He would argue with them; he wouldn’t remain silent. He would debate heroically with them, with all the heroism of a lone man, a defenseless man ambushed by enemies armed with the most vicious spears. He would tell them that they had stifled in him the noblest of breaths one day. They had slain his first beloved in his heart and today, decades later, had come to slay heaven’s gift in his heart, to take from him his last consolation, the last amulet that heaven had provided him before snatching everything from this wayfarer. In the past they had taken everything from him. How would it harm them if today they allowed him to keep his little doll, if they let him retain a wife who recited poetry after they had forbidden him to recite it? What harm would it do them to leave near him an unassuming creature who sang lyrics to him during melancholy moments to make up for the songs they had stolen from him one day? But could he convince them using such language? Would the logic of a child from whom they had taken a doll suffice to convince intellectuals? Could someone who had filled his heart with the Law’s sternest dictates understand a poet whose tongue had been removed? Would wisdom’s heroes, the arrogant advocates of severe scriptures, understand the language of a wounded lover?
Yes, he lost the argument that day, too. That day he failed as well to convince the eternal clique, the stern clique that no longer recognized poetry after trading it in for the provisos of the Law, the clique that lost the secrets of passion when it embraced a religion called “Concern for the Tribe’s Destiny.” So they were disappointed to find him speaking a language they thought he had forgotten long ago, one they deemed inappropriate for His Honor the Leader. So they defeated him. They vanquished him. When they left, all he could do was sob with grief, suffocating from the calamity, because calamity had become his default consolation during the decades he had spent alone.
4
After this defeat, he wrote his beloved a note saying that leadership was a curse he had not chosen, that destiny alone, so it would seem, was what had decided his fate by making him the late leader’s sister’s only son and that he had not been able to rebel against the will of the elders back then, long ago, because that would have meant not only a rebellion against the elders but a desperate contravention of destiny’s volition. This passionate woman, however, didn’t recognize logic’s language, didn’t understand the secret of destinies, and considered the Law to be a handful of dead words, of deadly words. If his beloved had been just any woman, it would not have been so hard, but she was both a woman and a poet; she wasn’t just a poet, but a poet in love. What earthly argument could sway a female poet in love? Before she departed and deserted the tribe forever, she sent him a note too, an angry note, a note in which she said that she had decided to do what he ought to have done. She said that self-imposed exile in the far-off wastelands had in the past been a male prerogative but apparently now the situation had changed, just as everything had changed, because men now were forcing women to choose exile, forcing women to be heroic (because the ultimate expression of heroism is self-imposed exile) while they, men, secluded themselves in their homes. Then he received news of her. They told him she had emigrated; she had migrated to an unknown land. After that no one ever saw her again.
He went out to the open countryside to bury his defeat there. He went to the wasteland to contend with the ancient lump in his throat, to sob over this calamity instead of reciting beautiful poems and chanting sorrowful songs, because the bird of poetry had flown away, becoming lost, and the voice of song had choked and died.
5
And here they were — coming to him again.
They came as they had come long ago in expanses of the Western Hammada. They came as they had once come to take poetry from him, as they had come on another occasion to take his beloved from him, taking the poet from him, leaving him alone and abandoned with no companions save solitude, calamity, and a life that time had decimated, leaving it a fantasy like any other.
Here they were coming again today to confiscate something else, but what was there left to take? Were they a group charged to take, a group that would never lack something to take? Yes. Yes, these elders would never lack for something to take from the leader’s dwelling. They arrived one day to take the bird, to take the secret he had hidden in the retem thicket, in the sanctuary’s groves, in the valley he had placed off limits to the hoi polloi when he told the herders, vassals, and slaves: “Anyone entering Retem Valley from today on will have his head chopped off with a sword.” So everyone had avoided it and had kept their herds out of it. He had stationed mounted warriors on its heights as guards. He had done that as a precaution to erase the evidence, to hide his little secret. Had the jurists discovered this little secret too?
Were they too stingy to allow him this play-pretty? Had they come to deprive him of the bird, the song, and the secret — camouflaging their action with the need to uproot themselves in obedience to the law of nomadism?
When they approached, he went out to meet them in the open. He hurried to greet them out of respect for Emmamma, the same Emmamma, the venerable Emmamma, the immortal figure who had accompanied the elders on that first day in the Western Hammada and who had accompanied the group during the second assault. All the former elders had passed on. Time had carried off Asaruf during the third assault, but Emmamma led the way this time too. He was leaning on an elegant acacia walking stick and shaking. He shook and the stick shook too.
Once they finished their attack on him, he requested just a few days before the forthcoming departure. Emmamma took him aside to say, “Don’t think I came because I feared people would say the venerable elder had missed an opportunity to influence the leader concerning some worldly matter, because you know that a person who has turned his back on life will not be much harmed by what is said. I came instead because it isn’t a bad omen for the leader to contravene a time-honored law and refuse to migrate; truly the bad omen would be for the venerable elder to fail to join a deputation of elders visiting the leader’s home.” Then he laughed sorrowfully as he waved his staff before him. He joked, “I have come to you today on three legs. I fear I’ll be forced next time to borrow a fourth leg from the acacia tree in order to reach your dwelling.”