even an ellipse … Yes, an ellipse, leading from him to him passing through me. Or maybe not, he was already close to me when he straightened out, atop that dune I still saw as unattainable … he was already there, to lift me up while I continued to admire the star that he had become high above that dune, which at the time seemed to me to be the entire Earth. I seek the eyes of Mansour because they have the power to save us. Gassouh! Gassouh! I stood at Mansour’s side, calm in the face of the unfolding of the sands and the rocks that sprawled the length of a red and ocher immensity below a sun giving off a soft glow that spread in long sweeps across the majestic cliffs of the Najd which also stretched out, rolled out in waves into dizzying escarpments that threaded their way across that vast expanse of sand, beyond which towered yet more majestic cliffs, like the two banks of the great river that flowed noisily centuries and centuries earlier and which had since become nothing more than a graceful and undulating succession of dunes, curved and dry and flowing toward the infinite that unfurled itself everywhere my eyes could turn …
3.
THE WIND WAS BLOWING hard that day. Stirring up the desert in every direction. I had parked the Camaro at roughly the same place as the previous time and had let Mansour return to that point, which he doubtless believed to be the same one as usual, on top of the same dune, so he could sit and stare, despite the wind, straight out in front of him. As for me, I remained in the car to smoke my hashish. I kept an eye on Mansour, up there on his dune, as if I needed to supervise him … less afraid that he might dash off into the void, where he would have just ended up huddled in a ball in the sand, and more that fate was bound to strike once again and cast over him an even darker cloud. Heaps of sand, carried about by the wind, hurled themselves against the windshield with a noise like a dry downpour. Out past Mansour, I could see the rocky plateau swept by violent gusts that whipped up clouds of dust, stone, earth, which shot into the air only to fall back down farther away, which is to say right here, too, on this long stretch of red dunes. And I imagined the gigantic masterpiece that was being assembled a stroke at a time before my very eyes, and before those of Mansour, which he held riveted on the sand, or so I assumed. Perhaps observing the millions, or the billions, rather, of grains, perhaps identifying them with the millions of neurons that made up his thinking matter, which is to say him, which is to say even more than his hands or his face or his eyes … even more than his entire body … Him, impalpable, the permanent and unquestionable feeling that he is not someone else … or something else. And it’s most likely this, precisely this feeling, that tormented him in the face of that expanse of lifeless sand with which he was perhaps associating his mental state … while I sucked down the last puffs of my joint, continuing to observe him from the smoke-filled interior of the luxurious Camaro, observing him like that until the initial effects of the dope took hold, which led me to believe that Mansour must be self-identifying with a heap of sand … an agglomerate of sand sitting on a sand dune.
Within that deluxe leather interior, smoky and reeking of burnt wood, I took shelter from the wind’s fury. I connected my iPhone to the Camaro’s speakers to listen, in the very heart of the tumult, to Rasha Rizk’s incredible voice. The majesty of the setting, the storm, and the combined effects of the dope and Rasha’s songs carried me away toward sweet reveries which gave me an immediately physical pleasure. A roiling sensation moved its way through my head and a numbness soldered my entire body to the seat of the car. A consensual prisoner to all of these sensations, I let their caresses envelop the stone I had become … only my eyes kept a relative mobility so as to admire the expanse of dunes stretching off to one side and the cliffs to the other, to occasionally look in on the mineral agglomerate that Mansour had become, or at my legs, which I could no longer feel … the wind continued to hurl itself against the windows like pails of sand that my eyes attempted to follow … streaks of sand that formed into vortexes up above the dunes then descended toward the road on their way to slam against the car, exploding and dispersing into thousands of grains only to reassemble, by some miracle, into another vortex that went off down the other side of the road, toward the other expanse of dunes and then on to make its way up one of them and fly apart at its summit and disperse once again into thousands of grains that flitted about high above the entire expanse, as if blasting off, torn free of gravity once and for all and gathered up by even stronger winds and higher winds to soar above the entire region, well beyond Ar Ruwaidhah and perhaps even past Jeddah … only to fall to earth on another rocky plateau and be fixed there under the effects of the heat. As if soldered by the rays of an uncompromising sun. And me, more and more devastated, crushed, ground-down, and yet visibly at the heart of this creation painted one brushstroke at a time … the creation of the Earth. I observed this back-and-forth from one side of the road to the other and retraced the trajectory, imagining the destiny of one grain of sand … namely one originating on the plateau of the Najd, born of a minuscule cracking that the cold would have yanked without a cry from the ground and then bowled along by the gentle morning breeze and then whipped aloft by a storm from the east and then brutally dispatched across the long expanse of the dunes, this depot, the temporary matter of our world, to remain there for a few moments or a few centuries and then to be snatched away once again by the storms out of the east and sent back toward other rocky plateaus to remain there, eternally or not, pinned down by the heat, as if melted by the rays of an eternally uncompromising sun. In this way the future imposed itself. For the centuries to come, these renovations were already underway, and nothing would remain of the imposing plateau that so proudly rose up before Mansour, who simply stared back, or so I imagined at the time, without opening his eyes or even lowering them … No, there would be nothing left of Riyadh nor any trace of the Najd …
In this way the future revealed itself, in a sweet reverie in the interior of a luxurious red Camaro, with force and conviction. And then, my mind almost no longer having the strength to organize the thoughts that sprang forth and my eyes almost as paralyzed as the rest of my body, no longer having the strength to follow the curvatures traced by the wind, I let myself drift into contemplation of the natural beauty that the desert knew how to so generously offer. The gentleness of the sensations that beset body and mind, alongside the well-being I felt at the contact with Rasha’s voice, these forced me toward this contemplation of beauty—the good in seeing the beautiful and the beauty in being good—an equivalence that crossed the centuries without ever being eroded, one employed by Ibn Sina and al-Farabi to articulate, develop, and disseminate a philosophy alongside a religion that was strong, intelligent, one of beauty and love … an equivalence perhaps borrowed less from Aristotle than from Plotinus, the anti-Arab Arab, and of course leading back to
Plato and Socrates themselves and likely leading back to other enlightened men … much further back, possibly leading back to the first glimmers of thought … leading back to the first human who sat his bum down on a rock or a dune and, even for a moment, stopped hunting or running away, just a moment to contemplate a landscape and to feel something strange travel through him then overwhelm him, and not likely having words yet … perhaps also leading back to the first glimmers of language … and perhaps language itself sprang forth from this shock … perhaps the first word was poetic … whatever the case, this human likely not having enough words to express all of the beauty and all of the good to be shared with his species, his ilk, still took them by the hand and led them to that same rock or that same dune; magic, he had felt then or he had maybe thought or he had already said … whatever the case, he made them park their asses as he had, which is to say made them sit a moment and take the time to see the beauty and feel the good … like listening to a song. Whatever the case, I remained seated and full of words, contemplative before the distribution, the undulation, the sinuation of the dunes and the rocks that sprawled the length of a red and ocher immensity alongside a sun descending and diffusing its gentle rays and spreading them wide and finally setting in long sweeps across the majestic cliffs of the Najd which also stretched out, rolled out, reproduced in waves forming gigantic and dizzying ridges or escarpments that threaded and dashed their way across that vast expanse of sand beyond which towered yet more majestic cliffs from another plateau like two banks two shorelines of the great river that must have flowed noisily centuries and centuries earlier and which had since become nothing more than a graceful and undulating and silent succession of dunes, curved and dry and flowing toward the infinite that unfurled itself everywhere my eyes could turn …
Gassouh! Gassouh! A love song. But all must perish. The vast river like the vast thoughts of Ibn Sina. From Rasha’s beautiful voice to the cries of Al Safat Square. All is manifestly perishable within the unfolding of time. The car door opened and then abruptly shut, startling me and letting in a drift of sand. Mansour looked at me and noticed the state I was in. From within that pathetic state, I nonetheless thought I could see tearstains on his cheeks. But I didn’t have the strength to question him, hardly enough to say to myself: My God, what life is this? He said nothing, content to lower the volume and drive off. I checked out a short while later, lulled by Rasha’s voice, somewhere between Ksour al-Moqbel and the entry checkpoint of the Governorate of Riyadh.
The following day, after having washed my face and drunk a coffee and having assured myself that the topography of the earth most certainly didn’t take shape the way I had dreamed it the evening before, I dashed off to see Kingdom’s neurologist. The same nurses welcomed me with the same Good morning Sir! and the long corridor of the department still seemed just as dark. I explained to one of them that I wanted to see Dr. Maarafi again without my friend present so that we could discuss things without any embarrassment … The nurse assured me that Dr. Maarafi always spoke without embarrassment and that of course I had the right to come back and see him again for further explanations but that I would have to wait until the end of his consultations. And so I waited, a long time, sitting on a bench, watching the comings and goings of the patients and the nurses, thinking again about Abdelkader, Mansour’s illustrious ancestor, and recalling an episode of his life that had struck me as strange and perhaps had some connection to the illness of my dear friend. It was said that Abdelkader, he too, had observed (or had perhaps been afflicted by) a long period of muteness upon his arrival in Damascus, that he had remained in seclusion in a corner of the Umayyad Mosque, hardly taking any nourishment and going for the most part without sleep, without reading and without chanting, his eyes fixed on the ground … for many days and nights. Was it of the same order as what Mansour was living through? Like something hereditary … Was it maybe just temporary? Like a nasty virus that would stir up disorder in Mansour’s head and then leave again just like that, the way it had come … and I would find my friend back to the way he had always been, melancholic, to be sure, but full of life. No!, Dr. Maarafi curtly replied. No, there is nothing viral about it and whether it is hereditary hasn’t the least bit of importance … Allow me to repeat myself, there is unfortunately no treatment … The best thing to do was still to give up on seeking out the origins of the affliction and assist Mansour, whether it was me or his parents, with the terrible ordeal he was going to go through. I nevertheless felt the need to suggest treatments in France or the United States, but Dr. Maarafi dismissed the idea by reminding me that in our day medicine was the same, here or elsewhere, and that in Arabia we had the most modern methods, state of the art medical techniques … and moreover, we were even, us Arabs, trailblazers when it came to modern medicine … and then he concluded by asking me, without awaiting my answer, if I had ever heard of Ibn Sina. Not wanting to get into all of that and not wanting to give up on my hopes of helping Mansour, I tried to find out if it wasn’t impossible that there had been an error or if Mansour might develop another kind of intelligence … different … and thus undetectable to the battery of tests to which he had been subjected … because I felt that, in spite of everything, Mansour sensed things and understood situations … in a different way, sure, but he understood something … Like he was reading signs in the curvatures of the dunes and letters among the serpentine meanderings of the sand … like he heard something in the movement of the winds … like he saw a meaning in the reddening of the sun … Because he always returned to me, descending from atop his dune, his eyes always luminous and his gaze backlit by something … Maarafi looked at me a long while, took out his prescription pad, scrawled something across it, tore off the sheet and held it out to me as he stood up. Take this for a few weeks. It will do you a lot of good … and take care of your friend! he told me as he opened the door to his examination room and shook my hand. Goodbye Sir!
Gassouh! Gassouh! the men continue to shout as they accompany you with their eyes and mouths toward the center of the world from which you will disappear … in spite of yourself, in spite of all that you are and all that you have been and in spite of all the life that flows within you and in spite of all that springs forth from you as life as well … Gassouh! the crowd continues to shout in spite of all that I can remember about you, Mansour, and about the illness that the judge didn’t want to recognize, didn’t even want to consider in spite of the courageous testimony, it must be said, of Maarafi, whom I had pulled from a consultation and thrown into the Camaro so we could race to the courthouse in time to locate the small office of Judge Abou Daoud al-Qassimi and prevent him from signing the indictment for heresy … In that small lightless office, Maarafi had tried his best to explain that medically speaking Mansour could no longer be properly considered a man, that he only had the appearance of one, the exterior … that he should be considered more as an animal … like a donkey, he had specified … and that His Excellency the Judge had not been appointed by God to judge donkeys, he had unfortunately added. The judge’s small office had seemed to contract and grow even darker. A small eight-by-eleven pane let through something that wasn’t quite light but a kind of grayish glow that leaked, that poured in like dirty water, into the scantiness of that hole in which there was a shelf containing a dozen books and a prayer mat, in which there was also a table, three chairs, and an unlit floor lamp. I had the sensation that we were at the bottom of a well while Maarafi continued to develop his argument before the impassible and ageless face of the judge, who intermittently readjusted the ample headscarf, white and immaculate, with which he covered his head … while Maarafi, in turn, readjusted his argumentation in accordance with the look given him by the judge so as to convince him. To save what remained of Mansour, of the man … because in spite of everything there was something left, at least a story, at least a name, at least a soul … a breath. Or were we at the bottom of a tomb when Judge Qassimi had straightened up, adjusted once more the large fold
s of his white shemagh, then had begun to speak … He to whom God has not granted light, what light shall he have? he seemed to ask by citing the Qur’an and lowering his eyes toward his hands, which he had moved forward to rest on the table. Then he went back over Maarafi’s explanation point by point, explaining that indeed he had not been appointed by God to judge donkeys. That the will of God, manifested through destiny, had in some way brought about the meeting of our trajectories for us to arrive where we were … Ambroise Paré once said, You treat him and God heals him, to respond to Maarafi, and as you might easily guess, I do not judge bodies but minds and souls. You have just explained clearly to me that his body ails from an incurable illness and without a doubt his mind and his soul will be involuntarily eaten away by it, and so it falls upon me, unavoidably, to save these … Then he brought his hands back toward him, joined them together on his chest, and began to recite a verse from the Qur’an … Light upon light! God guides to His light whom He wills. Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp … Then he interrupted himself, tried to pick up his previous phrase again but the word Light seemed to leave him in an uncomfortable position, unexpected and uncontrollable … Overtaken by emotion … a lump in his throat … overwhelmed by emotion … no longer able to speak aloud … then he took a deep breath, and finally managing to collect himself … The lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a shining star … kindled from a blessed tree. An olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil would almost glow forth though no fire touched it … Then once again overtaken by emotion, and finally overwhelmed … he finally succumbed, crying, sobbing, breaking off and then picking up again at the last phrase and then sobbing all over again, uncontrollably … without being able to complete his verse … he then hastily rose to his feet and left the office. Fleeing. Was it the meaning of the verse that was bringing tears to his eyes or was it the sound of the words or was it the gravity of his decision? We had no idea … In silence, and completely puzzled, Maarafi and I awaited his return so as to know what the future held for Mansour … but he never came back. After never-ending minutes in the dark of that small office, an employee noticed us as he made his rounds through the halls of the courthouse. Can’t stay here, he told us, the judge has gone home. I dropped Maarafi off without a word in front of Kingdom Hospital and felt, for the first time, the need to go out to the dunes. Facing a reddening sun, the Camaro floated along Mekkah Road to leave Riyadh and the Najd plateau, to pass its dizzying escarpments and to seek out a meaning to ascribe to those unexpected sobs. But how is one to know? How is one to know anything at all?