Señora Mirano stood up, excusing herself, “The question is how much space we create for the audience within the dream that consumes our life.”
A burst of music sent a flock of pigeons flapping down the alley and away into another alley in the distant basin of her memory; they returned like a wave of night directing the rhythm of her body.
“I came from an alley like this. Two walls …” Rafi listened as Nora’s mind wandered to the night when she’d been woken by an almighty gasping, banging, and scraping beneath her window. For a moment she’d thought someone was trying to break through the barred window, but then her consciousness began to distinguish the sounds, and a deep instinct impelled her to peep out of the window. She saw a man’s head below her window; he was unconscious, his eyes were closed, his head was rolling back and forth against the wall. She leaned further forward, thrusting her nose between the bars of the window, and was able to make out the black mass between his legs: it was a head in an abaya, glued mercilessly to the spot, gorging itself. When the epileptic spasms ebbed, the head detached from the body and out of the black appeared the face of a woman with dribbling lips. The epileptic man bent forward to kiss them quickly. “You cursed woman …” he murmured hoarsely.
The woman’s eyes widened, anticipating an equally epileptic response, but the man began to move away, cautiously tidying himself up before he left the secluded alley. The man’s face disappeared and Nora saw Rafi’s face again. “At night, our alley was a theater where the actors never got tired, a strange shadow play. I used to lie in my bed and listen, hearing but never seeing the actors — footsteps bursting out of nowhere and running, voices walking the length of the alley acting out angry or debauched amateur dramatics, spurred on by the sense of privacy that the narrow alley lent their performance. They all played their roles safe in the sense of secrecy that surrounded their climaxes and exhibitions. The voices of men arguing or talking with drunken slurring tongues or sharp angry tones; mumbles and pants, women clapping in upper-story windows to catch the attention of those lower down; in the background, laughter or crying, or the hurried footsteps of that woman coming home at dawn from her shift in the hospital. The only thing I knew about her was the smell of a day’s sweat, Dettol, and strong disinfectants as she dragged her exhausted body onward to the sweat-drenched future. I never saw her but I could picture her with her white gloves raised in the face of our alley’s indifference. The alley always picked itself up and kept going, never stopping save for the cries of women, or the call to prayer, or fathers, indoors mixing with outdoors in that unique mixture that was our daily bread, interrupted now and again by the applause of the audience outside …” Nora’s gaze shifted from the gypsy across the street to her assistant and from there to Rafi’s heavily lined face. Everything that was yet to come was also part of that obscure map of life.
Señora Mirano suddenly interrupted them. “Would you like to join our discussion of The English Patient?”
Rafi declined politely, echoing Nora. “Have you actually seen The English Patient?” she asked him as they made their way back to the hotel.
He nodded. “I thought it was wonderful, but there’s no way I could sit through it again. I’ve seen enough violence in real life, in the civil war, had enough shocks, experienced enough adrenaline rushes, that I’ve found I get pretty upset when I watch a sad film or read a sad poem. I think I’m getting worn out.”
“Maybe not — maybe you’re just learning to appreciate the value of a peaceful life.”
“Also, I can’t stomach this Western thing of watching real life through movies any more. Señora Mirano once told me that we’ve invented a duality, a second reality and I think I agree with her. Our mental world is a reflection of what we see around us, civilization is the shell that represents our inner spiritual selves. Without it, we’re just animals in search of food and sex. We want to exist on a higher plane, but we can’t get there or we can’t stay up there. Most of us never will. In the end, it’s just a dream …”
Reading Triangle
IN THE ENDLESS VOID OF THE CORRIDOR, AN EPOCH OF SAND STRETCHED BETWEEN the three men. The whole time they were in the corridor, Mushabbab had remained calm, and when at one point Nasser’s throat went dry, Mushabbab was poised and ready. Whenever Nasser’s doubts became too much for him and he looked like he was about to tumble from the nightmarish plane of reality they were exploring, Mushabbab quickly handed the will over to Yusuf so he could pick up where Nasser had stumbled:
EVERYTHING CHANGED WHEN WE ENTERED the heart of Najd. We left the soft sands saturated with the Hijazi breeze. Even the air tasted dry and harsh and began to dig into our skin. My body must have become stiffer somehow, as well. I have no idea how long we climbed, teetering on our camels, as we followed our Ghatafani guide across the ribs of great sand dunes on the edge of the Nafud Desert. It took us a while before we realized that we’d been surrounded by a group of men riding bareback on massive camels. In the burning sunlight, it wasn’t entirely clear whether they were men or mirages or demons. The men, and the camels they were riding, were the color of sand, even their eyelashes. There was no way we could’ve gotten away from them; it was hard enough to figure out what direction they were headed in. They were kicking up a sandstorm that either lashed at your back, or blinded you, or suffocated you. They tied us to our saddles by the feet and forced us to follow them. At one desperate moment, I thought the horizon was a sheet of molten copper rising up to the sky, propelling us forward with flames until we finally reached the top of the copper wall, where the wind rose up and began pelting us with what felt like sandstones. “Locusts!” Ayif al-Ghatafani shouted.
We had to protect our eyes and faces from the locust attack. It was well known among the Bedouin that locusts were so vicious that they ate humans alive. I raised my abaya over my head like a tent, while the giants faced the onslaught head-on and didn’t seem at all bothered. They didn’t even cover their faces and they laughed at al-Ghatafani as he tried desperately to keep the locusts off the terrified camels. I don’t know what caused it but my camel bolted and I could do nothing to control it. It was all I could do to hold on to the reins as locusts buzzed all around me and inside my abaya. The camel didn’t stop until we’d made it out of the locust swarm. When I opened my eyes, I saw the other camels were outrunning the last of the locusts and the giants appeared around me, riding alongside. It was as though I hadn’t crossed the locusts and the desert, rather that the desert had receded. I could see gouges on my camel’s neck and around her eyes; the locusts had left what looked like a tattoo across the belly of al-Ghatafani’s camel.
“We’re lucky we made it out of there.”
An oasis in the Rimmah Valley lay before us, looking like a ruin. The palm trees were stripped bare, the locusts having decimated their crowns and clusters, and as we neared the village, we could see the uncovered graves of the children and the elderly done in by smallpox, which the locusts carried.
The camels instinctively gave that hell a wide berth, looping around toward the southeast. It was as if the giants were leading us from one disaster to another more horrific as our detour continued. Smallpox ran alongside us, borne by the locust swarm, leaving oases of death in its wake until it disappeared inside the bones of the desert.
We ran past the tribes of Tayyi and Asad, and our captors drove us like a storm between the tribes of Hanifa and Tamim on the way to their oasis.