The Fall of the Imam (24 page)

She lifted her head with the pride unknown by a legal wife and said, ‘I am his mistress Gawaher.’ Their bodies swayed on their high heels, stirring the consciousness which lay buried somewhere, for in her black eyes they saw the pain-giving gleam which spells truth, felt it go through straight to the heart.

They asked in one breath, ‘Whose mistress?’

‘All of them,’ she said, ‘starting from the Imam down to the guardian of the mosque’s minaret.’

Their eyes opened wide in fear, and they hid their fear behind their hands, folding their arms around their breasts, closing up like a mollusc closes its shell, and gasping out in one breath, ‘You are the Devil, and your punishment is death.’ After that they fled, their high heels rapping on the floors like the sound of rockets bursting overhead. Only two women remained after they went: the illegitimate daughter and the legal wife. They stood with their hands clasped together, and after a moment the mistress held out her hands to them and the three women embraced, with six arms holding each other tightly above the dead body lying in the box. The smile on his face vanished, and his features seemed to evaporate, leaving a face which no longer resembled that of the Imam or the Great Writer or the Chief of Security or the Leader of the Official Opposition, or anyone in Hizb Allah or Hizb al-Shaitan. His face became faceless, or became the face of all of them merged into a single face without features, so that it was no longer possible to distinguish between one and the other except by a badge on the chest or a star on the shoulder, or something or other on the head.

In the mirrors of the universe was reflected the image of three women with upright heads, their big black eyes staring out like holes in the night and the world looking on in silence.

His eyes looked out at her from the box where he lay with a look full of love. Her hand caressed his head from the top to the nape of his neck, then moved round like a silk thread, tightening itself around his neck until he started to gasp for breath. The more she pulled at the thread the more he laughed, and she kept tightening the noose until his face went blue, so she loosened the grasp of her fingers and started to move her hand slowly over his chest, playing with the blue bead which he had worn since his mother had hung it around his neck, and which he had never thought of removing. Her fingers started to play with it, to catch hold of it and let it go, like the slender jaws of a forceps. ‘Your mother was afraid for you from the evil eye, and I fear for you from the evil ear,’ she said, pulling at his ear, laughing from the bottom of her heart and throwing her thick hair behind her back with a quick movement of the head.

His ear stood up, straining itself to catch the words of love, and her eyes gazed steadily into his eyes until the roots of the hair on his head became erect, and he hid the white hairs with a dye of black henna sent to him by his mother in a small sack made of calico. He dissolved the powder in water and dyed the hairs once and twice and thrice until they became as black as a moonless night, but the grey hairs on his belly and his chest revealed his age, and he kept touching the wrinkles on his face, opening his eyes wide with astonishment, for it was as though old age had crept up on him while he slept. Her eyes met his in the mirror and she looked away at once, fearful as though he had a disease which could infect her if their eyes embraced. In her eyes he could read an expression of sadness for herself, for she was still young and living and he was old and dying. He put his arms around her and wept between her breasts, saying, ‘I am defeated, Gawaher.’ She pushed him away from her with a quick movement of her hand, for deep down inside her she knew that he wanted to infect her with his impotence. With each encounter between them his failure grew more evident, yet he never ceased to come back to her like someone suffering from an addiction with which he cannot cope, like wine to an alcoholic which breeds a thirst so great that he can neither live nor die without it.

He would never admit defeat to her, for like an addict his exhilaration increased with every moment, giving him a false sense of being victorious. Whenever he was with her he would watch her body as it moved under her clothes. In her eyes was a gleam that showed like the edge of a sword and injected new life into him like a steel needle. His body quivered in her arms like a chicken being slaughtered, but her body was never moved at all. ‘You are different to other women,’ he would often say. ‘You are a woman who is unconscious of her body and conscious of her mind at every moment.’ After that he would yawn as though sleep had pounced on him all of a sudden, and peer at her with eyes full of jealousy, for he was more jealous of her mind than he was of anything else, sometimes trying to take her by force, to rape her, as though through rape he could restore the balance that was lost between them, only to reveal his impotence more and more. Once he left her he hurried to one of his legal wives to bury his head between her breasts and sob like a child. His wife, still fast asleep, would take him into her arms, and his hot breathing on her neck would give her a vague feeling that he was mortally in love with another woman whom he did not know how to possess. Thus in the midst of her sleep she would discover that a woman who belongs to nobody is adored by all men without exception, since she is the only woman capable of inflicting pain on them, and still asleep, she would say to herself: Men love only those who make them suffer.

She sees herself standing in the mirror, tall and slender. Around her head is a halo the colour of night, and her eyes are as large and as round as the disc of the sun. The curves of her body burn with the colours of the rainbow lying over the green hill between the river and the sea. She opens her arms to embrace the world and moves her legs over the earth, her feet treading to the rhythm of music. The melodies of the morning, like the harmony of the night, move through her body, for she has a mind that knows no rest and a body that never ceases dancing, and the air around is the music which she loves, and the music in her breast is the air which fills her lungs. She flies through space like a spirit without body, whirling round and round in a dance, like a spirit without the roundness of a thigh or the curve of a belly, and she raises her head to the sky and captures it. But she herself is captive to no one.

In her ear she hears a knock, followed by another, followed by another, three knocks that she knows too well ever to forget or to confuse with anything else. The small face looks out from the clouds, and she knows it too well ever to mistake it for anyone else, for she can pick it out at once from among a million other faces. The small hand protrudes from its sleeve, pale white, without a drop of blood under its skin. The eye is big and black, like a hole in the night. She hides the small body close to her breast and starts running, on and on, without stopping, and behind her she can hear them treading with their iron heels, for on the bottom of every shoe is a hoof made of steel, and in the grasp of every hand is a stone or an instrument used in killing. She lies hidden in her mother’s breast, close to her mother’s heart, and her heart beats with every beat of her mother’s pulse, and her five fingers clutch her mother’s thumb, and her mother runs on and on under cover of night before the light of the rising sun breaks out, and the sun lingers to give the mother a chance, and the moon too has hidden itself away in some place, and the stars have gone to sleep somewhere else, and so in the whole wide world you cannot find the faintest light, even if you search high and low. The guardian has locked the last door in the palace, reciting the Verse of the Seat as he slams the bolt, and the Imam is fast asleep and so are all the members of Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan, and even the wind and the trees have gone to sleep.

She stands and looks around, fearing to be seen. Then, having made sure that all is clear, she wrenches her child away from her breast and starts to make a smooth bed with the palm of her hand, brushing the pebbles and stones to one side and sprinkling soft earth over the surface of the ground to make it like the bosom of a mother, and when everything is ready she lays her gently down. Her face is a pale patch looking out of the wrappings and her teeth chatter with cold, so her mother removes her black woollen shawl from her shoulders and wraps it closely round the small body. A small hand touches the finger of the mother, and the five fingers curl around it closely, taking a tight hold. The mother lets her hold on to it for a long moment, for as long as the sigh which goes through her, for she had forgotten that they were after her and that the distance between them had shortened.

She let her finger lie in the little hand until her very last breath, until she stood up, looking down at her, and they stabbed her in the back, one stab after another without stopping, so she turned her face away from the child, refusing to look at them, and they continued to stab her from the back right through her body. But her body continued to stand up, refusing to bend or to fall from its upright position, for it had already fallen before, and when something which has fallen falls it can only rise up once more.

They shouted at her as loud as they could, but she continued to give them her back, for she knew that as soon as she turned round to face them they would run away. They could not bear her eyes on their faces, knowing full well that she knew them one by one, for starting from the Imam down to the guards and sentinels and lowest henchmen, at one time or another they had all come to her in the dark wearing a false face. But once in the House of Joy and in her bed, they took off their rubber faces and their whiskers and their beards and their turbans and their trousers. So she alone of all people had seen them without their clothes, without the badges on their shoulders, or the stars on their breasts, or the medals pinned to their coats, and they all looked the same, and smelt the same, and made the same movements, for it was always they who made the movements, attacking suddenly or retreating suddenly, or raising the flag of defeat suddenly and letting it fly like a cockscomb while the rockets continued to explode in the sky and the acclamations of the people continued to resound everywhere. And she would stand half-naked under the lights, wearing her dancing costume with the brass discs snapping between her fingers, and her body hot, her mind cool as the edge of a sword, and her eyes wide open and burning red, like the sun on a hot summer’s day. She stared into their faces, one by one, as they lowered their eyes to the ground, knowing that every one of them had two faces, a gentle handsome face with tears flowing from the eyes and another face dark as the devil with round bulging eyes and a nose sharp-pointed as a sword.

Her voice, when she sang, was music; and her body, slender as a deer, was love. She did not care if the stab came from behind or in front, for she continued to dance. She was not worried by the thought of death. She was not a member of Hizb Allah nor of Hizb al-Shaitan, she was not a man nor a woman, and she was not a human being nor a devil, but she was all these things at once, and even if a part of her happened to fall off, the whole was always there to continue the dance.

While they were trying to pull out her head from her body, they discovered that her roots were plunged deep into the soil, and they became as afraid as they were tired, so they hid their fear behind their exhaustion and sat down in the shade to protect their heads from the sun. They wiped the sweat on their faces with their handkerchiefs, and from under the cloth their faces were featureless, as though everything had been wiped away, leaving no trace of anything which could distinguish one face from the other, or distinguish one person from the other except a badge on the head or on the shoulder.

She managed to recognize the shoulder of the Chief of Security as he stood in front of her, wiping his face with his handkerchief. He said to her, ‘Have you got anything to say before we execute the order?’

‘What order?’ she asked.

‘The order willed by the Imam, the nation, and God,’ he said. She remained silent, not troubling to answer his question. ‘Do you not believe in the Imam, in the nation, and in God?’ he asked.

‘All three of them at once?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. He wrote something down in the book with a pen. Silence means that she is thinking, and thinking indicates a lack of faith. He wiped his face with his handkerchief again and asked, ‘Do you have anything else to say?’

‘I want to say that I am innocent and have committed no sin, and that I have one mother and she is the sun, and innumerable fathers whose faces and names I do not know. I also do not read the letters of words written on paper and I live in the House of Joy, but in my heart there is sadness. What is day for you is night for me, and what is happiness for you is sadness for me. Pleasure for you is pain to me, and victory for you means defeat to me. Your Paradise is my hell and your honour is my shame, whereas my shame is to you an honour. My reason is madness to you and my madness becomes reason for you. If my body dies my heart will live, but the last thing to die in me is my mind, for it can live on the barest minimum, and everything in me dies before my mind. Not one of you has ever possessed my mind. No one. And no matter how often you took my body my mind was always far away out of your reach, like the eye of the sun during the day, like the eye of the sky at night.’

She saw them standing in front of her in a long line, striking one palm against the other in great surprise. They said, ‘She is neither a sorceress nor is she mad.’ They said, ‘She is in complete control of her mind and what she says is reason itself.’ And her reason to them became more dangerous than any of her madness, and they decided to condemn her to death by a method that was more rapid than stoning to death so that she would not have the opportunity to say anything further. They also decreed that her trial should not be published in the newspapers and that her file should be definitely closed and buried deep down in the earth for ever.