Seeds of Corruption. Sabri Moussa
To the desert which loved me.
—S.M.
This edition first published in 2002 by INTERLINK BOOKS An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060 www.interlinkbooks.com
Copyright© Sabri Moussa 1980, 2002
Translation copyright© Mona N. Mikhail 1980, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moussa, Sabri.
Seeds of corruption.
Translation of Fasad al-amkinah.
I. Title.
PZ4.M9855Se [PJ850.U845]
ISBN 1-56656-457-3 (pbk.)
892.7'3'6 79-24666
Cover painting ''Al Hada'' (1987) by Yussef Jaha, courtesy of The Royal Society of Fine Arts, Jordan Gallery of Fine Art, Amman, Jordan.
Listen to me, my friends, for I am your host today at a royal banquet. I will serve you a meal from the mountains, from mountains unknown to the city dweller, as I narrate to you the tragic tale of Nicola, that man whose mother named him after an ancient saint when he was born, a long, long time ago, in a country whose name he could not remember. His tragedy lay in his constant wonder at things; whatever took place before his eyes, he received it with the love of a child, even to the extent that he never did learn from experience.
FIRST
An All But Final View
IF IT WERE POSSIBLE TO LOOK DOWN on the Darhib like a bird flying high, careful not to collide with the mountain's rocky crests, it would be seen as a huge crescent, like a meteor that had fallen from its place in the heavens long ago and landed on earth, shattered and petrified. The huge arms of the crescent would embrace an arid valley scarred with crevices and craters, formed by the winds and erosion of a thousand years.
Perhaps that bird aloft, if it were to focus on one spot, would see Nicola, he who was named after a saint, an old man now, standing naked under the hellish August sun. Against the rugged backdrop of basalt and granite and petrified marine formations of chalky rock, there stands Nicola, as he himself has decreed he must, trying to maintain his balance on the deceptive slippery crest, on small asbestos pebbles and sharp-edged marble crystals and broken shells a thousand million years old.
Nicola, a man without a country, stands there alone, naked, crucified. From time to time, in the burning heat, gusts of desert wind buffet him, and he grasps at the wind as if trying somehow to capture it in his hand. And every day Nicola reenacts the same ritual again and again.
That same bird, if it were one of the brown-feathered eastern eagles with the yellow beak and yellow claws, could clearly see Nicola on his illusory but inescapable cross. It would glide over the Darhib, over the Shalatin well and the mountain of Abraq, across the mountain peaks of Zarkat al-Na'am that glitter white as feathers, on its way to the banquet of corpses in the Valley of Camels, where the she-camels sometimes die from the violence of mating.
But even the eagles refrain from flying when the sun is at its height, and so Nicola remains exercising the rituals of his suffering alone, unseen except by the heavens themselves, that seem to pale and shudder as if in sympathy with the horror of the actions that Nicola relives repeatedly in his mind.
As the sun moves past its zenith, the red rocks in this desert emptiness begin to radiate heat, and the black rocks become hot enough to bake bread. At this point Nicola realizes that he is not worthy even of bearing his suffering in this manner, so he rolls his naked body down from the slippery crest, descending to a haven within the curve of the Darhib to resume his rituals in yet another way. For in the belly of the Darhib, things are different.
The place is filled with remnants of human activity, at the spot where the Darhib curves and its summit slopes away on either side. Approximately halfway down the mountainside the ground levels off. There is a flat circular area where wooden houses and outhouses have been erected. The ground rises up to form terraced yards in front of the three houses, and wooden planks, tin barrels, and black spots of oil dripped from machinery are strewn all over. The yards twist into a narrow lane that climbs and then disappears between the rocks—burying itself—until it becomes a curving passageway with an open ceiling. Only then does one arrive at the mouth of the Darhib, the entrance, the door that unlocks its treasures.
Once, men lived in the houses and searched daily for these treasures; but they have long since picked up and left with all their belongings. No longer does anyone descend into the heart of the Darhib but Nicola. Only he knows the long tunnels and passages, the cells on both sides, the wide caverns at depths of a thousand meters or more.
Running for kilometers in those tunnels, tracks were built to carry cars loaded with rocks and raw materials. Nicola drafted and planned them all. He stood in the heart of the Darhib a thousand times over the years.
In the cold tunnels, in the hot tunnels, in the white caves with their opaque dark green shadows, in the icy hollows, surrounded by waxy talc formations like sharp teeth or drawn swords, Nicola used to stand, a benevolent leader, planning for his men, designing new tunnels into the Darhib, leading his men along the tunnels to lay rough hands on the insides of the mountain ... But still they all left, leaving behind whatever was too heavy to carry; and they even dared to think of taking Nicola with them.
Remembering that, Nicola spits, licks his dry mouth with his dry tongue, and mutters curses in his heavily accented Arabic. He surveys the deserted, ruined courtyard in front of the houses. There the workers used to come and go, work and eat, play cards, drink, and shout their usual complaints. They brought to this place both the good and the evil in them, and exposed both cleverness and licentiousness, like offerings, on the sands and rocks of this mountain. How stupid of them to betray their true souls and leave.
But such is the nature of things. The men had come in hordes, and they left in hordes, and were always capable of taking their true souls with them. But Nicola alone remained chained to the Darhib.
“They have fled! All of them have escaped!”
Nicola utters the first words angrily. Then his voice softens as if he feels compassionate toward their cowardice and their flight, as if he is convinced that his level of endurance is superior to theirs. In the end, they were free, independent of the place, because they were not bound to it by sin.
For none of them had fled from the tunnels with his daughter's screams ringing behind him. None of them had led his daughter through the darkness and the heat and the cold of the tunnels inside the Darhib, had drawn her in to where the peopled tunnels ended and the deserted ones began, to die!
In those tunnels unvisited for hundreds of years Nicola left her, trapped by a rockslide. Ilya had cried out when she saw the rocks crashing down; she had clawed at the rocks with her fingernails as she struggled to breathe in the choking dust and darkness. Nicola heard her cries all the time he was running in panic through the tunnels, as if the voice were pursuing him and trying to drag him back to Ilya. The cries were like pain put to music; the surprise and desperation in her voice blamed Nicola and pleaded with him to return. It was as if she were trying to lure him back into an enchanted world they could create together within those mute impregnable walls, as they always had done, not merely as a man and his daughter but as a man and his mother or a man and his beloved wife.
How could there be any such blood link to hold all those men who fled?
Remembering, Nicola