A River Dies of Thirst (3 page)

At a light-hearted stage of life we call maturity we are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. We have renounced passion and longing, and calling things by their opposites because we were so confused between form and essence, and we have practised thinking calmly before expressing ourselves. Wisdom has procedures similar to those of a doctor examining a wound. As we look behind us to see where we stand in relation to ourselves and reality, we ask: ‘How many mistakes have we made? Have we come to wisdom too late?’ We are unsure which way the wind is blowing, for what is the use of achieving anything too late, even if there is someone waiting for us on the mountainside, inviting us to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving because we have arrived safe and sound, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but too late?

He looks upwards

and sees a star

looking at him

He looks into the valley

and sees his grave

looking at him

He looks at a woman

who torments and delights him

and she does not look at him

He looks in the mirror

and sees a stranger like him

looking at him.

Walking on his own, he passes the time by holding a brief conversation with himself. Meaningless words, which are not meant to mean anything: ‘What’s it all for?’ He hadn’t intended to grumble or ask questions, or rub one phrase against another to ignite a rhythm to help him walk at a young man’s pace. But that’s what happened. Every time he repeated ‘What’s it all for?’ he felt a friend was keeping him company on his walk. Passers-by regarded him indifferently. Nobody thought he was mad. They thought he was a dreamy, absent-minded poet receiving sudden inspiration from a demon. Nor did he consider he was doing anything wrong. He doesn’t know why he thought of Genghis Khan. Perhaps because he saw a horse without a saddle floating in the air above a ruined building in the valley basin. He continued walking to the same rhythm: ‘What’s it all for?’ Before he reached the end of the road he walks every evening, he saw an old man go over to a eucalyptus tree, lean his stick against its trunk, undo his fly with a trembling hand and say, as he peed, ‘What’s it all for?’ And the girls climbing up from the valley, not content with laughing at the old man, threw hard, fresh pistachios at him.

When he thought about hope he felt weary and bored, and constructed a mirage and said: ‘How shall I evaluate my mirage?’ He searched in his desk drawers for the person he was before asking this question, but found no notes containing thoughtless or destructive urges. Nor did he find a document confirming he had stood in the rain for no reason. When he thought about hope, the gap widened between a body that was no longer agile and a heart that had acquired wisdom. He did not repeat the question ‘Who am I?’ because he was so upset by the smell of lilies and the neighbours’ loud music. He opened the window on what remained of a horizon and saw two cats playing with a puppy in the narrow street, and a dove building a nest in a chimney, and he said: ‘Hope is not the opposite of despair. Perhaps it is the faith that springs from divine indifference which has left us dependent on our own special talents to make sense of the fog surrounding us.’ He said: ‘Hope is neither something tangible nor an idea. It is a talent.’ He took a beta blocker, putting the question of hope aside, and for some obscure reason felt quite happy.

Far away, behind his footsteps

wolves bite moonbeams

Far away, ahead of his footsteps

stars light up the treetops

Close to him

blood flows from the veins of stones

Therefore he walks and walks and walks

until he melts away

and the shadows swallow him up at the end of this journey

I am only him

and he is only me

in different images.

Noticing how many of my dreams are lost, I stop myself demanding too much water from the mirage. I confess I have grown tired of long dreams that take me back to the point where they begin and I end, without us ever meeting in the morning. I will make my dreams from my daily bread to avoid disappointment. For dreaming is not seeing the unseen, in the form of an object of desire, but not knowing you are dreaming. However, you have to know how to wake up. Waking up is when the real arises from the imaginary in a revised version, when poetry returns safely from the heavenly realms of elevated language to an earth that doesn’t resemble its poetic image. Can I choose my dreams, so that I do not dream of the unattainable, so that I become a different person who dreams that he can tell the difference between a live man who thinks he is dead and a dead man who thinks he is alive? I am alive, and when I’m not dreaming I say: ‘I didn’t dream, and it did me no harm.’

He walks along the same road, at the same time of day, content with the chance the evening offers him to savour the air at leisure. He is sad when he notices the growing decline in the number of olive trees, while the buildings grow bigger, like our sufferings, and the amount of space diminishes. But the young girls grow more numerous, older, more mature, and do not fear time lying in wait for them at the end of the road that descends into the valley. He looks at them without desire and they look curiously back at him and say: ‘Good evening, Uncle!’ He loves them without a lump the size of a quince constricting his breathing, celebrates the beauty of their freshness, and the freshness of their hopes, as he would music, a watercolour, a blue-tailed bird. They want time to move fast so they can paint their nails a provocative red and wear high heels that crack walnuts and make people jump. He wants time to slow down so he can prolong the enjoyment of walking among them, of being next to this self-contained beauty. It doesn’t matter that he remembers that when he was younger he would envy himself as he walked, on other roads, with a beautiful girl, and say: ‘Is this really all mine?’ Then he continues along the street alone. He counts the remaining olive trees on his fingers and delights in the gazelles leaping around him unconcernedly, and envies nobody, least of all himself.

How far is far?

How many ways to get there?

We walk

and walk towards meaning

and don’t arrive

It is a mirage

guide of the confused

to distant water

futile and heroic

We walk, and in the desert

we grow wiser

and don’t say: ‘Because the wilderness is perfection’

But our wisdom needs a song

with a lively tempo

so that hope doesn’t flag

How far is far?

How many ways to get there?

I’ve been here for ten years. This evening I sit in the small garden on my plastic chair and look at the place, intoxicated by the red stone. I count the steps leading up to my room on the second floor. Eleven steps. To the right is a large fig tree overshadowing some small peach trees, to the left a Lutheran church, and beside the stone steps an abandoned well and a rusty bucket and unwatered flowers soaking up little drops of the night’s first milky dew. I’m here with forty other people to see a play with little dialogue about the curfew, whose forgotten protagonists are dotted about the garden and on the steps and the large balcony. An improvised play, or a work in progress, like our life. I steal a glance at my open window and say to myself: ‘Am I up there?’ I enjoy rolling the question down the steps and integrating it into the elements of the play. In the last act everything will remain unchanged. The fig tree in the garden. The Lutheran church facing it. Sunday in its usual place on the calendar, and the abandoned well and the rusty bucket. But I will be neither in my room nor in the garden. This is what the text demands: someone has to be absent to lighten the burden of the place.

He was afraid. He said in a loud voice: ‘I’m afraid.’ The windows were firmly closed, and the echo rose and spread: ‘I’m afraid.’ He was silent, but the walls repeated: ‘I’m afraid.’ The door, chairs, tables, curtains, rugs, candles, pens and pictures all said: ‘I’m afraid.’ Fear was afraid and shouted: ‘Enough!’ But the echo did not reply: ‘Enough!’ He was afraid to stay in the house and went out into the street. He saw a mangled poplar tree and was afraid to look at it for some unknown reason. A military vehicle drove by at speed and he was afraid to walk along the street. He was afraid to go back into the house but had no choice. He was afraid he had left the key inside, and when he found it in his pocket he was reassured. He was afraid the electricity had been cut off. He pressed the switch in the passage leading to the stairs and the light came on, so he was reassured. He was afraid he would slip on the stairs and break his pelvis, but it didn’t happen so he was reassured. He put the key in the lock and was afraid the door wouldn’t open, but it did, so he was reassured. He went inside and was afraid he had left himself sitting on the chair, afraid. When he was sure that he was the one who had entered the house, and not somebody else, he stood in front of the mirror, and when he recognised his face in the mirror, he was reassured. He listened to the silence, and did not hear anything saying: ‘I’m afraid,’ and was reassured. For some obscure reason, he was no longer afraid.

I listen to the silence. Is there such a thing as silence? If we were to forget its name and listen intently to what is in it, we would hear the sound of the winds roaming in space and the cries that have found their way back to the earliest caves. Silence is a sound which has evaporated and disappeared in the wind and fragmented into echoes preserved in cosmic water jars. If we were to listen intently, we would hear the thud of the apple against a stone in God’s garden, Abel’s cry of fear when he first sees his own blood, the original moans of desire between a man and a woman who don’t know what they are doing. We would hear Jonah’s meditations in the belly of the whale and the secret negotiations between the ancient gods. If we were to listen intently to what is behind the veil of silence, we would hear nocturnal conversations between the prophets and their wives, the rhythms of the earliest poetry, sybarites complaining of boredom, horses’ hooves in a war in an unspecified time and place, the music accompanying the sacred ritual of debauchery, Gilgamesh’s tears over his friend Enkidu, the monkey’s bewilderment as he jumps from out of the trees to occupy the throne of the tribe, Sarah and Hagar exchanging insults. If we were to listen intently to the sound of silence, we would talk less.

As if you were someone else indifferent

you did not wait for anyone

You walked along the pavement

I walked behind you disconcerted

If you were me I would say to you:

‘Wait for me at sunset’

And you would not say: ‘If you were me

the stranger would not need the stranger’

The sun smiled at the hills. And we smiled

at the women passing. And none of the women said:

‘There’s someone talking to himself’

You did not wait for anyone

You walked along your pavement indifferent

and I walked behind you disconcerted

and the sun set behind us

and you took a step or two towards me

and did not find me standing there or walking on

And I went up to you and did not find you

Was I alone without realising

That I was alone? None of the women said

‘There’s somebody

chasing himself.’

Darkness. I fell off the bed troubled by a question: Where am I? I searched for my body and felt it searching for me. I looked for the light switch so that I could see what was happening to me, but couldn’t find it. I tripped over my chair and knocked it over and it knocked me over onto I don’t know what. Like a blind man seeing with his fingers, I felt around for a wall to lean against and collided with a wardrobe. I opened it and my hand came into contact with clothes, which I sniffed and found smelt of me. I realised I was in my own domain but had become separated from it. I continued the search for the light switch to see if this was true, and found it. I recognised my things: my bed, my book, my suitcase, and the person in pyjamas was more or less me. I opened the window and heard dogs barking in the valley. But I didn’t remember when I had returned, couldn’t recall standing on the bridge. I thought I must be only dreaming that I was here. I washed my face in cold water and was convinced I was awake. I went to the kitchen and saw fresh fruit and unwashed dishes, indicating that I’d had an evening meal here. But when was that? I flicked through my passport and realised I had arrived that day, but couldn’t remember going away. Had some gap opened up in my memory? Had my mental existence split off from my physical one? I was scared and called a friend, even though it was late at night: ‘There’s something wrong with my memory. Where am I?’ ‘You’re in Ramallah.’ ‘When did I get here?’ ‘Today. We were together this afternoon in Vatche Garden.’ ‘Why don’t I remember? Do you think I’m ill?’ ‘It’s not the illness you’re thinking of: it’s the longing to forget!’

A river was here

and it had two banks

and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds

A small river moving slowly

descending from the mountain peaks

visiting villages and tents like a charming lively guest

bringing oleander trees and date palms to the valley

and laughing to the nocturnal revellers on its banks:

‘Drink the milk of the clouds

and water the horses

and fly to Jerusalem and Damascus’

Sometimes it sang heroically

at others passionately

It was a river with two banks

and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds