Fire in the Unnameable Country Read online

  CONTENTS

  IN CONFECTIONARAYAN’S CANDY STORE

  Alauddin’s Rug

  Capsicum Candies

  The Annunciation of Niramish

  The Banquet

  The Centimetre Patch

  GANGSTER-STEPS

  Backslang

  The Wardrobe Orderly

  In the Endless Movie Studio

  Thirsty Ghosts

  Spiderclouds

  The Mirror

  The Stranger from Berlin

  SATAN AND THE MAROONS

  Fable of Yeshua

  Journey to the Unnameable Country

  Satan and the Maroons

  A-O-I A-O-I

  Inside the Grand Piano

  Fly You to the Moon

  Ben Jaloun Ben Janoun

  Assemblers and Collectors

  Shoes for the Servant

  FIRE IN THE ENDLESS MOVIE STUDIO

  A Visit Home

  Blow a Little Pepper

  Hungry Ghosts

  Black Organs

  The Boy with the Backward Conch

  Ring Around the Rosie

  Hosanna

  The Re-Employment Office

  Acknowledgments

  IN CONFECTIONARAYAN’S CANDY STORE

  ALAUDDIN’S RUG

  The universe is shaking. All the light enters the world in a great breath and I am asleep. What a shame. What a shame, yells my mother in the shattered night. She howls at the air-raid sirens’ spray of glass as light smashes windows and the sound rattles homes hospitals offices of our city in an unnameable country.

  My mother crouches in her pitch-black living room, hand at her balloon belly, hoping she won’t go into labour at this inauspicious hour, muttering her fears surely these are my final fears. She wonders the whereabouts of her husband, of course he’s at Xasan Sierra’s cigarette shop, the lout, no doubt doing adda, nada, yada yada, talking talk as usual from evening till dawn. She takes it out on the transistor radio minding its own business, catching fire talk with rabbit ears. Shame, she shakes her head at the reporter informing how all the city’s communication facilities, telephone switchboards, television and satellite stations are bursting flames as sky rubbish keeps falling in the worst aerial bombing campaign conducted by the occupation army.

  The city, my metropolitan mother, drifts with her eyes ears lips sewn shut, in total darkness not unlike yours truly, Hedayatesque, still swimming in her wombwater, still corded to Shukriah Ben Jaloun, anxious, agitated, passing endocrine signals to mother wanna get born now. When the loud sounds diminish for a moment of eerie calm, Shukriah confuses the tumult inside her with the messed-up world, convinced it’s sucking out the air in her lungs with all the racket. She lies down on the living room couch, not entirely convinced she isn’t dead.

  My mother awakes to a wail in distant streets at dawn, realizes her home is intact and that she’s been chattering teeth biting lips, drawing blood while sleeping. Her venture outside proves local pharmacies have run out of painkillers, and, as Hamza the shop owner informs after getting off the phone to answer the crowd gathered in his store, the entire city has been sucked clean of antidepressants. She leaves them bickering and licks her wound. She has her own shop to attend to.

  Another fire in our unnameable country. Why, asks my mother as she walks the movie-set streets to her shop while people swirl around her talking hurriedly about what the latest bombing expedition has done. She passes the cracked mirror alleyways broken homes walls floors and edifices. She sees brother offer brother half a loaf of consolation and, pity for pity, promise to help the other rebuild.

  When her husband wanders wide-eyed up to her with bloodied palms/ but a scratch, he swears, insists it’s only encrusted blood/ she is horrified at the sight and remembers instantly the psychological horror that felled him bedrest for years. She kisses him and forgets cursing his absence when the falling bombs last night. She orders him upstairs and insists she will open her hosiery shop as usual.

  Time passes. Morning drags hours into the afternoon sun. Shukriah rubs her pregnant balloon belly before waddling to the front of her hosiery shop where neighbourhood ladies sit eating sharing shelled peanuts talking damages and a magical escape from the occupation army. Then someone mentions the arrival of a certain Alauddin, a magician, and his rug. Who is Alauddin and what do they say about Alauddin’s magic carpet. Shukriah is curious and retrieves a stool from inside the shop to sit for the chatter, though she has heard them speak of him many times.

  It was said that a certain Alauddin, a magician who had made a modest income once upon a time in English music halls performing sleight-of-hand routines, who had served in Alexandria in the British Army during the Second World War, who had died two inglorious deaths, first by dysentery and then murdered after quarrelling with an army sergeant over a woman before returning to life while floating down the Suez Canal, who had been picked up by a merchant marine vessel, migrated by the luck of his toothskin to California where he began to play small parts in Hollywood, who had wound up years later in Iraq from where he had just fled the Baathist regime for tax evasion, this selfsame Alauddin with a single name had flown to our unnameable country in the dead of night about a month earlier by flying carpet and was now offering rides daily on his fabled machine.

  To prove the verity of his craft, the magician described to citizens their country from the air exactly as it was, claiming he had seen it only while flying on his patterned peagreen carpet, which seemed more old than majestic, is actually ancient, he declared, from the century of Haroun al-Rashid, and which he claimed worked only by his direction. All this was true: he hovered several feet off the ground, rose twelve feet in the air, and when others tried to operate it similarly, the rug was unresponsive until Alauddin uttered some inscrutable open-sesame words which were once commonly understood, and clapped twice.

  Nasiruddin Khan, enthused by descriptions of Alauddin by the nameless rebels positioned against the occupying American troops/ Nasiruddin who: Nasiruddin son of Joshimuddin Khan, owner of the largest spidersilk fields in our country in the early 1900s, Nasiruddin owner of spidersilk factories that produced soft cloth light to lift but impenetrable to arrows, beautiful spidersilk that drove a century of fashion and brought the late-slaving British and later invaders, the Americans who still remain, Nasiruddin who later added pop manufacture—Capsicum Cola, Valampuri Coke, Mirror Water—to his productions, was the primary advocate of rebellion against The Mirror, the Hollywood enterprise that began before Hedayat was even seed-egg and swept up the entire country in a maze of scaffolding and unfinished construction and two-dimensional houses, your nation for a movie set, would you have this, Nasiruddin Khan ridiculed, as we watched the region turn to mist.

  Nasiruddin Khan, enthused by the information that among the magician’s past exploits was his disappearance of Alexandria during the Second World War, thereby saving it from bomb attacks, thought of Alauddin as potentially useful to the rebellion but wanted to wait until proven he was not an American operative.

  Watch him for now, he told his men. So for several months, Alauddin’s rug becomes a household name, and his success invites other, less talented magicians, some capable of twisting wooden staffs into snakes, others lesser talented and repeating old rabbit-and-hat tricks, as the miracle of flight remains in Alauddin’s grasp alone, since only he is able, with the magic carpet, to recreate the scintillating effect of the Maroon slave Amun’s flight from the unnameable country and his perforation of the atmosphere through his calculated eviction by the colonial authorities at the dawn of our story elaborated elsewhere.

  At street level, our city La Maga has become the ruins of a movie set, so Alauddin sets
to work at sundown on the rooftop of the hotel where he stays, and watch watch: already they’re stretching from outside hotel doors through first-level corridors up five flights of stairs to the rooftop where waiters serve patrons lined up to raised platform for rug-and-flight show.

  For the price of an intracity bus fare, he takes up grown women, men, screaming children who cover their eyes as they climb above the clouds and dare not look as the ground becomes an encyclopedia map. How high, he asks each person, informing that after a certain distance from the earth you feel no fear because it no longer seems real.

  Given his natural charisma as well as the fact that his carpet is potentially capable of freeing people from the checkpoints of La Maga and throughout the unnameable country, he quickly becomes a threat to the occupying army, under whose hire it becomes clear Alauddin is not serving. At first they try poisoning him, which fails, since his first death from dysentery inoculated him against all attacks on the gastrointestinal. The sniper’s bullet fired from a higher rooftop at dusk when Alauddin is taking customers up into the sky misses the mark not once but four times as if the projectiles simply disappear before reaching their target. The operative responsible for strangulating the magician while he is bathing slips on a slight pool of water and lands badly on his neck, remains paralyzed for life, and Nasiruddin Khan denies the coincidental possibility of all these events and realizes Alauddin the Magician is meant to serve the cause of resistance.

  In the small flat above the hosiery shop, the news of the flying rug excites even my worldweary aunt Chaya, who has cut all ties with the world in permanent convalescence and decided to remain bitter against her sister, though Reshma has no interest in her German heart palpitation/ her romantic interest, I mean, and as I will later reveal fully. Alauddin briefly unites the sisters before Reshma’s scheduled departure to Berlin to study at an art academy. Our whole family, including yours truly, Hedayatesque, swimming fetal, shuttles to the hotel and lines up to test-fly the rug.

  Evening, folks, only three at a time, Alauddin’s young assistant directs my mother and sisters forward, leaving my father grounded. I don’t mind, he shrugs under the shawl he has brought for chills, latest symptom of his curious illness.

  Are you sure, my mother takes a step back, but Reshma grabs her arm. We’ll only be a minute, Mamun, says my aunt.

  The signal of my arrival can be described this way: high high in the air, my mother is narrating aloud with eyes closed as her sisters shout, hold hands, as Alauddin directs the sights from the distant horizon Gulf of Eden backward, and my mother tells the story already once upon a time in her mind though not yet distant past, once upon a time, your father and I met in a cemetery crowded with cirrus clouds, she tells, as the thrill of flight pushes me curious toward the world, down through the birth canal as the carpet rises, and in my mother’s shock a scream flies eyes like butterfly wings flutter. I am almost here. Like death, birth is unexpected.

  Afterward, we are home and an experienced neighbour serves as midwife. My head is appearing and the tension is everywhere along Shukriah’s uterine walls her thighs abdomen vulva as the pale green walls breathe in and out in time to her hard labour breaths in-exhalations.

  My father: I understand, Shukriah, it hurts, darling, but please just breathe. And my mother’s roar: Just tell me how you understand fifty-three hours seventeen minutes of constrict relax constrict relax/ a scream interruption/ my mother resets her huffing-puffing, swiftly regains rhythm/ broken water, muscles seizing, tissues distending, she continues yelling, surely torn now, and then maybe push out a miscarriage, because like you can empathize, you man. Recall, as if you have overheard, their loving words to each other just several hours prior, but can we judge, are we in any position to judge.

  Meanwhile, I am caught in the midst, who is paying attention to me, where is the doctor/man, lowly cretin man whose hot breaths populated microscopic insects inside, my mother continues cursing, as another big push and something greymucus and pink is emerges emerging from inside her until finally my owl’s screech ear-rending howl.

  Out of the womb and into the sky: our neighbours still report to Shukriah that first wail of Hedayat Awwal Ben Jaloun, or Owl as they would call him in his life, that cry they had waited years of slow gestation in wombwater to hear, the sound that entered their homes bustled furniture rushed window into the streets to rustle branches and tremble birds, thump hearts in chests for one what the hell moment.

  Everything is monochrome. There are some nearshapes. Wet light splashes everywhere onto objects in the room. Some items are near, others farther away. Correction: this is uncertain. A pungent odour. Is it from the elongated masses waving near me. (Myself. Limbs, I would later learn, and digits. Fragments of and little control over these. But myself nevertheless.) Or is the smell over there. Other smells, but these are more nuanced, indescribable. The smells go away when the elongated masses near me disappear and then a warm shape, bright, soft, singular, a clothshape, I would learn to feel.

  Hark unto the sounds. Little sounds and the bigger sounds; the bigger sounds come closer and their shapes and movements become ordered: a wholething, a face, I will come to know, of either the one or the other, mother or father. I am frightened but no one is crying. Cover him more with the blanket, my mother says as my father carries me around the room, and his smell is heavy, weighs hasha hasha from the nose, and then a yellow tinkle.

  Ooh, he has soiled himself.

  At least we know that works, Shukriah is laughing, gleaming. Bring him to me, please. Her smell means something like before, long ago. I am lifted closer, and then the smell is closer.

  Then the dark but not so much. Like a wholething though not quite. A shadow. The universe disappears; to say it another way, sleep divides time, though I know neither word. In the beginning, the world seems dislocated from my mother’s stories while I waited in the red-lit darkness of her womb, in its lub-lub comfort mother heart, its swimming sense of already and always. (Later, I would conclude that even in these earliest times, I had realized the continuity with some distant past, but knew no origin could be deduced by this feeling, and that one could not conflate it with any notion of eternity; rather, tick-tocking on and on: only a vague sensation of existing, having existed, and persisting in time.)

  What others observed in Hedayat was that he didn’t speak a word after his introductory howl, went dumb, and scared his parents who thought he was deaf. He waited until his second year to take his first steps, then climbed out of his perambulator without warning one day and broke into a trot in a crowded marketplace covered with glass shards and husks of rifle shots, eggplant vendors and sweet sellers until Shukriah caught up with him, surprised by the deftness and surety of his steps.

  When my mother’s sister Reshma returned for holidays from her studies in Berlin, he was already four years old and she swore she could hear all the answers to her questions, and later verified that the quality of his voice was the same on these earlier occasions, though at that time he did not move his lips and was still in the habit of pointing to indicate this or that thing. He showed no prodigious insight in these early years, exactly dumb, but projected endless curiosity with his eyes and the hidden desire to match the world with what he had imagined it to be before he was born.

  Recall, as if I have told you, in those days Mamun M had not worked for a long time, and it was only through Shukriah’s indefatigable and successful efforts to unfreeze his savings account from his playback singing days that the family managed to survive, even to pay Reshma’s tuition and living expenses abroad. No one could locate his sickness anymore because he did not shit florid, was no longer wasting thin away, displayed a healthy appetite, and had re-formed talkative friendships with Xasan Sierra, the cigarette vendor, as well as Confectionarayan Babu, the candy seller, among other neighbourhood staples. Mrs. Henry, meanwhile, my parents’ downstairs neighbour who owned a hosiery shop where my mother began working soon after my parents moved to La Maga, had grown arthr
itic and suffered from chronic diarrhea, which she blamed on the equatorial climate and infested drinking water that grew no better if boiled, she claimed, and returned to England. Before she left, Shukriah convinced her to mortgage the shop to her, allowing the old woman to add to her pension and for the family to acquire a means of supporting itself for the foreseeable future.

  After numerous trips to the local doctor, who was not an oncologist but who managed through conversation to prove (without actually proving) that Mamun M’s illness was imaginary, my father decided he had let years of his life slip away into fabulism as he lay in bed regurgitating the past, and began to impose upon the house strict notions of reality, cutting strings of remembrance and loosening events that seemed no longer plausible, including his discovery of his father’s thoughtreel rubbish, he would say, that they can read thoughts with the shortwave, another way of controlling the public imagination with fear, and that jazz orchestra blowing about a windy hallway and the pressing of the body against the wall like a carpet beetle: true to an extent, but remembering the nightmare, my father would say before casting a gaze elsewhere in time.

  Hedayat remains curious of his father’s thoughts those days on the magician Alauddin’s sudden rise to prominence, his opinions of his wife and wife’s sisters’ flight on the magic rug, but at that time infant Hedayat’s vow of silence was absolute, and he would not have revealed his clairaudience and grown-up thoughts for all the curiosity in the world.

  Grip, Mamun M would declare, placing his thumbs and forefingers on his son’s cheeks and pinching paining invoking evolution, is what distinguishes our ability, our opposable digits, God bless, to manipulate the world and to make it human.

  Shukriah, he would instruct with wagging finger: Tell this boy no funny stories beyond the grip of normality, and you too, Chaya, samesame, I am warning.

  As an act of protest against the strict conditions of reality and human behaviour set down by his father’s newly stentorian, masculinist voice, Hedayat briefly returned to a non-ambulatory state and acted as if he had forgotten how to walk, and when his mother yelled, see what you have done, Mamun, he showed preference for scuttling sideways, his back arched, on his hands and feet like a crab, or for crawling about like a barbaric example of the canine tribe, until his mother cajoled him to return to his original silent, ambulatory state. Recall from press reports how at that time there lay strange fruit scattered everywhere in La Maga, which would explode out your raspberry insides and reveal the true colour of your hidden organs, you know what I mean: clusters of little fruits on the treebranches and lying fallen on the dusty streets, which they told you in school to avoid at all cost.