The Scarecrow (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  Across the room from him, the chief merchant said, “The threat does not lie in taking it seriously. The danger comes from another site that is closer to us than our jugular veins.”

  The council members gazed at him with interest, but he did not turn to face his peers. Instead he traced a symbol on the ground with his finger and then concluded cryptically, “The threat lies in the title!”

  More than one voice asked, “The title?”

  “In the awe-inspiring title of leader.”

  They exchanged covert glances, and the hero interjected, “You’re right! The tribes have learned from long experience that a man remains a man like any other until the Spirit World tests him with leadership. Afterward he is changed and transformed much as nursing infants are when their mothers neglect them and leave them in areas that aren’t safeguarded by knife blades. I think our late comrade is a prime example of what I’m talking about.”

  They retreated into silence again. They traveled far away, wandering in other realms. They circled the deserts and descended into the caverns. The cavern into which suspicious people descend during hours of despondency, however, is not merely enveloped in gloom—it is also bottomless, because it is a cavern that is not temporally perceived or located in space.

  Even so, the peers heard a voice issue from Imaswan Wandarran’s cavern: “What is the secret reason for the change, I wonder? Shouldn’t we consider this a symptom of a major defect?”

  From the cavern symbolized by the cryptic mark he had traced in the dirt with his finger, the man with two veils spoke again. “We wrong the man on whom we bestow the title of leader if we think he possesses a choice in the matter. We forget that the leader is a miserable creature because he isn’t his own master.”

  He fell silent. Ah’llum urged him to clarify his statement: “Take one more step, because we haven’t understood.”

  “‘Areyakhrakan yaqled Anhi. He who has lost his way should consult Anhi.’ This is what the Lost Book teaches us in its laws. We forget that leadership is a form of sovereignty, and that sovereignty is as haunted a place as the site of a treasure.”

  Imaswan Wandarran cried out, “Did you call sovereignty a haunted site?”

  “If the Spirit World’s tribes seized control of gold in the first age, and forbade its use by anyone else in the ancient covenant our forefathers discussed in our lost Law, the jinn had already seized control of leadership long before that. They singled out sovereignty as their homeland before they ever seized control of gold dust.”

  “Reports of an irrevocable gold-dust covenant between our forefathers and the people of the Spirit Word have reached us, but we have never previously heard of a group seizing control of sovereignty.”

  More than one voice moaned appreciatively in support of their comrade’s clarification. So the chief merchant continued his struggle to reveal the secret of leadership with the keys provided by talismans he had drawn in the dirt.

  “It is right for a merchant to discuss haunted homelands, because merchants are the only community that uses a haunted currency for their transactions. Yes, yes: treasures are our currency, and leadership is not merely the mainstay of treasure, which is what the masses imagine, but actually the secret of the treasure, the mate of the treasure, and the head of the treasure.”

  He buried legions of talismans beneath a pile of dirt and plucked from the earth a handful of pebbles of different colors. He heaped these in his palm and gazed at them absentmindedly.

  From an unidentified cavern a voice called out, “In the time when rocks were moist and the earth was inhabited only by the people of the Spirit World, Grandfather Mandam descended to it after he was exiled from his unidentified homeland. Dressed in the rags of desert nomads, the jinn went out to meet him. They had decided to offer a little secret to this migrant, who was exhausted by the curse of interminable travel. They told their guest that they were the desert’s masters and that if he wished to enjoy living in their kingdom, he merely had to obey their Law and accept a covenant whereby the son of the desert lands would become lord of these lands but leave the affairs of the spiritual worlds to the inhabitants of those worlds. Then curiosity gnawed on the human being’s heart. So he asked these people what the spiritual worlds hid. Their leader’s cryptic reply has been passed down through the generations. It is said that the jinn’s leader declared to our ancient ancestor on that day, ‘Our distinguished guest errs if he asks this, but we should excuse him, since we understand that his curiosity was the sole reason for his banishment. So know, then, that should you learn this, your knowledge would not increase but decrease and what you learn would harm you. The spiritual worlds we inhabit are the abode of the wilderness that the desert and the desert people, who will descend from your loins, occupy. The spiritual worlds are not merely a home for the empty land; they stand supreme over its head. So you must entrust your affairs to the spiritual worlds forever and never raise your head—if you want to enjoy your stay in your new homeland. If you are arrogant and wish to impose yourself as sovereign over the sovereignty of the spiritual worlds, evil will track you down, and you will suffer. So beware!’ The immigrant, who was footloose by nature, did not merely dare to raise his head and walk proudly in the desert, thinking he would reach as high as the mountains, but began to strive to devise a path for himself to the heavens. He whispered, hinted, and searched for a secret that could convey him to the spiritual worlds so he could seize control of them, because he realized that human beings would never be able to possess the wilderness if they didn’t find a way to seize control of the spiritual worlds. The people of the Spirit World thought they would punish this upstart for his violation of the covenant. So they allowed him to fall asleep. Then they excised his heart, which they replaced with a different one. They removed his brain and substituted another one. They amputated his hand and grafted another in its place. When the upstart woke, he found that the compassion in his heart had fled and been replaced by cruelty, that wisdom had quit his head and left in its stead stupidity and delusion, and that his right hand—which had been loath to reach up to chase a fly from his face—now rushed to slay everything in the desert. His tongue declared blasphemously that day: ‘I am sovereign over the earth. I am lord of all creatures. Haven’t the people of the Spirit World left me in the desert as their lieutenant? Didn’t the lords of the spiritual worlds install me as lord over the wilderness?’ On that ill-omened day, the upstart did not merely lift his head to boast before the heavens but also used his hand to slay. He killed—for the first time in the history of the desert. Since that day, killing has become one of the laws that rulers follow. Since that day, replacing leaders has become a favorite pastime for inhabitants of the Spirit World.”

  The chief merchant leaned over the pebbles, which had colors that people of the desert usually found only in beads, and covered this pile with the palm of his other hand. He began to crush the pebbles together between his two hands as if this were a ritual associated with some magic spell.

  The members of the council fell prey to despondency, but Amasis the Younger waddled toward the chief merchant, dropped to his knees, and stuck out his neck to scrutinize his neighbor with a very long, inquisitive look, which not only suggested curiosity but also the suspicion that leaps from the eyes of people when they converse with individuals of dubious mental acuity. Finally Amasis, as if whispering a blandishment into the ear of a girlfriend, asked, “What are you trying to say?”

  Stillness overwhelmed the council, and the members’ fingers ceased furrowing the dirt, fiddling with pieces of stone, or fingering the hems of their garments. This time the men held their breath—not to quench the thirst of base curiosity, which can never be quenched, but from a desire for the wisdom hidden in the folds of a proverb and from their yearning to acquire the truth to which the Law’s counsel alluded.

  At that hour, the cunning strategist realized that the time had come, because his slow deliberation had realized its goal and hearts had emptied of the ma
rkets’ babble and of worldly whispers. Purity had washed their hearts and prepared people to learn. So he spoke.

  As he clenched his fist around his amulet and gazed at the elders even more mysteriously, he said, “Beware of binding the cord of insanity round the neck of anyone you love!”

  As if waving his protest in the face of the man seated there, Imaswan Wandarran sprang into the debate: “What does this mean? What are you trying to say?”

  “If you allow one among you to go there, you should realize that you will lose him forever—just as you lost poor Aggulli.”

  “Aggulli was stubborn, arrogant, and duplicitous.”

  “Everyone who goes to sit on that ill-omened throne will be stubborn, arrogant, and duplicitous.”

  “What’s the secret reason for that, I wonder? Is it reasonable for one of us to lose his reason when he gains that title, even though he knows the whole affair from start to finish is nothing but a game within a game?”

  “We will find an excuse for the wretch when we learn that he acts involuntarily.”

  “Did you say ‘involuntarily’?”

  “Our life in the desert lands is a game, but life in the spiritual lands is never a game. The man who goes to sit on the sovereign’s throne is possessed by inhabitants of the Spirit World. He must see things with the eye of the Spirit World, not with the eye of the wasteland’s people. This is where the calamity starts, because the wretch must believe a matter that we see by the Law of this worldly life to be a lie. So from the day the haunted piece of cloth becomes part of him, he becomes a puppet in the hand of the Spirit World, which does not see that life is a game, that the sovereign is a puppet, or that there is no place in its Law for anything besides a seriousness that surpasses by many times the seriousness we boast of. Our error comes from treating the sovereign as if he were the person we knew yesterday. We do not realize that he isn’t merely another man—who bears no relationship to the man we used to know—but that he retains no relationship to any part of our world. From today forward we must be aware that the man we choose to command us is not simply lost to us forever but becomes another creature who never knew us and whom we haven’t previously known. For this reason, we shouldn’t expect compassion or any good from him. Indeed, we ought to expect evil. So will you insist on turning one of our peers, whose presence with us in this council delights us, into our worst enemy?”

  Imaswan Wandarran turned toward his fellows and glanced absentmindedly at their faces in turn as if waiting for one of them to bring him an argument quickly or to take his side in the debate.

  Finally he moved to confront his adversary with a painful question: “If what you say is true, then we treated our late comrade very unjustly.”

  The man with two veils responded with a courage that the tribes were unaccustomed to hearing from the tongues of merchants: “Do you doubt that?”

  “Are we murderers?”

  “Do you doubt that?”

  Imaswan looked at his mates’ faces in succession as if appealing for help, but their countenances were stern, mute, glum, expressionless masks, as if the jinn had replaced his friends and inserted creatures of their ilk into the council. He turned to confront the seated man again and stared at his face for a long time, as if seeing him for the first time.

  In a peculiar tone he asked, “Do you remember the day when you surrounded us with proletarian armies who demanded that we leave the affairs of the dead to the dead and appoint the living to oversee the living?”

  The chief merchant nodded his head yes but did not stop playing with the handful of pebbles in the palm of his left hand. So Imaswan resumed his questioning in the same tone: “I asked you then where you had come from, but you did not reply. Can you answer me today?”

  The seated man looked up from his game inquisitively. Then Imaswan leaned toward him as if intending to butt him with his turbaned head. Staring at him provocatively, he asked, “Who are you? Who are you?”

  The man with two veils shot him a proud, disparaging glance. Then he turned his attention back to the bits of rock. But Imaswan did not yield. With childish insistence he asked again, “Tell me: are you really one of the people of the wasteland or are you one of the people of the Spirit World?”

  2

  “If what you say about the sovereign is correct, how was our leader who sleeps in the neighboring tomb able to assume leadership one day with a finesse that hostile tribes acknowledged even before the tongues of the generations forwarded that praise—without being afflicted with the Spirit World’s lunacy, which you discussed?”

  The council members backed Ah’llum with a murmur of approval while the hero thrust his hand into his pocket to pull out the dark scrap of cloth that he used to daub his eyes during anxious moments—on the advice of the herbalist, who had claimed that the fabric, which was saturated with blue dye, had a magical effect and could relieve pain temporarily from his eyes and over time would heal their underlying ailment.

  The council had convened many times in the temple, and the members’ voices had been raised in dispute there. The sessions had been dissolved just as frequently, without the members reaching a consensus on a new governor. Neither the logic of the chief merchant nor the adage of this inscrutable man (whom they had found among them one day without knowing where he had come from or to which clan he belonged) disturbed them so much as their comrade Aggulli’s fate, which seemed to presage their own, should a thirst for sovereignty get the better of them and they aspire to become the ruler.

  On this day, when they reconvened, they discovered for the first time that whispers and doubts had demoralized them. They listened apprehensively to each other and were wary about what was said, as one comrade looked at another with a cautious eye.

  Before the man with two veils rushed to respond, the hero asked him for a slight clarification: “You should realize that I’m not discussing the characteristics of the leader of yesteryear to rehash the generation’s legends or to confirm the views of the masses, who did not know him. I said what I said, because the Spirit World rewarded me by making me a member of this noble council when I was young.”

  The chief merchant glared at him malevolently. He toyed with the edge of his lower veil to mask his reaction before he responded to the question with a question: “Did you find in the late leader the traits of leadership during all the time you associated with him?”

  “What do you mean to say?”

  “Was the leader in the tomb a leader like all the others?”

  “What do you want to say?”

  “I am saying that the leader of eternity was a poet before he became a leader. The invisible jinni called ‘poetry’ in our language conquered in his chest the ghoul we call ‘leadership’ in our miserable language.”

  “It is said that he recited charming poems in his youth, and I don’t deny that in my youth I recited couplets the tribe attributed to him. Everyone knows, however, that the Council of Wisdom stifled the gift in him because it thought poetry a game ill befitting a leader’s majesty. Similarly, on another day, it stifled in his chest his desire to marry the poet, because it thought that she too was a caprice inappropriate for the grandeur of the leader.”

  “The sages stifled in his chest the poetry of the tongue, but his poetry flowed out in his deeds and traits.”

  “Why not dam the flood head on? Why do you want to tire our heads with hard puzzles? Here, I’ll dam the flow and say that anyone who has settled in the Spirit World to become a poet doesn’t need to change and disguise himself from the world—unlike a worldly leader. The secret doesn’t lie in his being someone who lives only for play—as befits any ruler—but in his being someone who has known from the beginning that he will govern a wasteland in which he discovers the clearly visible face of the Spirit World.”

  “Everyone who knew him will acknowledge that he never was playful.”

  “Did you all spy on his heart too, the way you spied on him whenever he stood up or sat down, went or came?”<
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  “Playfulness, like passionate love, cannot be concealed.”

  “The wise way he ruled the tribe proves that he wasn’t merely playful but a cunning strategist too.”

  “People who knew him never found him to be anything but a shining exemplar of earnestness and an icon of severity.”

  “Severity flourishes only in the meadows of playfulness.”

  “Here we return to riddles via the widest portal!”

  “The playfulness to which we refer isn’t the sport of young minds, which is what the masses assume. It is, instead, a great secret no less significant than the Law itself.”

  “….”

  “If the question of playfulness were insignificant, people wouldn’t have cursed life and wouldn’t have found happiness to be harder to achieve than passing a camel’s neck through the eye of a needle.”

  “Do you consider play really to be this difficult?”

  “Play, like prophecy, is a heavenly firebrand. If it could be grasped by anyone hustling and bustling on earth, happiness would have been easy.”

  “Amazing!”

  “Our master, who slumbers nearby, didn’t go to the distant sanctuary to snatch the gift using the sovereignty of the intellect; he did that following the path of a possessed person who went to reclaim a bequest left to him by his ancestors.”

  “His ancestors?”

  “The Spirit World. For a man obsessed by poetry, the Spirit World is, quite simply, his homeland. I mean that a poet obtains by inspiration what sages do not obtain through the sovereignty of the intellect.”

  “Do you think so highly of poets?”

  “The poet is the only man about whom there is no fear of his becoming lost in the labyrinth, because he is the only creature who came to this wasteland as a lost wanderer.”

  “We merely need to search for a poet to rule over us on our behalf.”

  “I fear you won’t be able to find the poet I am talking about.”