Sarmada Read online

  “Sit down, you little bastard! You pathetic son of a whore, you don't even know who your own father is, and now you want to start acting tough and making threats. Trust me, you better sit the fuck down before it's too late.”

  There was a heavy silence followed by giggling and snickering from the students who couldn't believe they'd just heard those words come out of their principal's mouth. Then it was absolute pandemonium as Bulkhayr lost control: he threw himself onto the bus driver and tried to wriggle his way into the driver’s seat, until the driver was forced to stop the bus. The principal literally kicked the boy off the bus and then they continued on their exciting educational journey.

  Bulkhayr was covered in dust. The bus let out a cutting honk as it carried on into the distance and the despondent boy turned back. He was only a few kilometers from Sarmada, but it felt so far away he thought he’d never get back and he desperately wished there was somewhere else besides that wretched little village where he could go and seek permanent refuge. His head began to fill with uneasy fantasies, but they were soon interrupted by a military tractor trailer hauling a broken-down tank, or perhaps it was an army truck with the sides torn off. The air seemed to pulse with a clamor and dingy smoke that he breathed in quickly. Meanwhile his memory was busy gathering up every last hushed whisper, every suppressed wink, and assembling them in an appalling picture of the truth: he honestly didn’t know who his father was. He was a bastard, and his mother was just a whore, and everybody in the mountain region knew it, everyone but him. All the love and good feeling he got from everyone in Sarmada was only because all the villagers thought he might be related to them.

  As Fayyad was busy tearing the flag atop the school to shreds, Bulkhayr scratched through the veil that’d been wrapped tightly around his eyes and watched as his world began to fall apart. He reached the shed after two hours of dejected walking, and Farida was surprised to see him home so soon. She sent away her patient, who’d come looking for help with flatulence and intestinal bloating, and wiped her hands on a white rag. Bulkhayr was filthy and his face looked sick with the poison of unvarnished truth. Her heart began to beat frenetically, her hands trembled and a bitter distress consumed her. He stood in front of her and stared straight into her eyes. Then clenching his fists, he asked a question that she

  could never answer: “Who's my father?”

  “What's wrong, my love? What happened?” she asked; his pointed question had nearly reduced her to tears. He'd finally found out, but she wasn't ready for that yet. She had thought there would still be time before she'd have to come clean.

  “Who is he? Tell me who he is.”

  “What's wrong, dear? Tell me what's the matter.”

  “Answer me,” he said, cutting her off. “How many times are you going to make me ask you? Give me an answer. Who is my father?”

  Her voice stumbled on his insistence and she thought back over all the houses in the village, every memory a pinprick. She wanted to slap him, or maybe hug him, but the only thing she could bring herself to do was to grab the broom, pour some water out onto the ground, and begin to sweep the porch, submitting helplessly to the tears that overwhelmed her. He was still standing there, looking as if he'd aged ten years in an instant. The place grew silent: first the sounds in the distance died out, then the rustling in the trees. The village was still; he couldn't even hear the broom sweeping against the ground anymore. The only thing that remained was a buzzing, which appeared yellow-colored somehow; the sound itself seemed yellowed and it surrounded him. He went into his bedroom and shut the door behind him.

  The next morning, he was still clothed in that yellow buzzing. He couldn't hear the police cars that came to take Fayyad away after they'd been tipped off by Principal Zaydoun. He'd worried that the destruction of the flag had been the work of more than one culprit, and he even had to defend himself against some of the villagers who attacked him for being so underhanded and manipulative. Kalashnikov-wielding forces dressed in uniforms with stripes and shiny medals stormed into Fayyad's bedroom and dragged him away to the investigations bureau as if he were a war criminal or worse.

  He returned to the village nine weeks later to find that Bulkhayr had regained his sense of hearing, but that he could no longer see the color yellow; he could only hear it. Bulkhayr came to see him at his grandmother’s house. They sat across from each other as his nearly blind grandmother cried tears of joy and got up to bring them something to eat. Fayyad looked broken—as if he’d be broken forever and his spirit simply couldn’t be fixed. Bulkhayr wasn’t able to find any words of consolation—not for his friend, or for himself—and so he left him wordlessly, alone in his despair, and he wasn’t at all surprised when Fayyad ran away a few days later. No one heard from him after that. Not a single message came for twenty years, not until 2006.

  Everyone was celebrating the birth of “a new Middle East,” but it was born seriously deformed. In Iraq, death was serving up cheap daily specials, and Lebanon, the only Arab democracy, was a running joke. Who killed Hariri? It was just another question to add to the long list of history’s unsolved cases, which stretched all the way back to the Caliph Uthman and his tunic. The 2006 war on Lebanon had left everyone in a difficult position because the winner hadn’t really won and the loser hadn’t really lost. But it was especially bad for Sarmada, which watched Fayyad al-Hadi on their television screens returning from Lebanon after the war, reaching the border, and then the village itself. He’d come back from the depths of some faint, forgotten past. The collective memory of the village kicked into gear and the details reappeared instantly; he became the talk of the town and everyone remembered his name, and remembered to say a prayer of mercy for his poor grandmother, who’d died cold and alone. They organized a grand homecoming for him with songs and ululations and festivities and the kind of high-brow, pulpit poetry you sometimes get. Everyone talked about him as if he’d been a close friend. His old principal—who’d been appointed mayor—praised him for his heroism and selfless devotion to his village, even as a child, and he mentioned how the boy had strived and toiled from earliest youth, and he explained that he took personal pride—the principal, that is—in having taught the boy about dignity and patriotism.

  But to tell the truth, Fayyad didn't hear any of that. He was in a wooden box draped with the Syrian flag, lying in his lovely coffin. He'd been returned to the village as part of the famous initiative between Israel and Hezbollah to exchange prisoners and the mortal remains of martyrs. He was taken to Lebanon first, and then, after all those years, back to Sarmada. Today, his old elementary school in the village is named after him. There's a huge sign out front that reads “Fayyad al-Hadi the Martyr Elementary School,” and that same flag still flies over it.

  What with Fayyad running away to Lebanon, and his own choice to punish his mother with silence and to cut himself off from everyone in Sarmada, there was nothing left for Bulkhayr to do but take walks through the rocky wasteland and lock himself away with Hamoud's books. He'd rooted the books out of the attic. All together, they amounted to about seventy books printed in the 1960s, faded and smelling of moths, and the leaves of some still hadn't been cut open, which meant they'd never been read. He dusted them off and found they helped to take his mind off things. The first book that stoked his appetite for reading was Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. On the first page he found a line in nice, clear handwriting: From the library of Hamoud al-Ayid. He felt like erasing it, the name of his hypothetical father, and writing his own name there instead. The sudden realization that his surname would never be al-Ayid made him shiver.

  He devoured those seventy books in less than three months and he decided he’d enroll in the middle school in the neighboring village. He didn’t want to carry on at the school in Sarmada. He couldn’t bring himself to deal with any of the villagers anymore, so he went to the middle school in the neighboring village of Minzar. He had to commute eight kilometers a day by foot through the paths in the rocky waste-land,
entertaining himself by remembering the plots of the novels he’d read and contemplating the forest of stone and all the different shapes it took.

  He was silent at his new school, obstinately so, and quicktempered. When some of the older boys tried to test his mettle, he easily bent one of their noses with a savage punch and they all stayed out of his way after that. He sunk into the school library and he didn’t have any friends except for the few boys he exchanged books with. One of them was a tall borderline dunce whose father had a huge library and collected books merely for decoration. The other kids were always trying to beat up the tall boy and Bulkhayr stepped in to protect him from the older boys a couple of times.

  Bulkhayr figured it was a gesture of thanks and loyalty when his new friend Faris al-Khateeb gave him the collected works of the poets al-Mutanabbi, Abu Ala al-Ma‘arri and Abu Nuwas, out of which he memorized dozens of poems, but the truth of the matter was that Faris had seen the two willies dangling between Bulkhayr’s legs in the bathrooms at school and something about that interested him, attracted him even. He decided to shower Bulkhayr with books because he knew that it was the only way to build a relationship with him, to grow close, and he even risked inviting him over to pick some-thing out of the great big library at home for himself.

  Bulkhayr leapt at the invitation. No one was home, so Bulkhayr could take his time picking through the books that Faris’ father, the high-ranking military officer, had collected to round out the prestigious accoutrements the well-off were meant to have. Every time Bulkhayr found a book that interested him, Faris would take it and stick it in a big bag until the bag was bursting with books. Bulkhayr couldn’t help but feel a bit embarrassed afterward about this excessive generosity. They went and sat together in Faris’ room and drank the tea Faris had prepared. Bulkhayr was uncomfortable; his friend was being a bit too fey, leaning a bit too close. Faris put on a cassette of the Concierto de Aranjuez and tried to put his hand between Bulkhayr’s thighs. Bulkhayr stood up angrily, and when Faris tried to get him to stay, he smacked him, knocking him to the ground, and stormed out, fuming and slamming the door behind him, partially ruing the bagful of books he’d had to leave behind.

  In addition to plowing through books, he also went on long hikes through the wasteland, where he spent hours upon hours examining the huge basalt stones and the wasteland wilderness, tracing the not-so-distant past when the people of the area finished off the forces of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in a battle in which whole divisions of Janissaries and French mercenaries were wiped out.

  To him, the wide, wild wasteland was the most familiar place in the world, and he eventually started taking a small tent with him and a bag full of Hamoud’s supplies, and even blazing a few short trails himself. That wilderness was where he thought and matured; it was where he learned his silence and toughness, where he’d regained the peace and tranquility he’d lost. His trips began lasting several days, which he’d spend lost in thought, communing with the rocks and the humped boulders and the august and immovable stones. Time meant nothing to him when he set his tent up and lit a fire beside the flowing springs or on the edge of the forest that lined the mountains and encircled the massive rock formations that lay just outside Sarmada. His hikes eventually took him deep into the heart of the Lajat. He'd sit for hours among strange ruins, enjoying the silence, contemplating the spirit of the basalt and all its shapes, its peculiar formations and figures, under a clear open sky and a bright sun, breathing in the pure air and all the scents of stone.

  The wilderness of the wasteland was tamed in his contemplative mind and he began recording his first dense vignettes in a special notebook, which he'd titled Transformations of Basalt and Sunlight. It made him drunk with joy to record the lives of the rocks and their shapes, their relationship with the rain and the sun, their colors, how they changed over the hours of darkness and light, their breath as they soaked up the sun and swallowed the plants growing on them, how water collected on their surfaces after a downpour in little pools topped off by fleeting sparrows or cicadas and other bugs come to stay. This seemed more perfect to him, these worlds opened up to the deep blue sky of day, pure and proud beneath the stars, which were like freckles on the sky at night.

  In his notebook, he wrote about one rock that was pregnant with small pebbles. With words, he painted a picture to show how the earth drank the milky liquid of the stars from the mouth of the moon. He wrote about the foolish pebbles that wouldn't be budged from beside a pool of water for more than 290 years and were absolutely covered in the droppings of thirsty sparrows. He recorded the whispers of silence in sentences that bulged with the ups-and-downs of the pock-marked face of a furious boulder. He absorbed the rocky insomnia and whispering solidity, he watched as the silt fermented and the pot-bellied boulder seemed to waltz. He committed the smells of the place to words, recording the nitrate-laden breezes in a poem he called “A Dictionary of Zephyrs and Abrasions.” He was overjoyed when he unlocked the language of basalt and its scent. He and the stones became one and then he could turn them into new words, which oozed energy and shine. His overpowering desire for discovery pushed him toward Hebariyeh, that magical spot in the mountains, so he made up his mind to go set up camp there.

  It was evening by the time he arrived. He found a bearded man absorbed in prayer beside some ruins. The man had reclaimed a plot of about fifty square meters and ringed his garden with some strange stones he’d found; he also had a goat and a few chickens. The old man welcomed Bulkhayr and invited him to stay the night. Bulkhayr told the old man that he’d heard a great deal about Hebariyeh and that he wanted to find out the truth for himself. Was it really the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah or just some settlement that’d been taken unawares by a volcano 5,000 years ago?

  “Neither,” said the old man. “Here, they used to make graves out of leftover corpses. I bet they must’ve had to collect hundreds of corpses from all over the region. They heated them up with the rocks, at temperatures between 600 and 1000 degrees Celsius, so the bones mixed in with the rocks, as you can see. But no one has any idea why. Were they making sacrifices to the place? Or was it some primitive ritual having to do with ancient idols?”

  Bulkhayr took a look around him. There were several huge stones with protrusions that were quite obviously joints, and palates and jaws complete with teeth. He could see fragments of bone, and crimson dirt, and lime, as well as stones inlaid with vertebrae and skulls. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, and he was the one who’d memorized all the stones and different basalt shapes in the Lajat. But here were seven square kilometers of boulders, rocks, and pebbles formed from the bones of humans and animals and from parts of trees that had been carbonized and cooled and preserved in strange and inexplicable shapes. He was completely taken with the place and he started leaping around like a maniac, looking, peering, poking, examining, recording, cheerfully collecting whatever small stones and scraps of metal he could get his hands on until darkness swallowed them up. The old man lit a fire and they kept each other company till the morning. Bulkhayr recited poems by Abu Nuwas and Abu Ala al-Ma‘arri, as well as some four-liners he’d written himself about geological revelations, and the old man recited mystical poems by al-Hallaj, al-Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi for him until daybreak. He woke up sluggishly and climbed to the top of a short hill and looked out over the crematory, the pit of massive stones. The layer of moss that had grown over the stones was soaked with dew. As the sun rose, the scene was transformed into a symphony of stunning colors and the first threads of dawn trickled out onto the freshly washed stones. The boy’s forsaken heart was moved and—for the first time in his life—he understood that special, secret tingle that the place inspired.

  He stared at the rocks closely and saw that they possessed human features, faces. Some were crisp and distinct, others were disguised and dulled; some were lofty and fixed, others hidden and vague. They seemed pliant, and changing and synchronized as the dew began to gleam in a bath of light poured out fr
om the fresh sun, and the desolation became a jungle bursting with color and the buzzing and chirping of insects. The perfume of those millennia still stored up in that virginal, untamed place emerged.

  Places had their means of self-defense, too, he felt, just like primitive beings, and if he only listened and looked closely enough, he could liberate geography from its suspension. Place was no more than frozen time. And time was only flowing place. This was the paradox that gripped his heart and allowed him—for the briefest moment—to understand that anyone who came across this patch of earth was fated to resemble it, to bury his emotions beneath a stony, blood-red screen and to let them out only on mornings like this one.

  He understood for the first time and forevermore that what kept the people here wasn't sectarian feeling or a sense of community, it was the spirit of the rocks, the virgin sentiments stored deep in the rugged wasteland, the secrets of the basalt. He felt the spirits of those whose corpses had been burned appear. He could hear them muttering, their footsteps. The dreams of people who'd performed their duty and returned to their rest appeared fleetingly before his eyes.

  True nature can't just be some spindly plants, and forests, and sand. It was rock and metal that had come together with unparalleled symmetry in order to put disorder straight. Nothing can be built if there's no solidity, nothing, not souls, not cities. The soul of a city is usually derived from the type of stones that are used to build it and relationships are formed based on the type of metal people use to shield themselves against nature.

  As the sun rose up in the east, the dew dissipated in the driving heat. He didn't resist his conscience when it suggested that it was time to return to Sarmada. He didn't even think of the old man: whether he'd really been there or was a mere hallucination. He found a shady refuge from the midday heat and dozed off, watching as the history of the place played out before his eyes in a smooth rendition that led him—when he woke up—to the moral of the story: we're going backwards. We're walking back toward that first drop of primordial sperm. The future is nothing more than a past that's been achieved. That idea would gnaw at him for the rest of his life and lead him to venture into worlds no one had ever seen before.