by Amjad Nasser
You are your parents’ second child. Your brother Sanad is older than you. You were born at the height of the time of the big shiny black cannons. In the days of your childhood a space charged with fear and dread lay between ‘the town’ and Hamiya. You remember your childhood outside the walls. Your family lived in a poor neighbourhood at the end of the downtown area. Your father had an office there until he moved to work officially in the centre of Hamiya and took you there with him. Only the children of those who lived behind the wall enjoyed the distinction of crossing that protected space, and not the other way round. You remember your bloody battles with the other children. Your attempts to approach the wall, which were rapidly repelled by the guards. The furthest you could reach was the carpentry shop owned by the hunchback. Right next to that ran the covered watercourse that separated Hamiya from everything else. But this almost total separation gradually began to change when the economic elite and the political forces intensified their demands for more openness and for equal representation in the new political union. Despite the new relationship between Hamiya and the surrounding communities, the Grandson constantly refused to remove the wall of volcanic rock that separated Hamiya from its environs or to open up the gates where guards barred the way to any casual intruders. Only in his latter years, under duress, did he agree to relax the restrictions.
You didn’t know what your future would hold. The traditions that prevailed in previous generations generally required that sons inherit the professions of their fathers. But calligraphy, the profession of your father and grandfather, did not leave a significant impression on you. It was your brother Sanad who was destined to inherit the family tradition, but in his own way and in a manner compatible with the needs of the time. He was born at a time when pure calligraphy was on the wane in public life, and there were new, previously unknown demands. Graphic design, for example. Your elder brother excelled at that and took advantage of the family heritage, although your father did not see him as a calligrapher, but merely as a designer. Your handwriting, on the other hand, was hasty and of poor quality – in ordinary writing, not in calligraphy, which requires patience, self-control, a steady hand, concentration, and an interest that you never had in inks and brushes with strange names. Besides, you saw your elders’ infatuation with calligraphy and illuminated texts as a ridiculous attempt to restore the glory of the past and to bring to life an art that lay dormant in ancient manuscripts.
So fate prepared for you another future, another profession.
Another profession?
You don’t know whether writing metrical verse in a modern style can be called a profession, but that’s what you ended up doing. In spite of your passion for poetry, you didn’t have a single book published, because what you wrote, some of which was published in the local newspapers, was not enough to make up a whole book in your own name. You would make do with this limited number of poems, not because the vogue for metrical poetry was in decline but because an unexpected event brought you by chance to a crossroads.
You didn’t take much interest in your father’s calligraphy pens – thick ones, thin ones, ones that looked like deadly arrows or like whittled reeds – nor in his Persian and Arab inks, his cloths and silks, or the smells of his brewed tea. His work, to which he was as dedicated as a pious dervish, irritated and bored you. Sometimes the past is no less mysterious than the future. Don’t be at all surprised if someone gives you another version of how Hamiya was, with events, people and details you must have lived through but were not destined to know. What’s new about it, or this is what you think, is that at the time you could not imagine a future for Hamiya other than the one suggested by the signs of power and permanence that were evident then, just as you never imagined you would have interests that would take you far away from your family.
* * *
Some twenty years after you left for a city overlooking a tame sea (and later to cities overlooking wild seas), you have finally come back to the place where you took your first steps. There were previously many obstacles that stopped you returning, including a life sentence passed against you in absentia. Although you’re not now as interested in politics as you once were, and although you’re engrossed in the past, in dreams and in seeking formal perfection in your writing, you know how deceptive memory is and how coarse the real world.
Nostalgia amplifies things. The memory preserves tastes and smells and images that are of its own making, or that are not as they were in reality.
Some people will jump to the conclusion that when, twenty years later, you went back to the places where you took your first steps, you did not find what you left behind. That would be a hasty and erroneous assumption. You found the covered watercourse as it was, except that it had dried out. You found the wall in exactly the same place, and the new communities surrounding it on the same sides were still there, greatly expanded. No spade had turned the soil on the eastern side and no concrete had been poured in that vast and fickle sandy waste. You even found Khalaf, the sentry at one of the pedestrian crossings into Hamiya, inside the wooden hut where his father used to stand guard before him.
Khalaf was your schoolmate in middle school, before he left school to work as his father’s assistant. When he left school early, he said, ‘You know I don’t like studying. I can’t bear books. I’m not like you, they make me depressed and more lonely. Since I’m going to inherit my father’s position in the guardhouse sooner or later, why don’t I do it now?’ So you started seeing Khalaf helping his father check the identity cards of people going in and examining whatever they were carrying into or out of Hamiya. Books were among the things Khalaf’s father scrutinised most carefully. There were types of books that were completely forbidden. Books printed in troubled neighbouring countries, which might export their troubles to you. Books that would poison young people’s minds about Hamiya. Books that described the country in a way that was deemed unrealistic or portrayed it in a way they didn’t like, such as describing it as a recent creation detached from its surroundings, or as an entity set up by a general of obscure warrior stock in order to act as the base for some inevitable foreign invasion of the region. As well as other books that spoke of revolution, of class and of man’s exploitation of his fellow man.
What families feared most was that one of these books might fall into the hands of their children. Your father was among those who saw these books as a bad omen. He was in fact a reader, but his books were different, books with fine bindings and titles that were hard to read. Some of them were on calligraphy, some on Sufism – which you considered to be a kind of intellectual opium – and some were on classical poetry that was hard to understand, on poems in the rajaz metre, and on folk medicine; in other words, books that those of you in whom the satanic seeds of dissent had sprouted would – without hesitation – call trash. And since life holds in store for people a fate that they cannot know in advance, and sometimes brings them exactly what they fear most, you fell, unfortunately for your father, under the thrall of the most dangerous books.
* * *
Khalaf, your closest friend although he hated books, came out of a hut painted in the three colours of the national flag, now faded, with your solemn eagle spreading its wings in the centre. He didn’t seem to recognise you. He stood in front of you, less erect than you had expected. He pulled into shape his creased blue jacket, from the belt of which hung a revolver in a somewhat shabby brown leather holster. ‘Where are you going, brother?’ he asked grumpily. Surprised that he didn’t recognise you or even suspect that he might have seen your face before, you said, ‘Don’t you recognise me, Khalaf?’
‘Sorry, but why should I recognise you?’
‘Because I’m an old friend that you haven’t seen for ages.’
He seemed to be searching his memory, which had grown sluggish with the years and with the intense heat. Then he resumed the attitude of a guard who shouldn’t be too familiar with people he didn’t know, and said, ‘Your face doesn’t remin
d me of any old friend of mine, though there is a distant resemblance between you and another friend. So who might you be, old friend?’
He spoke the last phrase with a trace of sarcasm.
‘I’m Younis,’ you said.
The name Younis isn’t unusual in your country, so you had to add, ‘Younis al-Khattat.’
‘It’s true I don’t see Younis al-Khattat much, but you couldn’t possibly be him.’
‘Then how did I know your name?’ you asked him.
‘That’s not hard,’ he said. ‘I’ve been guarding this entrance for about twenty years. Thousands of people know me, by face and by name.’ Before he had time to send you off and go back to the shade of his ramshackle wooden hut, you said, ‘Don’t you remember when we – you and Salem and me – stole the papers for the secondary school exams and the Hamiya disciplinary committee punished us by making us spend three months non-stop painting the cannons with the secret paint stored in the depots of the Construction and Maintenance Department?’
‘That doesn’t prove you’re Younis al-Khattat,’ he said. ‘There’s a writer called Ayham Jaber, or Adham Jaber, who claimed in an article in a local newspaper that he was the one who did that. The newspapers aren’t very careful these days about verifying what they publish, not since they laid off the censors who used to check articles and news reports for accuracy before publication. So that’s no proof either, because the story was published, in a distorted form, and lots of people read it.’
‘What about the watch?’
‘Which watch?’
‘The watch you had to wind up.’
You lifted your left arm and showed him the watch, which was ticking with the regular beat of a young heart. He looked at you for a while, then said, ‘It’s true I gave my watch to Younis al-Khattat, and the man called Ayham, or Adham, wrote a story about it in the same paper. But then in the old days all the watches were manual.’
‘If the fact that I knew your name, and the fact that I knew about the exam papers incident and about the watch, don’t amount to conclusive proof of my identity, then let me remind you of something else. You remember that Younis al-Khattat was severely punished when the Hamiya secret police found him in possession of a book called The State and Revolution, and he was branded with an iron cross on his stomach. That was out of respect for his father because, as you know, the custom was to brand people who committed such acts on the back of their right hand, so that everyone would know what kind of thing they had done.’
With an obstinacy that almost exhausted your patience, he said, ‘But the man called Ayham, or Adham, published that in the same newspaper.’
Without further ado, you found yourself lifting up your sweaty linen shirt and showing him the scar of the cross branded on your rounded belly. Small, sparse hairs, some of them greying, had sprouted around it.
‘Impossible,’ he said.
‘Sometimes reality is like that,’ you said.
Khalaf’s hair was greyer than you expected and his back, after forty years, was stooped more than usual for someone from Hamiya, where people often remain upright well into their sixties. The man now faced two possibilities: either he was dreaming in broad daylight in the heat of summer, or he had to concede that Younis al-Khattat, whom he had not seen much in recent years, was indeed this strange person who did somewhat resemble his old friend.
‘How could you be Younis al-Khattat?’ he said in confusion. ‘You have balding grey hair and a thin moustache. You’re frail, older and more careworn, judging by your face, while Younis al-Khattat, after that incident with the branding and after reading too many poisonous books, contracted a mysterious disease that froze his appearance as he was when he was twenty, with the same interests and powerful emotions. The doctors diagnosed it as a rare ailment they’d never seen before among the inhabitants of Hamiya. Medical delegations visited him to investigate the nature of this disease, which preserved his slender figure, his droopy moustache and his thick black hair.’
‘I’m also called Adham,’ you told your old friend, who used to ignore the books he found in your possession as you went into Hamiya, in spite of the gravity of the offence.
Khalaf no longer understood exactly what was happening. He waved you aside and said, ‘Go away, brother, I don’t have time to waste with you. I want to go back to my nap, which I hold sacred, and I’ll miss it if you carry on with your riddles.’
But you didn’t leave. You coughed more than once. You wiped your lips with the pocket handkerchief you were carrying in your hand and then hid it. Then you tried to explain to him, using all the memories you had to hand and all the evidence you could muster from your memory, that Younis and Adham were two names for the same person, or two names for two people who were once the same person but who then split in two after the book incident and other more serious incidents, because Younis stayed here while Adham went to the city overlooking a tame sea, from where his fates led him to countries overlooking wilder seas. You also told him that the person who used to write modern metrical poetry had lately became a writer of articles and biographies and had had books published in cities Younis never reached. You didn’t expect Khalaf to know Adham, the writer of articles and biographies, except perhaps through extracts of his writings published in a local newspaper – writings he called allegations or fabrications about Hamiya and its characters. As for books, you knew his attitude towards them and you didn’t expect him to have read any of them.
Khalaf began to reel from the existential shock.
He told you he was longer a guard working for the Hamiya government, that the Grandson had died and there was a new commander from the Grandson’s family; not a direct descendant because, although the Grandson had been briefly married to a relative of his, under pressure from his father, they didn’t have any children. (Of course you knew that and more. You knew the rumours about the real purpose of his annual tours of inspection in the countryside and to the troops on the front, which lasted the whole of the spring, and of course you had also heard of the resentment the Commander the father felt in his latter years because of his son’s divorce and failure to produce an heir to preserve the chain of succession in his immediate family.) He said that one of the Grandson’s relatives had been brought back from a military academy abroad before he had finished his studies, to take the Grandson’s place; that the Hamiya he had known no longer existed, or, to be more precise, the contract for a project to develop it had been awarded to a large company that had started the transformation; that he was now an employee on a short-term contract with a new company that was going to lay him off after rebuilding and renovating Hamiya’s infrastructure; that the company was planning to set up modern facilities and malls stocked with all kinds of goods, and was working on turning the houses of the officers, soldiers and civilian employees who had been living in Hamiya for successive generations into contemporary-looking flats; and so on and so on . . .
More distraught than he had appeared earlier, Khalaf told you that the authorities no longer banned the books that had given the families sleepless nights and that had led to the development of very thorough monitoring mechanisms in the departments responsible for national security and traditional values; and that those in charge now had a list of banned items that included books and other publications that dealt with such apparently contradictory topics as weaponry and computer programs. Now civil servants fluent in several languages kept themselves busy registering the titles and classifying them into categories, the most dangerous of which were the booklets on thick belts that explode automatically as soon as the temperature of the bodies they pass matches the setting in the electronic chip connected to the explosive charge in the lining of the belt. Now that he was reluctantly convinced that two people with different names and in separate places might be, for some reason that escaped him, the one person Younis al-Khattat, you told Khalaf that books lose their magic when faith in them wanes. They become just pale ink on paper. A book can be poison, or a flower
, or a heart that throbs when it stumbles upon someone who believes in it. You also told him he had done well not to fall under the spell of words, which boast, sometimes deceptively, that they are the epitome of life or even life itself, while life, according to a writer who does not care to have his name mentioned, is somewhere else.
After listening at first in confusion and anxiety, Khalaf gradually began to take a genuine interest in what you were saying, reminding you of the days when you used to tell him stories or the plot of a novel that had captivated you. There probably isn’t anyone who isn’t fascinated by stories. They may not read books that tell stories, but for sure no one objects to listening to a story, especially if it comes to them when they’re lonely or bored. So Khalaf thought it well worth listening to the story of the man who, to his misfortune, turned into two people, who were however reunited in flesh and in spirit when they dreamed or when they met face to face on the balcony of their family home.
Khalaf no longer spent much time checking the identity papers of those going into Hamiya or searching the bags of those coming out. He and his hut were just props from the past, because those tasks were now performed by modern electronic devices that saw through things, operated by unseen specialists. You saw people passing who didn’t even greet Khalaf, people wearing uniforms and with plastic laminated name tags hanging from their necks. They definitely weren’t Hamiya people or their offspring. You heard some of them speaking several languages, some of which you knew from living in numerous countries. Trucks and large bulldozers passed under the vast triumphal arch that could be seen from tens of kilometres away, inscribed with an incomplete line of verse. Khalaf was smoking a cigarette made in some foreign country. He offered you one and you said, ‘I’ve given up smoking.’ He was surprised. ‘Younis al-Khattat is a voracious smoker!’ he said. You smiled at the expression, which he had picked up from you, or from Younis al-Khattat, in the days of enthusiasm and promises. You remembered that he used to smoke local cigarettes that came in a square packet in the three colours of the national flag. You asked him why he had stopped smoking them and he told you they were no longer to be found. Khalaf sounded impatient that the story about the person who became two people was being interrupted, and wanted to hear it all, without any side talk or digressions. ‘That was a long time ago,’ you said. ‘As you can see, I have all the time in the world,’ he said. ‘I’ve just arrived,’ you said, ‘and perhaps there’ll be a chance later to tell you the story of what happened, and anyway, my story is like all stories, which tell of some things and are silent on other matters.’