The Scarecrow (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  An enigmatic smile glinted in the eyes of the wily foreigner. No—it was not a genuine smile; it was the shadow of a smile, a sign preparing the way for the birth of a smile.

  Then….

  Then he spoke. The retinue heard a soft, melodious voice—like the song of the wind blowing in the retem groves. “I’m sad to hear you had trouble deciphering this message.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Via the doll, the message’s author demands back from my master the woman (or women).”

  The leader gazed at the man’s eyes, which were as beautiful as a gazelle’s, and asked attentively, “The leader of the foreigners demands back the woman or the women?”

  “The beauty! The leader beyond the gates demands the beauty by means of the doll, master. The perfectly crafted doll in our spoken language means ‘beautiful woman,’ either in the singular or the plural.”

  “Beware!”

  “A genuine message, like a prophecy, always brooks more than one interpretation.”

  “We could return the beautiful women from Azjirr’s tribes, but how could we return all the women? Can we find for the leader of the foreign coalition his captivating daughter, who was allegedly kidnapped and brought by a warrior through the gates of the oasis one day?”

  “I beg forgiveness, but human issues are beyond my purview.”

  “What about the second half?”

  “The second half spells destruction!”

  “Destruction?”

  “Even children back home know that a skull is a symbol of destruction.”

  “What destruction are you talking about, wretched alien?”

  “If my master will allow, I will read him the message’s two parts together.”

  “Quickly!”

  “If the beauty is not returned, your fate will be destruction!”

  “What are you saying?”

  “This is the message, which was composed in the language of semiosis.”

  “But, but, this is an ugly threat and not an appropriate communication for one leader to send to another.”

  “A messenger can do no more than communicate the message.”

  “This … this is an insult, not a message.”

  “A messenger can do no more than communicate the message.”

  4

  He issued a stern order to the vassals, soldiers, and guards to search for the daughter of the leader of the foreign coalition. So they vied to investigate, searching every room, nook, and cranny in all the houses, but found no trace of the beauty. They scoured the entire oasis and plowed up the fields. Then they returned to stand before their leader. Some trembled with fright and others bowed their heads dejectedly.

  The chief vassal stepped forward and stammered, “It seems most likely, master, that she was sold in the markets and that men from some passing caravan bought her.”

  The leader, whose cheeks were yielding to pallor, stared at him with expressionless eyes. After a period of silence, he asked, “Do you mean that this calamity has departed from the walls of our oasis?”

  When the chief vassal nodded in the affirmative, the leader added, “If this female jinni has fled from the oasis, a curse has descended on it.”

  A new expression passed through the master’s eyes—one that was unfamiliar to the soldiers, vassals, and courtiers. It was an expression that no beast in a herd would see in the herder’s eyes. It first afflicts those suffering from some unknown angst and eventually casts them into ague’s kiln. The onlookers were a miserable community who viewed rulers and powerful figures in the world as gods soaring above the hateful paralysis called “weakness” in the language of the masses.

  The way the downtrodden see things, the weakness of sovereigns is always an ill omen.

  To fend off the specter of weakness, the chief vassal said, “I would have thought that the arrival of the beauty was the curse, not her flight.”

  “Would she have run away had she not first settled here? Her flight is a cunning scheme associated with settling here.”

  “I knew Ah’llum was a hero but have realized only today that he was a diviner too.”

  “….”

  “The day he left the oasis he said that when women are plentiful on a patch of earth, a calamity will soon strike there.”

  “The secret lies in his blindness. The secret lies in the affliction. Blindness turns a creature into a clairvoyant. The affliction makes a man a sage.”

  “I wonder where he is now.”

  The leader gazed at him inquisitively. Raising his eyes to the heavens as if to read a prophecy in the grim void, he remarked, “Somewhere in the badlands he is rubbing his hands together with all the intoxication of those who have waited patiently to see the day their revenge is accomplished.”

  “Revenge?”

  “People like him endure the pains of life merely to take revenge. Revenge for them isn’t merely a consolation; it is life itself.”

  “Does my master—like many others—suspect that our friend played a part in decimating the women of the oasis with secret potions?”

  The sorcerer journeyed far into the sky’s void. There was an uncanny glint in his eyes when he remarked casually, “We shouldn’t dwell on what is obvious while ignoring what is covert—either in our judgments or our lives. When the Spirit World frowns in our face, what difference will the means make?”

  “Had the women not been decimated, master, we wouldn’t have sallied forth to hunt for them. Had the women in our homes not been slain, we would not stand today encircled by massive armies we are powerless to combat.”

  “When a wanderer is struck by a destiny like this, he must read the message as it ought to be read.”

  “The message?”

  “The Spirit World never wrongs us. If a transitory calamity strikes us, we should welcome the lesson, because it is merely a trial. If the time is ripe for a disaster in our settlements, we can still control it, because we can fashion an ending that terminates the pain.”

  “If I understand my master’s words properly, their import is no doubt painful.”

  “The Spirit World has placed in our hands the panacea for all pains!”

  5

  The governor ordered the people’s nobles to gather.

  He received them on luxurious carpets in the courtyard of his glorious bastion and addressed them tersely: “The leader of the foreign coalition suffocates us with armies we cannot possibly repulse and demands the return of a girl we cannot find. What do you advise?”

  The miserable silence that followed reigned for a long time. The leader, who stood facing the group, clasped his hands behind his back and paced east and west, bent forward, as if searching for some bonanza or treasure on the ground. He was starting to speak again when a voice, which erupted from the crowd of noblemen, stopped him. “Did our master ask our opinion on the day he decreed civil strife and raided tribes near and far to snatch women? Did our master assume that a man could lie contentedly in the arms of a woman he had abducted with a sword’s blade? Doesn’t our master realize that a man who kidnaps a woman by force of arms is a murderer, even if destiny is slow to catch up with him and allows him to live a hundred years?”

  A soldier rushed to silence the man forcibly, but the leader gestured sternly for him to desist. When he took two steps toward the assembly, he spotted in the midst of the tribe’s elders a thin, scrawny, mature man who was turbaned with a faded veil and who clutched a burnished cane in his trembling hand.

  He did not wait for the leader’s response. Instead he added in the same daring voice, “We all know, master, that woman is a creature devoid of utility. She not only lacks utility but is actually injurious. Although we know this, we cannot keep ourselves from vying to acquire her. So we value her more than whatever is most precious in the desert and even consider her the crown of all the desert’s treasures. Therefore, intellectuals know that kidnapping women by force is a reckless adventure and an enormous danger. The total idiot who commits th
is offense wouldn’t have dared to embark on this madness had he realized that he was condemning himself to destruction. When he is not destroyed by the hand of her husband—if he survives—he is done in by the hand of comrades who pledge their fealty to him although their real goal is his treasure: the woman. When he is not destroyed by the malevolent conspiracies of these men, he is done in by the hand of the woman herself. This mysterious creature, whose secret no man has grasped, will surely poison his food one day, because a woman never forgives a man who abducts her from her father’s house—not even if she was abducted with her father’s consent. She will continue to harbor rancor and will scout for opportunities for revenge to the final day of her life. The man will never escape her rancor, no matter how many children he fathers for her. He won’t escape from her ill will, not even if he grants her ten children from his loins.”

  This mature man fell silent, and the courtyard was still. The vassals and guards discerned in their lord’s eyes a dread shadow, a sign that frightened everyone and afflicted their souls with despair. It was weakness!

  The leader unclasped his hands only to clasp them behind his back again. He was going to speak, but one of the notables rushed forward to address the strategist derisively: “I wager that the cunning foreign strategist entrusted that jinni woman to our master’s custody precisely because he knew our master is of jinni heritage!”

  A noisy muttering spread through the assembled crowd, and the vassals glanced back and forth between the two adversaries with confusion and astonishment.

  The sorcerer smiled with the forbearance of the ancient sages. So his interlocutor found the courage to add, “It is said that only a sorcerer can decipher a sorcerer’s talisman. The day the Spirit World brought you forth from the innards of your eerie scarecrow, we didn’t imagine that you would incite the rabble against us, ruin us with your taxes, or shed the blood of the elite while allowing the proletariat to conquer the earth. Today, when the specter of punishment looms on the horizon, you send lackeys to summon us to the consultative assembly you dissolved.”

  People anticipated an angry response. People awaited a dreadful response. People expected a veritable earthquake of a response but were surprised to see the leader’s head contract that day and shrink toward the leader’s chest till it almost vanished in the folds of his dark robe.

  His head became an insignificant blister on his shoulders. Then his body immediately began to shake with an alarming tremor. This feverish shaking was accompanied by the sound of muffled laughter—an ignoble, uncanny, detestable rattle that so provoked and poisoned their bodies with shudders and nausea that many people present were sure they confronted at that hour the scarecrow of the fields, and were no longer in the presence of the leader.

  The sorcerer, however, caught his breath and popped out of his flask to address the people in clear language. “Woe to anyone who waits for people’s gratitude! Woe to a ruler who expects any acknowledgment for a benefaction, because people construe good deeds as evil ones!”

  In a far corner, near the exterior wall, a local notable whispered, “For a citizen to dare to address a ruler insolently—our ancestors have warned us—is a harbinger of evil!”

  The leader, however, did not notice this whispered comment. Perhaps he did but ignored it. He clasped his hands behind his back and paced in the courtyard for a time. He stopped. Then he said, as if addressing himself, “What you all consider to have been the slaughter of the elite, others consider deliverance from an oppressive group. What some of you think was incitement of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, others think of as a return of usurped rights to those whose rights they had once been. Today most of you consider the importation of women to have been a foolhardy adventure and evil, but yesterday the majority of you considered it a necessity that saved the lineage from the ghoul of extinction. So what do the people actually want? Or, is there no way to satisfy man, who has a natural tendency toward wild fluctuations, anarchy, and insurrection?”

  He advanced two steps toward the assembled crowd and glared at them defiantly and challengingly. Then he tossed out an importunate challenge: “I will give you everything I possess if you answer my question: What does man want?”

  You could have heard a pin drop in the courtyard.

  THE IDOL

  1

  During the first stage of the siege, the strategist pinned his hopes on the desert and told the vassals that the wilderness had always been a resource for both landowners with water and enemies raiding other tribes. Rubbing his hands together repeatedly, he had said gloatingly, “The party that lays siege to another group, according to the customary law of the desert, stands outside the walls, far from the water—unlike the group inside the walls where the well of water is located.”

  But, in only a matter of days, this claim was rebutted, because the belligerent armies—which had supplied their water needs from the well called Harakat at the fringes of the Western Hammada—disrupted the flow of caravans and the importation of food stuffs, which the leader discovered were no less critical than water, because the harvest of the oasis had not been adequate even for the original inhabitants. How could it suffice once the number of inhabitants had multiplied many times, when foreign communities and lineages had crowded into the oasis from distant lands, and when women’s wombs—after the recent raids—had supplied it with columns of a new generation (which was, if possible, even more ravenous)?

  Realizing that he had miscalculated, the sorcerer reconsidered. He decided to resort to every sorcerer’s favorite weapon: an underhanded scheme!

  He selected a bevy of the most beautiful women in the oasis and sent them as a gift to the leader of the foreigners. Along with this present he sent an oral message via a spokesman.

  In this message, he acknowledged that he had read the leader’s message. He lauded its author for his sagacity in crafting its symbolism and said he understood that it was incumbent on him, as a condition for peace, to return the women whom men of his tribes had abducted. So here he was sending the leader a first group of women as a confidence-building gesture. With reference to the rumor that the distinguished leader was demanding the return of his youngest daughter (who was reportedly abducted one day and brought to the oasis), he could assure him truthfully that this claim was false, because he had searched the oasis house by house, nook by nook, and rock by rock, but not discovered the alleged victim. Should any doubt remain in the heart of His Honor the Leader concerning the veracity of this claim, he could send messengers to investigate and to search all the houses and nooks.

  The courier returned bearing a new message. This was an identical, equally superb doll, and no detail had been overlooked in its fabrication. The beauty was composed of ivory, linen, goat hair, and silk thread.

  The leader called in the caravan’s diviner, who had been stranded in the oasis by the siege. He gazed indifferently at the doll and translated the message derisively: “We are still waiting for the beauty!”

  “Is that all?”

  “I discern no change in its production to distinguish this toy from the first.”

  “Is there no reference in this message to the offer for an international team of inspectors?”

  The soothsayer shook his head no. Then the leader recoiled into his corner like a hedgehog. His head slipped down between his shoulders, but he did not sway with the rattling giggle of the scarecrow of the fields.

  2

  “Master, I saw an effigy, not a leader. I saw a dreadful effigy, larger than any statue I have ever seen.”

  The leader sat with his courier, who had returned from the raiders’ camps, and listened with intense curiosity to this debriefing. He remained silent and seemed absentminded. Then, still aloof, he inquired, “You mentioned a dreadful effigy?”

  “The fact is this wasn’t just any oversized doll. It was … it was a scarecrow!”

  “A scarecrow?”

  “A scarecrow just like the scarecrow in our oasis—except the foreigne
rs’ was bigger.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The very sight of it shook me to my core and made me feel dizzy. I had to search for my tongue a long time before I could deliver my master’s message to that idol.”

  “Did the idol speak? Did you hear a voice from the foreigners’ idol?”

  The messenger wiped away the sweat flowing down his cheeks with the edge of his veil. He sighed deeply before replying, “No.”

  The leader roamed far away and migrated to his naked, indifferent heavens, which were washed with a radiant blue. When he returned from his travels, he found that his messenger was singing the praises of the lost girl’s beauty and reporting that the leader he had seen crammed inside the skins of the hideous scarecrow would never renounce her, because she was as beautiful as the desert moon and men of the tribes could not milk their camels properly on dark nights, when the moon was not visible, unless the tribe’s beauty showed her face to them.

  3

  Once evening fell and the full moon appeared, he stretched out on the courtyard’s carpets and requested the female vocalist. He wished to listen to songs as he had often done during the days of lost peace.

  The bard plucked the string twice. Then the bird of longing fluttered inside him, and the desert disappeared from the desert. Times were transposed to violate the law of temporal progression by pausing in space. Tears glittered in the sky’s eye and winked back and forth between the stars.

  Then he sang….

  He sang along with the female vocalist in a plaintive voice. Obscure worries enervated him, and his eyes overflowed with a hot liquid like flaming water.

  He released a loud cry, wailing as he rotated from right to left. He was trembling violently. Then he collapsed, leaning his back against the wall, and gestured that the party was over.

  The singer left, and the chief vassal appeared. He took a seat nearby and gazed anxiously at the master. He searched the legacy of his ancestors for a key to start a conversation. “We have inherited from our pious ancestors their fear of listening to tunes, because music feeds the soul’s pain and afflicts bodies with chronic depression.”