Ibrahim al-Koni - Anubis - A Desert Novel

He studied me, while brandishing his mace in the air to mask his discomfort, but never once looked me in the eye. I told myself the man’s soul surely retained some remnant of shame. Nonetheless, he said, with the glibness of a man proficient in double-talk, “Do we know, master, anything about the stronghold of reality? Do we know, master, anything about the stronghold of falsehood? What can show us, master, that the stronghold of reality is in the homeland of falsehood? What can show us, master, that the stronghold of falsehood is in the homeland of reality?”

“Should I be surprised to hear an exposition like this from a man who claims to be a prophet?”

“On the contrary, master! My master will never hear an exposition of this from anyone except a prophet.”

“Is that so?”

The cunning strategist, however, waved his stick in the air and continued to recite his prophecy without looking me in the eye: “Absolutely! I’m not cognizant of the reality of reality nor of the reality of falsehood, because this type of knowledge is found only in the spirit world, but I do know that reality cannot be established without falsehood and that falsehood cannot be established without reality. Had this not been the case, our master would never have needed to jest one day.”

“Bravo! Bravo! Here you are talking about the jest that made you a ruler. Then you disavow this regime and its ruler.”

“I meant to say that the fraud we term ‘jest’ is the same fraud that creates reality.”

“Do you label your situation at present ‘reality’?”

“Isn’t our present situation the actual one that we can see and touch?”

“Do you take everything seen to be real?”

“What does my master consider everything seen?”

“I would have thought the reverse. I would have thought that the fraudulent is what is seen and the reality what’s not seen.”

“If my master is right, what meaning is there to all this? What meaning is there to debating? What meaning is there to loving? What meaning is there to living?”

“Yes, indeed; there is no meaning to living. The meaning is, rather, in learning to live.”

“This is the language of the law!”

“I would have thought that the master of prophetic visions would be, of all the people, the worthiest person with whom to discuss a clear exposition of the law.”

“Not so fast! Not so fast, master.”

I did not cut him any slack. I did not go slow with him, for I decided to render a verdict: “I fraudulently installed you as my replacements. Then you betrayed me to install yourselves for real. Is this legal according to your law, which celebrates what is visible?”

He replied icily, “Certainly, master. This is a legal system for what is visible. We, master, are the children of what is visible.”

“I thought I heard you discuss your affiliation with offspring of the spirit world.”

“Certainly; I am a scion of the spirit world, and it is, my master, the spirit world that has decreed that I should live according to the law of what’s visible, for there is a wisdom I do not understand in the fact that it plucked me from the hidden recesses of the spirit world to place me in the homelands of light.”

“Amazing!”

“What’s amazing, master, is that we live in the physical world according to the spirit’s laws of the private and live in spirit world according to the laws for public life.”

“From now on, I won’t be surprised if you all rule in favor of aggression and seek to enslave the members of pacific tribes. I’ve even begun to wonder if you’re the mastermind behind the schemes of aggression.”

“Yes, certainly, master; the mind plotting what you term aggression is mine and the law of visible reality is what has inspired me to spread the influence of the oasis beyond its boundaries, because the spirit world does not grant a community wealth, sovereignty, or wisdom to fool around with, the way numbskulls do, but to use in visible ways. If we don’t master the tribes of the world with our power today, they’ll enslave us tomorrow, when our powers have waned, for the spirit world’s law has hidden its secret in an endlessly revolving wheel. This is an inexorable wheel that reclaims today what it created yesterday and resurrects tomorrow what it assassinates today.”

I listened to him dumbfounded, because from this terrifying jinni’s discourse I learned that this was not just a plot against me but a conspiracy against the entire desert and that my wife was not the mastermind plotting this insurrection but merely a piece of the snare the cunning strategist had disclosed to me in his fatal exposition.

After this, nothing surprised me. I was not surprised when the nobles deserted me, one at a time. I was not surprised when they clustered around my former consort in the temple’s heart to finish weaving the strands of this conspiracy. I was not surprised when they kept me from seeing my son, preventing me from sharing stages of his development as he grew, matured, and explored the desert, where he learned to hunt, grew tough, and discovered how to be a man. I found myself alone, isolated, and abandoned, just as I had always been. I grew ever more certain that the fate of men in this desert is always Anubi’s. I was born in the desert like Anubi, live in the desert like Anubi, and will leave the desert one day the way Anubi did, for anyone whose father has ever left him will have Anubi’s destiny as his eternal fate. My slave Hur attempted to lighten my burden. “What’s all this, my master, but a trial from which we can learn?” he asked me one day.

“Learn what, Hur?”

“Learn the reality of truth and falsehood.”

“Don’t talk to me about the reality discussed by the prophet of lying.”

“The prophet of lying?”

“Is the leader of the people of Ragh anything other than the lie’s prophet?”

“Master, we’ll never recognize truthful prophets, if we aren’t plagued by the lying ones.”

“But I lost reality the day I decided to play. I have come to believe that the lady of the temple was right to scold and menace me with the punishment appropriate to this offense.”

“We can’t learn, master, unless we suffer.”

“I lost reality, thanks to my taste for amusement; so forgive me.”

“Despair master, is also therapeutic.”

“I have lost my offspring, my nation, and my reality and have brought you all down with me. Worse than all this is the fact that I’ve lost my son. By losing the prophetic counsel of the law, I lost my son.”

“We don’t find ourselves, if we don’t lose ourselves, master.”

“The one thing I ask from you is to refrain from changing my offspring’s name. Inform the people that as of today my name is no longer Ara. From today forward it will be Amahagh; so don’t forget.”

“We are all Imuhagh, master. We are all children of a desert labyrinth. None of us, master, knows what to do with himself. It is this ignorance that motivates us to commit offenses like playing, because we must inevitably ask ourselves one day: ‘What will we do with ourselves, if we don’t play?’ Thus entertainment slays us, just as others are slain by longing. One group dies from the offense of playing, master, and another group dies from the disease of longing.”

“I entrust my offspring Imuhagh to your care and count on you to divulge to all the people the true nature of this name.”

“Master, I pledge my life to be true to this trust.”

A few days later I was informed of the community’s verdict, which sentenced me to exile, once more.

I FOUND MYSELF in my desert, cleansing myself with the last drops of my mirage and roaming through the endless expanse of my open countryside. I returned to my solitude and believed in my solitude, since only solitude is real. The evidence for this claim is that within its confines I had no need for entertainment in order to live. I discovered life-threatening entertainment to be an innovation created by the lassitude of oases. The antidote to this malady is closer to us than the jugular vein, since it rushes to greet us as soon as we venture into the desert, embracing us to provide a replacement for whatever we have left behind. I roamed and began, in the labyrinth, to purify myself. I contemplated what appeared and what was concealed, what was manifest and what latent, what was visible and what invisible, and cleansed myself from all the rot of lethargy. I stood a foot or less from a sanctuary to the spirit world, feeling certain that if I called out, I would receive a response and that if I pressed my intrusion an inch farther it would appear before me. Yet, fearful, I suppressed my cry each time, so that I would not receive an answer, and confined my intrusive behavior to my head, so it would not show. I quit my confrontations with the covert and diverted myself by reading the talismans of the ancients on the rock statues or on the walls of the caves or by re-enacting my first gallop behind the herds of gazelles or pursuit of the heads of Barbary sheep, when the fates cast me at the outskirts of the oasis. Then I had eaten my relatives’ flesh grilled by a heavenly lightening bolt, and my body has been aflame with greed ever since. I roamed through the companionable countryside. I rambled around to enjoy my isolation, reveling in the time I had alone with my beloved, whom I realized I had betrayed when I substituted for her another creature, who soon betrayed me. I courted my former true love with the most heart-rending poetry. I sang her plaintive ballads she had never heard before, not even from the jinn’s female vocalists, whom I had seen in the caves and encountered while they roamed the great outdoors by the full moon. I forgot my curse. I forgot my destiny. I forgot Anubi’s fate, which had always encumbered me. I forgot my lost father. I forgot the lost law. I forgot my lost spouse. I forgot my lost oasis. I forgot my lost reality, for the desert became father, law, spouse, homeland, and reality for me. I threw myself into its embrace. Then it eased my mind, dandled me, calmed me, and made me forget my exhaustion. I wandered through its vast expanses. I scaled peaks to discover springs that my desert had never shown any creature before. I descended ravines and valleys to find, in their lowest reaches, wells that my consort had hidden from strangers’ eyes for ages. When I wandered across the plains, she fed me secret fruit more delicious than any I had ever tasted. My desert showed me her affection like a tender mother with an errant child, a son who returns after a misguided voyage. So how could I help but recite poems about her beauty or sing ballads glorifying her?