Silent Minaret

by Shukri, Ishtiyaq

  “I understand why she did what she did. And those who tell you otherwise, let them spend one day in the life of Wafa and others like her – my father.” He raises a solitary finger into the night, then lets it rise and fall three times, once for each word: “Just one day.”

  One night, she comes to hear of her mother’s death. Despite all the years, the news, the indirect route by which it reached her, months later, leaves her devastated. She goes to find him but he isn’t there. She can’t think of what to do. She doesn’t want to go back to her empty flat. She doesn’t want to see Issa. She only wants him. So she sits down on the pavement outside his building because it’s his pavement, it’s the pavement outside his building. She barely notices the cold, barely notices the two hours before he returns.

  When he gets home, he sees her huddled in the shelter between two cars. “My God,” he exclaims and scoops her up in his arms. “Why didn’t you come to the café?”

  But she is unable to speak. She just lies face down on the bed, crying – not the inhibited sobs of earlier, but a terrifying, howling lament that she is only brave enough to release because he is now with her.

  When she wakes in the middle of the night, thick-eyed and dry-throated, she finds him watching over her:

  “What’s the matter, habibti?” he asks, tilting his head pleadingly to one side, running his fingers through her hair.

  She tells him.

  “So you will be going home soon?”

  “No.”

  He doesn’t understand. He offers to lend her money – money he himself will borrow, if money is the problem.

  “It’s not money,” she says. “It’s history.” He is the only person to whom she repeats the story about the monster’s name.

  On their last night together before he returned home – “Hell on Earth, but hey, apart from you, this is not that great either. I don’t know what I’ll do. Home is like a ghost town now, I’m told. But I’ll have my family and my friends, and they’ll have me. They need me” – he gave her an inexpensive watch with Arabic numerals. She put it on immediately.

  “Now you’ll never confuse seven and eight... And, insha’allah, you won’t forget me.”

  “I won’t forget you.”

  He sniffed. “That’s what they all say.”

  “I’m not like that.”

  “Then maybe you’ll visit, one day?”

  She lifts herself onto her elbow and lays her hand on his shoulder: “‘Except for thy haven, there is no refuge for me in this world other than here / There is no place for my head.’ I’ll come visit, I promise.” Then she snuggles back into him.

  He smiles a fading smile. “Come soon,” he says. “Before we’re completely walled in. While we’re still there.”

  On her first night without him, she compiles an indulgent playlist, which she names ‘Melancholy’. Some of the songs on the list, she hasn’t heard for years. When the selection is complete, she puts it on continuous play and goes to bed:

  In the middle of the night, ‘They’re dancing with the missing’ - a tune she once used in a teaching practice lesson when she was a student in the Free State – ‘They’re dancing with the dead’ – a way, she thought, of alluding tangentially to the horrors of apartheid. ‘They dance with the invisible ones’. She failed the lesson. ‘Their anguish is unsaid’. Her subject was South African history. ‘They’re dancing with their fathers’. Not Chilean. ‘They’re dancing with their sons’. She sees herself in a vigil of veiled women. ‘They’re dancing with their husbands’. Around their necks are draped photographs, pictures of the dead. Some women have so many photographs around their necks that other women have to help them, like bridesmaids attending to a bride. ‘They dance alone’.

  One of the women steps forward and walks towards the police barrier. ‘It’s the only form of protest they’re allowed.’ When the woman reaches the barrier, the police step forward to block her way. She removes the veil from her face. Decades of sadness bursts from under her veil, causing the police to shield their eyes and step aside. ‘I’ve seen their silent faces scream so loud’. When the unveiled woman reaches the main gates, she turns around to signal to the other women. They follow her up the short street and through the already-open shiny black door. ‘If they were to speak these words they’d go missing too’. One by one, the women enter the house. ‘Another woman on a torture table what else can they do’. One by one, they place their photographs next to those of the happy family on the mantle piece. ‘They’re dancing with the missing.’ One by one, they lay down the pictures of their missing and their dead. ‘They’re dancing with the dead...’

  When she enters the house, she realises that she too has a picture draped around her neck. She enters the room and moves to the photograph of the woman on the mantelpiece. ‘Can you think of your own mother / Dancin’ with her invisible son’. She lifts her photograph from her neck and places it on the mantelpiece next to the smiling woman.

  ‘They’re dancing with the missing

  They’re dancing with the dead

  They dance with the invisible ones

  Their anguish is unsaid

  They’re dancing with their fathers

  They’re dancing with their sons’

  When she sees the photograph she has placed, she wakes and shouts his name into the night.

  ‘They’re dancing with their husbands’

  It is a picture of...

  ‘They dance alone’.

  “Karim!”

  One day, she will be on a train, looking out through the window, only half-conscious of the story a mother next to her is reading to her daughter. When the train enters a tunnel, her ears will take over from her eyes: “...but Salim had fallen in love with the court dancer. When Akbar heard of this, he warned his son to give her up, but the prince refused. And so the Emperor ordered his masons to bind the girl and then build her into a wall while she was still alive.”

  When she gets to school, she will resign her thankless post. Her superiors will try to dissuade her. “I’m sorry,” she will say. “This isn’t education. It’s crowd control.”

  A week later, she will land in Tel Aviv, from where she will travel by land to Qalqilia. By the time she reaches her destination, she will have spent five hours flying from London to Tel Aviv, and a disproportionate eighteen hours travelling the short distance from Tel Aviv to Qalqilia. To Karim. Karim behind The Wall.

  Baghdad Café

  “THIS is BOND STREET. The next station is Marble Arch. Please allow passengers to get off the train first. Please move right down inside the carriage. Please take up all available space inside the carriages. This train is now ready to depart. Please stand clear of the closing doors.”

  On the tube, Kagiso notices a picture of a family strolling on an idyllic private beach. It is an advertisement for a credit card company offering an exotic holiday on an exclusive island for a lucky winner and nine people of their choice. On the golden sands of the beach, someone has scribbled:

  ‘The world is not your private holiday destination. People live here and they probably don’t have access to this beach.’

  “This is Marble Arch. The next station is Lancaster Gate. Please stand clear of the closing doors.”

  They exit the station and step out onto the throng of Edgware Road on a Saturday night, four lanes of traffic, a huge crowd waiting to enter the cinema complex, bustling pavements, busy restaurants.

  “Many Londons,” Katinka says, “and if Brick Lane is like the Meghna flowing through its east, then this is the like the Euphrates, or the Tigris, or the Nile flowing through its west.”

  A little way up the road, Kagiso follows her into an elaborately decorated café, filled with scented smoke and intoxicating music.

  “Woah!” he exclaims as the waiter leads them to the alcove in the corner behind a mashrabeya screen. “What is this place? Are we still in London?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s... It’s like I steppe
d through the glass doors and into The Thousand and One Nights. How did you come by this place?”

  “Issa’s hangout. And the last place I saw him.” A waiter approaches their table. “I’ll tell you later.”

  She places their order in Arabic. “A pot of mint tea and two shisha... Apple, please.”

  “I’m impressed,” Kagiso nods when the waiter has left.

  “Don’t be. That’s the only sentence I’m fluent in, because I say it all the time. The rest of my Arabic is still pretty dire.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “All conversations I have, whether it’s about the past or the future, they all still happen in the present tense. I find the conjugation of the verb in Arabic incredibly difficult.”

  “And people understand?”

  “Mostly, but I could do better,” she admits. “Of course, I prefix the past with yesterday, even if I’m talking about ten years ago, and the future with tomorrow, even if I’m talking about next year; not very sophisticated, I know, but mostly people appreciate the effort.”

  “And can you read and write?”

  “I’ve just about cracked the alphabet,” she says, smiling broadly. “I’m still at the c-a-t, cat stage. So let’s say that I can decipher rather than read.”

  “So what does this say?” he says, pointing at the menu.

  “That says Baghdad.”

  “Well, that was pretty fluent.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice with that one too. It’s been on there constantly these last few months,” she says, pointing a finger over her shoulder at the giant screen behind her.

  He introduces another round of the game they have been playing randomly during the course of their ambling afternoon - the game he taught her during that first shared drive to Cape Town, all those Februarys ago, with Issa’s deep, reticent silence driving them through the hot Karoo.

  “Marianne Sagebracht, Jack Palance and CCH Pounder? That’s a hard one.” She raps her fingers on the table and screws up her eyes as she tries to guess the film in which the three actors appeared.

  Pleased with his challenge, he reclines in the plush sofa and smiles, blowing out large plumes of apple-scented smoke.

  “Is it recent?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Marianne Sagebracht?”

  “Sexy woman. Fat is beautiful.”

  She shakes her head. “Don’t know.”

  “Clue?”

  “Clue... You’re sitting in one.”

  “An arabesque sofa?”

  “Not the sofa, the place.”

  “An Arabic coffee shop?”

  “Warm.”

  She repeats the information he has given her, “Jack Palance, not recent, Arabic coffee shop,” and then opens her eyes wide with excitement, as a child would, to indicate she’s hit on the answer:

  “Lawrence of Arabia!”

  Kagiso chokes on a lungful of smoky laughter. “Still as crap as ever. You haven’t got one right so far!”

  “That’s because you keep coming up with the most obscure films.”

  “You give up, then?”

  “Ja, tell me.”

  “Bagdad Café!”

  “Bagdad Café?”

  “Yes, Bagdad Café.”

  She remembers. “Café in the bundus?”

  He nods.

  “Gosh, that takes me back. Surreal film? Really haunting theme tune? I can almost hear it now.”

  “Callin U,” he says.

  “That’s right.” She struggles to hum the tune.

  He helps her out.

  “Anyway,” she says, slapping his wrist, “how was Arabic coffee shop supposed to be a clue?”

  “Katinka!” he sighs, with a tone of mock exasperation, and points to the same menu in front of her.

  She sucks her teeth and slaps her palm to her forehead. “Baghdad Cafe... Very good!”

  “Baghdad, we used to call it. Meet you in Baghdad. Sometimes I’d get texts from him – ‘Comrad! Smokin in bagdad. Wair r u? Join me!’ Once, he texted me in the middle of the night, oblivious of the time. I was really pissed off, and sent a text back saying – ‘In bed! Iv got 2 teach 30 bastad brats in da am.’ But, being Issa, he had to push it even further:

  ‘An on fone means u not ntyly unavlbl.’

  ‘Im vlbl 4 emgncis only! Now Fuk off!’

  He didn’t.

  ‘In bagdad dis is an emgncy. Fuk da bastad brats. Kids r dying here. Get u gat ova here asap. & Fuk lemonde – we r all afghanarabs now!”’

  “What was he doing here in the middle of the night?”

  Again she points over her shoulder at the enormous screen. “Watching the war on that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought, fuck it, and jumped in the car. By the time I got here, everybody was gripped. The place was packed out, with thick fumes of smoke hanging in the air. It felt as though I had driven across London and into Baghdad itself. The waiters were all standing in a group facing the screen, their backs towards the door. They didn’t turn around to meet me when I walked in. That one,” she says pointing discreetly, “held an empty tray to his chest.”

  “Issa wasn’t in our usual seat, so I had to search among the dazed observers to find him. It was a strange feeling. The whole room was caught up in the screen – the shock and awe of the bombs, the explosions reverberating around the world, all the way here, into this room. It felt as though I was walking through a war, looking for my friend amongst the dazed and stunned.

  “I found him over there, at that table behind the banister, pipe in mouth, chin to chest, staring at the screen. On his T-shirt was written: ‘I am a standing civil war.”’

  Sit down. Come see the view from underneath. This is what the descending heel looks like – the soles of George and Tony’s feet.

  “I squeezed in next to him.”

  These bombers left Britain as people here were sitting down to tea.

  “He gave me the mouthpiece.” She puffed her pipe. “Have you ever seen a real war projected live onto a screen the size of a fucking Piccadilly Circus billboard?”

  They stare through the window at the pavements now crowded with late night strollers. The waiter replenishes their drinks, the sabby stokes their pipes.

  “It was here, in Baghdad, that we first met when he came to London. He was sitting in his favourite seat, where you are now, smoking a shisha pipe. I was quite nervous, but of course I pretended not to be.”

  He frowns. “Why were you nervous?”

  “I was intimidated by where we were meeting. Jy moet onthou, ek is ’n plaasnooi. I thought it a strange place for him to suggest. And when the waiter brought the damn pipe he’d ordered for me to the table, carried high through the air, and then set it down beside me in an elegant bow, like a ceremonial offering, I had no idea what to do with the damn thing, so I just puffed it like you would a cigarette. Of course once Issa told me to, ‘trek soos ’n bottle kop,’ I was away and never looked back.”

  “Why were you intimidated by this place?”

  “I’d never been out on Edgware Road. I guess, like a lot of people, I saw it as rich Arab turf. It would never have occurred to me to socialise here – I didn’t know what that entailed. But look at me now; a regular who can’t get enough. When I told a friend that this is where I was coming, she warned me to be careful, said I might get rolled up in a carpet and smuggled into sexual slavery.”

  He smiles.

  “I said I wouldn’t be that lucky.”

  His smile turns into a laugh.

  “Yes, I laughed too. But I don’t think it’s funny anymore.”

  He moves around awkwardly in his seat. “Why?”

  She shrugs. “Now it makes me cringe to think that I, an Afrikaner, the victim of so much stereotyping, could have done the same to others. It makes me think of Afrikaaners and Arabs as brethren. The last of the Mohicans. The two tribes it is still acceptable to denigrate and berate.” H
er thoughts fly to Karim, and to her friend; she never told her about him, knew she’d never understand, didn’t want to hear her sexually-charged references, doesn’t see that friend anymore. She drinks a deep inhalation causing the water in the pipe to gurgle and boil as in an agitated teapot. When she has filled her lungs, she releases a huge cloud of smoke, like a dragon, into the air, thick and fragrant and white, dense enough to hide her face and, for a moment, to cover her sorrow.

  She reaches for her phone – “The next day I got a text from him” – and hands it to Kagiso. ‘Tnx 4 cumin last nite. Wen we achievd & da new world dawnd da old men came out again & took our victry to remake in da liknes of da 4mer world dey new. Read Anil’s Ghost, the last sntnc on pg 43.’

  Kagiso puts down the phone.

  “That was the last I heard from him,” she says. “I never saw him again.”

  London N4

  WHEN KAGISO FIRST SAW ISSA’S address, he took N4 to be the postcode for London: Finsbury Park, N4, Piccadilly Circus N4, Covent Garden N4, Buckingham Palace N4. London N4. Now, walking around the area, at the end of his stay, he shies away from the memory. How little I knew.

  He moves in and out of the station, as if exploring a maze. That was what it seemed like when he first arrived. He was sure he would never find his way and expected to get terribly lost.

  “Customer information. Please do not leave your baggage unattended. Customers are reminded that smoking is not permitted on any London Underground train or platform.”

  Now he sees the tunnels as they are – simple, like a T with staircases descending down from the vertical branch to each of the platforms. Right for the Piccadilly Line which, tomorrow, he will take, westbound, to Heathrow. (Katinka is insistent that she will drive him as it is a Saturday, but he would prefer to slip out of London, quietly.) Left for the Victoria Line to Brixton – the name reminds him of the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad near downtown Johannesburg – the Brixton Murderers and Robbers Squad, as they used to call it. Detainees would end up at John Vorster Square slipping accidentally and falling through open windows to their pavement deaths far below. Oops.