by Amjad Nasser
‘Here we are, breathing some new life into our old friendship, so if you don’t want to tell your story, at least tell me who you are now. I mean, are you Younis or Adham?’ asked Khalaf.
You told him, ‘I’m both of them. My greying hair and my posture, which is no longer as upright as a strict upbringing in Hamiya requires, are Adham, whereas the stubborn ticker (you smiled as you uttered the phrase) between my ribs may still be Younis. In fact it’s hard to tell them apart. I know Younis stayed behind and, as you said, he hasn’t changed much. But my new name and my new life apparently haven’t turned me into a completely different person, and the proof is that I want you to come with me to where I buried Roula’s letters and the perfumed locks of her hair, under the cinchona tree in front of our house before I escaped.’
Khalaf laughed. He still had his bushy moustache and there was a gap where two of his upper teeth had fallen out. The rest of his teeth were stained yellow by tobacco. Because of the two, or maybe three, missing teeth, he looked older than you, and you felt a deep sense of empathy with him.
‘Why do you laugh?’ you said, without disapproval. His bushy moustache, streaked with grey, cast a dark shadow on his lips. ‘Don’t you know?’ he asked.
‘Know what?’
‘What happened to Roula.’
‘Not much.’
‘But Younis knows!’ he said.
Then he looked at you with a trace of pity, or maybe of caution. You thought he was going to say you were like the bankrupt who goes through his old ledgers looking for debts he’s owed, but he didn’t. If he had, he could have wounded your pride, which was already wounded. You were going to say that you might be bankrupt but it was beneath you to leaf through old ledgers, because what was past was past and one shouldn’t cry over spilt milk. You didn’t say that, though he looked into the very depths of you, to the fragility that lurked there. You told him you were writing a history of Hamiya and that your sentimental youth was a core part of the book.
With that mix of pity and caution, he said, ‘You’d better not do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Take my advice,’ he said.
‘But I have nothing to lose,’ you said, without thinking what the words meant.
At that very moment you had a coughing fit that you tried to smother with the pocket handkerchief you carry around. ‘You look tired,’ Khalaf said. ‘Would you like to sit down a while?’
‘OK, let’s go,’ you said.
Khalaf shut the door of his ramshackle wooden hut and went off with you.
* * *
From the outside, because of the remains of the wall, the tall trees, the massive gun emplacements, the rusty glare reflectors and the dust blockers, the old installations looked the same as when you left. Of course you had expected them to look a little old and dilapidated, but you hadn’t expected the public library with its dome, the vaulted barracks, the polo ground or the central market to be gone. Nor did you expect that the company assigned to renovate Hamiya would have started demolishing most of what was left with bulldozers and dynamite, or that it would all look completely different. Near the polo field you were surprised to note the disappearance of the iron fence around the headquarters of the General Command, where the Grandson had been based. The guards had been withdrawn; it had lost its aura of mystery and dread and been turned into a company headquarters. You saw young men and women going in and out of the building, carrying maps and long rulers, with mobile phones that never stopped ringing. You were surprised to find the Commander’s new palace nestling, remote and stately, on top of the only hill overlooking Hamiya, surrounded by missile batteries and artillery pieces. You remembered that the hill had once provided the local people with a place to breathe fresh air when the heat was stifling, and had served as an arena for the carefree nocturnal frolics of young lovers, but in their conflict with the Grandson the jihadists had used the hill to bombard his office several times. You and Khalaf passed close by the Upright Generation Secondary School where you had studied. It was still there but was being used as a depot for the dynamite the company was using to blow up the deep concrete foundations of the stone structures. The name was still there, inscribed in a familiar ruqaa script on a stone plaque at the entrance, but underneath it the company had attached a metal sign with lettering written mechanically. ‘Dynamite Depot. Keep Away’, it said. As for the girls’ school nearby, it had been wiped off the face of the earth, and it seemed impossible to make out the cobbled pathway that led to the park where young men used to date their girlfriends, under the pine and queen-of-the-night trees. Nonetheless you imagined a school uniform with purple stripes, a head of wavy chestnut hair and big dark eyes looking bashfully at a dark, thin young man with the sparkle and the mysteries of the desert in his eyes. You took the girl in the purple striped uniform by the hand. Your hand started to sweat and your heart raced.
Sustain me with cakes of raisins,
Refresh me with apples,
For I am lovesick.
You heard Khalaf say, ‘This is where the Mothers grocery store stood, where you would trick the owner and steal the cigarettes she sold in ones.’ You remembered the square packets of local cigarettes she used to sell. Khalaf carried on naming the buildings and districts that for a long time defined the real or imagined image of Hamiya, both for those who lived there and for those passing through. You could hear his voice as he spoke the names with a whistling sound caused by the gap left by the missing two or three upper teeth, but your hand was still sweating and your heart pounding. That hand, with its five dainty fingers, was still in your hand and the wavy chestnut hair sometimes brushed your face, and you could smell a mixture of jasmine and faint girlish sweat. In the meantime you thought about Khalaf laughing when you mentioned Roula and her letters buried under the tree with the perfumed locks of her hair, and you wondered what he meant when he said, ‘Younis knows!’ When you reached the site of your old house, its stones heaped up like a pagan grave, and you saw the enormous trunk of the cinchona torn out of the ground, you realised what his laugh meant. You didn’t notice that your tour of the ruins of the old buildings with Khalaf had made you more like Younis than Adham, until you reached the site of your demolished house, where the teeth of a bulldozer blade had ploughed up the ground. You stood in front of the trunk of the cinchona tree, which you could once embrace with your two arms but which even four arms could not possibly encircle now. Four or five big slow scenes crossed your mind: Roula at your last meeting, telling you that you were still a child and would never grow up; Khalaf himself, avoiding looking you in the eye whenever you met; the Grandson, shot in the shoulder, and the master of ceremonies shot dead; the poultry farm where you and several of your comrades hid, waiting for the smugglers who took you across the border one dark night.
VI
When you told Khalaf, ‘I don’t have a story worth telling,’ you were lying. If it was up to Khalaf, he would have said graciously, ‘Let’s go and sit on a wooden bench in Hamiya Park and I’ll tell you what happened today.’ You could have done that twenty years ago too. In fact, that’s what you used to do. It used to be other people’s stories, not your own. You didn’t have a story at that time, and anyway telling other people’s stories is easier and living them is more fun. Lying to Khalaf was not pure lying. You didn’t lie to him because you wanted to lie, but perhaps because you weren’t confident of your story. It wasn’t like those stories you used to tell him, sometimes on a wooden bench in Hamiya Park, sometimes on a chair in a café in the downtown area, or like the secret information Khalaf used to tell you about people arrested trying to smuggle banned books into Hamiya.
* * *
That’s because Khalaf was in fact dead.
Khalaf had been killed before you came home, in a confrontation with jihadists who had adopted the shanty towns as the base for their activities. These people became active after you left and they came close to establishing a monopoly on the streets. They broke their long tru
ce with the Grandson, or rather their undeclared alliance with him from the days when the National Security Agency was hunting you down like rats in holes. A group of them tried to infiltrate Hamiya while Khalaf was on duty at the pedestrian gateway, and he resisted and was killed. Khalaf was dead. You read the news, which was published in the local press, and you saw a picture of Roula, whom you hadn’t seen since you escaped abroad, receiving the Medal of Duty, Hamiya’s highest decoration, from the Grandson. She looked different from how you remembered her. Her hair was tightly gathered at the back, her face was severe, her mouth pursed and her dimples less pronounced, but nonetheless she had preserved some of her magic, which was hard to define.
You weren’t alone when you escaped from Hamiya. You were a group. Most of those who planned the conspiracy to assassinate the Grandson and took part in carrying it out tried to escape abroad. Some were arrested before they could get away. Those who had played the least important roles were imprisoned. The fugitives were sentenced in absentia. The chief conspirator, the local leader of your organisation, was executed, and his relatives had to bury him in an unmarked grave. There were branches of your organisation in the City Overlooking the Sea. They were from an older generation than you. A generation whose ties to Hamiya had in effect long been severed. You felt there was a gap between you and those who hadn’t set foot in your country for thirty years. They had the leadership positions. You noticed that relations between them and the people of the City Overlooking the Sea were not as they should have been. In fact that’s how relations were between the other foreign groups and the people of the city, which had in theory embraced the cause of revolution and change. Those of you who had recently arrived from Hamiya and had just read the theoretical texts diagnosed the relationship as elitist. You wanted a relationship with the common people, not with the political elite and prominent people. The common people, or the masses, to use the phrase common in your political literature, were the rock on which your struggle must be founded. They were the armour that would protect your presence among them on their soil. But for numerous reasons this did not happen. What your group had done together had created a strong bond between you. You were scarcely ever apart and you thought that what you had done had won you worldwide renown. A short time after taking refuge in the city, you were surprised to discover that few people knew where Hamiya was, although your country was not far away. As time passed and you moved around, the bonds within your group weakened. The warning signs of fragmentation began to appear at closed meetings and in cafés. Before the thousand-day siege of the City Overlooking the Sea, you began to argue among yourselves – over who was responsible for what had happened, who had informed on whom, who had lost interest and had turned to chasing the local women or was mixed up in business or smuggling, who still kept the flame burning for the cause – and this began to loosen a bond that had seemed eternal. After the siege, which drove you either to the sea or to the wilderness, some of you tried to slip back but you were deported. For years you haven’t had any official connection with the Organisation, and after you left the Island of the Sun you all dispersed to various countries. Your relationship with the Organisation became largely nominal. It was the leaders (in fact you had become one of them) who maintained a loose and vague relationship with you. They accepted your criticism. Your aloofness. Your moods, which have become more and more changeable. But they still see you as their protégé, perhaps because of your modest fame, perhaps out of loyalty to an old dream. You meet whoever’s left of your old comrades by chance. At a conference here. A seminar there. You no longer hear much of their news, except that some of them have gone home and taken important positions in government. Obviously you weren’t among them. After several failed attempts to go home, you convinced yourself that matters had become settled and that nothing could change the direction of winds that blew from just one quarter. But you did go home, in the end. You didn’t find much of what you remembered. Change had not only swept you along; it had touched everything. Those who have been living abroad for years want everything at home to remain as it was when they left. This is impossible. You know that and do not often complain.
You braced yourself to accept the cold, and the dark sky,
The passage of time, the uncertainties of life, and the treachery of friends.
But sometimes you cry. Some powerful force convulses you and you cry. Alone, beside a river with dark waters, you cry. Under a disused railway bridge, you cry. In front of the spectre who turns up at the worst of times, his arms folded across his chest, scrutinising you like an obstinate examiner, you cry. They do not last long, these convulsive moments, which might be inspired by an image that crosses your mind or a smell that reminds you of another smell, and you soon recover your composure and control of your emotions. This is a price you know must be paid, although no one seems to check the accounts any longer.
With all your self-confidence, your wounded intellectual pride, your deep sense of disappointment, your exhausted and sickly body, could you have said all that to Khalaf, if he were still alive? Probably not, although you’re confident he wouldn’t have gloated at your misfortune. He wouldn’t have said, ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay away from those ideas, which only lead to ruin?’ He’s not malicious like that. You didn’t tell him you belonged to the Organisation, because that’s a secret you wouldn’t have divulged to anyone, especially if you were arrested. You had received strict training on how to keep secrets and not to divulge anything important under interrogation. Khalaf knew deep down that you were no longer the person who used to tell him stories, who used to share secrets with him, including about your relationship with Roula, his friend who wrote love letters for the other adolescents in your gang. But how could you have told him you’d been chosen to check out the location where they planned to assassinate the Grandson, and to make sure the assassins could enter and leave Hamiya safely?
In the eyes of the Organisation you were very much the right person to perform this task, because you were the youngest member and the son of ‘the calligrapher’, whom everyone assumed to be above suspicion, and most importantly, because you knew how to get in and out of Hamiya without going through the checkpoints. You met all the criteria for someone who would not be suspected and from whom no danger was to be expected. You might add to that the recklessness that hovered over your head like an unholy halo. So the leaders of the Organisation decided to carry out an act that others had attempted before and failed. They set the date and zero hour for the operation.
The timing was appropriate: the celebration of the silver jubilee of the Grandson’s accession.
* * *
This house has an arched stone gateway with an inscription in Persian script that irritated you for years. The house, to which you are returning after twenty years, was the family’s summer house. It lies in an area allocated to the families of Hamiya’s junior and non-commissioned officers and civilian staff such as your father. You lived there during the long summer holidays and your memories of it are partly good, partly bad. It hasn’t changed much. The strange inscription on the gateway is still holding out against the ravages of dust. A new floor was added after your brothers and sisters had lots of children and finally moved in when your father was laid off. The venerable olive tree has grown and its trunk and branches have thickened. Now it reaches your bedroom window on the second floor, from which you used to see children playing football in the street, girls filling the afternoons with the scent of lavender, soldiers going to the front, and bedouin still attached to their scrawny camels. In front of it there now stands a supermarket with a foreign brand name, a hairdresser’s for both men and women, and an Internet café frequented by adolescents whose long hair glistens with gel. But Antar, the dog that became devoted to you after you found him as a puppy yelping in the street and brought him up, has died. He no longer keeps vigil under your window or wags his tail when he sees you. Shortly before you came back, he stopped eating or drinking or wagging his tail. Yo
ur grandfather and grandmother, your father and mother, have passed away one after another. Your favourite brother Sanad, to whom you entrusted your boyhood secrets, lives in the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. Your younger brother, Shihab, the air force pilot, was given early retirement because they suspected his relationship with you might be more than merely fraternal. Salem, with whom you smoked, chased girls and daydreamed, and who became a National Security officer after you left, had a stroke and lost half his memory. Tom Thumb, who was your bitter rival in the gang warfare in the narrow lanes and who later became the leader of a feared smuggling gang, comes out of jail only to go back in again. Comrade Hanan has died. Salman, who first taught you poetry, has become an itinerant preacher. Your friend Hasib, who wrote detective stories, has disappeared from sight and is said to have died in a traffic accident while crossing the street drunk, or to have entered a monastery and become an ascetic. What next? It’s hard to list them and count.