‘I had never seen my father and I thought he was God, but later on I heard he was a Great Writer in the court of the Imam, that he had children, money, a good reputation, and no enemies, whether in Hizb Allah or in Hizb al-Shaitan, and that everybody liked him, whether friends or enemies, because he led a simple and ascetic life, much like that of Christ, except that he shared it with his latest wife whom he never touched except on Thursday nights, after which he went to prayer on Friday mornings without doing his ablutions, kneeling behind the Imam with great piety and devotion. After prayer, still in a kneeling position, he nodded his head to the right, expressing his loyalty and obedience to Hizb Allah, then nodded his head to the left in greeting to Hizb al-Shaitan, and prayed for God’s mercy three times before prostrating himself, and after repeating the same prayer another three times he got to his feet, light as a newborn babe, purified of all sin. He would leave the house of worship walking behind the Imam with slow steps and with bowed head, all the time murmuring verses of the Qur’an and repeating the ninety-nine holy names of God on the beads of his rosary, and preceded by the Imam he would walk down the narrow corridor leading, like the straight and narrow path of God, to the wine room on the first floor of the palace. There they would drink glass after glass to their old friendship, recalling memories of their youth when they used to visit the House of Joy together.’
Illicit Love
There was a green garden surrounding the wine room of the palace, and surrounding the garden was a high wall made of iron bars. In the garden was a wolf-dog of the best breed, imported from overseas, and at night he had such a fearsome bark that no one would come near the place except brigands, or devils, or evil spirits. During the day they disappeared in tombs or in tomblike houses; at night they came out, and the Imam would sit under the smooth red lights with a glass of wine in his hands. By his side on the sofa, separated by no more than an arm’s length, sat his lifelong friend, and filling the space between them was a cushion stuffed with ostrich feathers which hid under it the Holy Book of God written with gold letters, and a revolver of the best type fitted with an efficient silencer. Whenever the dog barked the hand of the Imam would creep by itself to feel the butt of the revolver, and the heart of the Great Writer would beat furiously under his ribs, for his smooth fingers had never known the feel of anything apart from his pen. Ever since he was a child he had been afraid of the dark, and he had not known what it meant to have enemies. His friends in Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan were numerous and he gave abundantly of what God had given to him. He nourished friendship with money and people called him the Generous Writer, but his wife said he was a miser at home.
On the night of the Feast he came home with empty hands instead of bringing her a gift, and in the morning he would forget to leave her money for the house before he left. He returned home late at night with empty pockets and a lost consciousness, his breath smelling of wine and women’s sweat. The lips of his legal wives remained tightly closed and not one of them dared to open her mouth, for if she did she risked hearing him swear an oath of divorce, pronouncing it three times as he lay on his back with his mouth half-open and his eyes half-closed, and after that she would be seen carrying her bundle as she left the house, and the next wife would arrive carrying the fear of divorce in her heart like a fear of death.
People knew all about her husband but she always remained the last to know. She would hear rumours and refuse to believe them, chase all illusions out of her life or hide them deep inside, fearing to reveal them to herself and transfer them into truths she could not deny. Her lips remained closed all the time and she never opened her mouth, and yet the oath descended upon her like fate, and along came the next wife with a fear in her heart as deep as her fear of God. She would never say a word, never allow herself to have the slightest illusion, but divorce would knock at her door for no reason, and so came the turn of the fourth wife, as allowed by Shari’a. She was young, held her head high. Her body was slender and lithe and she lay in wait for her fate like a lioness, her eyes wide open and black like a devil. She had read books, read the history of kings, and knew the cultural heritage, including The Thousand and One Nights and the sacred writings. She knew both God and the Devil, Paradise and Hell, did not fear death and was in no haste to see Paradise, for in Paradise there is no place for women who are not virgins.
He went to ask for her hand, carrying the marriage contract in his hand and wearing his virgin’s face. He showed her his picture, an enlargement set in a frame, hid his thrift behind generosity, his fear behind love, but he was like his father, bedding with another woman and forgetting his mother until it was time for him to die.
His mother had nurtured another love than that of cooking and having a spouse. She hid sheets of paper under her bed, wrote stories, and collected them, one by one, into a book. It was her first book and her last, for after she married her fingers never touched a pen. At night, after his father went to sleep she would open the bottom drawer in the desk, feel the cover and the letters of her name printed on the book with the tips of her fingers, as though she was holding a precious jewel. She would look around her, fearful lest someone should see her, to find her eyes looking into the eyes of her baby son, wide open in the night, like the eye of God watching what she was doing. So she put the book back in the drawer and closed it with a lock, then lay down again on the far side of the bed near the wall, with her husband on the other edge and the child lying on his back between them, his eyes closed, pretending to sleep, and in the morning his father would beat him because he had not learnt the lessons of the previous day. Like his mother he hid his love for writing about the things which he felt, and continued to study science as though science and art were locked in struggle, learning the words of God by heart, engraving them in his memory, gaining the love of his father and losing his art. In the dark of the night he could feel his father’s ear listening intently to the beats of his heart, trying to detect any beat, any drop of art, that might have leaked into him with his mother’s milk.
The Mistress
She had come from the House of Joy to take a last look at him, as he lay in the box smiling from ear to ear. When he saw her bend over him, he looked up, and in his eyes she saw a glimmer of love. A last desperate fantasy which will lead to nothing, she said to herself. His love for women has always been like the struggles he fought, in vain, against defeat. His legal wives were standing there when she walked in, holding herself upright, her abundant hair wound tight around her head and held up with a white kerchief adorned with black sequins which hung in a row at the edges. Her look moved away from him to the legal wives standing in line, their ample bodies clothed in mourning black, their plump hands clasped over their hearts, their feet shod in high-heeled shoes, their legs pressed together, their breath held in awe and respect for the dead. They looked alike except for a badge on their shoulders or a brooch on their breasts, for their features seemed to have been rubbed away, their heads small like birds on a tree, their haunches prominently displayed, bodies all flesh without spirit, thin lips pressed together in silence, eyes bulging like frogs in a stream or fish in the sea. And suddenly their mouths opened to ask, ‘Who are you?’
She lifted her head with the pride unknown by a legal wife and said, ‘I am his mistress Gawaher.’ Their bodies swayed on their high heels, stirring the consciousness which lay buried somewhere, for in her black eyes they saw the pain-giving gleam which spells truth, felt it go through straight to the heart.
They asked in one breath, ‘Whose mistress?’
‘All of them,’ she said, ‘starting from the Imam down to the guardian of the mosque’s minaret.’
Their eyes opened wide in fear, and they hid their fear behind their hands, folding their arms around their breasts, closing up like a mollusc closes its shell, and gasping out in one breath, ‘You are the Devil, and your punishment is death.’ After that they fled, their high heels rapping on the floors like the sound of rockets bursting overhead. Only tw
o women remained after they went: the illegitimate daughter and the legal wife. They stood with their hands clasped together, and after a moment the mistress held out her hands to them and the three women embraced, with six arms holding each other tightly above the dead body lying in the box. The smile on his face vanished, and his features seemed to evaporate, leaving a face which no longer resembled that of the Imam or the Great Writer or the Chief of Security or the Leader of the Official Opposition, or anyone in Hizb Allah or Hizb al-Shaitan. His face became faceless, or became the face of all of them merged into a single face without features, so that it was no longer possible to distinguish between one and the other except by a badge on the chest or a star on the shoulder, or something or other on the head.
In the mirrors of the universe was reflected the image of three women with upright heads, their big black eyes staring out like holes in the night and the world looking on in silence.
Gawaher
His eyes looked out at her from the box where he lay with a look full of love. Her hand caressed his head from the top to the nape of his neck, then moved round like a silk thread, tightening itself around his neck until he started to gasp for breath. The more she pulled at the thread the more he laughed, and she kept tightening the noose until his face went blue, so she loosened the grasp of her fingers and started to move her hand slowly over his chest, playing with the blue bead which he had worn since his mother had hung it around his neck, and which he had never thought of removing. Her fingers started to play with it, to catch hold of it and let it go, like the slender jaws of a forceps. ‘Your mother was afraid for you from the evil eye, and I fear for you from the evil ear,’ she said, pulling at his ear, laughing from the bottom of her heart and throwing her thick hair behind her back with a quick movement of the head.
His ear stood up, straining itself to catch the words of love, and her eyes gazed steadily into his eyes until the roots of the hair on his head became erect, and he hid the white hairs with a dye of black henna sent to him by his mother in a small sack made of calico. He dissolved the powder in water and dyed the hairs once and twice and thrice until they became as black as a moonless night, but the grey hairs on his belly and his chest revealed his age, and he kept touching the wrinkles on his face, opening his eyes wide with astonishment, for it was as though old age had crept up on him while he slept. Her eyes met his in the mirror and she looked away at once, fearful as though he had a disease which could infect her if their eyes embraced. In her eyes he could read an expression of sadness for herself, for she was still young and living and he was old and dying. He put his arms around her and wept between her breasts, saying, ‘I am defeated, Gawaher.’ She pushed him away from her with a quick movement of her hand, for deep down inside her she knew that he wanted to infect her with his impotence. With each encounter between them his failure grew more evident, yet he never ceased to come back to her like someone suffering from an addiction with which he cannot cope, like wine to an alcoholic which breeds a thirst so great that he can neither live nor die without it.
He would never admit defeat to her, for like an addict his exhilaration increased with every moment, giving him a false sense of being victorious. Whenever he was with her he would watch her body as it moved under her clothes. In her eyes was a gleam that showed like the edge of a sword and injected new life into him like a steel needle. His body quivered in her arms like a chicken being slaughtered, but her body was never moved at all. ‘You are different to other women,’ he would often say. ‘You are a woman who is unconscious of her body and conscious of her mind at every moment.’ After that he would yawn as though sleep had pounced on him all of a sudden, and peer at her with eyes full of jealousy, for he was more jealous of her mind than he was of anything else, sometimes trying to take her by force, to rape her, as though through rape he could restore the balance that was lost between them, only to reveal his impotence more and more. Once he left her he hurried to one of his legal wives to bury his head between her breasts and sob like a child. His wife, still fast asleep, would take him into her arms, and his hot breathing on her neck would give her a vague feeling that he was mortally in love with another woman whom he did not know how to possess. Thus in the midst of her sleep she would discover that a woman who belongs to nobody is adored by all men without exception, since she is the only woman capable of inflicting pain on them, and still asleep, she would say to herself: Men love only those who make them suffer.
The Mother and the Daughter
She sees herself standing in the mirror, tall and slender. Around her head is a halo the colour of night, and her eyes are as large and as round as the disc of the sun. The curves of her body burn with the colours of the rainbow lying over the green hill between the river and the sea. She opens her arms to embrace the world and moves her legs over the earth, her feet treading to the rhythm of music. The melodies of the morning, like the harmony of the night, move through her body, for she has a mind that knows no rest and a body that never ceases dancing, and the air around is the music which she loves, and the music in her breast is the air which fills her lungs. She flies through space like a spirit without body, whirling round and round in a dance, like a spirit without the roundness of a thigh or the curve of a belly, and she raises her head to the sky and captures it. But she herself is captive to no one.
In her ear she hears a knock, followed by another, followed by another, three knocks that she knows too well ever to forget or to confuse with anything else. The small face looks out from the clouds, and she knows it too well ever to mistake it for anyone else, for she can pick it out at once from among a million other faces. The small hand protrudes from its sleeve, pale white, without a drop of blood under its skin. The eye is big and black, like a hole in the night. She hides the small body close to her breast and starts running, on and on, without stopping, and behind her she can hear them treading with their iron heels, for on the bottom of every shoe is a hoof made of steel, and in the grasp of every hand is a stone or an instrument used in killing. She lies hidden in her mother’s breast, close to her mother’s heart, and her heart beats with every beat of her mother’s pulse, and her five fingers clutch her mother’s thumb, and her mother runs on and on under cover of night before the light of the rising sun breaks out, and the sun lingers to give the mother a chance, and the moon too has hidden itself away in some place, and the stars have gone to sleep somewhere else, and so in the whole wide world you cannot find the faintest light, even if you search high and low. The guardian has locked the last door in the palace, reciting the Verse of the Seat as he slams the bolt, and the Imam is fast asleep and so are all the members of Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan, and even the wind and the trees have gone to sleep.
She stands and looks around, fearing to be seen. Then, having made sure that all is clear, she wrenches her child away from her breast and starts to make a smooth bed with the palm of her hand, brushing the pebbles and stones to one side and sprinkling soft earth over the surface of the ground to make it like the bosom of a mother, and when everything is ready she lays her gently down. Her face is a pale patch looking out of the wrappings and her teeth chatter with cold, so her mother removes her black woollen shawl from her shoulders and wraps it closely round the small body. A small hand touches the finger of the mother, and the five fingers curl around it closely, taking a tight hold. The mother lets her hold on to it for a long moment, for as long as the sigh which goes through her, for she had forgotten that they were after her and that the distance between them had shortened.
She let her finger lie in the little hand until her very last breath, until she stood up, looking down at her, and they stabbed her in the back, one stab after another without stopping, so she turned her face away from the child, refusing to look at them, and they continued to stab her from the back right through her body. But her body continued to stand up, refusing to bend or to fall from its upright position, for it had already fallen before, and when something which has fallen falls it can o
nly rise up once more.
They shouted at her as loud as they could, but she continued to give them her back, for she knew that as soon as she turned round to face them they would run away. They could not bear her eyes on their faces, knowing full well that she knew them one by one, for starting from the Imam down to the guards and sentinels and lowest henchmen, at one time or another they had all come to her in the dark wearing a false face. But once in the House of Joy and in her bed, they took off their rubber faces and their whiskers and their beards and their turbans and their trousers. So she alone of all people had seen them without their clothes, without the badges on their shoulders, or the stars on their breasts, or the medals pinned to their coats, and they all looked the same, and smelt the same, and made the same movements, for it was always they who made the movements, attacking suddenly or retreating suddenly, or raising the flag of defeat suddenly and letting it fly like a cockscomb while the rockets continued to explode in the sky and the acclamations of the people continued to resound everywhere. And she would stand half-naked under the lights, wearing her dancing costume with the brass discs snapping between her fingers, and her body hot, her mind cool as the edge of a sword, and her eyes wide open and burning red, like the sun on a hot summer’s day. She stared into their faces, one by one, as they lowered their eyes to the ground, knowing that every one of them had two faces, a gentle handsome face with tears flowing from the eyes and another face dark as the devil with round bulging eyes and a nose sharp-pointed as a sword.
The Fall of the Imam Page 18