by Elias Khoury
At that moment, he felt that the coffer had become as wide as the world. Breezes sported through it, and he listened as his heartbeats gradually died away.
He forgot Umm al-Banin and Rawda, as if they had never been, curled himself up in the box, which had begun to fill, and entered the lethargy of the water.
And so ended the story of the most beautiful lover in the history of love known to the Arabs.
(Note: The story appears to have two, contradictory, climaxes, but I don’t find myself obliged to choose between them, a fact that may be attributed to my decision to refuse to offer an allegorical interpretation. The chroniclers of this story have fallen without exception into such an allegory, choosing one of two easy solutions: either to end the story with the words of the king – in which case all that the reader knows of Waddah’s fate is his death, while his terrible experience within the coffer is overlooked; in this way, the writing of the story becomes part of the victors’ version of history, and thus we betray literature, whose first task is to upend that formula and make the story the history of the vanquished – or to regard the story as a silly myth and a political forgery directed against the Omayyads. I’m against both options, because the explicative version would turn Waddah into a symbol, which is impossible: it is a condition of the symbolic figure that he can be replicated, as was the case with Mad-over-Layla. All I know is that Waddah’s story wasn’t replicated in the past and never will be in the future. Likewise, to regard the story as a myth or a lie, one told as part of the war between the Omayyads and their enemies, is to turn it into a purely gratuitous tale. I hate such tales because they lose their meaning with time, while the story of Waddah hasn’t lost its meaning; on the contrary, it has increased in radiance and uniqueness.
On the other hand, entering the coffer with the poet to write the story from within the darkness places me before two further options, between which I am neither able nor in the mood to choose.
Did the poet keep silent in order to protect his beloved, in which case his story is an epitome of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation? Or did he keep silent because he no longer cared about life itself after the obliteration of love in the refusal of the lips to either speak or kiss, thus finding in death a fitting form for the ending of his love?
My perplexities over memory bring me back to Sheikh Usama al-Humsi, whom my mother brought to the house to make me memorize the Koran as a way of preserving my Arabic when the tiny minority of the inhabitants of Lydda who remained in the city came to fear that everything Arabic was on the verge of becoming extinct under the new state that had taken over Palestine. Whenever I put a difficult question concerning Islamic law to my sheikh and teacher, he would give me two different answers, and when I asked him which was correct, he would reply, “There are two points of view, and only God knows which is right.”
I end this manuscript with that same expression of my revered sheikh’s, in the hope that I can write my novel from two points of view and leave time to rewrite it as it wills.)
ADAM DANNOUN
Prayers of Refuge
SAY: “I TAKE refuge with the Lord of men, the King of men, the God of men, from the evil of the slinking whisperer, who whispers in the breasts of men, of jinn and men.”
I left the cinema consumed by rage and sought sanctuary in the two “prayers of refuge.”
Say: “I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak, from the evil of what He has created, from the evil of darkness when it gathers, from the evil of the women who blow on knots, from the evil of an envier when he envies.”
It was a strange scene. In that New York cinema I saw my life being torn to shreds before my eyes and the corpses of my friends dragged from my memory and dissected in front of everyone. I felt rage, and then the rage evaporated into a slight dizziness accompanied by nausea and a feeling that I was about to vomit. No one has the right to turn memory into a dissected corpse and rip its joints apart in front of everybody just to make a movie.
What kind of a way to behave is that?
I remember that Sarang Lee came after me, running, and took me to the café, where she explained that I was in the wrong, and that it was inappropriate for me to insult the director and the author. When she got to the bit where she told me I’d looked like a psychopath, claiming that I knew the heroes of the film and the novel personally, I found myself standing up, kicking the iron table in the Lanterna Café’s glass-roofed garden, and walking out into the street.
The ground was covered in muddy snow. The temperature was five below zero, and I walked without buttoning my overcoat, exposing my chest to New York’s whistling, bone-chilling wind.
Something inside me was on fire, my chest was burning, and a strange craving for air swept over me, as though my chest had been locked shut and my lungs were no longer capable of inhaling. At the same moment, all my pores closed and my head started ringing with a kind of senseless jabbering.
I don’t remember what happened exactly. I went into a bar, drank a lot of vodka, and went out again into the street, where I walked without thinking about where I was going. I don’t know how I found myself in my little apartment on 96th Street. Had I really walked all that way from Lower Manhattan to my home or taken a cab or what? I had no idea. All I know is that I recovered from my daze when I fell on the bathroom floor, banged my head on the edge of the basin, and saw blood. I washed my face and forehead and got into bed to sleep. In the morning, I found myself in the middle of a pool of blood that had spread over the pillow and couldn’t get out of bed because I was overcome by dizziness.
Sarang Lee told me she’d given up on trying to get in touch with me by telephone, so two days later she came to my house. My pallor and the blood congealed on the pillow and the sheet frightened her, as well as by the bouts of feverish ranting that would seize me. She said she hadn’t understood a word I’d said because my speech was slurred. She got me a doctor and stayed with me for four days, until I began to emerge from the fever.
Six days was enough for my life to turn upside down and for me to walk away from the novel that I’d begun writing. I’d long dreamed of writing a novel. One novel would be enough to say something no one had ever said before. I’m the son of a story that has no tongue, and I want to be the one to make it speak; when I found the story, and took up residence in Waddah al-Yaman’s coffer, that damned movie came along and expelled me from the coffer of metaphor where I’d hoped my story would be buried, the cave from which it could shine forth once more. The scales fell from my eyes and I saw that I was alone, looking for my shadow, which I had lost. My shadow had disappeared. It became my task, before I could write, to find it again, so that I could lean upon it.
The fever was devouring me and I was trying to explain to my young friend, in stumbling English, who I was. I told her everything and watched my life arrange itself into a story before me, and my story was long. Was she listening to me, or could her eyes not see the story because she couldn’t understand what I was saying?
She told me my speech had been slurred and that I’d talked without stopping and would jump from one subject to another, beginning in English, then switching into Arabic or into a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew, drinking a lot of water. She spoke of tears she’d seen in my eyes and said she’d tried the whole time to calm me down.
Odd. I remember things differently. I remember seeing everything clearly and being amazed at what I saw. I could recall everything. I saw the remnants of the people of Lydda living in a ghetto fenced off with wire by the Israelis, and I smelled death. I even saw before me the words in which my mother recounted to me the story of my birth, as though I were remembering them. I recalled everything, and today I sit down to write what I remembered and saw, convinced that memory is too heavy a burden for any to carry and that forgetfulness was brought into being to liberate us from it.
From that moment, the weight of my memory began to exhaust me, and I decided to write i
t, so that I could forget it.
People think that writing is a cure for forgetfulness and the vessel of memory, but they’re wrong. Writing is the form most suited to forgetfulness, which is why I’ve decided to review my entire project, and, instead of killing memory with metaphor as I tried to do through my aborted work on a novel about Waddah al-Yaman, I shall transform it, as I write it, into a corpse made out of words.
I am not Waddah al-Yaman, I will not die in the coffer, and my beloved is neither Rawda nor Umm al-Banin.
True, I did love two women: the first died and my love for the second died in my heart. Between those two, I loved a number of other women; or at least, did not love them but had relationships with them that were like love but quickly crumbled. What remains, though, in my memory, of the heart’s blood that I lost is connected to just two women, one of them was born in Saffourieh in Galilee and died in Haifa at the age of twenty-two; the other was a Polish Iraqi born in al-Ramla who moved to Tel Aviv to live and study and who did not die, but my love for her died in my heart for no clear reason, which is what drove me into the depression of writing.
Unlike Waddah al-Yaman, I entered no coffer, though now I discover that I’ve lived my whole life inside a coffer of fear, which, in order to escape, I must not just write, but break.
This is why I’ve decided to change everything.
What happened at the cinema?
Now, remembering those moments, I can’t understand what brought about the state I was in during my six days of delirium. It wasn’t worth it. I should have left the cinema quietly and without making a fuss, gone back home, and immersed myself in the Songs, as I do every day. I return from my job at the restaurant, wash the smell of frying oil from my body, and become clean, so as to be worthy of the blessing of reading the verses and the stories of the poets.
The truth is…(I have to stop using this word. It doesn’t express the truth of things, because no one knows the truth about that forest of tangled branches called the soul. Our souls are worlds spotted with darkness and no one knows the truth about them, and when inspiration or anything of the sort possesses the poet, he thinks he’s gotten to the truth, but inspiration is abundant and multiple, as is the truth.)
The truth is that the movie and the discussion that followed triggered something inside me that was waiting to explode. I won’t say my memory exploded, its water flowing like blood at an explosion of the arteries, but what happened was something like that.
The water of my memory drowned the metaphor and erased the symbol, which is why I now feel that I have to write the truth – naked, shocking, contradictory, and cruel – as I lived it.
I have decided to adopt a genre that all my life I have rejected. My problem with many novels was always my feeling that the writer was borrowing the novel form to write a part of his autobiography but from an oblique angle. I used to regard that kind of literature as a trick and an easy way out, and I still do. That’s why I’ve eliminated all references to my own life story, even where it concerns the woman with whom I was on the verge of sharing my life and death. I refuse to behave as lovers do at the beginning, when they tell each other the stories of their lives. I told Dalia I had no story to tell her. The dusky girl whose desire shone on her wrists would, when intoxicated with love, overflow with words, then ask that I tell. She used to say that my silence was the sign of the deficiency of my love, and I’d say nothing. How could I tell her a story without a tongue? How was I to tell her about the invisible child I’d been and the journey of my life that had hidden itself under a magic cap of invisibility? My mother used to tell me to put on the cap so I’d disappear and no one could see me, because we had to live as invisible people if we weren’t to be thrown out of our country, or be killed.
I never let Dalia in on my story because my tongue had been cut off. I never even told her about Hanan, who died in Haifa.
Now, though, I find myself swimming in words and depression, and I take off my cap of invisibility and don’t care, which is a sign of the end.
I want to clarify things for myself first. What I write now, and what I shall write, isn’t a novel or an autobiography and it isn’t addressed to anyone. It would be logical not to have it published as a book, but I don’t know. I shall let myself address itself as it desires, without rules, I will not change the names to make myself think that I’m writing a work of literature, and I shan’t cobble together a framework. I shall tell things as I told them to my young friend.
I don’t like what the critics call “the dramatization of the self” as a novel form, and I don’t like autobiographies despite my extreme admiration of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s book The First Well, which I consider to be the most beautiful thing written by that elegant and admirable Jerusalemite.
I think literature shouldn’t be like life. It should be a pure literature dedicated to language and its beauties, which are without limit.
This is neither a novel nor a story nor an autobiography. And it isn’t literature. I lost the opportunity to make literature when I decided to break open Waddah al-Yaman’s coffer, and I must pay the price and let the ink flow as it will.
I have to begin at the beginning, but every beginning has its own beginning, so where am I to begin?
I was standing behind the counter watching the two young Egyptian men who were preparing the falafel and shawarma sandwiches for the numerous customers filling the little Palm Tree restaurant that I’d been managing for more than two years, when Chaim Zilbermann walked in. I love the man. I loved him first for his way of devouring food: when he eats a dish of hummus, I feel as though he relishes the interplay between the garlic, the tahini, the lemon, and the ground chickpeas. This large bald man became my personal taster, on whom I’d try out the different mutations that I would introduce into the various dishes. He was the first to taste the fried-eggplant-mixed-with-tahini-and-yogurt sandwich, which became one of the reasons for the restaurant’s success.
I loved him too because he loved the Middle East, which he’d left because he felt that there was no place for him in a country that had occupied another, a feeling brought about by what happened between him and the donkey in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
I loved him thirdly because he was a film director with a conscience and made fascinating documentaries.
My friendship with him grew deeper when I met his Jewish-American wife, Tally, who did not feel the cold in New York, a woman who concealed behind her mild manner a depth of human feeling that I only discovered when she told me the story of her love for Chaim.
The fifty-year-old became my friend. We spoke Hebrew together and would recall the Middle Eastern sun and talk about politics, and sometimes we would go out with his wife to the Italian pizza restaurant Tre Giovanni, where we’d drink red wine. I would observe his embarrassment when faced with the pizza, which he didn’t dare to eat in front of his wife because he claimed he was on a diet, so Tally and I would eat while the poor man made do with devouring a plate of chicken salad and stealing sad glances at our tasty food.
Chaim hadn’t come that day to eat, and when I made him a jumbo falafel sandwich, he took it with an annoyed expression and said, as he wolfed it down, that he wasn’t hungry.
That was his habit: he would come to the restaurant, and when I offered him food he would look at it with annoyance because it didn’t fit his diet, and then eat it with aggressive appetite.
That day he had come to tell me he’d got me two tickets for the opening of his new movie.
I said one was enough, and he said he’d be going out after the movie with Tally and a few friends and would like to make the acquaintance of the young woman whom he’d seen here in my company on many occasions, and he winked at me before bursting into laughter.
The next day, I was surprised when Sarang Lee invited me to the same film. I told her I’d received a ticket from the director and had an extra one for her, and she said she�
��d go with me even though she didn’t need my ticket because her Lebanese professor had also invited her.
I didn’t ask her what the professor had to do with the movie. I surmised it was one of the things the faculty did to get out of teaching. This was something I’d been told by a customer of mine, a Palestinian living in Ramallah and teaching history at Birzeit University who also worked as a visiting professor at the university here and with whom I had old history that went back to Jaffa, though this isn’t the time to tell it. Dr. Hanna Jiryis used movies a lot in his class and when I asked him why, he gave me a lecture about the importance of the image in the postmodern period. I guessed that the man, who loved the Big Apple (as New Yorkers call their city), had chosen an easier way to enjoy it than burying himself in books, devoting himself instead to his hobby of hunting girls with his cappuccino machine.
It was Chaim who told me of this obsession of Hanna’s, and how the professor would take him to Caffe Reggio to show him the oldest cappuccino machine in America.
I thought the professor who’d invited my friend to the movie must likewise have fallen in love with cappuccino and that he too must now be playing the game played by Hanna, whose coffee-making talents were made clear to me by the girls he brought with him to the restaurant before going on with them to cappuccino paradise in his lovely home overlooking Washington Square, where the university professors resided.
But I was wrong.
I didn’t hate Chaim afterward. It was nothing to do with him and I’m convinced his motives were good and his attempt to make a film about the beginnings of the Second Intifada was his way of expressing his anger at the Occupation.
I can’t blame anyone; instead, I blame the incompleteness of the truth. Art, no matter how hard it tries, will never hold every facet of reality, so there’s no point in talking of “realism” in art. My friend’s mistake lay in thinking that the exhausting research he’d undertaken had brought him to the complete truth.