by Nihad Sirees
Contents
Title Page
The Tale of the Tale, or the Prologue, or the Preface, or Whatever Heading Novelists Typically Use to Introduce Their Novels
On the Margin of the Story
CHAPTER ONE How Innocent Widad Appeared in a Photograph with the French High Commissioner
CHAPTER TWO How Khojah Bahira Introduced Widad to Her First Kiss
CHAPTER THREE How the Old Man’s Servant Ismail Plotted to Kill Me, or at Least Make Me Run Away
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE From the Train Station to the Roxy Cinema
CHAPTER SIX The Rest of the Story, as Far as I Could Piece it Together; How I Got Away from Ismail; and, Finally, The End
About the Publisher
Copyright
The Tale of the Tale, or the Prologue, or the Preface, or Whatever Heading Novelists Typically Use to Introduce Their Novels
THE WORLD IS SO STRANGE. The strangest things are the stories you overhear here and there. I had never once thought of myself as a storyteller, mind you, gathering people around me in order to tell them about something I happened to hear or see with my own two eyes. That would be a waste of breath because I’m no good at the art of narrative anyway, of telling stories at all. But sometimes life, this strange life we all cling to, gives us a job we never thought we were cut out for, and this strange life gave me an incredible job. To tell stories… to tell all of you a curious tale I once heard in a moment that was even more unusual than the story itself.
I work at the Agricultural Bank, where I head up a division, which is to say I’m not the director or a worker or a mighty accountant whose task it is to balance the annual budget and then breathe a sigh of relief once the ledger is clean. The peasants got used to calling us experts, my colleagues and me. Our job was to trek out into the fields in Land Rovers, to ensure the state agricultural plan was being implemented properly, to survey the cultivated lands, and to dole out loans to the peasants, which might come in the form of seeds or empty sacks or other things I’m quite good at talking about; so much so, in fact, that I wish they could have been the subject matter I ended up writing about, because I would have been able to present you with a scientific treasure, replete with precise statistics. However, and there’s nothing shameful about this, really, I’ve undertaken something else altogether, namely, to write a story… That’s right, a story. Please don’t laugh… I’m already embarrassed enough to have embarked upon this kind of work in the first place. I’m definitely not cut out for it. It never occurred to me that I might pick up a pen and write literary prose one day instead of agricultural reports and explanations of the rural development projects, which I can slash and joust my way through like a knight in shining armour. On second thought, who knows? You might just wind up loving what I have to say here, because this isn’t something I made up, or, as writers like to say, this isn’t a product of my own thoughts or imagination, which is more often than not crammed with dry facts and figures. No, all there is to it is that I happened to hear what I’m about to relate to you, and I simply had to write it down. I’ll fill you in on the details later, as we used to say at the Agricultural Bank, my good people.
It all started last winter while we were out on one of those exhausting expeditions, travelling by Land Rover between villages. There were three of us: the driver, my assistant Mr Tameem and myself. We had wrapped up our work in one village just before sunset and were about to take off for another called Abu al-Fida. In order to get there we would have to drive back to the narrow asphalt road, which we would then follow for a few kilometres before turning off once again in order to head east on a godforsaken dirt path. Even though we should have stayed the night in that first village, my idea, a burning desire really, was to be done with our last village before the following afternoon so we could get back to Aleppo as quickly as possible, which led me to insist that we go out in wet and stormy weather. By the time night had fallen, it was cold, pouring rain, and the sky was dark. The windscreen was coated in condensation from the humidity outside and the breath from the three of us trapped inside.
We struggled not to let our fear show whenever the harsh wind and frightening downpour got so bad that we had to scrape the water off the glass with our bare hands so the driver could see the road. Although the two of them were trying to keep quiet, I could tell that my colleague and the driver wanted to scream in my face and accuse me of stupidity and recklessness.
Things got worse still when the car broke down all of a sudden. I felt cold sweat dripping down my forehead, under my arms. The driver tried to restart the car several times, but to no avail. This workhorse of a Land Rover, which had got us out of sticky situations on more than a few occasions in the past, in much worse weather conditions, became immovable, a stubborn hunk of metal. The driver switched on his flashlight and hopped out of the car, lifted the hood and fiddled with the engine, spewing curses all the while.
“Bitch, son of a bitch. Fuck this job.”
I smiled and turned around, encouraging my assistant Tameem to smile as well, but he glared back at me with hatred in his eyes, then looked away and muttered repeatedly, “God help us.” He wiped the window clean with his coat sleeve and tried to get a look outside. Tearing that smile off my face, I followed his lead and peered outside myself, but my vision ran smack into a dark wall obscured by ropes of torrential rain. Flashlight beams leaking out from under the hood managed to provide some light.
I jumped when the driver slammed the engine hood shut, shooting a derisive and vengeful message my way as he climbed back in the car, sopping wet from head to toe. Falling back into his seat, his face illuminated in the flashlight glow, he said through gritted teeth:
“It’s no use, sir. The car’s dead.”
For a while I remained silent, wishing he would switch off the flashlight so I could hide my embarrassment. They were staring at me as if I were a circus monkey, as if I could come up with a magical solution to our predicament. I asked him to switch it off, making up the excuse that we needed to conserve energy. I took a deep breath and mumbled a few scattered words that were meant to indicate to the others just how hard I was thinking about a fix, even though I was fully aware of how empty my head actually was, how utterly incapable I was of offering even the feeblest suggestion. One of the drawbacks to being a team leader is having to put up with the insults and sarcasm of employees without being able to tell them to stop; doing so would immediately cause them to erupt in laughter, and lead to losing their respect once and for all. I subsequently dreamt about that happening more than a few times, imagining Mr Tameem and the driver laughing at me as I drowned in embarrassment, tossing and turning in bed so violently that my wife had to wake me up and calm me down.
“What do we do now?” they asked. Because I had ordered them to leave the first village, to leave the warm shack, the guest house redolent with the aroma of bitter coffee, the seductive glances Merhej’s daughter threw towards Mr Tameem suggesting, to him alone, of course, so many many things… Since this was all my fault, it was now up to me to find an acceptable solution to the predicament I had got them, and myself, into.
Before going any further with the story, I think it’s necessary for me to tell you something about Merhej’s daughter. I hope the reader will forgive me for making these detours, but I warned you at the outset that I don’t know the first thing about how to write stories in a properly literary fashion. Besides, I have to say what’s on my mind as soon as it occurs to me, or else the reader might miss out on some important details that I deem necessary, especially since I could then forget about them altogether.
Now, this Merhej is an elderly man, fast approaching the age of seventy, and he’s married to three women. He does nothi
ng all day but sit in Abu Jasim’s guesthouse—Abu Jasim, whom the government had appointed mukhtar after its previous village headman, Shaykh Aswad, passed away, and because they forbade his son from inheriting the position, as was generally the custom; this because for some reason Shaykh Aswad’s son was not well liked by the sub-district director of the Office of Peasant Affairs. Despite his marriage to a second, and then a third wife, Merhej had not been blessed with the birth of a son. And so his three wives seemed to be pregnant constantly, giving birth over and over until he came to have more than twenty children. Since there were no male children to work in the fields, he ordered his daughters to take care of the animals and planting and harvesting as well as to wait on us hand and foot whenever we came to visit. As a matter of courtesy he would order his daughters to see after our every request, fetching water from the well or picking up food from the main house or cleaning the guesthouse where we stayed and other chores like that.
Mr Tameem would insist upon going to visit the village of Abu Jasim and his daughter whenever we had a job in that area. It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on. Merhej’s daughter was sending lascivious glances his way, smiling at him suggestively. Then she’d walk out of the guesthouse, and my colleague would follow after her a few minutes later, not coming back until after midnight. When he did finally return, he’d jump under the covers without saying a word out of fear that he and this girl would cause a scandal.
But I was onto everything that was taking place. Although I was somewhat envious, I kept my mouth shut. My insistence that we persevere through stormy and wet weather that day might have had something to do with envy, with my extreme frustration at approaching fifty years old, nearly twice Mr Tameem’s age.
I’d rather not cop to this, but those of you who are still reading right now deserve to know the real reason we stayed out there. I wouldn’t want anyone to imagine for a second that I was the head of a failed division.
Let’s get back to our story, though. I’ve already explained how I was in an unenviable position. I could feel the pressure of their stares despite the fact that our eyes never met in the dark car, as I took shelter in the silence. What silence, though? The rain was pounding the car like chickpeas, making a sound that reminded me of popcorn kernels when they cook and split open and bang the pan they’re frying in.
I opened the car door and went outside. That was all I had the strength to do. Suddenly I noticed that the darkness wasn’t so dark, that the sky was illuminated with dim light, the source of which I couldn’t make out. It was a light in the darkness, a light scattered in a single pattern, preventing the darkness from being pitch-black. I moved away from the car, in the direction we would have kept going if the Land Rover hadn’t broken down. My colleague and the driver weren’t concerned with what I was doing. Maybe they both thought acting crazy like this was the right thing for me to do.
As I started to walk, I didn’t feel wet, much the way a swimmer feels while in the water, not noticing at all the fact that he’s wet, thinking instead about how to traverse the coming distance. My feet were searching for the dirt road created by the residents and the livestock of the village of Abu al-Fida. Whenever the topography beneath my feet shifted, I would adjust my course to the left or to the right. I walked without thinking about anything at all, discovering something else in the process: my rational mind. In order not to think about anything, no matter what it might be, but especially my physical safety, I started counting my steps. I continued to talk out loud and keep track of my steps until I heard the howling of wild dogs approaching. At that point I froze. Discerning the difference between the sound of my racing heartbeat and the sound of the storm coming down from the sky, I swivelled around and tried to figure out the direction the barking was coming from. But my God was that difficult, which is why I decided to just keep walking. The howling was getting closer, and for the rest of my life nobody will ever believe me when I say that I didn’t care. Why should I care about some stupid dogs after successfully getting away from the driver and Mr Tameem, who hated me so much all because of Merhej’s daughter? In that moment I also hated myself for coveting her.
Just then the wall of water stretching between earth and sky was peeled away to reveal hundreds of animal eyes shining in the gloom: fixed, motionless, round, shimmering with phosphorescent colours, surrounding me on all sides. Muffled growls revolved around me as these creatures watched. What am I going to do? I thought, or rather, I blurted out loud, as if I could ask those eyes for advice. I didn’t know what to do other than to keep walking, with slow and sure-footed movements, without breaking into a run. People had always warned me not to run away from wild dogs. The dogs followed me, circling around me. Apparently they were searching for my most vulnerable point. But that’s a load of bullshit—my entire being was one big, walking weak spot.
The dogs were tracking me from all sides, alternating between barking and growling. They sparred with each other as well, nipping at each other’s heels. I blubbered at them that not all of the guests had arrived for the feast yet. Then I noticed another pair of eyes in the distance out in front of me, most likely belonging to another wolf that had decided to wait and let me come to him, or maybe belonging to their alpha, to whom they had been leading me all along. Whoever it was, I was headed right for him. But would anyone believe me if I said that I stopped right there, stupefied, and the dogs stopped along with me? I felt warmth rising to my head and a violent shiver. It was the kind of shiver experienced by a man about to be hanged, the noose already wrapped around his neck, when they abruptly tell him he has been pardoned, that the law has just been changed. But that pair of eyes turned out to be two electric lamps beaming out through the window of a house.
By the time I was a few metres away from that house, the dogs had started to retreat, as if their mission of delivering me there safely was complete.
The house was unlike any of those we used to see during our visits to villages in the area. It had been built out of white stone, cut and engraved in the Aleppo style. There were designs carved into the stones above the front door and over the windows. I found the existence of the house strange, as if I were in some kind of a dream just before death, but there I was, standing there, while the dogs began to sniff each others’ butts, prancing around in the rain, entirely unaffected by it. What was the story of this house? How could it have sprung up so precisely at the moment when I most needed it?
The windows were curiously large. I approached the one that was illuminated and looked inside. There was a large mirror reflecting the light outside, which is what had allowed me to see the lamp and its reflection from so far away. The room was cavernous, furnished in the style of wealthy urbanites: oil paintings hanging from the walls, elegant, comfortable furniture. Sitting beside a giant fireplace there was an old man dressed in black evening wear, staring motionless at the floor, his back hunched. Believe me, if the fireplace hadn’t been in use, blowing warmth and life all around, I would have thought the old man was dead. I drew away from the window, climbed the two steps up to the large, decorative front door, and rang the bell.
A dignified man who was clearly from the city opened the door. He stood there for a moment scrutinising my appearance. He clearly found my presence there strange and wanted to ask what could possibly have brought me there. For what it’s worth, I also found his presence there quite strange. But instead, after informing me that he was the butler, he politely asked me, in a smooth accent quite similar to—but not quite—an Egyptian one, what I wanted. I told him how I’d got lost in the wilderness, how I would like to speak to the man of the house in order to ask for his help. To allay the butler’s concerns, I told him who I was, about my job and my assignment. He hesitated for a moment, and I thought he might not let me in. He shut the door and walked away. A few minutes later he returned to open the door once again and invited me inside.
This house and its owners were strange. Everything about it left you confused. In th
e same way I had stood outside beforehand, marvelling at its very existence in these distant parts, I also stood inside, amazed by its elegance and neatness, marvelling at the owner; from the look of the antiques hanging on the walls, he had travelled the world without leaving a single foreign city unexplored, returning with valuable objets to hang on the wall or place on the shelves full of treasures. I’d ask him how it came to be that a man could leave the world behind, come here and build a fancy house that he lived in all by his lonesome.
The butler showed me to the small room off the corridor that was used as a storeroom for old junk, where he invited me to dry off and change out of my wet clothes into others he had grabbed off the shelf for me. There was an electric heater with hot metal coils that the butler had switched on so I could warm up. I drew closer to it and stood there, fighting off the cold that had settled deep into my bones, the damp causing steam to start rising from my clothes. I quickly got changed, as the butler instructed me to do, because I was excited to meet the owner of the house.
Then the butler showed me to the room I had looked into through the window when I was still outside. The old man had a hard time getting up to greet me. Although he didn’t smile, the man was very kind, and the warmth in his eyes comforted me, made me feel like less of a stranger in his beautiful treasure-filled house. To be sure, I’d say I felt much more at ease with the old man than with his butler; there was something unfriendly about him that made you feel he despised you.
The old man was seventy years old, or thereabouts. He respectfully asked me what my name was and where I was from; this, despite the fact that I was certain the butler had already told him. He searched his memory and remembered other people with the same last name as mine, explaining to me how he had known them back in the day. Then he proceeded to tell me about his life, how he was alone in this world, that he didn’t have anyone other than his butler. He had run away from the city after having lived there for a while but then got bored, the same way he had got bored of hundreds of other cities he had passed through during his travels. Finally, he said: