A River Dies of Thirst Read online

  The roar of silence

  I listen to the silence. Is there such a thing as silence? If we were to forget its name and listen intently to what is in it, we would hear the sound of the winds roaming in space and the cries that have found their way back to the earliest caves. Silence is a sound which has evaporated and disappeared in the wind and fragmented into echoes preserved in cosmic water jars. If we were to listen intently, we would hear the thud of the apple against a stone in God’s garden, Abel’s cry of fear when he first sees his own blood, the original moans of desire between a man and a woman who don’t know what they are doing. We would hear Jonah’s meditations in the belly of the whale and the secret negotiations between the ancient gods. If we were to listen intently to what is behind the veil of silence, we would hear nocturnal conversations between the prophets and their wives, the rhythms of the earliest poetry, sybarites complaining of boredom, horses’ hooves in a war in an unspecified time and place, the music accompanying the sacred ritual of debauchery, Gilgamesh’s tears over his friend Enkidu, the monkey’s bewilderment as he jumps from out of the trees to occupy the throne of the tribe, Sarah and Hagar exchanging insults. If we were to listen intently to the sound of silence, we would talk less.

  A person chasing himself

  As if you were someone else indifferent

  you did not wait for anyone

  You walked along the pavement

  I walked behind you disconcerted

  If you were me I would say to you:

  ‘Wait for me at sunset’

  And you would not say: ‘If you were me

  the stranger would not need the stranger’

  The sun smiled at the hills. And we smiled

  at the women passing. And none of the women said:

  ‘There’s someone talking to himself’

  You did not wait for anyone

  You walked along your pavement indifferent

  and I walked behind you disconcerted

  and the sun set behind us

  and you took a step or two towards me

  and did not find me standing there or walking on

  And I went up to you and did not find you

  Was I alone without realising

  That I was alone? None of the women said

  ‘There’s somebody

  chasing himself.’

  A longing to forget

  Darkness. I fell off the bed troubled by a question: Where am I? I searched for my body and felt it searching for me. I looked for the light switch so that I could see what was happening to me, but couldn’t find it. I tripped over my chair and knocked it over and it knocked me over onto I don’t know what. Like a blind man seeing with his fingers, I felt around for a wall to lean against and collided with a wardrobe. I opened it and my hand came into contact with clothes, which I sniffed and found smelt of me. I realised I was in my own domain but had become separated from it. I continued the search for the light switch to see if this was true, and found it. I recognised my things: my bed, my book, my suitcase, and the person in pyjamas was more or less me. I opened the window and heard dogs barking in the valley. But I didn’t remember when I had returned, couldn’t recall standing on the bridge. I thought I must be only dreaming that I was here. I washed my face in cold water and was convinced I was awake. I went to the kitchen and saw fresh fruit and unwashed dishes, indicating that I’d had an evening meal here. But when was that? I flicked through my passport and realised I had arrived that day, but couldn’t remember going away. Had some gap opened up in my memory? Had my mental existence split off from my physical one? I was scared and called a friend, even though it was late at night: ‘There’s something wrong with my memory. Where am I?’ ‘You’re in Ramallah.’ ‘When did I get here?’ ‘Today. We were together this afternoon in Vatche Garden.’ ‘Why don’t I remember? Do you think I’m ill?’ ‘It’s not the illness you’re thinking of: it’s the longing to forget!’

  A river dies of thirst

  A river was here

  and it had two banks

  and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds

  A small river moving slowly

  descending from the mountain peaks

  visiting villages and tents like a charming lively guest

  bringing oleander trees and date palms to the valley

  and laughing to the nocturnal revellers on its banks:

  ‘Drink the milk of the clouds

  and water the horses

  and fly to Jerusalem and Damascus’

  Sometimes it sang heroically

  at others passionately

  It was a river with two banks

  and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds

  But they kidnapped its mother

  so it ran short of water

  and died, slowly, of thirst.

  The wall

  A huge metal snake coils around us, swallowing up the little walls that separate our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. A snake that does not move in a straight line, to avoid resembling us as we look straight on. It twists and turns, a nightmare of cement segments reinforced with pliant metal, making it easy for it to move into the fragmented bits of land and beds of mint that are left to us. A snake eager to lay its eggs between our inhalations and exhalations so that we say for once, because we are nearly choking to death, ‘We are the strangers.’ When we look in our mirrors all we see is the snake making for the backs of our necks, but with a bit of effort we can see what is above it: a sky yawning with boredom at the architects adorning it with guns and flags. And at night we see it twinkling with stars, which gaze at us with affection. We also see what lies behind the snake wall: the watchmen in the ghetto, frightened of what we’re doing behind the little walls we still have left. We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

  The law of fear

  The killer looks at the spectre of the dead man, not into his eyes, without regret. He says to those around him: ‘Don’t blame me. I’m afraid. I killed because I’m afraid, and I’ll kill again because I’m afraid.’ Some of those present, accustomed to favouring psychological analysis over the laws of justice, say: ‘He is defending himself.’ Others, admirers of the idea that progress is superior to morality, say: ‘Justice emanates from the generosity of power. The victim should apologise for the trauma he has caused the killer.’ Scholars of the distinction between life and reality say: ‘If this ordinary event had taken place anywhere but here, in this holy land, would we have even known the victim’s name? Let us then turn our attention to comforting the frightened man.’ When they went down the road of sympathising with the killer, some foreign tourists passing by asked them: ‘What has the child done wrong?’ They answered: ‘He will grow up and frighten the frightened man’s son.’ ‘What has the woman done wrong?’ They said: ‘She will give birth to a memory.’ ‘What has the tree done wrong?’ They said: ‘A green bird will appear from it.’ And they shouted: ‘Fear, not justice, is the basis of power.’ The spectre of the dead man appeared to them from a cloudless sky and when they opened fire on him they did not see a single drop of blood, and they were afraid.

  I walked on my heart

  I walked on my heart, as if my heart

  were a road, or a pavement, or air

  and my heart said: ‘I have tired of identifying

  with things, when space has broken into pieces

  and I have tired of your question: “Where shall we go

  when there’s no land there, and no sky?”

  And you obey me. Give me an order

  direct me to do what you want’

  So I said to my heart: ‘I have forgotten you since we set off

  with you as my reason, and me the one speaking

  Rebel against me as much as you can, and run

  for there’s nothing behind us except what’s behind.’

  Routine

  Low pressu
re area. Northwesterly winds, heavy showers. Grey wrinkled sea. Tall cypresses. Today the autumn clouds let thirty martyrs fall in the north of Gaza, among them two women taking part in a demonstration to demand a share of hope for their kind. Clear skies. Calm blue sea. Northerly winds. Good visibility. But the autumn clouds – the symbolic name for killing – wipe out an entire family, made up of seventeen lives. The news searches for their names under the rubble. Apart from that, abnormal life appears to be running its normal course. The Devil still boasts of his long quarrel with God. Individuals, if they wake up alive, can still say ‘Good morning,’ then go off to their normal jobs: burying the dead. They don’t know if they will return safely to what remains of houses encircled by bulldozers and tanks and smashed cypress trees. Life is so indifferent it seems to be no more than a rough draft of some stubborn urge to have one’s presence registered: equal rights with jackals to enjoy a safe cave. But we have a difficult mission to perform: mediation between God and the Devil to get them to call a brief truce so that we can bury our martyrs.

  A gun and a shroud

  ‘Nobody will ever defeat me, or be defeated by me,’ said the masked security man, charged with some obscure task. He fired into the air and said: ‘Only the bullet should know who my enemy is.’ The air responded with a similar bullet. The unemployed passers-by weren’t interested in what went on in the mind of a masked security man, out of work like them, but he was seeking his own private war since he hadn’t found a peace to defend. He looked at the sky and it was high and clear. As he didn’t like poetry he couldn’t see the sky as a mirror of the sea. He was hungry, and his hunger increased when he smelled falafel, and he felt his gun despised him. He fired up at the sky in case a bunch of grapes might fall on him from paradise. He was answered by a bullet, which kindled his suppressed enthusiasm for a fight. He rushed forth into an imaginary war and said: ‘At last I’ve found work. This is war.’ He fired on another masked security man, hit his imaginary enemy and received a trifling wound to his leg. When he returned home to the camp, leaning on his rifle, he found the house crowded with mourners and smiled because he thought they thought he had been martyred. He said: ‘I’m not dead!’ When they informed him that he had killed his brother, he looked contemptuously at his gun and said: ‘I’m going to sell it to buy a shroud worthy of my brother.’

  If we want to

  We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others

  We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner

  We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan’s gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial

  We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer’s belly

  We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details

  We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful!’

  We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets

  We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

  We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception

  We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

  Cheated time

  Because nobody ever arrives on time, and because waiting is like sitting on a hot tin roof, he put his watch back twenty minutes. In this way he made the torment of waiting easier to bear, and forgot about it. But since he cheated time he hasn’t been on time for anything. He sits on his suitcase in the station waiting for a train that never comes, without realising that it went exactly on time, and it was he who was late. He goes back home disappointed. He opens his suitcase and returns its contents to the drawers like anyone coming back from a trip. Then he asks himself angrily: ‘Why don’t people respect time?’ When death knocks on his door, asking permission to enter, he reproaches it, saying: ‘Why are you twenty minutes early?’ He hides in the bathroom, and does not open the door to it, as if he had died in the bathroom!

  Perfection

  Azure space, high and wide and washed with light. If a small cloud appears like a soap bubble, it dissolves at once into a forgotten poem. Circular space borne on towering forest trees and seagulls’ wings, or on a camel litter, remembered by pilgrims to the holy land. Vast space perfectly formed and coloured, so perfect I am afraid of a forest fire, an attack on the seagulls, an assault on a prophet’s wife, some random breach in the order of things. And I am afraid of writing a cadenced poem on such a delicate surface.

  One, two, three

  The actor climbed up on stage with the sound technician: ‘One, two, three. Stop! We’ll try the sound again: One, two, three, stop! Would you prefer a bit more echo?’ He said: ‘I don’t know. Do whatever you want!’ The auditorium was completely empty, hundreds of wooden seats staring at him, silent as a communal grave, urging him to leave or to join them. He preferred the second option, chose a seat in the middle of the front row and went to sleep. The director woke him up for the final run through. He went up on stage and improvised a long section, as he liked the idea of addressing empty seats and no one applauding him but the director. Then he improvised another section without a hitch. In the evening, when the auditorium was full and the curtain went up, he stood there confident in the silence. He looked at the front row and remembered himself sitting there and grew confused. He forgot the written text, and the improvised text evaporated into thin air. He forgot the audience and made do with repeating the sound test: ‘One, two, three.’ He repeated ‘One, two, three’ until he fainted and the theatre resounded with applause.

  Empty boxes

  If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general. If war is an accident on the motorway, then the living have a duty to vote: we will choose the donkey. But the living did not go to the ballot box, not because the snow was falling in big flakes, but because a sudden paralysis afflicted the city’s inhabitants, and when they opened their windows they saw spiders spinning their webs in the snow and went blind. When they tried to hear what was going on, storms arose, whose wild sounds were unfamiliar to them, and they went deaf. The astrologers said: ‘It is the chaos of existence at the door of the last judgement.’ Luckily or unluckily for us, foreign historians, experts on our destinies and our oral history, were not here, so we don’t know what happened to us!

  On nothingness

  It is nothingness leading us to nothing

  We gazed at nothingness searching for its meanings

  and were stripped of nothingness by something resembling nothingness

  and missed the absurdity of nothingness

  for it is more attractive than something that makes us into things

  The slave loves an oppressor

  because venerating nothingness in an idol deifies it

  and he hates it

  if his awe encounters something

  he thinks is visible and ordinary

  So the slave loves a tyrant like him

  appearing from another nothing

  thus nothingness is begotten by another nothing

  What is this nothingness, master of reinvention

  multifaceted, tyrannical, overweening, unctuous

  a joker? What is this nothingness?

  Perhaps it is a spiritual illness

  or a hidden energy

  or, perhaps, a satirist experienced

  in describing our condition.

  My imagination . . . a faithful hunting dog

  I was on my way to nowhere in particular, a gentle drizzle making me slightly damp, when an apple with no resemblance to Newt
on’s apple fell on me from the clouds. I reached out my hand to pick it up and could neither feel nor see it. I stared up at the clouds and saw tufts of cotton wool driven northwards by the wind, away from the water tanks crouched on the roofs of the buildings. The light poured brightly down onto the asphalt, spreading out gleefully in the absence of pedestrians and cars, and perhaps laughing at my uneven progress. Where is the apple that fell on me? I wondered. Maybe my imagination, which is independent from me, picked it up and ran off with it. I said: ‘I will follow it to the house where we live together in adjoining rooms.’ There on the table I found a sheet of paper on which was written, in green ink, one line: ‘An apple fell on me from the clouds,’ and I knew my imagination was a faithful hunting dog.

  If I were someone else

  Solitude is good training for being self-reliant. He writes the phrase and looks at the ceiling. Then he adds: To be alone . . . to be able to be alone is an educational experience. Solitude is choosing a sort of pain, training to conjugate the verbs of the heart with the freedom of the self-sufficient, or being more or less detached from your exterior self and forced to plunge inside yourself without a parachute. You sit on your own, like an idea unencumbered by argumentation, not trying to guess the content of the dialogue between outside and in. Solitude is a filter, not a mirror. You throw what is in your left hand into your right, and nothing changes in this gesture of transition from non-thought to non-meaning. But this harmless nonsense isn’t getting us anywhere: and what if I were alone? Solitude is the choice of someone with an abundance of possibilities – the choice of the free. When you are bored and fed up, you say: If I were someone else I would abandon this blank sheet of paper and set out to imitate a Japanese novel whose writer climbs to the top of a mountain to see what the birds of prey have done to his dead ancestors. Maybe he is still writing, and his dead are still dying. But I lack the expertise and the metaphysical toughness. And you say: If I were someone else, as I am now, I would go down into the bottom of the valley where a girl is arousing her suppressed desire with a rough fig leaf and grabbing at her panties, but I lack the narrative skill and daring required to write pornography.