There is nothing in the place . . . apart from heat, cold, dryness and moisture.
The fire is so warm and dry, the water is so cold and wet, the air is so hot, and the sand is so cold and wet.
Out of these properties, Elixir or Red Mercury– that liquid which flows from the stone of philosophers, may grant a bit of immortality and a lot of desire.
In an attempt to understand Jābir ibn Hayyān,and the reasons behind stone worship
Inside the sculptress’s house. Her name has been absent from the minds of the distant neighbours, because of her profession. Her real name was mentioned only by the journalists who rejoiced in festival opening days, or suggested art exhibitions, as if it were a professional duty, or as if they were critics capable of entering the game of sculpting.
The silo, as she liked to call it in her very few joyous moments, was that stone building lying on the edge of the city. He had witnessed long years of hard work serving as a diplomatic agent abroad, a man torn between his government position, his readings, the lack of pleasure, the incomplete family, and the torments of a cousin wife, who did not live long.
That house was encircled by a wild garden, which was designed to look like that, to correspond to the impetuousness of the stone, and to the remote alienated place, while her sculptures were scattered in every small corner. Once in a while, you might come across them . . . here and there . . . near the house, beneath a lighted stained glass window, and in a garden that was like a Catholic cemetery in a small village.
“Stone . . . stone . . . how wonderful stone is . . . who says it is unmalleable? Who says it is a flintstone . . . a stone block?! My stone is perfectly shaped and takes possession of my blood veins . . . confessing my feelings for him, whispering to him, silently conversing with him, yearning for him, looking for him. Only selected stones enter my house, since the words of the chisel and the hammer, and the dance of the fingers together with the brush, form a meaningful whisper, almost exploring the remote labyrinth soul.
“Now . . . the sculpture is readymade, a perfect creature completed that bears both the stone’s mightiness and my fanciful dream. The details of its shape are perfectly carved; it stands opposite me like a legendary hero worrying about his triumphs, while I stand in front of him like a temple woman, infected with concealed passion. Only then the stone speaks out while I split into his warmth: my stone has no parallel!”
Thus spoke the sculptress in a moment of revelation when the sculpture has been completed. Rapturously, she felt a great joy while covering her new manly sculpture with a white coverlet, embalmed in her confidential scent.
The sculptress spent her entire day trying to interrogate the stone’s emotions, while occupied in itemising the trees of the garden. Nothing shatters the serenity of an artist’s morning like an awkward work schedule. That was her decision, despite the insistent pleading of her father’s acquaintances, who wished to offer free services to “Youssif Bey” and his respected position.
She was in love with the morning shadow, the scent of lemon blossom, and the leisurely picking up of decaying dry leaves. She added her own flavour to things, and worked them out in accordance with her own aesthetic philosophy.
During pauses, she moved from corner to corner with her coffee mug, standing either beneath a fig tree, or an almond tree, leaning her back against the stone wall and enjoying its coolness. No one shared their solitude with her and her coffee mug, except the cigarettes that she pulled out of the few packets in that box on the table.
When she started her day in the early light of dawn – after a carefree night – she would carry on working until mid-day. Then she took a shower, had a light snack and slept for an hour. When she woke up, she dressed well, perfumed herself and started work anew, or rather resumed her work on a sculpture that she had been unable to finish in the morning.
She continued until late afternoon, when she would feel a sudden urge to doze. Her eyelids were hidden behind thick corrective lenses, with frames of gold and ivory – at one time very valuable.
She used to turn to her garden at twilight, when the orange sunlight was fragmented in the atmosphere, creating a burning tranquillity with the stone of the house.
When she felt satisfied with her day’s work, she would laugh aloud. A special smile played on her lips when things moved leisurely. She smiled when she was about to enter through the door in the house. This was hand carved in her own way, with remnants of a scene that she loved captured through her eyes: a scene for which there was no substitute, in any other city.
At night . . . she had a different ritual . . . a different routine. After preparing her vegetarian dinner, she would put a carefully chosen bottle of wine on the table, selected from some intimate corners of some airports. The bottle would be by her own glass. She then took another shower, and dressed in a mischievously bright light evening dress.
She spent her nights reading, enjoying green vegetables soaked in lemon and vinegar, her wine glass filled with the red blood of saints. When the body shivered in rapture, she turned the music up to amuse herself, her lonely house, plunged in the darkness of the night. She went on with her pleasures, until she felt her body was anaesthetized. Her mind was stimulated and she was overjoyed. It was like when she was a little girl, thrilled with her maturing body, the first symptoms of femininity, with small adventures toward her innocent coming of age.
Today, she is stirred, as if things had never gone away all these years. Only the blazing light could dispel them. They have been invoked by the cold gale of the night, and the glitter-filled wine glass. When the glass is emptied, her body is already exuding sweat. She is utterly exhausted, weary of rapture, paying the tax on her life, with her incomplete fading beauty heading towards decay.
Like some primitive piece of stone, she threw herself over the old sofa. Nothing could wake her from the dreams that attacked her mercilessly, though her cough occasionally disturbed her on midwinter nights. When the bones moaned of the stone’s coolness and the silence granted by the night with blackness of evil, she dragged her legs and went and lay down on the large bed. She plunged into its soft warmth, as her hand searched for a man’s ghost. She wished he was there that moment.
Morning light revealed the features of a woman in her fifties. She had been tall and thin, but age had brought on obesity and a flabbiness that girded her waist and rump, and caused her breasts to sag.
The receding henna-dyed hair made her twice her age. There were more freckles all over her face and breasts, but few on her hands. These hands had long fingers, like those of a trained pianist and were adorned with silver and majestic gem stone rings.
In two things you would find no gleam; her fragile and damaged hair, and the teeth accustomed to daily doses of coffee and nicotine. Only her skin maintained its freshness.
She had always searched for her crude stone, looking for complicated things in people, creating that complication between woman and existing things. Man’s body was her real pleasure. She dealt with every single muscle in that body with a woman’s body strength, a woman haunted by thirst for passion. The dance of the fingers seemed as if she had soaked them with attar or bay leaves. As she sculpted, all her senses connected her to communication, though she was never satisfaction until the mouth had granted her the feeling of an absent kiss.
When the sculpture was completed, she made passionate love to her new idol, with a nocturnal pagan wedding ceremony. She dignified its presence by uttering old ritual prayers. Like a temple priestess, she writhed around to the hymn of the god of fertility and growth, confronting his rain, and waiting for his herbs to grow and go green around her. In those nights, she would light a fire with the remnants of a Zoroastrian fire, and recall talismans from the earliest hymns of guidance. She continued pacing round the fire, giving birth and spontaneity to her body before it sunk into filth!
After performing this pagan prayer ceremony, she would wake up, purified from the spirit’s wounds, as if she were a new bride of fertility, rejoicing at the moment of possession, wishing that this moment would only last in a different form . . . any different form in life . . . even if it was that atheist workman who, when she was still a child, came to install the gate of the big house. She was fascinated by his sweating hands, and the blue suit that concealed the details of his tall body. She had watched the ductility of the steel and the process of heating that melted everything. It had been a moment of a child watching things that she would love in the future. But the blacksmith’s look had hurt her and affected her eager wish to watch the hand at work.
If only he would come now, with all his satanic desire!
Let that guy who stole her youth and the pink school-day letters live with his wife, subdued under the responsibility of providing for his children, and pursued by the curse of diabetes that has turned him into a haunted greenish ghost. It was he who had run away from her that day, dumping her and all her gifts, using his unemployment as a pretext for not marrying. The truth was that all he cared about was trying to find at any price an opportunity to travel to the Gulf. At that moment, she took money from the box which she had inherited from her mother, and gave it to him. He took the money and went to Kuwait, and came back to marry a divorced woman who had already worked there as a teacher, with a girl and a five-year old boy. He made her his wife, urged by both a steady internal avarice and a masculinityfrom days in the merciless coast cities!
On that day, she sculpted the bust of an effeminate man, one half a face, the second half fragmented, carved as if beasts were eating it, living on it for days on end.
She placed it outside the house and kept glancing at him whenever she had a chance. After the affair she had with this fugitive semi-man, she spent all her life advancing towards success, gaining celebrity through newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, critical acclaims, non-stop travel, and participating in activities. She also hosted occasional guest intellectuals who attended conferences, and lovers of her art. These visits usually ending up with helpless drunken kisses, with the guests claiming they had to go back to their impatiently waiting wives.
Indeed, those nights started joyfully, yet the house was soon free of visitors, and the dinner plates remained upon the dinner tables. Like a lioness fed up with satiety and mating, she wished they did not belong to her that moment. These nights rapidly faded away, filching that unconsummated feminine happiness she had always longed for. Nothing remained after those intimate gatherings but painful memories of a mother who had been unable to raise her, and a father who was lost in the cities of politics – and his second wife. Long years of absence were enough to gratify his wish for lukewarm meetings with his only child, meetings that soon ended up shortly with complaint and counsel from his second wife.
Thus she passed a life that imposed new measures of love, and the kind of affair she should have. Day after day, her condition deteriorated, and she was unable to give her transformed body to anyone anymore. Then one day, a blind beggar led by an eleven-year-old boy knocked on her door. She gave him what was left over from breakfast, and wanted to give him a lot more.
At first, she felt he was her new art project . . . that he could rudely heal her old virginity. She watched him as he ate, drank, rubbed his moustache and groped at things; she looked at the body’s details, his wakeful ears, his leaping nose, his unkempt beard that looked like wild night plants.
She looked at him stealthily, as he entertained himself inside his void, engaging in a dialogue with her; and conversed with him just by asking questions.
The boy noticed her glances, and she became almost confused. She threw him an orange, to appease and distract him, seeking to silence him.
The blind beggar burped and prayed for her, as he usually did when he was happy with the food he had been served. He prayed that God may grant her a long life, good health, a livelihood, children, and a blessed house.
She felt he was sincere, or imagined him so. She asked him to stop over, and tried to explain to him that he was her next art project, that she wanted to make a sculpture of him.
As a professional beggar, with street begging skills, he did not really understand her words, nor was convinced of what she said. He replied:
“Ma’am . . .”, he replied. “I’m only a poor dervish . . . pray for our generous all-giving God”
“I’ll pay you 100 dinars for a month of work,” she said like an apprentice prostitute. “In addition, two meals a day, and a quarter bottle of arrack are guaranteed . . .”
“Fine,” the blind beggar replied, “just throw in a daily packet of cigarettes.”
“I wouldn’t have agreed if you’d asked for a quarter hash joint,” she laughed.
The blind’s eyes shone in the dark. His front teeth stuck out as he laughed, “Ma’am . . . you’re a woman of inherent generosity . . . I swear by God . . .and I deserve your compassion”.
At that moment, she wished she could explore his body. The blind beggar pretended to be plunged in dark blindness, and made a suggestive movement that he had learned early in his blindness. Did that cunning beggar make this gesture intentionally, in order to get her, or was it spontaneous? She was not convinced of the latter; however she was assured of her next art project. He accepted her kind offer, and was thus guaranteed a month of pleasures: food, wages, no walking, and no more scuffles with his wife that usually ended up in violence.
Only one question worried him: was her offer worth it? What was so special about him?
There was a brief conversation between the beggar and his son. The boy, who used to answer his father’s vague questions, himself asked many questions. He was his father’s two eyes, but this time, he wished he were the black stains under the eyes!
It seemed that there was something relating to masculinity. The blind man hoped that the boy did not understand it and reveal it to his mother who was forever cross during her customary uneventful evening.
The blind man said to the boy, “Son, let’s eat two meals a day, cash the one hundred dinars, and tell your mother that we have earned only fifty dinars. We can get a whole packet of cigarettes and you can smoke one cigarette alone after each meal. What do you say? Let’s enjoy this month without telling your witch of a mother. Don’t tell her anything if you really want to eat good food, and oranges, and try a cigarette, and not walk so much”.
The boy murmured agreement, wishing he had known everything sooner.
Like all blind people afraid of their livelihood being snatched away, he came with his son regularly to her house even before the appointed time. This began to annoy the sculptress, upsetting the rhythm of her day, which she liked to flow like a stream.
The boy had in mind the daily fresh orange, the breakfast at half past eleven, and the shadow of the large fig tree that brought on a noontimedrowsiness, and the woman’s glances that his adolescent mind tried to understand, and also her sweet words. He even he tried to visualize her female form which he could drag into his wet mattress. Late at night in his miserable camp the image of her nakedness came to him.
After these days of anxiety, the father and his son spent the evenings at their home sitting together. The father wanted to know something he had forgotten or maybe he wanted to reveal something. When there was no response from his son, he slipped out feeling his way with his fingers and groped through the dark. He was content with the silence, and flirting with a woman he knew only by touching her, in search of ecstasy with the effortless union of their hands. Desire was roused, dispelling the pain of daily weariness of hassle, chatter about details of the children, the harassment of the overcrowded neighbourhood, whose poverty-stricken inhabitants had to make their own days and worlds. Even small things in life added a liveliness that was otherwise absent.
At night, he could not forget the sculptrrss’svoice, and tried to create a sculptured image of her in his blindness, as he made love to his wife. The new image worked, like the night itself, and his wife’s laugh and form turned into soft hands caressing his back and stiff limbs, and he briefly fell asleep.
Of course his daily visit to the sculptress’s house with his son disrupted her plans, and her pleasant idle way of life. However, she adjusted her life to him as much as she could, very conscious of him and his son.
She finally managed to fit them into her daily routine, determined by her work.
The son kept close to his father until she devised some games that were appropriate to his passage toward early adulthood. This way, she ensured his silence with an amazing television set which she usually switched on to watch documentary programs or disagreeable reports or news items that reminded her of the old homeland and the villages scattered along the other forgotten bank. The television was a sedative for the boy. The black and white films it showed gave him pleasure and made him laugh, and even stirred him.
At first, the blind man thought that the attention given to the boy was an excuse to get to him personally, and that the boy’s presence was insignificant to her. He tried to explain this to her, saying that he was a man who wanted answers.
“This wasn’t our agreement, Ma’am,” he said. “The boy is still young, he hasn’t grown a moustache yet. What are your demands? If you still want something from me, I’m ready”.
He was overwhelmed by doubt like any blind man. The sculptress understood his intentions, and tried hard to prove to him that he was only an art project, and that was what he had to stick to and not disturb her work with his private affairs. As regards his basic needs, she was ready to meet them all.
He cried out, “But, Ma’am, the boy is still young. He hasn’t grown a moustache yet. I’m ready to meet all your needs. May God have mercy on your parents’ souls”.
“Try to understand, man! Let the boy be diverted, and let’s get on with our work”.
“Ma’am, I am under your orders. Whenever you want. You have showered us with kindness.”
“Listen, try to understand me. I just want to make a cast of your shape.”
“Whatever is your command, Ma’am. Though I don’t really get the point. Whatever, just stay away from the boy.”
“Listen to me now. You’re driving me crazy with talk of your boy. I don’t need him. You are my chief concern. Do you understand?”
“As you wish, Ma’am. I am at your disposal.”
“There’s no need to call me Ma’am.”
“As you like.”
“Come with me. I want to make a cast. But don’t say a word.”
“Yes, Ma’am. May God bless you with all success.“
“God! Grant me patience. Follow me and hold your tongue.”
“And the boy, Ma’am?”
“Let him watch TV. Do you want him to be blind like you?
“Have mercy on us, Ma’am . . . we are wretched people. Begging dervishes.”
“Enough chatter! Let’s focus on our work.”
He submitted to her like a boy rebuked for making a mistake. However, everything inside him made him cross about life’s cruelty in creating mankind. He also felt he was receiving a new light that would make his days much happier. Then he felt as if his bladder was about to burst.
She treated the beggar’s body as raw material that differed from stone. It was more like a dead skin – and she was a vegetarian – and lacked the solidity of marble, and the plasticity of stone. It was a shape that did not relate to her – she never paid attention to its creation process. She waited for the moment of readiness, as if she had to do something she did not like doing, but did it nonetheless. That wearisome night, she had to defeat the fugitive man, the fugitive life, and just be content with her handiwork.
She became exhausted with the beggar and his son, and their incessant demand for food. She wished she could be alone with the rituals that granted her a sense of nostalgia.
Words of thanks could have been enough, but not for a blind beggar and a son on the outset of a begging career. She had better open up the fridge, and empty it of food, which was soon due to expire.
She stood still, not knowing why she thought about the idea of expiry. This thought caused the muscle in her face to twitch unceasingly. Soon she surrendered to her solitude again, realizing that the heart cannot always have a place for many people.
Only the son stayed attached to that door. He had felt happy ever since coming to the house. He also felt attached to the sculptress who was like a feminine sculpture that was fixed in his mind. She did not look like his mother; and he did not know how to hold fast to her. He remained attached to her many sculptures, and to details that he got to know outside the rotten camp. He spent his night feeling lost. How could he get all these things back again? Most of all he recalled the orange that he had had, now almost a month ago!
Twenty one years, seven months and seventeen days later, at the corner of the street with a new name, Ahlam al-Majeedi Street, in the little yard of the square a sculpture was set up, and was unveiled by the governor of the capital earlier that day. I had before taken the path, barefoot, to the house for the first time in my life. Today I left some lemon blossoms that would brighten up this new empty place, and remind her of a flower she always loved. I lit a pipe, and wrapped my Kashmiri shawl round my neck. I did not wait for the rain to stop. I was there, and her soul was there too, and the city needed that rain on that exceptional day – exceptional at least for me, a man who had changed as soon as he entered the sculptress’s house, leading a blind beggar, amazed and full of questions.
I passed my hands over the sculpture’s freckled face, and touched the thick glasses, realizing then the value of ivory. I looked for a long time at the slightly bare forehead, and then planted a kiss of consent on the lips of the sculptor, a kiss that meant nothing but celebration of her anniversary, and love for a woman in every detail of whose daily life I had been familiar. She was a woman who had taught me much during her last years. There was satisfaction at what his hands had worked at on this stone.
Translated by Reem Ghanyem