Sarmada Page 11

  He came out to see Nawwaf and Shahir packing up whatever they could, getting ready to move back into the old house. He worked alongside them in silence; he was energetic and active. He went over to the old house and cleaned and tidied up the place. He threw himself into work like a madman, and every time his memory called up a scene from what had happened at Farida's, his energy increased, his body elated, and his eyes shone. There was no hiding it. His brothers were shocked to find that the old rundown house had come back to life and they could move back in that very evening. What made it even more poignant was that their youngest brother had a childlike smile on his face, which made them smile in turn, before they remembered themselves and stared down at the ground, erasing any trace of smiles, putting on masks of threadbare anger.

  He was dying to get back to Farida, but he was blocked by the gaze of his brothers, whose unbearable censure never let up.

  A week after the remaining brothers returned to the house, they invited the notables of Sarmada to a reception that would allow them to rejoin the life of the community. They slaughtered seven sheep and prepared twenty-one trays of mansaf, and then they slaughtered another seven sheep and distributed the meat among the poor. Everyone accepted their decision and the hospitality they were known for.

  Shafee was watching her through the bushes, so she hid quickly. She started trying to avoid him. She was enforcing her rule—one time only, that was all, just like anybody else—but it pained her, too, not to have him.

  She worried that love would lead them down a path from which there was no turning back and that he would consume her soul and the denuding of her body. When he said Hela's name, she was brought back to reality and she knew for certain, and sadly, that she couldn't love a damaged, pained adolescent who was condemned by himself and God and society to an eternal punishment because he'd murdered his innocent sister on delusional grounds known as “honor.” She refused all his winning attempts to see her and burned her memories down to ash so that it was as if nothing at all had ever happened between them.

  It went on like that for weeks and then he made up his mind. He wrapped his gift in a bag and knocked on her door. She knew it was him, so she didn't open the door. He knew she wouldn't open up, but he wanted to settle his doubts so he could carry out what he'd decided to do; he knocked again and again, and again. Then he called to her through the door: “I'm leaving something for you here by the door. I just wanted to tell you that I'm leaving for good, but that I'll never forget you.”

  He walked away from the house and hid behind the big cactus near the entrance. She opened the door a few minutes later and took the package inside. She looked into the void, but she didn't see him. She stared into the void; she could feel him nearby. She waved. It was the last time he'd ever lay eyes on her. The next morning he set out for Beirut, where he waited for the ship that would take him to Colombia never to be heard from again.

  She opened the bag and found a transistor radio that he'd ordered especially for her. The brown radio was about as big as a tray of tomatoes and it would fill her life with news and songs until the very end. It was on the radio that she learned that there'd been a Corrective Revolution and that a new future awaited Syria. She didn't understand a word of it, but she started noticing as her adolescent lovers began parroting strange new words about liberty, unity, and socialism—all the brand-new Baath party slogans.

  Yet there wasn't a force on earth that could alter the routine she'd established. She was like Sarmada: whatever was going on in the world marched along easily until it got to this volcanic plain where its seeds might be accepted, but its roots always failed to penetrate the ground. Four houses down, the remaining members of the Mansour family were working to win back their family's good name. Nawwaf didn't seem to care and he told his brother that he wanted to marry him off.

  “Not right now, brother,” Shahir answered calmly.

  Several defiant years later, dozens and dozens of teenage boys had passed through her house, but now she was showing signs of pregnancy; she could feel a child growing inside of her. Despite all her careful precautions, pregnancy surprised her and her new reality was unmistakably clear.

  Every time she considered killing her fetus, she knew she wouldn't be able to forgive herself if she did. She also knew that accepting a fatherless child was too much to ask of Sarmada's abilities and sensibilities; it was impossible for a bastard to get along in a place so tied to its rigid rules. Thus she decided she'd choose a husband who wouldn't interfere with what she considered to be her divine mission. When one of her teenage lovers was talking to her about the mission of the Arab nation and its renaissance, she cut off his nonsense and said, “I've got a mission to do, too,” and kicked him out of the house to spread news of the miraculous body and its revelation.

  Long story short, she thought it over and decided there was no one better for her than Hamoud, the crackpot.

  By June 10, 1967, it was clear that the defeat was total. The loss of Quneitra and the Golan Heights combined with the occupation of Sinai, Jerusalem, and the West Bank—a defeat on that scale—was too much for the geography teacher, who'd believed all his government's lies, to handle. He didn't sleep at all on the sixth night; he stayed up listening to the radio and when he heard the announcement that Quneitra had fallen he chugged down half a bottle of straight arak. When he returned home from the local party meeting, boiling with rage against the enemies of Arab nationalism, he tried to turn his wife's body into the Arab nation. He stripped off her clothes and got started—no time to lose! He plotted a grid over her entire body with a black marker and began sketching a map.

  At first, she thought it was just a fit of his uniquely mad lust, which she'd always enjoyed, for he never stopped thinking up new ways to measure and sketch maps of pleasure over her body's secret terrain. But he just kept on sketching maps of the Arab world. He was convinced that the solution to the world's problems lay in maps, which never lied, and that everyone should just keep to their borders and discover the treasures they possessed.

  On that day, he transmigrated the souls of Sykes and Picot as he divided up the parts of his wife Ibtihal's body up into the territory of the former colonial powers. When he came to her vagina, he drew Palestine and looked at her as he shouted, completely naked himself, “You tricked us, you sons of bitches! You gave us everything and you took away the womb!” As he gripped the scalpel in his hand, he knew he wanted to kill international Zionism, and a terrified Ibtihal got up and ran into the bathroom and locked the door, and when he finally passed out on the bed from the defeat and his drunkenness, she ran away to her family in the north and never returned.

  Hamoud lost half his mind after the defeat in the June War, and the party found they no longer required his services. He spent his days, shouting at the village: “Lock your doors! Don't leave anything unlocked. Lock your doors!” He wouldn't go to sleep until he'd gone around to every house in the village and made sure the doors were locked. Nothing made him angrier than an unlocked door someone had forgotten. Unlocked doors reminded Hamoud, the brilliant geography teacher and committed Baathist, of the night Ibtihal ran away.

  It wasn't his geographic lust that'd scared her off, it was more likely that she'd just been waiting for the chance to get back at him for the awful poverty he'd put her through, since he was a member of the Baath who donated his salary to his brother Arabs from the Gulf to the Atlantic. He memorized the party's theoretical principles as if they were the names of God. He was overflowing with a fervor that could accept no alternative to the ineluctable destiny of liberty, unity, and socialism. He'd wanted Ibtihal to be his wholly committed, freedom-fighting comrade-partner and to discipline herself strictly for the sake of the cause of the Great Arab Revolution to come, but the aftermath of the June defeat was too much for his mind to handle—loaded as it was with thoughts of coming revolutions.

  After going around to all the doors and making sure they were locked, he'd head off to bed, and in the morning, h
e'd get up bright and early to take care of the holy chores that Mother Nature cryptically sent to him. He shaved, washed in cold water—in summer or winter, it didn't matter—shined his shoes, put on cologne, gathered up his maps and great secrets, along with a big compass, protractor, and astrolabe, and set off for Wind Hill. There, he measured God's country and noted the signs until he reached the Salt Spring. He would sit there in the stream, lost in thought, announcing his peculiar daily prophecies, synthesizing signs and symbols, reading faint clues, jotting down his amazing five-line poems in a big book he called Uncovering Falsehood. He erased whatever he'd written every night before he went to bed so that the hidden evil forces wouldn't get hold of his secrets.

  He knew when solar and lunar eclipses would take place, he was an excellent geomancer, and he spent most of his time doing complex calculations to determine precisely at what time God would wake up. “Our lives are a divine dream,” he'd say. “Everything that happens is a dream. And God's dreams only last three minutes. Every second is a million years, so it's not over yet. One day he's going to wake up and then everything will go back to how it started.”

  He carried a book with him wrapped in the March 8, 1963, issue of the Baathist newspaper Militant; this was the day when the Baathists triumphed over the Separatists to rule Syria for an endless forever. For decades long it seemed entrenched and unshakable, but places have their own logic and maybe all it takes is one distant spark to burn the whole thing down. Sarmada got used to Hamoud and it wasn't as if he went around poking his nose into other people's business—aside from the doors, of course.

  His garden was turned into a lab where he built his ridiculous time machines out of crates and cardboard and junk. His furniture was draped with dozens of maps that showed what lay beyond geography itself. “Everything has a unit of measurement,” he said. “Everything has a map, from galaxies to atoms. Anything that doesn't have a map is worthless.”

  Over time, they discovered he had lots of amazing talents, and while it was true that the name “Hamoud the crackpot” had stuck, it was born out of the villagers' sympathy and their lingering respect for a man who was naturally both noble and crazy.

  Farida knew exactly how best to lure him in. She'd known ever since he started coming round to her shed to make sure the door was locked. The evening after she'd decided that Hamoud the crackpot was the man for her—the man who could give the fetus forming inside of her a chance at life—she tied the door with a rope to keep it open and waited for him to come. She put on a thin slip so that the features of her body could draw in the topographically obsessed geography teacher, and she perfumed the house with very rare incense she'd been given by one of her teenagers who'd left with his family for Saudi Arabia. The boy had stolen some amazing Cambodian incense and presented it to the woman who'd given meaning to his adolescence. She burned the incense with some fragrant resin, turning the whole atmosphere of the house into one of seduction, and she added some of her own homemade incense, which gave off magic-mixed scents, which couldn't be compared to moments of basil, whispers of mischievous jas-mine, or even the rapture of wily damask rose. It was as if the scents were a language that spoke directly to Hamoud's mind when he turned up, as he did most evenings after sunset. He grabbed the roped door and yanked it angrily, but there was no use. He tried again with some force, but again he failed. She stepped out from between the ferns of green-tinged seconds, her perky breasts barely hidden by her lace slip, her alluring curls bouncing and flashing as they fell over her shoulders, her long neck, and her big eyes protected by arched, heart-snaring eyebrows. She called to him, parting those cherry-red lips painted with crimson lipstick, and her straight white teeth made him freeze stock-still in the face of this oncoming army.

  His agitation-aching head begged him to run, but some hidden desire and his geographic curiosity ordered him to wait to see this convoy and the strange storm of scents it brought with it up close. Before he could even make up his mind, the perfume of incense, orange-blossom water, and other oils and spices that wafted from her body caused a little—maybe even too little to see—drool to form at the corner of his gaping mouth.

  “Having trouble?” Her question knocked him down and the convoy of her body swept over him, every last detail of which was bewitchingly revealed.

  She bent down over the knot on the door handle, three-quarters of her chest spilling out, and the totally defeated teacher's jaw dropped to the floor. She untied the knot easily and they both—the door and the teacher—jerked. She calmly shut the door, slid the bolt to lock it, and unlocked the gates to a geography the teacher had never known before.

  She took him by the hand and sat him down on the sofa. She knelt down in front of him and took off his gleaming shoes and bright white socks. She undid his belt and took off his trousers, and when he saw her fold them carefully, he thanked her from the bottom of his heart. She stripped him down completely and took him over to her washbasin, which was really just a barrel she'd cut in half lengthwise. She sat him down in the water, on the surface of which floated troops of rascally chamomile, red poppy anemone, and clover flowers and began to bathe him. She scooped up the flower-embroidered water into a plastic bowl and poured it over his head, which was still brimming with Baath party slogans. This was followed by a ritual massage of his stiff shoulders that made the hairs on his shoulders stick up, and she continued lavishing him with her abundant affection, massaging his muscles, which had ached for a touch like this. She took him out of the pond of sweetness and laid him on his back in the bed of wonder. She blindfolded him with a silk scarf, but despite the overwhelming darkness, the lamp of his body lit up his docile vision, and he gave into her entirely as she massaged him with sesame oil that she'd pressed herself from seeds she'd carefully selected, then distilled the oil with a chemist's care, using all her talent and experience. His desiccated body sprang to life. It shook its every hungry cell, and he was overcome by a current that shocked all his muscles, and then they relaxed, and for the first time since Ibtihal had left, his erection sprung up. Farida fed him one of her grief-milk-soaked sweets, which he followed with a swig of wine she'd aged in casks. He could smell the hillside grapevines bathing in the drowsy sunlight, washed in clean breezes. The scent of the wine mixed with the scent of her body made it the best wine in the entire world. Ever since the mountains had produced an emperor of Rome, Philip the Arab, Rome had drunk the wine of Sarmada and the surrounding regions. He could almost hear nature trotting and history shouting as they slid over his tongue and a bitter taste filled his throat. He finished his glass, and she lay down beside him, burying his face, tanned with repressed anger, in her breasts. He began to suck on them and then to sob. He spent the first half of that moonlit night in tears. She was soaked in the irrepressible tears streaming out from his heavy gloom. When he was finally freed from the sorrowful showers of his bitter memories, from the ungrateful abandonment of a party he'd given his life to and a woman he'd been devoted to, Farida rode him with her abundant femininity and he was overcome with a forceful desire. As he erupted into her womb, he cried out, “I am al-Idrisi! I am al-Idrisi!”

  She got off him and lay down beside him, kissing his overgrown, polo-stick-shaped ear lobes, and whispered to him—not to be nosy, but just to ask: “Who's al-Idrisi?”

  “The author of The Book of Wonders for those with Lust to Wander.”

  He stood up, striking a teacher's pose, and she sat down on the floor leaning forward onto the sofa, drinking her wine, and smiling as she listened to him.

  “He was the first person to draw maps, unlock the secret symbols of the land and paint the seas; he drew connections between human life and the environment. Al-Idrisi was born in Ceuta and lived in Cordoba. He traveled to Syria to study and then he went to Norman Sicily to draw the first map that represented the world, or close to it. One second,” he said, reaching for his bag. He pulled out a stack of maps and carefully picked one of them: “Look at this map here. It's an exact copy of al-Idris
i's. Look how he drew the seven climes with all the countries and continents and the distances between countries, the routes and the mileage. His books on geography are a highpoint in Arab geographical texts, and in all of medieval science.

  “Al-Idrisi died at the age of seventy-one, but no one knows where he was buried. I think he died while he was still at the Norman court in Palermo, Sicily.”

  He continued demonstrating his wide knowledge, and she could only watch this amazing man, sometimes holding back her laughter and at other times with her mouth gaping in wonder.

  “Al-Idrisi was followed by Yaqut al-Hamawi and al-Istakhri and Ibn Battuta and Ibn Majid al-Maqdisi; they all knew the earth was round before everyone else. They understood about lunar and solar eclipses and seasons and the earth's rotation and its orbit around the sun, with their eyes, their minds, and their tools, which I have with me in my bag.”

  He was full of information and explanations. Farida was visited by every Arab geographer and explorer in an amazing exposition until Hamoud passed out. He woke up at noon the next day to the smell of frying eggs; he had a slight headache and his madness seemed to have disappeared.

  “Where's Ibtihal?” he asked her with evident shyness.

  “She died years ago,” she said firmly. “Come on now, no time to waste, breakfast's ready.” She brought over a tray festooned with cheese, yogurt, milk, honey, stuffed eggplant, radishes, and eggs sunny-side-up, as he tried to remember what had happened the night before. All he could remember was that it was day eight of the war! That the soldiers who passed by Sarmada had been shouting: “They wouldn't have occupied it if it weren't for the announcement that Quneitra had fallen! We retreated in a panic. They tricked us! The Israelis are cowards; they wouldn't have been able to move up if they hadn't announced the fall of Quneitra.”

  He remembered that he'd drunk half a liter of homemade arak and that he'd been drunk up until this moment. Five years had passed since the defeat and he'd been lost in his own world. He'd only just snapped out of it, smelling the remnants of the incense, oil, and perfume. They lingered in his nose.