At one of these parties, the émigrée pinched me secretly on my buttocks. The first time, I doubted whether she had actually done it, but the act was repeated several times. I was astonished and then repulsed, but she leaned over my face until her braids buried it. As the scent of her body assailed my nostrils, I began to feel dizzy. I closed my eyes and found that she was putting a handful of dates on my lap. Then she brought her face so close to me that I felt her breath caressing my neck. Her lips touched the flesh of my right ear as she whispered in a sibilant voice, “If you visit me, I’ll give you a lot more. If you visit me, I’ll fill your arms with fresh dates dripping with honey.”
That night I did not find dry dates in my lap; I found truly fresh dates. I found the most delicious fresh dates of the oases, and honey actually oozed from them, as if a generous hand had plucked them from the palm trees of distant oases and fled with them to the desert with the speed of the jinn. The fruit’s delightfulness did not rest in its sweet juiciness, its tremulous mass, or its succulence, but in its taste, which I would never forget. It was a mythic taste that shook and provoked me, awakening in me forgotten moments I had not experienced in this lifetime. The taste made me sense that this birth was not my first, that I had been born a thousand years, indeed a million years, before. The suppressed memory awakened by the wondrous taste of that amazing fruit did not hail just from ancient times but harked back to ages that could not be reckoned in years and for which the concept of time itself was meaningless, to that secret entity wise men call “eternity.” Could it be what these sages term “immortality”? Was the taste concealed in the fruit a magic potion created as an antidote to the fearful disease people term “forgetfulness”? Against this malady even the elixirs of the magicians have been powerless.
Does this not imply that I am a creature without end or beginning, enjoying in this respect the same status as the desert, so that my death is merely a disappearance, an inevitable consequence of being asleep, and my life is simply an appearance, an inevitable consequence of being awake?
For several days I wandered about dazed, but I could not bear to wait long. I determined that I would vanquish forgetfulness and recapture that lost life, my true life, no matter what the cost.
I went to her tent, where I found her bowing in the direction of the forenoon’s Ragh to plait her luxuriant hair into slender braids. She intimated with a glance of her eye that I should approach, and I crept a few inches closer. The perfume of her body assailed my nostrils. I staggered and shut my eyes to ward off dizziness, but she stretched out her hand and seized me. With a bold palm she grasped me and pulled me into her arms. No, that was not it; I did not find myself in her arms but snuggled against her full bosom. I was inside her flowing gown, in a vale between two astounding breasts crowned with prominent nipples. My body fell atop a taut ivory expanse. I became lost in this labyrinth of ivory and slid ever farther down. I clung to the only outcropping my hand could reach and grabbed hold of her breasts, but they escaped from my hand, because they were larger than my palm. So I struggled desperately and grabbed the jaunty, protruding nipples at the tips of her breasts.
Then I heard her say in the same hoarse, sibilant voice, “The women say you like to fool around. The women say you’ve taught their daughters several games. Even your mother wants you to be playful, because she thinks a playful boy is a successful one. Now you can play. Hee, hee, hee.” She chortled for a long time, until the chortling turned into a deep moan.
While struggling to keep from slipping ever lower, I remembered her promise and shouted to remind her what she owed me. “Dates! You promised to give me dates.”
She crooned, “Is any date in the desert tastier than the one you grasp, rascal?”
The jaunty nipple escaped from my fingers, which had become slippery because of some liquid, either sweat from my hand or moisture oozing from the teat. So I skidded further down the soft, ivory-colored body. I found myself in another valley at the center of which lay a thicket of dense undergrowth. As I grasped this undergrowth, my nostrils were met by a fragrance I could taste with my tongue. It was the secret taste that disperses forgetfulness and lights the path to immortality.
I began to visit her tent every day to savor that taste until the day of separation dawned. I awoke one morning to discover that her tent had been struck and that the mistress of the taste had departed. I could not believe it, perhaps because I had never imagined I could lose this taste and fall prisoner to forgetfulness again.
Forgetfulness felt like a mountain crushing my chest, and I resolved to liberate myself. I asked which way she had headed and set off in pursuit. I raced after her like a madman but found only mirages waiting at the horizons. I became exhausted and dehydrated, while the sun-baked earth scorched my bare feet. I fell to the ground and began to creep on all fours. As I crept forward, the path skinned my knees and hands, and I began to bleed. Finally unable to proceed any further, I experienced bitterness, not the taste of the lost fruit. My only consolation lay in weeping. I wept and wept, until night fell and sleep overtook me.
7 Last Watch of the Night
I SET OUT TO SEARCH for the priest, but he had disappeared from the settlement. I consulted the nobles, but they all agreed that they knew nothing of his whereabouts. I asked the matriarchs, and one of them commented that priests are a race comparable to the jinn’s offspring, who disappear whenever we search for them and reappear only when we do not expect them.
I went to the grisly tomb whose stones the priest had soaked with my mother’s blood, according to the neighbor-girl’s account, but did not find him there either. I traveled to the pastures and questioned the camel herders, who told me he had branded his camel with the sign of the goddess Tanit to protect her from thieves and since then had allowed her to roam untended in the desert of Tinghart for several years. I finally lost all hope of finding him and decided to bury my anxiety in forgetfulness. Since this world was the ablest assistant I had found, I headed for Targa to search for the camel my mother had given me just before that ill-omened day of separation. I had entrusted her to a fellow tribesman who said he was related to me in some way. So I headed out to the open country nearby to watch for caravans heading south.
Using my wrist for a pillow, I stretched out under an acacia tree to spend my first night. I was just drifting off to sleep, as dreams hovered around me, when the priest’s figure appeared, standing above my head. At first I imagined he was a fragment that had split off from a dream. Then I was able to recognize him by the light of the stars, even though he was partially concealed by his garments, which were of a gloomy color. He stood by my head for what felt like a lifetime before he observed coldly, “I was told you’ve been looking for me.”