Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

  When you were living in a rough neighbourhood at the edge of the downtown area, your father used to sit in this café after finishing work. In summer he would have a mint tea, in winter tea with cinnamon and ginger. He would take a break from his pens and inks and from the phantoms of a thousand calligraphers in his head, or play chess with Mr Shatti. During work hours he would order his coffees and teas from the café, for himself and his many guests, sometimes delegating you for this task if Hassan the office boy had work outside. Your father would repeat his orders to you item by item. He knew your head was always somewhere else, ready to respond to any invitation to play or take part in ‘devilry’, as he put it. Mr Shatti would see you rushing about, ready to take off, and would repeat his standard phrase without the slightest variation: ‘How’s the young calligrapher?’

  Like anywhere that’s full of life, the downtown area grew crowded, even clogged, with people, with traffic and smells. In spite of everything, in spite of rampant modernisation, of time riding roughshod over the old, and the growing divide between rich and poor among the local people, it still formed the guts of the town and the stem from which the other districts extended like tentacles into the surrounding plains and valleys, in all directions except the east, which was left to the eerie desert. The function of this downtown area had not changed, but the faces and the appearances of those who frequented it may have changed. This is what you noticed when you were hanging around among the crowds there after you went back. You also noticed that the people you still know here rarely go there, now that fancier and more modern shopping areas have sprung up in places far from the crowds. You noticed with surprise that there were large numbers of foreign tourists, who are usually drawn to narrow streets crowded with pedestrians and goods, with strong scents and the street cries of people selling spices, vegetables and fruit. There weren’t any tourists before. At least, you don’t remember there being any. It hadn’t occurred to you to wonder about that at the time. Perhaps because the Hamiya authorities imposed restrictions on tourism, just as they imposed restrictions on travel abroad, or perhaps because in those days the place didn’t yet have a past that was disappearing. Now there were many tourists, most of them from faraway countries. You could see the amazement on their faces when they saw that local goods were still on sale, in a world where commodities and other things have been standardised and individuality is the exclusive preserve of museums and antique shops.

  You were with your son Badr, who was named after a poet you liked in your early youth, though he didn’t become a poet but rather a student of architecture. Your return to your country was not some figment of your imagination. This was demonstrated to you in an email you received from your friend Ghaith, who was enthusiastic about existential literature and aroused your interest in it too. He was commenting on your impressions of your return and of your tour downtown. It’s clear that you had written an article about your visit on the website you contribute to from time to time in the City of Red and Grey. Here’s an extract from Ghaith’s email: ‘Your article oozes nostalgia. It’s the nostalgia felt only by those who have felt the pain of departure. The days add up and one’s resolve flags the longer one journeys. The article is the work of someone who turned his back on home and set out to look for truths elsewhere. But, if only you knew, they are not there. This is what we don’t know at the beginning of the journey, because the truths are here. Inside us. Inside our yearning to know more about ourselves. Inside the old markets where we have left stuff that might have guided us to ourselves. You wonder whether we can live up to our big words and bring to fruition the promises we have sown like seeds. This implies guilt, and guilt serves no purpose. By writing this you are avoiding the real objective. Posing the wrong question. So you won’t find an answer, or maybe you’ll get a misleading answer. The reality you have seen doesn’t provide the answer you seek, and neither does your hectic tour of your old haunts with your son bring the truth closer. You may have gone back, but you haven’t arrived.’

  It wasn’t you who wrote these words. Clearly. But they are proof that you published an account of your tour on a well-known website that is followed by many, including your friend Ghaith. Ghaith found solace in books similar to your father’s, or so he told you in his message after some foreign trip (to use his expression), but not one as long as yours. One proof that the previous words are not yours is that he says, ‘The truth is inside us!’ Those are words with a religious flavour, and that’s not your tone, because religion, as you would counter with a poetic flourish of your own, is a dark cloud that blurs the distinctions between everything in existence. It’s a single package and you must either take it or leave it.

  You think there’s an inner truth and an outer truth. The two truths might merge, they might change places but they cannot be the same thing. In your view reality comes before the idea: first reality, then the idea. The idea is the offspring of reality and cannot exist without it. This is not your invention, but what you have read in books that cast a spell on you, and believed. Anyone familiar with your quarrels with your father knows you fought a relentless war with him against the idea that the inner truth reflects a higher truth that is the source of all truths. You weren’t convinced that there is one supreme source of truth. One form from which all other forms are derived. You believed it was people who invented the absolute, supreme and total truth, so that their final resting place, from which they could never escape, would not be in the dust. It was the need for solace, or a longing to come back again. Human narcissism. But there is no return from dust and decay. No Day of Assembly. No resurrection. No heaven and no hell. Your father would block his ears when he heard you uttering one of these blasphemous noes. ‘I take refuge with God from the accursed devil,’ he would say. But what your friend Ghaith said is no less confusing than the argument by which you try to prove that your visit to the old market happened a short while ago ‘in reality’, and not in a dream, not in the remote past or in an uncertain future; and that Badr, the enthusiastic student of architecture who shares some of your traits, but not your nervousness or your tendency to melancholy, was with you in that sudden heatwave.

  To emphasise the point, this is what happened:

  You were sitting with Badr in the Black Iris café, which is in Umara Street, sipping mint tea served to you by a waiter from an old country to which history has been unkind, who was trying, without noticeable success, to talk to his customer in your local dialect. You had come to this café after having your hair cut in a small barber’s shop a few steps down the street. You used to know the owner of the barber’s shop, but he seems to have retired or died and the young barber might be his son, but you didn’t ask, to avoid a conversation that would have dragged on and pleasantries you’re not good at. Between rapid and skilful snips of his scissors, the young barber was following a football match between a local team and an Asian team in the knockout stages of a continental cup. There were some young men of his age in the shop. Clearly friends of his, they were riveted to the television screen in excitement as they watched the local team take the lead over the Asian team. The match was not yet over when the barber finished cutting your hair, and the local players still held the lead. You left the barber’s shop into a surprise hot blast. The weather was hot, very hot. You didn’t notice but the heat made it look like there was a curfew. You and Badr were walking almost alone down the street, which shimmered in a scorching haze.

  You know this long street. You have many images of both sides stored in your memory. They include the image of a pair of feet in tattered running shoes cutting their way through it like a ‘drunken ship’. But you don’t remember sitting in a café on the eastern side of the street. Perhaps because there wasn’t a café there, or because you usually sat in the Black Iris café.

  While you were walking down Umara Street, you ran into Fahmi, a writer of science fiction stories who was with you in the city where you took refuge after escaping from Hamiya. Although he was with you there, he
wasn’t part of your group or of your generation. He belonged to an older group, most of whom had fled abroad like you. You hadn’t seen Fahmi since the siege of a thousand days, but he hadn’t changed much anyway. He was carrying the small bag you used to see him carrying in the 1970s. He laughed when he saw you, and something golden glinted in his mouth. Perhaps the remains of a gold tooth. Fahmi was surprised to see you here and when you invited him for a cup of coffee in the Black Iris café, he said he couldn’t because he had an urgent appointment and that you were bound to meet again, given that you had finally come home. Badr asked you who this man was that you greeted with a warmth you hadn’t previously shown, and you told him he was a writer. You told him, as far you could remember, about one of his fantasy stories in which pieces of a satellite fell on a city with glass towers that were protected by robots. It was a story known to most of those who used to sit in the cafés of the City Overlooking the Sea. Badr didn’t think the subject of the story was strange, though it was strange at the time it was published.

  When you and Badr sat down at the table, part of the rough area where you used to live with your friend Hannawi was visible in front of you. As you tried to identify a particular spot in the area, you told Badr that in the distant past you had lived in an unusually elongated apartment on the roof of a building there. He was surprised. But it wasn’t surprising. Badr, the student of architecture, tried to sketch the houses piled on top of each other where you lived, when you were about his age, in an apartment behind a maze of washing lines, where clothes of a hundred and one colours fluttered in the breeze. He showed you the sketch and you saw a scene that started with the shops right in front of you, selling meat, mobile phones, clothes, vegetables and coffee, and then ending in open sky where three kites made of coloured paper were flying high. Three kites that defined the horizon, tumbling and turning alone in the void, while the children flying them (for that’s probably who they were) were invisible among the houses, which from a distance looked like pale cardboard boxes.

  The café, protected by the thick stone blocks of its walls and aired by a large ceiling fan, had retained some of its coolness despite the stifling heatwave. The cafés in the downtown area still performed some of their old functions. They were spaces where workers and passers-by could have a rest. They were refuges for the unemployed, for retired civil servants and those who wanted to escape their cramped homes for a thousand and one reasons. In them you could hear the clatter of backgammon and people playing cards, you could smell tea and coffee and the aromatic tobacco used in shishas. In the old days famous musicians would perform in them, singing songs with long overtures, many reprises and crooning that came from deep in the belly. Nowadays the television occupies a key corner. There are new singers you don’t know who use their noses instead of their throats. They proliferate like weeds, on countless satellite channels. Alongside them gyrate young women who have been discovered you know not where, women with long legs and narrow hips, in tight trousers or short skirts, women of a kind unseen in streets where nowadays you rarely find a woman even with her head uncovered.

  The football match against the Asian team ended in a 3–2 victory for the local players. The few customers in the café were watching the last minutes as you went in, and as soon as the match was over the waiter turned the television off, the noise subsided and the customers turned to conversation or playing cards. Some of them left at the end of the match, which was only available by special subscription, while others came in, apparently less enthusiastic about football.

  The man sitting alone at the table opposite you didn’t move. He had his back to the television and he almost sighed in relief when the match ended. He was in his late sixties. Rather sullen. A narrow wedding ring shone on his veined right hand. His hand lay splayed on top of a book but the title wasn’t visible. He had large sunglasses that covered half his face and was wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers. His hair was dyed. It must have been. The jet black was not convincing. The same for his thin moustache, which looked like a fine thread above his thick upper lip. The neat way he dressed suggested a middle-class man who had fallen on hard times. He definitely wasn’t from the city of Sindbad, although many people from there frequented the cafés in the downtown area, continuing a tradition they had acquired at home. You saw him smile once when a fat boy with Down’s syndrome came along, stopped in front of him and shook his big bottom. Clearly the fat boy was a local landmark and one of the street’s distinguishing features. The assistants from the nearby shops had been harassing him playfully, asking him to shake his big bottom again, and he complied with a pleasure that was saddening. The man looked behind him. He lifted his big sunglasses off his eyes and looked at you, then at Badr. He must have heard some of your conversation, because he said, ‘Sorry to bother you, but where are you from?’

  ‘From here,’ you said.

  ‘You must live abroad,’ he said.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It shows,’ he answered.

  You didn’t ask him how it showed that you lived abroad. How could he know the contents of your black box with just one glance at the table where you were sitting, in the same streets you walked as a young man? Again, and for a last time, the man turned his face towards you, while his body, which showed a flexibility you hadn’t expected from a man of his age, remained static. ‘Might we have met before?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think so,’ you replied, curtly and firmly. Perhaps it was your terse responses that made him stop interrogating you. He turned his back to you again. But when the man had raised his sunglasses the first time, and you saw his melancholy eyes, a tangled skein of memories began to roll around in your head. The threads were hard to unravel. You felt that one of the threads was about this man in particular. He was very much like Mr Shakib, who had taught language and literature at the Upright Generation Secondary School and who had noticed the devil of poetry hovering around you. But a strange feeling of indifference towards things suddenly came over you, and you stopped wondering who he was.

  * * *

  You told Badr that you used to sit in this café, that you began your poetic life here, amid the clatter of backgammon pieces and the cries of the waiters, that the man who had helped you take the first steps along the path of poetry was a romantic poet called Salman, who used to tell you that real poets don’t live to be forty. You told Badr that at one of the tables inside the café you had read a book that had greatly changed you, and that a poet called Hamed Alwan – who had a sharp tongue that was always critical, and a loud laugh that shook the whole café when he laughed, and who was killed in a mysterious car accident – always used to sit in the centre, and that a stout adolescent with thick glasses used to carry around books that weighed more than he did and used to call out to you at the top of his voice from the other end of the street and that . . . The names you mentioned sounded strange to him, the incidents unexciting. So you shut up. You didn’t tell him that when you were living in the area visible right in front of you, you had travelled to the city of Sindbad, taking a taxi through towns and villages, parched oases and checkpoints in the scorching month of August, and carried in the heel of your high boots, which were fashionable among young men at the time, a message of unknown content that you had to deliver to the founder of your secret organisation, who was living there in political asylum. Nor did you tell him that the secret message, which the man in charge of domestic operations placed in a cavity he cut out of your high-heeled boots (was it the right boot or the left?), was probably important, and that the answer, which you carried on your way back, must have been even more important. You didn’t tell him, because the names, the events and the timing are all so entangled that even you yourself find it hard to put them in correct chronological sequence.

  One of the three paper kites that were flying free over part of the town disappeared. You don’t know what happened to it. One of the other two kites tried to swoop on the other, like a bird of prey. The man who looked like you
r teacher at the Upright Generation Secondary School disappeared and was replaced by a solidly built man with an enormous moustache of the kind worn by truck drivers. Your son Badr disappeared. The gold ring disappeared from the ring finger of your left hand. You heard a voice repeating, insistently and annoyingly, a name that had an unsettling resonance: Younis, Younis. You turned to where the voice came from. You saw a young man with a pale complexion, stocky, wearing thick glasses and carrying a thick book, urging you to leave. He was smoking with ostentatious voracity, as adolescents usually do. With his usual impatience, he said, ‘Drink up your tea quickly. We’re late for our appointment with Ghaith.’

  VIII

  You were embarrassed by the two strange words and by the time you found out what they meant you were already at odds with your father. It embarrassed you that children used the words to identify your area and the street junctions, saying, for example, ‘At the Nakuja Abad corner’, or, ‘After the Nakuja Abad house’, or even worse when they called you the Nakuji in jest, a nickname that sounded obscene in the local language. The words, written over the gateway to your summer house in a Persian script, made you angry. Why had your father chosen them, rather than any of the usual formulas written at the entrances to houses in the neighbourhood? Why did he make a point of embarrassing you and your brothers in front of your local friends with this gibberish?

  Some of the houses in the neighbourhood had inscriptions at their gates, with words such as ‘The home of Captain Hassan Rafie’ or ‘This is by the Grace of God’, or ‘God is the Light of Heaven and Earth’. But not Nakuja Abad. Nothing like that. Your father also differed from the other men in the neighbourhood by wearing a small white cotton skullcap that covered half his head, and by having a beard, which started to turn grey early and was neatly trimmed. He was tall and slim and had a cigarette permanently in the left corner of his mouth, while with his right hand he penned words that leaned against each other like dominoes, or slumped flirtatiously like women in beds of love, or craned their necks like gazelles listening for the footsteps of predators, or that were as convoluted as a labyrinth or a viper in a bunch of grapes.