Nasser Amjad - Land of No Rain

* * *

Hamiya may be the only country in the world that does not arrest fugitive dissidents when they try to come home. Instead, it sends them back where they came from. This has created several diplomatic crises with neighbouring states as well as with other more distant countries. It once happened that a group from an organisation similar to your own left the airport on the Island of the Sun to go home, and the airport authorities in Hamiya put them back on the plane that brought them. The authorities on the island wouldn’t let them back in and put them on the first plane back to Hamiya, and the guards at Hamiya airport sent them back to the island again. The authorities on the island contacted Hamiya, but the contacts failed to secure assurances that the group of returnees would be let in. Human rights groups condemned Hamiya’s conduct. Statements were issued demanding that Hamiya let its dissident nationals come home, especially as some of them had wives and children. The appeals and protests fell on deaf ears in Hamiya, which forced the Island of the Sun to accept the group, who were kicked around between planes and airports until another country agreed to take them.

Many people know that this strange arrangement, unique to Hamiya among all the countries in the world, is the brainchild of the security-obsessed adviser, who is said to be a relic of a vanished empire, a man who does not appear at any public functions and whose photograph is not published in the newspapers; so shadowy a man that some people doubt he even exists. But those who are confident that he does exist assert that he was the man closest to the ear of the Grandson and that it was he who suggested this despicable procedure, which is a punishment harsher than the humiliations of imprisonment. The Hamiya authorities do not explain the procedure. They neither admit it nor deny it. But the most plausible explanation for it can be derived from the phrase, almost a slogan, that recurs in the official media: Let them rot abroad.

* * *

In his usual friendly way Mahmoud said, ‘Let’s go and have a coffee outside. Don’t you know a good café where we can sit?’ ‘Sure,’ you told him.

The cultural complex where the exhibition was being held lies on the riverside. Nearby there are several cafés and bars. It was afternoon. The great river that divides the city in two twists and turns like the body of a giant snake. Dark. Mysterious. On its surface floats the detritus of human society — empty bottles and cigarette ends, just as the city’s famous poet described it. Men and women cross in both directions, carrying umbrellas as a precaution against rain that might fall at any moment, their eyes fixed before their feet, oblivious of everything around them. You noticed that while speaking to you Mahmoud was ogling passing women in a way that violated the norms of behaviour in the City of Red and Grey. This is a habit that people coming from your world are forced to abandon grudgingly after staying for some time, because almost no one in the city stares at anyone, let alone casts lecherous glances at the breasts and bottoms of passing women. It’s even worse for a man to look back at a woman who has already walked past him. This is wholly improper. When you see someone do that, you can bet he’s a newcomer to the city, and you rarely lose your bet. That doesn’t mean it’s a virtuous city, because vice also exists, with its own market and customers. Vice is a packaged commodity: there are people who buy it and people who sell it. When you first analysed this you attributed it to capitalism itself, which commodifies everything, including the human body and human desires. Then you were uncertain how to categorise it, and in the end you saw it as a mixture of commodification and irremediable human defects. You don’t deny that in the city you saw types of perversion you had never heard of before. Don’t panic, it wasn’t first-hand experience, but in the magazines displayed on the uppermost racks in newspaper shops (which you would sometimes peek into). From browsing nervously through these magazines, you learnt that there were devotees of feet, of shoes, of underwear and body odours, and that there were people who were turned on only by handcuffs, whips, canes and slave chains. Do you remember the Conservative member of parliament who was found hanging from a tree in a public garden, in women’s underwear? People on their way early to work came across him hanging there, in lingerie, a conservative who advocated maintaining values and family cohesion. That made you wonder. Then you remember another strange incident that happened to you personally, but not here. It might not have been perverse but it seemed strange, and at the time you didn’t find any explanation for it. Anyway, you hadn’t come across it before. It involved a young widow, the wife of a colleague killed in the City of Siege and War. You had gone to her apartment to pay your condolences. You were surprised how the situation changed so quickly. From patting her on the shoulder, to putting your hand on hers to comfort her, to hugging her firmly, and then with desire, then with passionate kisses, and taking off her black mourning clothes and scattering them across the small sitting room. It wasn’t the sudden surge of carnal desire that struck you as strange at the time but the words she used. In her husky voice, she asked you to have sex with her in the most explicit and vulgar terms. After frantic sex, and perhaps because of the vulgarity, which stemmed from a moment when you were both emotionally confused and carried away by raw instincts, she started to cry, almost hysterically. Sex without any preliminaries whatsoever. Unconsciously you were both swept away in its raging torrent. As she apologised, between copious sobs, you reassured her that it didn’t matter. ‘Please don’t get a bad impression of me,’ she said. She kept repeating this phrase until you left. Just as, in the heat of erotic excitement, she had repeatedly asked you to have sex with her in words that would ordinarily sound crude. This spontaneous erotic encounter with your colleague’s widow was not the end of the story. When you again felt the urge to taste the unfamiliar fruit that unexpectedly hung within your reach, you went back to her. In fact you never forgot the strange squealing noises she made, nor the vulgar words she used. It excited you to go back to her, specifically the vulgarities of which you silently disapproved when you heard them for the first time.

As quick as a flash your memory came up with a much older reminiscence. One that was even stranger. From the depths of your memory there floated to the surface the image of an officer in Hamiya who, on a visit to the City Overlooking the Sea before a series of wars broke out, paid a prostitute three hundred pounds to piss in front of him just so he could see the yellow liquid pour out between her legs, or, as he put it, to see how women differ from men when they piss.

But all that is one thing, and the norms of public behaviour in the City of Red and Grey are something else. Call it politeness, aloofness or social hypocrisy. The appellation doesn’t change the fact that staring at people and intruding on their private business are not approved of in this noisy Babel, where faces from all over the world ebb and flow, where people babble a hundred and one languages in the streets, bars and underground tunnels, in this conurbation that is tangible and abstract, simple and complicated at the same time.

* * *

You and Mahmoud walked past a group of young men and women who were standing in front of a fast-food restaurant, eating sandwiches and laughing together with infectious good humour. They had clearly come out of one of the offices nearby. Mahmoud pointed to the group and asked you, ‘How’s the invasion going?’ At first you didn’t understand. You hardly noticed the crude gesture he made with his hand but after a while you understood what his words meant and where they came from. He was referring to a famous remark by a fictional hero who came from your world: ‘I came as an invader into your very homes.’ For a moment you thought about the virility implied in this remark by the character, who turned his bed into a field of battle where symbols, natural impulses and eternal opposites fought it out: white and black, lust and revenge, sand and water, superiority and inferiority, Othello and Desdemona, strength and weakness, penis and vagina, hot and cold, Muhammad and Christ. An endless chain of binaries that met only across a chasm. An eternal relationship of collision and confrontation. In your opinion the causes lay in the nature of exploitation, not in human nature itself. East is not always East and West is not always West. They are not two parallel tracks that never meet. The world is more complicated than a railway line.