Monarch of the Square Read online

  “No, I can’t,” she replied

  “Why not?” I said. “You can do anything.”

  “You’re wrong, but thank you for thinking so.”

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” I suggested. “That may be better.”

  We sat on a wooden bench in the park where children were playing.

  “Do you like children?” I asked my sweetheart.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Do you want us to have children?” I asked.

  “Our relationship wouldn’t allow it,” she replied.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you love me?”

  “No, I admire you.”

  I said nothing but stared at the children. . . . As I waved my fingers in the air, I watched her hair being blown by a slight breeze. I suggested that we get up and stroll along the wide street. . . . People’s faces still looked pale, and store-fronts no longer reflected the sunlight. . . . Could such tall buildings ever reflect sunshine?

  I said goodbye to my sweetheart and walked away, heading down toward the suq . . . and enjoying the display of human stupidity.

  [2]

  “I love you so much,” I told my mother that evening. “You’re wonderful . . . you’re a saint.”

  She gave me a kiss and hugged me. I was touched.

  “My son,” was all she said.

  I used to love my mother so much. It never occurred to me that someone could change my love for her . . . but things are always changing. . . . I had the impression that my sweetheart, who, as she put it, didn’t really love me but only admired me, was in control of my feelings. She was throttling my heart (even so, my sweetheart, I’ll still worship you for ever and ever . . . ). She has managed to replace my mother in my heart, but now my mother is going to reclaim her place. That very evening, I expressed my long-suppressed feelings to her, the loving, unspoken relationship I had with her. My mother is wonderful; she can control the world with her finger. So often she has told me that she couldn’t live without me. Her husband still loved her even so. He isn’t my real father, but she thought she would be able to compensate for my own father, who had been snatched away by the darkness. What a kind mother! Yes, I love you too; I can’t live without you. Look up at the sky and stare at the pale moon; that’s where our gazes will meet, and you will find out just how much I love you, the way a child loves his mother. . . . Don’t you realize that you are the most precious thing in the world? Please believe it . . . !

  That night I stared at the moon longer and longer; the geometrical pattern in the sky kept moving toward the east, but I couldn’t detect any motion. Yet my imagination was too strong to be defeated: I loved my sweetheart, I loved the moon, I loved the night, but I didn’t love my stepfather. He reminded me of the Jewish character in Jean Anouilh’s play, Invitation to the Palace. Too many speeches and declining values. . . . What’s the value of money compared to gaining the love of a companion? A woman may be impressed by her boyfriend’s wealth, but she will never love him (I don’t think that my mother loved her husband for his money, but he certainly loved her till death did them part. And let’s bear in mind that women have only recently acquired the right to fall in love). Sweetheart, I don’t want to be admired; I want to be loved . . . Never forget that the world functions only on the basis of love. Without love, the moon will never shine. I will keep waiting and waiting. . . .

  That night I slept better than I had ever slept before. . . . I felt totally shattered, and yet I had the sensation of loving the whole of humanity the same way.

  [3]

  Next day I walked along dirty, garbage-laden streets, the kind where children eat their own snot. I needed to go there. Narrow, dirt-encrusted eyes stared at me. . . . I paid no attention and went into the nearest house. . . . When I left, I was feeling sadder than ever before. . . . My imagination took over. I was bound to get syphilis . . . but I would still go on living, even if I caught the disease. . . .

  “The world can go wherever. . . . Nobody can change its direction . . .”

  Once I found myself on wider streets, I collapsed on to a chair at the nearest café. . . . I ordered a black coffee and then started staring at all the pale faces. . . . For a long time I waited for my sweetheart to pass by so I could ask her if she still admired me or had moved on to the stage of real love. I could put on a brave front and take whatever she had to say; to hell with feeling down. I waited for ages, but she didn’t come. Syphilis kept threatening me with a lingering death. But, in spite of it all, I still love humanity. I shall return to the back streets where the encrusted, narrow eyes are to be found and children feed on snot . . . and the Jew will have to learn how to be happy with his money. . . .

  State of Mind

  I actually like fog, with its grey hues. That’s not what’s making me feel so bored. True enough, I’m angry and morose, but the fog has nothing to do with that. Cold weather affects people, especially people like me who don’t have warm wool coats. Well, how’s anyone supposed to avoid feeling sad when his head is like a heavy bag stuffed full of scary talk and disconnected ideas?

  I gulped down the hot coffee, realizing that it would burn the roof of my mouth and hurt a bit. Better to suffer a little now, I told myself, rather than the rest of the day. My wife used to love me and pretends she still does (although I don’t believe it), but every morning she complains, and then starts nagging and insulting me. She pretends that she loves me, adores me to the point of worship. But it doesn’t matter.

  In the past she was a beautiful girl with long hair that reached as far as her knees. We fell in love. I asked her to cut it short, and she did. She used to love me, and her hair as well, but now she slaps me.

  “What’s the use of a man with no job?” she says “and with no money?”

  She’s absolutely right, of course. But how can I get a job? If she gets me a job, I’ll show her. In fact, if any of you give me a job, I’ll show you, too. I don’t care what kind of job: garbage collector, carpenter, anything—even toilet cleaner. I want to have a job, to use my hands, like this (he waves his hands). I want to get rich so I don’t have to listen to non-stop complaints that only manage to hurt and depress people.

  I want a different coat. Mine is all ragged. Well, it doesn’t matter. Actually that’s not true, it does. The cold weather is definitely making me more depressed this morning, the way it has done every morning since November arrived with its freezing cold. I thank God for bringing me into the world in what they say is a country with a temperate climate. I’ve been told that in other countries, people can die of being too cold or too hot. I’ve never heard of that happening in my own country.

  At any rate, cold weather can be a killer. If this choking feeling I have gets any worse, it may well kill me. For some time now I haven’t detected much movement in my body, and this condition may well consign it to a hole that’s large enough for me, my coffin, and my shroud. I may be moving, walking, and eating, but I feel as if I’m dead. Those activities don’t have the same meaning for me as they do for other people—even the idea of being sated or having had enough. . . .

  That man may have been kind, but he was still shameless. There may seem to be a contradiction in what I’m saying, but in fact there’s none. Absolutely not! He emigrated to a distant land and left me without a job. Everything he’d paid me for my job (or whatever you want to call it) disappeared over years gone by. Potatoes, tomatoes, and bread, they all leave your hands empty. The bread-basket, that’s the real enemy of mankind. Yes, that’s right! You fill it up, then empty it again; fill it once more, and empty it once more. It’s as though you’re trying to sift water or trap it in your fingers as it cascades in a silver stream from above.

  He owned a field in the city suburb. Truth to tell, for all those years he’d provided me with vegetables and even clothes, so I didn’t need to buy anything. He used to give me hand-me-downs, which I always managed to exchange for other things. This old coat I’m wearing is one of his donations; by now it
’s very ragged. All of which makes it very easy to compute the number of years he’s deprived me of work since he left. When he handed it to me with a cordial tap on the shoulder, we realized that the coat was in fairly good condition. He asked one of his friends to look after me, but that person was crafty. He told me that I was going to work for him, and I told him that was fine, in fact very nice of him. I agreed, but then he hired someone else and totally ignored me without explaining why. I felt humiliated, as though my sense of dignity had been trampled underfoot in broad daylight—like a chicken that’s been run over by a shiny car and left flattened on the road.

  “It’s not a problem,” my wife told me. “Just look for another job.”

  I told her that I would try. In fact I did try, and I still am. To give her credit, my wife tried as well. Her cousin’s husband belongs to the class a notch above ours, so she asked her cousin to help. She promised to help and still does. While she waits for me to find a job, my wife is dying of anger. It’s as though some mythical fingers were transforming her mood from sorrow to tears and making her say things that sound like lamentations for the dead.

  This morning she did it again. You don’t have a job, she told me. Go and look for one. What are we supposed to eat? If things keep on like this, I’m going back to my mother’s place.

  She was in tears. I felt like crying too, but then I remembered that I’m a man; and men don’t cry. What they do is think, although actually they are crying inside, crying and crying. . . . It’s by no means the first time she’s told me she’s going back to her mother’s; in fact it may be the thousandth or even more. Perhaps I haven’t taken it seriously enough.

  She used to show me her clothes. “Just take a look,” she’d say “They aren’t even worth mending.”

  She was right, and I had to agree. She had every reason to cry.

  I like fog with its grey hues. It’s just that this morning the cold weather’s bothering me while I’m enjoying the lovely fog.

  My coat needs mending, and so do my wife’s clothes. I’ve no job, but I’m heading for the seaport warmth shining in my eyes. I’m reasonably content.

  The Burial

  Breathing so hard was very painful. Sweat was pouring from his pores, overworked not so much because of the searing spring heat, but rather from having to clamber up mountains. It was trickling slowly through his short, thick body-hair; in the silent world that enveloped him, it managed to sound like the ripple of a tiny stream flowing through a canyon. Nothing but silence, the lethal trickle of sweat, a blocked road, utter exhaustion, and a woman who was still unburied even though she had been dead for two days.

  S. stopped climbing, panting even harder than before; he was totally exhausted. Being forced to use another route than the one that was blocked made for very tiring work. For two whole days now he had been climbing up and down other trails . . . but no matter how exhausted he felt, he could not stop or take a break. Back down there, his wife still lay inside the house like a bag of wet hay. By now her corpse may well have begun to smell bad; perhaps worms had started sprouting from her toes in search of exits to the world of light. The cemetery was still a long way away. The blocked road had made it even further.

  One evening, exactly a week ago, while S. and his now-dead wife were having dinner, they heard a violent crashing sound and a loud rumble, which totally obliterated the combined noise of thunder and pounding rain. They had never heard such a sound before. The next day they discovered that part of the mountain had collapsed in a landslide, because the floods had eroded part of the ground. The road was now blocked. There it all stood, stubbornly defiant. From that evening on, S.’s house was totally cut off from the world, from the village and its shops two miles away.

  S. was totally exhausted as he tried to get there. To get around the landslide, he had had to resort to his hands and knees—in fact, his entire body. Once he had reached the top of the landslide, he’d jumped down to a lower point, then back onto the blocked road.

  When his wife had died, he’d thought about wrapping up her body, tying her to his back, and making his way over the landslide. However, he realized that that would be totally undignified for a dead person. In any case, he might not make it, and that would make him feel very sad. For two days now, he had been trying to come up with some other way of getting his dead wife to the cemetery, but the road was still blocked. It was the only road, and the cemetery was very far away. He would need to go around the mountain and get to the place where the shops and cemetery were located. Feeling desperate, he thought of taking an ax and burying his wife somewhere close to his house, but everything he tried was utterly futile. The ground was as hard as steel; digging just a few cubic inches took many hours. He had tried in other places too, only to confront the same firmness, obstinacy, and rejection from the ground.

  But now he had found a solution. In the afternoon two men were going to meet him and help him carry the corpse. They would walk with him down the circular road to the bottom where the village, cemetery, and shops were located.

  When S. reached the house, he paused for a moment. Utterly exhausted, he collapsed on the ground; even though it was actually cold and hard, it now felt warmer and more sympathetic. He stared off into the distance, relentlessly observing the curved line that separated earth and sky. A doleful tableau took shape before him: white houses, plowed land, shapeless, colorless trees, and far away a curved line separating earth and sky. From that scene he looked back at his own surroundings and focused on the lower part of the door. Still feeling stunned and ill at ease, he realized that behind that half-opened door lay the shrouded body of his wife. By now it might well be, indeed probably was, turning blue and covered with a layer of worms. In his mind he gathered together all the foulest smells he could imagine; it was the most repulsive ones that seemed to stick in his mind. A strange image occurred to him: what if wolves had sneaked in through the door while he was out and savaged the corpse? He imagined his wife, whom he had often hugged and embraced, being instantly torn to pieces. In his mind he tried to put the pieces back together and restore to his dead wife the tender body that had become so diseased in her final days.

  Like a defective machine, he stood up slowly, placed his hands on his knees that were sagging under the weight of so much grief and bitterness, and rushed like a madman toward the house, chasing away the image of carnivorous wolves as he did so. No one deserved such a death, he told himself, especially someone who, during her lifetime, had been one of the most beautiful, kind, and tender of creatures. Divine care always attends such benevolent souls, protecting them from evil.

  He scratched the nape of his neck; it was the sweat that was making his hair coarse and damp, not the rain. When he opened the door, his eyes fell on a serenely shrouded body, covered with a clean and plain cloth that his wife had kept locked away in a chest for such a day as this. It was painful for S. to find himself alone and isolated, facing the world unaided (but then death spares no one).

  His wife had passed away one morning while she was chatting to him in her usual amiable way. She never worried about death or imagined it would surprise her, but now it had! Even if she hadn’t been aware of the imminence of death, her life-partner certainly was, now that she had died. . . . Her husband was now fully aware of the fact that death can surprise you wherever and whenever.

  S. could not bear to stare so helplessly at the serene corpse, so he shifted his gaze elsewhere to focus on things that reminded him of his dead wife’s image. Slowly closing the door, he left the house and sat on a rock fixed firmly in the ground. Once again he could see the white spots on the horizon, the plowed land, and the curved line separating the kingdom of heaven from that of earth. He stayed there sitting on the rock till he heard the sound of voices floating on the air, which was as oppressive as a stagnant lake.

  The two men arrived and followed S. into the house. They looked sad. Even though they themselves hadn’t lost anyone so far, they were aware that they were supposed to
look sad and mournful.

  After awhile, S. tried to close the door. By now, he was even more upset, but somehow his exhausted frame managed to find some fresh, nervous energy. More than ever, he now realized that he would have to face the world on his own, without any help. While the three of them stumbled their way over the rocks on the road, a movie image passed rapidly across S.’s vision. In it, the circular road was not long, and he imagined it as having been asphalted, even though it was actually rocky, hard, and impassable. In any case, it led to the valley where the white houses, shops, and cemetery were. Far away, a curved line still separated heaven from earth.

  He was feeling bitter and exhausted. Even so, he sensed an unusual burst of energy which he had never felt before. . . . At this point, his wife only seemed to weigh a few ounces (for sure, by now her soul would be flying toward that distant unknown place along with many others). . . . A tear fell from S.’s eye. The rough, twisting road seemed to grow shorter.

  LOW HOUSES

  (1977)

  In the Middle of Nowhere

  10 p.m. Outside, everything was white, and the snow was still falling. Inside the freezing cold café, Ahmad had managed to wrap himself up in his overcoat like a hedgehog. There were very few other customers. The glass windows were all fogged up, which gave the illusion of actual warmth even though the café still wasn’t at all warm.

  “There’s no way of avoiding the cold,” said the girl behind the counter. “This place is between mountains, and it’s always snowing. Besides that, we can’t afford to heat the café; it’s too expensive, especially now that the number of customers keeps dropping.”

  “This weather makes the place look deserted and gloomy.”

  “Not entirely,” she said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Please, and pour yourself one, too, if you want to stave off the cold. It could well give you a bad case of flu.”