What happened was that I stumbled upon the complimentary sentence I had used to honor Zuhri the day he read me “A Don Quixote with Absolutely No Connection to Cervantes” in Wadi al-Hikma, when I went there with my brother, Muzaffar, to search for Nishan, other similar sentences I written, without intending anything in particular in them, in response to his insistent text messages that came to my mobile phone, and some further paragraphs that I really hadn’t spoken or written, but which had been composed on my behalf. He had written all these down or penciled them in with extreme care and placed my name beneath all these on the back cover of Shu‘ayb Zuhri’s story collection. It was called Worst City–Failed State and would be released shortly by the Nonaligned Publishing House, which belonged to the former Communist Asim Revolution, who aspired to present gifted new authors.
This was the alliance that had undermined my isolation and plundered my time. How could I have been stupid enough to provide him a possibility that wasn’t a reality by opening the door to find these two men? As a matter of fact, this wasn’t new; I had often been exposed to comparable situations. I remember once discovering a Romance novel – written by someone called Life Pulse–that had on its cover an encouraging comment attributed to me. I did not know who had composed the blurb and could not find out, because the novel had been self-published and the author was himself a ghost. No one had heard of an author named Life Pulse. In newspapers, I had also frequently come across interviews that I hadn’t given. These were assemblages of interviews I had granted previously – rewritten in new ways – or else dialogues someone had conducted with himself and attributed to me.
I mentioned to my visitors being embarrassed by views that I had never agreed to, views that might have been meant merely as compliments, and complained of the exploitation of my name without my knowledge. Zuhri, who was killing me with his sinister smile, rebutted my allegation that I didn’t know about his plan, pointing out that at least I did now. He also contended that even if I hadn’t known, the book’s publication would not harm me at all. These were simply remarks I had actually made to him or written to him in text messages. Asim Revolution flared up zealously in a way that reminded me of his past when he would visit us at the university and debate politics in one of the discussion corners that were a characteristic feature of university life at that time.
His theory, which was peculiar to him alone and wasn’t suitable for being popularized as a theory that everyone could follow, was that a youthful writer resembled a recently planted seedling that might grow at a slant or die young if no one watered it. On the other hand, it might sprout leaves, bear fruit, and cast extensive shade if everyone took care to water it.
“You are a long-time gardener who used to repeat, ‘A gardener can stake leaning branches and can also uproot the tree.’ Perhaps you don’t like Mr Zuhri’s stories. You will, however, cause others to like them if you say they are stories worth reading. So what do you say now?”
“Nothing,” I said as I gasped for breath. “Actually, nothing. I will play the part of the gardener. It won’t be my fault if this role isn’t successful and the seedling dies, in spite of my care for it.”
“Beautiful,” Asim said.
“Very beautiful,” Zuhri added as his tongue moistened his lips. “This is excellent.”
The two men had the final section of their pitch prepared and were about to deliver it. I knew that this was the case and sensed from Asim’s restlessness and from the way Zuhri kept rising aimlessly and sitting back down that a final significant and perhaps lethal blow would be added to this session of misfortune.
I decided to sock it to myself in order to alleviate its impact. “You also want me to finance the publication, isn’t that so? How much will it cost?”
This thrust seemed to have greatly relieved Asim Revolution, because his narrow eyes, which were exhausted from the weight of a lifetime, smiled and his meager white mustache danced a little jig. Zuhri seemed to be warbling, because I heard something that resembled trills of joy escape from his throat. I was as miserable as could be and attempting to claw my way out of this succession of crises. With extraordinary straightforwardness and without any further internal debate, I agreed to bankroll Zuhri’s collection with a sum that was not unreasonable and that was within my means, in addition to contributing the quotes that were attributed to me on the back cover. In this manner I hoped to neutralize one of the crises in order to devote myself to Nishan and poor Linda the Shadow.
No one would blame me for this if he knew my motives, and Zuhri would surely discover a reader who would be dazzled by his disasters and promote them. From my long experience in this field, I knew that even if malaria, rheumatic fever, and whooping cough wrote short stories through some intermediary, they would find readers who would savor their tales and bow respectfully before them. If lesions on the body, pimples, and disgusting secretions were narrated in any language, some reader would exclaim, “By God! By God, splendid!” I will never forget an American novel called Diabetes. All that happens in it is that the novelist goes to the bathroom and returns to watch a football game before he passes out. It racked up huge sales one year as readers fell over each other to purchase it.
I wanted these two guests, who were standing up, to leave my house immediately but noticed that Zuhri had left his brown notebook on the table, whether deliberately or inadventently, I didn’t know for sure. I said, “Please don’t forget your notebook.”
He replied, “I haven’t forgotten it. I’m leaving it so you can have a look at the stories as a group. I normally make a copy in another notebook.”
They had already departed when the theory, inspired by the cynicism that has haunted Muzaffar, my brother, since he became conscious of the world, leapt suddenly into my mind. Had what happened to my life actually been Shu‘ayb Zuhri’s devious plot to achieve this precise result – getting me to agree to support his weird literary efforts – meaning that Nishan Hamza had been merely a tool used ingeniously by the educated boy to achieve what he had now?
But such a result did not merit such an ambitious plot. Zuhri could have exerted pressure on me in some other less dangerous manner than this. He could have dispatched a respected friend to me to praise him. Besides, Imam Hajj al-Bayt had declared that Nishan Hamza actually was insane and that they were accustomed to his seasonal attacks. I didn’t think a religious man like Hajj al-Bayt would have become a tool in a plan as contemptible as this. Hajj al-Bayt had also referred to the truck driver Zakariya, a relative of Nishan’s, as living in Wadi al-Hikma, marrying a girl from Ethiopia, and leaving the country with her. He too had been a character in the novel.
I didn’t intend to cast aspersions on Hajj al-Bayt, but they headed his way despite my intentions.
Finally, where had Nishan gone when he fled from al-Nakhil Hospital?
Really – where had he gone?
This was what I had not been able to ascertain. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of finding out.
I deferred my suspicions for a time and began, motivated only by boredom and despair, to flip through the brown notebook that contained Shu‘ayb Zuhri’s collected stories – all of them, or so he said. Filled with the small, deliberate script characteristic of adolescent girls, the notebook was heavy and chockfull.
I read:
Giraffe
They placed her in a little cage in a crowded zoo. When they looked for her a number of days later they found her suckling the little cage with her tits.
As Wakeful as an Ant
A beggar asked me one day: “Can you sleep without giving a beggar alms?”
I replied, “Have no fear. I’m as wakeful as an ant.”
Contradiction
Near the Republican Palace I came upon contradictory opinions. I listened to some of them and my destiny changed.
Love
My true love asks, “What need is there for your talk about hearts – so long as you don’t pay the dowry and don’t marry me?” I replied
that she’s the one who concludes the marriage.
I quickly lost interest, because I didn’t understand the point of these stories, which seemed to be mere arrangements of words, devoid of any pulse or narrative tension that would attract a reader. I started searching for the story “Worst City – Failed State”, from which the title of the collection was taken, thinking it might have some deeper significance. I finally found it halfway through the notebook. I was caught off guard when I discovered nothing but the title and a hundred question marks beneath it. These constituted the whole story.
– 15 –
I don't know when my suspicions regarding Nishan Hamza Nishan overpowered me with even greater audacity and completely seized control of me, but it most probably happened a number of days after the demise of Linda the Shadow. Her muscular dystrophy overwhelmed her respiration and had finally arrested it.
This was no easy blow to bear. It had been days and perhaps months since my portrait had been torn to pieces. I was reassembling its parts in my mind and restoring their beauty, whenever I had time alone.
Abd al-Qawi the Shadow delivered the news himself, one afternoon when I was drowning in the seas of my everyday life. After ending my self-imposed isolation, I was sitting by myself in a coffeehouse waiting for a literary critic I had promised to meet. I was thinking about everything and nothing in particular when I was surprised by a telephone call; despite my forebodings, I took the call.
He said, “Come help us bury your favorite reader, Writer. Linda has died.”
Then he hung up.
His voice was choked this time, the voice of a truly old man who was repulsed by the words on his lips. I imagined that it had required enormous effort just to speak in that choking voice instead of being strangled by the ropes of expressions that fathers typically use when they lose their sons or daughters.
I was unable to drive my car or even approach it. I left it where it was parked and took a taxi that pulled up suddenly beside me without my hailing it. I was surprised to find that the driver, who was more or less a young man and wore local garb and whose lower lip bulged with a wad of tobacco, knew me. He had stopped because he recognized me, at a time when cab drivers had become arrogant and wouldn’t stop for anyone.
This driver didn’t know me as a writer but as a former math teacher who had taught him in middle school. He had not forgotten that I had mistreated him more than anyone else in his life. I had punished him non-stop for extreme inattention and incomprehension of lessons. Because of me, he had been forced to drop out of school and to work at a great number of humiliating jobs, until he ended up as a cabbie. He related to me all my errors: giving him detention in the classroom for many hours while his classmates whispered together, pulling him by his ear in front of the other pupils, calling him a shoeshine boy hundreds of times. My mind caught some of this but not all while a rude song blasted from the vehicle’s player: “He fed me noodles when I didn’t have a penny and said to me: ‘Sleep, dear.’” I was forced to apologize to him in a feeble voice – totally unlike the harsh voices of teachers – for my severity, which I had thought was in his best interest. I honestly didn’t remember all the forms of punishment that he rattled off and don’t think they would have come naturally to me even when I was a teacher. The taxi driver accepted my apology good-naturedly and deposited me in front of the cemetery. The driver refused point blank to accept his fare, repeating, “By God Almighty, your fare is dedicated to the deceased woman. We are God’s and to Him we return.”
We buried the distinguished reader in al-Salatin Cemetery, an old cemetery on a neglected road on the outskirts of the city. It enjoys a prestigious reputation, and its history dates back to the era of the former kingdoms. It is said that the daughter of the last sultan of the Kingdom of Funj was buried there, but it certainly didn’t give that impression. There was nothing except pebbles, dry dirt, and some straggly shrubs, which revived during the rainy season and looked dead during a drought. The Shadow had chosen this cemetery himself, despite his suffering. I knew that he loved it and had spent a number of months living in a shack near it, entering it several times a day to help people bury their dead so he could write a play that focused on the dead. The play, “The Sultan’s Hand,” was performed in the late 1970s. I attended it when I was still a teenager and not at all tuned in to art and writing.
The loss was obviously great, and the funeral was crowded with many people I knew and many I didn’t. I saw Sonia al-Zuwayni, the Moroccan proprietor of hair salons, swathed in mourning black; I wouldn’t have suspected that she knew the Shadow well enough to share in the family’s sorrow in this manner. I also observed Professor Hazaz, the reflexologist, as nimble as ever, but his face looked a little different. The glamorous star Mustafa Khalifa was there, along with a number of poets, novelists, and dramatists, as well as the retired female vocalist Zakiya the Nightingale. The Shadow told me once, when he was in a good mood, that they had loved each other madly. A young writer with bushy hair, who had published a novel called Futile Yearning two years earlier, approached me and told me in a whisper that the deceased woman had spoken to him by telephone and discussed his talent and his novel enthusiastically, asking him to write more novels because he had a distinctive style. He admitted that when he heard her tremulous, breathy, languid, inspirational voice he had never imagined she was a girl who was fighting to survive.
So I wasn’t the only person whose writing Linda had fallen in love with and I wasn’t the only man who had sketched a dazzling portrait of The Reader. Perhaps he was also recalling her on drab nights. I happened to be the one who had seen his portrait ripped to shreds.
When I was most deeply immersed in the prevailing atmosphere of tragic loss, I spotted Najma. I tried to avert my face from her eyes as best I could but failed. It was the same new Najma who had updated herself as part of a plan to achieve motherhood without bothering with the preliminaries; she had not reverted to her former classic self. She was walking in Linda’s funeral procession, after decking herself out, applying cosmetics, and allowing her hair, which she had dyed blonde this time, to extend enticingly beyond her light headscarf. She actually looked more like a girl in a bridal procession than someone at a funeral.
I suddenly found Najma beside me, very close to me, and almost touching me – in spite of the oppressive burden of the tragedy – while men’s eyes, which could brush aside every other distraction, collided with her and me. I felt agitated. She asked, “Why are you ignoring me, Master? Why haven’t you returned my calls?”
I didn’t know how to respond. I had made a firm decision not to reply to her calls. My feelings had instituted that policy and my humane tendency, which no doubt is shared by most other people, had confirmed it. I almost blurted out, “Why would I answer a girl who is a calamity?” All the same, I was afraid she might collapse or become hysterical in this mournful place and at a time when an outburst would be totally inappropriate. I knew from personal experience that personalities like hers were capable of creating any type of spectacle for no reason at all. So I said, “I haven’t found the time. I’ve been absurdly busy.”
She replied, after, I imagined, carefully filling her sentence with traps before she uttered it. “I was contacting you to tell you what I thought of three of your novels that I have recently read. You’re a brilliant writer, and your friendship makes me very happy as does your advice, which will help my writing in the future.”
She didn’t mention the name of the three novels she had read. I swear she hadn’t read more than half a page out of my thousands of pages of works. Had we not been at a funeral, I would have asked her about the books and inundated her with questions about characters and events and what she derived from reading the novels. Of course I wouldn’t do that, and she knew this perfectly well, because she could see my misery and that of the real people with whom she was saying farewell to Linda the Shadow.
They had begun the funeral rituals when Najma left me, after pressuring me to meet her
soon. Now I was able to breathe, to weep silently, and to extend my hand to help lower Linda into the great beyond and to try to support the Shadow to keep him from falling, despite his heroic composure, which I sensed was very fragile and could shatter at any moment. I was listening without much interest to a sermon delivered deliberately and expertly by a man of sterling faith, when I noticed Luqman the Shadow, or Loco with a Shadow, run up from the distance. He was short and plump, and his hair was in cornrows. He wore yellow, reflective glasses, jeans that were ripped at the knees, and a T-shirt adorned with a color portrait of the late singer Michael Jackson.
Evening had fallen when Loco arrived. Notwithstanding his long period of exile and his appearance, which didn’t fit our society, he retained his sense of solidity with our community and had come when he learned that his sister had died.
– 16 –
I have mentioned that my suspicions began to get the better of me, especially when Nishan Hamza disappeared from my life and from the city’s hustle and bustle, apparently once and for all.
I began brooding seriously on some aspects of his story that didn’t seem to add up. These were matters I had overlooked because of my extreme agitation following Nishan’s surprising and upsetting appearance at the Social Harmony Club and his subsequent recital of my novel or most of my novel at the home of Malikat al-Dar, my spiritual mother. My bewilderment had continued for a number of months as this puzzle staggered on without any resolution.
I realized that the soldier Asil Muqado, who had tried to overthrow the government and, in the novel, had been executed but in real life, according to Nishan, had fled to Chad, would be known to the public in this country. Since my birth I had experienced all its periods of upheaval and its peaceful and troubled times, yet I had never before heard of a rebellion spearheaded by a soldier called Asil Muqado.
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