Rawi Hage - Carnival

And that is how I met Otto. He was working the cage and he hired me.

At night, we shared a tent. When it got dark, he would dress up, take a pickup truck, and leave for the city. He never asked me to come. And I never asked where he went. I would open the stand and he would sleep until the afternoon.

Once, early in the morning, I stepped out of the tent and walked towards the bonfire to prepare a coffee and salvage a piece of bread. I saw a woman sitting next to the fire with a blanket on her shoulders and her hair filled with beads.

I nodded to her. She nodded back and we both looked in silence at the coals glowing from beneath the ashes.

You must be Fly, she said.

Yes, I replied.

I am Otto’s friend Aisha.

A beautiful name, I said.

She smiled. Otto tells me that you are a reader.

Otto noticed.

Otto likes you. You two have more in common than you think. Do you know where he goes every night?

Never asked, I said.

He comes to my place. He sits and he works until early in the morning.

What kind of work?

Activism. She said this and nothing more.

I made coffee and gave her a cup, and before I left, she said to me, Take good care of yourself, Fly. I am sure we will meet again.

WINTER CAME AND the tents came down and the stuffed animals hibernated and the guns ceased to pop and the water clowns closed their mouths for the season, and as I rolled my last shirt into my bag, Otto asked me, Do you have a place to stay?

I will walk for now and decide later.

Aisha told me to tell you that we could lodge you for a while, he said.

When we arrived in Aisha’s neighbourhood, Otto pointed out the apartment building. We carried our bags up the stairs.

Aisha kissed me and said, It is a small place but we will make do. You guys relax and catch me later. Otto, are you helping tonight?

He nodded.

Fly, you are welcome to come and help too, Aisha said. The ladies at the centre would be happy to see you. And she winked at me, smiled, and left.

Otto rolled a joint and passed it to me. Have you smoked before?

Yeah, I said.

Started at an early age?

Yeah, I said, and took a long puff and held the smoke in my chest.

Otto put on a jazz LP, then he opened the cupboard and took out a bottle of vodka. Here, comrade, he said, this glass is for you. Jazz and vodka, the fuel of resistance.

In the evening we walked down the street to a school, and Otto told me that Aisha was a social worker and that, two nights each week, she volunteered in a soup kitchen. In the basement of the school, I saw her in an apron serving food to a line of adults and children. The children were loud and their voices echoed against the low ceiling and the wide floor. Some were running in circles, others were fighting over toys, and the rest sat at little tables and ate in silence and with big appetites. Otto knew many people and he introduced me around. He then took two aprons, hung one around my neck, and tied the other around his waist, and we both stood behind tables and served food.

Aisha kept smiling at me and she passed behind me and touched my back and said that the servers ate last, and then, in a lower voice, she added, It is all you can eat. And the ladies behind us laughed and repeated, All you can eat.

I STAYED WITH Otto and Aisha for a few months. They never complained and never asked me to leave. Otto worked on his causes. I would hear him typing through the night. He alternated between the couch and Aisha’s bed, and I would sleep in the small room behind the kitchen. Aisha and I exchanged book titles; she was also a reader, like the rest of us. On my birthday, she bought me a cake and a book of short stories by Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks. And then I blew out a few candles and she turned up the music and invited me to dance.

Aisha and I did the rub-up dance and she held me from behind and rubbed her thighs against my buttocks, and then we switched and I did the same. And Otto sat at the table with a faint smile on his face and drank vodka and watched us dance, his face full of melancholy.

And Aisha called to Otto, Come on lover, step down, show us your moves.

And Otto stood up and danced and Aisha laughed again.

ONCE WHEN OTTO was away, I lay in bed and lowered my zipper and reached for my erection and started to fantasize and pound, and then the door opened and Aisha came in. She saw me and said, No need to be alone, move over, and she took off her shirt and lay her hand on my chest and kissed my neck. After we were done, a fear came to me and a sense of shame and sadness made me want to cry. I said to Aisha, Otto will be here any minute.

She replied, Otto won’t mind. Just lock the door and come back to bed and everything will be fine.

MARY

EVERY DAY, I choose a book or two from the massive collection in my apartment and take them with me in my taxi. I may have neglected to tell you that my apartment is filled with books, towers of books stretching up in all directions. When a woman enters my house, a tunnel of books welcomes her, a carnival of heroes bounces from every corner, and I lead her straight through the welcoming applause of writers and mice.

I sit on books, sleep on them, breathe them. I arrange them by character, the colour of their skies, and the circumference of their authors’ heads. For instance, James Joyce, because of the size of his skull, is located at the entrance. As for Rousseau, he comes towards the end, right at the window, and that is for two reasons. First, his slim head size, and yes, that is indeed in accordance with my own empirical measurements (to use the British norms of philosophy), and second, because of his ever-constant need to relieve himself and to be close to nature. There is nothing like the cure of fresh air for cases of bladder infection, paranoia, and Cartesian thinking.

In short, I have a system that defies every methodology of documentation ever made or conceived. A library that contains the world, as the blind Argentinean would say. A true mystery that I keep to myself and share only with the likes of Mary, the lover of books.

One night I met Mary in the utmost embarrassing circumstances. Mary, sweet Mary, innocent Mary, Marrrrry, my Mary. . she took a ride with her husband in my taxi.

I was working the university side of town, where young college girls chew gum and hail rides to the dancing clubs. On Thursday nights, they come bouncing out in their tight miniskirts and squeeze themselves into the back seat, all talking at the same time, all sharing the same pack of gum. They block my rearview mirror with the redness of their lips, the magnitude of their ever-expanding tropics of hair. At red lights, they all stop their ruminations and strike seductive poses at the reflections of the store windows along the sides of the streets. And the leader of the pack usually sits next to the driver, calling me Mr. Taxi, inquiring about my wasted life, laughing at the clown figurines that occupy my dashboard like drunk toy soldiers in colourful hats. The irritating popping of their chewing gum, the giggling of the chorus in the back, all this shames my tragic path through the busiest street in town, chanting, You will be stuck on Lenaia Street, Sophocles! You will be stuck with these tarty little monkeys giving oral birth to balloons in the shape of apocalyptic nuclear mushroom clouds.

It makes me want to fly as I sit stranded, wishing for a titanic bubble to lift and raise the car up and take us above this street of loud music, past the parade of teenaged boys driving with hands that dangle in the manner of caged animals, their menacing eyes scouring the long thighs above spiked heels.

Mary had sweet legs and thick glasses and she was crying when her man forced himself into my cab beside her. The first thing I said to her was, Is everything okay, ma’am? And her man looked at me in the mirror and said, Yes, everything is okay. Just drive, driver.