Samar Yazbek
An Excerpt from the Novel
Clay
Ali Hassan's men spread out all around the place. They were searching for the woman in the red car that had raced off at an insane speed from the old house, leaving a cloud of dust and astonishment in its wake. Their master had commanded them in no uncertain terms to investigate absolutely everything, no matter what it was, even if it meant shoving their noses up each others' backsides. They must look everywhere, circle one another, examine the very air in front of them. Their lives depended on their ability to carry out orders without thinking or questioning what they were doing and how and why they were doing it. They shuddered at the thought of Ali Hassan's raging eyes as he demanded they fetch Riham. There was no question of coming back without her. They could think of nothing else. Orders were orders; they couldn't return unless they had been carried out. The sad thing was that this time the prey was that remote palm tree, the bare-chested Riham. That same Riham, whom, after long hours standing before them, drenched in sorrow, dripping with temptation and red-nosed from crying, each of them secretly wanted to spread out on the ground and have their way with.
The search filled each one of them with joy and fear. They scurried around like rats, hopping keenly and nimbly from place to place. One of them stopped his car and crossed the road several times, peering at anything that moved. Another climbed the hill overlooking the old highway, hoping to spot the red car from overhead. A third chewed his fingers and spat angrily as he nervously questioned people, his eyes darting around in every direction. They reconvened and sped off in their cars once more. When they passed the area they had already covered they slowed down and reverted to scampering about all over the place, hunting out their prey. They noticed a light near a group of abandoned plastic greenhouses below some tall china trees between the railway track and the supply road the government had built a few
[l4l]
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years before, robbing the coast of its best farm land. The light was faint and the men debated whether or not they should waste time traversing the rugged dirt path. The light probably belonged to one of the numerous houses scattered nearby of the poor peasants who had [142] come from the coastal mountains to earn a living working in one of the plastic greenhouses. They passed by, convinced they were doing the right thing. This bought Riham some extra time to read the yellowing papers, and intensified the pain she sought but had not found until now. Where will you appear? Where are you? she asked herself. Why hadn't Haydar mentioned her in his papers, of which she understood very little anyway. She turned the pages with trembling hands, tears streaming down her face. Some of them were torn. She cursed her luck, then calmed herself and lit a cigarette. She pressed on with the difficult reading.
Upon returning from the other side, one of Ali Hassan's men decided to head for the light. Their master would kill them if they returned without the woman and he still had life left to live. They left their vehicles on the side of the road and leapt over the barrier separating the two streams of traffic. The four of them stole quietly across the ground. As they drew closer, they became convinced the light was none other than a headlamp. Their hearts rejoiced. Riham exhaled the smoke of her cigarette and read the next sentence. She read it again in a rasping whisper: I'm the last of this clay and being killed by its very elements. As she cast it aside to begin the next page, the car doors were suddenly flung open and four strangers descended on her. She found herself outside the car surrounded by men, gagged with a foul-tasting cloth. She clutched the papers to her chest. They formed a circle around her and touched her in a manner that made her feel she was dissolving in their hands. Delighting in their complicity, each tried to embrace her, to lose themselves in the degradation of her body. The forbidden fruit, the unattainable woman, whom they had never got anywhere near. She used to shake with laughter before them, oblivious to their existence, as though they were mere insects. The swinging of the hips they had grown accustomed to as she strutted past was no more, and she was within their reach. The groping could not last very long, yet even so lust enabled one of them to come in his trousers as he
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rubbed himself against her and grabbed at her haughty breasts. They slid into a trance, forgetting all about Ali Hassan and the task at hand, until the cry of the most loyal member of the group rang out: 'You dogs! By God, Ali Hassan is going to kill us. Put her in the car!'
Only then did they recover their senses. They remembered they [143] were on official business, not at one of the cabarets they had frequented since they left their villages and signed up for work under Ali Hassan and became 'real commanders,' as the announcement Dalla made demonstrated when she entered Haydar's room for the last time: 'A prince's dog is a prince.'
When the men arrived at the vault they found Ali Hassan marching round in circles like a bull, trying to divide his thoughts up into manageable portions and make sense of what had happened. Where was Haydar now? What had happened to that devil Dalla, whom he had detested all his life? Had the two of them colluded as they used to back in the village? They would hide in the forest and he would spend endless hours looking for them only to return home at the end of the evening, exhausted, starving, covered with mud and dirt, and drenched in sweat. He passed from mirror to mirror, biting his lips and glaring at his various reflections.
'I'm the one. I'm the one who'll survive. He's gone at last! Gone never to return!' he shouted.
He paused and gazed at his face. He raised his hand high in the air then calmly brought it down onto his cheek. It was unnaturally quiet and for a moment he forgot he had covered the ceiling of the vault with sponge, timber and mirrors. Shouting to his men was pointless anyway as they would rather wait a few days for their master's usual ring of the bell, than go and tell him they had Riham, unconscious and barely breathing.
He tried to find to a possible cause for what had happened but could not even surmise a guess. He was most alarmed that Haydar's death was making him feel ill at ease; he grew anxious when he thought of his wretched damned disappearance. Could someone betray him? He was Ali Hassan himself. No one could turn on him. He had tamed an entire country. No woman could stand up to him. He was sure Riham had something to do with all this and tried to convince himself
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she was Haydar al-Ali's daughter and belonged to a family that had always treated them like slaves — not the daughter of a great man like Ali Hassan, who had stood up to fate and who alone was the architect of his majesty. He was the only one of his kind. There would never be [144] another like him. His progeny would not bring forth a man like him, for he was unique. He drew closer to the mirror, which was the same size as Haydar's. He stood upright, as he would have stood before his subordinates when he was a young officer in the army. He put one hand under his armpit and laughed, as he imagined the officials would. He spun round, trying to capture an image from the past ten hours that might provide the key to the problem. But he could not think of anything that could have inspired Haydar to leave the country. Why should he flee now? What did he hope to achieve by fleeing? Was he carrying any documents that would incriminate Ali? Had he gathered evidence on Ali that he would pass on? How was he going to escape? Ali began tapping his head. How was Haydar going to get away? He had sold all his father's land when he left Damascus and sent the proceeds to Sahar. Did he know something? Had the spells of madness returned that, according to Sahar, sent him to a mental hospital in Beirut from time to time? But that hadn't happened for thirty years. Had he and Riham ganged up against him? He wouldn't dare — he's a mouse!
A mouse!' Ali Hassan screamed at the mirror.
Hearing the word mouse pleased him. He recalled how, with a single kiss, he had turned Sahar al-Nasur, the fairest of the fair, into a hungry lover and made her leave Haydar, who always got what he wanted. Ali Hassan's cheeks puffed up and filled with colour and he began massaging his moustache. The vodka had relaxed his muscles, glass by glass, and he momentarily forgot that, even on his own in his secret vault, it was inappropriate to swagger about like a young lady. Yet this was precisely what he did. He whispered to Sahar, recalling that fatal kiss and swelling with pleasure, and imitated her walking along swaying her hips, like an old man behaving like a child. Suddenly his cheeks contracted and he bent over double like a viper, clutching his stomach and bracing himself in pain. His stomach failed him for a moment and he was just about to scream when his reeling reflection in
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the mirror struck him. He stopped for a minute, his head bowed, and stared at his bulging bloodshot eyes. He felt as if he'd been smacked in the face so slapped his cheek himself. He stood erect in front of the mirror for a second, as though he had just woken up from a nightmare. He clenched his fist and smashed it into the mirror to make sure [145] it was real and not just another of the spectres dancing in front of him. It didn't break so he retreated, then fell. Haydar's image appeared in the mirrors. Ali Hassan stood up once more, aimed his clenched fist at another mirror and brought it down on the glass. He fell onto the floor and from where he was, lying down, looked around at the mirrors. Haydar had moved somewhere else and was standing quietly smoking an argila, staring into Ali Hassan's eyes, who lay where Hay-dar had been a few moments ago. He laughed loudly.
'Have you come back?' he shouted.
He stopped in front of the calm and relaxed Haydar. He approached him, then pounced, but as he did so Haydar evaporated into thin air. He turned around: 'Come out, coward! Come out!'
Haydar came out from behind the shelf of bottles of wine. He leaned against its wooden edge with his elbow and it began to tremble, as did the bottles on it.
It is not easy to describe Ali Hassan at that moment nor explain what was happening. He wanted to escape from the spectres. He wanted the images of Haydar Ali mixed up all over the room to disappear. He turned round and round, throwing punches at everything in front of him, as though he was fending off an attack. He shut his eyes, a prisoner of the spectres, and was slowly collapsing to his knees as though dragged down by a river current when a hand seized him and pulled him up.
The scene before him consumed all his senses. Haydar grabbed a sack of straw, held it up and assured him nothing bad was going to happen to him. The hand transformed into another, tender, soft and deadly. It stroked his chest gently and crept down to his thighs, plunging him into an eternal fire. Sahar al-Nasur's lustreless moist eyes emerged out of the middle of the hand and then vanished. The tender hand returned and frisked his body, searing it with fire.
The fire was burning him.
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It was going to destroy him.
He wanted to forget who he was. He wanted to go back to being the boy hanging about at the banks of the river, his face spattered with dirt and grass. He wanted to shout: 'How I loved you Haydar! How I [146] hate you now!'
He wanted to weep over his friend, to scream, to beg his forgiveness for everything. He wanted all these things. But instead, Ali Hassan, the grown-up military man, hurled himself at the mirror once more. 'You're not weak!' he shouted. 'You're made of iron. He's dirt. You're the future. He's the past. You're the one who can change destiny and control fate. You've been around all this time and you're the one who'll survive!' Ali Hassan shouted at the top of his voice.
Eventually he stopped shouting. 'But he's dead! Dead! And I killed him slowly,' he sobbed.
He collapsed on the ground, wracked with tears. Uttering those words pleased him. He felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders, and struck the mirror once more. 'I survived! You're not weak. Crying is for weaklings. Throw your heart to the dogs...!'
He smiled calmly, tears streaming down his cheeks. A grin spread across his face and he started laughing. He chuckled and glanced around, assuming the posture he had adopted from a photograph of Napoleon Bonaparte he'd once admired. He bent over again, smothering the sound of pain. He started to step firmly and heavily towards the mirrors. He fell down and got up again. He stood yelling at the foot of the stairs. He tried to climb them but stumbled and fell. He shouted out several times but no one heard him, and even if they did none of his men would dare come down unless Ali Hassan opened the door himself. He felt a strange heaviness, which he couldn't place. Today it would all end and things would go back to how they were before. Everything would be different in the morning. Haydar and Ri-ham would both be gone and he'd be the only one left. He and Sahar al-Nasur, the woman who'd entranced him all his life. Right now his beloved was resting peacefully in a quiet English hotel.
He tried to get up again. He climbed a few steps. As he reached the door he fell to the ground, though somehow managed to open it and call his men. The most loyal one lifted his master off the ground, sob-
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bing, and, in spite of his weight, carried him back down the steps. Ali Hassan was muttering strangely. It was the first time the men had seen their master behaving like this. They had believed him to be exceptional, immune to weakness and tears, his head always held high. Indeed, he was superhuman. They had often asked themselves [147] if there was any commander on earth who could match his might, so they were naturally aghast to find him in such a state. They whispered in bafflement between themselves. As the whispering grew louder Ali Hassan opened his eyes and looked into their faces sternly. They fell silent.
'You sons of bitches!'
He got to his feet with difficulty and asked about Riham. One of them quickly ran up the steps and returned with Riham slung over his shoulders. He stood before his master. Ali Hassan poured a glass of vodka, added some of his favourite grapefruit juice and gulped it down in one go. He looked languidly at Riham and confirmed to himself she was not his daughter but his son's lover and that he had no reason to be ashamed of what he was doing. This woman was not his daughter; she was simply someone under whose skin Haydar Ali's blood flowed. He would be happy when that bloodline was extinguished once and for all.
'Leave her here!' he shouted at his men.
The men were perplexed. They stood motionless, glancing around. Where should they put the young girl?
'Leave her on the floor and just get out,' he shouted.
They stood staring at him in disbelief. The four of them had loyally served Ali Hassan for over twenty years and were able, through habit and natural instinct, to comprehend his various actions. But today he confounded them. They could not understand what was going on. They filed out one by one, leaving Riham on the floor of the vault with her hands tied up, clutching to her chest a bundle of old papers that looked like they'd come from a rubbish dump.
The last man looked at his master as he closed the door of the vault behind him. He was convinced things would never be the same again. He, Ali Hassan's most loyal follower, was pretty sure something had changed to allow something like this and make this man weaken like
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this. This man, whom he had believed was his protector, had turned
feeble.
Ali Hassan was examining Riham's features, trying to find something to change his gut feeling. She was a curse that had never left [148] him alone. He bent over Riham and scrutinised her face as she lay unconscious. Her breathing was uneven. For the first time, he caught a glimpse of Sahar al-Nasur. He suddenly noticed an astonishing likeness between Riham and Sahar. How come he hadn't seen it before? He conceded his son was right about his connection with this woman, and jumped back as though he'd been stung, muttering that it was impossible that this devil could be his daughter. Implausible. Otherwise, how come he was attracted to her?
He moved away and considered what he should do next. She would soon wake up and he would have to answer questions about Haydar's whereabouts. He was entirely convinced she was behind his disappearance, for Ali Hassan knew that she knew a number of influential people. He decided he should____
But why would she conceal Haydar? He was dead . . . dead!
He was talking to himself, his confused mind racing against time on account of his imminent departure for London, where his paradise and only love was waiting for him on the edge of her seat.
He returned to Riham. He noticed the strange papers she was clutching and jumped. His heart pounded. Perhaps now he would understand what was going on. He broke open Riham's fetters, grabbed the yellowing bundle and went to his desk. He poured himself a glass of vodka, forgetting to add his favourite juice, as he gazed at his various images in the mirrors. He tossed Riham a cold look and, with heavy calm, began reading the faded papers in the light of his Victorian candelabra.
The silence was exaggerated.
Riham lay deep in sleep.
The men crept away from the door of the vault, sure that today had ended peacefully.
Translated by Christina Philips
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