Tell the Running Water

  Abbas El-Zein

  TELL THE RUNNING WATER

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  For Hiam

  Contents

  Historical Note

  One

  The Perch

  Whimsical War

  Two

  The Onlooker

  A Matter of Space

  City Lights

  The Larger-than-Life Trader

  The Last Straw

  The Faith of Um Marwaan

  Fields of Sound

  Fields of Vision

  The Salvation Voyage

  Three

  Nocturnal Creatures

  The Markets

  The Dormant Flame

  Author’s Note

  Glossary of Arabic Words

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Historical Note

  War broke out in Lebanon in 1975. Initially, a right-wing Christian coalition fought against Palestinians in refugee camps allied to left-wing, mostly Muslim parties. It was not long before the national army split into factions. The war went through many phases and many times appeared on the verge of expiring, only to flare again. Regional powers became involved, with wholesale invasions by foreign armies. The war took on an increasingly confessional and religious aspect, and internecine wars broke out among Christians and Muslims, as well as between them. Scores were killed, injured or maimed. By the late nineteen eighties, few Lebanese still believed the war was achieving anything. In 1990, for reasons both national and regional, internal and external, fighting ceased, an agreement was reached and the fifteen-year nightmare ended. Although the novel is based on the civil war, all characters, organisations and events are fictional.

  The weird, or rival, often appears in nightmare as the tall, lean, dark-faced bed-side spectre, or Prince of the Air, who tries to drag the dreamer out through the window, so that he looks back and sees his body still lying rigid in bed; but he takes countless other malevolent or diabolic or serpent-like forms.

  Robert Graves, The White Goddess

  Silent friend of those far from us, feeling

  how your breath is still enlarging space,

  fill the sombre belfry with your pealing.

  What consumes you now is growing apace

  stronger than the feeding strength it borrows

  Be, as Change will have you, shade or shine.

  Which has grieved you most of all your sorrows?

  Turn, if drinking’s bitter, into wine.

  Be, in this immeasurable night,

  at your senses’ cross-ways magic cunning,

  be the sense of their mysterious tryst

  And, should earthliness forget you quite,

  murmur to the quiet earth: I’m running.

  Tell the running water: I exist.

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

  One

  Beirut. One Sunday in 1975: the day war took the city by surprise. Seven o’clock in the morning. Three teenagers gazed in silence at the world around them.

  The Perch

  Kareem Kader opened his eyes and saw a different room. Not that anything had been altered, moved or removed. Yet as the first rays gleamed through the thin slits of the white Venetian blinds, there was something not quite right about the colours reflected into his eyes. The blue wallpaper faded into jade green; the patterned rug, a wide threshold along the edge of the bed, lost its brightness and turned into violet; the curtains appeared to be colourless.

  Kareem closed his eyes for a few seconds, trying to bring back a better image of his bedroom. He looked around him, seeking his points of reference once more: the open books and notebooks piled up on the wobbly desk, the huge colour poster hanging from a loose hook in the wall, the pair of green slippers next to the dumbbells under the plastic chair. The poker game set that his mother gave him on his seventeenth birthday a fortnight earlier, a wooden box with baize compartments, was tucked between two books on the shelf. Usual colours slowly returned. Only two days earlier, he had had a nightmare in which he was hurled, headlong, down the seven-storey-high balcony, by a cyclone of some sort.

  Some mischievous Jinn must be keeping an eye on me. At least I didn’t break any bones this time.

  He closed his eyes again and huddled up under the quilt.

  Once he could summon enough strength into his limbs and overcome the lingering sleepiness, he got out of bed, parted the curtains and went through the French window, straight onto the balcony, as he did every morning. And here it was, Beirut and the whole world behind it, still asleep, refusing to acknowledge the daybreak. There was no sign of life in the square concrete blocks that watched over the narrow streets, except for the fresh newspapers tagging the thresholds of a few closed front doors. The sky, cloudless and birdless, was the deep-blue shade of remote seas. Underneath, an erratic maze of apartment blocks encroached on a few detached houses, offering a wide variety of facades but revealing little of the life within. Paved roads flaunted themselves to Kareem’s gaze, only to snake away and taper off in the horizon.

  A week earlier, at around the same time of the day, a little boy in a white, hooded gown had walked past the building. He had looked up at Kareem, had smirked at him, then had intoned a poem in literary Arabic as he walked away:

  Sleepers, awake.

  Your eyelids can break

  the morning’s mist.

  Your languid gaze

  will set ablaze

  the virgin sky.

  Heaven will shed

  its purple sheath.

  No sign of the white-gown boy today.

  Am I waking too early?

  The days when his mother’s sleep-in felt like a threat to his wellbeing were far behind, and yet... He could wake his mother up by sneaking into her bed, but how on earth could he give Beirut a stir? Leaning on the cold, wrought-iron rail, he tried to pierce the three wide windows level with him across the street, in search of a promise of intimacy, a human face or any sign of human life. To no avail. They were half-shuttered and curtained off. Nothing stirred. Legs bent and knees squeezed in between two banisters, he changed his prop and the outlook of his perch every now and then.

  Should I close my eyes and retreat back to my room?

  But he did not; he resigned himself instead to the obstinate silence of the city and remained there, five floors above the ground, on this conveniently high balcony.

  ·

  A few kilometres away, Raawya Neayme clenched her fist and raised her arm with a semblance of solemnity, the way she had
seen the boys act out in the playground.

  I swear I shall neither give in, nor come down. I’ll just watch the anger mount like a bubble of soap in my bath. This is my word of honour.

  Oblivious of the delicate balance of her perch, she tossed her legs and swung them to and fro, her thighs pressed against the window ledge. She looked down and saw the servants scurrying in and out of the hall. She had held her breath on first hearing her father’s voice:

  ‘I don’t care where she’s hiding, she can’t be too far. Find her immediately.’

  The hoarseness of his voice seemed to be lashing down at her from the ceiling.

  I’m afraid it won’t be easy, Sayed Neayme.

  Now he’ll learn a thing or two about what being stubborn really means. She had tiptoed in the early morning into his private study, in nightgown and slippers, and had opened the front of the bookcase. She had swept the crystal ashtray, the gilt-edged file and the key to the wardrobe off the lower shelf into her knapsack, flung the paper slip bearing her signature onto the desk and walked out. Then she had skipped up the steel stairs, which led in one steep flight straight into the uppermost attic of the house, grabbing the railing with both hands to steady herself against the weight of the knapsack. Once inside, she had fumbled around in the darkness because electric light was too risky, knocked one or two dusty bottles, stubbed her toe against a chair, drawn back the wooden panes of the window overlooking the entrance hall, sat on the sill, her legs dangling out, and waited, her chest heaving with spite and anticipation. The attic, protruding from a corner of the roof, was an excellent vantage point, with a view over the most central part of the house.

  She had to get over the impact of the first imprecations of her father.

  ‘I have a bloody meeting at the Serai in ninety minutes,’ he yelled. ‘All the papers are in the damned file. What will I tell the Prime Minister? Believe me, if she doesn’t show up on time, I’ll break her neck.’

  Anger had stripped his voice of its habitual imperial detachment. He started quietly enough, giving orders to the servants, expecting the world to submit to his will; then he began to lose patience, pacing around the house and mumbling to himself. He was now ranting and raving. It was the first time she had witnessed him losing his temper in this way. But now, somehow immune to the anger blasting in her ears, she smiled with pride at the possibility of her playing a part in the history of Lebanon, no matter how small it might be.

  One can never tell, small acts can bring about great upheavals.

  Might not the whole scene come to a close with the Prime Minister himself pleading with her through a loudspeaker and then she, bowing to pressure out of generosity of spirit, finally showing up, after making sure her father is humbled by a word of rebuke from the government? She had a vision of him lying in state, a line of old women proceeding past his coffin, and a toothless witch turning around and spitting on his face before running away, singing and laughing.

  But meeting or no meeting, she was not budging. She would either stay put and watch, or move inside into better hiding, but she wasn’t coming down, not just like that. What if they found her? What would she do? She would think of something. Run inside, perhaps. Look for another place to hide, or tear all the papers in the file. She would think of something.

  ‘Raawya, for God’s sake,’ her mother cried imploringly, ‘what do you think you’re doing? Something must have come over her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Raawya, I beg you, come out wherever you are.’

  Get yourself a spine, Mother. Or just get lost.

  If only she could tell them what she thought.

  ·

  Some forty kilometres away, Tony Mirshid wound the wool scarf round his neck and sat waiting on the damp grass, uncertain whether his father might still pick him up on his way back to the village. Abu Tony, his father, might have forgotten him completely. His memory was becoming unreliable. Tony did not mind. It should not be so difficult to walk over to the main road and hitchhike or catch a bus. After all, Tony was sixteen years old, a ‘brave young man’ as his father called him sometimes; he had enough money in his purse and had made the journey on his own before. It was just that he’d rather not be squeezed inside a car or have to cope with talkative passengers. Besides, he liked the company of his father and the blue interior of his van. They had been selling carpentry tools to shops in the neighbouring villages, but there was one last hamlet which Abu Tony wanted to visit on his own. So he dropped his son in a meadow by the river, said he wouldn’t be long, then drove away.

  Tony climbed an oak tree and perched himself on a strong bough, his arms hooked onto a bare branch running over his head. When he looked at the river, he saw towards the far bank what he first believed to be a rock interfering with the water flow. But the obstruction was neither immobile nor rigid; it was bending itself in and out of the water, and a black tuft of hair was bobbing up on the surface. There was a man fighting for his life in the river. Tony raised himself and craned his neck over the leaves obstructing the view. The man clutched at water and thrashed his head about, only to become submerged once more. There was no rock or raft close by he could cling to. Tony had never seen anyone drowning before. There were more trees on the other side of the river and he would have had a better view of the scene over there. There was no one else around and, apart from the rustling of tree leaves around him and a strong smell of tree resin in the air, nothing stirred. What would his friend Mark have done? The right thing, no doubt. Just the thing to do.

  Tony could no longer see the drowning man. The water was flowing steadily now. He wished his father would come. His mother was expecting them for lunch anyway, so Abu Tony had better come soon.

  ·

  The voice of Kareem’s mother calling him for breakfast interrupted his daydreams. He rushed to the bathroom, washed his face and brushed his teeth, cheerfully performing the morning’s rituals. By the time he padded into the dining room, it was already nine o’clock and everyone, apart from himself, had already finished eating. He sat alone at the dining table and dipped a piece of bread in the labné plate. A newspaper rustled in the hands of his father sitting in the living room next door.

  The sound of water spurting from the tap in the kitchen was broken by the clatter of china.

  ‘Family is the infallible cement of social cohesion,’ the radio’s DJ reflected in one of his brief bouts of meditation in between pop songs. ‘Our country is going through a severe crisis, no doubt, but we are strong and will triumph over adversity.’

  As soon as he finished his breakfast, Kareem ran up the stairs into his private darkroom, set up in what should have been the storage room. He bowed his head to get in, pulled the hinge to lock the door, swung closed the window’s shutters, groped for the dangling switch and turned on the red safelight. He had promised the Yearbook Committee at the Conservatoire he would have the pictures of last Sunday’s annual concert ready by the next day, when the new term would begin. He rolled up his sleeves, soaked the first print slowly and waited. The final stage of development never failed to fill him with excitement, even when the photos themselves held no great value for him.

  First the violin materialised, crossed by the bow, then his own face swam up in waves to the surface. He was lined up downstage with the five other boys, bow-tied, rigid and staring ahead. The clapping hands of the Minister of Education and Fine Arts made a late appearance, cutting the photo in two halves. Judging by the sharpness of the boys’ features and the violin’s contours, the photo was going to be a success. He took it out slowly from the basin, hoping that only underwater muteness had stifled the sound of the instruments and that music would break out and fill up the room, as soon as the water trickle subsided into a drip.

  I discovered today that photos do not make sounds. I must be a genius. My mother would no doubt agree.

  He pegged the photograph to the overhead cable, then moved sluggishly to the next print. When he finished the whole set of photos, he came down, d
izzied for a moment by the abrupt passage from red light to daylight.

  He put on his roller skates and roamed around the rooms and balconies of the apartment. This he found more appealing than street skating, except perhaps when he indulged with a group of friends in scaring pedestrians by deliberately careering towards them, with a glare and a faint smile, to deviate only seconds before a collision. Although never caught in the act himself, he was once identified among a group of skaters by an acquaintance of his father who had fallen victim to one of Kareem’s accomplices. But indoor skating offered him better opportunities for refining his skills and mastering every possible move and change of direction. Swerving around two successive corners, swaying to avoid a moving obstacle, rolling backward or sideways, accelerating, slowing down, arching his legs or braking with a full swing. Predictably, his roaming sprees irritated all family members who happened to be present at the time.

  Today was no exception. The race began at a rhythm that was only slightly faster than usual, amid the protests and unheeded warnings of his mother. If he felt tired, he would watch TV, do some homework. Or perhaps he might practise his violin.

  ‘Oh, come on, Kareem,’ his father would moan. ‘You’re ruining our nerves and your future with this string thing. Just keep it low, for God’s sake, and keep the doors closed.’

  Apart from the early morning discomfort, this Sunday appeared to be like any other Sunday.

  About an hour before noon, a visitor knocked on the door. Not just any visitor. Najat was a good friend of Kareem’s mother and, so fond were they of each other, they called each other cousin on account of a distant relationship they once discovered, knowing all too well they would find one the moment they set themselves the task.

  Najat was a beautiful woman, Kareem had long ago decided. Olive skin, brown staring eyes and eyelids never caught without kohl lining. A divine mix of Claudia Cardinale and Sophia Loren. Her mouth was slightly pouting both by nature and habit. Her smiles had her quivering lips parting and her eyes opening wide, giving her rounded face an air of gay astonishment. Though in her mid-thirties, she looked ten years younger with her brisk walk, flirtatious laugh and the few ringlets running over her forehead.