A River Dies of Thirst (2 page)

I was there a month ago. I was there a year ago. I was always there as if I was never anywhere else. In 1982 the same thing happened to us as is happening now. We were besieged and killed and fought against the hell we encountered. The casualties/martyrs don’t resemble one another. Each of them has a distinctive physique and distinctive features, different eyes and a different name and age. The killers are the ones who all look the same. They are one being, distributed over different pieces of hardware, pressing electronic buttons, killing and vanishing. He sees us but we don’t see him, not because he’s a ghost but because he’s a steel mask on an idea – he is featureless, eyeless, ageless and nameless. It is he who has chosen to have a single name: the enemy.

What’s going on in Nero’s mind as he watches Lebanon burn? His eyes wander ecstatically and he walks like someone dancing at a wedding: This madness is my madness, I know best, so let them set light to everything beyond my control. And the children have to learn to behave themselves and stop shouting when I’m playing my tunes!

And what’s going on in Nero’s mind as he watches Iraq burn? Does it please him that he awakens a memory in the history of the jungle that preserves his name as an enemy of Hamurabbi and Gilgamesh and Abu Nuwas: My law is the mother of all laws, the flower of eternity grows in my fields, and poetry – what does that mean?

And what goes on in Nero’s mind as he watches Palestine burn? Does it delight him that his name is recorded in the roll of prophets as a prophet that nobody’s ever believed in before? As a prophet of killing who God entrusted with correcting the countless mistakes in the heavenly books: I too am God’s mouthpiece!

And what goes on in Nero’s mind as he watches the world burn? I am master of the Day of Judgement. Then he orders the camera to stop rolling, because he doesn’t want anyone to see that his fingers are on fire at the end of this long American movie!

I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if

the forest were free of the beast’s hunger

and the army defeated or victorious – there’s no difference – had returned

over the severed limbs of the unknown dead to the barracks or

the throne

And I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if

the wind carried it to me, and said to me:

‘This is your voice,’ I couldn’t hear it

I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if

the wolf stood on his hind legs and applauded me:

‘I can hear your voice, so give me your orders!’

And I said: ‘The forest is not in the forest

Father wolf, my son!’

I couldn’t hear my voice unless

the forest were free of me, and I were free of

the silence of the forest.

A flight of doves scatters suddenly from a break in the smoke, shining like a gleam of heavenly peace, circling between the grey and the fragments of blue above a city of rubble and reminding us that beauty still exists and that non-existence is not making complete fools of us since it promises us, or so we like to think, a revelation of how it is different from nothingness. In war none of us feels that he is dead if he feels pain. Death pre-empts pain, pain is the one blessing in war. It moves from quarter to quarter bringing a stay of execution. And if someone is befriended by luck he forgets his long-term plans and waits for the non-existent which already exists circling in a flight of doves. I see many doves in the skies of Lebanon playing with the smoke which rises from the nothingness.

In one minute the entire life of a house is ended. The house as casualty is also mass murder, even if it is empty of its inhabitants. A mass grave of raw materials intended to build a structure with meaning, or a poem with no importance in time of war. The house as casualty is the severance of things from their relationships and from the names of feelings, and from the need of tragedy to direct its eloquence at seeing into the life of the object. In every object there is a being in pain – a memory of fingers, of a smell, an image. And houses are killed just like their inhabitants. And the memory of objects is killed: stone, wood, glass, iron, cement are scattered in broken fragments like living beings. And cotton, silk, linen, papers, books are torn to pieces like proscribed words. Plates, spoons, toys, records, taps, pipes, door handles, fridges, washing machines, flower vases, jars of olives and pickles, tinned food all break just like their owners. Salt, sugar, spices, boxes of matches, pills, contraceptives, antidepressants, strings of garlic, onions, tomatoes, dried okra, rice and lentils are crushed to pieces just like their owners. Rent agreements, marriage documents, birth certificates, water and electricity bills, identity cards, passports, love letters are torn to shreds like their owners’ hearts. Photographs, toothbrushes, combs, cosmetics, shoes, underwear, sheets, towels fly in every direction like family secrets broadcast aloud in the devastation. All these things are a memory of the people who no longer have them and of the objects that no longer have the people – destroyed in a minute. Our things die like us, but they aren’t buried with us.

Metaphorically I say: ‘I won’

Metaphorically I say: ‘I lost’

And a bottomless valley stretches in front of me

and I lie in what remains of the holm oak

And there are two olive trees

surrounding me on three sides

and two birds carry me

to the side which is empty

of the peak and the abyss

so that I don’t say: ‘I won’

so that I don’t say: ‘I lost the bet.’

The mosquito, and I don’t know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is more destructive than slander. Not content with sucking your blood, it forces you into a fruitless battle. It only visits in darkness like al-Mutanabbi’s fever. It buzzes and hums like a warplane which you don’t hear until it has hit its target: your blood. You switch on the light to see it and it disappears into some secret corner of the room, then settles on the wall – safe, peaceful, as if it has surrendered. You try to kill it with one of your shoes, but it dodges you and escapes and reappears with an air of malicious satisfaction. You curse it loudly but it pays no heed. You negotiate a truce with it in a friendly voice: ‘Sleep so that I can sleep!’ You think you’ve convinced it and switch off the light and go to sleep. But having sucked most of your blood it starts humming again, threatening a new attack. And forces you into a subsidiary battle with your perspiration. You turn on the light again and resist the two of them, the mosquito and the sweat, by reading. But the mosquito lands on the page you are reading, and you say happily to yourself: ‘It’s fallen into the trap.’ And you snap the book shut: ‘I’ve killed it . . . I’ve killed it!’ And when you open the book, to glory in your victory, there’s no sign of the mosquito or the words. Your book is blank. The mosquito, and I don’t know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is not a metaphor, an allusion or a play on words. It’s an insect which likes your blood and can smell it from twenty miles away. There’s only one way you can bargain with it to make a truce: by changing your blood type.

The traveller in the poem said

to the traveller in the poem:

‘How much further do you have to go?’

‘All the way’

‘So go then, go

as if you have arrived, and not arrived’

‘If there weren’t so many ways to go, my heart would be a hoopoe and I

would know the

way’

‘If your heart were a hoopoe I would follow it’

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

‘I have no name on my journey’

‘Shall I see you again?’

‘Yes. On two mountain tops

with a loud echo and a chasm between them, I will see you’

‘And how shall we jump the chasm

as we are not birds?’

‘We will sing:

“Who sees us we cannot see

and who we see cannot see us”’

‘Then what?’

‘We won’t sing’

‘Then what?’

‘Then you ask me and I ask you:

“How much further do you have to go?”

“All the way”

“Is all the way far enough for the traveller to arrive?”

“No. But I see a fabulous eagle

circling above us, flying low!”’

They shouted ‘Hero!’ at him, and paraded him in public squares. Young girls’ hearts leapt at the sight of him, and from their balconies they pelted him with rice and lilies. Poets hostile to poetic convention addressed him in the rhetoric required to inflame the language: ‘Our hero! Our hope!’ And he, raised shoulder high like a victory flag, almost lost his name in the flood of epithets. Shy as a bride on her wedding day: ‘I did nothing. I was just doing my duty.’ Next morning he found himself alone, recalling a distant past that waved at him with amputated fingers: ‘Our hero! Our hope!’ He looked around and saw none of yesterday’s enthusiastic audience. He sat in lonely rooms, searching his body for traces of heroism, picking out the splinters and collecting them in a metal dish, feeling no pain. ‘The pain is not here. The pain is elsewhere. But who is listening to their cry for help now?’ He felt hungry. He searched for tins of sardines and brown beans and found they were past their sell-by date. He smiled and muttered: ‘Heroism too has its sell-by date,’ and realised he had done his patriotic duty!

It is time for the war to have a siesta. The fighters go to their girlfriends, tired and afraid their words will be misinterpreted: ‘We won because we did not die, and our enemies won because they did not die.’ For defeat is a forlorn expression. But the individual fighter is not a soldier in the presence of the one he loves: ‘If your eyes hadn’t been aimed at my heart the bullet would have penetrated it!’ Or: ‘If I hadn’t been so eager to avoid being killed, I wouldn’t have killed anyone!’ Or: ‘I was afraid for you if I died, so I survived to put your mind at rest.’ Or: ‘Heroism is a word we only use at the graveside.’ Or: ‘In battle I did not think of victory but of being safe, and of the freckles on your back.’ Or: ‘How little difference there is between safety and peace and the room where you sleep.’ Or: ‘When I was thirsty I asked my enemy for water and he didn’t hear me, so I spoke your name and my thirst was quenched.’ Fighters on both sides say similar things in the presence of the ones they love. But the casualties on both sides don’t realise until it’s too late that they have a common enemy: death. So what does that mean?

If someone said to me: ‘You’re going to die here this evening

so what will you do in the time that remains?’ I would say

‘I will look at my watch

drink a glass of juice

and crunch on an apple

and observe at length an ant that has found her day’s supply of food

Then look at my watch:

there is still time to shave

and take a long shower. A thought will occur to me:

One should look nice to write

so I’ll wear something blue

I will sit until noon, alive, at my desk

not seeing a trace of colour in the words

white, white, white

I will prepare my last meal

pour wine into two glasses: for me

and an unexpected guest

then take a nap between two dreams

but the sound of my snoring will wake me

Then I will look at my watch:

there is still time to read

I will read a canto of Dante and half a
mu‘allaqa

and see how my life goes from me

into other people, and not wonder who

will take its place’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that’

‘Then what?’

‘I will comb my hair

and throw the poem, this poem

in the rubbish bin

put on the latest shirt from Italy

say my final farewell to myself with a backing of Spanish violins

then

walk

to the graveyard!’

Yellow flowers make the room lighter. They are looking at me, rather than me looking at them. They are the first messengers of spring. A woman, who is not distracted by war from studying the disfigured nature left to us, gave them to me. I envy her this focus that transports her far away from our fragile life. I envy her the way she embroiders time with a needle and yellow thread broken off from the sun, which hasn’t been occupied. I gaze at the yellow flowers and feel they are lighting me up and dissolving my darkness, and I grow less heavy, finer, and we end up reflecting one another’s translucence. I am seduced by a metaphor: yellow is the colour of the hoarse voice that only the sixth sense can hear. A voice whose tone is neutral, the voice of the sunflower, which does not change its religion and always worships the sun. If there is any point to jealousy – which is supposed to be the same colour as the sunflower – then it is that we view our surroundings with the heroic spirit of one defeated, and learn to focus on correcting our mistakes in honourable contests.

The tree is sister to the tree, or its good neighbour. The big one is kind to the little one, giving it the shade it needs. The tall one is kind to the short one, sending it a bird to keep it company at night. No tree attacks the fruit of another tree, and if one tree is barren the other does not make fun of it. A tree does not attack another tree and does not imitate a woodcutter. When a tree becomes a boat it learns to swim. When it becomes a door it continues to keep secrets. When it becomes a chair it does not forget the sky that was once above it. When it becomes a table it teaches the poet not to be a woodcutter. The tree is forgiveness and vigilance. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but is entrusted with the secrets of dreamers, standing guard night and day, showing respect to passers-by and to the heavens. The tree is a standing prayer, directing its devotions upwards. When it bends a little in the storm, it bends majestically, like a nun, looking upwards all the time. In the past the poet said: ‘If only the young were stones.’ He should have said: ‘If only the young were trees!’