Fire in the Unnameable Country (31 page)

By the time my grandfather and grandmother fell in love, everyone had forgotten why sharpshooters with SLRs and Technicolor film
cameras shot scene after scene on sliders, on tracks, or through moving cars as dynamic microphones hung wire thin from rooftops or swung on peeled umbrella veins shading chickens for sale. Exotic lizards and belly dancers vibrated in front of thirty-five millimetres in the equatorial heat.

Zachariah Ben Jaloun goes to market one morning, and there he spots Gita. From far away he calls her name, and though she carries a bag in one hand and the other handles indiscernible fruit, she turns in the movie breeze blows hair and shines. She turns to her name called song: crap, there's that man, she puts hand up to cheek to check her makeup. She waves. Let's give them music to arm them against trepidation, reintroductions, as they share more than a handshake, less than a hug.

Then there are scenes of everyday life: they walk through the old souks where they hear the drumming of Quinceyenglish, and where children play in Server, or inverted slang, and run with birdwhistles that sound like chickadees when filled to the quarter and doves when filled halfway. Everywhere, cranes make shadows, and fluorescent lights hide in wait for when it gets dark.

They're shooting a historical docudrama, Mamun Ben Jaloun informs, pointing at a replica naval vessel from the turn of the twentieth century resting on the back of a flatbed truck. They walk along the overpass recently renamed after Governor Anwar, and share oranges on a knoll.

While they sit in aimless conversation, taste oranges, the dips and rises of the other's voice, an eyeless man comes searching for a morsel and coins. He sits beside them hastily, let me rest for a moment, he says, though not to the pair. Just behind him, as if they had been following him for a long time, two men find the knoll, and mercilessly, the first
plants tripod legs and the second fixes a quick camera on top to catch the moment.

The blind man sits next to Gita and Zachariah, quivers for a moment, cataract eyes unaware. Are they gone he asks, and neither Gita nor Zachariah knows what to say because
The Mirror
is here. The two film workers place index to lips shush. Yes, says Gita, they're gone, she says, as the camera's jib arms swivel and the lens inches closer to their conversation.

Would you like a plum, Gita offers, and the beggar, who is a beggar judging by appearance, says please. Who are you, asks Zachariah Ben Jaloun, biting succour for cinematic effect. He looks at the ragged guest whose tattered clothes resist sunlight, whose shadows fall darker, thicker. In post-production, they must have delighted in the natural difference between him and the other characters.

Who am I, Yeshua's companion nods gravely as yes, who are you, Gita echoes.

Recall if you have heard the story elsewhere: this mendicant is not Yeshua, and that the fable is related by a companion of Yeshua.

Plum after plum, Gita urged him go on. She offered bread and milk from her bag's grocery stores. Tell us, she cajoled.

Who am I.

Yes, who are you.

What is the Fable of Yeshua. And what do they say of the Fable of Yeshua. When Yeshua came to the unnameable country did he not sow discord in the souks, casting lots, those against and those who believed his story. Why did he and the Amharic Jews come to decide the earth would swallow them and allow them tunnel-passage back to Jerusalem. Why were they driven from the Holy Land. In plain truth, enemies and
friends, when Yeshua and the Amharic Jews came to the unnameable country, drenched in brine from clothes to the marrow, stinking pesticide, blinded, hungry, shivering cold, they were mute, couldn't say a word about what had happened, who they were. That is to say, Yeshua and the six others had arrived at the shores of the unnameable country without a boat or any other visible craft, and for twenty-four hours could not explain their past.

Grenadier Lhereux, second in command to Anwar, head of state, whom the nameless rebels called Governor because our nation is a province among other unnameable countries according to their socialist claptrap, was a singularly calm man of rational persuasion, and an amateur linguist. After being the first official to take charge of the situation, Anwar found himself concluding that no human language contained so many pharyngeal stops and strange syntactical breaks, and that the strangers were glossolating in either rubbish or angelic tongue.

Yeshua regained his speech before the others and claimed that the seven had travelled from the unnameable country to Israel to make aliyah. After being told they would have to wait for security clearance, then after being sprayed by Israeli Secret Service in the face with the pungent insecticide dicholorottengas, they were shouted at in a language that was claimed to be Hebrew, which they did not understand and which proved they were not Jews and possibly spies. They were shackled together by the feet and left eyerotting in a small jail cell with other refugees, common criminals, and by the smells and sounds of it, several chickens and a goat. Most important, none of this may be true. By the grace of the she-goat's owner, they were allowed to suckle from its udder and kept alive for the week before being taken on a boat to the Red Sea.

Surely, then, Yeshua said, we were going to die. Shit sticks, they told us frightening things about picking worms off of clams as mist and
cold pawed, fought our faces. Our breaths rattled. We were blind, but more out of the fear we felt at our sudden condition, for death is the greater blindness, we began to babble, all together and in a spontaneous coordinated way, which has not stopped for the others and into which I descend now and again. When they dropped us, entangled, into the water, we were carried away from them by swift current, and the sound of the motor disappeared after some minutes, which means they did not pursue us. By the grace of God we floatedon the water, south for several days, wet, hungry, exhausted, sightless, embattled by waves much of that time, through the Red Sea, Yeshua supposed, through the Gulf of Eden, before finally arriving at the shores of your unnameable country, which we thought was New Jerusalem.

But the story had its faults. Grenadier Lhereux could discover no Egyptian, Yemeni, or Israeli naval records to verify the storm on that date; the weather, in fact, had been quite clear. They said they arrived very early in the morning, and this too was incredulous. It was a youth named Abdullah who claimed he woke up to urinate in the outhouse near his fisherman's hut, his eyes pasty, still sleepy, and was astounded in early daylight by who were these men-looking flotsam. Lhereux wrote down the boy's testimony. A fisherman, Mahmud, meanwhile, claimed the strangers had in fact arrived later in the day, at around one-thirty in the afternoon, and that he himself had brought them into his hut where the Governor met them for the first time several days later, by which time a hundred other refugees had floated onto the shore. Other individuals also claimed they were the first to find the six blind, shackled men.

The Fable of Yeshua is apocryphal. Was it true they were discovered with no boat in sight, and were wet, shivering, and had no luggage, no water or food, no provisions at all. Had they huddled together for warmth for hours before being brought inside a fisherman Mahmud's shack. There, the newly blind began accustoming themselves to their
blindness, to distinguishing between children and adults, females and males, the old and young, intuitively by smell and touch. They were incapable of communicating, as I have mentioned, for the first twenty-four hours, and were visited in the afternoon by the Governor, not for humanitarian purposes but out of the same perverse curiosity that afflicted half the city of La Maga. He had the strangers interned in a nearby hospital, treated until at least one of them had regained his speech.

The Governor, witnessing first-hand the poverty of the society of fishermen, the beach huts that had stood ramshackle tenuous against the gusts of the sea for as long as anyone could remember, did nothing to uplift their condition. Nor did he take up the matter of the strange visitors with anyone from the nascent Israeli government. Our unnameable country was being forced by the other Arab states to shoulder the weight of the Palestinian refugees, and in the fishermen's huts he saw a solution. He declared that Grenadier Lhereux should arrange for the provision of plastic and wood and other building supplies so that more such huts may be built on La Maga's shores, and that the arriving refugees might fish and live there until their fates could be determined.

The shipless refugees lived in a crowded hut with fishermen in the area and changes came naturally with time. Yoni stirred the heart of Abdullah, the youth who always claimed to have found the sea-drenched travellers first, who fell in love with her because he realized she saw more than the sighted, and the two were married one Saturday. The others, too, grew accustomed to their harsh lives and new circumstances. One of them climbed high school rungs to university and became a teacher. Another learned carpentry. The population of the beachside village grew from two thousand to twenty-six times that amount within a year due to Palestinian immigrants, and help was limited and the fish did not always visit nets, nor was there ample
arable soil to grow what one liked. Six of the seven visitors did not wish to return to Israel, but Yeshua grew old and with age his mind began to long even more for the true Jerusalem.

Then the eyeless old man got up and left the two orange eaters on the grass. Why did we interrupt with the Fable of Yeshua when we were talking about Gita and Zachariah. While we were wading through Yeshua's tale, time has passed for the pair as well: have taken a shining to each other and many significant details have been shared—Gita's loss of time, sometimes whole hours will go by and I will realize them as minutes; Zachariah's two names, his inexplicable illiteracy, which he has been trying to treat by eating raw onions.

Gita begins teaching Zachariah Ben Janoun to read again. Excellent, she nods when he does it right, you are making progress. He feels shy to reveal the existence of his blank verses, harder to come by these days, harder to write while exhausting hours at the border or while bedded rootless soil. Night after night, Zachariah descends. Each morning, he surfaces increasingly illiterate but dug up and alive somehow with hope he'll deliver a complete manuscript to Benjamin Pasha's secretary.

Who knows whether he still remembers Zachariah, even the professor has possibly forgotten him. He received several invitations, and the most recent communiqué expressed sadness for Zachariah Ben Jaloun's lack of response; but uncomfortable with his slowness in production and his inexplicable illiteracy, Zachariah never wrote back.

What are you doing, Gita will ask as he paces sometimes from one end of the small flat to the other, staring intently at a certain corner of the ceiling, mumbling with pages in his hand.

Reading, he will say, but it is obvious his mind is elsewhere. And some earlymornings he will leave the house, which eventually has
become his house as well, since he resides there more often than in his own flat (which he is renting to a university student and considering releasing altogether), and toward whose rent he now contributes, without returning for a whole day. Sorry, I was running errands he will say, and account for his absence with a kiss, a bag of vegetables, or a gift menagerie, something for the house, he will say. Slowly, however, the pages are ordering themselves and the narrative and prosody are aligning, but at the expense of Gita's accumulating suspicions.