Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

  Some people suspected that your friend Mahmoud had been a plant. You hadn’t suspected him. You knew how he tended to seek the limelight, to stand out and compete. But you didn’t suspect him. You defended him as much as you could. You offered arguments and evidence in his favour, such as the fact that Mahmoud knew about the poultry farm where you were hiding before you escaped abroad. If he had been a plant he would have given you away. Those who suspected Mahmoud told you this wasn’t proof. It could have been the opposite – to give you that impression, while he went on working for them abroad. You remembered that argument about Mahmoud at one of the coffee sessions in the NSA, when the interrogators referred to the apartment that you’d lived in briefly, in the City Overlooking the Sea, and the weapons that were in it and the maps for the operation in which they stormed the Hamiyan embassy in some Asian capital. They described the apartment in detail and its location in the maze of lanes, which floor it was on, what the door handle was made of, the number of rooms, and the colour of the curtains. You remembered the man in charge of ‘external operations’ in the Organisation, who had put you up in that apartment. You had a fleeting memory of meeting him in a local coffee shop. You remembered his white face with sharp features and blondish hair, but when he laughed, for whatever reason you don’t now recall, you could see his decaying teeth. While one of the young interrogators was talking about the apartment, you were thinking about how the external operations boss had always avoided laughing, in fact had almost refrained from smiling, probably because of his teeth. You thought to yourself that he must have had a complex about them. You have your own complex – you have a slight squint in your left eye, so you can’t look straight at the person you’re talking to. You’ve devised a studied turn of the head, so that both your eyes are directed at the person. You’ve tested the manoeuvre dozens of times in front of the mirror until you’ve mastered it. Your feelings about your cross-eyes only changed when the woman you loved said how fetching they were. Except for Mahmoud, you don’t remember anyone visiting you in the temporary apartment. Oh yes, you do. There was that girl you met in some bar in the city. Mahmoud was with you too. You don’t know how you ended up walking into that bar. You wanted a drink and you went into more than one bar in an area that was almost deserted because of the war. You had a drink here and a drink there. In that dimly lit bar, which reminded both of you of one you used to frequent in Hamiya, you found some girls smoking sullenly at the wooden counter, as dark as the bar itself. You don’t remember how many there were, four or five. There were two down-at-heel men drinking and smoking, pensively, as though in another world. When you went into the bar – you were two tall young men, one with long hair and a droopy moustache, the other with short hair and a trimmed moustache – a tremor ran through the dark-skinned girls. You ordered beer. You wanted to round off your bar crawl, the first you’d had in this city, with a cold beer. You sat at a wooden table with long benches along either side, rather like a school desk. Two women came up flirtatiously and asked to join you for a drink. You didn’t object. The one sitting next to you was older than you. In her thirties, you guessed. She could tell from your strong accent that you were a foreigner. She asked you where you were from, and you told her. That was your first mistake, or rather the second, because for security reasons your instructions were to avoid dubious contacts such as these. Out of drunkenness or desire, or both, you took her back to that apartment and slept with her. You’re almost smiling to yourself now as you remember how clever she was at pretending to be aroused and enjoying it, which was convincing at the time. You gave her some money and she left. That was your third mistake. Was it her? You thought about it, but no. She hadn’t sought you out. It was you who’d staggered into that dark bar. You’re no longer interested in who the informer was. You had nothing to do with the embassy-storming operation. For a start you weren’t close to the external operations department. It’s true that, like others, you underwent military training, but you didn’t work in the military wing. Your work in the Organisation was in the public relations and mobilisation department. When the external operations boss put you up in that apartment, it was at least a year after the embassy operation and its aftermath. The aim of the operation was apparently not to kill anyone but only to hold the ambassador hostage and exchange him for some prisoners from the Organisation. No one knows exactly who opened fire first: the ambassador’s bodyguards or one of the gunmen. Whoever had fired the first shot, the operation ended in a bloodbath. The ambassador, two of his bodyguards and three of the gunmen were killed. The support team was arrested but they did not stay long in prison because the external operations department of the Organisation, in collusion with a friendly country, abducted the ambassador of the Asian country in the capital of that country, and he was exchanged for the support team. You told them you had nothing to do with the operation, and the one who seemed to have the highest rank said they knew that, but they wanted to hear your version of it. He also said it was a procedural matter because all the sentences had been dropped. It was just a matter of closing the files! You told him that the external operations chief in the Organisation had disappeared while crossing the border of a state sympathetic towards you, and there was no trace of him. In the tone of someone who knows everything, he said they knew that and it had happened ten years ago. All you could do was ask him, with a trace of sarcasm, why he didn’t ask the secretary-general of the Organisation, who had returned to the country before you. The officer who seemed to be the most senior of the three concurred. ‘We’ve already asked him,’ he said, in the same sarcastic tone. ‘In fact we’ve asked all your comrades who’ve returned.’

  * * *

  I am Younis al-Khattat, and the man who has returned is me twenty years ago. I’d been waiting for ages for the opportunity that arose that night when we got talking, on the balcony of our house, amid bouts of coughing and sweating that made me feel sorry for him, though I suppressed my sympathy. I didn’t tell him a story as he’d expected. I spoke after he’d finished telling his own story, about the other man who had the same name as him and who practised the same profession. He wanted that story to be a metaphor for, or a counterpart to, my story about him. But he chose the wrong beginning with that story, which struck me as a little feeble, the way he invented someone who happened to share his pseudonym and of whose existence he wasn’t previously aware. Besides, knowing that the other guy existed didn’t change the course of his life. It was just a random coincidence of the kind that keeps happening to people without becoming a pattern or amounting to anything of consequence. I told him that his story was not enough to say that things were quits. I made fun of the poems in which he mourned his father and mother, and those in which he alluded to Roula. I said, ‘Which pavement were you hanging around on when your father was found dead in his studio, with a cigarette butt in the left corner of his mouth? In which bar or café were you boozing or sipping a cup of coffee while the cancer ate away at your mother in Hamiya’s public hospital?’ I also said that no words, however remorseful or apologetic, could make up for the way his mother had gazed westward, the direction she thought had swallowed him up for ever. I also told him that Roula had not betrayed him and Khalaf had not deceived him. I reminded him of Muhsin’s suicide. I told him that comrade Hanan had died, that Hala had married a businessman and Hasib had disappeared. I told him that Tom Thumb was the head of a smuggling gang and that Salman, his first poetry teacher, had become an evangelical preacher who toured the country towns and villages. I mentioned names that surprised him and others that he remembered straight away. I showed him a toughness that he wasn’t expecting. I played devil’s advocate with him. He had to hear a voice other than the voices of his brothers and sisters saying how much they had missed him, although they had coped in his absence. Their reminiscences and hearty laughs were all genuine but it’s also true that life here had moved on, detached from him, without the need for his existence, because life doesn’t wait for anyone and it doesn’t sto
p when one person gets off. This is a simple fact known to the ignorant and the learned alike. I’m amazed how it escaped him. Roula waited as long as she could. Men were courting her, men who wanted a wife or companion, but she kept turning them down. She offered many excuses and reasons, some of which were convincing and others less so. Khalaf stood by her throughout. He did not hide his relationship with his fugitive friend. He did not dissociate himself from him, although that was not easy for a security man in Hamiya.

  He has to know the truth and no one is better placed than me to tell him. If a drop of my blood still runs in his veins he’ll know I’m the only person who didn’t lie to him or humour him, because how can one lie to oneself? Of course, there are people who do, people who deceive themselves, but I think that one decisive moment face to face with one’s self is enough to show one the truth. There are others who didn’t lie to him either: Salem, for example, at least when the conscious half of his brain was able to receive the right signal and he knew who was speaking to him. Wahid brought back memories of a bunch of youthful pranks. And his brother Shihab is rude enough to tell him things he might not like. He believes Shihab. If he wasn’t so rude, Shihab would be a copy of his father.

  He looked into a mirror and asked me if he had changed much. I said, ‘Of course you’ve changed. Everyone changes, what else do you expect?’ But out of compassion I did not tell him that the people who were waiting for him at the airport did not recognise him at first. All his family were there, except his late father, his mother and his elder brother, who lives in the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. And when he came through customs pushing his trolley with his suitcase and some plastic bags he almost passed them by without them recognising him. They didn’t believe he was the same person who had once been as tall and elegant as a rattan cane. The torch of the movement. The one on whose shoulders all the world’s devils liked to play. Cheerful. Noisy. Cruel and compassionate. It’s true they had seen his picture in magazines and newspapers, but pictures are one thing and reality is something else. With their expectant eyes they saw what the hammers of time had wrought on his face, his shoulders, his frame and the movement of his hands. They heard his cough, which he tried to cover with a pocket handkerchief that he carried in his hand. His languor was evident, and his helplessness looked deeply ingrained. But members of his family told him he looked younger and healthier than he did in the pictures. It wasn’t true. What mattered to them was that he had returned, not how or in what shape. They colluded, without any overt agreement, in ignoring anything that might spoil the pleasure of his happy return, while for him it was hard enough coming to terms with the shock. Their collusion worked, for a while. He went along with it readily. The City of Red and Grey came to his mind by way of comparison between here and there, in terms of behaviour, orderliness and development, and strangely the comparison usually ended in favour of the last place on his long journey – the City of Red and Grey that he had just left, with his frame bowed and his pocket handkerchief covered in red stains.

  That was in the daytime, surrounded by listeners with the intense curiosity of provincials. At night it was a different matter. The whole night was his, the night when his cough and his insomnia never failed to start on time, along with the random disconnected images that crossed his mind. No one can stop the machine of memory from working. Nothing has been invented, as far as he knows, that can tame memory, make it work on demand. Even I, with my few exaggerated memories, cannot fend off attacks by the most unpleasant of them.

  * * *

  One afternoon his brother Shihab took them for a drive in his father’s old Land Rover, which for years they had used for hunting trips. He thought it a good omen that the vehicle, which he used to call the mechanical steed, was still in use, but he was surprised to find that the civilian airport, which used to be on the outskirts of the city, was now part of the suburbs. He looked out of the car window at the passing scenes but found no reference in his memory: the mansions, the tourist resorts, the big malls, the temporary encampments of people displaced by the blood and fire sweeping the country next door, the vast advertising hoardings for five or six mobile phone companies – written with outrageous spelling mistakes – the glass towers crowned by enormous dishes, the children and old people offering seasonal fruit and vegetables from plastic crates, the shanty towns built of corrugated iron and cardboard, teeming with children and the unemployed. He was filled with a kind of aesthetic numbness at such eyesores and at the renowned establishments that had made the fields of wheat and corn, the groves of pine and juniper trees, a distant memory. He recalled a famous local song that spoke of how the country girls walked around carrying water jars on their heads in the afternoon. He told himself that even the songs failed the test: it was hard to listen to them now that the things they described had changed. He was surprised when the car skidded on the edge of a roundabout in the centre of which stood a large statue of Hamiya’s eagle. The venerable bird looked old, scarcely able to spread the vast wings that used to cast their fearsome shadow over the country. The only familiar landmark that the car passed was this old statue. He suspected his memory was at fault. His brother Shihab smoked throughout the journey, leaving his returning brother to see and compare in silence the new reality with the images he remembered. He asked Shihab if all these buildings had existed before. Shihab told him that most of them were new and that the ring road meant that people going in this direction were spared the trouble of driving through the downtown area, which was congested with cars and pedestrians. But as soon as the Land Rover started to emerge from the built-up labyrinth around the airport, with its chaos and its shabbiness, the space opened out in front of them. The endless desert showed its yellow face and he managed to catch blurred glimpses of shepherds, wrapped as usual in their heavy cloaks.

  II

  Once you were a poet. Apparently you no longer know what poetry is or how it’s written. Now you write articles and biographies, without parting company with poetry’s uncertain, hesitant attitude towards the world. Some of what you write is personal, and some of it public, though it’s hard for you to differentiate between the two. You don’t categorise what you write. You just write, but you believe that, besides biographies, you are writing poetical articles. This is not a category that’s recognised on the literary scene, and it’s hard to persuade people that it exists, so you don’t speak about it openly. The truth is you don’t care what it’s called. In the prime of your youth you cared. You and others fought battles over form and content and the link between poetry, reality and the reader. But you no longer do that, now that you harbour doubts. Now you believe that categorising and pigeon-holing don’t achieve anything. That they’re just labels. Your problem is that whenever you write something you rush it into print, especially when you’re working on newspapers and magazines, which, for those who don’t know, are machines that never stop turning, churning out thin gruel and rich cream in equal measure. You’re hasty. Haste is a trait that’s ingrained in you. Despite all your attempts to take it easy and slow down, you can’t change. You see it as a genetic defect that you have to live with. You write in a hurry. You publish what you write without any prior plan or any clear concept or vision of where your writing is leading. But when you reread everything you have written, one piece after another, you can see a common thread, or a mysterious pointer, always pointing in the same direction, even though the pieces were written at different times and under the sway of different emotions. Only then do you get a sense of that obscure something that drives you on towards the lights that flicker in the distance. Then you regret rushing into print, not rushing into writing, and you say to yourself, ‘If only I had sat on what I wrote before publishing it.’ (Despite your long waiting in exile, patience is your deadly enemy.) Perhaps that way you could have come up with a work that had organic unity, or a harmonious sequence in which one part led to the rest, without interruptions, gaps or jumps. But no way! Only after it was too late did that kind of prudence or fa
rsightedness descend on you from the ethereal heights. But that’s all in the past and nothing can be done about it. Now the situation is different.

  * * *

  Behind a window overlooking the street, as you watch a bird tracking prey you cannot see, you’ve started to write your last book. The book of all your books. You’ve decided to take a different approach this time. Because this time is different: there’s no newspaper or magazine waiting for you to throw it a piece of your flesh (an extreme metaphor for words, which you often used without realising what it meant; you just liked the sound of it). You’ve decided to set your writing free from the dates, parenthetical clauses, digressions and proper names that usually weigh it down. For a long time you saw the latter as essential props, before you discovered that their solidity was deceptive. You’ve resolved to ignore them or replace them with description. You have a rationale in your head for this plan: you want to free yourself from them. But you’re not sure about the validity of this reason, because it’s hard to free oneself from names. It’s also hard to free oneself of chronic habits, favourite words and obsessive ideas.