The Fall of the Imam (23 page)

The telephone on his desk never stopped ringing. When it rang he gave me his back, lifted the receiver, and whispered into the wires for hour after hour. After he hung up he said, ‘It is not permitted for a legal wife to surprise her husband in his office like the Chief of Security does.’

I laughed loudly and said, ‘It was not my intention to surprise you, but it is not permitted that a legal wife refrain from passing by her legal husband while on her way to meet her lover.’

He turned round in the swivel chair to face me with his whole body, and when he lifted up his eyes to look at me I could see them shining with lust. He desired me more, the more I desired someone else, and I could feel his eyes fastened on me, but I looked the other way. At night he tried in vain to possess me, so he took hold of his pen and tried to write, but failed to write anything, and in the morning when he opened the newspaper he found the same article published for the hundredth or the thousandth time. His face framed in the box was his old face, as old as Adam, peace be on him. Failure invaded him through every pore like sweat going in the wrong direction, and I could see him struggling against it like a fly in a plate of honey. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and gave me a smile as though overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness. Then he said, ‘I am attainted by writing, like a man attainted by disease, and writing kills just like love.’

But I replied, ‘Writing does not kill. Nothing kills but the lack of a real consciousness, and it is not love that kills but its absence.’

I could see him look at me with eyes full of jealousy. Deep inside he hoped his consciousness would return to him so that he could write, and deep inside he wished that he could love like I did, so that life would return to him after it had left him behind. The smile on his face remained fixed, and I realized that he had hidden his sadness in the heart until death. I used to hear him laughing loudly all the time and thought him incapable of sadness, and I left him alone in his room to write; but he did not write, and in the morning I saw his article filling a whole page of the newspaper with his picture framed in a box at the top, and I looked at it thinking it was his new face, but I realized it was the old one and that there had been no change.

I lifted my head and saw her face, pale and thin, with black eyes like two stars shining in the night. ‘Who are you?’ I said.

‘I am his daughter,’ she said.

‘But I am his legal wife, and he had no daughter,’ I said.

‘He ran away from my mother and refused to recognize me as his child.’

‘You are his illegitimate daughter, then,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, and when she had said it my eyes retreated before her eyes so far that they hit against my body, shaking it deeply, so that my brain was shaken with it and my heart and consciousness came back, making me realize that he was a body in a box and that she was a young virgin, and that she and I were the same in many ways, for she stood on two legs, not on four, and so did I; and she had two arms and two hands and each hand had five fingers and she held her hand out to me and bared her breast before me without fear. So I held my hand out to her and our hands met over his body, lying in the box, and when they met my heart shivered, and she held my hand in her hand with a firm grasp, and I held her hand in my hand, and it was the small hand of a child the size of my palm, and it was warm, as warm as my body and as warm as my heart. Then our four arms moved towards each other, following our hands in an embrace, and the embrace was close so that our bodies followed our arms and body touched body, leaving no space.

I said, ‘Where have you been and when were you born and are you still alive?’

She remained silent, answering nothing, just looking at me with eyes big enough to contain all the sadness of the world. Then, walking slowly over to the window, she looked out over the universe, opening her arms as though calling out to God or to a mother or a father. Her look fastened itself on the picture set in a frame carved on the box, then swung upwards to the sky over the arches of victory, the domes of churches, and the minarets of mosques, and down again to the earth, the streets, the houses, the shops with people drinking glasses of canned juice, children wearing their new clothes for the Feast and flying coloured balloons which rose up in the air to the sky, floating under the sun accompanied by the cries of the children, moving with the cool breeze of the river until it met with the cool breeze of the sea. And the voices of the children ran through her body like peals of laughter and she stretched out her arms to embrace their voices, to embrace the sun as though she was its mother.

I stood watching her as she looked out of the window. I heard her breathe in gasps, like someone stifling her sobs or choking with laughter, and her panting went on as though she had been running for a long time and could not stop. I could hear her heart beating, and she held her hand over the wound cutting deep into her flesh below the left breast. Her face was white, almost bloodless, her eyes dry without a tear, her pupils black, shining like seeing holes in the sky at night. I heard her say in a whispering voice like the rustle of leaves, ‘I did not cry out when I felt the knife go through my back. I turned around, trying to see where it came from. After a while I stood up again, pressing my hand over the wound to stop the bleeding, then walked, holding my shoulders upright, looking at the sun above me. I went through the streets, between row upon row of closed windows and closed doors, and stopped in front of the only door which was open. Written on the outside were the words “House of Joy”. I said to myself: This is the door which leads to God. I asked about my mother, for I had not seen her since the day I was born, and they told me that God had taken her away. So I thought, if I find God, then I will find my mother, and I started to walk in my sleep with my arms stretched out in front of me, looking for her in the dark of night. I had never seen God face to face except in dreams, and in the orphanage they used to call me Bint Allah, and when I looked over the high wall I could see the dome of the church and the light of the minaret high up at the top of the mosque. The guardian of the mosque told me that God had neither sons nor daughters, and the guardian of the dome told me that God was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that no one had ever heard of Bint Allah.

‘I had never seen my father and I thought he was God, but later on I heard he was a Great Writer in the court of the Imam, that he had children, money, a good reputation, and no enemies, whether in Hizb Allah or in Hizb al-Shaitan, and that everybody liked him, whether friends or enemies, because he led a simple and ascetic life, much like that of Christ, except that he shared it with his latest wife whom he never touched except on Thursday nights, after which he went to prayer on Friday mornings without doing his ablutions, kneeling behind the Imam with great piety and devotion. After prayer, still in a kneeling position, he nodded his head to the right, expressing his loyalty and obedience to Hizb Allah, then nodded his head to the left in greeting to Hizb al-Shaitan, and prayed for God’s mercy three times before prostrating himself, and after repeating the same prayer another three times he got to his feet, light as a newborn babe, purified of all sin. He would leave the house of worship walking behind the Imam with slow steps and with bowed head, all the time murmuring verses of the Qur’an and repeating the ninety-nine holy names of God on the beads of his rosary, and preceded by the Imam he would walk down the narrow corridor leading, like the straight and narrow path of God, to the wine room on the first floor of the palace. There they would drink glass after glass to their old friendship, recalling memories of their youth when they used to visit the House of Joy together.’

There was a green garden surrounding the wine room of the palace, and surrounding the garden was a high wall made of iron bars. In the garden was a wolf-dog of the best breed, imported from overseas, and at night he had such a fearsome bark that no one would come near the place except brigands, or devils, or evil spirits. During the day they disappeared in tombs or in tomblike houses; at night they came out, and the Imam would sit under the smooth red lights with a glass of wine in his hands. By his side on the sofa, separated by no more than an arm’s length, sat his lifelong friend, and filling the space between them was a cushion stuffed with ostrich feathers which hid under it the Holy Book of God written with gold letters, and a revolver of the best type fitted with an efficient silencer. Whenever the dog barked the hand of the Imam would creep by itself to feel the butt of the revolver, and the heart of the Great Writer would beat furiously under his ribs, for his smooth fingers had never known the feel of anything apart from his pen. Ever since he was a child he had been afraid of the dark, and he had not known what it meant to have enemies. His friends in Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaitan were numerous and he gave abundantly of what God had given to him. He nourished friendship with money and people called him the Generous Writer, but his wife said he was a miser at home.

On the night of the Feast he came home with empty hands instead of bringing her a gift, and in the morning he would forget to leave her money for the house before he left. He returned home late at night with empty pockets and a lost consciousness, his breath smelling of wine and women’s sweat. The lips of his legal wives remained tightly closed and not one of them dared to open her mouth, for if she did she risked hearing him swear an oath of divorce, pronouncing it three times as he lay on his back with his mouth half-open and his eyes half-closed, and after that she would be seen carrying her bundle as she left the house, and the next wife would arrive carrying the fear of divorce in her heart like a fear of death.

People knew all about her husband but she always remained the last to know. She would hear rumours and refuse to believe them, chase all illusions out of her life or hide them deep inside, fearing to reveal them to herself and transfer them into truths she could not deny. Her lips remained closed all the time and she never opened her mouth, and yet the oath descended upon her like fate, and along came the next wife with a fear in her heart as deep as her fear of God. She would never say a word, never allow herself to have the slightest illusion, but divorce would knock at her door for no reason, and so came the turn of the fourth wife, as allowed by Shari’a. She was young, held her head high. Her body was slender and lithe and she lay in wait for her fate like a lioness, her eyes wide open and black like a devil. She had read books, read the history of kings, and knew the cultural heritage, including
The Thousand and One Nights
and the sacred writings. She knew both God and the Devil, Paradise and Hell, did not fear death and was in no haste to see Paradise, for in Paradise there is no place for women who are not virgins.

He went to ask for her hand, carrying the marriage contract in his hand and wearing his virgin’s face. He showed her his picture, an enlargement set in a frame, hid his thrift behind generosity, his fear behind love, but he was like his father, bedding with another woman and forgetting his mother until it was time for him to die.

His mother had nurtured another love than that of cooking and having a spouse. She hid sheets of paper under her bed, wrote stories, and collected them, one by one, into a book. It was her first book and her last, for after she married her fingers never touched a pen. At night, after his father went to sleep she would open the bottom drawer in the desk, feel the cover and the letters of her name printed on the book with the tips of her fingers, as though she was holding a precious jewel. She would look around her, fearful lest someone should see her, to find her eyes looking into the eyes of her baby son, wide open in the night, like the eye of God watching what she was doing. So she put the book back in the drawer and closed it with a lock, then lay down again on the far side of the bed near the wall, with her husband on the other edge and the child lying on his back between them, his eyes closed, pretending to sleep, and in the morning his father would beat him because he had not learnt the lessons of the previous day. Like his mother he hid his love for writing about the things which he felt, and continued to study science as though science and art were locked in struggle, learning the words of God by heart, engraving them in his memory, gaining the love of his father and losing his art. In the dark of the night he could feel his father’s ear listening intently to the beats of his heart, trying to detect any beat, any drop of art, that might have leaked into him with his mother’s milk.

She had come from the House of Joy to take a last look at him, as he lay in the box smiling from ear to ear. When he saw her bend over him, he looked up, and in his eyes she saw a glimmer of love. A last desperate fantasy which will lead to nothing, she said to herself. His love for women has always been like the struggles he fought, in vain, against defeat. His legal wives were standing there when she walked in, holding herself upright, her abundant hair wound tight around her head and held up with a white kerchief adorned with black sequins which hung in a row at the edges. Her look moved away from him to the legal wives standing in line, their ample bodies clothed in mourning black, their plump hands clasped over their hearts, their feet shod in high-heeled shoes, their legs pressed together, their breath held in awe and respect for the dead. They looked alike except for a badge on their shoulders or a brooch on their breasts, for their features seemed to have been rubbed away, their heads small like birds on a tree, their haunches prominently displayed, bodies all flesh without spirit, thin lips pressed together in silence, eyes bulging like frogs in a stream or fish in the sea. And suddenly their mouths opened to ask, ‘Who are you?’