The Fall of the Imam (20 page)
She said, ‘My brother died a martyr for his country, and we fought together in the same trench, and I saw him fighting the enemy with my own eyes.’
‘What did you say?’ he said. ‘You were with him in the same trench?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘The two of you alone? That is another crime, for if a man and a woman who have not been married according to Shari’a meet alone in a secluded place then Satan will always be there.’
‘But he is my brother,’ she said.
‘He is your foster-brother, and your presence together alone is not allowed.’
‘In the orphanage we had neither mother nor a foster-mother, but we drank milk from the same buffalo.’
‘Buffalo or mother, it comes to the same thing,’ he said, ‘for both of them have teats for suckling. He is your foster-brother by decree of the Imam, and your punishment is to be stoned until death.’
She said, ‘I am innocent. I am still a virgin and no one has ever touched me.’
‘We will examine you for evidence of your virginity, for you cannot be acquitted without material proof,’ he said.
In the dark pit, where I lay deep in the earth, I saw the face of the judge emerge into the light. I recognized him immediately, and before he had time to disappear I said to him, ‘You are the Imam.’
‘I am the judge, not the Imam,’ he said.
‘How can the criminal take on the role of a judge?’ I asked.
‘I am the one who is supposed to ask the questions, not you,’ he said, and immediately after that the last light went out, and the night was so dark that whether I opened my eyes or closed them it made no difference, for the black of the night stayed black. The cold air seemed like waves of an invisible sea and his words landed heavily in my ears like drops of molten gold.
There he stood in front of me wearing a black sash over his naked flesh, his bald head shining, his face covered in hair, his eyes sinking deep into the bottom of their sockets. ‘Do you not recognize my face?’ he asked.
‘Since I have never seen a judge all my life, how can I tell?’
‘Have you never seen my picture in the newspapers?’
‘I never buy newspapers,’ I said.
‘Why do you not buy the newspapers, then?’
‘The price of a newspaper can feed me for three days on bread.’
‘But a civilized person does not live on bread alone,’ he said. ‘Are you not interested in culture? Are you a woman or an animal?’ he asked.
‘The price of a buffalo is more than that of a woman,’ I said, ‘and a man will have only one buffalo and yet will marry four wives. And when I was a child in the orphanage I had no mother so I was nursed by a buffalo, and I had a sister who died young and a brother who died in the war, and did you ever have a sister who died a child, or a brother who died fighting in the war?’ I said in one breath.
‘The Imam died fighting and the Prophet died fighting, and Jesus Christ died smitten by his enemies, and I have never stopped fighting the battles that our Prophets fight,’ he said. ‘In the last session the Imam appointed me to be a judge and ordered me to teach people all that I had learnt from him as a boy. The human spirit lives through four different phases, but in not one of these phases does it adore living in heresy and in sin like Namrud and Safrut and Awisra’a, who spread heresy at the time of the Prophet. I saw God in my dreams long before any of the members of Hizb Allah or Hizb al-Shaitan even had a glimpse of Him, and I have seen the Prophet on the night of the Revelation before the Big Feast. In fact I have seen all the Prophets, starting with Adam and Noah, Joseph and Aron, David and Solomon and Zakaria down to Moses and Jesus Christ. I stood in front of the Prophet with my head upright, but my soul shrank in humility within me. And as I stood there down came Gabriel, peace be with him, in the form of an angel, and carried me far away on his wings so that I could see to the end of the world, further than anyone else has ever seen. I closed my eyes and opened them again, only to find myself in the highest kingdom of heaven where stands the tree of thorns overlooking the infinite infinity of the universe. There I heard God call me, saying, “Judge of judges, remove the mist which lies over your eyes so that your sight may be renewed, your face renewed, and your spirit renewed.” My memory at once became as clear as crystal so that I realized immediately that I was the very soul of the Imam, that I was none other than the Imam in his previous phase and that God had delivered to me all the secrets of the universe, of the sciences and of medicine, so that I could recognize a sickness and prescribe its cure, tell who speaks the truth from he who lies, know the voice of God from the voice of Satan, a woman with child from a woman whose belly is empty, a virgin girl from a girl who is no longer a virgin, the sex of a child before it is born, a legitimate father from an illegitimate one. Now I could also treat women who suffer from menstrual pain, sexual hunger or sexual lust which exceeds the ordained limits, and indeed I do give to every woman a part of my secrets proportionate to the good she gives to me and to the charity she gives to others for the sake of God. For those who give generously shall be rewarded, and if you give me a part of what good God has bestowed upon you I shall tell you whether you are a virgin or not and whether the child in your womb, be it male or female, is the fruit of virtue or of sin.’
Her face turned white, as though all the blood had been suddenly drained from it. ‘I swear that I am a virgin and that no man has ever touched me,’ she said. ‘If there is a child in my womb it can only be Jesus Christ, for God has visited me in my dreams several times.’
And he shouted, ‘Silence! May your tongue be cut out of your mouth. Remove your clothes so that I can examine you, for I am the one to know whether anyone has touched you, be it man or spirit, for there are evil spirits that go with women in the dark of night. Take your clothes off, and be not afraid of anything.’
She trembled as she took off her clothes, and her teeth could be heard chattering. She lay down on the table and on the wall above her was his big hand, a huge black shadow with five fingers. As she lay there two invisible arms stretched out and tied her arms and legs to the four white marble columns of the table, and their cold went through the bones of her back as she lay there naked, staring at the ceiling above. He stood looking at her in silence, then pulled the curtain over the door, and the room was plunged in a darkness deeper than the dark of night. He stood there, almost touching her, but she could not see him and he continued to stand beside her, motionless, as she lay listening to the world while the world looked on in silence.
Suddenly she heard two hands creeping over her body where it lay on the table, and she tried to pull herself out from under the heavy blanket of the night, but her body was tied down by the ropes. She heard him blow out air, once and twice and thrice, and each time he blew, her dead body died a little more, like the bodies of the dead kept in a morgue, yet each time the flames in his body went higher and higher, like dry sticks added to a fire. She lay with her arms open in supplication to God, but the flames rose more and more as though he could not stop, like the god of war and destruction burning new victims for his lust. In the dim light she saw a hand emerge from a small cleft in the depths of the earth, first the big finger with no nail, then the small finger with a long nail, then the palm of the hand, smooth and hairless, then its back covered with rough dark skin and tortuous blue veins and black spots like old freckles or roots of hairs which had died and dropped off. She heard his voice ask her to blow the air out of her chest, and each time she blew she felt her face touch the wall. Slowly she was getting closer to the shadow on the wall, and slowly she moved her face towards it, but inside her she could not find the strength to look at it. She saw it turn round and come back on her like a tall giant where she lay, and the invisible hand crept out again and squeezed her nose or the nipple of her breast, she could not tell which, then there was more blowing and a tongue of fire leapt up, stunted at first, then growing taller, then smaller, then twisting and dancing and burning into her flesh.
She lay in the dark and the wound in her body was a deep gash, reaching down to the bone, and under her body was a ribbon of red blood. She could hear the songs being sung for the Feast, the voices of angels rising in a hymn of praise, the ringing of church bells and the crowing of cocks announcing the approach of dawn. Then came the call to prayer, the sacrifice of the victims in the slaughter yards where they were tied, and the acclamations of the crowds, multiplied by the microphones a thousand times as they cried, ‘Glory to God, our nation, and the Imam.’ He stood on the platform making his speech. On his right were the members of Hizb Allah and on his left the members of Hizb al-Shaitan, and on the balcony reserved for the harem were the legal wives mounted on their sharp, pointed high heels and surrounded by the women of the charitable societies, the model mothers, the widows of martyrs, the children of God dressed in robes made of white calico, the schoolchildren wearing the uniforms of scouts, the girls from the House of Joy in dancing costumes snapping their fingers with the brass discs to the beat of a tune. Up into the sky soared the coloured rockets celebrating the Feast, and below on the ground the beat of drums and tambourines mingled with the wail of pipes, the hallelujahs of joy, the screams of pain and the sharp burst of bullets fired from a gun.
But the uproar in her ears was like a silence she could not hear, and the gash in her flesh was a wound which bled without pain. She left her body lying there, turned away from it with no regret, and stood up on her feet. She walked on the earth without a body, like a spirit or a dream, with feet that did not touch the ground as she moved here and there. Her face was pale and thin with wide-open eyes and thick lashes, the pupils black and seeing. Her mind was like the river water, pure and flowing and crystal-clear.
Near the outer door I saw the women. They were dressed in black robes and were standing in long lines waiting for their turn to go before the judge. They struggled with each other, fought with their elbows, each one hoping to get in first, for at the touch of his blessed hand the sick woman is cured, the barren wife becomes pregnant and the pregnant woman empties her womb, the guilty woman is made innocent, the spinster marries, the paralytic rises up and walks, the bedridden woman stands, the healthy woman becomes infirm, the mad woman regains her reason and the reasonable woman is cured of all reason by God, the open eye is closed and the closed eye opens, for he is the judge, and by order of the Imam God has revealed all the secrets of the sciences, of law, and of medicine to him, and for every measure of secrets which he reveals to a woman, there is a measure of good which she must give for what she has received.
I remembered now that I had paid before going in to him. In the dark there was a box hanging down so that each woman could pay without being seen. The voice of the crier went down the lines of women standing at the door, whispering, ‘Pay, O Servants of God, for by the will of God he who gives today shall receive tomorrow, not only in Paradise but also in this world, from the Bank of Faith under the patronage of our Lord the Imam. Allah is All Supreme. He is the Abundant who giveth to the rich, and all wealth is His, but He provides it for our use. Wealth is owned by the God of the two worlds, yet He asketh people for charity and loans. He who giveth to God a good loan shall be compensated many times over. Contribute, O Servants of God, to the fund of the Bank of Faith blessed by God and you will be paid over fifty per cent, for we speculate in gold and do not fear bankruptcy. Come forward, O ye men and women of good faith, for with God your interest will reach seventy per cent. Pay in secret and let no one see you, for charity given in secret dispels the wrath of God and cures the sick. The barren women shall bear children and the paralytic shall walk. Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, used to imbue the dinars she gave in charity with sweet-smelling perfume and when she was asked why, replied, “I heard the Prophet say that a dinar given in charity passes through the hands of God before it goes to the poor.”’
I pulled the belt tight around my belly, neither ate nor drank, threw piastre after piastre into the hands of God, then closed my eyes, and fell asleep with the deep sleep of children. In the dark I opened my eyes and heard the voice of God calling to me in my mother’s voice, warm and soft as her bosom. I ran towards it, and from a distance I saw her standing in the dark, waiting for me with her hands stretched out. I had one step to go before I threw myself into her arms, but I ceased running for just a moment to take my breath and they stabbed me in the back, why I did not know, and I turned round to face them before I could forget my words or the letters of the alphabet, and I said, ‘Why do you strike when I am giving all I have to God?’
They said, ‘We were speculating in gold, and the Bank of Faith went bankrupt because you are a daughter of sin and a bad omen and you brought us bad luck and God will never make us victorious and multiply our profits until you are wiped off the face of this earth.’
I asked, ‘To whom can I complain? To whom can I have recourse in my grievance?’
And they said, ‘The Imam, he is our ruler.’
‘Can I complain about him to him?’ I asked.
‘We all complain about him to him,’ they said.
‘Complaining to anyone but God is a humiliation,’ I said.
I folded the grievance I had written and hid it in my bosom so that no one should see it, but the spies of the Imam spotted me, for his spies were everywhere. They asked, ‘What are you hiding in your bosom?’