Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

  There were several secret organisations that were active. Some of them concentrated on trying to assassinate the Grandson, without notable success, while others tried to bring about a popular revolution and organise civil disobedience campaigns, but they didn’t succeed either, because the situation in the country was stable, security was under control thanks to the hidden forces keeping watch, and living conditions were reasonable for most people, perhaps better than elsewhere in your troubled part of the world. Why should they rise up against the Grandson and the status quo? For freedom? To express themselves? For democracy? To take part in government? These were imported ideas, according to the phrase favoured in the local press and media. The men of religion urged the common people to obey their rulers. It was a religious duty prescribed in the Book. That’s what they preached at Friday prayers and on feast days, when the Grandson made sure he was in the front row in his brocade gown with his ruddy face. But that didn’t stop the formation of secret associations that were hostile to the establishment and vented their wrath at the Grandson and his corrupt coterie, as they liked to put it. In one of the many attempts to assassinate the Grandson, the commander of his guards was killed: Roula’s father. It happened a year or more after you met her. The standard of living of Roula’s family didn’t change after the head of the family was assassinated, because the Grandson maintained all her father’s privileges just as they were while he was alive, as well as awarding him the new honorary status of an officer who had fallen in the line of duty. The death of her father was an earthquake that traumatised Roula. Her attachment to her father was unequalled. The first unfortunate repercussion of his assassination on your relationship was that she held you indirectly responsible for what had happened. She didn’t hold you personally responsible, but she said that the ‘poisonous ideas’ that you parroted were responsible for the murder of her father (‘parroted’ was precisely the word she used, which was insulting to your youthful pride). At the time you weren’t yet involved in any organised activity, and the organisation you would later join was not the one that made the failed attempt to assassinate the Grandson. It was another, similar organisation that thought in the same way and repeated similar slogans. But one of the good repercussions of her father’s death (if one may use such an inappropriate expression) was that you started to meet more often, and almost overtly. In fact, maybe it was that horrific event which paved the way for what would follow. Khalaf was close to your relationship. You happened to meet in his presence several times, or you would entrust your friend who hated books with the task of conveying messages to her because you were busy with something else. By that time you had joined a secret organisation that was called To Work, not because a book with a similar name was part of its ideological literature, but because it believed in deeds rather than words. Theorising did not play a prominent role in the culture of your organisation. In that respect it made do with a few books and leaflets printed abroad and smuggled to you in complicated ways. These were your inexhaustible and unquestion­able gospels, the teachings of the prophets of revolution with their thick grey beards and their long hair.

  Theorising, in the opinion of your leaders, was a game, a pastime for the petty bourgeoisie, just like ‘joining the ranks of the masses’, the policy pursued by the largest organisation in the arena. Your organisation was not against the masses; in fact it insisted on speaking in their name, but it believed that an organised elite could bring about change and ‘skip stages’ rather than wait for objective circumstances to mature. In your opinion revolutionary violence was necessary to push forward the creaky wheel of history.

  How long did your relationship last? Not long compared with all the water that has since flowed under the bridge. Less than four years. From the moment you told her ‘I love you’ without prior warning, to the moment when you promised her you would be reunited as soon as possible. You were telling her the truth, because you were in love and could not bear to be apart, and also because all you could see at the time was the moment and your immediate surroundings. Because how could you have known, when you promised to stay close to her, that your exile would last twenty years and that the fates conspiring in the heart of future time would send winds to carry your sail further and further away, right to the edge of the dark waters? But the affairs of the heart, and maybe of memory, are not measured in days. They have another scale that you don’t quite know. So her image kept pursuing you. If it ever slipped your mind, it would soon reappear. At least in the first years of your journey. Every female face you saw, every gait, every glance, every voice, every hand gesture, every dress and shawl and pair of shoes and pair of underwear, every bottle of perfume, powder compact and stick of lipstick you automatically compared with her face, her gait, the way she turned her head, her husky voice, the way she moved her hands, her dresses and shawls and underwear, her perfumes and make-up. Even the smells revealed only in moments of passionate physical contact were pleasant or repellent to the extent that they were similar to or different from the smells of her naked body. They were the references that found a home in your memory and laid a foundation for love and desire. The references that became a benchmark, that started to operate, by a mechanism of their own and independently of your consciousness, with every woman with whom you later had a relationship. Even after you married the woman you met on the Island of the Sun. When you kiss a woman you want to taste the wild honey of the first saliva you tasted. When you embrace you want to put your hand around that waist you used to encircle with just one hand. When you move close to her neck you want to detect the faint smell of sweat and jasmine combined. When you put your hand on her breasts, you want to feel them tremble like a brace of trapped partridges. When you lick her navel it has to reveal childhood secrets. When you go even lower, you expect the smell of marjoram. When you enter her, you prepare yourself, midway, for the pulsations and contractions of her vagina, for the way she held her breath as though she were about to die. You don’t know why these images, these smells and tactile sensations have been filed away so carefully in your head. You don’t know if they were so divine, so exciting and normative at the time. But that’s how they became. Your marriage to the Island of the Sun woman was not just a matter of solidarity in the struggle and admiration for her experience and what she said. There was also emotion and desire. Admiration and desire for a body. But why, whenever you slept with her, did you imagine you were sleeping with the woman whose vulva smelled of marjoram and basil and freshly crushed wheat? Was it the influence of the Song of Solomon? But no, words have no smells or textures unless they have some reference in one’s memory. Why was I enthralled by the ordinary in Roula and thought it such a wonder: her fingers, her feet, her neck, the many freckles on her shoulder blades, the way she opened her mouth and smiled, her husky voice, the expressive power of her dimples? Her shawl when it slipped off her shoulder. Her dress riding above her knees when she sat down. Her tense thumbs slowly removing her underwear. The repeated kisses after making love, lying skin to skin before you fell asleep together, while you slept and after you slept. What disturbed you most were the kisses that followed making love with any other woman; you usually did that out of a sense of duty or courtesy. Complete fusion, the melding of bodies and beyond bodies, getting under the skin: that happened only with Roula. Was it complete emotional and physical fulfilment? Or does the extraordinary power of nostalgia exaggerate what was minor and erase the margins, the peripheral, the accompanying symptoms, while preserving the stable essence, an elixir that might be of nostalgia’s own making, impervious to the ravages of time? Nostalgia, that disease or form of ignorance, to use the expression of a writer who examined it in its many elusive guises and did not come to any clear conclusion. You have suffered that disease. Here’s an amusing practical example. You love mint tea. Everywhere you have lived there was tea, but there wasn’t always mint, especially in the City of Red and Grey. But nonetheless you would contrive to obtain a sprig of mint, stealing it from parks that
cultivate herbs and plants that come from hot countries as well as cold. You would make tea your mother’s way: pour bottled mineral water into a teapot (because tap water is too hard). Put some sugar in, at least a cup of sugar when the water starts to warm up. Before it boils, throw a handful of loose tea into the pot. Bring everything to the boil. Turn the stove off. Lift the lid and put the sprig of mint in. Leave the tea to brew a while. Put the pot on a tray next to an empty glass. Take the tray close to the window where your desk is. Sit behind the desk. Light a cigarette. Pour the tea into the empty glass. Sip it once, twice. Take a puff of your cigarette. But the mint tea that you’ve prepared, although you’ve made it properly, doesn’t match the tea of your memory.

  * * *

  Young Younis didn’t budge from the room. He just said, ‘They’re waiting for you in the diwan.’ He remained standing a few feet away from you. You remembered your first meeting with Roula, the words ‘I love you’ and how, as her dimples prepared to make a storm, she said, ‘Are you mad?’ The smell of the cinchona trees, the kisses, the letters that came close to the Song of Solomon, the perfumed lock of hair, morning coffees in the central market, the suns that rose and the suns that set, the storms, the biting cold, Khalaf’s face and his eyes avoiding you. A videotape with a thousand and one images, replayed at speed as you looked inanely in the mirror.

  Suddenly, something happened that you hadn’t expected.

  You felt that all your sensations – the rise and fall of your breathing, your heartbeat, fast or slow, all the images that passed one by one through your head – were happening to someone else you could see in the mirror. You could feel exactly what he felt, and see the images, fast and slow, that went through his mind, but he wasn’t you. It was as if the two of you had been one person and then you had quietly split in two, like space ships undocking on a television screen. But you were strongly aware of him nonetheless. You even felt that his mouth was dry and he was trying to moisten it by producing a little saliva. There were three of you in the room: you, the other person in the mirror and young Younis, whose round eyes were darting between you and the mirror. You thought it had happened under the influence of the tranquilliser you had just taken. But no. Because when you put your hand on the shoulder of young Younis and said, ‘Let’s go’, the hand of the man looking out at you from the mirror did not move. He kept staring at you with looks that ranged between pity and expectation.

  With her hair tied back and her black dress raised to her knees, Roula was sitting on a chair under the calligraphy that read Souls yearn for you for eternity. You told yourself it might have been a coincidence, though to you she retained some of that aura of princess she had in distant days. She too liked that poem, which you had read to her. Your brother Shihab and his wife Fadwa were talking to her. You heard her voice before you went into the diwan, saying that she had been going to the park for a walk. It was the same slightly husky voice. The huskiness that used to make your head spin. Then you heard Fadwa say that you had been shutting yourself up in the room all the time. Then you went into the diwan. She stood up and greeted you. She looked shorter than you remembered her. ‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ you replied. ‘It’s been a long absence,’ she said. ‘Indeed!’ you said. Then she asked, ‘Just visiting or back for good?’ ‘I’m not sure yet,’ you said. Her dimples were in action, both when she was speaking and when she was listening. You felt that they were about to take off with full force but they didn’t. Some kind of intentional self-control held them back. The two of you didn’t know where to begin. All the things you said at the start were laborious attempts to discover the path the conversation should take. You didn’t come across that path. The conversation remained desultory. It went back and forth but didn’t lock on to a particular track. It was the talk of strangers, or of people who last met a long time ago. So commonplace talk was safer. She asked you if you found the country changed. ‘Sure,’ you said. ‘Everything’s changed,’ she said, ‘even the weather.’ Then she fell silent. You found yourself telling her, ‘That’s the case everywhere. Places change and people too.’ You chatted a little about how change was the way of the world, and then you shut up. She said you had become famous, and you said, ‘Not very. It’s actors and singers who can be described as famous, not writers. At least, not writers like me.’ She said, ‘But we’ve seen your picture in the papers several times.’ ‘Maybe,’ you said, ‘whenever one of my books comes out.’ You didn’t notice you were now alone, in front of glasses of lemonade with rosewater, until she said she had lost all those she had loved and that she had only her children left. Apparently you had made a reference to the black dress she was wearing. You thought of that ancient line of poetry: ‘Those I love are gone and I am left solitary, like a sword.’ But you didn’t say it. Your mind, quite separately from you, summoned up the words of the poem, which didn’t normally come to mind, and the line tripped across your silent tongue word by word. The line took hold of you and you couldn’t drive it out of your head. That saddened you, or upset you, you don’t know, and you told her, ‘At least you have your children.’ When you uttered this stupid comment you broke free of the line of poetry and relaxed. But she ignored the comment and said, ‘It’s not true what you wrote in your book Hamiya and the Bridge.’ You asked her what she meant exactly. She spoke about how the woman you had loved in your country asked you for a divorce shortly after you escaped abroad. She was referring to one of the chapters in your previous book, which was a mixture of autobiography and fiction. You told her the book was not a documentary work, not a real auto­biography, because it had imaginary elements, perhaps more than it drew from reality. She said something to the effect that even if the book was entirely fictional, that didn’t change the fact that the woman you were talking about had not sought a divorce soon or in the way you described.

  You remembered your contract of marriage to Roula, which you had found among your papers. It was dated about six months before your sudden flight. The conversation between you finally seemed to be on the right track. You felt comfortable and you felt no urge to cough.

  You don’t know how long you went on talking. Then the lights came on. Roula pulled down the hem of her dress, which had ridden up above her knees, exposing two round, well-formed, wheaten thighs that you knew well. ‘My deepest condolences!’ you heard her say, referring to your wife.

  X

  You had to face the person you had long avoided, the one you left behind twenty years ago. Or, more precisely, the one who hadn’t crossed the border with you to the City Overlooking the Sea, and had not lived the life you had lived since that moment. The one you hadn’t dragged with you from country to country, along with a small suitcase and a few books, the one who had not known the cold that had chilled you to the bone, who had not seen wars and sieges and how people can eat rats and cats, who had not seen the victims of the plague staggering in the streets and falling on the pavements like autumn leaves. You knew that confrontation was inevitable with this person, who would turn up at the worst of times, fold his arms across his chest, and scrutinise you like an obstinate examiner. He’s not a ghost. But also he’s not flesh and blood. You find it hard to define his status. He exists and that’s it. He’s here, exactly as you left him.

  That night you sat alone, as usual, on the balcony after the rest of the family had gone to bed one by one. The coughing and the insomnia, which had disappeared on your first nights, now recurred. Your remaining family did not stay up late on the balcony as they did in the old days. The nights of the past now came back to you, with their smells, the carefree laughter, the stories told in three or four versions. Your grandfather’s version. Your grandmother’s version. Your father’s version. Your mother’s version. It was usually the last version that decided between the other versions, because your mother had an extraordinary memory and could reconstruct faces, events and words with an accuracy unrivalled by anyone else in the family or in the neighbourhood. You felt there was someone hover
ing around you. There was someone waiting for this opportunity. Maybe you were waiting too.

  You knew that if he spoke he wouldn’t stop. If he stopped it would be hard to persuade him to speak again. You also knew that you were the one expected to speak. You first. Because you were required to tell a story that matched his story. A story justifying what had happened. Then you might be quits in his eyes: a story that settles the score after another story. But can one story mend the ruptures, patch up the holes in a life that has almost run its course? Is there a story that is the mother of all stories? An overall story. You don’t know. But nonetheless it’s definitely you that has to speak first. Go on, tell him one of the stories from your exile, your life abroad, your wanderings (call it what you like), or make one up for him. But what should you talk about? About promises, hopes, wars and sieges, the wandering life, the cold, waning vigour, sadness and death the reaper? That’s too much. Besides, you’re scatterbrained and disorganised. There is a story that might not make him very happy but it might hold his attention. It’s about the man who split in two. Of course he knows that story. But you don’t mean you and him, but rather you and the person whose name was the same as your pseudonym, who wrote in newspapers like you and who chased you tirelessly through a labyrinthine city of twisting lanes because he wanted to find out who had assumed his identity. Tell him that story, even if you don’t know what his reaction will be, but stipulate that he must listen to you till the end. Stipulate that he cannot interrupt. That way you can keep him under control if he rebels. You can sidestep his questions when you don’t have a satisfactory answer. You can take him on a wild goose chase with your convoluted story. You’re in a good mood now. Take advantage of it.