Ibrahim al-Koni - The Puppet

The ghoul standing guard over her treasure, however, eventually forced him to plunge into her strongholds. The ghoul standing guard over her treasure demanded a treasure in exchange for releasing her treasure to him, because a treasure is required to buy treasure, and the only way to escape from the ghoul is to seek refuge with the ghoul.

6

Two days before he burst into the ghoul’s cave, he stole into his beloved’s house. There he found the guardian hovering around her ward’s chamber like a she-demon from the wilds. She gestured to the woman that they wanted to be alone; the crone cast her a threatening look before retreating behind the wall. That night she told him the schemer had decided to grant him only forty days to bring her what she demanded. If luck did not favor him, she would consider herself absolved of her promise and would sell the girl to the owner of a shop for hides and linen in the blacksmiths’ market.

This was a despicable proviso from a despicable creature, but it would not have unnerved him so much had he not seen in his wretched true love’s eyes a lethal pain he at first thought he had never seen before in a living creature. Then this pain reminded him of the eloquent expression in the eyes of a gazelle kid he had surprised in a Barbary-sheep gulch. He had grabbed hold of it with both hands, and it had resisted him for a very long time, trying to escape. When it finally gave up and started shivering silently, he had seen the same expression and the same pain he now witnessed in his beloved’s eyes. It was a look of impotence born of a loss of strength and power and of desperate surrender that discounted any deliverance short of a miracle. It was a pain that surpassed other pains, a despair greater than other types of despair, and a surrender beyond other forms of surrender. What was the significance of this look? What should a person call this type of pain? Was it a calamity or something even greater than that? Yes, yes … in the gazelle’s eyes and in his beloved’s was something even greater than a calamity, because it contained some of the Spirit World’s majesty, the certainty of recluses, the purity of those who expect no boon or beneficence from the world or from worldly people. In it, regardless of everything, there was a mysterious rapture washed with prophecy’s nectar. He bolted from the house as if a snake had bitten him and then slipped into the ghoul’s cave.

7

He saw nothing, felt nothing, and thought nothing till they seized him.

Within him stirred a beast he had never encountered before. It flew him to the treasure’s abode the way the jinn fly desert prophets to the desert’s end. This was a bold soul mate. In its impetuosity, zeal, and nonchalance, he detected the daring of a person who has taken charge of some matter, any matter, oblivious to any shame that might accrue should the matter go awry. He asked himself at once about the provenance of such a soul mate in a desert where the Law disapproves of daring. A man there must inevitably mull over every issue a thousand times and question the diviner time and again before taking a single step forward followed by a step back, in order to overcome at last the whispered insinuations. When he decides to throw his full weight into the struggle, he discovers — too late — that the combat has ended, that the dust has settled, and that only the battle’s debris is left on the field. The reason for this behavior is not a fear of loss. It is, rather, an ancient, age-old dread of the ghoul named dishonor. For this reason he was amazed by the impetuosity of this mysterious soul mate and felt certain, beyond a doubt, that it was a creature from another lineage not affiliated in the slightest fashion with those of the wasteland.

This brute, who excited his admiration and whose feats and heroic deeds astonished him, left him, however, and disappeared the moment he was arrested.

8

They cast him before the leader, who sentenced him to banishment.

He set forth with the first caravan, and they dropped him off in a harsh, dead, lethal patch before the next oasis, because the law governing banishments decrees that the condemned person should not serve his exile in another oasis after he has been convicted of a crime in the previous one. They left him in a deadly wasteland with water, dates, and some barley and continued on their way. He walked along with the caravan for a distance and then stood watching till it reached the horizon, where a mirage swooped toward it, tearing it limb from limb.

He wandered through the open terrain, which was strewn with rough stones of comparable height and size. These were copper-colored and scattered across expanses stretching in all four directions, limited only by horizons swamped by the tails of mischievous mirages. No rise of earth burst from the plain and there were no dips. There was no hint of a hill and no promise in the distance of a mountain or an acacia. As far as the eye could see, the earth’s surface did not decline downward in a gulch or ravine and showed no willingness to reveal any hint of life through a blade of grass or even a dry tuft of weeds. It did not provide the least indication of good will. Indeed, to the contrary, it confronted him — scowling, threatening, and hostile — the way it does any wretched stranger ignorant of its secret. However, it is absurd to think that the desert’s ruses would dupe a creature born of the desert. It is absurd to think that a mother would deceive a son whom she had carried in her belly, fondled at her breast, and borne on her back. It is absurd to think that the ruse would trick a being whose entire training in strategies was provided by the desert, whose only passion in life was for the desert, whose first and only world was the desert, a person who never recognized a flesh-and-blood mother until the desert granted him permission, because she was not a mate, a mother, or a beloved. A creature who was not part of the desert but the desert itself — could this being defile the law of existence and plot against himself? Would he accept — like doltish travelers — that what he saw was what recluses refer to as annihilation? Would he believe that the first mother might one day reject her ancient offspring and cast before him snares woven from death’s ropes? Would he not be the first to know for certain that what seemed to outsiders a scowl was actually a smile, that what fools deemed sternness was diffidence on her part, and that what terrified strangers in her hostile expression was actually a promise and a renewal of a covenant? Did she not once tell him that she is a belle who gives herself only to those who have been faithful to the covenant and who only find themselves and discover their lost spirits when they rely on her and unite with her?

9

He rushed off, trailing the playful liquid that bubbles up in the wasteland to tempt fools, strangers, and masters of ignorance. He pursued it for a day and a half and spent the night in the heart of the obstinate maze that spreads and extends in every direction without ever promising anything. He passed the night but did not lose heart. Indeed, to the contrary, his smile never left his lips while he stretched out on his back, lying in wait for information from the life of storms. He was spying on the desert and listening to her mysterious voice. She was menacing her prodigal son — as was her wont. She was chiding the son who had ignored her and had followed the tribes that adopted houses not unlike stone prisons for their residences. She threatened, browbeat, and brandished the penalty in his face.

He listened humbly to the anger of this most ancient of mothers but smiled surreptitiously and enigmatically, because he knew this language in the same way he knew the mirage’s trajectory. He knew the language of mothers. He also knew the hearts of mothers. He knew that the language of mothers is one thing and the hearts of mothers are something else. He knew that strangers, or even relatives, grow angry and then hurt you when they threaten. He knew that only a mother instructs when she threatens or punishes; so he smiled. He smiled at the wretchedness of the deluded and began to read his mother’s messages in the stars’ trajectory, because she had once taught him to read her reports in the heavens’ storms, in the prevailing tendencies of the Qibli, or in the murmurs of the Spirit World’s inhabitants. He carried his reading to the extreme. The Camel captivated him and he followed behind her until he spotted the Calf fastened by a weak thread spun from colored wool. The poor fellow was hungry and thirsty for the mother’s teat, and the mother was inflamed by longing for the Calf, but for the mother to meet the Calf would cause the destruction of the desert and the heavens. The Calf’s escape from the wool tether is the mothers’ extinction and the sons’ annihilation. Can fragile wool thread prevent the Calf from escaping? Will the mother bear separation from the Calf for long? Or — were the sorcerers right when they declared that the era when a thirsty calf takes the camel’s dug, when the Camel consents to meet him, is our own era, the era of us creatures of dust, because in the law of the higher spheres, this era lasts no longer than the wink of an eye, whereas in our reckoning it seems a timeless eternity?