“You’re so right!” she replied dutifully.
He then asked her to recite the shortest sura in the Qur’an. She really wanted to leave, but nevertheless recited it bashfully:
Verily we have given you abundanf,
So pray to your Lorf and sacrifife,
Verily the one who loathes you is clippef.
As she turned to leave, she was singing: “The man who tells me he loves me, I’ll serve him coffee with my own hands.”
“You can leave now,” the judge yelled with a smile. “May God forgive you that reading that I requested, just as he forgives the proponents of the seven readings of the Qur’an. But when it comes to Jumana, the previous secretary, who seems to have relied on her femininity alone, the Lord God will never forgive her the way she treated people with such violence and corrupted their piety with her flagrant sensuality. Weak-willed people and prisoners straying from their faith and practice were all proclaiming her name and falling in love with her. Tell me, did anything untoward happen to you while I was away?”
I stared at the floor and said nothing.
“That cursed woman,” he screamed angrily, baring his teeth, “that tart! I told her to treat you properly, and she promised to do so. Did she hit you? And anything else. .? Damned woman! Her case reminds me of another woman, even worse in the pre-Islamic era. If a great poet of his generation and lineage had not fallen in love with her and immortalized her in his famous mu‘allaqa poem,* she would have been unknown and forgotten for all time. Do you know who I’m referring to?”
I indicated that I did not. Clearing his throat, he sat up in his chair like someone about to convey some heavy news to me: “That pompous, flirtatious woman who strutted about like a peahen was the beloved of a poet who composed about her two lines of poetry that, by God Almighty, have no peers in the whole of secular Arabic literature. So remind me. It starts: ‘As I recall thee, the spears quench their thirst. . ’ Finish the line for me, Hamuda!”
I reluctantly responded: “. . on me, and the Indian swords drip with my blood.”
“O my God, how wonderful!” and “I longed to kiss the swords because. .” “Go ahead and finish it, Hamuda. .”
“they gleam like the teeth in your smiling mouth.”
“Even though the poet ‘Antara* recited such glorious and eloquent lines, the cursed ‘Abla was totally unaffected. Her heart never even fluttered. In fact, she rejected the black poet whose heart and mind were of purest white! Don’t you agree with me that this woman, ‘Abla, was cursed — not only that, but a prostitute and nasty racist at that?”
I chose to say nothing.
“There’s a huge temporal gap between the defeated pre-Islamic poet and you, but there’s an element of similarity as well. While he chose to express his love and frustration over ‘Abla in the form of a magnificent poem that has lasted through the ages, your relationship with the former secretary, Jumana, is best described by the old proverb: ‘there’s many a trial that brings its own reward.’ At least you’ve proved that your masculinity is still intact. God be praised, and to Him be all gratitude!”
He now lit his pipe and offered me either a cigarette or cigar. I refused both.
“In my own humble opinion,” he said with uncharacteristic modesty, “there’s no text that forbids tobacco (unlike the proscription on wine). In both cases I strive to maintain a moderate position. In your case I suspect that you avoid alcohol and use analogy to deny yourself tobacco and opium. Am I right?”
“Certainly,” I replied. “Health is what matters for everyone. It’s better to be cautious than to get sick and have to be treated.”
“True enough, by God, true enough! And yet, these times of ours are full of tensions and annoyances. You need some form of tranquilizer to deal with them all.”
He fidgeted in his chair, blowing smoke right in my face.
“I used to let suspects come in this office,” he told me nervously, “with all their filth and stench. For the sake of truth and the need to discover it, not to mention pleasing God Almighty, I would put up with it all. But when I returned from responsibilities abroad, I issued instructions that from now on nobody would be allowed in until they had been properly cleaned and perfumed. You’re the very first one to be treated this way. The thing that’s made me take your side and stopped me forwarding you to a much nastier interviewer is that we share something in common. Do you know what it is?”
“You told me about it earlier, Your Honor,” I replied in spite of myself. “We’re both graduates of colleges in Arabic-speaking countries. You have a degree in law and so do I; you also have one in literature, and so do I.”
“That’s right,” he replied, “and yet fate and careers have sent us in different directions. So all praise be to God who has so arranged things that we meet and can thus expose the truth and eradicate falsehood.”
He paused for a moment, giving me a hard, inquisitive stare.
“But what truth and what falsehood, Sir?” I asked in dismay. “In what particular spot on earth am I currently located? What’s the purpose of this arbitrary imprisonment and excessive torture that is sapping my health? Do you want me to burst into tears and beg you to take your collective hands off this poor body of mine that is starting to lose weight and deteriorate?”
The judge’s face turned purple with rage, and he started thumping the desk.
“No questions are allowed,” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Come in, Nahid, and read this stubborn idiot Article Ten of the section on non-permitted conduct. .”
The young woman took down a tome from the shelf.
“The tenfth article from the section on internal regulafions states. .”
At this point, the judge who was frothing at the mouth in anger, snatched the tome away from her and carried on reading.
“‘Questions are the particular province and competence of the investigator alone. He alone is legally permitted and competent to formulate and pose questions. The accused person is not permitted to engage in questioning unless he is asked and permitted by the investigator to do so. However the investigator is in no way obliged to record the question or to answer it. End of article.’”
He continued smoking his pipe.
“So, Hamuda from Oujda,” he went on, “do you have a joke for me, something to restore the sugar balance in my blood?”
I was so overcome and perplexed that I could think of nothing to say. The secretary slapped me to make me pay attention.
“The judge is asking you a question,” she said.
“No violence, Nahid, no violence,” he told her in a gentle tone intended to calm things down. “God is my witness that, even when I’ve been cross-examining the very worst offenders, the kind of people who hate having to tell the truth, I’ve never tortured anyone, hit anyone, or spat on anyone. It’s just the way I was made. Violence spoils my mood; more than that in fact, it ruins my religious devotions. This rogue sitting in front of me here is trying to provoke me and refusing even to tell me a joke. Okay, so I’ll tell myself one, in the hope that it’ll calm me down. As the proverb says, ‘Nothing scratches you as badly as your own fingernails.’ You can listen too, Nahid, before you leave us. ‘Once upon a time there was among the Bani Khafajah a shaykh, who, when night fell, used to get a particular type of ache, the kind in which cocks with hens partake. . But, what’s more significant that all that, is that this shaykh of ours had an ongoing feud with his colleagues because they accused him of confusing the months of Sha‘ban and Ramadan. He regarded this accusation as an obscenity and forcefully denied it. ‘If you all think it’s fair to accuse me of something,’ he told them, ‘then at least make it something that I really do; then I’ll admit it.’ When they asked him what that was, he replied that it was not confusing Sha‘ban and Ramadan, that was his main point. It was actually two other months, Shawal and Dhu al-Qa‘da! His colleagues spent a month and a half cackling over that one!”