Ibrahim al-Koni - The Scarecrow

The courier returned bearing a new message. This was an identical, equally superb doll, and no detail had been overlooked in its fabrication. The beauty was composed of ivory, linen, goat hair, and silk thread.

The leader called in the caravan’s diviner, who had been stranded in the oasis by the siege. He gazed indifferently at the doll and translated the message derisively: “We are still waiting for the beauty!”

“Is that all?”

“I discern no change in its production to distinguish this toy from the first.”

“Is there no reference in this message to the offer for an international team of inspectors?”

The soothsayer shook his head no. Then the leader recoiled into his corner like a hedgehog. His head slipped down between his shoulders, but he did not sway with the rattling giggle of the scarecrow of the fields.

2

“Master, I saw an effigy, not a leader. I saw a dreadful effigy, larger than any statue I have ever seen.”

The leader sat with his courier, who had returned from the raiders’ camps, and listened with intense curiosity to this debriefing. He remained silent and seemed absentminded. Then, still aloof, he inquired, “You mentioned a dreadful effigy?”

“The fact is this wasn’t just any oversized doll. It was … it was a scarecrow!”

“A scarecrow?”

“A scarecrow just like the scarecrow in our oasis — except the foreigners’ was bigger.”

“What are you saying?”

“The very sight of it shook me to my core and made me feel dizzy. I had to search for my tongue a long time before I could deliver my master’s message to that idol.”

“Did the idol speak? Did you hear a voice from the foreigners’ idol?”

The messenger wiped away the sweat flowing down his cheeks with the edge of his veil. He sighed deeply before replying, “No.”

The leader roamed far away and migrated to his naked, indifferent heavens, which were washed with a radiant blue. When he returned from his travels, he found that his messenger was singing the praises of the lost girl’s beauty and reporting that the leader he had seen crammed inside the skins of the hideous scarecrow would never renounce her, because she was as beautiful as the desert moon and men of the tribes could not milk their camels properly on dark nights, when the moon was not visible, unless the tribe’s beauty showed her face to them.

3

Once evening fell and the full moon appeared, he stretched out on the courtyard’s carpets and requested the female vocalist. He wished to listen to songs as he had often done during the days of lost peace.

The bard plucked the string twice. Then the bird of longing fluttered inside him, and the desert disappeared from the desert. Times were transposed to violate the law of temporal progression by pausing in space. Tears glittered in the sky’s eye and winked back and forth between the stars.

Then he sang….

He sang along with the female vocalist in a plaintive voice. Obscure worries enervated him, and his eyes overflowed with a hot liquid like flaming water.

He released a loud cry, wailing as he rotated from right to left. He was trembling violently. Then he collapsed, leaning his back against the wall, and gestured that the party was over.

The singer left, and the chief vassal appeared. He took a seat nearby and gazed anxiously at the master. He searched the legacy of his ancestors for a key to start a conversation. “We have inherited from our pious ancestors their fear of listening to tunes, because music feeds the soul’s pain and afflicts bodies with chronic depression.”

The ecstatic leader’s breathing calmed a little, but he writhed along the wall while he kept his eyes trained on the moon. He mumbled, “What does a person do when he has a thirst he can never quench?”

“A thirst that water cannot quench is satisfied by a beautiful woman, master.”

“There is one thirst that not even a beauty can satisfy.”

“I bet this thirst is nothing more nor less than yearning.”

“Can anything but melodies satisfy a man’s yearning?”

“I fear that melodies will prove a short-lived remedy.”

“What treatment is there for patients suffering from yearning if melodies provide no cure?”

The chief vassal fell silent and directed his gaze toward a sky that was washed by the moon’s deluge. He watched a shooting star that fell to the east and another that fell to the west. In the voice of a person wandering away, he said, “Travels, travels. The only antidote for the pains caused by the Spirit World is travel. The only balsam that treats yearning is travel.”

The leader swayed as if dancing. He soon joined the visionary vassal in the distant land: “Travels, travels. Don’t you suspect that this word is itself a tune? Don’t you know that this word conceals the most exquisite melody? Don’t you know that lyrics would not be lyrics if they didn’t discuss travels?”

“How could I not know, master, when I was the first devotee of this god? But for him, people of the desert would never have deserved the title of ‘desert people.’”

“Do you know I was once a wayfarer too? I was a man the tribes called the sorcerer — the way they do all wayfarers who keep their secrets to themselves. I disliked arriving in a land if I couldn’t leave it the next day. I came to the oasis as a wayfarer too, but the walls caught me by surprise the day I decided to use some of my secrets to purchase supplies. I had forgotten that provisions are an ignoble stratagem that evokes whispered temptations in wayfarers who then hunker down on the earth, which enslaves them. The earth’s turn ends only when the beauty’s turn commences. The day the beauty entered the earth of the fields, I became her captive. I have never left the earth of the fields since.”

“The fields?”

“I have been a hostage of the scarecrow since that day.”

“The scarecrow?”

“The scarecrow is our destiny. We settle in it. It settles in us. We are the scarecrow, and the scarecrow is us.”

“My master was discussing travels.”

“The scarecrow is the enemy of travels.”

“Frankly, master, I don’t understand.”

“Trips. Travels. If I didn’t long to travel, the siege wouldn’t upset me — not even if it lasted a thousand years.”

“This is further evidence of the cunning of the foreigners’ giant mascot. He knew our secret and grabbed us where it hurt.”

“You’re right. This ignoble chap knows that a siege for a wayfarer is a harsher punishment than any other.”

He fell silent and watched the stars’ sign. His eyes gleamed by the light of the full moon. He added cryptically, “If the idol weren’t a scarecrow, he wouldn’t have been granted much of the Spirit World’s knowledge!”

He repeated this prophecy twice.

4

The suffering of the oasis began despite crisis management.

During the first days of the siege, the leader had released a stern command to purchase grain and produce from the caravan markets at market prices, which began to rise once the scent of danger was in the air — as normally happens in chaotic times to any commodity. He encouraged the vassals to offer farmers tempting prices for their crops and continued to press them to spend money lavishly on food supplies, even if that meant expending the last gold coin collected for taxes.

Despite his crisis management, the oasis began to suffer a food shortage after only a few months. Then misgivings tormented people, and sages felt anxious about the fate of their offspring, because they saw the specter of famine hovering over the oasis — which had enjoyed prosperity, affluence, and the good life for years.

Many people grasped the oasis’s secret that day. They grasped the secret of that timid child who fears anarchy and therefore flees to the farthest land or is afflicted by paralysis. He is called, in common parlance, “commerce.” They realized that the oasis’s secret was borrowed from commerce’s secret and that the aggressors’ scarecrow had been granted much of the science of the Spirit World, because he had terrified the creature that cannot tolerate wars. Then the artery that had supplied New Waw with life throughout these years was severed. The ignoble creature’s goal was to starve the masses to death and to prevent the minority that hunger would not kill (because such people were sustained by poetry and plaintive songs) from stepping forth and wandering through the world.