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Surely thy Lord (1982)
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Then she conceived him; and withdrew with him to a remote place. And the throes of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm-tree. She said: Oh, would that I had died before this, and had been a thing quite forgotten!
So a voice came to her from beneath her: Grieve not, surely thy Lord has provided a stream beneath thee. And shake towards thee the trunk of the palm-tree, it will drop on thee fresh ripe dates.
QUR’Ā N, XVI: 19: 16–23
Surely thy Lord [1]
It was his first hour in the country. He picked up his luggage and went to the door marked EXIT. The customs officials stared after him sternly.
Immediately as he stepped outside he had the sense of being crowded by something. He stood there in the night until he could see, hearing patient, deferential breathings and rustlings of garments on either side of him. He saw that the sidewalk in front of the terminal had a low fence on his right and his left, like a slaughter chute. Pressed up against the fence were hundreds of men, calling out softly: “A nickel, please? ” —“Taxi, sir? ” —They awaited his pleasure. Step by step he traversed the protected space, trying to look straight ahead of him and hoping that he would see a sign directing him to official transportation of some kind. Fifty feet ahead, the railings ended at the street curb. The Pakistanis stood waiting for him. He was by himself; the other passengers, who were all native to the place, had been cleared quickly and had gone. He had never been to Asia before. What should he do? Would they rob him there in the dark when he came in among them? — He continued walking. Having worked for a year in a reinsurance firm to finance his visit to the battlefields (which were still a thousand miles away), he had drawn up and balanced out to zero a list of his assets and liabilities:
ASSETS
LIABILITIES
1. My what-the-hell attitude.
1. The same.
2. My meager need for comfort.
(Call this “stamina.”)
2. The steady decay of my immune system.
3. Lack of much hunger.
3. Lack of much money.
4. Prudence.
4. The same. (Call it “cowardice.”) TOTALS: 0 0
He concentrated on that first item, his what-the-hell attitude, and took his last few steps.
The red hill [1]
Once upon a time there was a Young Man who wanted to be more than he really was. This made him unhappy. He decided to go to Afghanistan and take pictures of the bullets whizzing past his ears. Unfortunately he had a stomach ache.
The red hill [2]
Once there was a Young Man who wanted to go to war. Unfortunately, no one would take him at first. — “Well, ” he reflected in his hotel room, “it could have been worse. They could have taken me and gotten me killed.”
Still and all, he thought, choking down a kebab at the Lone Star Café, he felt like a failure; for he had tried and tried to go. — What a panting puppy! — Had he been called upon to fetch newspapers for any master, oh! he would have run across the lawn of politics, tail a-wagging, like that breathless zigzagger Luká cs, that silly noser-around in satellite countries, trying desperately to implement his convictions with any ready-to-hand artillery clip, even obligingly changing the convictions themselves as required by Stalin & Co. (At least, thought the Young Man, if any creepy organization is breathing down my neck at the moment, I’m on the other side!) — and always missing the democratic revolutionary boat, poor Gyö rgy, always getting short-circuited in the Great Electrification; for whenever he got his revolver out and aimed at the head of the oppressor class he would be informed of dismaying changes in the curriculum, so that all his efforts to raise the toiling masses and other Igor beavers up to social consciousness succeeded no more than any other type of levitation — and every time he got expelled from the people’s this and the people’s that, until he was left with nothing to do, finally, but talk about praxis in nineteenth-century novels. Stupid bastard. — Well, he wasn’t going to end up like that, the Young Man vowed, no sirree; why, he’d grab one of these here topaks all cocked and loaded with golai swiped from some Soviet ammunition dump, knock out the lights and maybe shoot somebody’s cap off just for effect (if only he could shoot!), assume command, lead the Mujahideen to the battlefront like Lawrence of Arabia, capture a helicopter in Kabul and proceed to Moscow, rotoring comfortably along below the radar line; and then he’d strafe the Kremlin roof and interrupt any number of important meetings. Oho, he’d change the objective conditions of history, he would; he’d make the materialists acknowledge the mud that they were made of—
And if he had been a Soviet Young Man, he would have gone to Nicaragua.
His little fiancé e bought him sausage, and shortbread, and marzipan, and chocolate, and fancy crackers, convinced as she was that she would never see him again. He put it all in his camera duffel, which he then in military fashion STOWED beneath his feet on the plane. As one kind of cloud gave way to another beside his window seat, he drank ginger ale. He imagined calling his fiancé e from each stop — New York, Frankfurt, Karachi — getting successively worse connections, having less and less to say. Mainly, however, he let himself be pampered by a benign blankness of thought, as if the ever-changing clouds had wandered in behind his eyes, and the blue lucidities between them were vacant. — He passed out of Swiss airspace. The clouds were thicker over Yugoslavia, and it was raining in Istanbul during the refueling. He stayed in the plane and watched a blue tank stenciled POLIS amble around the runway, with two white helmets sticking out from the hatch.
Coasting from time zone to time zone, he presently found himself sitting next to an ex-ambassador who was going home to India to do some trout fishing. The plane was almost empty. At midnight the blackness in the windows was challenged by rare small patterns of brightness from the United Arab Emirates. Two hours later came the descent, the lights of Karachi extending indefinitely beneath the window in all directions like electric pushpins marking the spread of cholera. The plane stopped, the door opened, and from the Arabian Sea came a fishy, sulphurous steam, like a malfunctioning boiler, that made the stewardesses’ uniforms stick to their bodies. The Young Man picked up his duffel, hands sweating, and got off the plane.
2. THE LAND OF COUNTERPANE (1959–81)
Ephraim herds the wind, and pursues the east wind all day long…
BIBLE, HOSEA, 12: 1