The Bamboo Stalk

by Saud Alsanousi

  The weather was so cold that for the first time in my life I could see my breath condensing in the air. I shivered as I walked the streets and watched the air I breathed out turn to mist. I had the strange feeling of being in a new climate, in a winter unlike the winters I had known in the past.

  One day as I was walking along some backstreet, a car pulled up against the pavement and a man wearing traditional dress and headgear got out. He waved his identity card in my face. It was similar to the one I had. ‘Police,’ he said.

  I was caught off guard and tongue-tied. The man continued angrily. ‘Show me your identity papers,’ he said.

  I put my hand in the back pocket of my trousers and took out my wallet. He took it out of my hand before I had a chance to get the identity card out for him. I stood still and watched him. He began to look through it. He pulled out the ten dinars Ghassan had given me and put them in his pocket. He threw the wallet in my face without looking at my identity card, got in his car and drove off at speed. I stood there, unsure what to do, with the wallet at my feet. If the police are thieves, what do the thieves do, I wondered.

  A policeman? Without a police car or even a police uniform! I didn’t understand anything.

  4

  After dinner one evening, I said to Ghassan, ‘I’ve never seen you playing the musical instrument, the one my mother told me about.’

  He looked at my face in surprise. ‘Do you mean the oud?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. He was silent for a while, as if thinking about something. He went out of the sitting room for a few minutes, then came back with the oud in a black leather cover that was the same shape as the instrument. In his other hand he held a damp cloth.

  Ghassan sat cross-legged on the ground, with his back against the sofa behind him. Without thinking I slipped off the sofa and sat on the ground like him. With the damp cloth, he started removing the dust that had gathered on the leather cover. As he worked, he said, ‘Josephine seems to have told you everything.’

  Ghassan put the instrument on his legs without taking it out of the cover.

  ‘You know, Isa,’ he began, with a sad look on his face. ‘The last time I played this instrument was during our activities under the occupation.’

  ‘I thought you resisted the Iraqi army with weapons!’ I said disapprovingly.

  ‘Each of us resisted in his own way. Everyone had his weapon.’

  While my father joined the Abu al-Fuhoud group, along with Ismail al-Kuwaiti and others, Ghassan was resisting the Iraqis elsewhere, using a different approach. He was writing patriotic poems and setting them to music, then recording them for distribution to the public, with the aim of inspiring people with the will to resist. Ghassan soon stopping doing that and started working with Abu Faris, who was writing a patriotic operetta that became known as al-Sumoud (Steadfastness). Ghassan sang in the chorus with other young men from the resistance. He also helped distribute the operetta in the form of cassettes, which were widely circulated during the Iraqi occupation.

  Ghassan said that after the secret meetings where they rehearsed for the patriotic choral work, far from the eyes of the Iraqi forces, he no longer had any desire to play the oud, especially after Abu Faris and the man who wrote the music for the operetta were captured by the Iraqis.

  Ghassan took the oud out of the leather cover. The colour and shine of the wood made it look new, untouched. He picked up the small piece of plastic and strummed the strings. He smiled at me. I prepared to hear him play. He reached out to the keys to tune the strings. He turned one of the keys and plucked the string to test the pitch. Suddenly the string snapped.

  ‘See? Even the strings refuse to play,’ he said, putting the oud back in its cover.

  Ghassan went to his bedroom while I stayed in the sitting room. I kept thinking about the drawer that held the pictures of my father, but at first I was hesitant to open it. I didn’t hesitate for long. I sat in the chair at the desk and gently pulled it open.

  There were dozens of photographs from different periods of his life. Pictures of him with a thin moustache, others with a thick moustache. Pictures of him wearing glasses and others of him without. If he had looked sad in the pictures, the fact of his death would have had less impact, but in all the pictures he looked so happy that it brought a lump to my throat to think he had died so young. Every picture showed that my father had been full of life. There was a picture of him in the beach house with a large fish hanging from one raised arm, and his other arm bent to show off his biceps, as if to say, ‘It was me who caught it.’ Walid was standing next to him, with his arm raised high too, but with a fish only the size of a finger, and with his other arm bent like my father’s. There was another picture taken in London, with my father standing under Big Ben in a smart grey suit and a dark red tie, next to a woman who appeared to be Kuwaiti, wearing a long brown coat, a short checked skirt, knee-length boots and an elegant hat that made her look like an English princess. There was another picture of him and Walid in Thailand, wearing short-sleeved shirts. My father was bowing, his hands folded, in the traditional Thai greeting, as was a young woman standing beside him. Walid was behind them, sticking out his tongue as always and making V-signs with two fingers of each hand behind their heads. It looked like a peace sign but that definitely wasn’t what Walid meant. There was a picture of my father with Ghassan, with Ghassan in goalkeeper’s kit and my father standing with a ball between his feet. He had such long hair that he looked like a tree. He was wearing black shorts and a yellow T-shirt with the number nine. Ghassan told me later that was the number of my father’s favourite player. There was another picture in which my father appeared with his head shaved and a piece of white cloth wrapped around his body, baring his right shoulder and part of his chest. In the corner of the same

  picture Walid is wearing the same type of cloth, submitting to a man who is shaving his head with a razor. In one picture I couldn’t easily make out my father. He had a long beard and was wearing a white gown and the traditional headdress any old how without the black headband. I later found out that it was taken during the occupation and was the last picture taken of my father.

  Could I say that I grew to like him, just by looking at the pictures of him? No, my feelings went beyond that. I didn’t just feel affection for him. I loved him, and longed for him and missed him, though I had never seen him. I felt a strong desire to hug him and hear his voice. I often cried to myself and realised for the first time that never in my life had I called anyone papa.

  I understood why Mendoza, under the influence of tuba, used to repeat, ‘I’m alone. I’m weak.’ I’m just like you, Mendoza, and without any tuba I admit it. I’m alone. I’m weak.

  5

  Kuwait was beautiful. That’s what I thought when Ghassan took me out to the shopping malls and the restaurants. The streets were remarkably clean. They had to be, because the cars that drove on them weren’t ordinary cars. Each building and house was different, and each had some special feature – the colours, the design and so on. And the cars parked outside were so beautiful!

  I was particularly struck by the way men kissed each other as a form of greeting. In fact it wasn’t really a kiss, but it came close to one. The man brushed his cheek against the other man’s cheek as they shook hands. I heard from Ghassan that it was the traditional form of greeting here, and not just between men. In fact the women did the same when they greeted each other.

  One man walked past us and whispered ‘As-salam aleekum’ and kept walking as Ghassan replied, ‘Wa aleekum as-salam.’ I turned to Ghassan and asked if he knew the man. He shook his head. Before I had time to ask more questions, he was saying ‘As-salam aleekum’ to one of the men at the door to the lift in the shopping mall. ‘Do you know him?’ I asked him again. He shook his head. So why did they greet each other, I wondered.

  People looked and dressed so differently from each other, sometimes the complete opposite. I pointed to one man whose appearance caught my attention and a
sked Ghassan where he was from. ‘He’s Kuwaiti,’ he said.

  ‘And that one?’

  ‘Kuwaiti.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t mean that one, I mean that one.’

  ‘They’re both Kuwaiti.’

  ‘And the one standing there?’

  ‘Kuwaiti.’

  ‘And the girl who’s wearing the . . .’

  ‘Kuwaiti too.’

  And so on, and so on.

  Some people wore clothes that followed the latest fashions. Others wore traditional clothes. There were people in shorts, in T-shirts or in jeans. There were young men with long hair visible under their headdresses. There were people in clothes that would be tight even on thin people. There were young people who had bizarre hairstyles that I really liked, while others wore hats. Some had white headdresses and others wore red ones. There were burly athletic bodies and others that were very thin. There were lots of girls, with different hairstyles, nice clothes, some short skirts and some long, and bright colours. Some of them covered their hair with headscarves of various kinds – beehive-style scarves, scarves that showed a wisp of hair on the forehead, scarves that covered all the hair and others that also covered part of the chin. Black thobes, some of them so tight that they showed details of the woman’s body, others loose. There were young women who looked like Hollywood stars, others with so much powder on their faces that they looked like geishas. Sharp noses, unnaturally full lips. There were women who covered their faces with pieces of black cloth that only showed the eyes. Black hair, blonde hair. Brown people, white people, black people.

  With so many differences, I found reason to hope. You’ll be invisible among all these people, I told myself.

  * * *

  I stayed as Ghassan’s guest for more than a month. During that time Kuwait gradually cheered up. At the end of January the new Emir took office and his picture started to spread in the newspapers, on the streets and on cars. By the last week of February Kuwait was completely changed. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I saw Kuwait dancing for joy on 25 February.

  Ghassan took me out for a ride in what he called his ‘beloved’, his white Mitsubishi Lancer, to the streets near the sea. The air was cold although it was sunny. It grew more crowded as we drove closer to the area on the coast. Cars were flying flags of all sizes and playing loud patriotic songs with the windows down. The car horns competed with each other. There was clapping and cheering and people looked happy. On national holidays Kuwaitis fire water pistols and foam sprays at each other, so it’s like a giant washing machine. That’s what I felt. People were singing and dancing soaked in water and covered in foam, as if they were washing in a communal bath. Ghassan made sure all the car doors were locked, saying that some people wouldn’t hesitate to open car doors and spray the passengers with water and foam.

  I remembered the crazy young men I used to see at Boracay and realised they were only a small sample of those who were dancing in the street on National Day.

  I looked into people’s faces, examining them closely. There must surely be a place for me in this mixture, which blended together well despite the diversity.

  My musings were interrupted by a strange noise. A woman had put her hand close to her mouth and was flapping her tongue up and down, making a noise rather like the war cries of the American-Indians.

  I was struck by how people interacted. The deep sadness on the day I arrived had changed in record time into enthusiastic celebration.

  ‘Did you – my father, Walid and you – celebrate like this?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ghassan, as if I had made some accusation.

  ‘We celebrated our love for Kuwait in here,’ he said, pointing to his heart.

  6

  ‘Are you prepared to meet your grandmother tomorrow?’ Ghassan asked me on the evening of the day he took me to the National Day celebrations.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered hesitantly. ‘She used to hate me.’

  I watched Ghassan’s face, expecting some encouragement from him, but he didn’t say anything. ‘Do you think she still feels the same way?’ I continued.

  ‘I’ve no idea, Isa, but . . .’ Ghassan began, then paused. ‘Don’t think it will be easy,’ he continued.

  The next morning, a little after eleven thirty, I was shaking and sweating. I sat next to Ghassan in his beloved car. He parked outside my grandmother’s house and looked at me. ‘Isa! What’s wrong?’ he said.

  ‘Take me back to Jabriya, please.’

  He took a paper handkerchief out of the box in front of him and passed it to me. ‘Isa, take it easy,’ he said. ‘Don’t be . . .’

  I hated myself when I couldn’t stop myself looking so weak. I cried like a child who was about to be thrown down a dark hole. Ghassan was shaken. He started patting me on the shoulder. ‘Take it easy, take it easy,’ he said.

  He opened the car door and said, ‘You stay here. I’ll go and see your grandmother alone.’ He closed the car door, then put his elbows on the window sill and put his head and shoulders through the hole. ‘I’ll talk to her about you, and then I’ll come and invite you in,’ he said. ‘Be brave,’ he added with a broad smile.

  I wiped my tears away with the handkerchief and watched him ring the doorbell. He spoke to a maid who looked Indian. She went off for a while, then came back to let him in. Ghassan disappeared into the house, but the door remained open.

  Which door would he come out through, I wondered. Would he come out of the garage door with his tail between his legs, like my father years earlier? I looked at the big house and imagined my mother working inside. How did she manage to look after such a big house all by herself?

  ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar,’ called the muezzin from a small mosque about fifty metres from Grandmother’s house, followed by other calls to prayer from far and near: ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar.’ It was the first time I had heard the call so clearly and so close up. I had a strange feeling. Something about it reassured me. The words sounded familiar even though I didn’t know the language. Something still inside me started to stir. It was the same call that my father had whispered in my right ear just after I was born. That was the first human voice I ever heard. Did the call to prayer perhaps stir a subliminal memory of the words my father whispered? It was a sound that made me curious to go into the mosque near my grandmother’s house – a curiosity I had never felt when I went past the Golden Mosque or the Green Mosque in Quiapo in Manila.

  I had a strange, vague impression of Islam. For me it was associated with certain symbols, like any religion or civilisation or idea. If the symbol worked well, it left a good impression of the thing it symbolised. If the symbol was a failure, it sent the wrong message.

  When I was young, I looked on Islam with some bewilderment, mixed with respect when I found out how highly people regarded Lapu-Lapu, the famous sultan of Mactan, seen by Filipinos as one of their most important national heroes because he resisted colonialism in the sixteenth century. There are giant statues and other memorials to him in main squares across the country, portraying him with long hair, bare-chested, with his hands resting on the hilt of a sword planted in the ground. I remembered everything about this Muslim sultan. My classmates at school skipped this lesson and jumped on to the next lessons, but I read on until I reached the description of what happened on the morning of 27 April 1521, when Lapu-Lapu came out at the head of 1,500 warriors armed with barong knives, lances, kampilan swords and kalasag shields, in the famous battle of Mactan against Portuguese invader and explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who organised the first expedition to sail around the world. Magellan had sailed to Mactan in command of a force of more than 500 troops armed with muskets, on a mission to convert the sultan of the island to Christianity after successfully converting the ruler of a nearby island. Lapu-Lapu refused to meet Magellan’s demands and sprang to the defence of the island. They managed to kill Magellan with a poisoned arrow at the end of the battle.

  Lapu-Lapu was the only
Muslim icon I knew. I saw him and his men as mythical heroes and I thought my Muslim father was a distant descendant of his lineage. Because of him I had a positive image of Islam. But later this image was severely challenged by another Muslim icon that undermined my earlier impressions. That was the Abu Sayyaf group, which financed its activities by robbery, assassinations and blackmailing companies and rich businessmen. I had heard plenty about them when I was in the Philippines but I didn’t pay them much attention because I was young and I wasn’t interested in details of their movement at the time. Then they carried out their famous kidnapping in the middle of 2001. Everyone in the Philippines followed the news of the hostages, among them three Americans – two men and the wife of one of them. The news was horrifying. Twelve Filipino hostages were killed and the body of one of the American men was found with his head cut off. The hostages were held for more than a year before the army made an attempt to rescue them and the other American man and a Filipino nurse were killed. The Muslims in Mindanao are no doubt kind and peace-loving, like poor people everywhere, but people abroad only know them through the Abu Sayyaf group.

  The heroism and life story of Sultan Lapu-Lapu, and the way ordinary people in the Philippines, regardless of religion, admired him and recognised his role in resisting invasion, were positive images that made me feel close to Islam. But the Abu Sayyaf group, by killing missionaries and other innocent people, very much alienated me from Islam.

  * * *

  The call to prayer was over and quiet returned. I was still in the car outside keeping an eye on Grandmother’s house. The curtain on one of the upstairs windows moved. I caught sight of a young woman looking down at me. She disappeared behind the curtain a few seconds later. I looked down to the front door, where Ghassan was coming out. His face left no room for guesswork.