Ibrahim al-Koni - Anubis - A Desert Novel

The fog finally dispersed, and the vision’s details became clear. I saw a boy rolling between two full breasts before dropping into a dark abyss. I had to struggle even longer to make out the character of the abyss, which was that obscure ghost I today call “forgetfulness,” before I could perceive the cure — memory. It helped me remember my name.

After I recovered my name, the gloom lifted and the dream vision continued, starting with the rituals of childbirth and ending with the hunting knife I used to sever my father’s sway over me.

A new, profound sensation took hold of me. It rocked me, but I only recognized it much later as that murky enigma the tribes refer to as “happiness.” I did not then know that the spirit world, which grants happiness, normally refuses to grant it unalloyed. In my case, when I used the stick to poke at the ewe’s body roasted by the fire, I discovered, in part of the body buried under the heap, the twin, curved horns from the head of the creature that was a composite of a Barbary ram and a gazelle. Then I realized that I had poisoned my body with “evil,” since I had devoured my mother’s flesh, which had been molded together with my father’s.

THE CLOUDS LIFTED and the sky lost its distinguishing features, but the earth remained soaked from the downpour. I plunged into the mires in the valleys to rejoin the herds. I saw a knot of gazelles in the northern plains, but they shied away from me. I moved a few steps closer, but they looked alarmed, prepared to flee, and stamped the earth with their hooves. When I advanced still farther, they shot off all together, as if fleeing from a jackal. I rushed off too and caught up with them before I knew it, but the herd continued to flee and disappeared behind the hills that lead to the eastern ridges of sand. I raced after them for a long way. I gave chase, because the flight by this herd of my boon companions awakened in my heart an ugly feeling of abandonment. I choked on a bitterness that clouded my happiness by immediately bringing back my memory. I felt as ostracized, deserted, and banished as the day I fled from my tribe’s encampment. When I pondered the secret behind the gazelles’ rejection, I could think of nothing save my gluttony. Had the appetizing morsel constituted an act of civil disobedience grave enough to warrant my banishment? Was I destined to become an alien again because of this ill-omened slip? Had the gazelle clans welcomed me only because forgetfulness had allowed me to revert to a swaddling-clothes stage of animal metamorphosis and to morph into a gazelle or a Barbary sheep without my realizing it, and had this stage lasted until I devoured the morsel and thus freed myself from it by regaining my memory, only to have my shameful identity revealed to the herds, which then fled from me, horrified by my true nature? Was it reasonable for that era to end and for me to be denied forgiveness, just because I ate the flesh of a relative — not out of hunger but driven by the intoxication of something I later learned is called “greed”? All the same, I did not admit defeat.

I crossed over the northern hills to circle back on the herd from the spines of sand, but the mires slowed my pace. I did not reach the lower valleys until late that afternoon. The sky had cleared, although the shells of a few clouds loitered in the void. In the valleys, moist vapors continued to rise, carrying to my nostrils the earth’s prophetic counsel. Looking down over the depression below me, I spotted the herd grazing in its hollow. I fell to my knees and watched from my vantage point.

The gazelles were roaming peacefully, munching on plants as dry as chaff down to their roots, since they had appealed for sustenance to an earth reduced to powder by the intense drought. The gazelles lowered their heads to pluck at the stalks and then began to glance around nervously, as if sensing danger. They turned to the right and left and kept flicking their tails, another sign they thought danger was nigh.

Some of the fawns bounded hither and yon, while others were busy drawing milk from their mothers’ teats. Males with horns haughtily patrolled the circumference, not stooping to nibble the grass. Instead, they stood guard over the herd, earnestly endeavoring to protect it. I watched a male that kept staring at my hill, as if he had found me out. Then I saw the prophecy in his eyes, despite his arrogance. I saw the prophetic message in his stance, physique, build, coloring, posture, nobility, and in his eyes, which gazed into the void of eternity, staring at the spirit world, which I could not see. Was it beauty? Was this the beauty that had disowned me and was too hardhearted to pardon me? How could I live without beauty? How could beauty be retrieved?

I crept on all fours across the top of the hill and continued in the same fashion down its flank. I approached the nearest doe and gazed into her eyes. She stared back at me, stopped chewing, and stamped the earth with her hoof. I used my eyes to show her my affection. I entreated her with my eyes. I told her I was the same creature who had played with her the day before and who had shared her hiding place this very day, but she rejected me. She kicked the ground with her front hoof. Then she bolted, and the herd bolted with her. They shot off like an arrow in the air and vanished from sight. This was how I realized that my tie to the herd had been severed. I admitted to myself that I had not merely lost beauty but had emerged as beauty’s eternal foe. Still, I did not capitulate.

I left the gazelles, resolving to try my luck with the nation of Barbary sheep. I galloped across the ravine, traversed the valleys, and then plunged into the muddy wallows of the plains, as if pursued by a demon from the spirit world. I fell many times, and my feet sank into the mud up to my knees. I do not know how I reached the bare, rocky area adjacent to the southern mountain’s cliff face, which was cloaked by sandy deposits that twisted like serpents’ bodies. Apparently my struggle through the mires had transformed me into a monster uglier than any other, for the sight of me caused the herds of Barbary sheep to bolt from the mountain’s foot and to gallop en masse uphill. I scaled the cliff face behind them, as if possessed, and did not slow my pace until I caught up with a pregnant ewe, whose progress was hampered by the creature she bore in her belly. As she raced higher, she stepped on a friable layer of rock that time had weakened. Her two rear hooves slipped so that her belly hit the ground, and she began to slide back. She attempted to stop her fall with her front hooves but failed. Then she tried to save herself with her head, planting her muzzle in crevices between brittle layers of stone, but she could not hold on and continued to slide ever lower in a slow, grievous descent. I reached her, or more precisely she reached me, for her descent rather than my effort to catch her placed her before me. I seized her rear hoof, gasping to catch my breath, but she stamped her hoof in a murderous way to free herself. I recklessly grabbed hold of her hoof with both hands. She was quiet then only because she was too weak to resist, not because she felt reassured. She turned her head toward me, and in her eyes I perceived not only dust, mucous, and grains of sand but terror, revulsion, and agony.

I was so hurt by the agony visible in her weeping eyes that a tear sprang from my eye too. I massaged her body, which was shaking violently. Seeking a way to regain her trust, I whispered to her, in Tuareg, “It’s me. Have you forgotten me?”

Her response, however, was a rude kick to my right cheek. Then she struggled to break free. She succeeded and began bravely climbing higher, but the eroding layers of rock failed her once more, and she slid back down to find herself in my grasp again. Then she bleated desperately before turning toward me. I could read in her eyes a plea and an admission of impotence. She collapsed on her right side and gazed at me in despair. I stroked her neck to reassure her but noticed that her misery continued to show in her eyes. She was allowing me to touch her only because she was too weak to resist, not because she liked me. I wondered what secret had separated me from these docile creatures, which only the day before had been my family, my race, and my clan. The only answer I could find to this puzzle was the hunk of meat. Had I been transformed, in one fell swoop, into a predator in their eyes? Was I a monster that had denied his true nature by swallowing the morsel and had then become a different creature that deserved to be shunned?