Amir Elsir - Telepathy

I delved deeper into my memory and reviewed all the military rebellions that had clawed on the walls of previous regimes or had actually torn them down, from the nation’s independence to the present day. I uncovered Colonel Musa Gad al-Karim’s rebellion, which only lasted two days before collapsing; Lieutenant General Fadl Allah Zayn al-Kamal’s rebellion, which lasted for a number of months but ended bloodily; Samih, the teenager who occupied the broadcasting building one day to win a bet with his girlfriend; Sergeant Kaka Kuku, who came from Jebel Nuba in the west and advocated separation of the Nubians from the Arabs; and even Sabata al-Hazli’s rebellion, which was conducted with wooden weapons by a lunatic from al-Qama’ir District as he guffawed. But I didn’t come across a rebellion led by Asil in any corner of my memory.

I telephoned some journalists and political analysts skilled in investigating the country’s conditions and in blowing them out of all proportion if necessary. They confirmed to me emphatically that our national history lacked any insurrection of this stripe carried out by a soldier of Chadian heritage — unless the rebels had been very close to the authorities, who then might have hushed up the unpleasantness to safeguard their own reputation.

So the point remained a bit murky, and I resolved to try to shed light on it if I could find anyone to assist me.

At this time I also discovered that I had concentrated so exclusively on Nishan during those days that I had neglected to verify the existence of a real nurse named Yaqutah who had worked in the psychiatric hospital and then had migrated to newly liberated Libya under a different name. I would not need to investigate her relationship to a former patient named Nishan Hamza, because the mere existence of a nurse by this name — even if she wasn’t still working at the hospital — would give the damn text some legitimacy as being true-to-life.

I entered the government psychiatric hospital with a physician I knew who had offered to assist me. The shabby old building, which dated back to the colonial era, continued to serve the same purpose of embracing indigent mental patients, even if its embrace now was foul and frigid and devoid of any emotional warmth. Once inside I discovered, to my astonishment, someone I knew, a man I would never have dreamed would end up with chains shackled to his ankles, especially not in such a place. He was stumbling around the courtyard with difficulty in the midst of dozens of befuddled people. Tough guards were scattered among the nurses, and security officers in blue uniforms were also stationed there. I shouted incredulously, “Ifranji! Joseph!”

The Southerner turned toward me. Here was the man who had been a vagrant in the Aisha Market and the jinni Daldona’s lover, the man I had hired as Nishan’s caretaker, but who had never performed that duty. His eyes were red and his lips were swollen with exanthema. His hands seemed to have been part of some argument, because they were bandaged in rags.

“Ifranji!”

He did not seem to know me, even though he had caught his name when I lobbed it toward him. His face remained expressionless, and he showed no reaction. Clearly Joseph Ifranji was in some predicament over and beyond being held in a detention center for undocumented aliens, where he had been interned as the authorities prepared to expel him to his new homeland of South Sudan. He had most likely assaulted someone in that camp or had perhaps pretended to be schizophrenic in order to remain in the country longer, while he thought up some new ploy to leave the detention center and resume his life as a vagrant in the Aisha Market. I had forgotten Ifranji — or my affairs had distracted me from him — and I hadn’t attempted to secure his release from the internment camp. Now I was confronted by a genuinely insane person or an actor who was capable of realistically portraying insanity.

I rushed toward Joseph Ifranji but found I couldn’t move. I almost fell, forgetting that my feet were also shackled with rude iron chains.

AMIR TAG ELSIR, who was born in the north of Sudan in 1960, currently lives in Doha, Qatar. He has published two biographies, a poetry collection, and fifteen novels. He studied medicine in Egypt and Great Britain and worked for many years in Sudan as a gynecologist before moving his practice to Qatar. He began by writing poetry but shifted to novels in 1987. Among his novels are Ebola ’76, The Yelling Dowry, The Copt’s Worries, French Perfume , and Crawling Ants . His novel Sa’id al-Yaraqat was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010 and published by Pearson in the African Writers Series as The Grub Hunter in 2012. His novel 366 was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, and he works as a mentor for creative writing students. English translations of his novels French Perfume (Antibookclub) and Ebola ’76 (Darf Publishing) are scheduled for release in 2015. Tag Elsir is the nephew of the beloved and distinguished Sudanese author Tayeb Salih.

WILLIAM MAYNARD HUTCHINS is an American translator of contemporary Arabic literature. Hutchins’s best-known translation is The Cairo Trilogy by Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz. He has also translated Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, al-Jahiz, Muhammad Khudayyir, Ibrahim al-Koni, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Hassan Nasr, and Mahmoud Saeed. Hutchins has received two US National Endowment for the Arts grants in literary translation. His translations have appeared in Banipal magazine and online at wordswithoutborders.org and brooklynrail.org.