A River Dies of Thirst (7 page)

you said to me, and left me

You left my night to me, and yours, and both so cold

and I will be hurt by winter and memories of you

and you will be hurt by the scent of my lilies in the air

Too bad!

I will love the first passer-by

crying over a woman who threw him out as you did me

We (the stranger and I) will care for our night and light it up

We will furnish our little eternity. We will choose

(the stranger and I) our bed and our feelings with care

Perhaps we will recite together (the stranger and I)

the love poem you dedicated to me

‘Night is a history of longing

and you are my night.’

Frustration follows the spurious kind of happiness that is like a sneeze brought on by the smell of petrol. I was happy I sneezed, but that doesn’t help create a memory I can look back on. When I ask: What is happiness? I am philosophizing without a philosophy, not trying to be a mystic searching for happiness in the beyond. I might find it by chance, and I might not, but I am not searching for happiness as much as for an answer to comfort and console me. Whenever I ask myself: Am I happy tonight? I am embarrassed by my naivety and open the window to see what the sky looks like, because the cold also makes me sneeze, and because the stars are words on their way towards me, and so a moment of happiness arrives from outside. Joy is nothing more than a winning lottery ticket, for which we only have to say thank you to chance. Is my life merely non-existence indulging me for a moment? As I write this question the electricity is cut off and I feel cold without sneezing!

I study the wine in the glass before tasting it. I let it breathe the air it has been deprived of for years. It has been suffocated to preserve its character. It has fermented while it slumbered, and stored summer for me, and the memory of grapes. I leave it to choose its colour, wrongly described as red. It is a mixture of crimson tinged faintly with black, which can only be called wine-coloured, so we can take a break from the charade of describing things. I let it respect its smell, the proud, exalted smell like women of unblemished reputation. If you want to smell it, it doesn’t come to you. You have to make sure your hand is clean and free of perfume, then extend it softly and affectionately towards the glass as if approaching a woman’s breast. You bring the glass up to your nose with the deliberate action of a bee, and a profound, mysterious smell throws you into disarray: the smell of a colour that takes you into old monasteries. I let it gather its thoughts on its taste until we are both thirsty enough to receive inspiration by mouth. I go neither too fast nor too slowly, for either would break the rhythm of enjoyment. I bring the glass to my lips as shyly as a man begging a first kiss from a woman whose feelings are not clear to him. I take a delicate sip and look upwards, eyes half closed, until the most exquisite feeling of intoxication flows through my veins. My appetite is aroused as befits a wine fit for a king. The wine is raising me to a higher level, not celestial but not earthly either, and convincing me that I have it in me to be a poet, even if it’s just this once!

She said to him: ‘Are you the one who wrote the poem?’

He said: ‘I don’t know. I dreamt I was alive’

She said: ‘Then what?’

He said: ‘I believed the dream, and flew for joy

to you, to you’

She said: ‘Then what?’

He said: ‘When I spoke your name the valley returned

the echo, and my eyes were bathed in visions’

She said: ‘Then what?’

He said: ‘I dreamt nothing more

I see in the glass clearly. You are you

as I saw you in my dream. And I am I’

She said: ‘And what else?’

He said to her: ‘Life is short and beautiful

Are you the one who wrote my last poem for me?’

She said: ‘No. I am a ghost’

He said: ‘So am I, perhaps ghosts can converse

like souls’

She said: ‘Where are we now?’

He said: ‘At the top of the cypress trees.’

What distinguishes the narcissus and the sunflower is their different points of view: the former looks at its reflection in the water and says: ‘There is no I but I’, while the latter looks at the sun and says: ‘I am only what I worship.’

At night the distinction grows narrower, and the interpretation broader!

I envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme.

Shyly I look at a beggar’s bowl. Shyly I listen to an old song on a scratched record.

Shyly I smell the perfume of a rose that is not mine. Shyly I savour the taste of wild mulberries. Shyly I rub one of my limbs. Shyly I use my five senses and obey my sixth. Shyly I live, as if I were the guest of a gypsy who is ready to move on.

Time has flown, and I have not flown with it

‘Stop,’ I said, ‘I have not finished dinner yet

not taken all my medicine

not written the last line of my will

not paid any debt to life

Life has seen me standing hungry by the fence

and fed me with a fig from its trees

seen me naked under the sky

and clothed me in a cloud of its cotton

seen me sleeping on the pavement

and housed me in a star on its breast’

Life said: ‘Learn about me, you will find me waiting for you!’

I said thank you to life, for it is a gift and a talent

I learned about life with all the hardship I could

and it taught me how to forget it to live it

Death said to me unbidden:

‘Don’t forget me, for I am life’s brother’

I said: ‘Your mother is a vague question of no concern to me’

and death flew from my words to take care of its business

‘Long live life!’ I shouted, when I found it spontaneous

instinctive, playing and laughing without a care in the world. It loves us and we love it

It is harsh and gentle, a mistress and a slave-girl

and weeps for nobody. For it does not have time

It buries the dead in haste, dances like a courtesan

falls short, then reaches perfection. Perfection is the same as imperfection

and memory forgetfulness made visible

But I played with life as if it was a ball and a game of chance

I never thought of the riddle: What is life?

‘How can I fill it and it fill me?’ I asked when

I saw death was giving me time to ask

and I waited for time to pass. I said: ‘Tomorrow I shall look into the question

of life.’ But I didn’t find the time

because time double-crossed me and took me by surprise, and has flown.

The prickly pear that borders the ways in to the villages was a faithful guardian of signs. When we were children, just a few moments ago, these plants showed us where the paths were. So we stayed out late with the jackals and the stars. We also hid the little things we stole – dates, dried figs, school notebooks – in their spiky secret rooms, and when we grew older, without realising how and when that had happened, their yellow flowers enticed us to follow girls on the way to the laughing spring, and we boasted to one another about how many thorns we had stuck in our hands. When the blossom died and the fruit swelled, the prickly pear was incapable of repelling the weapons of the killer army, but it remained a faithful guardian of the signs: there, behind the plants are houses buried alive and kingdoms, kingdoms of memory, and life waiting for a poet who does not like stopping at ruins, unless the poem demands it.

An empty square. Flies, midday heat and a fig tree keeping nobody company. A dog barks in the distance as I approach the empty square. I wonder what lies beyond it, and behind a poem written by a frustrated poet about the terror of the empty square: ‘I and the words I spoke, and the words I did not speak, arrived in an empty square.’ There dryness resounds like a piece of metal, and your footsteps make a similar sound ‘as if you are someone else’, followed by an echo from the dry air ‘as if I am him.’ When the square is empty, thoughts extend to what went on before: to a life that was here, that came from the narrow alleys to take the sun or have a breath of air or prove what was possible. I did not ask: ‘Where have I come from?’ but: ‘Why have I come to the empty square?’ I was afraid, and tried to retreat into one of the narrow alleyways, but they all changed into snakes. I closed my eyes, rubbed them and opened them again to see my nightmare in front of me. It was not a nightmare. It was a nightmarish reality. But the empty square grew bigger and the fig tree higher, the noonday heat blazed brighter and the flies multiplied. The barking dogs kept me company in the distance, there was life over there. For some vague reason I remembered the words I had not spoken, remembered them and forgot them.

I believed I’d died on Saturday

I said: ‘I must leave something in a will’

but could find nothing

and I said: ‘I must call a friend

to tell him I’ve died’

but could find no one

and I said: ‘I must go to my grave

to fill it’, and couldn’t find the way

and my grave remained empty of me

and I said: ‘I have a duty to do my duty:

to write the last line on the shadows’

and water ran from them over the letters

I said: ‘I must accomplish some deed

here and now’

but found no action suitable for a dead man

So I shouted: ‘This death has no meaning

It’s a joke, it’s anarchy in the senses

and I won’t believe that I have died completely

Perhaps I am somewhere in between

or perhaps I am a retired dead man

spending a short holiday in life!’

Fame is the humiliation of a person deprived of secrets. It makes him vary the speed of his walk to reassure the onlookers, as they demand, that the ground is solid beneath his feet. The top of the head must not be held too high, so the sky can remain a general reference point. The frame must be slightly bowed for greeting passers-by, and any birds who may be hovering close above. The left hand, wearing a watch, gold or diamond according to who you believe, is thrust into the pocket of trousers of a neutral shade of grey, while the right hand regulates its movement by clutching a book or newspaper. The overcoat is navy blue, because any other colour would stir up rumours. Fame, as it is a person being stripped naked, requires some protection under the clothes from hidden cameras full of pictures ready to be taken. Fame tempts slander to aspire to the level of crime by committing acts of spiritual assassination that go unpunished by law. Fame is punishment where no wrong has been committed, imposing a mask of contentment on the person so he smiles on demand, dictating that he stand at length with strangers even if he resents it, obliging him to utter stock phrases devoid of sense or meaning. Fame is the enemy of instinct and spontaneity, the difference between what is said and what ought to be said, and the transformation of one person into two, having a conversation in a room with closed windows: which one of us deceived the other, me or you? Fame is the scourge of the impulsive, and a many-windowed prison, well-lit and under tight surveillance.

If I were a hunter

I would give the gazelle a chance

and a second

and a third

and a tenth

to fall asleep

and I would be satisfied with my share of her:

peace of mind as she slumbers

I am able but I abstain

I am pure

like the water in the spring near her covert

If I were a hunter

I would be a brother to the gazelle:

‘Don’t be afraid of the gun

my poor little sister’

And we would listen, safe and sound, to

the howling of wolves in distant fields.

When I wake up at dawn my day is sick. Nightmares do not come back to me from the night, but from a depraved dawn, as if a metaphysical sorrow is dragging me into a dark blue forest: here there are masked gunmen and a camera. They tie me to the trunk of a grieving Iraqi palm tree, next to another palm where an Arab horse is tethered. They ask me for my full name and I give my father’s and grandfather’s names wrongly because of this pressure at dawn. I cannot see their sarcasm under their masks, but I hear them whispering to one another: ‘We won’t execute him now, all at once, as we’re still in the first chapter of the novel. We’ll kill him gradually, in instalments, and make do with executing the horse now.’ As they loosen my bonds, they stuff a videotape in my pocket and say: ‘This is a torture training video’, then take me back home. I don’t rejoice that I am alive as I watch the tape. I am sad because the horse is looking at me with a mixture of pity and reproach.

for Sa’di Yusuf

Iraq, Iraq is blood that the sun does not dry

and the sun is God’s widow over Iraq. The murdered Iraqi

says to the people standing on the bridge: ‘Good morning

to you, for I am still alive.’ They say: ‘You are still

a dead man looking for his grave where the doves cry’

Iraq, Iraq, Iraq’s night is long

Dawn only breaks for the dead to pray half a prayer

and they never complete a salutation to anyone, for the Mongols

are coming from the gate of the Caliph’s palace on the bend of the river