As the madrasa prepared for the evening show, they would sneak into an empty story room, and by candlelight bare their feelings to one another, one performance at a time. Their trysts saw them chastely explore each other’s hopes, fears, flaws and burdens. Their days were spent wondering how a plot twist revealed an aspect of the other’s heart, or how the sudden introduction of a new character implied uncertainty within their relationship. Soon, their plots and protagonists intertwined, the different choices their heroes took became a conversation about the decisions they would take in their own life together. Their stories became less fantastical, and more domestic. How many children did the hero have? How much time did he spend at home? Their stories began to overlap in both content and timing. The frictions that mired certain forks in a story’s path started to ease; puppets no longer shook their heads in disagreement with the words. On the one-thousandth consecutive night they told a love story together that had no leader or follower, no reserve or amendments. On night 1,001, they wed.
They decided that the only way for the madrasa to reconnect with the world was to try to understand it. First they took trips to the great cities of Cairo and Alexandria. Later visits to Jerusalem, Damascus and Beirut demonstrated that stories were political weapons battling for power and truth.
So Al-Shā’ir sought to drag the madrasa into the modern world. They returned to their trading roots. Initiates were sent to the cities to study business and economics. Some returned to teach at the madrasa, while others embedded themselves within corporations. A similar route was taken with politics and international relations, with initiates rising up through government and international organisations. The public’s obsession with TV and film saw a focus on media studies, production and acting.
No more would initiates be cut adrift from The Order. Those who left the madrasa submitted quarterly reports to what was now jokingly labelled ‘HQ’, detailing opportunities within their industries. Each month Al-Shā’ir headed a committee of orators, musicians, puppeteers and mimes to brainstorm their responses. It often took hours of revelry crafting them: be it relevant stories, strategies, or introducing fellow initiates from competitive companies or industries to each other. They spent hours mocking committees of storytellers in America who made ‘ads’, using their powers to create money instead of empathy. Within the madrasa, accept-ance into the committee was seen as the highest honour, and was soon labelled the Grand Circus: the GC at HQ.
In 1975 Al-Shā’ir and Aliah had their first, and only, child. They named the girl Jalila. Unlike his own childhood, Al-Shā’ir encouraged her to talk as much, and as early, as possible. His parenting reflected the realisation that the world rewarded not the one who told the greatest story, but the one who told it the loudest. Yet in spite of paternal pressure, his daughter chose the path of listener over orator. She followed debates that raged for hours, before expertly providing a synopsis of the common ground and potential paths forward. She would extract the hidden truth from within a story’s cliché. Her eyes could calm even the most nervous speaker.
Aliah comforted her husband. ‘Every great storyteller needs a great audience.’ Al-Shā’ir nodded, unconvinced. She was right, except that it had been entrusted to them, The Order, to do the talking.
And so the differences between father and daughter continued as Jalila matured into a woman. With every disagreement, Al-Shā’ir used more words in his bid to convince his daughter, while Jalila became more patient. ‘Father, I’m just looking for proof that someone is listening.’
He had none. He had been naïve to suppose that the world was a stage for him to use for free. No number of initiates in all the world’s media and entertainment could change a simple truth: an audience only forms for a story they want to hear.
In academia, stories became theories; in politics they were propaganda; and in business they were PR. Cynicism stalked the stage.
By this time, a young man called Ramsey had fallen in love with Jalila, and although now a teacher of logic and reasoning, she could not help but love him back. Her eyes were sirens to his deepest secrets. They reached inside him and extinguished his insecurities.
Unfortunately, they could not extinguish the tuberculosis that took him four months after they married, and two months after Jalila fell pregnant. She now felt trapped by stor-ies she had no affinity with. The one story that was hers, and hers alone, had ended before it had started. She was inconsolable, and spent hours sitting on the riverbank, dreaming of escape.
Al-Shā’ir and Aliah were similarly broken: parents haunted by their inability to ease their child’s pain. Al-Shā’ir knew his daughter would see through his words, and reproach him for using wisdom he had not learned first-hand.
Soon after, the Grand Circus received an unusual request from an initiate who worked in the book industry. It was an invite to something strange yet utterly familiar: the literature festival. The Order had been holding variations of them for a millennium. But the initiate reported how such festivals had become recent highlights in the diaries of the powerful. They had selected a couple of events with particularly influential attendees, such as the inaugural Festival of Good in Britain, and asked if Al-Shā’ir would like to perform. His initial response was no. It was Aliah who changed his mind. ‘Since when did the great storyteller avoid an audience? Have we become too content with age, my love?’
He agreed so long as it was a family performance. That summer, suitcase of puppets in tow, Al-Shā’ir, Aliah, Jalila and the bump set off for Europe. At first, nothing eased Jalila’s sadness. Strange cities only intensified the loneliness. Yet in performance she found comfort. Although her parents tried to hide it, Jalila noticed that they had never seemed so in love. They stole smiles during shows. She had forgotten their talent and chemistry when they performed together. She could hear belief return to her father’s words. He felt vindicated by the laughter, gasps and applause.
Jalila thought of baby names. That summer was their happiest as a family.
It would also be their last. Aliah complained of nausea before they left their London hotel for the airport. By the time they entered French air space she was feverish, and as the Mediterranean stretched out below them, she was helped to the bathroom where she collapsed. As the plane descended, stewardesses cleared the back row and a solicitor with basic CPR tried to resuscitate her. The plane braked heavily, stopping prematurely on the runway.
Al-Shā’ir refused a post-mortem. Through her tears, Jalila arranged a vehicle. After three hours they boarded a felucca headed for the madrasa. They sat on the bow holding Aliah as the sun set and the stars awoke, as Al-Shā’ir recited poems of the eternal nature of love.
Aliah was buried on the edge of the madrasa, on a spot that overlooked the Nile. Al-Shā’ir sat by the grave all night. He remained all the next day, and was taken food, drink and a mat to sleep on. Jalila joined him, listening to her father describe to his sleeping wife the world around him. There was a patience in his voice that led Jalila to believe he would never leave this place again.
It was said that over the next 1,000 days he recounted every story that had ever been told. Jalila would join him every morning and evening with her newborn daughter, Aiya. At first Jalila would carefully place her in her grandfather’s arms, but before long Aiya would crawl, walk and run down towards him. Years were passing, but the loss that clung to Al-Shā’ir and Jalila’s hearts was not.
Then one day, Al-Shā’ir returned.
Jalila smiled at him as they took a seat by the fire under the acacia tree and called for refreshment. The silence that followed lay heavy with all the questions burning within Jalila.
‘The river is a constantly changing story of where it has been, who it has met and what has been done to it,’ Al-Shā’ir finally said. ‘It’s the witness of civilisations past, heavy with the load of hope and greed, politics and poetry. It’s maybe the greatest storyteller that has ever come to be. And look how we treat it: it is now a mild poison, running wit
h the carelessness of our world. When I was young, we respected the river as a member of The Order, telling stories from faraway lands. But now . . .’
Jalila stared at the fire, for once unable to find words of comfort: heavy sediment falling to the riverbed within.
‘When your mother and I were young, we made a pact to modernise the madrasa. Even then, the majority of boats that sailed past the bank were feluccas.’ He smiled and looked at his daughter. ‘And now I look out, and there are these cruise boats. On deck are all the people looking at the river through their screens, taking these terrible pictures of themselves, refusing to ask fellow passengers for help. They send these pictures of the river back home to their families in an instant.
‘The river, the great storyteller, may not be what it once was, but what sails on top of it has created a global audience it could have never dreamed of.’
Jalila smiled, raising her eyebrows. ‘Does my father wish to be the cruise boat?’
Al-Shā’ir shrugged. ‘Maybe we were never quite as modern as we thought. I think I owe your mother one last attempt.’
At first the madrasa was infused with energy. Modern buildings were erected to house the new computer labs and recording studios, as external initiates were invited to return to give coding tutorials. Al-Shā’ir’s calls to harness the internet inspired dreams that the whole world was a potential audience. For a while it seemed possible. When the Grand Circus was formed, they found their stories ignored by an audience captured by corporate money. But now they were promised a ‘democratisation of storytelling’. They accepted the ugly language in return for the opportunities it promised.
But it wasn’t long until Jalila could see the sadness of the grave return to Al-Shā’ir’s eyes. The new world he had invested in cut him adrift from his earlier joys. Time in the story rooms had been replaced by the editing booth. Audiences were gauged not by smiles of delight, but by website hits. The Grand Circus became a bureaucratic chore, haunted by spreadsheets and an obsession with algorithms. Maybe it was for the best, yet he cursed the present for its lack of patience, craft and presence. He was an irrelevance cast aside by the tide of progress.
‘Do you think the world is listening?’ asked Jalila.
Al-Shā’ir looked at her with a tired look of love. ‘The world does not exist. It is a distraction,’ he said with wet eyes. ‘Only stories remain.’
Jalila had no will to argue. She had learned how The Order was struggling – the promised huge audiences proved fickle and easily coerced by the corporate interests her father thought he had escaped. But Aiya was happy growing up within the madrasa. What do children care about ancient prophesies? She was precocious, and took her grandfather’s sombre advice to excel in IT. At the age of six she hacked into government websites and placed nursery rhymes on their homepages. She was fluent in English, Italian, German and Spanish. Her horizons were widening, and her mother realised that one day soon she would want to take part in the world she was reading about.
Jalila walked with her father to the grave early one evening. A few minutes of silence passed.
‘I have to believe in the world,’ said Jalila.
Al-Shā’ir nodded. ‘If anyone can save it, it is you.’ He smiled at his daughter, who, holding his hand tightly, kissed him on the cheek, then slowly walked away.
The Fellowship of the String
It wasn’t a separation; it would be a renaissance. Once more, the Mediterranean would be crossed in the name of a prophecy: this time in pursuit of something that had sailed centuries before. While Aiya’s excitement was infectious, Al-Shā’ir had long ago been hardened against such optimism, and looking on from his wife’s grave to the departing felucca that was carrying his family away, he thought he saw traces of the same resignation in his daughter’s eyes.
They arrived in Alexandria after a day on river, road and rail, accompanied by Aiya’s endless questioning about the world that passed by their window. A bored customs official nodded them and their chest of puppets aboard the ferry.
The three-day crossing was uneventful. To pass the time, Aiya begged her mother to tell her The Order’s history one more time. Her eyes lit up with the evocation of the names Salamanca, Bologna and Cambridge. Her soul soared like the Venice skyline that eventually appeared through the porthole.
Soon they found themselves in the Piazza San Marco giggling with each other, almost in disbelief that the adventure had begun. Although Jalila’s excuse for coming had been the re-forging of links to the European madrasas to escape the inertia of home, as they sat in the square, she couldn’t help being caught up in her daughter’s imagination.
For two weeks Aiya took to the daytime streets alone. At first her voice was timid, but her confidence soon grew. ‘Deutsch? Español? Português? English?’ she quizzed audiences from atop tables, lampposts and fountains, weaving multilingual tales clothed in her newly favourite black bomber jacket. ‘Gentlemen, come close, Denn ich muss eine Geschichte erzählen, die so ist, und auch nicht.’ Even those on the wrong side of the language barrier were transfixed by the music of her voice, where the meaning was understood even when the words were not.
Jalila, meanwhile, immersed herself in a world of horns, hand gestures and accusations. Her driving instructor was impressed by the lengths she would go to absolve herself from blame: ‘You should tell stories for a living.’ After nine days, the examiner nodded as she pulled in to the test centre. The next stop was a car dealership where she bought a 1970s white Fiat 500.
For the next three days, Aiya and Jalila performed together around the casino on the Grand Canal, where the Venetian order was said to have originated. Aiya’s confidence infected Jalila as they performed in front of a black banner, embroidered with The Order’s insignia: a secret calling to the initiated.
They spent their afternoons customising the car. The insignia was spray-painted on the bonnet and sides. They installed three angled mirrors, enabling them to perfect their own version of mime over the thousands of miles they were to drive.
On the fourth morning, they were on the road to Padua where they gave a matinee puppet show of The Taming of the Shrew in the piazza where it had originally been set.
The following day they were in Bologna where for two days they performed in and around the medieval squares and university buildings.
In Florence, Aiya protected the decency of Michelangelo’s David: he was, after all, one of them, and in Rome they performed in the Coliseum, before heading north via Perugia, Siena and Genoa.
At first, their hours on the road were spent refining their stories. A blackboard stretched across the dashboard from wheel to passenger door: a storyboard to hone their craft. With each passing mile, their silences grew longer: mime had become their chosen medium of communication. As their virtuosity increased, their facial expressions became subtler, to the point where the untrained eye would fail to notice any passing narrative between them.
They gave late-summer performances in Barcelona, Valencia and Murcia. After putting on a three-day retelling of Don Quixote in Salamanca for Aiya’s fifteenth birthday, they parked their car for a few days to join the Camino de Santiago: a pilgrimage initiates had historically made in homage to the innovative madrasa at Santiago de Compostella. Modern-day pilgrims had their evenings brightened by a mother and daughter mind-reading act.
As autumn arrived the Fiat Madrasa boarded the Channel ferry at Calais. It was only as the days shortened and they reflected on their continental adventures that Al-Shā’ir’s doubts started to prey on their minds: after three months they had yet to come across a single member of The Order. On the streets of Cambridge, Oxford and Stratford, they performed to small crowds who lingered at most for a couple of scenes, took photos of the spectacle, and moved on.
The long drives that followed were the first true silences that had passed between them in months. As they reached The Order’s most northerly outposts at Copenhagen and Uppsala, their breath frosted and their fingers seized in
the Arctic air. Father, I’m just looking for proof that someone is listening. She understood his resignation now.
They arrived in Prague dreaming of the warmth of home. It was drizzly and dark as they set up in the Old Town Square. All the outside bar and restaurant tables were covered by tarpaulins. Pedestrians beelined across the square. For 20 minutes, Aiya and Jalila damply evoked a lost Baghdad, then dejectedly stopped mid-scene, packed the puppets away and pulled down the banner one last time.
Solitary applause cut through the rain’s soft patter. They looked towards a bar doorway, where a waiter was sheltering, drawing on a cigarette. He gestured for them to come inside. Aiya shook her head uncertainly, but he scurried out with two umbrellas, placed them in their hands, and grabbed the chest before they could stop him. They followed meekly, too forlorn to care.
‘Come on, let’s get you warm. Tea? Hot chocolate? It’s on me.’ He guided them to a cramped corner table next to a heater and left to get their drinks. On the tables around them, agitated parents provided chips and technology to entertain their restless children. Couples sat largely in silence, sipping their lager. All the seats were angled towards a TV that hung above the bar, where a news channel looped grainy images of armed men, with the headline scrolling underneath.
So this was where their audience had been hiding. And who could blame them?
‘Two hot chocolates.’ The waiter placed the steaming cups in front of them along with two ragged towels. ‘Where are you from?’
Aiya dried her face. ‘Egypt.’
‘Woah. Long way to come to perform in the Czech rain. But I liked your show very much.’ Aiya nodded seriously, to which the waiter responded with a comforting smile. ‘I see many performers come through here. Sometimes they get big crowds – but only in the summer, and never for long. Five minutes, maybe ten, and then the audience drifts away. Nobody would perform as long as you, and definitely not in the rain.’
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