PART 4
Isa . . . The Second Wandering
‘The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.’
José Rizal
1
Kuwait airport looked very gloomy when the plane landed on Sunday, 15 January 2006. People’s faces were much the same – gloomy in a way for which I could see no justification. The passengers formed lines in front of the immigration officers who stamped their passports. There were signs above the front of each line, some of them saying GCC Citizens and others saying Citizens of Other Countries. I stood there, uncertain which line to stand in. Should I go to the line where the Filipinos from my flight were standing? Or the line with the people who didn’t look like me?
Under a No Smoking sign attached to one of the columns, a man in military uniform was standing, leaning against the column. I went up to him and asked him which line I should stand in. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘does GCC Citizens include Kuwaitis?’
He threw his cigarette on the floor and crushed it with his boot. He spread his arms, shook his head and said, ‘No English.’ I went over to where they were stamping passports, carrying my briefcase of valuables: old pictures of my father and my identity papers. I stood in one of the GCC lines behind men wearing loose gowns and Arab headgear. They must be Kuwaitis like me, I thought.
The officer stamped their passports one by one until my turn came. I put my hand in my trouser pocket but before I could take out my passport the officer shouted at me so rudely I was shocked. He waved me towards the other line, where the Filipinos and people of other nationalities were standing. He said something I didn’t understand. I hurried to the other line, while the officer went on talking loudly and pointed at the sign above him. He sounded angry. Then he pointed a finger at his ear and made that gesture that meant he thought I was crazy. I was shaking and people were looking at me. Was it forbidden to stand in that line? Was it a military zone?
In the other line, a young Filipino said to me, ‘You were standing in the wrong place. That line’s for Kuwaitis and people from the other Gulf states.’
I nodded gratefully and muttered to myself, ‘He turned me away when he saw my face, even before he had a chance to see my passport.’
I crossed the yellow line on the floor and presented my blue Kuwaiti passport to the officer. He took it, leafed though the pages and examined my face. ‘Sorry about my colleague,’ he said with a smile. ‘I could stamp your passport here, but would you mind going back to my colleague?’ I looked over at the scowling officer and shook my head. ‘Please, you have a right to stand there, even if it does take you longer,’ he said. He handed my passport back without stamping it and said with a smile, ‘Welcome to your country, but not through the gate for foreigners.’
I crossed the yellow line a third time and submitted my passport to the angry officer. The fact that my passport was blue made his face turn red. Without checking my face or making any comment, he stamped the passport. I turned to his colleague with the smile as soon as I was through the gate. He was looking at me, still smiling. He gave me a wink and a thumbs-up sign, then went back to work stamping foreigners’ passports, letting people into the country in the proper lane.
The shops, restaurants and cafés at the airport were closed. The lights were off and the chairs were upside down on the tables. It was really depressing. I turned and looked at the faces of the various people who had come to meet arriving passengers. If the faces weren’t sad, they were blank and silent. If they weren’t in a good mood, what made them come out to meet people coming back from their travels, I wondered.
Ghassan was standing in the crowd. I wouldn’t have recognised him if he hadn’t been holding a sign with my Arabic name, or my Filipino number, on it – Isa. He was wearing a dark Arab thobe and nothing on his head. His moustache, like his hair, was silver, or rather a mixture of black and white, which made it difficult to guess how old he was. His eyes were sad in a way I hadn’t seen before. If someone were ever to ask me what sadness looked like, I would say, ‘Ghassan’s face.’
It was cold outside, not as my mother had described it in our conversations about Kuwait. When we came out of the airport I took a close look at the streets. Beautiful trees and flowers were planted on the verges and the roundabouts but the scenery grew less and less green as we drove away from the airport, until in the end it was mostly yellow. On that day there were flags at half-mast along the road too.
‘The way we put up flags is different from your way,’ I said to Ghassan. ‘In the Philippines we put the flag at the top of the mast.’
Ghassan nodded and in English with a strange accent he replied, ‘In Kuwait too, and everywhere else, but the country’s in mourning.’
‘Mourning?’ I asked him, expecting an explanation.
‘The flags are at half mast because the Emir died this morning,’ he said.
2
Ghassan told me he was supposed to take me straight from the airport to Grandmother’s house, but the country was in mourning, people were upset and, most importantly, it wasn’t clear how Grandmother felt about me coming back. What would she think about me arriving just as the Emir had died? Hadn’t my mother and I caused enough trouble in the past? My mother had arrived at the time of the attack on the Emir’s motorcade in the mid-1980s, I was born at the time of the plane hijacking, and we left Kuwait when the passengers were released. The fact that I had arrived at just that moment confirmed my grandmother’s belief in the curse of Josephine, Ghassan said. So my meeting with Grandmother had been postponed for a month.
Just because I took a liking to Ghassan and trusted him didn’t mean I took a liking to the place where he lived. It was a small flat in the district of Jabriya, the same name as the plane that was hijacked years earlier with Ghassan and Walid on board. Both took their name from Jabir, the first name of the Emir that people were mourning on the day I arrived.
We didn’t go out of the flat for the first three days. Ghassan didn’t need to go to work because government offices and most companies and other offices were closed for the period of mourning. Ghassan was busy watching television. He would speak to me a little, then go back to watching and occasionally crying. He wiped away his tears with the back of his hand. The television showed the Emir carried on people’s shoulders, wrapped in the Kuwaiti flag, and thousands of people around him in a cemetery in the desert. The presenter sounded sad but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He would stop his commentary whenever he was about to cry. I said nothing. Ghassan seemed to be performing some religious rite and I didn’t want to interrupt him. On television the camera switched to another place that was packed with women with black tattoo marks. They were weeping bitterly. There were girls carrying pictures of the late Emir and old women crying on the pavement. Amazingly some of them had come in wheelchairs.
I was surprised at how the sadness affected everything. Seeing sad faces is only to be expected on some occasions, but for everything to be sad – the streets, the houses, the land, the sky – all at the death of one person, seemed a little too much.
Sadness is something colourless and invisible that a person projects and that then infects everything around them. The effect is evident on everything they touch, even if the sadness itself remains invisible. That’s how Kuwait was in the first days after I arrived. People were projecting their grief; the ground, the sky and the air, everything soaked it up.
The television went on broadcasting shots of the late Emir at various ceremonies, with the voice of a man singing unaccompanied. Or perhaps he was praying or reading the Qur’an. I wasn’t sure.
If Ghassan hadn’t told me that the man on the screen was the late Emir I would have thought he was a major religious figure. His simplicity, his humility and the way people jostled to be near him suggested that people had an unusually warm relationship with him. There were shots of him stepping out of a black Mercedes in a black cloak and shaking hands with old men who looked overjoyed to see him. In other
footage, which Ghassan said dated from when he came back to Kuwait after the liberation from Iraq, he was in a brown cloak on the steps of a plane, with his hands raised in the same way as at Friday prayers. He kissed the ground as soon as he set foot on Kuwaiti soil again. The black band that held his white headdress in place fell off when he bent down. He stood up, put it back on his head and then kissed a red book that some men presented to him. In another shot he was on a red carpet greeting men in military uniform, and in one he was without a gown, sitting with many men around a meal laid out on the floor. Finally he appeared on a flat piece of desert turning his head right and then left, with a line of men behind him following his lead in communal prayers. Far from the scenes on television, in the sitting room where I was sitting, Ghassan was in another world.
* * *
‘Sir, the first time you called you told my mother there was a reason why you couldn’t go abroad,’ I said to Ghassan a few days after I arrived.
‘Isa! Ghassan isn’t a hard name to say,’ he replied disapprovingly. ‘Why do you insist on calling me “sir”?’ He paused a while, then continued, ‘Yes, I can’t go abroad, because I’m not Kuwaiti.’
In everything I had heard about Ghassan from my mother, she had never told me he wasn’t Kuwaiti. Besides, I couldn’t see what not being Kuwaiti had to do with not being able to go abroad.
‘So where are you from then?’ I asked inquisitively.
‘Bidoon,’ he answered straight off.
‘Really? I thought you were Kuwaiti,’ I said, uncertain what he meant. He didn’t offer any further explanation. ‘Bidoon? I’ve never heard of that country,’ I added.
Ghassan still didn’t speak. ‘Is Bidoon one of the GCC states?’ I asked with my usual stupidity.
Ghassan laughed, but it sounded like crying.
Through Ghassan I met a new and special type of person. A rare species. I discovered people who were stranger than the tribes of the Amazon or those African tribes that are discovered from time to time. They were people who belonged where they didn’t belong, or didn’t belong where they did belong. The idea was hard for me to grasp. I tired Ghassan out in my quest for an explanation. After many attempts to simplify the concept, my mind managed with difficulty to digest it.
‘But you went abroad on that plane that was hijacked that day!’ I told him.
‘Things were rather less complicated in those days than they are now,’ he replied, with a smile that I couldn’t explain.
I went over all the information I had heard about Ghassan from my mother. ‘But you’re a soldier,’ I said, pressing him to explain.
‘I was, once upon a time,’ he replied.
I pestered Ghassan with questions till I knew everything about him, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I understood everything. The sadness on his face was because of a label that had been stuck on him and that he couldn’t shake off. He was a bidoon – a term I grew to hate. I didn’t really understand the term even after Ghassan translated it for me. ‘Without nationality,’ he said, ‘born that way.’ If he had been a sardine born in the Atlantic, he would have been an Atlantic sardine. If he had been a bird in the forests of the Amazon basin, he would have been an Amazonian bird. But although Ghassan’s parents were born in Kuwait, and he too was born in Kuwait, although he knew no other country, had served in the army and defended the country when it was under occupation, he was still a bidoon.
Bidoon. He had five Kuwaiti brothers and sisters. They had escaped while he had fallen down some legal crack.
‘For God’s sake, Ghassan, what’s the complication?’ I asked. He laughed, as if his experience was nothing to cry about. ‘You and your parents were born here. Your brothers and sisters are all Kuwaiti. You had a job in the army. You helped my father, a Kuwaiti, defend Kuwait, and yesterday, and I apologise for intruding, I saw you crying at the death of the Emir. And in spite of all that . . .’
‘Isa!’ he broke in. ‘All these questions of yours have stopped you asking about your father.’
I didn’t say a word. I didn’t have any feelings for my father that mattered.
‘Rashid loved you, Isa. He was always talking about you,’ Ghassan said.
Deep inside me, a strange feeling for my father stirred. ‘Was my father really like that?’ I asked.
‘More than you imagine.’
I hesitated before asking my next question. ‘So why didn’t he let me stay? Why did he get rid of me?’
Ghassan smiled. The man had a strange face. When you find a smile on a sad face it’s impossible to predict what the person plans to say. ‘OK,’ he said. He was still smiling. He also gave a long sigh. ‘There’s someone you care about, someone you love and worry about, and that person faces two options and for some reason he doesn’t have the right to choose,’ he said, turning to me and pointing at me with his finger. ‘You, only you, can decide.’
I nodded and Ghassan continued. ‘Either he’s going to be thrown into Hell or into a bed of thorns. Which would you choose for him?’
‘The thorns of course,’ I answered without thinking.
Like someone who has just won a bet, Ghassan gave me the thumbs-up sign. ‘That’s what Rashid did,’ he said.
3
Ghassan and I built up a close relationship in the month I spent in his little flat, where I felt so claustrophobic. I wasn’t used to living like that. In Cheng’s flat, although it was tiny and quiet, I at least had the window overlooking the Seng Guan Temple. But from among the windows in Ghassan’s flat, although there were plenty of them, I never found one that looked out on anything interesting, other than that bitter feeling of alienation towards the country and the people.
Ghassan went to work every morning while I stayed at home looking for ways to kill time. All the books on the shelves on the wall were in Arabic. The newspapers and magazines that Ghassan kept were also in Arabic. One morning I started browsing through them, looking at the pictures. In every magazine and every newspaper there was always one or more photos of Ghassan. That’s why he had kept those copies. There was plenty of writing under the pictures and I wondered what it said, what was written about him. He told me later that these newspapers and magazines were like his personal archives, including some of his poems and reviews of them, newspaper interviews he had given and press coverage of seminars and discussions in which he had taken part.
One evening I asked him to read me something he had written. He looked at my face with interest. ‘Read you one of my poems? In English? I never thought of that,’ he said. I was delighted when he pulled a piece of paper out of his desk and put his glasses on the end of his nose. ‘That sounds like a wonderful idea. Just give me some time, Isa. I’ll translate a small passage,’ he said. He started writing on the paper with a pencil. It didn’t take him long. He lit a cigarette. ‘I can’t talk without some smoke to go with my words,’ he joked. He cleared his throat, then started reading in English in a beautiful voice, softly at times and sometimes more loudly. He was waving his arms around melodramatically and using facial expressions to reinforce the effect.
I was very moved by Ghassan’s performance and was almost crying. He finished reading and looked at me. ‘What do you think?’ he said.
I was embarrassed. The words of his poem were indeed English but they didn’t include a single meaningful sentence.
‘To be honest,’ I began, hesitantly. ‘I didn’t understand anything.’
Ghassan nodded his head. ‘If you had said anything different, I would have known you were lying,’ he said, then paused. ‘Because I didn’t understand anything of what I said either,’ he added.
He roared with laughter, blowing cigarette smoke from his mouth and nostrils. I laughed too, and examined his face.
I wished I could read what Ghassan had written, or understand it when it was read, as easily as I could read his face.
* * *
‘There are lots of pictures of your father in that drawer,’ Ghassan said one morning before leavi
ng for work, pointing at the drawer of his desk. Then he took ten dinars out of his pocket and gave them to me. ‘On the top of the desk, you’ll find the telephone numbers of some restaurants, if you don’t like what I have in my kitchen,’ he added.
I had never thought about whether I liked a particular food or not. As far as I was concerned, the function of food was just to stave off hunger. White rice and soya sauce served the purpose. My only problem at the time was with the water. It had a different taste from the water I was used to drinking in the Philippines. Ghassan laughed when I said one day, ‘The water there is nicer.’ He bought me two bottles of mineral water but it still wasn’t as nice as the drinking water I was used to.
When Ghassan went out, I kept thinking about the drawer where he said the pictures of my father were.
Years earlier, when my mother used to show me pictures, she had been trying to help me find out about a man I was going to meet one day. Now that the man was dead, I had a strange feeling about seeing pictures of him. I was very reluctant to open the drawer, especially after Ghassan told me my father was always talking about me, which made me feel drawn to him. I didn’t want to love this man now that it was impossible to meet him, but how much longer could I resist looking inside the drawer?
Despite all the clutter in the sitting room, it was the drawer that interested me most. The pictures of my father that I had in my briefcase didn’t seem to be enough. I kept myself busy watching the English-speaking channels on television. There was nothing in Ghassan’s flat to help me kill time other than the television. I looked out of the window from time to time but I didn’t see anything outside that would encourage me to go out.
* * *
I couldn’t walk down the street in Kuwait without noticing the cars. For an ordinary Filipino the cheapest, most basic car you could find in Kuwait would be like an impossible dream. The same with the houses. The smallest of them would be considered a mansion in the parts of town where I grew up.
The Bamboo Stalk Page 13