Land of No Rain (17 page)

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She was in the third year of middle school when you first saw her. Before that, just like other adolescents whose bodies had been shaken by new and unfamiliar impulses, you, Salem and Khalaf used to pursue a local girl, the daughter of the woman who owned the Mothers grocery, a girl who was susceptible to pursuit because her school was conveniently remote. Your heart was liable to throb audibly inside your ribs and you had little control over what went on between your legs. You also especially remember Widad, the girl next door, and the cream nightdress that clung to her body when she was washing the veranda of their house. The girl who smelled of perfumed soap. It almost came back to you now, the same arousal you felt when you saw the roundness of her firm bottom and the way she looked back, half embarrassed and half in collusion, when she saw your mouth agape, looking at her bottom and at the black underwear that showed through the wet nightdress. But until you saw Roula all these pursuits and early arousals had nothing to do with what you had heard and read about love.

You were borrowing a book from the public library when your eyes fell on Roula, the girl to whom you would later say, ‘Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead’; the girl to whom you would write, loosely inspired by the Song of Solomon, ‘I remember the smell of your mouth better than the taste of wine, your underarm better than the smell of apple,’ even before you had tasted wine and before the sweetness of her mouth had become a memory; the girl who would write to you on pink notepaper after she discovered the source of your pastoral poetry and you began to share its gifts in secret: ‘Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am lovesick.’ You didn’t know the key to attracting women. You thought it was strength. Acting tough. Combing your hair with a quiff. It didn’t occur to you that words might be more powerful, when allied with inspiration. It was Roula who made you believe that you possessed, in words, a dangerous weapon you would use often after that, sometimes honestly, sometimes dishonestly, sometimes with success, sometimes without. With two of her colleagues, who looked like ladies-in-waiting, Roula was borrowing some reference book from the library. One of Hamiya’s virtues was that it encouraged students to research scientific subjects and the classics and to be competitive, so it provided a large public library for this purpose. You couldn’t keep your eyes off her eyes. She had big dark eyes, very black and very white, that stared perpetually into an unknown the depth of which was hard to gauge. She had two deadly dimples, especially when she smiled or laughed. She had a mouth like the bud of a Persian rose flecked with the dewdrops of a northern dawn, or so you thought, though you had never heard of or seen such a flower. As with the epiphanies of which the Sufis talk, or the inspirations that descend on poets from angels or devils, you knew she was the one your restless soul was seeking. At that moment you surrendered voluntarily to the power of those eyes, the dimples, the hair that trailed down like a flock of goats on Mount Gilead. You left the library before her. You waited an age for her. You didn’t know what you would say, what you would do with your stray hands. On other occasions you had had casual flirtatious words ready in your head and you had control over your hands. This time you succumbed to a state of lightness, weightlessness, imminent flight, and one phrase, or to be precise one feeling, took control of you. When she came out between her two ladies-in-waiting, you looked straight at her, ignoring the presence of the other two, who might as well have disappeared. With your legs trembling, your hands waving aimlessly, your tongue tangled, you said, ‘Excuse me.’ ‘Sorry?’ she replied. ‘Excuse me,’ you repeated. Her dimples played like the eyes of a storm about to break, and she said, ‘Excuse me what?’ ‘I want to have a word with you,’ you said. You can’t remember whether her friends stayed close by or moved away. You can’t remember, because you couldn’t see anything but her. It was she who stepped forward to where you were standing at the entrance to the library. Several steps to the right, where a giant cinchona tree cast a mammoth shadow on the ground. You seemed to be luring her in. You weren’t of course. Perhaps you stepped back because of the simple phrase that imposed itself upon you. Right under the cinchona tree, with the eyes of that storm about to break in her dimples, she stopped. She didn’t show any sign that she knew what you were about to say (or so it seemed to you). ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘I love you,’ you said. ‘What?’ she asked, and the eyes of the storm played again on her cheeks. ‘I love you,’ you said firmly. ‘Are you mad?’ she said. ‘Not always!’ you replied.

You didn’t know who she was. Unlike her. Because she had seen you before. She had heard of what she called your escapades, such as the incident when you stole the exam questions, and then the branding incident, which was fresh at the time and common knowledge among young people. In Hamiya such news didn’t need legs or a megaphone.

Although Hamiya is divided into separate encampments, one for each branch of the armed forces, each with its own housing complex and facilities including schools, there are meeting points that bring people together, such as the traditional central market, the park that is famous for its cinchona trees, the domed library, the sports stadium and the gyms, the art galleries and the cinemas. So people with common interests can meet up. In one of these places Roula had seen you before. After meeting her in the public library, you found out that she was the daughter of the commander of the Grandson’s palace guard. But you weren’t interested in her father’s sensitive position. You were not a complete unknown. You had the makings of a promising poet, as Hamiya’s weekly newspaper put it when it commented on a poem it had published at just that time, and you were also the son of the Calligrapher. In fact these considerations never occurred to you. You were living as though you had wings, living dreams that hovered above the harshness of reality, living life with a boldness that looked like recklessness to many. That’s what mattered to you. That and nothing else. Despite your attempts to be discreet and secretive in your meetings with Roula ‘out of respect’ for her father, as she put it, the story of your love affair soon leaked out and drove her father to complain to your father. Your father, who was in no way held to blame, was furious. His anger had no effect on you. You had been swept far away, on a powerful wave of emotion you had not known before. But Roula started to discover in you things she didn’t like, or things she hoped to avoid so that your love might have a happy ending, such as your tendency to make hasty judgments, the banned books you were reading, your pointed criticism of the Hamiya leadership, your lack of respect for your elders and for convention. ‘Respect for elders’ was the precise expression she used in one of your angry discussions. The traditional ring of it, coming from a girl of sixteen, almost made you crack up laughing. But with a hug, or with one of your surprising turns of phrase, you could make her forget the subject in dispute and set her dimples back to work. She loved your explanation of her name. The second or third time you met, you told her, ‘The Roula are Arabs whose palaces are tents.’ But she didn’t understand. She thought you were making fun of her name. You told her that it came from the first half of a line of poetry that included her name, perhaps the only Arabic reference available for the name. She asked you what the line of poetry meant, and you said it was about some Arabs who bore her name, a tribe that is, whose palaces were tents. But she preferred the other meaning you came up with at another meeting. You had searched through all the encyclopaedias in the Hamiya library, and you came across the theory that the name Roula was a corruption of a Latin word meaning ‘lady of the city’. After that you started calling her ‘lady of the city’. She liked that, especially when you told her about how, when you first saw her, you imagined her companions as ladies-in-waiting to a princess from another world. She tried to defend her friends, saying they were dear friends and not ladies-in-waiting to her or anyone else, but that didn’t prevent a sly narcissistic glitter showing in her eyes. The name ‘lady of the city’ spread among the young people of Hamiya after you had a poem published with that title, a poem that imitated the Song of Solomon because you were enthralled by its pastoral lyricism and its ingenuity in describing love. The local teenagers liked the poem so much that a new boutique selling women’s fashions called itself Lady of the City. But the story of your love, which reached her father, was about to run up against an event that was taking shape in the womb of the unknown, an event that would have repercussions you did not expect.

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.