Seven Veils of Seth (10 page)

“ ‘Fool' is an epithet. We all know that the fool's name is Edahi and that idiocy is a trait attributed to the wretch.”

“If our master has admitted in front of this crowd that the fool actually is a fool and not merely called one, then what law leads the elders to think that a fool's testimony constitutes evidence?”

People became restless and agitated. Heads bumped against each other, and laughter was heard among the common folk. Ewar fiddled with his veil once more to disguise his manifest discomfort. In a tone that indicated that he had lost his self-confidence, he asked, “What?”

“You said that the person who saw me release what you term a suspect powder was the one you call ‘the fool.' You have also just admitted that the fool actually is an idiot and not merely called that. So what sense does it make to consider the testimony of an idiot as evidence?”

“But he's a fool unlike any other. Everyone knows that Edahi is unique among fools.”

“Ha, ha. . . . The fool's a fool. The fool's a fool in all respects, at all times, in all tribes, and in every language.”

“I trust the testimony of this fool more than I do that of the noblest elder in this oasis. What do you think about that?”

“Ha, ha. . . . This is according to our master, not according to the Law. Our master can believe anyone he wishes. Our master can believe the fool to end all fools even more than the wisest elder, but the Law acknowledges only the intellect's sovereignty over the world. The Law says: ‘Death isn't evil; the real evil is losing one's mind.'”

“Not so fast! Take it easy! The Law truly said that death is not evil but did not say that losing one's mind is evil. It declared instead that insanity is evil.”

“Ha . . . ha. Does our master see a difference between going insane and losing one's mind?”

“I actually do see a difference. Anyone with a mind can tell the difference between going insane and losing your mind.”

“Can our master share that distinction with us?”

“We often lose our ability to reason clearly. Frequently the wisest elders don't think straight, but with insanity we lose our ability to reason once and for all.”

“Is idiocy a type of reasoning or a loss of reasoning?”

“Idiocy is a short-term liberation from reason's restraints.”

“Amazing!”

“Yes, indeed; idiocy is the boundary between insanity and reason, between liberation and restraint, and between shackle and prophecy.”

“Did my master mention prophecy?”

“Certainly. Prophecy. Occasionally idiocy is prophecy.”

“Wouldn't that assertion count as blasphemy against the lost Law of the ancients?”

“No, certainly not. Occasionally idiocy is prophecy.”

The crowd murmured excitedly. The uproar lasted a long time. Then the strategist proclaimed decisively, “Reasoning that allows us to say that idiocy is prophecy also lets us say that prophecy is idiocy.”

“Prophecy is not merely idiocy. It is also insanity.”

The strategist clapped his hands together while the marketplace shook with people's commotion. They did not limit themselves to a restrained objection but shouted their protests out loud.

When the jinn she harbored in her breast stirred one day, she protested: “You've destroyed me! Chasing after you through the deserts has destroyed me.”

He did not disapprove so much of the thought expressed then as of the inflection used, for she had repeatedly said even more scathing things but had never dared to express them in the tone she used for this complaint. A comment's tone is our only evidence for its veracity – just as the music of its words is our only evidence to support a declaration of love . . . or of hatred. This time, she had revealed her hatred in the ring of her voice.

He let his gaze wander then into the eternal wasteland, which had never promised him anything save liberation. Then he asked with the calm typical of a recluse, “What do you want us to do?”

She replied immediately, as if she had been expecting this question: “We'll do what everyone does.”

“What does everyone do?”

“They abandon the nomadic life and settle down on the land.”

“But if we give up nomadism, we'll perish.”

“Don't say we're nomads because we must search for grazing lands in the great outdoors. Don't say we must migrate to stay alive, because you know that everyone searches for grazing lands outdoors, but they settle on the land for a time to ensure that they have a life, too. So don't say that only wanderers truly live and that people with an easy life are specters and zombies, as you like to claim.”

“Yes, I'll never be ashamed to repeat that sedentary people are really dead even while alive and that nomads live on even if they perish.”

“We're nomads, but not because we search for pasture in arid lands; we migrate to search for our selves. We become nomads to flee from our selves. Do you deny that?”

“There's no need to deny it. Indeed, I'm happy to repeat along with you that we migrate to search for our selves. Indeed, we're nomadic because we flee from our selves. I wonder who you heard reveal this maxim. Ha, ha. . . .”

“I didn't hear it from my mother or father. I didn't hear this aphorism until I learned the nomad's tale, because hearing maxims is the only good point about nomadism.”

“I'm delighted to hear you confess that nomadism has a good point.”

“I'm not embarrassed to acknowledge that the nomadic life teaches maxims, but it sells us these aphorisms at the most outrageous price, since it demands our lives in return.”

“Any maxim for which we don't sacrifice our lives is fraudulent.”

“We could afford to sacrifice our lives for prophetic counsel if we lived more than once.”

“Nonsense! We must pay for a prophetic maxim with our lives, even if we live only once, even if we live but half a lifetime, even if we don't live once, because our true life is in the maxim, not in this physical world for the sake of which you want us to throw down the nomad's staff and become farmers.”

“A prophetic maxim can refresh a wanderer through this world and can rescue a solitary man. It cannot, however, revive a woman's heart.”

“Is a heart that's not inspired by a maxim a heart or a lump?”

“Woman's always made of different stuff.”

“Ha, ha. . . . I admit that this is what I wanted to hear. Do you admit that woman's a creature with a different provenance?”

“There's no need to deny that!”

“Do you agree that man and woman are creatures from two different communities?”

“How could I fail to agree with you when you see that man is devoted to flight from the earth whereas woman's temple nestles on the earth?”

“Does this mean that I violated the laws of creation when I carried you off into the vast expanses of the desert?”

“How could you have failed to violate natural law throughout the dreary years you attempted to bid the earth adieu and to make a throne for it in the expanses of the heavens?”

“Are you trying to say that you play the part of the earth on our voyage?”

“I'm not the one who said that woman is always an earth and that traveling man is the wind.”

“Ha, ha. . . .”

“You're too arrogant to admit that you've wronged me.”

“I've wronged you!”

“Don't we wrong a person whom we ask to accomplish what she's not created to do?”

She fought back a flood of tears before adding miserably: “You have sinned against me because you know I am your hostage, since I have no father to protect me, no brother to deliver me, and no mother to comfort me.”

He did not abandon nomadism, however, because – although he did not dispute her argument that he had wronged her – he still could not alter what was in his soul. He felt certain that a man must inevitably wrong other people if he wishes to bear his burden, if he wants to be true to his trust, and if he ever means to communicate his message.

He did not abandon the nomadic life even when she took matters into her own hands and delivered from her belly a peg to restrain him. He knew she had not done that to satisfy a woman's natural thirst for a child or to gratify a lust to plant human progeny in an expansive, arid land indifferent to both seeds and offspring. She had done what she had in order to fasten a collar more firmly around his throat and a band tighter around his neck, so she could pull him backward, to a set place, downward, to the lowlands. Yes, yes, indeed . . . the bottomlands; that's what the she-jinni wanted for him when she delivered the infant. Understanding this secret shook him and sent a wave of terror through his soul. He could feel the band tighten around his neck as if it were a python. He began to feel he was being strangled, that the earth had split open to reveal a dark abyss wanting to swallow him whole so he would disappear into its belly forever. These fatal events were not merely revealed to him in waking visions but became horrible nightmares and a daily way of life. He would leap upright from his slumbers and then race across the empty plains like a madman.

The visions persisted and the nightmares became more severe. So he decided to end the nightmare and fled. He fled once more. He journeyed from the borders of the western Hamada to the far side of the great, central desert. To challenge the specter of sedentary life he traveled to Massak Satafat. En route he noticed the wretched glint in her eyes once more. He could see the hatred that he had heard in her voice the day she first mentioned her distress to him and her fatigue from all their travels. He paid no attention, however. He continued on his way, letting the horizons guide his steps without trying to get to the root of that look. When a woman's eye gleams with a meaningful look, she is brooding about something. When a woman's eye shines with hatred, she is certainly hatching a plot to divest herself of that feeling. Man is different, because he can feel hatred without humoring it or finding relief through some plot.

He carried her across the southern deserts on the back of a camel while she clasped in her arms the infant she had hoped would be a peg to tie him to the soil. Instead that child became a goad for the father and a red-hot poker. Each time the horizons begat new horizons and the desert extended into the distance to engender another desert, her despondency, misery, and depression increased. Yes, indeed, her cheeks flushed in an alarming way and the features of her face darkened more from despair than from any tanning by the southern, Qibli winds. She remained closeted in her despondency even during the evenings when – to prepare for departure during the following days – they halted their nomadic travels. She once asked him a question, the thrust of which he did not grasp until she had performed her heinous act: “I wonder whether children can find a place in the heart of a nomad?”

He remembers telling her then: “No one loves his children as much as a nomad. A wanderer admittedly does not really choose to bring children into his world, but he loves his children when they arrive in this world much more than those idiots who pride themselves on their love of the earth.”

She smiled slyly that night, but he paid no attention to her crafty look, because he roamed around in the obscurity of the night's desert, which was bathed in moonlight. He trailed after the stillness far away to borrow prophetic maxims from unexplored regions of the spirit world. He did not realize that when hatred gains the upper hand, it inevitably seeks a victim, sooner rather than later.

The next morning she placed before him their son, wrapped in swaddling clothes, eyes protruding, blue-cheeked, his delicate neck still showing the imprint of her fingers. In an unfamiliar voice, she said, “I guessed that the nomad who did not choose to beget a child would never think of burying it in the ground.”

He deserted her.

He left her in the wilderness and bolted, roaming through the wastelands. Whenever he remembered what she had done, he collapsed and vomited till he almost threw up his guts, which had gone without food for days. His need for food led him to consume grass and drink from mud puddles. Although he had resolved he would never return to her, a disruptive whispering crept into his breast, urging him to go back. It was an odd kind of whisper; not one he could label. Only after he had groveled in his desert for several more days was he able to assign to it that strangest of all titles: compassion, alias mercy or the duty that binds the heart of anyone who has one. So he went back.

He returned to find her kneeling like some evil spirit at the tent's entrance. She stared at him with the antipathy of a sorceress and the eye of a she-owl but said nothing. He sensed that it had been a mistake to return but realized as well that duty's call inevitably leads to pain, even though it relieves the heart. Since her presence near him felt like a life-threatening lasso around his neck, he decided to liberate himself.

One day he approached her and began: “Do you remember any family member to whom I can take you?”

She replied gruffly, “I have no family. You know that.”

“There's not some distant relation somewhere?”

When she shook her head no, he felt the lasso tightening but did not despair. “Tell me what I should do with you.”

“Just do what any man who takes responsibility for a woman does: he settles down with her on the land.”

“A nomad has no fixed abode . . . as you know.”

“But I'm not a nomad. I'm a woman. I'm a female. I'm a mother. I can't live if I don't settle down. I want to have a fixed abode. I should have a home: is this true or false?”

He gazed curiously at her face. “How can you claim to be a mother when not long ago you strangled an infant you plucked from your own belly?”

“I strangled him because I know I can bring him back.”