And yet, the more innocent she looked, the more he began to feel that her innocence hid something behind it, and that she was without doubt a dangerous female, and what was more, a child of sin. So he went on playing a game with her, handing her the branch of a tree and saying in his sweetest voice, ‘Take your time, girl, for there is no need for you to fear anything, even if you happen to be a member of Hizb al-Shaitan, since it was also created by decree of the Imam, exactly like Hizb Allah, and do not think that I am trying to find out about you in order to do you harm, for God forbid, that is not my intention at all. On the contrary, I want to reward you for the work you have done, and for the efforts you have made without seeking anything in return. Such behaviour is the very essence of true self-sacrifice as expected by God, our nation, and the Imam.’
But the woman continued to be silent, her face expressing an even greater innocence, her heart swelling with a pride and happiness so overwhelming that she could hardly contain it. She lifted her eyes and looked up at him. This was the first time she had ever seen him. He looked a strange man, completely bald with not a single hair on his head, but with a face covered in hair and thick eyebrows meeting in a line above his nose. On his forehead was a patch of dark scaly skin like a mulberry, and his nose was hook-like, overhanging a big mouth which was twisted to one side. His chin was pointed, with a deep cleft in the middle from which hung down strands of straggly hair like a goat’s beard. She told herself that this face looked like that of the Imam, the one she had seen many times in pictures; then she thought it could not be possible, for the Imam would surely not be walking around just like other people, nor would he have that big hole in his trousers.
She continued not to say a word, and the Imam asked her why she was so silent. ‘I thought you were the Imam, but you are not him,’ she said. And somehow at that point his intelligence seemed to grow sharper, and he remembered that information had become an important weapon these days, and he said to himself: Now it is possible for me to test how loyal she is to me and to her country, and how great her faith is in God, and so reach right to the bottom of her heart. And he was filled with a great exuberance at the thought that he was now going to probe deep into her heart, whereas neither the Chief of Security nor the superpowers had as yet discovered a means to spy on people’s hearts. He was so excited with the idea that he started to imagine that he was God in person, forgetting he was only the Imam in disguise, since it was God alone who could get into people’s hearts, and he was almost on the verge of revealing his true identity when at the last moment he decided it was better to remain incognito in order to discover her true feelings and how devoted she was to God, to her country, and to the Imam. He made a special effort to hide the coarse tones of his normal voice, speaking very gently and taking good care to expose the big hole at the back of his trousers, for the more he hid his real identity the more certain he became that she would reveal the truth about herself, and the things she hid deep in her heart.
He was still standing in front of her when suddenly he noticed that he was very afraid and that his whole body was shaking with fear. He could not understand why it was that he was shaking so, but after a while he started to realize from her continued silence and the steady look in her eyes as she stood facing him, that indeed she believed not in God, nor in the nation, nor in the Imam, that she was not a member either of Hizb Allah or of Hizb al-Shaitan, that she was certainly a devil of a girl and the daughter of a devil of a woman and that both of them had been born in sin. Having reached these conclusions, he said to himself: Now, if this is true she is capable of committing the worst sins and the most terrible crimes and there is nothing else that can be done to deal with this than to stone her until she drops dead.
There is a strange enchantment in this other world which attracts me to it. My old sweetheart Katie fled over there, and I have heard many tales and myths, like those of
The Thousand and One Nights,
about it. I have heard about lust in the eyes and molten gold in the earth, yet here I am in a room without heating. I change from one train to another under the ground. I work as a small employee in a small company and I wanted to marry the daughter of the director. I fell in love with her but she turned me down, and so I married a woman whom others had turned down before I met her. She is ten years older than myself and she has a flat chest, thighs thin as walking sticks, and no haunches. Her mind is hot and seething with things, but her womb is freezing. She gives birth to one book after the other, but when it comes to children she prefers test-tube babies.
I said to her, ‘To my mind a great woman is the woman who gives birth to a great man, not to a great book.’
She said, ‘The Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ, but I lost my virginity when I was a child and no longer believe in Christ.’
I asked, ‘What do you believe in then?’
‘I believe in my mind and in anyone who can relate to my mind, but not to my uterus,’ she said.
So I said to myself, I pray that God and Jesus Christ will be my compensation in life, and every morning I rush through the corridors of the underground to ride in long narrow trains like the tubes of test-tube babies, standing in row after row with the other rows, all packed like sardines with the feel of oil and salty sweat around me, or on the escalators closing my eyes and letting myself be carried up to where the cold wind buffets me about as I dash over the pavement, shielding myself from the rain with an old black umbrella. When I enter my office I shake the rain off my coat like a sick dog and comb my hair slowly in the mirror. My telephone no longer brings me the tones of a voice I am waiting to hear. All I can expect is the director saying the same thing he says every day. This report is urgent, this letter is important, where is the file, I want twenty copies of this document, call the number I gave you again, reserve me a place on the plane, write the memorandum in time for the meeting tomorrow. It never stops ringing and his voice never stops asking and my fingers move over the keys of their own accord as though they are no longer part of me, and time passes with the tick of the clock to bring nothing, no love, no friendship, no hope, not even some fuel for heating. Even despair has gone.
The walls of my heart are made of white ice. The cup of coffee in my hand is cold, and my room is painted a dark grey tinged with a pale blue so that I seem to live in shadow. I have not renewed its paint for the last twenty years. I saved up some money and decided to paint it before last Christmas, but Christmas came and went and I did nothing. They sent rockets under cover of night, and with a nuclear war no walls will be left standing, so what use is it painting it anew? The walls of my room have no pictures hanging on them, not even a picture of my father or my mother, but in my mind I have an image of my father in his military uniform, for that is how my grandmother described him to me. After the end of the First World War he carried me away over the seas, and our ship anchored near a mountain of ice. He left me there with his mother and went off to another war. He died without telling me how I was born, and my grandmother knew nothing about his life at all. If I asked her, she would say you looked a handsome baby through the glass of the test-tube, and in my sleep I used to dream of myself swimming in a test-tube, looking for my mother, when suddenly a huge whale swallowed me up in one gulp, and a moment later I would wake up bathed in sweat.
The tips of my fingers feel icy as they hold the glass. Black coffee without milk every day for breakfast, swallowed without appetite on an empty stomach. An appetite for food, an appetite for love, an appetite for books, are things I knew at one time, but now they are gone. All I read is the main heading of the first page in the morning newspaper, for I am waiting for a single item of news, a short sentence composed of three words. Nuclear War Declared.
It is five minutes to nine. I pull the covers over my head again. Every day I decide to stay in bed. Every day I say to myself, why get up? For outside my room there is nothing but the tarmac street, the rain pelting down, the tunnels under the ground, the trains like test-tubes teeming with human embryos, the escalators to which I abandon myself as they climb, the keys which my fingers touch all the time, and the voice of the director squeaking on the line. I want an urgent report, this letter is important, write that down, no the other file, a non-smoking seat in first class please and don’t forget that I cannot fly otherwise. He smokes but does not like to inhale the smoke of other people’s cigars.
One night he invited me to dinner. He said he admired my intelligence, but while we ate his eyes kept running over my body all the time. After we had finished our meal we sat on the sofa eating chocolates and drinking fine champagne cognac. Suddenly he put his arms around me, but I turned my face the other way, for his breath smelt. I expressed my appreciation for his wonderful feelings but told him quite frankly that I was very much enamoured of somebody else.
‘Man or woman?’ he enquired.
‘You have no right to question me about my private life. What do you care whom it is that I love, since it is not you?’ said I. I left his flat and walked out without even saying thank you or good night. Yet the truth of the matter was that I loved no one, that I was completely free, free of a need to love, of a need to wait for somebody, of a need to hear promises made that were not real. My body was my own, and I had no desire to possess the body of somebody else. All I needed at the time was the sum of money each month to pay the rent, and buy myself coffee and bread, and if I lost my job it meant I would no longer have even that, so the next day, when he put his arms around me again, I whispered words of endearment in his ear. He looked at me and asked if I was all right and told me that my face had changed since yesterday. I explained that in fact I was not feeling too well, that my mouth had a bitter taste like that of black coffee. ‘Have you been to a psychiatrist recently?’ he said, looking at me in a queer way, and when I answered no, he told me it was better to go since the signs I was showing were most probably those of depression.
The psychiatrist asked me about my life, and I told him everything very frankly. So he said to me, ‘The only treatment for you, my friend, is to travel. What you need is the warmth of love, the rays of the sun, and the feel of money in your pocket.’ So I prepared my bags, and when I was ready, I told my wife that I had decided to travel.
‘Where to?’ she asked me, and I pointed with the tip of my finger to a place on the map. She put on her spectacles, which were thick and green like the bottom of an empty bottle of beer, and looked at the place I had pointed to. ‘So that’s where you’re going,’ she said, ‘overseas.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I will be back very soon carrying diamonds and jewels for you.’ I kissed her tenderly on a mouth without lips and went off alone, thinking of my old love and the new life which waited for me. My heart beat to the clink of gold, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw myself living like King Shahrayar, raping a virgin each night and killing her at dawn.
From where I was, high up in the air, I could see the land shining under the sun like liquid gold, with a green hill rising in its midst between the river and the sea. The plane landed after sunset, and as I stepped out my nose inhaled a smell of things from bygone ages, an odour of sweat mingled with fat and burning kerosene. The air was filled with smoke, from which emerged the grey faces of people, words spoken in an unknown language, lack-lustre eyes staring at me, square bodies wrapped in cloaks, and children with grown-up faces and swarms of flies devouring their eyes. As I walked out of the airport men wearing long robes gathered around me, almost assaulting me, pulling at my arms, now to one side, now to the other, as they quarrelled over my bags. One of them threw me into a taxicab, and my bags were thrown in after me. The taxicab leapt forwards in the dark, surrounded on all sides by the blare of horns and by what seemed to me like rockets bursting in the sky or artillery guns being fired in a continuous barrage. When we stopped at a crossing by the red traffic lights, children rushed up on all sides carrying yellow dusters and started to wipe the front window of the cab vigorously, then they pushed their cracked palms under my nose, but the driver drove them away with angry shouts.
I reached the hotel in a state of collapse and asked the reception if anybody had called me, but they said no. ‘I am waiting for an appointment with the Imam,’ I said.
‘Today is the Big Feast, and the Imam is in the middle of his speech, and everybody else is on holiday,’ they said.
‘What can I do until the holiday is over?’ I asked.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ they said. ‘Everything is closed.’
‘But isn’t there anything I can see these days?’
‘You can go and see the Virgin Mary if you want. She has appeared several times during the last days in the old church neighbouring the new mosque, and all the people are gathered to try to get a glimpse of her.’ And before I had time to decide for myself one of them threw me into another taxicab and I found myself seated on the edge of the back seat making the sign of the cross for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
When I arrived I could hardly believe my eyes. People seemed to have come from the most distant parts of the land, and they were there in huge numbers, men, women, and children, young and old. They were squatting on the ground or sitting on straw chairs, some wearing the peasant robe and others dressed like city dwellers. There were women with their faces covered in veils and others who walked about showing off their half-naked bodies. There were people who looked ill and hungry and pale, and others with ruddy complexions full of health and vitality. But all of them had their eyes fixed on the dome of the church, waiting for the Virgin to appear. They had read about her in the newspapers, and all those who had not seen her when she appeared the previous year had come to get a glimpse of her this time. Even the foreigners had come to witness the miracle, and they could be seen watching with the others, standing slightly apart, each one with his black dog on a leash squatting obediently on its haunches with its eyes raised reverently upwards to the sky.