Ibrahim al-Koni - The Scarecrow

Awaiting a reply, they directed heads wrapped in veils toward their colleague, but the chief merchant’s eyes fled to the ceiling, and his right hand repeatedly massaged his left wrist. Then, with the cryptic phrasing of a diviner attempting to discern a prophecy in the void, he said, “I fear the best plan would be to confer leadership on someone who is not present with us now.”

Imaswan Wandarran clapped his hands together and shouted, “Lately riddles seem destined to become our language.”

Ah’llum, however, gestured for him not to be hasty. Like someone sighting the bearer of glad tidings in the distance, he told the chief merchant: “Not so fast! Slow down! I think I have found the talisman’s key. I bet you’re referring to the venerable elder. Am I right?”

A smile glinted in the eyes of the man with two veils, and rubbing his hands together jubilantly he returned from his journey to the ceiling. “You’re right. I actually didn’t mean any other creature.”

The council members exchanged glances that were a confused mixture of anxiety and astonishment. Ah’llum entered the fray with a solemn question: “Are you mocking us?”

Fiddling with his hands, the chief merchant replied frigidly, “Mocking you never once crossed my mind.”

“But … but I’m sure you realize that the venerable elder has had no foothold in our world for a very long time.”

“A person without a foothold in our world is the most appropriate creature to head our world.”

“Are you mocking us?”

“Have you forgotten that I once said in this council that our mistake lay in continuing to treat commanders in chief like creatures of our world, when everything shows that they become creatures of another type, tracing their descent to alternative homelands, the day they consent to don the mantles of leadership?”

“Emmamma has quit all homelands. Emmamma has lived on the borders of the Spirit World for a long time. How can someone who has taken the Spirit World for a homeland become our governor? How can we convince people that this is right? How can we deflect their scorn? How can we shield ourselves against their anger?”

“This is the goal. The aim is for us to allow people of eternity to enjoy their absence in eternity and to leave the affairs of this world to people of the world.”

“What are you saying?”

“Only a person who has traversed a long stage in the Unknown can realize that our world is a game inside a game.”

“Won’t you proceed a stage further so we may understand the talisman’s allusion?”

“I’m saying that the venerable elder Emmamma is the only creature who will not contest sovereignty with us — not because he isn’t interested in the earth’s thrones but because he exists outside the physical world.”

“Ha, ha, ha … I admit this is a sordid plan!”

“This will shield us from the error we committed the day we made Aggulli our leader, and repeating mistakes is a foul deed that ill befits the people’s sages.”

“Bravo! Bravo! Now the council can cheer with me, because thanks to this judicious plan, we won’t merely obviate a matter that has caused us trouble all this time, we will also be able to say that we’ve achieved an epiphany.”

He turned to face the council, gazing happily, comprehensively, and childishly at its members. Then he shouted, “Rejoice at the good news: from today forward you, collectively, are the governor. Ha, ha…. Each of you from today on is a leader. We’ll grant the title to the venerable elder, because that poor man won’t need anything but the title. We’ll retain the amulet and divide up the booty. What a plan! What a scheme! Ha, ha…. I admit once more that you are a grander schemer than all the others. But … but, why weren’t we able to hit upon this division of power before?”

He continued to guffaw as the edge of his lower veil slipped down. The linen revealed an ugly mouth that looked like a female bosom. On top, it was bounded by a bushy mustache streaked with gray. Below, it was besieged by the jungles of a bushy, very gray beard. Anyone who saw this mouth understood the secret reason for the desert people’s invention of this wrapped veil, which became their trademark among all the tribes.

He extended a trembling hand to hide a crack the Law had reckoned tantamount to genitalia even before people came to see it as disgraceful.

He shouted again, “Send at once for the venerable elder!”

4

The venerable elder is said to have adopted a litter for a bed long before old age vanquished him and he was no longer able to walk. So he had become the first to recline on a wooden frame supported by the necks of slaves.

Apparently this invention aroused the admiration of the noblemen and the lords of commerce in the oasis, because they adopted it from him and competed with each other to accessorize it with rows of lucky charms, other amulets designed to ward off evil, wild animal skins imported from the southern forestlands and adorned with symbols of gods, magical designs, and celestial bodies outlined with colored beads. The nobles climbed onto these wooden frames and had slaves and mamluks carry them on their shoulders as they toured the alleys, markets, fields, and plazas to flaunt what they owned. Such opulent litters put to shame the venerable elder’s meager, bare sticks, which had been crisscrossed into a lattice by admirers’ hands and covered with a glabrous old goatskin mat. Thus Emmamma’s convoy no longer attracted the attention of passersby or sparked curiosity in the breasts of the masses, as it once had, when their eyes spotted this load transported on the heads of two dark, bare-shouldered mamluks of different heights.

Even when the sorcerers’ prophecies came true and the inhabitants of the oasis saw with their own eyes the unfolding of those phases this coterie believe are a gambit concealed in the life of each person who is destined to live a long time so that he may be born a second time, and when people witnessed the transformation in the venerable elder’s body (which sprouted black hair and teeth with a gleam, whiteness, and soundness that rivaled those of boys and which shed its pathetic skin that resembled a mass of palm-fiber rope or wrappings made from acacia bark, sloughing it off the way a serpent sloughs off its scales for a new skin that seems so alive it resembles the temptation leaping from belles’ faces), this glorious birth, this “second birth” as sorcerers call it, could not persuade Emmamma to descend from his mobile throne and to dismount from his glorious litter, which was supported by the necks of sturdy men. His refusal to walk was not because of the custom that turned free men into slaves and not because he thought himself more entitled to the throne that he had created one day than copycats who had adopted it and then had soon started competing with each other to adorn it the way women’s hands adorn the bride’s face on her wedding night — even boasting that they owned it and bragging to people about its beauty the way they vaunted their possessions and children.

The slaves, instead, reported a different view from their master. They said Emmamma would not abandon the stretcher — which had become his bed, house, homeland, and bride by night and day — until this second birth also provided him with the energy of a boy who can hop through the open countryside on one foot. The set of poles represented for him — at that time when he had absented himself from time and retreated into eternity’s tenebrous obscurities — the sepulcher of everlasting solitude. A man who has a natural propensity for generously making sacrificial offerings can forget everything and sacrifice everything but does not forget the person who consoled him in a time of trial and does not sacrifice the prop that has protected him from his fear of chaos in a time of forgetfulness.