Sarmada Read online

  Azza Tawfiq stopped speaking. Her mood changed and she asked me for a cigarette. She lit it and her gaze drifted, not off into the distance, but deep inside. Her left foot bobbed constantly as she spoke as if she were casting off a long-kept silence, as if she were finally shedding a heavy burden after endless toil. I had nothing to say. She looked out absent-mindedly toward the Seine. You could see the Louvre in the distance and the Latin Quarter buzzing with life. She began to stroke her left palm. There was a small wart and dark spots where two warts used to be. She noticed I was looking at her palm, but she didn't hide it. She whispered, sardonically, “I never could get rid of these warts. For that you need a psychologist. The only way to get rid of them is the power of suggestion. One difference between Hela and me is that she managed to do it by using an old Aramaic cure. But me, in Paris in 2010, I've had three laser procedures for them and they're still not fully cured. Maybe I need to go back to Sarmada, to the Salt Spring, to cure them.” Azza looked me in the eye. “You know the Salt Spring, of course?”

  “Yes, I remember it. We used to go there when I was little to drink the cold water. We'd walk down four stone steps and scoop the water up. It tastes better than Evian if you ask me.” That was my attempt at lightening the mood, but she didn't react. There was only a wan smile sketched on her lips. She went on, confident and unwavering; she wanted me to know every last detail, to convince me it was true, and to free herself.

  “I was rubbing my hand as I walked towards them, remembering the Salt Spring and my cow, Princess. I'd cured my warts with Aunt Rosa's remedy on the same day Princess fell from the cliff...

  “I was there the day she fell down off the cliff. I was only about eight years old and I was following the old Aramaic cure that Aunt Rosa, the old Christian medicine woman, had given me along with two lumps of rock salt. ‘Don't speak to anyone,’ she said. ‘Don't look behind you. And don't return anyone's greeting. Just go to the spring and throw the salt in, and then come back the same way you went.’

  “I went to the Salt Spring, performed the rite, and repeated three times: ‘My warts, O Spring, dissolve, as salt dissolves in water!' I went home and fell asleep in my mother's arms. I woke with a start: outside there was a commotion. I got up to see what was going on. My father and two other men were sharpening butcher knives and then they hurried off. I followed them to the cave in the valley below the cliff where people used to take shelter from French air raids. The village thoroughfare ran alongside the cliff that overhung the cave and there was a sliver of rock that jutted out and came to a dead end.

  “I saw all the villagers heading for the bottom of the cliff, looking up at the huge cow as it mooed plaintively for help. I can still remember the look in her eye: a faint glimmer of hope that they might save her from her fatal predicament.”

  Old man Salama had been one of the ones preparing himself in case Princess should fall. He said he could remember it as if it were yesterday: Princess was the most famous cow in the whole region. No one could quite understand how exactly she'd managed to set the terms, how she'd won them all over, silenced their mocking, and maintained her poise until they finally realized that she was something special. They ended up giving her a name that matched her imperious bearing, breaking the longstanding tradition that only thoroughbred Arabian horses merited such names.

  “Princess never wore a halter, so she'd nearly trample the village cowhands when they came to take her to pasture. She once went two days without any water because she refused to drink with the other cows in the herd and when they tried to stall her with another cow, she knocked down a pair of wooden doors and slammed her stubborn head against the wall. Her milk was the best, though, the most abundant and delicious in the whole region.”

  Salama went on, reviving the memories of his peers gathered there with us in front of Mamdouh's shop: “One time she was in heat and the village bull couldn't mount her, so she had to spend a whole week in heat until we brought her a proper stud bull from the north. After hours of resisting and butting, he finally mounted her. She got that prize bull in the neck with her horn, but at long last she let out a moan of pleasure that rang through the village. Women came ululating and we danced the Dabke till the morning. It was the first time we'd ever put on a wedding for someone that wasn't human.” He laughed, as did everyone else.

  “Well then, how come this super-cow suffered such a disgraceful death?” I asked them, hoping to compare the memories on the ground to what Azza Tawfiq had told me in Paris.

  “The cow followed strange whims,” Salama said. “She wandered off, following the green grass that took her from the safety of the familiar toward the lure of the unknown. She walked along the edge of the cliff, looking for the freshest virgin shoots. She drifted off her usual route in search of sweet mallow and tempting clover.”

  Salama stopped and pointed to the nearby cliff. He turned to me. “See there? Every day she went down that path towards the Salt Spring to drink. Except that day, she stopped unexpectedly near where the cliff hangs over the cave; she'd spotted a little path that took her right up over the roof of the cave. To her right there was a massive drop and to her left a wall of basalt. The path was narrow and a boulder blocked the way forward. It was barely wide enough for her; she couldn't go back, she couldn't go forward, and of course she couldn't turn around and head out front first.

  “She ate her fill and then when she realized she was stuck, she mooed a few times. A crowd gathered and we tried everything to save her from what seemed like certain death. We tried to use strong ropes, but the climbers couldn't get to her to wrap the ropes around her body. We went around to all the houses in the village and got all the foam mattresses out of the parlors, and the women collected tattered clothes and stuffed sacks with straw. Hamoud supervised the creation of a safety net made out of blankets, mattresses, rugs, and yarn. In the heat of the moment, he even tore off his carefully pressed coat and threw it on top of the surreal pile of textiles. I bet that was the weirdest safety net ever made. But, you see, the problem was that it wouldn't have saved a mountain goat let alone a cow as big as Princess! The ground wasn't level and the whole idea was sort of absurd. People can get rather foolish and childlike when they're desperate.

  “After four hours we still didn't have anything to show for all our effort. All we could do was pray for a miracle—maybe the cow would sprout wings. When our imagination had gone as far as that, we knew it was time to start getting out the knives and cleavers. We spread out along the bottom of the cliff and started sharpening, just waiting for her to fall!”

  I left Salama at the shop with the other men and walked over to the cliff. The place hadn't changed in all that time. It was the setting of my childhood, too, but I don't want to force my memories into the story just yet. I thought back on my life and work, about constantly being swamped making those films about bridging East and West, those interminable months of research and discussion—everything had to be just right so the camera could make concrete images out of my paper ideas—and then I met Azza Tawfiq in Paris. She not only upended my schedule, but—as I'd later discover—she was also the spark that set my whole life up in flames.

  I looked up at Princess's cliff, half-expecting Hela Mansour to walk past. It was as if time were commixed. A place can't be a frozen moment. All it takes is a little memory and some storytelling, and time begins to flow. It was my job to set the scene just as Azza Tawfiq had seen it in her previous life, just how she'd told it to me, and also how the people of Sarmada were recounting the story, here and now. Once I'd added some of my own perspective and imagination, it went like this:

  Three knives, two daggers, and a cleaver waited below as the body fell through the air to the sound of the bell ringing around her neck. The blades plunged into the carcass from every side. They cut off her limbs, and blood gushed over their faces and clothing. Her final groan terrified the crowd, but it faded away and the precious cow fell silent. The crowd jumped back to avoid the spurting blood and its
sticky splatter, expanding the circle of spectators that had grown tighter and tighter around the stiff and crumpled carcass lying on the rocky ground. One of the most skillful butchers was put in charge of beheading the creature. One carefully gauged blow of the cleaver and the little bell fell from its neck and rolled down to the foot of the cliff. Hela Mansour's youngest brother went after it and brought it home to her as a token of the day.

  The tale of Princess's demise was over, I felt. Now it was time to head over to the Salt Spring and circle around the cliff, waiting for Hela to arrive at the mercy of this summer heat that simply wouldn't let up. I stopped to examine the craggy cliff face and to look down the path all the way to the end, where Hela Mansour was slaughtered. I spent a long time just looking in the midst of what seemed like a thicket of oppressive calm. Steam rose up from the asphalt as if it were about to melt and the air was heavy with an alien heat. My body felt weighed down suddenly, and then instantly lighter. I trembled and broke out in a cold sweat. Something like a light drizzle fell on my face. Hela Mansour's body had settled, it seemed, inside my own. We'd melded and she now occupied my body. I didn't realize it, but suddenly I was walking along beside her, or through her. I'd become her, she'd become me, and together we returned to that Tuesday evening in 1968.

  She spotted her brothers coming toward her in the distance—a gang of bearded men carrying knives and cleavers like the ones she'd seen thirteen years before, on the day Princess fell from the cliff.

  She closed her dark eyes—just as she'd done when she watched that scene with her brothers all those years ago—and arrived on the stage for a scene she'd never imagined would be replayed on her own body as the price for her deadly defection with an outsider. They slowed down and eventually stopped, standing in a semicircle. I stepped forward into the center. Their beards masked their faces, but she knew each one by the look in his eyes. She wished she could throw her arms around them, embrace them one by one, and say, “I'm tired of running,” but she didn't. She just listened to the eerie silence, which was broken only by the cold whistling wind coming down from the North. One brother's eyes articulated sorrow and longing as if to say “I missed you,” but his voice, sad and cracking, said only, “Why'd you do it?” and seized up.

  Rain didn't fall, although the sky darkened with clouds. Nawwaf came up to us—to me who'd become her—roaring and snarling, and plunged his knife through her scarlet shirt into her chest as it rose and fell rapidly. A shivering spasm came over her whole body as she sank to the ground. Together we watched the heavy clouds break and become snowflakes. I could feel the blade burying itself in my chest as I watched. As she fell to the ground, she looked up to the sky and summoned up all her remaining strength. “Are you satisfied now? Anything else you want from me, God?” she cried, her voice passing through the cloying blood that tasted salty in her throat.

  I screamed alongside her, “Anything else you want from me, God?” Her memories appeared before her eyes in an uncanny flow as her numb body longed only to lie and rest. And yet the lightness gave her the feeling of flying. I watched the tape of her life streaming before me: school papers, old friends, her brothers carrying her around, laughing at her mischief, passing her from shoulder to shoulder, her father's kindly eyes, her mother's divine laugh, the mulberry tree at her old house, berries sweet like nectar.

  He withdrew his knife and took a step back, permitting the others to come forward and stab her in the neck, the back and torso. She glimpsed the Salt Spring as she fell. The swift current of her memory whirled. Milk thistle didn't help with the warts. The old medicine woman. The church bells she loved so much. The muezzin calling morning prayer. Druze shaykhs reciting the Epistles of Wisdom or the story of Judgment Day on the last evening of the Feast of Sacrifice. The scent of lit candles in the majlis. Milk sloshing melodiously in stomach bags. Women lamenting a death.

  The fourth knife pierced her windpipe just below the neck. She tasted only salt; her body grew torpid; her head teemed with memories. Gushing blood stained her mind.

  The smell of roses on the morning of Holy Wednesday. Running to pick the supplest red poppy anemones, oleander, daisies, sweet clover, pennyroyal and rosemary, which she soaked in an earthenware pot and left out under the stars of the spring night sky. In the morning on the second Wednesday in April, she'd wash her body with the flower infusion, as was the ritual, to be protected from snakes and scorpions for an entire year. Old tales. Weddings and pranks. Amulets and strings that could change one's destiny. My warts, O Spring, dissolve!

  Her belly was rent open from one hip to the other. She fell to the ground and thrust her hands into the muddy dirt that was mixed with her own warm blood. My warts, O Spring, dissolve. Her mind was clear but for a gentle peal that withered into a still whiteness.

  At that point, I left her to collapse, dead, and came out of her; or she came out of me—I don't know which. But I watched the final scene, standing there by the cliff, soaked with sweat, searching my soul. There was a gluey taste in my mouth, acrid like blood. One of them stepped forward and drove his knee into her back. He pulled her head back by the hair. With a twitch of her neck and a swift movement, her head was severed. They took out their razors, smeared their faces with her blood, and began to shave their beards off in clumps that fell onto her corpse. They didn't say a word. They stood and took in the scene as a light drizzle of rain began to fall, and an unfamiliar numbness pricked their faces. A great burden had been lifted, but it was as if it'd flowed out with the blood and settled somewhere in their chests; the burden was a voice they didn't want to hear. They squeezed their eyes shut to hold back the tears that burst out despite them when the wind blew away the tufts of hair covering her body. They retreated hastily and were met with cheering women ululating and men standing dry-eyed as rain fell from the gloomy sky.

  The taste of blood in my mouth was real. I fainted. The neighbors carried me over to their house, where I was given a glass of cold water and began to regain some of my strength. Friends and relatives came running, “What's wrong? Is everything okay?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” answered the man of the house. “It's just a touch of sun.”

  Panning the video camera, I captured the whole of Sarmada from the top of the hill—a panorama of the quiet little village. When I got down from the hill, I filmed the paths, focused on the old stone houses, the cliff, the Mansour family's detached homestead by the old mill, Cannon Hill—it got that name because it was where the French had set up their cannon when they were shelling the town and its environs. I filmed the rest of the valley, Farida's shed, the terebinth tree, the myrtle, Wool Creek, until I got to the Mansour family's old house. The aged smell of the place enveloped me as I kicked open the old gate, which hadn't been replaced in decades. It opened with a screech. The dotty old mulberry tree stood in the center of the garden. It made me feel as if we'd known each other for years. I filmed everything I could and then sat down to contemplate the ruination. It occurred to me to search through the soil under the mulberry tree, so I started to dig. My hands were no use, so I went round to Salama's house to borrow a shovel.

  I got down to work. I dug up the earth around the trunk down to an arm's length, but found no sign of the will, or the bracelets, or the bell. I suddenly realized I was being ridiculous and stopped. Salama, with his narrow brown eyes and wrinkled face, came over to see what I was up to and asked me what I was looking for. “Nothing... It was just a stupid idea I had.”

  “You're not the first person to go looking for treasure under there,” he said. “We've dug down under the ruins of this house two or three times already and we didn't find anything except for an old copper cowbell.” I was dumbstruck. “The bell's round the neck of one of the cowhand's cows now.”

  “Really?”

  “Follow me.” He led me to Poppy Bridge. A man was leading a herd of nineteen cows back from the poppy fields. The herd walked calmly past us; each cow had a copper bell around its neck. Salama went up to one of th
em and snatched off its bell. It was about as big as a fist and slightly dented. He held it out to me and said, “I found this buried in the Mansours' garden.” I started laughing and imagining how the physics professor would react when I handed her the bell. It didn't prove anything, not that transmigration was real or that reality could transmigrate. Anyone could be Hela Mansour or not. And yet, had she not come over me? I'd taken the stabs alongside her. I'd choked on the sour blood in her throat. I watched her memories soar and touched the awesome darkness as she lay there, motionless.

  I left her body, or she left mine. And then the place I'd fled from opened up before me: Sarmada. I hadn't realized that Sarmada was a part of me, and that I was a part of it. But now I could see—without eyes—and hear the rush of people's stories and dreams; the simple setting teemed. I wasn't the same “me” anymore. I wasn't dying to get away as I usually was during my visits. I wasn’t oppressed by the customary, crushing boredom. The dull sluggishness of life here didn’t remind me of the brisk city rhythms of my beloved Dubai, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. I craved Sarmada all of a sudden, preferred it, and for the first time, I realized that I’d merely been searching for something within myself the farther afield I went and that I could only find it here.