by Amjad Nasser
Nevertheless, in your room, which has become a guest room, you found books that had taken you away from your family, scraps of paper, official documents and sentimental letters promising eternal love. Among the books, which remained almost exactly as they were when you left, you reached out for a small book. Dormant memories of a distant age flooded back.
You opened the book and a multitude of sounds, images and smells swirled in your head. It was an inspirational book for you, and from the moment you opened it you were never the same person again. The moment you discovered it marks the unexpected dividing line between your old self and the new.
It was a magical book, but not magical in the sense of secret talismans, mysterious triangles or squares. It didn’t have any of that. Its magic lay only in the fact that the words and images in it, its esoteric whisper, coincided with a willingness deep inside you to come under its spell. A susceptibility of this kind seems to have persisted in you for some time, but your receptivity to enthralment diminished the longer the road turned out to be and the less clear the landmarks became along the way.
As with any such book, you didn’t have full control over yourself as the text led you from one discovery to another. Before you ventured into the expanses of that book you were yourself, but gradually you began to change as the book’s subtle vibrations seeped into you. The first thing you lost was your sense of your own weight, then your old memory. The words in the book began to wipe out most of the words that were there before them. That’s what you felt when you read it for the first time, or rather that’s how you were predisposed to react, because you were fertile ground at the time. Seed sown in fresh furrows soon sprouts.
The book, which you thought you had lost in your apartment in the downtown area, took you back twenty years. You felt lighter, thinner, nimbler. You imagined your hair had grown longer, that you had a droopy moustache, feet that hardly touched the ground and eyes that reflected tall trees, blue beaches and girls from whose shoulders little panthers leapt. You recognised this feeling of being so light you were about to take off. You had experienced it before when you opened the very same book, brought to you by a young man named Hannawi, who was tall and thin with dishevelled hair and a slight limp in one foot.
Hannawi had come from abroad, and after you met by chance in the Black Iris café he became your best friend for some time. He was entranced by the book and for you the effect was contagious. The book was passed around among others, but its magic did not work for them. The book held its secret gifts within a cover that did not reflect the contents. You and Hannawi shared those secret gifts. Both of you changed after that. You changed for several reasons, some connected with the book, others connected with the workings of fate or chance, and maybe of volition. After you escaped you lost touch with your friend. You looked for the book in the City Overlooking the Sea but couldn’t find it. You discovered you didn’t need it anyway because the words now ran in your blood.
It was a poetry book. It had nothing in common with The State and Revolution, the book that had left you with a scar in the shape of a cross above your navel. You thought you were the only person alive in the world created by the subdued language of the book, its limpid images, its muted rhythms, the evanescent quotidian worlds it evoked. But you discovered that the book had changed others too. There were other people the book had transformed. There weren’t many of them but they were slowly growing in number with the passage of time. They never became many. The title of the book was A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me. It’s a rather strange title. The strangeness lies in the juxtaposition of the words ‘prophet’ and ‘apartment’. Prophets are usually associated with the wilderness and antiquity, apartments with cities and the present. So he was a modern prophet. Without a message. Without commandments that make people tremble. His revelations might be ordinary, commonplace, superfluous. The title of the book was in fact like its contents, and the author was a poet from the city of Sindbad who had lived through the noisy last century and survived into this even noisier century with the same vigour, the same scepticism and the same preference for seclusion.
Before escaping abroad you lived with your friend Hannawi in an unusually elongated apartment in the downtown area. You first encountered the book when he pulled a cheap modest paperback edition of it from his bag, which didn’t hold much, and read you some lines of poetry in free verse with a muted rhythm that was cunningly insidious. As he read, your friend’s voice was moving. He was like someone reading to himself. He didn’t know that the words were sinking into you and coming to rest somewhere deep inside that had been waiting since you don’t know when. As he concentrated on the book, in his eyes you saw water rippling, arches swaying and skies rising, with sad palm or cypress trees. Your friend Hannawi was like the man who lived with the narrator of the poem in the book, also in an elongated apartment. You thought it was just a coincidence. But nonetheless you did feel that, several years earlier, someone far away had looked down upon your future life and written it up. Here was someone who had said things that you wanted to say but still didn’t know how. When Hannawi had finished reading the poem, you said, ‘Give me that book.’ You went to the Black Iris café that you frequented in the downtown area, sometimes with Khalaf, telling him stories, and sometimes with Hannawi, reading what the two of you had written or talking about books that might have changed other people but not you two, which in fact might have bored you. In the café you saw Hamed Alwan the poet sitting in his usual place in the middle. Your relationship with him was a mixture of love and hate. You liked the direct way he spoke, his daring approach to criticism, his surprising ideas, but you hated his biting sarcasm about your younger generation’s taste for what he called the gimmicks of modernity. He believed in direct poetry. Poetry that would move the masses and provide them with a weapon against injustice and tyranny. He was famous. He had a following that memorised many of his protest poems. Maybe that was another reason why you hated him; or, more precisely, it made your relationship with him more ambiguous. As soon as you came in he invited you to a cup of coffee. At the time you only wanted to be alone with the book. Nothing else. But you would have been embarrassed to turn down his invitation. He saw the book in your hand. He took it without asking. He read the title aloud: A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me. He laughed his famous laugh. His raucous laugh. He examined it quickly and handed it back to you. Strangely, he said, ‘An excellent book. I’ve read it. But his voice is more muted than it should be. I met the author at a poetry festival in the city of Sindbad. An admirable man but not impressive.’ His opinion surprised you. You had thought he would heap scorn on him without mercy. Hamed Alwan laughed aloud again and, speaking in his irritating rustic manner, said, ‘You look spooked.’ You didn’t know what he meant but you laughed along with him. You didn’t want to have a long conversation. Fortunately Alwan left the café for a prior engagement, or so he said, and you remained alone with the book.
How many times do you have to change?
How many times do you have to come across what you’re looking for, and when you find it, it’s not it?
A year earlier you had read a book that spoke of rain and sadness and impossible love. You remember the rain more than anything else. Heavy rain would fall on you steadily as you were walking down a side street to your house in Hamiya. You would arrive drenched and your family couldn’t understand where the water had come from when the air was so dry. You came back from the café after you don’t know how long and said to Hannawi, as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted two minutes earlier, ‘Tell me more about the author of this book. Is he in the city of Sindbad?’ He said he was probably there, because he never left the shade of the palm trees. ‘I’d like to see him one day,’ you said. ‘Maybe you’ll see him,’ he said. Then he added, ‘What matters is the book, not the author.’
* * *
These memories came back to you as you leafed through the book, which had stood in your old library as if
you had left it there the day before. Memories of the Black Iris café came back too, and of Umara Street and of the apartment where you lived with Hannawi; memories of Hamed Alwan (who was killed years ago in a mysterious car accident) laughing his raucous laugh, and of the mission you were assigned, to convey a secret message to the leadership of the Organisation abroad; and memories of how you changed the company you kept whenever you met a group of people closer to your changing interests. You saw yourself as a slim young man with long hair, a tight shirt and flared trousers, driving through towns and villages and across the desert in a taxi every part of which was red hot – the body, the windows and even the door handles. Then you remembered the street where you had stayed in a small hotel and the room where a large ceiling fan had stirred the viscous air with an audible groan. And the three days you had spent there, waiting for a messenger from the founder of your organisation to take the message you had carried in a secret compartment in one of your high-heeled boots, then how you slipped out into the street when you could no longer bear the boredom, the fierce sunlight that hit you as soon as you left the hotel, and the bookshop you went into at the end of the street.
In one of your boots was a secret message of unknown content, and in your head were poems with a subdued tone that your father, a reader of the classics, would not have considered poetry worthy of the name. Printed on the cover of his book, the picture of your favourite poet, who rarely gave interviews to newspapers or magazines, was etched in your mind.
You asked the man who seemed to be the owner of the bookshop about your favourite poet, and he said that he was in the city but that he didn’t know him personally. Then he added with a smile, as though colluding in a secret, ‘A new book of his has come out!’ He went into the dark depths of the bookshop and came back bearing a book with a black cover on which was written in a common newspaper-style naskh script: A Star for a Future Evening. It was about one o’clock. You were the only customer on that scorching August afternoon. The shopkeeper invited you to have a glass of tea. He went out into the shimmering heat of the street and came back dripping with sweat. Behind him came a boy dressed in a long white apron with permanent tea stains, carrying a small silver tray with two delicate glasses decorated with Persian miniatures. The bookshop owner, with the same conspiratorial smile, asked if he could try one of your cigarettes. You were smoking a cigarette made of your country’s best tobacco, a cigarette called Alexander after the Greek commander who passed through your country, or nearby. The bookshop owner took a deep puff, held it down, then slowly exhaled. He told you he had obtained a packet of these cigarettes from a student from your country who was studying there and that he liked them very much. Then, with a trace of contempt that annoyed you, he said, ‘How is it that you, an upstart country, can make cigarettes that are much better than our cigarettes, which taste like sawdust?’ You didn’t answer him. You told him you were interested in the author of the book. He pointed to a wooden newspaper rack near the entrance and said, ‘He writes for that newspaper.’ There were many newspapers in the wooden rack, and you couldn’t tell which one the shopkeeper was pointing at. He stood up and brought over a newspaper with a red logo that included a hammer and sickle. You examined the newspaper, which had very few pages. It looked different from the other papers. But there was nothing in it by your favourite poet. The shopkeeper said he did write for it, but not every day. Then he said he didn’t know which day he wrote, but he definitely did write for it. You were in a hurry to leave. You wanted to go to the hotel to read A Star for a Future Evening. You also wanted to buy the newspaper, but, with a note of caution he hadn’t shown until then, the shopkeeper said, ‘You’re a stranger in this city. I wouldn’t advise you to carry the newspaper with you.’ You said, ‘But it’s not a secret newspaper, is it?’ ‘It’s not underground,’ he said, ‘because here I am selling it with the other papers, but . . .’ (he looked around him and lowered his voice) ‘but there are people who monitor those who buy it.’
You left the newspaper, based on the shopkeeper’s advice, especially as you were on a secret mission in the city, and besides there was nothing in it by your favourite poet. You thought how strange it all was: the founder of your organisation was living as a political refugee in a country that monitors people who buy a newspaper! You said to yourself: ‘What’s the difference between the city of Sindbad and Hamiya?’ You didn’t bother too much about the idea. You had something more important in mind. You rapidly retraced your steps, under a sun that melted the asphalt, to your hotel that faced a small bronze statue standing in the middle of the street in complete isolation. A Star for a Future Evening was an extension of the first book you had read by the author. You started reading passages of it aloud, then repeating them, unconcerned that the messenger was late in coming to collect the message folded inside the secret compartment in one of the boots you had thrown on the ground next to the bed.
You didn’t see the poet on that visit. But you took this book of his back to Hannawi, who thought it less important than A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me. You disappeared for some time, you and Hannawi, and you turned up again by chance in the city that would see a long war and a total siege that lasted a thousand days. You didn’t forget the poet despite the bullets that flew past. You said to your friend Hannawi, ‘I’ll go and see him.’ You did go, but by plane this time, and you saw the owner of the bookshop.
You had brought him a carton of the foreign cigarettes and some local arak. ‘Ah, you?’ he said.‘Yes, me and not me,’ you said.‘You seem rather different, but what are these riddles: me and not me?’ he said.‘That’s another story,’ you told him.
You found out that your favourite poet hadn’t had a new book published, that he was no longer writing for that newspaper and that he was working in ‘the palm laboratories’ amid pollen dust and hybrid seedlings. You went and saw him. He was taller than you expected, thin, with a moustache streaked with grey. He was biting on a pipe that had gone out and he took it out of his mouth from time to time to look into the bowl. You never saw him light it or put any tobacco in it. You thought that the gesture of taking the pipe out, looking into it and then putting it back between his lips, or rather his clenched teeth, was a deliberate device to avoid talking with you. Your favourite poet didn’t talk much. He wasn’t what you had expected or how you would have liked him to be. He didn’t believe you had come specially to see him, from a city at constant war, where the airport was rarely open. He didn’t say that, but you sensed his mistrust deep down. You imagined, because he was under surveillance, that he had doubts about the nature of your visit, even though you weren’t from his country and had nothing to do with its politics. The author of A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me seemed distracted, remote, listless, although you recited one of his poems to him from memory. He may have thought your visit was a trap to draw him out of the cocoon that he had closed tight around himself. You would find out later that such suspicions were a trait deeply ingrained in the city of Sindbad. The succession of military brutes that ruled the country had planted eavesdropping devices almost everywhere and had persuaded children to spy on their parents. His poetry had a magic that was more powerful than his wary personality and what he said, half of which he mumbled. But you understood him nonetheless. You understood that he had put his best into the words he wrote and not into the words he spoke, and this does happen.
VII
Hamiya came first, but once the stone wall had been built it wasn’t long before the first shop opened in the downtown area. This detail is important: apart from that, society vouches for the rest of the details, which are hard to enumerate. Your father knows how the covered market began. Before that there were shops scattered here and there, built out of concrete blocks that were not commonly used at the time. He also knows the owner of the covered market, which was named after the man. You used to make forays into that shady, tunnel-like, half-dark market, which was hardly wide enough for someone going in to squeeze pa
st someone coming out (so much so that men and women sometimes contrived to meet there, in the knowledge that they could safely come into close contact in a way that outside the market would have been scandalous enough to merit a flogging). Close to the gateway to the covered market, the Black Iris café began as a wooden stall selling tea and coffee. The stone building was built later on the same spot. You heard this detail from your father, because you knew the café only when it was already thriving.
It was the first café you sat in as a young man. You would read there. Smoke. You’ll never forget the metal board with the name ‘Mr Ihsan al-Shatti’ written in a modern naskh script. You and your peers all thought that Ihsan was only a woman’s name, but then you discovered it could apply to both males and females. And here was the proof: Mr Ihsan al-Shatti, whom you knew as a man of medium height, stout, with a white face and short soft hair parted to the right and streaked with grey. He shaved once or twice a week and always wore a white shirt and tightly fitted black trousers. He was helped in the café by his son Taysir, who was four or five years older than you. To be free of the misery of school and school books, you would have liked to be Taysir. His age. With his freedom to smoke. His ability to buy a cinema ticket from his own money. To work all day alongside his tolerant, easy-going father. Your father wasn’t cranky or irascible. But when it came to studying and learning he was stricter than his chess partner, Mr Shatti.
The café was still in the same place. It’s true it had grown shabbier, but the metal board, penned by your father, was still at the entrance, coated with soot from the exhaust pipes of vehicles and the emissions of small workshops that were holding out against the ravages of modernisation. There was no sign of Mr Ihsan al-Shatti. There was a man of about the same height, the same stoutness and the same complexion, with the same hairstyle. It was Taysir. He saw you, stared at you a while, but did not seem to recognise you.