The village elders came up with a suggestion — to blindfold Sarsara with a piece of cloth. The experiment failed. Sarsara’s eyes glowed like burning coals and the piece of cloth didn’t stop trees sprouting. The women wept for her and the boys and girls grew more and more anxious about the state Sarsara was in. We performed the rites and bathed in the river together after midnight. We sang all the poems we could remember about the River Nabi. The young ones decided not to embrace or kiss their fathers until their fathers took the blindfold off Sarsara’s eyes.
We sent word for Hoopoe Marmour, who was wandering in the wilderness in search of himself. Marmour came from the village. He had abandoned us years earlier because of his struggle with God. He thought he was a hoopoe that had changed into a human while sleeping in a crow’s nest by mistake. But a hoopoe that had not followed the path of enmity towards the villagers. He would answer any call for help. From time to time he would check to see how the villagers were because he was a wise man despite his random ravings.
Mr Marmour arrived and the villagers were relieved. Marmour went for a walk around the village side by side with Sarsara and observed her closely. As soon as the first tree sprouted, Mr Marmour said that Sarsara imagined the tree and it sprouted and it was impossible to stop this.
After what Marmour said, the villagers gathered to consult. The women and children also took part in the meeting. The debate went on till the morning. When the first rays of dawn appeared most of the people in the village had agreed to get rid of Sarsara. But the women refused to burn the old woman alive. The children suggested sending her somewhere else with the migratory birds. Marmour had asked the villagers to be patient until he could understand how her imagination worked. The discussions went on three more days until they reached a final decision.
That night we brought torches with heavy hearts. The village was sunk in sadness and fear. We took Sarsara to the hill nearest the village. We left her alone and gave her enough time to look at the ground. Sarsara’s last tree sprouted, to immortalize her memory on the hill. We tied the old woman up, took her to the middle of the river in a boat and abandoned her to the waters of the Nabi.
Sunset had filled the village with a blood-red glow. The teacher advised me to stay the night because the road to the town was dangerous in the dark. He said there were armed gangs at large along the highway. I thanked Shamreen and told him I had to get home. My wife was expecting me and I had things to do early in the morning. I said goodbye to him and walked to the dirt road where I had parked the car. One thing was turning in my head: my wife naked in the shower… I would go in and press myself against her body. I was tired and I felt quite exasperated by Sarsara’s village.
I tried in vain to start the car. I retraced my steps to the teacher’s room to ask for help. I couldn’t find him. I didn’t know which house he lived in. I went to one of the nearby houses. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I pushed the door and started calling out. The house was empty. I headed to another house. The calm around me opened its mouth like a mysterious animal. Finally a young girl with dishevelled hair opened the door. ‘Are you thirsty…? Tonight the foxes are going to bring lots of presents,’ she said, as she took hold of my hand. I asked her where the teacher’s house was and told her I needed help because my car had broken down.
She led me by the hand to the cattle pen nearby. The girl went up to a grey cow and started to milk it into a small container. Then she left the cattle pen without taking any interest in me. I followed her outside into the darkness. The village seemed to be deserted. There was just the chorus of insects gradually growing louder, as though announcing that the night and the devils were descending. The girl was heading towards the dirt road where the car was parked. I followed her, trying to feel my way in the darkness that covered Sarsara’s village like an apocalypse.
The girl plucked a white flower from the side of the dirt road and threw it in the milk container.
‘It’s a windflower and it brings good luck,’ she said, offering me the container. ‘Don’t eat it. Chew it, then put it in a place you’ve forgotten to miss.’
I drank. Then I took out the wet flower and held it between the tips of my fingers. The girl opened the car door, pointed to the seat and then hurried off.
‘Hey girl, what’s your name?’
‘Sarsara,’ she shouted without turning back.
I checked the revolver was still in place under the seat and called my wife. As I spoke I turned the key to see if the car would start. It started immediately.
I noticed a man climbing the hill with a lantern in his hand. He hung the lantern on one of the branches of Sarsara’s tree and sat down next to it. Perhaps it was the teacher. I tasted the petals of the flower with the tip of my tongue, then chewed them warily. It tasted like milk with a slightly bitter sting. I drove off at speed between the ears of corn, listening to a Sufi song about turning in the womb of the one you love.
‘A place you’ve forgotten to miss!’
I continued on my way, thinking of places and funny incidents in my life.
The Dung Beetle
Doctor, there are stories for children and very short stories for sick people who no longer have much time. There are stories for the beach, that is to say, summer stories for women reclining in the sun topless, lazy stories about the excrement of reality, stories for the elite, for boring times, for pregnant mothers, for prisoners. I can’t write a story but I can tell a story. I crave incessant talk… I have a flock of sparrows inside me… ha!
The doctor had been driving to his mother’s house in a small town close to the capital. The road was slippery, because the previous day the sun had suddenly emerged from the great tent of gloom pitched above Helsinki and had melted the snow, which then turned to ice. The newspapers carried photographs of the smashed car after it had collided with the front of a school bus in which nine children were burned to death and others seriously injured. The doctor was also killed. His body had been cut in half, as if by a chainsaw. He was a good man of a sober disposition. He had been my psychiatrist for more than a year and a half.
The dung beetle, which lives in the deserts of Africa, makes small balls of dung, lays eggs in them and buries them underground. It takes care of them till they hatch. I’m reading about insects in a thick encyclopaedia and grieving over the state of humanity. I sometimes dream I’ve turned into a dung beetle foetus buried underground and that I’m now inside an egg. I imagine that the pain is a giant, warm-hearted beetle that has become my mother.
This morning, along with the pizza adverts and the free newspapers that come through the letter box, I received a letter from the hospital. A fine of 27 euros because I missed an appointment with the new doctor two weeks ago. Well, do I deserve such punishment? After that, something else bugged me: I realised it has been ten years since I picked up the telephone to ask after my mother and brothers, when I know very well what hell they’re going through. Other bugs of every shape and form trap the air in my head.
The man began to examine his chunky heart from every angle, and ask why from an early age he had started wrapping it in a thick layer of cement and iron. He didn’t find the answer, just mysterious feelings that didn’t help him explain why his heart was so hard and why he was constantly running away from the past. But didn’t he want to choose his life for himself and to be his own master? Here he is now, living in a beautiful flat in Helsinki, and in one year little Mariam will go off to school. His wife has savings from her work in the pizza restaurant and is now thinking of opening a restaurant that serves Iraqi dishes. She had given it serious thought: the waitresses would wear a hybrid uniform, combining elements of traditional Iraqi dress with the type of clothing worn by Oriental dancers. The décor would be traditional. If a permit could be secured, a real stuffed camel would stand or kneel in one of the corners. The food would be accompanied by interludes of oriental music. The floor would be covered with carpets with pictures of Sindbad on them. The incense would come out of an old lamp like Aladdin’s. She had thought of everything that would play into the fantasies that Finns and Western customers in general would have about the land of A Thousand and One Nights. A young Finnish novelist once asked me, with a genuine look of astonishment and curiosity, ‘How did you read Kafka? Did you read him in Arabic? How could you discover Kafka that way?’ I felt as I were a suspect in a crime and the Finnish novelist was the detective, and that Kafka was a Western treasure that Ali Baba, the Iraqi, had stolen. In the same way, I might have asked, ‘Did you read Kafka in Finnish?’