Packaged Lives, page 6
When he strolled through the door connecting the shop and the house in the afternoon and evening he would find her sitting in a corner knitting for him a pullover, a pair of socks, a hat, or whatever struck her fancy. He would prepare a meal for the both of them, sit with her, exchange stories with her, or read to her. He reread to her every news item in the old newspapers she had kept, and every line in the ten-volume History of the World his father left behind. Even though these had lost their luster through constant repetition, he continued to be attentive to them, as he would his grandmother’s stories.
On the occasions he went to the café, he listened to the radio equally attentively, to the dull reports on the weather, harvest, migrants, young people’s desire to leave the village, and even matchmaking.
A tourist who lost his way wandered into the café once. He announced he was a traveler, for he disliked being called a tourist. He told them about the world, and they told him about their days. They drank to the health of the traveler sweet wine distilled from white grapes and perfumed with wild anise. He discussed politics and history with them and was astounded by how much they knew about the world. Respecting their wish to stay far from the others, he apologized for his early impressions and bid them a grateful farewell.
The population of the village was about fifty. They lived in twenty houses built without prior planning or permission on the two sides of the main road, a farm, a shop, and a café, which was really an odd extension of one of the houses. It was made up of mainly the old, the middle-aged, and children. Young men were missing from the village age groups. They could not stay still and preferred to go where there was action and variation, to the cities.
Mountain
He was twenty-four. He chose to stay, to be near his grandmother, her shop, and the mountains surrounding his village. The tallest of them was more than 1,100 meters above sea level. This was the magnet that pulled him, more than anyone else, toward rocks and away from people. Or perhaps it drew him even closer to them, to their stable nature and tranquil life.
He would spend hours climbing the mountain and sitting on a rock high up there to contemplate and dream. He turned to his inner self fully awake, retreating into her, and into the wild grass, saplings, and trees to which she belonged. He would stand up tall, lifting his face to the falling snowflakes in the winter. In the spring, he would lie on the grass, stretch out his body and look at the clouds drifting across the heaven, chameleons in a world secure in its constancy.
To be at one with nature is to accept her as she is, to be alive among her elements, to partake in the varying chapters of her life, awake or in slumber, sunny or stormy, cold or warm, rain or snow, harvest or drought, and to be so in love with her you become her twin and change the tones of your skin according to the colors of her seasons: dark, shadowy, light.
There were four boxes of watercolors on a shelf in the right corner of his shop. They had remained there untouched for years. It never occurred to anyone to ask for watercolors. The children, all nine of them, who walked for miles to class in the neighboring village, got their supplies of notebooks, pencils and pens, and uniforms from their school. They wore their uniforms with enthusiasm at the beginning of the school year, but they would soon enough hide them and claim to have lost them.
The four boxes of watercolors were forgotten in their corner on the shelf until one frigid winter evening he decided to bring one down and take it to the living room. He drew colorful lines on white paper and on pages whose colors had gone off, and spilled paint over their edges. A few days later, he learned to control his force and lighten his touch. He put the box of watercolors and papers in a cloth bag he carried with him regularly on his walks. He did not know how to draw shapes very well, but his knowledge of nature helped him to understand colors. He wanted to transfer the colors of the mountains to paper, to capture them, to hold them captive, and take them to his living room and show them to his grandmother so as to brighten her long evening hours.
The mountains bordering the village were rich with perfumed vegetation, from groves of thyme, oregano, and rosemary to thickets of sumac, fig, and olive. The oldest olive tree in these mountains was nature’s gift to humanity. It had enormous roots and a hollowed trunk the size of a room big enough for four people to stand in. It was without a roof or a ceiling. Only ants and worms lived in it. Branches green with leaves and heavy with fruits grew out of its wrinkled, thick elephant skin artlessly, like a sermon delivered impulsively.
It drizzled. It poured. The earth sipped, gulped, and swallowed instantly. It kept its rain harvest out of sight and safe in the deep recesses of her innermost core. Her surface was fertile with lemon, orange, almond, and carob trees. A chorus of sounds coming from the trees, animals, birds, and his solitary presence filled the mountain air. It was singing the sound of silence.
He learned to listen, to listen to the sound of silence in the mountains, to the sound of nature, to the insects buzzing about, the bird wings bustling above, and the tree leaves rustling all around. With the breeze on his face, he lay still, listening to life rising up slowly from the gut of the tree, to form another layer in her timber, and add one more year to her age.
Her silent tunes changed with her colors, all in step with the budding of flowers following the withering of trees and the stirrings of spring in the wake of winter slumber. Colors were born in the big thaw. As snow turned into streams and seeped deep into the earth, life rose up from her heart and blossomed on her face. She was reborn amid budding flowers and breeding animals.
His daily wanderings, accompanied by tunes filling his ears and colors dazzling his eyes, brought him close to his mountain. He wanted more from her, as he drew, to get even closer, to know her intimately, to touch her soul, and to understand the meaning of their existence together, of his life.
Cave
He reached the summit one day. A blue rock caught his eye. Its magnificence astounded him. He drew near and saw a mass of blue flowers covering its entire surface. He touched them. He breathed in their fragrance. A sudden feeling that they were hiding something behind them took hold of him. He tried to push at them, and after some effort he moved them sideways. An opening through which he could crawl inside revealed itself to him. He was possessed by the sense of awe usually felt by someone on the edge of an abyss about to fall into an unfathomable void. He moved the rock back to its place. It was time for him to go home.
He entered the cave the day after. His body trembled from the silence of his anticipation. The lamp in his hand lit up the belly of nature. The granules of air hung on invisible threads. He groped along the passage narrowing here and widening there. The walls were so soft to his touch he could even feel himself melt inside. He lifted the lamp and saw marble all around him. It was decorated by overlapping forms so alive they were almost moving.
Deep inside the cave water was dripping gently, one slow drop after another, in corridors of varying sizes that did not seem to be a part of the mountain. Stalagmite formations, like sand dunes, rose up from the center of the earth in curves and waves, and stalactite formations, also like sand dunes, hung down from the ceiling, also in curves and waves. They rarely met midair. The ceiling and floor were smooth surfaces, and the walls sprouted formations that competed with those rising up from the floor or hanging down from the ceiling. Colors differed from one corridor to another because of the different ingredients that went into their making. It was red here because marble mixed with iron, green there because it mixed with calcite, and black because it mixed with moss. No two formations looked alike. Every square centimeter of the rock formations, deposits of minerals accumulated with every drop of water, needed one hundred years of still air and fixed temperature. There was no room for any man to add his signature to the cave.
He discovered something new every time he visited. His eyes became accustomed to darkness. There was light in the dark, and his eyes got used to the cave and no longer needed the lamp to see. The pupils in the wide opened eyes turned into the colors of the rock formations. They transformed the forms into knowledge that opened secret doors to the mystery he was witnessing. A total existence he had been longing to experience since he did-not-know-when. His vision had been limited by what the eye could see before he discovered the cave. The formations he saw before were sublime in their own ways: people standing up, sitting down, lying back, raising their hands in prayer, “Allahu akbar!,” prostrating in supplication, pleading for mercy and forgiveness. The shape of a woman stood at the center of a quiet place in the cave. A transparent veil covering her from hair down revealed the fine features of her face. She was looking down with love at the shape of a child she was holding to her breast. The very serenity of mother and child was threatened by stalactite formations above her head: needles of uneven length, each the size of an obelisk, were pointing at them.
The cave removed the barrier between the eye and what it saw. He became one with nature. He now saw clearly that his translucent inner world illuminated the world outside. The cave became his inner world two years after his daily visits. Conversing with the cave in a common language only they knew, he reached a point when he saw and heard everything, not just what his eye and ear chose for him.
In the days and months he made his daily journey to the cave, he wandered around the passages and gave the rock formations names he thought suited them. This was the “Romantic Mansion,” that was the “Gateway to Hell,” “Paradise,” the “Enchanted City,” and “Elephant.” “Elephant” was a gigantic animal formation he leaned on to avoid falling when he was navigating the slippery ground awash with marble waves. He saw through his senses. He saw the dripping water and what it created. He saw air. He saw labyrinths in the shape of domes, alleys, canals, and hallways. He saw life as he had never seen before. He felt life as he had never felt before. The rock formations animated life for him and he held on to it, translating the lines of dripping water and the colors of rock formations into his own watercolors.
Grandmother
His retreat did not last very long. He had to return to his grandmother. She lasted a year on her deathbed. He watched her take her leave unhurriedly, retreating into her diminishing body first, then drifting out of her mind. As she slipped into a fathomless darkness, she recited religious hymns in delirium and called out to her mother like a frightened child. Did wisdom grow against the grain of the dwindling body, as it moved less, felt less, and savored less with the steady onslaught of illness? What of thought and memory? Could we learn to be wiser without our memory, the roadmap left for us by our past?
His grandmother’s skin grew increasingly translucent with the passage of time, and her kind face became a mass of unpredictable lines. With the breakdown of the vehicle of her soul, she lost her knowledge of everything else. She stopped talking to him, complaining about her solitary existence or calling him to help her. She lived in another world. Did she also find her cave?
He abandoned his cave for her sake. He stopped painting. He opened the shop no more than two hours per day. The presence of death in his living room painfully awakened in him senses he felt he had to ruminate on for a long time before he could untangle their jumbled threads as he would the yarn in his grandmother’s basket. Without winding each around a spool according to its color, he would not be able to grasp the meaning of death or accept it.
He spent his days awaiting his grandmother’s death. He woke up in the morning expecting her to have left her tired, disintegrating body. The gift of life was an unfair deal, he felt, for from its very first moment it was conditioned by death. Man worked, went to war, traveled, loved, procreated, thought, wept, felt joy, and built, all the while holding on to death’s hand, day and night, not knowing when it would pull him toward it.
Courageous, man was, and naive!
War
The day he and three others received their conscription letters calling them to the battlefront to defend their homeland in a world war, he smiled. They made the decision he had been hesitating to make. With tears of joy in his eyes, he packed his belongings, handed his house and store keys to his neighbor, bid farewell to his fellow villagers, and left ecstatically for his cave.
He gave in to her call and went inside. He heard his heart beat with every drop of the water dripping down from the ceiling and along the surface of the rock formations. He could at times hear the beating in the marble veins as if it were the music of a soundless string ensemble. His ability to see, hear, and feel grew with the time he spent in the cave.
He moved from one place to another every day, changing the angle of his view and hearing. The inside of the cave was different from its outside. The light of life emitted from the unmoving rock formations, brightening up the imagination and expanding her world beyond the walls of the cave. She picked up the colors of the universe, colors the eye could not tally, colors that sparkled, shimmered, and dazzled, colors that united life with death.
One drop following another, he looked, he saw, he received, he recorded, he perceived, he realized. Joy filled him. Light suffused him. He rose above and beyond place. One drop of water following another fell on him. He turned into a glittering diamond, a splendid body of light whose sparkles graced all the inhabitants of the cave.
n.d.
From There Is Such Other (1999)
9
Pilgrimage
The House
Sheila stood at the gate of the small house that looked like a hut built in the wrong place. Five tourists disembarked from the bus right behind her: a Swiss man, a French man, a Dutch man, and an English man and his wife. Sheila, our guide from the Swansea Literary Tours, pointed to the blue round plaque fitted on the front wall of the house, between two windows on the first floor, and said: “This is his house.” She touched the front door painted in white and said, “He looked out to the sea from here, and contemplated the ebbs and flows.” One asked, “What is the house number?” “Five.” “What is the name of the street?” “Cwmdonkin Drive.” “Pardon?” “C. w. m. d. o. n. k. i. n.” Like a fatigued employee, Sheila spelled out the name of the street mechanically.
They stood quietly for a few minutes in front of the door. They turned their backs to it and looked ahead, trying to imitate what the poet used to do, so as to see the sea and its ebbs and flows. They saw nothing. The newly erected houses on both sides of the street blocked their view. They felt a momentary sadness. They were deprived of a means of getting close to the poet. One of the rituals of their pilgrimage to him was sabotaged. To compensate for their loss, they turned around to contemplate the little house one more time. The Frenchman commented: “Baudelaire said something about the amazing effect of looking at something at length. Whatever we spend time contemplating for a long time always becomes interesting.” Everybody laughed except for him. He looked rather sad.
From There Is Such Other (1999), 9–18.
They walked toward the bus. Ghada said: “This neighborhood reminds me of High Gate in London.” The German asked her with great concern: “Are you homesick?” “No, not at all! It’s my way of getting to know a new place. If I compare it with places I know well I won’t forget it.” “You’ll miss something important if you do this,” the German responded, “You won’t feel the excitement of discovery because you’ll be transforming new places into familiar ones. If you do this you won’t feel the need to discover the new place.” Taken aback, Ghada looked at him quizzically. “All I said was that this place reminded me of a neighborhood I know.” He continued, heedless of her protest, “All places, for you, regardless of where you go, become one and the same.” She muttered in her English husband’s ear, cursing him for making her accompany him on this literary journey.
They returned to their seats and the bus set off. After a long silence, heavy like air saturated with humidity, Ghada began to speak. She would have to initiate a conversation, she thought, if she wanted to make the four coming days with these visitors to the poet’s city bearable. “Did I tell you about my dream last night?” She went on, not waiting for anyone to respond. “It was a strange dream. I felt an invisible force drawing me toward it. I was hanging on to everything I could find around me to fight off this terrific magnetic force. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, refusing to go, no, no, I don’t want to go with you. What I got back was an even more powerful pull, and a mysterious voice, more like echoes than anything else. I was hearing this voice intertwined with the force as rising and falling waves.”
Ghada went silent. She was looking away into the distance as if she were trying to keep that mysterious power to herself. She realized suddenly that all eyes were on her and quickly brushed the memory away. “It was a terrifying dream.” “Was it a dream or a nightmare?” “I don’t know. How could I have known? I was very afraid.” Another asked, “Was it a ghost?” “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No, of course not,” he laughed out loud, “I believe in hidden forces, unknown forces created by gravity and energy that find their way to those inexplicable extraordinary phenomena. But ghosts,” he laughed out loud, “these are creatures of a befuddled mind. They talked a lot about ghosts haunting the castles and abandoned mansions we visited but believe you me none materialized in all the nights I stayed up waiting to catch a glimpse of them.” The Frenchman said, “Ghosts do not appear in solid forms. You feel them in the vibrations of the surroundings.” “It is then the state of the mind created by the expectation for something specific.” Ghada intervened to recover her role. “I don’t think so. I felt the presence of a ghost in the Scottish castle we visited last year. I heard music. It was the ghost of a musician who lived in the castle. He was forced out of the castle and died in sorrow then returned to settle there.”
