Telepathy (2 page)

I didn't have a logical answer for her question and had no coherent theory about names or precise strategy for choosing them. I couldn't even claim decisively that the names I wrote actually resembled their characters in the texts. All the same, I liked the attractive girl's question and
was flattered that she felt I had cloaked my hero in an appropriate name.

I replied, “It's just something I sense, my dear. Nothing more, nothing less.”

It seemed that another character – Nashshar, a perfume vendor in the old market who was wall-eyed and who also appeared in a number of twisting alleys in the novel – was admired by another girl in the audience, because she stood up at the event with a beaming face and asked, “Will I happen to meet Nashshar in the old market one day? If so, will he flirt with me?”

I said, “Perhaps.”

She smiled and the rest of the audience did too.

Among those who attended the book launch and lined up to get their book signed was a man of about forty-seven. He was slim and his back was slightly stooped. He wore traditional garb: a thobe, turban, and shoes made of cheap goat skin. His stance seemed a bit shaky, and he kept turning around.

He was the sort of person who would attract attention at any gathering and actually had attracted mine, despite the crowd, the many questions asked, and the haste of some people to obtain a “sound bite”, as is often the case at cultural affairs. I saw him rub against a young girl in the queue ahead of him – in a manner that seemed unintentional and caused by his agitation. The girl, who was wearing makeup and eye shadow that did not coordinate, turned toward him, frowned, left the line, and headed out carrying a copy without a signature. I saw him open the
book, peruse it for a moment, and then close it. When the man finally stood before me and placed his copy on the table for me to sign, he didn't hold out his hand to greet me the way the others had. He dropped the copy carelessly on the table and stood there with a distant gaze that swiveled in whatever direction his eyes chanced to look, without focusing on anything. I asked him his name so I could write a dedication for him in the book. He turned toward me, providing me an opportunity to notice in his eyes a gleam that quickly passed.

He said, “It's not for me. I'm going to give it to my sweetheart, Ranim. I'll bring you my own copy to sign some other day. Just write: To my precious sweetheart, Ranim, with my love.”

I wrote the dedication to his precious sweetheart, Ranim, with his love, not mine, on the first page, and held the book out to him. He grasped it quickly and proceeded to stagger off. He was certainly an odd fellow, just as agitated as could be. I had never met a man of his age with such an obvious tremor, wearing traditional clothing, who was supposedly a passionate lover of a girl named Ranim. Ranim is a name used only recently here and it would be impossible for a woman of his generation to be called that. But I didn't brood about this much and soon totally forgot him in the throng of people who clustered around me – among them close friends who wanted us to conclude the evening elsewhere.

When we eventually went out to the street after the event, Ranim's shaky lover was still staggering around the
area, carrying
Hunger's Hopes
in his right hand and a lit cigarette in his left.

Suddenly he approached me with quick steps and then stopped in front of me. Panting, he asked me without any introduction, “When will you return from your trip, sir?”

His question would have been perfectly normal if my trip had been announced. But I wasn't attending a cultural conference (so no one would have heard about it that way), I wasn't seeking medical treatment so that a journalist might have written that I was ill and traveling abroad for treatment, and I didn't remember referring to a forthcoming trip on my Facebook page.

It was a personal trip, one of a series I take from time to time to see a new country and to acquire the bits of information I need desperately for my work as a writer. I hadn't even told the friends who were standing with me then and attempting to shield me from a man they thought was an assailant.

I said, “I don't know” and moved away as I tried to think of the source from which Ranim's lover (as I thought of him) might have learned about my travels. I couldn't come up with any leads, however.  To spare myself further anxiety, I tried to convince myself that this man had merely guessed I was planning to travel – nothing more. Even so, I didn't sleep well the two nights prior to my departure. I would wake up with a groan in reaction to the acid reflux I experience every time I feel agitated or stressed out on account of the book I am writing. In a grim dream I saw Ranim as a tender girl in the embrace of a beast; her lover,
who bore no resemblance to storybook lovers, hit her with a signed copy of
Hunger's Hopes
and disfigured her with a lit cigarette in his left hand.

As I headed to the terminal carrying my suitcase, I sighed deeply and attempted to imagine a new country from which I might return with extraordinary Eastern spices that would get prose boiling on the hearth of my writing again.

– 
3
 –

The first thing I did when I returned from my splendid Malaysian trip was to seek out Umm Salama. She is a middle-aged widow whose military husband died in the Southern War while it was raging a number of years ago. She has two adolescent children bursting with curiosity, but her limited means curb their enthusiasm. She lives in a district far from my own and comes two or three times a week to clean my house and prepare my food.

I live in an excellent district in the center of the capital, in a house I purchased long ago. I am not married and have absolutely no intention of marrying again after my divorce – from a woman who loved me and whom I loved – seven years earlier. My ex-wife simply could not bear to live with the lunacy of my writing and perpetual travel, my bouts of pessimism and frustration, and the troupes of women who are always twittering at cultural events.

My house actually has been very well fortified against surprise visits of any type, and just a few people know where it is. By and large, no one visits me except my only brother, Muzaffar, who works as an aid coordinator for an NGO and who lives in a city in a distant region in the west of the country. He only comes twice a year, not to
spend time with me but to hang out with his friends in the capital, which we residents normally find less thrilling than do people who live in the provinces. On a few occasions, Malikat al-Dar visits me. She is an elderly, retired midwife and my spiritual mother, as I call her. She was a friend of my mother's and helped me a lot when I was starting out. I normally meet my friends and readers, however, in numerous coffeehouses. This strict domestic isolation has permitted me to organize my library the way I want. I have put most of my books in the living room and created two smaller libraries in the two adjoining rooms. Meanwhile, the master bedroom has remained free of everything related to reading and writing. When I enter it, I bring along only my drowsiness or my insomnia – nothing more.

Although I resigned from my post as a middle school math teacher a long time ago and haven't practiced any other occupation since, I have managed to eke out a living, one way or another. It's true that the furnishings of my house are very modest, but I respect that and love their modesty. I do not possess the latest car like those that brokers and social parasites drive, but my cranky old car, a Toyota Corolla, performs its duties on most days admirably and satisfies my limited transportation needs.

The next morning, entranced by the Eastern writing spices I had brought back, I was busily attempting to drag them onto paper when my cell phone rang. The call was from Najma – a presumptuous girl whom I had known for two years and whose arrogance still made me grumble occasionally. She felt so superior to the world that
she seemed even to breathe sparingly. She felt superior to the nation and its inhabitants and was fully convinced that the distant stars in the sky had been named for her – not the other way round.

Najma dressed traditionally and didn't follow modern styles, because she didn't care to be swayed by the fashions of this age or any other. Her perfumes were a mix of local and foreign scents so she wouldn't feel confined to one fragrance, as she explained. Her opinion of men could be summarized in just one sentence, and it wasn't favorable.

I met her one day at an out-of-the-way coffeehouse where she read me her story “The Neighbor's Goat”. The idea was imaginative and remarkable. One of the writer's neighbors owned a kid that could forecast the weather, volatility in prices, illness, and death. When the goat raged violently through the house, its owner knew that a military coup, a destructive earthquake, or some similar catastrophe would occur that day. Although the story showed a fertile imagination, it was poorly written.

I told the girl frankly what I thought and that she should rewrite it after she read more authors and acquired more literary skill. She did not like that at all. She quarreled with me and broke off contact with me for a number of months. She returned again, however, when she found herself in a quandary that she wanted to implicate me in – not to resolve it, because she would be able to resolve it on her own, at the appropriate time, as she put it – but for me to transform it into a novel.

During that period, she had moved with her family to an old district that was inhabited in the main by people with limited incomes, because her father had retired from a government post in the tax bureau and his resources had shrunk considerably. There, a young man who drafted legal documents in front of the Shari'a Court and who lived in that district, saw her and fell madly in love with her.

At first the young petition writer, named Hamid Abbas but known in the neighborhood as Hamid Tulumba (or “the Pump”), displayed his affection merely in swift, breathless looks at her face and trim body whenever he chanced upon her in the street. This display of affection evolved into the release of ill-phrased exclamations, when he found her waiting for a bus or taxi at the district's public transport station, and finally became thick letters with long, convoluted sentences. She would find these along the district's dusty roads, at the publicity and advertising agency where she worked, or tossed over the garden wall of her house. Sometimes one of her little brothers would bring a letter to her when he returned from playing in the street.

Laughing, Najma informed me with her extraordinary arrogance that she loved this situation immensely and wanted it to simmer for as long as possible so that it could serve as a splendid literary plot in the future. She had devised for the poor petition drafter all types of mud for him to sink in up to his hair. She had plied him with colorful smiles, carefully traced on her lips. She had provided him with glimpses of facial features that could easily be described as those of a dazzling, agreeable girl. Once, she
dropped a white piece of paper in front of him with only a question mark on it. One day she wore a screaming red dress and misted her body with a powerful jasmine perfume, because Tulumba had once written she was a red rose that emitted its scent incessantly.

Her dilemma, when I encountered her that day, had apparently reached a climax, and her lover, Tulumba, had informed her in the last of twenty letters that had reached her by various means, that he was preparing a house of love to embrace both of them, building a ceiling over it with a trellis of affection, and furnishing it with soft pillows of love that would never fray.

“Ah! Isn't this a splendid novel, Master? Isn't it a plot concept worth putting into words?”

In fact, it was by no means a splendid plot idea for a novel that contemporary writing would embrace. Stories of unrequited love, of requited love, or even of love between one hundred different partners have become so shopworn in all the literatures of the world that I believe they no longer attract mature readers. Moreover, even though I didn't know that unfortunate petition writer and never expected to meet him, I sympathized intensely with him and hoped that he really wouldn't need to pull his heart out of the muck and that his true-life ordeal would end. Besides, even if I had found the story concept convincing, I wouldn't write it, quite simply because I don't write from experiences that don't involve me at all. I have never written a novel based on an experience that some random person had and that I happened to hear
about. I have my own loose-fitting storytelling shirt that never feels too tight on the body of my writing. I have my imagination, my taste, my perfumes, my spices, and my paved and rocky roads that I traverse when I ride forth on writing's back.

That day I didn't laugh, even though I wanted to laugh till I died. I asked the sadistic, supercilious girl, trying not to anger her, “Why don't you write it? Aren't you a writer?”

She replied calmly as her right hand tapped her chest gently, “Of course I could write it, but it wouldn't enjoy a large circulation, and that's destined to happen when an established author publishes it. I want you to write it and delegate to me the task of enjoying reading and promoting it.”

“No . . . ” I said without thinking, as if the computer on which I write my manuscripts had spoken. “No . . . no, I don't write stories like this.”

That day, when Najma assumed a variety of colorings – primarily anger, indignation, and nervous tension – it seemed to me that she might actually be really captivating and attract many crazed admirers in addition to Tulumba, if her heart were to become more like those of ordinary people and if feelings were inserted into her – not lofty ones – just ordinary emotions.

I watched her hands. Their movements reminded me of a defeated person still struggling valiantly for victory. I observed her eyes a little and discovered that they lacked the limpidity of normal eyes. They seemed to be fitted with contact lenses to shield dark secrets that shouldn't have light
shed on them. She didn't move from her place but adjusted her posture. She struggled till the hint of a smile found her mouth.