Telepathy

by Amir Tag Elsir

  I was surprised when Nishan spoke. His eyes weren’t directed toward me, and his voice was odd. It was the quavering voice of a feverish man. “Where are we going, sir? I think you’ve been driving for more than an hour and seem to have no intention of stopping.”

  I had no ready answer for his question. I really had been driving without any destination or any interest in finding one. I looked around to get my bearings and was astonished to find myself in the Railroad District, near the central train station. This was where my spiritual mother, Malikat al-Dar, lived. Actually I was almost in front of her house. I had no idea how I got there. Some invisible rope seemed to have dragged me. All the same, I felt a certain degree of relief, because my spiritual mother’s house was my second home, which I visited whenever I wanted a mother figure, the scent of a mother, or food prepared by a mother. It wouldn’t seem odd for me to arrive now with a guest, because I had done that frequently, most recently two months earlier when I brought a former storyteller named Isma‘il. I had wanted some information about the capital’s ancient history. He had refused to provide these clarifications until after a repast of traditional home cooking. Malikat al-Dar’s house had been virtually the only place where I could find an old-fashioned meal.

  Malikat al-Dar’s house was expansive, not physically spacious but emotionally so. Thus at any time it might shelter strangers or people from her village in the North of the country – villagers who were clueless in the capital. The room she allowed me to use was at one side of the relatively large courtyard. It was a rather big room that was furnished with cots and quilts and a small cooler containing water and occasionally food.

  The house’s main entrance, which was directly opposite me, had been repainted a dark green; the sign announcing that the occupant had performed the Mecca pilgrimage had also been repainted: “Pilgrimage Accepted, Sins Forgiven, and Praiseworthy Return.” Malikat al-Dar had fulfilled this religious duty once with her husband and another time after he died as a member of an official delegation. Her income from her evening job, which she still retained – as a nurse for a well-known gynecologist and obstetrician – even after she retired from working for the government, was enough to animate her household and her whole life.

  I knocked gently on the door, and she opened it herself. She was limping a little. She had symptoms of osteoarthritis in her knees because of her plumpness and advancing age, and these symptoms had become more severe. An orthopedic physician had told her she would need knee replacement surgery soon.

  It was late and the house seemed empty. The beds in the open guest room appeared to be unoccupied, and the quilts were folded up. The sound of a colicky infant echoed from one of the inner rooms. I deduced that he was the child of her daughter Fatima, who had been quite pregnant during my last visit (before my trip to Malaysia).

  I asked, “Has Fatima given birth?”

  “Yes. Her son, Dhu al-Nun, was born nine days ago. You weren’t here for me to tell you. When did you get back?”

  I wasn’t at all surprised that this newborn had been given a name that far outstripped his age and that was unlike the names of other contemporary newborns. I knew that Malikat al-Dar and her family loved strong names and imposed them on their in-laws, even if they were foreigners. They regarded modern, wimpy men’s names through eyes filled with pity and regret. Malikat al-Dar had three daughters, each of whom had married and given birth to boys with names like Abd al-Basit, Abd al-Qayyum, al-Tanajiri, Abu al-Ma‘ali, and Suhayb.

  I didn’t have a chance to see Fatima, who was resting with the nuisance named Dhu al-Nun, because of the calamity accompanying me: Nishan Hamza Nishan.

  I thought Malikat al-Dar hadn’t noticed my companion in the faint light of the courtyard. But I was wrong, because as we crossed the darkest area of the courtyard, she asked, “You haven’t introduced me to your guest?”

  I would introduce her to my guest, since she was welcoming him into her home; this was an unavoidable evil. But I wouldn’t pronounce his full name or even part of it. I would limit myself to his father’s name, Hamza, which was a common enough name. I didn’t think he would object. My problem was that she too had read Hunger’s Hopes, although without understanding everything – like other old-fashioned midwives whose educations were limited. She had read it not because she loved reading or was fond of culture in general, but simply because I had written it. She would certainly know that Nishan Hamza Nishan was the lunatic who dwelt in that novel. If I pronounced his full name, I would raise dozens of question marks for which there was absolutely no need.

  I said, “My friend Hamza. He’s a writer who has recently begun to make a name for himself. We were driving around, talking, and suddenly found ourselves near your house.”

  She didn’t say anything and brought us into a room she normally used to receive transient guests, as opposed to the clueless ones who stayed for extended periods with her. It was an excellent room that was thoughtfully furnished with a large settee and chairs covered in red velvet, as well as two beds made of polished wood on which any tired guest could stretch out. She left us and then returned a few minutes later carrying two glasses of orange juice with ice. She departed, explaining that Dhu al-Nun needed her expertise in the care of newborns in order to quiet down. I knew that she had detected a hint of mystery and wanted to distance herself from it.

  Nishan’s telephone and mine rang at the same time. His ringtone was rather strange and sounded like distant barking. My ringtone is very common – it’s a cheerful song that I swear is on three-quarters of the cell phones in this country. I didn’t answer my phone; it was a call from Najma, who no doubt would ask me to comment on something she had written on Facebook about her seminar with Hazaz. I turned off my phone, but Nishan quickly answered his. Although I wasn’t certain, I thought he was speaking to a lady. The voice was shrill and gushing; I could hear some from where I sat. He responded with the word ‘yes’ more than ten times. Then he shut off his phone and turned toward me.

  Now, as I listened to his story, I would understand what I had done to him when I wrote Hunger’s Hopes and what he would do to me. He reached for the glass of orange juice, brought it close to his mouth, but set it down again without taking a sip. He cleared his throat, and then began to speak. I became a pair of large ears, something that hadn’t happened to me for a long time.

  – 6 –

  It was about one in the morning when I dropped Nishan Hamza Nishan off in the Wadi al-Hikma District, a neighborhood being developed on the western edge of the capital. Although it may well become an upscale neighborhood in the future, in its current condition it resembles the miserable district I described in great detail in Hunger’s Hopes. I had never visited it before, because I have no family or friends who live there.

  Nishan Hamza was calm except for a slight tremor of his hands and feet, and appeared to be extraordinarily alert mentally. He clasped his copy of Hunger’s Hopes firmly in his right hand while he groped in his pocket with his left hand for a cigarette, although I suspected that he had run out of them. I handed him what was left of my pack and told him as he stepped out of the car that I would return to meet with him again. I didn’t give him my telephone number or ask for his, for fear of consequences I didn’t feel like incurring then.

  Most of the houses in Wadi al-Hikma were unfinished skeletons of concrete and red brick. Some were one story, others had two, and a few stretched even higher. In front of them were cots with frames of rough wood and webbing woven from torn ropes. Men hired as sentries to guard the houses were stretched out on these. Other homes, constructed from canvas, corrugated metal, and tree trunks, were scattered through the area. These appeared to house poor people or migrants from remote areas, fleeing war or famine. They had built these shacks on vacant lands that hadn’t been developed yet, and the inhabitants would doubtless be forced to evacuate them when the true owners of the property returned and began building. My companion’s home was one of these huts.

  Elect
ricity wasn’t readily available there, and thus the depressing, faint light of scattered gas lanterns provided the night with desolate depth. I thought no one here could have read Hunger’s Hopes. Where there was no intellectual vigor, there would certainly be no reading. As long as Nishan said nothing about this calamity, no one here would know anything.

  Before leaving, I made several quick turns through the district in my car pursued by dozens of barking dogs. Then a number of the recumbent sentries rose from their cots to investigate the situation.

  I wasn’t alarmed but didn’t really feel calm either. I experienced a moment of extreme neutrality that I’ll attempt to maintain for as long as possible while I search for suitable answers to the striking eeriness I experienced for more than two hours while I listened to Nishan Hamza in the home of Malikat al-Dar. I was trying hard to comprehend all of this but not succeeding.

  Nishan Hamza Nishan in the novel Hunger’s Hopes was the same as the real Nishan Hamza Nishan. His family had emigrated from N’Djamena in Chad during the rule of the dictator François Tombalbaye at the start of the 1960s. His father had settled in the Sudanese capital, where he had worked as a guard for a private residential development. He had made special efforts to find his son work as a messenger in an elementary school when Nishan was ten, and his son had continued working in this position till he was thirty, when, at the prodding of the young pupils, he embraced education. He began to study and finished all his school exams through to the secondary level in two years. Then he worked hard to enter university and study law, only to be blindsided by the symptoms of seasonal schizophrenia. That had obviously impeded his progress.

  During his first bout of illness, Nishan had fallen in love with a nurse named Yaqutah who actually served as a nurse in the government psychiatric hospital until last year. She had done her best to care for him during his ordeal. But she had suddenly disappeared, changed her name to Ranim, and traveled to work in Libya once it was liberated from Gaddafi’s rule, after she found a position there.

  The aristocratic lady, who vaunted her superiority, without or without cause, was Su‘ad Mu‘tasim, the owner of the building where Nishan’s father worked as a security guard until he passed. She had died as a result of a blood clot in the brain last year. The ambitious soldier, who had attempted to overthrow the government without even the attributes that would have qualified him to lead a fringe football team and who was executed after the attempted coup along with his comrades, was a dead ringer for Asil Muqado, a member of Nishan’s tribe, and had embarked on the same adventure. He came close to seizing power but wasn’t executed, because he fled at a decisive, climactic moment. Now he was living in his ancestral homeland, Chad, where he bragged about being an adventurer who had almost succeeded.

  Nishan’s life story was very close to events in Hunger’s Hopes – even the page where I had suspended any grounding in reality. That was the folded page Nishan kept reading and annotating at the bottom when he sat beside me in the car. It was page 120, when the hero again succumbs to seasonal schizophrenia.

  Some of the names were real – Nishan, of course, and the nurse Yaqutah, although the end of her story was different. In the text she retained her name to the end, cared for the hero till his last moments, and wept for him when he passed. In real life, she changed her name to Ranim and traveled abroad in search of a better life. Asil, similarly, fled instead of being executed. In my novel, Su‘ad Mu‘tasim did not die of a blood clot; she died halfway through my work of liver failure. The work on the whole, however, consisted of true-to-life pages that described the life of a poor, desperate, marginalized man, who had communicated his story to me in some fashion and had even made me fiddle with the details of some passages, while I retained his name, life story, and present circumstances. Because the text was actually published, while reality was stuck at the folded page, neither Nishan nor I could say definitively whether his end and the novel’s would converge.

  But how had all this happened?

  “How has this happened?” I asked him with icy limbs, a pounding heart, and a mind that was totally blank.

  He didn’t know, and no one else could know, I believed. Something strange had happened. I had simply to accept that it had happened and strive to find some explanation for it if I could. I had to forget I had once visited Kuala Lumpur with its mischievous vigor and returned with Eastern spices that were going to produce a novel. I was obliged to work to create for this man a better destiny than the one I granted him in the text. Success in this effort would not be entirely in my hands or within my powers, but I had to attempt it. I felt a warm sympathy for the man and thought of a number of steps to take. I asked him, “Did you know about me before Hunger’s Hopes? Had you read any of my other works?”

  “Because of my circumstances, I don’t read literature or anything else on a regular basis. I’m a poor man whose education came late in life – but I definitely knew about you. I had read some isolated chapters from your novels in the newspapers. I also read some of your interviews and essays, which I didn’t understand too well.”

  “And Hunger’s Hopes? How did you happen to read it, since you don’t read many books?”

  “Someone I know who lives in the district brought me a copy when he found my name and story in it. He was enraged when he handed me the book, because he thought I knew you personally and had narrated my story to you to write.”

  “Was he one of the characters who appear in the novel?” I asked, gripped by anxious fear that I might have written about some ordinary person and distorted his life enough that he would wish to destroy me, especially since he got hold of a copy of the novel and actually read it, only to discover his neighbor and his neighbor’s story inside it. What I found most unusual was that Nishan was acting normally and hadn’t attacked me or accused me of anything.

  “No, he’s not in the novel,” Nishan replied as he silenced his old cell phone, which had begun to ring persistently.

  I sighed with relief. I was spared that then.

  Another question: “The Chadian man who purchased your sister Mabruka when she was a child and disappeared with her to unknown reaches of Africa – was he real? And your sister, herself – do you have a sister named Mabruka?”

  “No, I don’t have a sister or a brother. I was an only child. Now I’m the only one left, as you know.”

  Questions began to multiply in my mind and raced toward my tongue. What about the truck driver who bound Nishan with ropes when he was delirious? Or the perfume dealer Nashshar, who loaned him money from time to time? How about the exploding dolls – did he actually throw them at elegant men and beautiful girls in the streets? Did he take his treatment seriously? Did he go to prison, as happened in a passage in the novel, for example? But these questions were quashed when Nishan suddenly changed. I saw his eyes redden, his lips quiver, his hands gesture convulsively in the air, and something like thick slobber drool from his mouth. He cried out in response to an imaginary voice calling him: “Wait for me, Rabi! Wait for me, I beg you!” I thought he might shatter one of the glasses of orange juice over my head or smash one of the velvet chairs. He might escape into the interior rooms and strangle Malikat al-Dar, Dhu al-Nun, and his mother, Fatima.

  I couldn’t predict what a lunatic might do in his delirium, because I had observed people like him in moments of sudden frenzy. I’ll never forget a youth I saw one day in my neighborhood – he had throttled his male organ with a circular piece of rusty metal, and it exploded in front of me.

  I stood up quickly, feeling alarmed and guilty for paying attention to him in the first place and then for bringing him inside a household that respected and honored me. I grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the house as best I could. I was panting, because he was heavy and rigid. I pushed him into the car’s back seat and searched wildly for a rope to bind his hands and feet. Despite her age and cranky knees, Malikat al-Dar came running out with Fatima’s husband, her son-in-law. They asked what the problem was and
I insisted that there was no problem, that my friend the writer had simply had an epileptic fit, and that I was rushing to find medical assistance for him. Nishan had calmed down a little, luckily, and I was able to drive him to his house without any fear.

  When I finally reached my house after three a.m., the street was still busy, in a city that never quiets down. The trappings of a wedding that apparently had taken place on the street in front of a nearby house were visible; drowsy workmen were trying to guard the temporary pavilion and chairs but not faring too well, because I saw a couple of men in ragged clothing put several chairs on a donkey cart and flee with their booty.

  I spotted a trembling shadow in front of my house. Thinking that it was Nishan Hamza, I felt alarmed and drove around the block a number of times. When I returned, no one was there. I realized I would never fall asleep and would pass the remaining hours before the morning’s commotion as a wakeful fool, waiting impatiently for the arrival of all the bustle so I could slip into it, pursuing any openings it might provide me with.

  I sat at my desk in the living room, which was crammed with books, and turned on the computer. I cast a quick glance at the Kuala Lumpur file, and it seemed to me that what I had written thus far was merely contemptible scribbling on the wall of a novel that was destined to go unwritten – during a period when no novels would be written.

  The Chinese acupuncturist Tuli was there, and the features that made him so striking had begun to be sketched: his lavish elegance, his carefully crafted smile and the way he bowed repeatedly before every visitor and rubbed his fingers from one moment to the next. But I felt in no mood for him – not at all. For the American-Japanese Leftist Hoshika I had chosen a perilous future in a country that he did not comprehend. He would never live to be a hundred here, although that was what he aspired to. I had sketched the secretary Anania Faruq, outlining her eyes with antinomy, decorating her hands with dark henna patterns, and dressing her in an embroidered Sudanese thobe. I had reached the stage of planting her in potting soil so that she would grow to be captivating but fully capable of inflicting harm. I was in no mood for her now and felt opposed to any attempt to revive her. I wouldn’t proceed any further with her in the text.