The Fall of the Imam (16 page)

I embrace him in the mirrors and wipe away my sweat with a scented handkerchief, and he sniffs and says, ‘Have you changed your scent?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘but my body has lost the odour of childhood.’ I rest my head on the back of the bed, then put a pillow behind my head. The smell is in my body, although I keep washing it with scent, like an odour of death which hangs around and will not leave me.

He says, ‘Do not think of that. I love you better on the throne, even though your youth has fled. Do not try to change yourself, to hide your age or the wrinkles in your face.’ The glass trembles in my hand and spills my drink on the bed, and I laugh like a child that had spilt its milk, but on the sheet the stain is dark and never disappears, no matter how much I try to wash it off or bleach it white.

As I lie on the bed my body feels flabby, and I have to make an effort to lift its weight and get out of bed so that I can go to my place on the royal seat. I hide it behind a huge desk, seeking refuge in books and various papers. My name is etched in silver letters on a book I never open, and the name of my husband is printed in gold on a book he never wrote. He comes in smelling of drink and sweat from the other woman, but I look up at him and say nothing. For I am not the only woman in his life, nor is he the only man I have known. In him I seek refuge from poverty, and in me he seeks comfort in defeat. Deep inside my soul is the bitterness of knowing the truth, and on all sides I am besieged by the death of illusion. I can feel dust filling my nose as I look around for the throne which has disappeared, but I can see the Imam stretching out his arms, trying to hold me, so I stretch out my arms and try to cling on to him, but the closer our bodies approach the greater the distance between us grows, so that at the moment when we touch each other and hold one another close we are furthest away. It has always been so, for since the first day we embraced we were distances away, and no matter how much we tried to be close it has always been in vain.

I liked to read in my soft bed before going to sleep but he would move up to me, sitting on his haunches with a glass in his hand, and start telling me what had happened during the day. He would say something, then I would say something, and so we would go on talking, not without pleasure in conversing together. But as soon as he put his arms around me all the pleasure would disappear in a moment. I preferred hearing him talk than to feeling his arms around me. A dialogue between our two bodies was never set up right from the beginning, as though they spoke two different languages. When we talked I could understand him and he could understand me and each of us gave and took. But when we embraced the balance seemed to tip, to be replaced by a single movement on his side where there was always a sudden attack and a sudden retreat, as though pleasure was a sin and a lust, a weight which he carried around, desiring to be rid of it as fast as he could.

In the mirror I would see him as he lay in bed, watch him as he became two men, one the Imam and the other an exact double or copy of the Imam. I would often see him walking along the corridors of the palace with his Bodyguard near him, and at night when he embraced me I became confused and asked him many a time whether he was the Imam or the Bodyguard, and he would answer quickly, ‘I am the Imam.’

‘He resembles you so closely that sometimes I cannot tell the original man from the copy.’

‘I am more powerful than he is in mind, and he is more powerful in body than I am, and as time goes by my mind gets bigger and my body grows weaker, and you are young enough to be my daughter, so that sometimes I am afraid that one day I will come back from one of my trips like Shahrayar to find you in bed with my Bodyguard.’

I asked, ‘Who is Shahrayar?’

And he said, ‘Have you never heard of Shahrayar, have you never read
The Thousand and One Nights?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then you haven’t studied our cultural heritage and you should make up for that by reading,’ he said. He got out of bed and slowly walked up to the library. He stood in front of it for a long time, reading the titles of the books with difficulty. From the slight bend in his shoulders I could tell it was the Imam and not the Bodyguard, and at the same time I realized that I knew him better from the back, which gave me a shock not devoid of a certain pleasure, for understanding, even if painful, is better than ignoring the facts. After all it is certainly better for me to know him from the back rather than not to know him at all. I walked up to him on the tip of my toes and put my arms around him from behind, for I loved him best when he was completely absent.

He turned round and came back from the library carrying a huge book in his hands with an effort. He steadied his spectacles on his nose and I could see the gold chains attaching them to his ears dangling down on either side. As he read, his eyelids would close heavy with sleep, but his mouth remained half-open, reciting the Verse of the Seat in order to chase away devils and evil spirits, and he held the book in his arms as one would hold the woman one loves. In the dark he stole out of bed and went to her, and from where I hid I could see him clasp her in a warm embrace, and although to see her in his arms was painful to my heart, it was better than my not seeing what was going on. The feeling of knowing, of discovering, was like tasting a forbidden pleasure, something one did in secret on one’s own, and I had no jealousy or anger in my heart when I saw him, only a feeling of guilt as though I was being more unfaithful to him than he was being to me, for the truth was that I was enjoying his lovemaking to her more than I enjoyed his lovemaking to me.

I was always very interested in our cultural heritage, and before I went to sleep enjoyed reading one of the books that were a part of it. The book which I enjoyed best of all was
The Thousand and One Nights.
Before reading I would take off the face of the Imam and put on my spectacles. In the mirror I saw a face that was round, and under the light my complexion and my teeth became white and shiny like those of King Shahrayar. My heart was like his, white and pure, imbued with a great love for black slave women. My soul was innocent like his soul, and could not understand how a woman could love a man other than the husband she had married. My body trembled in agony at the thought of Shahrayar’s wife in bed with his black slave, and at night I would dream of my wife sleeping in the arms of one of my black slaves and would suddenly wake up, eyes wide open, to find her sleeping alone in her bed with her book in her arms and her eyes tightly closed. My mind tranquil and my heart at rest, I felt a wave of confidence sweep through me, and after a short while I slipped out of bed, careful not to make any noise, and in the dark of night went to my black slave. On my way to her, just like King Shahrayar.

I stopped under a tree to breathe in the fresh air and enjoy the feeling of going out alone, without a guard and completely unknown to those who might see me. There I stood, taking deep breaths of fresh air, when I noticed a gigantic man carrying a box on his head pass by. I thought he must be an evil spirit or one of my enemies from Hizb al-Shaitan and was so alarmed that I quickly climbed up the tree and hid in its branches, just as I used to do when I was still a young child. He put down the box and sat on the ground under the tree, resting for a moment, and then he started to open the locks on the box, one lock after the other until he had opened seven locks. Inside the box was another box which opened, and out of it came a woman. She was a very beautiful woman and I heard the man say to her, ‘My darling, devoted wife, I want to sleep for a while.’ Then he put his head on her knees and immediately fell asleep.

The woman lifted her face upwards to the tree where I was hiding and whispered in a soft voice, ‘Come down and fear nothing, for this devil sleeping on my knee is not a spirit but an ordinary man.’ As soon as I had climbed down from the tree she moved his head off her lap and rested it on the ground, and then did with me exactly as a woman does with her husband, and the things which happened to me were all that a virtuous man could possibly hope for if he found himself alone with a nymph from Paradise. But before I took leave of her she pulled a small bag out of her pocket and extracted from it a necklace of ninety-nine rings, saying to me, ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘I have no idea,’ said I.

‘The owners of these rings’, said she, ‘are the men with whom I did what I did with you just now, but my husband has never found out.’ She asked me for my ring, and after she had threaded it on to the necklace pointed to her husband and said, ‘This man kidnapped me on my wedding night and hid me in a box which he put inside another box, then locked it with seven locks and buried me under the ground, not knowing that if a woman wants to do something there is nothing in the world that can stop her.’

My body started to tremble all over and I felt my heart drop. So I took leave of her and ran back to the palace as fast as I could, only to find my wife in bed with her lover. So I cut off her head with my sword, exactly as King Shahrayar had done before, and then went off to my older wives and cut off their heads with the same sword, one after the other. Now, every month when the moon was full, I married a virgin, took away her chastity, and after that cut off her head with a sword. I went on doing the same thing for twenty years, until people could stand it no more and their daughters abandoned their homes and ran away, so that the day came when there remained not a single girl who could be taken to bed. So on the night of the Big Feast I called in my Chief of Security and told him that I was looking for a slave girl who was a virgin and that she should be the most beautiful thing ever seen in our times. And to make sure that what I wanted was clear I read out a list of qualities I desired in this maiden, taken straight from the cultural heritage which I had always held in high esteem. I said that I wanted her to be slender of waist, opulent of breast, with dense black eyelashes, a small head and large buttocks, her breath smelling like the scent of flowers in a garden, skilful in the art of love, and never touched by any man before. I wanted four things in her to be as white as milk: her face, the parting of her hair, her teeth, and the white of her eyes; four things in her to be as black as night: her eyelashes, her eyebrows, her eyes, and her hair; four things to be rosy-red: her tongue, her lips, her cheeks, and the flesh under her white skin; four parts to be well-rounded: her legs, her wrists, her haunches, and her belly; four parts to be large: her brow, her forehead, her eyes, and her breasts; four parts to be small: her mouth, her nose, the openings of her ears, and that other hole which is sought after in women more than anything else.

The Chief of Security listened without saying a word, and by the time the Imam had finished listing what he wanted he was as pale as death. For the first time in his life he felt inclined to believe in reincarnation, saying to himself: Indeed this must be the spirit of Shahrayar which has come to inhabit the body of the Imam, or else the spirit of the Imam which has lived in the body of Shahrayar. He remained silent, his head bent to the ground as the words of the Imam echoed in his ears, describing his needs, ticking them off on his fingers lest he forget anything, until he reached the four things which he wanted to be small: her mouth, her nose, the openings of her ears, and that other opening which is sought after in women more than anything else. Then, raising his head at last, he said, ‘But Lord Imam, such a slave as you describe cannot be found for less than ninety thousand dinars, and the Treasury of the State is empty, that is apart from our foreign debts.’

But the Imam, interrupting him, called in the guardian of the safe, and the guardian said, ‘If Allah wills, the safe is in good shape.’ And he asked from which budget item it was required that the draft be taken, upon which the Imam wanted to know what were the budget items for which no funds remained, and the guardian replied, ‘All the items except the one reserved for love affairs.’ He added, ‘Lord Imam, love is something that no one can define, for it is not known and yet is known to all. If serious, it should be taken lightly, and if taken lightly it can be serious, and God, above all, is the one who knows.’

At these words the Imam called in his Great Writer and asked him what the definition of love was in our cultural heritage, and the Great Writer said that love is that which makes that which does not move, move and stops that which moves from moving. He said that it was not among the things discovered by religion or among the things forbidden in Shari’a, adding that it was a cure for every ill, a pleasurable situation, a longed-for sickness in which recovery brought no joy and in which consciousness was not longed for. It makes man desire what he previously disdained, changes complex nature, gives and takes in sweet pleasure. Shelter its flames in the heart like a fire in a closed room, strike its flint and it lights up, neglect it and it dies out. If it is not a cornerstone of worship it is at least the essence of all faith.

The Imam threw a quick look of admiration at the Great Writer, feeling dazzled by his vast culture and his knowledge of the cultural patrimony, and just at that moment the Leader of the Official Opposition came in and stood with his head lowered, listening in complete silence, which was a most unusual thing for him, waiting for a chance to reveal the other aspects of this whole question. Until at last, almost at the end, he managed to intervene by saying that love is harmful vapours rising to the head from congested sperm after a heavy dinner contaminated with nuclear radiation. It is one of the snares of Satan which causes wasting away of the flesh, breathlessness, irregular heartbeats, and drags men like us down to a bottomless pit. It is a deadly infection which begins as a game and ends in ruin, and whenever God has sent one of His prophets to this world He has feared for him the seduction of women, for once a man’s organ rises up half of his mind is lost. The erection of the male organ is an overwhelming catastrophe since when it is provoked nothing can stop it, neither the reason of the mind nor faith in God. Love is like war, which rages forwards and backwards, advances to battle and retreats to escape. Women approach love with the faces of angels, and run away with the cunning of devils. They use magic to change a man into a cat or a sheep that crawls on its belly, and no man has ever mounted his woman without her crying out, ‘You have killed me.’