Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

  It was young Younis who took you down to the cellar where your father had spent long hours in summer mixing inks, sharpening pencils, boiling tea, rubbing pieces of paper with organic substances or writing, often with a single stroke of his pen, a large letter in a design he was working on. Breathing fitfully, you went down the twelve steps that you knew by heart. Young Younis had gone ahead and was waiting for you at the cellar door. He stood upright and stuck out his chest, with his firm hands locked behind his back, like a soldier on parade.

  Like the diwan, the cellar had been left as it was, as if your father, wearing his khaki shirt and trousers, might come in at any moment, after taking off his snow-white gown and his embroidered black cloak in his bedroom, keeping only his white skullcap on. You felt that strongly. You could almost hear his breathing as he came down the twelve steps to the cellar. You could smell the faint scent of musk, the smell of his trimmed beard after Friday prayers. There were several designs, complete or incomplete, on the cellar walls, on the workbench and on the bookshelves. On the edge of the workbench there was a round ashtray made of brass and engraved with five-petalled flowers, with four grooves around the rim to hold cigarettes, and a dark green patch in the base.

  You noticed that under the bench there was a pair of green plastic slippers that he apparently used when he was washing before prayers or when moving around the cellar. You took off your sandals and put the slippers on. They were your size. You remembered that you, your father and your brother Sanad all took the same size: 43. You remembered your brother, who had moved to the Land of Palm Trees and Oil. You used to filch his favourite shoes when the male hormones started to kick in. He would go crazy when he had an appointment and couldn’t find his shoes. He knew you had got to them first and he would have to change his trousers to match the colour of the only other shoes that were available.

  While you gazed around at your father’s workshop, at his tools and his relics, young Younis was standing upright, his hands behind his back, in front of a large design in Kufic script in a corner near the entrance to the cellar. It was the same design that could be seen in the photograph hanging in the diwan. Framed in a perfect square, it was severely geometric and appeared to be formed of pixels, as in today’s digital images.

  You had seen the design before but hadn’t noticed the maze, in which he had tried out two gradations of turquoise. You thought it was just a geometrical game. Your father, who did not usually play with calligraphy, wanted to play, to try out the surprising possibilities that playing would reveal, or to combine calligraphy and the graphic design for which he faulted your brother Sanad. He was not one of those who used Kufic much, but even when he did it wasn’t in this geometric style that looked as though it were computer-generated. The precision with which your father had executed his Kufic design was amazing. It was in the form of a maze, but a geometric maze based on the uprights and right angles of the letters. Young Younis, who turned towards you when he sensed you standing behind him, knew something you did not know, or had not paid any attention to. With his firm little hand he pointed towards the picture and said, ‘Can you read it?’ His question took you by surprise. Can I in fact read it, you wondered. The way the letters were interlocked, in a starkly geometrical structure, made it difficult if not impossible, and you repeated the same question to him. ‘Can you read it?’ you joked (were you really joking?). ‘I can,’ he said. ‘Very well, read it,’ you said. ‘Lift me up,’ he said. You hesitated a moment. You were just about to have a coughing fit, but you held it back. You brought your father’s chair from behind his desk. Young Younis stood on it. He pointed his little hand to an empty space between two blocks of writing in the upper middle of the design and said, ‘That’s where we go in.’ Then to an empty space on the left-hand side and said, ‘And that’s where we come out.’ ‘Clear enough,’ I told my nephew. ‘That’s the way in and that’s the way out, but you haven’t read what’s written.’ ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Where we go in it’s the word diiq and we come out at faraj, and the longest path between the entrance and the exit is through the word hayra. Do you know what hayra means, Uncle?’ ‘I know,’ I said.

  What young Younis said threw light on mysterious aspects of your father’s design. The words and lines emerged from a state of occultation to one of epiphany, as the Sufis say, and what you thought was playing really was playing, but playing by someone who, in an intricate and abstruse manner, was writing the elements of some redemptive talisman. The starting point of the design was the word diiq, ‘anguish’. You managed to work out the interlocking letters after young Younis pronounced them. The end point was the word faraj, ‘relief’. Then the word hayra, ‘uncertainty’. But in the middle was a fourth word that young Younis didn’t say, a word that offered a shorter way out of the maze. You made out the letter sin and then the a at the end of the word. The two dots were next to the a, not on top of it. Then you saw an open rectangle with another identical rectangle right underneath it. It was the letter kaf. Then it was clear to you that the fourth word, which offered a shorter way out of the maze, was sakiina, ‘peace of mind’.

  IX

  You told your relatives you didn’t want the whole world to know you were back. Your brother Shihab, now the head of the family, objected and said that custom required throwing a party to celebrate your return. You rejected the idea with a vehemence that hurt his feelings. Then you tried to ease the situation by saying you were exhausted from the journey and uneasy after so many years away, and you wanted to rest among them a while before they held the party, to which you would invite those closest to you and your old friends that remained. You calmed things down with this compromise, which postponed the challenge of meeting people you no longer knew and to whom you did not have much to say. But this wish of yours was not entirely honoured. You deduced this from the fact that certain people started passing in front of your house, people who hadn’t passed by very often since you escaped, since your brother Sanad went away and your father died. That’s what young Younis told you, reporting a conversation between his father and mother. So one of them had leaked the news of your return.

  Sitting in the diwan, you told your brother Shihab that the news of your arrival was no longer a secret and apparently there were people who had heard. Shihab, who seemed emotionally cold on the outside, said that no such thing had happened. Someone might have seen you and recognised you when you went to visit your parents’ graves. Then he said it didn’t matter because people were no longer as you had known them, and you were mistaken if you thought that the bonds between people here did not break in the same way as anywhere else. But what you heard from young Younis was true, or that’s what the remains of your vanity led you to believe. On the third or fourth day after your return, from the balcony that overlooks Muntazah Street, you saw Roula walking along bolt upright, wearing a black dress that reached to below the knee, with two children beside her and a third jaunting along behind her. Your heart beat so hard you thought they must have heard it throughout the house. In the pit of your lungs you felt a coughing fit coming on. You held it down with the palm of your hand. None of the adults were near by. There was young Younis telling you about his school and his knowledge of foreign literature, while you were watching the sun slowly set on a horizon flecked with red. When Roula was level with your house she looked up at the balcony. She saw you. But you don’t know whether she recognised you because she shielded her eyes with her right hand against the remaining rays of a sun that was still strong. Young Younis was reciting a famous foreign poem that compares life to a stage. You interrupted him and said, ‘Do you see that woman?’ You pointed at her. You told him, ‘Go and call her. Tell her your mother wants to see her urgently.’ Young Younis shot off like an arrow across the large balcony on the third floor and down the side stairs. He disappeared and then reappeared in front of the arched gateway. Then you saw him in the street. He seemed to be calling Roula, because she stopped. Then you saw them talking and young Younis’s hand
pointing to the house, not to the balcony where a middle-aged tiger lay in ambush for her with his memories. You went down to the kitchen on the second floor of the house. You called your brother Shihab, who was there with his wife and some of your sisters, smoking almost non-stop, imitating your father in the way he left his cigarette burning in the left corner of his mouth. You took him aside and told him what had happened. You told him, ‘It happened suddenly, so now try to find a solution.’ You went to your room. You changed the pyjamas you were wearing for a shirt and trousers. You stood in front of the mirror. You combed your hair quickly. You put some light cologne on your face, similar to the 555 brand that was popular before you escaped. In front of the mirror your nervousness was obvious. Your face showed signs of two conflicting emotions, each one pulling in a different direction, as though two separate epochs were trying to dictate their terms to you. You didn’t notice that your right eyelash twitched several times. You weren’t aware that your hand, which was still holding the comb, was shaking. You put the comb on the dressing table and it made a sound as if it had fallen from a height. You opened your bag, where most of your clothes remained, not yet hung on hangers. From a plastic container for medicines, you took out a packet. You opened it and swallowed a tablet. You felt the tablet slide slowly down your throat. You went back to the mirror. You stood stock still in front of it. Did you want to make sure you looked right for the occasion? Or to see the map that the years, your travels, trials and tribulations had etched on your face? Whatever the reason, you said to yourself, ‘I’m not the only one who’s changed, whose hair has turned grey, who has wrinkles starting to spread across his face, who has puffy bags under his eyes. I’m not the only one who’s been battered by fate, whose tattered sails have been blown to distant shores by winds and storms. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. She must have changed too, because from the balcony she looked like her picture in the newspaper when she received the Medal of Duty from the Grandson.’ Apparently you hadn’t been standing in front of the mirror for long when young Younis burst into the room, panting.

  * * *

  She was in the third year of middle school when you first saw her. Before that, just like other adolescents whose bodies had been shaken by new and unfamiliar impulses, you, Salem and Khalaf used to pursue a local girl, the daughter of the woman who owned the Mothers grocery, a girl who was susceptible to pursuit because her school was conveniently remote. Your heart was liable to throb audibly inside your ribs and you had little control over what went on between your legs. You also especially remember Widad, the girl next door, and the cream nightdress that clung to her body when she was washing the veranda of their house. The girl who smelled of perfumed soap. It almost came back to you now, the same arousal you felt when you saw the roundness of her firm bottom and the way she looked back, half embarrassed and half in collusion, when she saw your mouth agape, looking at her bottom and at the black underwear that showed through the wet nightdress. But until you saw Roula all these pursuits and early arousals had nothing to do with what you had heard and read about love.

  You were borrowing a book from the public library when your eyes fell on Roula, the girl to whom you would later say, ‘Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead’; the girl to whom you would write, loosely inspired by the Song of Solomon, ‘I remember the smell of your mouth better than the taste of wine, your underarm better than the smell of apple,’ even before you had tasted wine and before the sweetness of her mouth had become a memory; the girl who would write to you on pink notepaper after she discovered the source of your pastoral poetry and you began to share its gifts in secret: ‘Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am lovesick.’ You didn’t know the key to attracting women. You thought it was strength. Acting tough. Combing your hair with a quiff. It didn’t occur to you that words might be more powerful, when allied with inspiration. It was Roula who made you believe that you possessed, in words, a dangerous weapon you would use often after that, sometimes honestly, sometimes dishonestly, sometimes with success, sometimes without. With two of her colleagues, who looked like ladies-in-waiting, Roula was borrowing some reference book from the library. One of Hamiya’s virtues was that it encouraged students to research scientific subjects and the classics and to be competitive, so it provided a large public library for this purpose. You couldn’t keep your eyes off her eyes. She had big dark eyes, very black and very white, that stared perpetually into an unknown the depth of which was hard to gauge. She had two deadly dimples, especially when she smiled or laughed. She had a mouth like the bud of a Persian rose flecked with the dewdrops of a northern dawn, or so you thought, though you had never heard of or seen such a flower. As with the epiphanies of which the Sufis talk, or the inspirations that descend on poets from angels or devils, you knew she was the one your restless soul was seeking. At that moment you surrendered voluntarily to the power of those eyes, the dimples, the hair that trailed down like a flock of goats on Mount Gilead. You left the library before her. You waited an age for her. You didn’t know what you would say, what you would do with your stray hands. On other occasions you had had casual flirtatious words ready in your head and you had control over your hands. This time you succumbed to a state of lightness, weightlessness, imminent flight, and one phrase, or to be precise one feeling, took control of you. When she came out between her two ladies-in-waiting, you looked straight at her, ignoring the presence of the other two, who might as well have disappeared. With your legs trembling, your hands waving aimlessly, your tongue tangled, you said, ‘Excuse me.’ ‘Sorry?’ she replied. ‘Excuse me,’ you repeated. Her dimples played like the eyes of a storm about to break, and she said, ‘Excuse me what?’ ‘I want to have a word with you,’ you said. You can’t remember whether her friends stayed close by or moved away. You can’t remember, because you couldn’t see anything but her. It was she who stepped forward to where you were standing at the entrance to the library. Several steps to the right, where a giant cinchona tree cast a mammoth shadow on the ground. You seemed to be luring her in. You weren’t of course. Perhaps you stepped back because of the simple phrase that imposed itself upon you. Right under the cinchona tree, with the eyes of that storm about to break in her dimples, she stopped. She didn’t show any sign that she knew what you were about to say (or so it seemed to you). ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘I love you,’ you said. ‘What?’ she asked, and the eyes of the storm played again on her cheeks. ‘I love you,’ you said firmly. ‘Are you mad?’ she said. ‘Not always!’ you replied.

  You didn’t know who she was. Unlike her. Because she had seen you before. She had heard of what she called your escapades, such as the incident when you stole the exam questions, and then the branding incident, which was fresh at the time and common knowledge among young people. In Hamiya such news didn’t need legs or a megaphone.

  Although Hamiya is divided into separate encampments, one for each branch of the armed forces, each with its own housing complex and facilities including schools, there are meeting points that bring people together, such as the traditional central market, the park that is famous for its cinchona trees, the domed library, the sports stadium and the gyms, the art galleries and the cinemas. So people with common interests can meet up. In one of these places Roula had seen you before. After meeting her in the public library, you found out that she was the daughter of the commander of the Grandson’s palace guard. But you weren’t interested in her father’s sensitive position. You were not a complete unknown. You had the makings of a promising poet, as Hamiya’s weekly newspaper put it when it commented on a poem it had published at just that time, and you were also the son of the Calligrapher. In fact these considerations never occurred to you. You were living as though you had wings, living dreams that hovered above the harshness of reality, living life with a boldness that looked like recklessness to many. That’s what mattered to you. That and nothing else. Despite your attempts to be discreet and secretive in your meetings with R
oula ‘out of respect’ for her father, as she put it, the story of your love affair soon leaked out and drove her father to complain to your father. Your father, who was in no way held to blame, was furious. His anger had no effect on you. You had been swept far away, on a powerful wave of emotion you had not known before. But Roula started to discover in you things she didn’t like, or things she hoped to avoid so that your love might have a happy ending, such as your tendency to make hasty judgments, the banned books you were reading, your pointed criticism of the Hamiya leadership, your lack of respect for your elders and for convention. ‘Respect for elders’ was the precise expression she used in one of your angry discussions. The traditional ring of it, coming from a girl of sixteen, almost made you crack up laughing. But with a hug, or with one of your surprising turns of phrase, you could make her forget the subject in dispute and set her dimples back to work. She loved your explanation of her name. The second or third time you met, you told her, ‘The Roula are Arabs whose palaces are tents.’ But she didn’t understand. She thought you were making fun of her name. You told her that it came from the first half of a line of poetry that included her name, perhaps the only Arabic reference available for the name. She asked you what the line of poetry meant, and you said it was about some Arabs who bore her name, a tribe that is, whose palaces were tents. But she preferred the other meaning you came up with at another meeting. You had searched through all the encyclopaedias in the Hamiya library, and you came across the theory that the name Roula was a corruption of a Latin word meaning ‘lady of the city’. After that you started calling her ‘lady of the city’. She liked that, especially when you told her about how, when you first saw her, you imagined her companions as ladies-in-waiting to a princess from another world. She tried to defend her friends, saying they were dear friends and not ladies-in-waiting to her or anyone else, but that didn’t prevent a sly narcissistic glitter showing in her eyes. The name ‘lady of the city’ spread among the young people of Hamiya after you had a poem published with that title, a poem that imitated the Song of Solomon because you were enthralled by its pastoral lyricism and its ingenuity in describing love. The local teenagers liked the poem so much that a new boutique selling women’s fashions called itself Lady of the City. But the story of your love, which reached her father, was about to run up against an event that was taking shape in the womb of the unknown, an event that would have repercussions you did not expect.