by Amjad Nasser
Of course your problem with your father wasn’t only over these two words, or other similarly incomprehensible words, or your aversion to the Thursday salons. In fact it was your choices, or to be more precise your behaviour, that caused him to seethe with a rage that, when it reached boiling point, would explode in an outburst no one would have expected from a quiet man who was almost ascetically devoted to his workshop. You especially remember three times when your father completely lost his temper. Once when the Hamiya disciplinary council punished you, along with Khalaf and Salem, for stealing papers for the secondary school exams, when your father was summoned to appear before the council. A second time when you were caught red-handed with the banned book The State and Revolution. And the third time when Roula’s father complained to him about your relationship with his daughter . . . There was also the inauspicious moment when the attempt was made to assassinate the Grandson. But that time he didn’t explode, or rather you didn’t see him explode, because you weren’t there. After that critical juncture in your life, you never saw your father again. You escaped abroad. But you learnt that the incident left him deeply saddened and drove him into further seclusion. Because after the incident the Hamiya leadership dispensed with his services and put him under covert surveillance, and the elite and the media lost interest in him and his works. But that probably didn’t upset your father, who had never sought publicity and was devoted to his work. What upset him, and what saddened him for years, was his disappointment that you had turned out to be the opposite of him in almost everything, and the fact that you were not close by. How could he not feel that he would never see you again? You think it was this rather than anything else that pained him, because in spite of everything, although you contested his religion, his authority and his taste in poetry, you know your father loved you. In fact, he loved in you your spirit of rebellion and inquiry and feared for the consequences it would have for you. You can be sure he reserved a special dash of paternal affection just for you. You don’t know exactly why; perhaps because you were the only child who argued with him and challenged him, while your brothers obeyed him or were in awe of his prestige.
After you escaped, you and your father did correspond sporadically. Perhaps because the postal authorities were monitoring the letters, he never mentioned the Grandson incident or any of your radical disagreements: your hard-left politics, your writing of modern poetry instead of classical poems in the traditional format, which he said was essential to any proper poetry, the way you ridiculed religious beliefs, and so on. Instead he would tell you what was news at home and in the family and with relatives: who had married, who had died, what appliances or furniture had been added to the house, sometimes about a book he had read or an idea he was working on. Because of his emotionally reserved nature and his allusive style, you had to infer by interpretation and reading between the lines that he missed you, or was disappointed in you, or that you had left a void in the house. Being near or distant was a metaphysical matter, as far as your father was concerned, or that’s what you concluded from what he said and from the quotations he would copy out. You thought about that at length after, in one of his letters, he quoted a fragment written by, you think, the tenth-century Sufi mystic al-Niffari. He began his letter by writing about your brother Sanad’s plan to go to the Land of Palm Trees and Oil, before suddenly breaking off and writing a line across the middle of the page with a broader stroke (he clearly used one of his brushes and not a normal ink pen): ‘Farness is made known by nearness, and nearness is made known by spiritual existence.’ Then he went back to talking about your brother, who wanted to try his luck working and living in that country, to which some Hamiya people had started to rush after torrents of oil gushed out there.
Although metaphor was not unfamiliar in your life and your writing, your father baffled you with such fragments, which would spring from the unknown into letters that were meant to convey greetings and small talk. This was one of your problems with him: having to reinterpret a saying or a story that may not have had a meaning, in your opinion, other than the obvious one. You usually failed to relate to his metaphors or the subtext of his words, not because of some mental deficiency, as you sometimes thought, or because you are hostile to metaphors, but because you believed that reality was the proper reference point for testing words and things; that facts have an aspect that must be seen and touched, and that humanity’s heaven and hell are on this earth, not in some other place. Because oppression, exploitation, injustice, and the monopolisation of power and wealth are man-made creations, and mankind will give them up only at the end of a struggle that should not hesitate to use force if necessary: violence to counter violence in order to set up a human paradise on earth. The flower is here, so let’s dance here. That’s what you also learned from your secret organisation’s literature, and what you blindly believed.
Later, when you became less rigid in your ideas and doubts started to impinge, you read about a calligrapher who went into ecstasies and had visions – a description that reminded you somewhat of your father. The writer described the calligrapher as writing in three types of script: the first he alone could read, the second he and others could read, while neither he nor anyone else could read the third. By that time you had discovered the meaning of the two words your father had inscribed on the arched gateway of your summer house. It wasn’t he who told you what they meant; you had read a chapter on Suhrawardi, the mystic who was executed, in a book devoted to troubled personalities. Suhrawardi apparently coined a Persian phrase with the meaning ‘nowhere place’ or ‘nowhere country’ – Nakuja Abad.
In The Chant of the Wing of Gabriel, a book by Suhrawardi, the observer asks the sage where he comes from. The sage points to his brothers, who are lined up among those who had arrived before him, and says, ‘We come to you from Nakuja Abad.’
This strange linguistic coinage also made you think of The City of Where, the title of a renowned book by a poet from the city of Sindbad who, like his ancient forebears, crossed tame seas and dark seas, and went missing on the steppes of distant continents.
The truth is that your room had not been turned into a guest room after you left, as you wrote, even if your family did sometimes use it to put up passing guests. Such guests became fewer and fewer and eventually stopped coming with the passage of time. Your relics were still there: your books that filled a corner to one side, your bachelor’s degree certificate hanging in a glass frame, a photograph of you with Khalaf and Salem in khaki clothes and wide-brimmed hats, holding terrified rabbits on a hunting trip (there was another person of your age at the edge of the picture, who might have been Wahid), a transistor radio the size of a large hand with a dark-blue leather cover that had withstood the ravages of time, an oak desk with a silver rack in the middle, holding letters and identity documents between two semicircular plates of glass. Next to it stood an empty glass vase with a lotus flower design and on the base some faint writing that probably indicated where it was made.
You no longer know how or why you acquired most of the books and you were surprised at the names of some of the authors, which you might as well never have heard of. Apart from pulling A Prophet Who Shares My Apartment With Me out from among the books, you didn’t go near your other things. You left them staring at you, confronting you like the contents of an abandoned museum.
You were like someone postponing an inevitable confrontation for a later occasion.
In addition to the woollen mattress your mother had upholstered for you with her own hands, which had since turned to dust, there were three mattresses lying along the sides of the room. On your first night back you slept on the mattress that was printed with red anemones in an endlessly repeating pattern. You slept as you had never slept before. You forgot to take one of the sleeping pills you usually take before going to bed, which nonetheless do not always ward off the nightly visitations of insomnia. You slept without a sleeping pill. You slept long, without coughing, without dreams to distur
b or comfort you, until mid-morning, when you were invaded in your bed by the sound of the children and the smell of coffee. You washed your face and brushed your teeth. You combed what’s left of your hair. You went to the big kitchen your father designed for the family to gather at mealtimes, so that the women of the family could chat and discuss domestic matters and your brothers could take refuge from receiving your father’s unexpected guests. It’s both a kitchen and a family room, with one corner spread with carpets and cushions on the ground and one corner with a dining table and chairs that are rarely used. The whole family was waiting for you in the kitchen, except your brother Sanad, who lives with his family in the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. The brothers and sisters who were children when you escaped now had wives and husbands, sons and daughters so numerous and so close in age that it was hard for you to remember their faces and their names. Your brother Shihab, the third male born to your mother’s fertile womb, has named his second son Younis. That was a courtesy that greatly touched you. That was your first morning in the house and among family members, and it was filled with familiar images and smells after an absence that had lasted twenty years.
Younis hovered around you, nine or ten years old with round eyes. He showed you something in the kitchen cupboards, named the plants and the house things as if he were renaming the species that had survived the great flood. ‘This is snapdragon,’ he told you. ‘This is basil. This is geranium. This is my grandmother’s prayer rug. That’s my grandfather’s favourite cup. These are eggplants. This is ghee. Do you like ghee, Uncle?’
After taking you on a verbal tour of the things in the house, he said, ‘It’s better here, right?’
You stroked his short-cropped hair, which reminded you of your own hair when you were his age, and smiled at him. In return he gave you a bigger smile.
The real reception room, or what you call the diwan, hasn’t changed. It’s on the ground floor, right next to the front door of the house. It’s a traditional architectural layout, meant to keep the guests, especially outsiders, away from the interior of the house and from the intimate spaces reserved for the family and their closest relatives.
The members of your family use all the floors and most of the rooms in the house, which is built of black volcanic stone (except for the arched gateway which is made of dusty white stone), but the diwan, which is rectangular, seems to have preserved the smells and spectres of the past. As though it hasn’t been used for ages. After your father died, it was no longer the venue for the Thursday salons that witnessed lengthy discussions about Ibn Muqla the Abbasid vizier and his pioneering work in the field of calligraphy, the additional contributions of Ishaq Ibn al-Nadim, the innovations of Ibn al-Bawwab, and the contemporary work of Hamid al-Amadi and al-Dirani. The participants would bandy about the names of calligraphers, Sufis and poets, ancient and modern, questioning or casting doubt on what others were saying. Your father’s knowing words would modestly decide the matter, because he was the arbiter and ultimate authority among his friends, especially on questions of calligraphy and Sufism, which in his case arose from both a passion and a deep inner commitment, and meant more than merely repeating dry rules and metaphysical abstractions. They didn’t talk only about calligraphers and the various ways they made their letters twist and turn, stretch and double back. They might also talk about the heresy trial of Ibn Hanbal and the crucifixion of al-Hallaj, the murder of Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi’s views on the unity of existence, al-Niffari’s books The Stations and The Addresses, and then jump centuries forward to Taha Hussein and his scepticism about pre-Islamic poetry and the argument about his controversial ideas. (Apart from Taha Hussein, you didn’t know most of these names.) Sometimes your father would force you to attend these Thursday salons and you would hover between boredom and drowsiness among men who seemed to you to have just emerged from the Middle Ages. The subjects he discussed with his friends did not interest you, the names they mentioned were not familiar and the music they listened to and nodded their heads to, either in rapture or absent-mindedly, left you quite cold, especially the music in which the lines were repeated again and again, turning on themselves, like whirling dervishes, with irritating monotony. Your father’s Thursday salons, which you were forced to attend in the long summer holidays, were like torture sessions for your restless body and for your spirit, which was adrift in a domain very far from their own world with its clouds of dust from the golden ages. You would rather play with your friends, fight in the back streets, sharpen knives, chase everything that moved on the face of the earth or, when you grew older, go to cafés and meet poets and young writers who were interested, like you, in modern literature.
Young Younis was walking beside you like an undersized shadow when you went into the diwan. You saw the sofas, the chairs and the wooden coffee-tables, some of them inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The room evoked old voices, the smells of coffee with cardamom, lemonade with rose water and incense brought from distant climes. Your father’s calligraphies were still staring down from the walls, some words legible and others illegible.
You remembered that you very much liked one of his works in particular; it was a design that bore the last half of a line of verse and read: Souls yearn for you for eternity. Your father had written it in the thuluth style, which was one of his favourites and in which he designed notable masterpieces.
His books were still in the wooden bookcase, looking down on you with their spines of gilt leather. The only new thing in the diwan was a black-and-white picture of him, taken by the Grandson’s private photographer, showing him in his workshop, engrossed in writing a large inscription in Kufic script.
When young Younis saw you looking at the picture, he said, ‘That’s your father, right?’
‘That’s right,’ you said.
‘You’re Younis, and I’m Younis, right?’
‘That’s right, and there’s a third one too, apart from us,’ you said.
‘Where’s he?’ he said.
‘It’s hard to see him,’ you said.
‘He’s a ghost, you mean?’
‘Maybe.’
With his round eyes, young Younis looked at the photograph and said, ‘My father put it here. It used to be downstairs.’
You know this picture well. It never used to hang in the diwan but, as young Younis said, in the workshop that took up the cellar of the summer house. Your father was wearing a khaki shirt and trousers, which were common in Hamiya, in fact the standard work clothes there. The military differed from the others in that they had ranks and regimental badges, but not in the colour of their clothes. Your father wasn’t a military man but at work he used to wear this uniform, without badges to show his rank or the service he belonged to. He wasn’t looking at the photographer, in fact he didn’t even seem to be aware of his presence. His right hand was holding a wooden pencil. His head and body were bent over, his eyes looking at the spot where the pencil rested on the sheet of paper. His shoulders were thin and hunched and slightly tense. Fragile, engrossed in his letters, he seemed to be in a trance. You could see the Kufic writing, as intricate as a maze, but it was hard to read it in the picture.
Your father wrote few words in his designs. Despite his devoutness, he wasn’t inclined to use Quranic verses, common sayings of the Prophet or long sentences. Some of his designs consisted of a single letter, such as nun, ba, kaf or alif, with a little decoration such as foliage in the empty spaces. Even with the ancient poems that he loved, many of which he knew by heart, he seldom put a whole line in one of his designs. Maybe he wanted to leave it to the eye of the beholder to wander in the void. As if to be incomplete was the way things really were. Kullu man alayhi faanin, ‘Everyone upon it is ephemeral’, one of them read. You hadn’t known how to read this early design of your father’s. Especially the word faanin, ‘ephemeral’. It wasn’t until you grew up that you realised it was connected with the word fanaa, ‘transcendence’. You remember that he refused to write in full that famous line of Mutanabbi�
�s, starting To the extent that people are resolute, when he wrote the inscription on the triumphal arch at the entrance to Hamiya. In the face of opposition from the Grandson’s aides, he broke the inscription off after the first seven words. If it had been his choice, he would not have written even those words, which he considered, as far as you remember from a discussion that took place in the Thursday salon, to be pretentious and boastful, a sycophantic suggestion by the Grandson’s retinue. You were surprised how little decoration and foliage there was in the calligraphies that hung on the walls of the diwan. Apparently the empty space that calligraphers avoid, either for fear of a void or because they lack ingenuity, did not frighten your father. In fact the empty space so evident in some of his works may have been quite deliberate. It had a presence that was clear and unsettling at the same time. You had seen most of these designs before but you had never thought about this aspect. During your long absence and in your wanderings through numerous countries you had seen the work of many calligraphers, most of whom resort to decorative foliage and filling in the background of the design or the inscription itself in a way that diverts the eye. You don’t recall many of your father’s opinions on the art of calligraphy, but you imagine he would have seen excessive decoration as aesthetic padding that distracted from contemplation of the secret hidden in the letter or the word. Calligraphy in its absolute union with the letter and the word, which were united in their turn in a higher secret, was what mattered to him, and besides that, manual craftsmanship. Perhaps that explains why your father preferred to be called a calligrapher rather than an artist. Maybe he saw in art a creativity and playfulness that he did not believe in. Creation was for God. As for playing with letters and words that had conveyed countless inexhaustible connotations over hundreds of years, by his standards that was an adolescent folly that humanity had not grown out of. Such talk might have been aimed at you. His criticism of you was along these lines and you knew this, and you would answer him in the same manner. But playing with words that say one thing and mean something else delighted your father and encouraged him to bring the best of them out of his lexical treasure trove. You were his favourite partner in this chess game of words and meaning.