The Philosopher
There is a strange enchantment in this other world which attracts me to it. My old sweetheart Katie fled over there, and I have heard many tales and myths, like those of The Thousand and One Nights, about it. I have heard about lust in the eyes and molten gold in the earth, yet here I am in a room without heating. I change from one train to another under the ground. I work as a small employee in a small company and I wanted to marry the daughter of the director. I fell in love with her but she turned me down, and so I married a woman whom others had turned down before I met her. She is ten years older than myself and she has a flat chest, thighs thin as walking sticks, and no haunches. Her mind is hot and seething with things, but her womb is freezing. She gives birth to one book after the other, but when it comes to children she prefers test-tube babies.
I said to her, ‘To my mind a great woman is the woman who gives birth to a great man, not to a great book.’
She said, ‘The Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ, but I lost my virginity when I was a child and no longer believe in Christ.’
I asked, ‘What do you believe in then?’
‘I believe in my mind and in anyone who can relate to my mind, but not to my uterus,’ she said.
So I said to myself, I pray that God and Jesus Christ will be my compensation in life, and every morning I rush through the corridors of the underground to ride in long narrow trains like the tubes of test-tube babies, standing in row after row with the other rows, all packed like sardines with the feel of oil and salty sweat around me, or on the escalators closing my eyes and letting myself be carried up to where the cold wind buffets me about as I dash over the pavement, shielding myself from the rain with an old black umbrella. When I enter my office I shake the rain off my coat like a sick dog and comb my hair slowly in the mirror. My telephone no longer brings me the tones of a voice I am waiting to hear. All I can expect is the director saying the same thing he says every day. This report is urgent, this letter is important, where is the file, I want twenty copies of this document, call the number I gave you again, reserve me a place on the plane, write the memorandum in time for the meeting tomorrow. It never stops ringing and his voice never stops asking and my fingers move over the keys of their own accord as though they are no longer part of me, and time passes with the tick of the clock to bring nothing, no love, no friendship, no hope, not even some fuel for heating. Even despair has gone.
The walls of my heart are made of white ice. The cup of coffee in my hand is cold, and my room is painted a dark grey tinged with a pale blue so that I seem to live in shadow. I have not renewed its paint for the last twenty years. I saved up some money and decided to paint it before last Christmas, but Christmas came and went and I did nothing. They sent rockets under cover of night, and with a nuclear war no walls will be left standing, so what use is it painting it anew? The walls of my room have no pictures hanging on them, not even a picture of my father or my mother, but in my mind I have an image of my father in his military uniform, for that is how my grandmother described him to me. After the end of the First World War he carried me away over the seas, and our ship anchored near a mountain of ice. He left me there with his mother and went off to another war. He died without telling me how I was born, and my grandmother knew nothing about his life at all. If I asked her, she would say you looked a handsome baby through the glass of the test-tube, and in my sleep I used to dream of myself swimming in a test-tube, looking for my mother, when suddenly a huge whale swallowed me up in one gulp, and a moment later I would wake up bathed in sweat.
The tips of my fingers feel icy as they hold the glass. Black coffee without milk every day for breakfast, swallowed without appetite on an empty stomach. An appetite for food, an appetite for love, an appetite for books, are things I knew at one time, but now they are gone. All I read is the main heading of the first page in the morning newspaper, for I am waiting for a single item of news, a short sentence composed of three words. Nuclear War Declared.
It is five minutes to nine. I pull the covers over my head again. Every day I decide to stay in bed. Every day I say to myself, why get up? For outside my room there is nothing but the tarmac street, the rain pelting down, the tunnels under the ground, the trains like test-tubes teeming with human embryos, the escalators to which I abandon myself as they climb, the keys which my fingers touch all the time, and the voice of the director squeaking on the line. I want an urgent report, this letter is important, write that down, no the other file, a non-smoking seat in first class please and don’t forget that I cannot fly otherwise. He smokes but does not like to inhale the smoke of other people’s cigars.
One night he invited me to dinner. He said he admired my intelligence, but while we ate his eyes kept running over my body all the time. After we had finished our meal we sat on the sofa eating chocolates and drinking fine champagne cognac. Suddenly he put his arms around me, but I turned my face the other way, for his breath smelt. I expressed my appreciation for his wonderful feelings but told him quite frankly that I was very much enamoured of somebody else.
‘Man or woman?’ he enquired.
‘You have no right to question me about my private life. What do you care whom it is that I love, since it is not you?’ said I. I left his flat and walked out without even saying thank you or good night. Yet the truth of the matter was that I loved no one, that I was completely free, free of a need to love, of a need to wait for somebody, of a need to hear promises made that were not real. My body was my own, and I had no desire to possess the body of somebody else. All I needed at the time was the sum of money each month to pay the rent, and buy myself coffee and bread, and if I lost my job it meant I would no longer have even that, so the next day, when he put his arms around me again, I whispered words of endearment in his ear. He looked at me and asked if I was all right and told me that my face had changed since yesterday. I explained that in fact I was not feeling too well, that my mouth had a bitter taste like that of black coffee. ‘Have you been to a psychiatrist recently?’ he said, looking at me in a queer way, and when I answered no, he told me it was better to go since the signs I was showing were most probably those of depression.
The psychiatrist asked me about my life, and I told him everything very frankly. So he said to me, ‘The only treatment for you, my friend, is to travel. What you need is the warmth of love, the rays of the sun, and the feel of money in your pocket.’ So I prepared my bags, and when I was ready, I told my wife that I had decided to travel.
‘Where to?’ she asked me, and I pointed with the tip of my finger to a place on the map. She put on her spectacles, which were thick and green like the bottom of an empty bottle of beer, and looked at the place I had pointed to. ‘So that’s where you’re going,’ she said, ‘overseas.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I will be back very soon carrying diamonds and jewels for you.’ I kissed her tenderly on a mouth without lips and went off alone, thinking of my old love and the new life which waited for me. My heart beat to the clink of gold, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw myself living like King Shahrayar, raping a virgin each night and killing her at dawn.
From where I was, high up in the air, I could see the land shining under the sun like liquid gold, with a green hill rising in its midst between the river and the sea. The plane landed after sunset, and as I stepped out my nose inhaled a smell of things from bygone ages, an odour of sweat mingled with fat and burning kerosene. The air was filled with smoke, from which emerged the grey faces of people, words spoken in an unknown language, lack-lustre eyes staring at me, square bodies wrapped in cloaks, and children with grown-up faces and swarms of flies devouring their eyes. As I walked out of the airport men wearing long robes gathered around me, almost assaulting me, pulling at my arms, now to one side, now to the other, as they quarrelled over my bags. One of them threw me into a taxicab, and my bags were thrown in after me. The taxicab leapt forwards in the dark, surrounded on all sides by the blare of horns
and by what seemed to me like rockets bursting in the sky or artillery guns being fired in a continuous barrage. When we stopped at a crossing by the red traffic lights, children rushed up on all sides carrying yellow dusters and started to wipe the front window of the cab vigorously, then they pushed their cracked palms under my nose, but the driver drove them away with angry shouts.
I reached the hotel in a state of collapse and asked the reception if anybody had called me, but they said no. ‘I am waiting for an appointment with the Imam,’ I said.
‘Today is the Big Feast, and the Imam is in the middle of his speech, and everybody else is on holiday,’ they said.
‘What can I do until the holiday is over?’ I asked.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ they said. ‘Everything is closed.’
‘But isn’t there anything I can see these days?’
‘You can go and see the Virgin Mary if you want. She has appeared several times during the last days in the old church neighbouring the new mosque, and all the people are gathered to try to get a glimpse of her.’ And before I had time to decide for myself one of them threw me into another taxicab and I found myself seated on the edge of the back seat making the sign of the cross for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
When I arrived I could hardly believe my eyes. People seemed to have come from the most distant parts of the land, and they were there in huge numbers, men, women, and children, young and old. They were squatting on the ground or sitting on straw chairs, some wearing the peasant robe and others dressed like city dwellers. There were women with their faces covered in veils and others who walked about showing off their half-naked bodies. There were people who looked ill and hungry and pale, and others with ruddy complexions full of health and vitality. But all of them had their eyes fixed on the dome of the church, waiting for the Virgin to appear. They had read about her in the newspapers, and all those who had not seen her when she appeared the previous year had come to get a glimpse of her this time. Even the foreigners had come to witness the miracle, and they could be seen watching with the others, standing slightly apart, each one with his black dog on a leash squatting obediently on its haunches with its eyes raised reverently upwards to the sky.
A man whispered in his neighbour’s ear, ‘Do you think that faith can enter the heart of a dog?’ And his neighbour answered, ‘Why not?’ Another man commented, ‘Verily, if a dog knows what it means to be faithful to his master, why should he not be led to believe in God, especially dogs like these which are of the very best breed imported from abroad? God has given them the ability to know who is guilty of crime, and who is innocent, and it is known that they feed on whale liver and that they smile when their picture is taken.’ The second man who had spoken joined in again, saying, ‘You know their countries are not like our countries and their dogs are not like our dogs. They are the Great Powers, God protect us from their evil, and they send death to us in tins of food, and rockets to raze our cities to the ground, and planes which travel to the moon.’
The first man to speak was intently following what was being said, and opening his eyes in astonishment, he exclaimed, ‘To the moon!’ He looked up at the moon and there it was, hanging in the sky without columns or anything else to hold it up. He felt reassured. Yes, God was much greater than the Great Powers. He reigns high above all men and all things in this world. ‘You say they have men who have gone to the moon?’ ‘Yes, I swear by God that this is indeed true. They have even sent a woman too!’ The first man looked even more astounded than he had before and broke in again, repeating, ‘A woman?’ The man who had been talking nodded his head with the air of someone who knows all about it and said, ‘I swear by God that it is true, and that they have truly sent a woman.’ But the first man remained sceptical. ‘A woman,’ he said scornfully. ‘Tell us what she looked like. Did she have two breasts like our women here, like your wife and my wife? And did she travel alone without her man, without a male companion?’ And the second man said that she went alone, completely alone, without any male companion and she didn’t even wear a veil since there are no men on the moon. ‘Yes, there are definitely no men on the moon, and even if there are men they are different to men on the earth and are not attracted to the charms of women.’ The astonishment of the first man now knew no bounds. He asked, ‘But if they are not attracted by the charms of women, what is it that attracts them then?’ ‘God only knows,’ said the other man. ‘God alone knows what it is that can attract them.’
And now they were in the middle of the night and the Virgin had not made her appearance yet. Why had she not appeared? they wondered. Had she changed her mind and decided to show herself in some other land? In the past she had always chosen to appear in this land, and if she did not choose their land what other land could she possibly choose? Maybe it was because they did not believe that Christ was her son that she had decided to move somewhere else. And yet she had made an appearance yesterday at the church, so all this did not make any sense. Besides, it was known that she made no difference between those who believed in Muhammad and those who believed in Christ, that she was opposed to sectarian strife. In the newspapers they had described how she came down from the sky, and had even published pictures of her dropping down onto the dome of the church from on high. ‘Don’t you read the newspapers?’ said the first man, with a note of impatience. ‘No, I don’t know how to read,’ said the second man, pulling at his sleeve. ‘But isn’t the Virgin Mary a spirit without body or flesh?’ ‘She is the purest and most chaste in this world and the next,’ said the first man solemnly. ‘But do newspapers publish the pictures of spirits without flesh?’ asked the second man, dropping his voice to a whisper which could hardly be heard. The first man threw him a keen glance and said, ‘Why not, brother? They are the newspapers of the Imam and nothing is impossible for them.’
A child suffering from paralysis who had been brought by her mother and was sitting there looking up at the sky suddenly cried out and stood up raising her hands to heaven, and immediately all the people gathered around rose to their feet glorifying the name of Almighty God and the Virgin Mary. The two men who had been talking, squatting on the ground, stood up and started to cry out with the others. After that there was a silence. The first man whispered in the ear of the second man, ‘Is it the Virgin Mary?’ The second man shouted out, ‘Of course, don’t you see her up there?’ So he looked upwards to the dome of the church in the same direction as the others were looking and started to tremble all over because he could see nothing. For a moment he thought he was blind, but then he made a great effort to chase away all doubts, and staring into the dark night, he started to shout with the others, ‘There she is, there she is!’ as he pointed with his outstretched hand to the sky.
The Imam nodded his head in great satisfaction and said, ‘This is an excellent project and will change the expanses of desert sand into a real Garden of Eden.’ He gave me the title of expert, presented me with a private beach that looked out at the sea, and after that all I had to do was to sign my name on the contract. But before I signed, they asked me, ‘What is your name?’ And I said, ‘Joseph.’ They said that the origin of Joseph was Youssef and that I would have to change my name. So I said, ‘No harm in that, God and the Lord Jesus Christ will recompense me for sacrificing my name.’ But then they asked me whether I believed in Jesus Christ and not in the Prophet Muhammad, to which I replied that what mattered most were the interests of the project and that I was prepared to give up Jesus Christ if this was necessary.
After that they enquired about my mother and wanted to know her name, so I had to tell them that I was a test-tube baby and did not know my mother’s name. After a moment’s silence they asked me what test-tubes were, and I explained that test-tubes were a new kind of womb which produced babies completely innocent of any kind of sin since they did not require sex, or marriage, or intercourse between a man and a woman to be born. All that was required was artificial insemination of the egg.
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bsp; This caused a good deal of consternation, and they cried out in a loud voice, ‘God protect us from the Devil and his machinations, for this is verily the worst kind of adultery and fornication and can only lead to children.’
‘But’, said I, ‘what wrong did I commit that you should condemn me like this? I was an embryo in a test-tube womb and knew nothing about adultery or sin or fornication.’
‘The only salvation for you’, they said, ‘is to purify yourself from sin and declare your faith in the one and only Allah and in His Prophet Muhammad.’
‘But how do I purify myself from sin?’ I asked.
‘It is very simple,’ they said, ‘all you have to do is to cut off the foreskin that covers your male organ.’
But at that I broke down and, almost on the verge of tears, cried out, ‘I can bear anything except to have a part of my body taken away from me.’ But they insisted that this was the only way I could be purified of my sins, enjoy God’s blessings, and ensure the success of the project. So at last I gave in, saying to myself: I can undergo purification and lose my foreskin, for all this means nothing if the gold starts to roll in.
The barber came, carrying his small bag with him. He purified me by cutting off my foreskin with a razor, and the only anaesthetic used in the operation was a bottle of gin which I swallowed down quickly before he had time to begin. When it was over I found that scores of children had gathered round for the same thing and that I was the only grown-up to be circumcised among them. So I lowered my face to the ground in shame and arranged to have my conversion to the faith of Allah published in all the newspapers the next day, so that from then on I was known as the Expert Believer and my picture appeared regularly on the front page set in a frame with some declaration or other of mine, as though what I said was considered as setting the line in matters related to the faith. I had answers to every question and solutions to every problem, and as time passed I discovered that the whole matter was very simple since all we needed in the final analysis was a return to religion and an unlimited belief in God and His Prophet Muhammad. They would ask me, ‘And now, Expert Believer, what do you think of the dangers of nuclear radiation, and what can we do to protect ourselves from them?’
The Fall of the Imam Page 11