Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

  At the end of the programme the presenter asked the woman, ‘What are you going to do with the diary?’

  The woman paused for a while, and then said, ‘I don’t know. I might read it, or I might throw it straight in the bin.’ She seemed to regret giving a hasty answer that might suggest resentment unworthy of her pride. Of course it wasn’t possible to see her face, but that moment of silence on the radio weighed heavily. The woman, her old wound exposed to an inquisitive audience, quickly laughed – a jerky laugh – then added with a tongue-in-cheek warning, ‘As long as you don’t bring it back to me again!’

  The story had the effect of magic.

  III

  You don’t believe in signals the way your father did. You waited nonetheless. You wouldn’t just wait, you would cross your arms and wait, or lay your right hand casually on the table in a café where you were the only customer. That wasn’t exactly how you waited. You have lived and worked in several countries and moved around. In the meantime the blood in your veins has run fast and slow. You have fingered the secret cross on your stomach thousands of times. You have gasped and sighed endlessly. You have tasted a hundred flavours of coffee. You have smoked countless cigarettes and drunk enough to wreck a camel’s liver. Faces that you don’t remember have passed you by, and others have stamped their cheerfulness or their melancholy on your memory for ever. You have slept in many beds, some for a single night. You have smelled the scents of women – some more than once, others never to be smelled again. Suns have set and suns have risen. You have looked up at skies with big stars that lit up your sleepless nights, sometimes at skies where no stars shone and no meteorites fell. You have walked with many people (though fewer and fewer) along roads with landmarks that grew indistinct or disappeared entirely when you reached them. The idea of going back dogged you at every step, like your shadow. It didn’t happen when you wanted, but much later. The shadow faded and kept its distance, but it never completely abandoned you.

  Some beginnings are acute angles, and others obtuse.

  A decisive beginning puts footsteps on roads that may be long or may be short,

  And this probably happens early.

  There are abortive beginnings, appointments awaited,

  Circuitous routes, twisting and turning,

  This is a foregone conclusion.

  From time to time you would go to the flea market in the City of Red and Grey. In that city, which had taken in many such as you, you spent a part of your sojourn, your exile, your wanderings, call it what you will, waiting for the signal to return. You used to visit flea markets in your own country. You continued to do so anywhere your footsteps led you. In the City of Red and Grey these markets are usually held on Saturdays and Sundays. People there sell some of their possessions, because they’re bored with them or they need the money, or they might deal in antiques, local and foreign. Such markets are common in today’s world, which is afflicted with a modern scourge, unknown to people in the past, called consumerism. You don’t always go to these markets with the intention to buy, but you might need things that aren’t available in ordinary markets, so you resort to these markets that are set up haphazardly in public spaces, empty playgrounds, in schoolyards or outside churches. The main reason why you go to these markets is curiosity, the secret desire to find out what people possess and what they are getting rid of, as if you were looking inside houses that it’s not easy for foreigners like you to enter. The people of the City of Red and Grey have no scruples about selling things they no longer need, even their underwear. How often have you seen pretty girls at wooden stalls offering their tiny coloured panties, some of them mere thongs, or bras of various cup sizes? How often have you seen letters written during one of the world wars, tied together with silk thread, or black-and-white photographs of men and women with movie-star haircuts and in fashions from the 1940s and 1950s, offered for sale by old women? That’s your explanation of why you go to those markets. But some might say it’s blatant nostalgia for similar markets, with goods less varied or daring, that you knew in your own country.

  In such markets in Hamiya the brand names – some famous and some unknown – would whisk you away to distant lands without you needing to move an inch. The people call them bala markets. You don’t know exactly what the name means. You guess it comes from the Arabic word bila, meaning old and shabby, but some say it’s a corruption of a foreign word that you don’t remember now. You’ve lived in several countries: there are bala markets in almost every country, but they can’t be compared with those in the City of Red and Grey. In the bala markets in your country few people sell their own things. They are mostly clothes and shoes that come from abroad. The goods might be charity donations sent from rich countries to poor countries in the Global South, where corrupt hands, instead of distributing them to the needy, have turned them into a profitable business. In the City of Red and Grey it’s ordinary people, not traders, who sell their clothes when they’ve been overtaken by fast-changing fashion. But they also sell various other things: crockery, music cassettes, electrical appliances, spare parts for machines that are no longer used, old stamps, personal letters, books that have been read only once, watches, compasses that don’t point in the right direction, and medals from ruinous wars.

  You don’t usually wear a watch. You feel they’re like shackles, tying you by the hand and creating a coercive bond with time. Time is not a watch. An hour is a unit of time only in car parks, on punch-card clocks for workers and in the beds of prostitutes. Time has other criteria, some of which you see reflected when you look in the mirror, while others appear in the length and pace of your steps.

  You have been given watches on particular occasions but you would take them off and put them in front of you on tables in public places and forget them, perhaps deliberately, and when you went back to look for them, just out of a sense of duty, you didn’t find them. Because people, even those who don’t steal, love to find things. There’s a thrill that’s hard to explain about finding something that someone else has lost. When someone found a watch you’d left, perhaps deliberately, on a table in a café, hotel lobby or restaurant, they could have handed it in to the person in charge, but they didn’t. You’ve never found any of the watches you’ve lost in the course of your life – to be fair, they’ve been few. You never doubted the honesty of those who found the watches. You would interpret the fact that you couldn’t find them as a kind of inevitable fulfilment of your secret desire to lose them, although you are not fatalistic. Of course, that’s having it both ways, but it’s not the only case of that. You didn’t usually regret any of the watches you lost. You don’t remember what make they were or what they looked like. You would exhibit a certain insincere distress when the person who gave you the watch saw that it wasn’t on your wrist. But deep inside, you felt relieved and liberated. It was another shackle broken. You were rid of that annoying tick. That was how you felt in general, but you were sorry, even remorseful, about losing one particular watch. It was an old wind-up watch that your childhood friend took off his wrist just before your hasty flight from your country. As he presented it to you, he said, ‘I know you hate watches as much as I hate books, but the only memento I can offer you is this watch of mine. Please accept it.’ It was a moving and sentimental moment. You felt, as he felt, that you would be away a long time and that you might never meet again. In your long exile you lived in several countries. You sat in innumerable cafés. You adopted a name that would be an additional cause of endless sleepless nights, and you never took that watch off your wrist – except to have a bath, because it wasn’t waterproof. But you lost it even so. It happened when you were attending a literary conference in a country not far from your own, before you went back. You had put the old wind-up watch on a table while a number of writers and inquisitive people were hovering around. It was the first time you had done this with that watch. You went to the bathroom and came back to the table. The audience was about to disperse and you left the hotel in
a hurry to be in time for an appointment with a colleague in a café near by. You felt there was something missing, something you’d forgotten but couldn’t pin down. A few minutes later you remembered you had left your watch on the table. You stood up like an automaton and apologised to your colleague, saying you had left your passport on a table in the hotel. Only your passport was important enough to justify abandoning your colleague so hastily and in such confusion. Need one say it wouldn’t have been a passport issued by Hamiya? Naturally, of course: Hamiya didn’t issue identity papers to citizens who were in opposition or on the run. It would have been a passport from a government that was sympathetic towards the Organisation. Strange procedures such as that were common in those days. You didn’t find the watch on the table. The staff had cleared away the ashtrays full of cigarette butts and the coffee cups that had accumulated.

  You asked the receptionist if anyone had handed in a watch that had been lying on that table (which you pointed at), and he said he knew nothing about it. You asked the staff who were milling around in the lobby, some busily and some idly, and they swore on their honour (not an oath one can always rely on in these parts) that they hadn’t found anything. After that incident you were given other watches that you didn’t much care for.

  You went to the flea market. That was before the plague had started to spread in a way that was hard to control. You had no particular purpose. Perhaps it was just habit, or what you would call, with a trace of your old ingrained lyricism, tempting stubborn fate.

  You made your usual tour of the stalls that displayed clothes, jewellery, old records and crockery. You stopped at a stall selling antiques. The goods on display were not necessarily the property of the stallholder, who apparently specialised in watches and clocks and went to hunt down his spoils in towns far and near. That was his trade, and also his passion. That’s what the man said, and it gave you the impression that there existed something like a ‘clock cult’ that brought together people of different backgrounds, something almost magical or religious. The man was an expert in watches and clocks. What he said amazed you, especially when he talked about the inner workings – the cogs, springs, hands, cases, faces, gearing, and the tiny batteries that make that faint ticking in a watch strapped unobtrusively to one’s wrist or a clock hanging on the wall. A hive of activity, all coordinated, toiling away with stubborn mechanical persistence.

  The time that you need passes in a blink of an eye, whereas you have more than you need of time that doesn’t matter to you.

  The slow time of waiting, and the fleeting time of happiness.

  A time of stone, chalk and coughing, a time of air and drizzle.

  Hundreds of microscopic metal parts intermeshing. Turning. Dovetailing. Overlapping. Working away tirelessly and thanklessly, under the enamel face. The man could have gone on talking for ever if you hadn’t interrupted him by suddenly turning your attention to something else. Among the finds that he had placed in a glass cabinet, locked to protect them from the dirt or from theft, you caught sight of a circular watch with a large white face and a faded gold case. Your heart pounded. You asked the man to show you the watch. He halted his rhapsody on the inner workings of watches, of time and ticking, opened the glass cabinet like someone approaching an altar or going into Ali Baba’s cave, and handed the watch to you. You began to inspect it: the large dial, the big Roman numerals engraved by hand, the long golden hands, the antiquated brown leather strap, the back stamped with the name of the manufacturer and where it was made. The hands had stopped at five to five. It had been a long while since you lost your old wind-up watch, but when you turned this watch over in your hands, it took you back to that hot summer evening when you left it on a table in that hotel lobby, surrounded by people none of whose faces you remember any longer. You told the man you wanted to buy the watch. It was expensive but you didn’t bargain as you usually do in such markets, and when he saw you examining the time that the watch showed he warned you that it didn’t work. He told you the company that made it no longer existed and that spare parts were probably not readily available, but he knew an old watchmaker who could repair it. The old watch-hunter winked at you and said, ‘There you are. It’s not every day you come across such a special watch!’

  You put the watch on your left wrist as if it were a powerful talisman. When you went back home, your wife noticed it on your wrist. She knew you had once lost a watch and regretted it. You tried to hide your excitement. You didn’t want to speak. You just told her that all old watches are alike and closed the subject. You knew she was starting to probe into your past, maybe because you spoke about it more and more as though it were a lost paradise. At that moment you wanted to be alone with the watch. You went to the bathroom. You closed the door. Inside you there was a mumbling that no one but you could hear. You wound up the watch but it didn’t work. On your wrist it was more like a beautiful piece of jewellery than an instrument for telling the time, and you weren’t interested in following the hands of time as they crept with frightening regularity across the world and across the bodies of humankind. You remembered that when you had lost your watch that hot summer evening the time was about five o’clock.

  That night you dreamt three or four consecutive and interwoven dreams, not all of which you now remember. You remember that you saw a thin young man with a droopy moustache standing in front of another young man, rather stouter, who was undoing his watch strap and offering the watch to the one with the long hair. He told him something you couldn’t quite understand, but judging by the expressions on their faces, as they stood under a cloudy sky, it sounded sentimental and moving. Then you saw a wreck of a man, with some of the features of the young man with long hair, wrapping his arms around the trunk of a cinchona tree, looking startled by something.

  In those dreams, which were tangled together like a ball of wool, you heard a regular ticking, and you woke up.

  IV

  The museums in the City of Red and Grey contain many artefacts stolen from your country and its neighbours. Some of them are among the museums’ finest and most renowned acquisitions – the ‘sacred goat’ that was once a god, the vast obelisk that visitors see at the entrance to the great museum, the winged marble lions, the restored statue of the storm and rain god, the ‘spring palace’ that was removed in its entirety, and the stela on which the secrets of the first writing are engraved. But, apart from these objects, there are few things in the city that are connected with the world you come from. For a long time no trace of your old country has blown your way. You haven’t met anyone from your immediate family or any other relatives. As far as you know, no relative or childhood companion has come to the countries where you have lived or passed through. Your family doesn’t travel anyway, and the people in Hamiya in general don’t have a tradition of emigrating or travelling. The City of Red and Grey has no significant community of people from your country. There are people you sporadically come across at public gatherings, but you have started to avoid them, out of caution or irritation with their foolish rustic nostalgia. It never occurred to you to live in this city, where many years ago your region was dismembered like a cake at a birthday party. That never registered on the radar screen of your imagination. You came to the city by force of circumstance after your ship ran aground there. But sometimes, in the gloomy tunnels to the underground trains, you see large advertisements showing the desert, camels, bedouin encampments and oases with palm trees, and underneath, in bold type, this phrase that never changes: ‘The Land of No Rain’. You guessed that these tourism posters refer to your country, but they don’t mention the name. Although you doubt that camels and bedouin encampments exist in the way the adverts show, the basis for your guess that the posters refer to your country is the wall of volcanic rock that appears in shots of the oases. But there are similar volcanic rocks in neighbouring countries too.

  * * *

  Hamiya has an embassy in the City of Red and Grey, but it doesn’t do anything worth mentioning. It mi
ght as well not exist. Once, you remember, the embassy came out of its eternal slumber for the occasion of the historic visit of the Commander. It was because of his historic visit that you found out the embassy existed. You also found out that for many years it had done nothing but prepare for the visit, which was wrapped in secrecy until it was announced on his arrival at the airport. The Commander, by the way, was called ‘the Grandson’ for short, because his predecessors in the military dynasty were the Commander the Founder and then the Commander the Son, and the title ‘the Grandson’ never referred to anyone else in your country. He left his headquarters in Hamiya mainly for tours of inspection in the countryside or on the borders, and he rarely made trips abroad. The person who did that, when necessary, was his prime minister. It is said that the Grandson stuck to his office because he was frightened there might be a military coup against him, and also because he was a reclusive man uncomfortable mixing with others. But the prevalent view as to why he didn’t travel abroad was that he was too engrossed in working for security and stability. This entrenched idea about the Grandson and his devotion to your security annoyed you, especially when you became interested in public affairs. Once, in the presence of your father, you criticised the feeble terms ‘security’ and ‘stability’ – which the official press carried straight from the mouth of the Grandson – as being ‘imported ideas’, and even your father replied that the man dedicated his life to work and was not known to have any inclination towards luxury or leisure. ‘What’s not to like about that?’ he asked.