Suslov’s Daughter

Chapter One Post on my f*******: wall: Place: Sheikh Othman neighbourhood, Aden Year: 1962 (we were six) Hero of the hour: Hassani, a real class clown, twice our age, and ten times as big Moment of glory: he crossed the street, and one of us threw a pebble at his back. He turned around, and in perfect, melodious, religious intonation, thundered, ‘Who the f**k threw that?’ A battalion of kids scurried out from every nook and cranny, and clustered around him. In one voice, and with the same religious inflection, we shouted back, ‘Peace be upon him’. Then, bursting with glee, we formed a march: fifty children winding through the streets of Sheikh Othman. Hassani led us, chanting the first part: ‘Who the f**k threw that?’ And we chanted in response (to the beat of our sticks on Dano powdered milk tins, as our neighbours watched and laughed innocently): ‘Peace be upon him!’ Our childhood marches borrowed their melody from a sweet religious moulid song that occasionally floated through the streets of Sheikh Othman on Thursday nights. But the weirdest thing was that it resurfaced (just eight years later) in revolutionary protest marches that were a far cry from the one Hassani led. Marches of the so-called labouring masses chanted noble, romantic lines of poetry to the same tune: With fierce insurrections, the earth rebounded Violence, just violence, got feudalism pounded Only through violence have revolutions exploded Only through violence have those scum been eroded. These marches were part of what people called the ‘Seven Glorious Days’. Bedouins from the countryside attacked Aden to make its people join the revolution, claiming that Adenis were ‘lagging behind, due to the culture of English colonialism.’ The only way to celebrate violence is through more violence. And only violence can glorify revolutionary farmers in the countryside who rose up to end feudalism and nationalise our lands. All to the beat of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This was preceded by landmark events: 1963: Armed struggle against British colonisation begins in southern Yemen. 1967: The People’s Republic of South Yemen gains independence. 1969: A coup brings the Left to power, and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) is established. Here is the question that has long haunted me: Why didn’t the labouring masses compose a more fitting melody for their fiery words, instead of using this gentle Sufi tune we had chanted behind Hassani as kids? Their chant had but the faintest whiff of artistry; it was appallingly lazy and in shockingly bad taste. Forty years passed before I heard the melody again. During Yemen’s ‘Arab Spring’, I noticed a man leading marches of militiamen in nearly the same way. His fanatic voice bellowed, ‘Each time another martyr falls!’ and the militants chanted in response, ‘All revolutionaries gain resolve!’ Their chant didn’t have the same good-natured levity that Hassani’s did. It wasn’t accompanied by riotous revolutionary applause (which would have clashed with the sweet religious melody in any case). It wasn’t aimed at feudalism, or the counter-revolution. It was a mad cry. Impassioned but tuneless. Directed against life, against humanity. This performance was no more than a front for a culture of martyrdom and suicide bombers, a culture of self-annihilation. Here we are, at the end of an era of scientific socialism, entering an era of immaturity, obscurantism, and self-destruction. Intaha al-meshwar, as the great singer Abdel Halim Hafez would say: the journey is over. One day I’ll come face to face with Death himself, the Wrecker of Pleasures and Earthly Delights. If he asks me to look back on life and say a few words, I’ll tell him this: ‘Honestly, I don’t understand anything. I’d be grateful, dear Reaper, if you’d help me grasp it all by explaining a thing or two. Surely, God has revealed to you the enigmas of creation and vicissitudes of fate, hasn’t he?’ If he agrees to listen for a few minutes, I’ll be obliged to set aside my life’s trivial details (since the Reaper’s rather busy, bless him), and go straight for its deepest mysteries. If he doesn’t deign to explain these to me, I doubt I’ll ever understand them, even at the end of my days. I’ll start with the blind man’s shop, in the city of Aden, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. This was at the height of the National Democratic Revolution in the mid-seventies, on the eve of my departure to Paris on a scholarship. It was a small shop tucked away in our street, owned by a skinny half-blind sheikh I loved deeply. I used to pop in every day, sit on the sacks of sugar, flour, and rice, and watch him as he moved around the shop. I was amazed that no matter what his customers asked for, he always found it on the shelf straight away. With a tarnished copper scale in his hands, he carefully weighed the flour and ghee they requested, with no need for a fully sighted assistant. I often escaped from Aden’s blazing sun into the kind shade of his dark shop. ‘Uncle’ Saif al-Ariqi, I called him, even though he wasn’t actually my uncle. I chatted happily with him, and listened carefully to his frail voice that rattled in his throat and seemed somehow to fit the gentle dim light in his shop. To the right of the sacks where I sat was a low door leading through to the house where Uncle Saif lived with his wife and six children. When a girl of twelve or so (about six years younger than me) went into the house with her mother, the door cracked open a couple of inches, right next to me. Her mother, Fairuz, grew up on our street. People called her ‘Aden’s beauty queen’. She used to visit her old neighbourhood once or twice a week (in their government car, with their personal driver). Their family had lived in a villa in Aden’s Khormaksar neighbourhood ever since her husband, Salim, had returned from studying Marxism-Leninism in Moscow and been appointed head of the Graduate School for Marxist-Leninist Sciences in Aden. (People nicknamed him ‘the Party’s Suslov’ after Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Soviet Communist Party at the time.) He was a leader of the highest class – and a Don Juan of the highest class too. Their daughter’s name suited her: Faten, which means alluring. But I would prefer, dear Reaper, to call her Hawiya – the abyss. (My name, as you know, is Imran. The name of a beautiful island not far from Aden, a place my father, Haj Abdullah Abdel Salah, loved very much. He took the entire family swimming there for a whole day every month. Most of the time we were the only ones there. Whenever I think of my father, I think of the sea. From the dawn of my childhood, he taught me to ‘splash around’ as he would say. In reality, we swam masterfully. Every day we went fishing together for a few hours, or took a short dip at the beach. Thanks to my father, I fell fiercely in love with the sea. For me, it’s magical, like an opiate. In it, I’m born anew. I need it instinctively, pathologically. In it, an endless wave of memories washes over me: of the warmest and most beautiful beaches in the world. At Aden’s beaches, you can swim twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.) Whenever her mother visited our street, Hawiya came and stood by the door like a statue, barely two meters away from me. At first, she always looked at Uncle Saif and his shelves, for a long time. I could see her peripherally, just behind the door. Then she would turn towards me, slowly. Millimetre by millimetre. Nanometer by nanometer. Until she faced me directly. Fixed her eyes on mine. Stared at me silently, innocently. Boldly. For a minute; two minutes; an hour; two hours. She would keep her laser-like gaze on me until a customer arrived. When they came into the shop, she would turn back to face the shelf and Uncle Saif until they left. Then, her gaze would return to where it had left off and burn through me again. I’d look at Uncle Saif, and nowhere else. Only sometimes – quickly, shyly, and frustratingly – did I cast a furtive glance that skimmed across the edge of the door and passed over the young girl’s face. A thin but telling ribbon of sweat traced its way down my face. I was in a state, that was clear for anyone to see. Her eyes held a smile that took pity on me, mocked my frustration, maybe. I’d look at Uncle Saif, then back at her. Daring to stare at her for a long moment, then not daring to. This strange, silent ritual repeated itself once or twice a week. I waited for it every day, with building desire. ‘Maybe, dear Stealer of Spirits, it was that I’d never seen such a beautiful, angelic face in my whole life, and on such a promising body,’ I’ll whisper to Azazeel. In the last few days before my trip from Aden to Paris, I dared to stare at Hawiya for a few minutes, sometimes, as her gaze bored through me. But we didn’t utter a syllable, let alone a word. Maybe she was waiting for me to say something. I don’t know. After all, what could I say to a girl who was two thirds of my age? (I was eighteen.) A girl I couldn’t possibly share my life with? Our difference in age (six years) was as insurmountable as the ‘Planck Era’ (in quantum theory). This wall of time, an impassable barrier imposed by the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary convictions I held back then, decreed that my life partner should be no more than five years younger or older than me. Even so, her face never left my thoughts. Neither did her gentle, penetrating stare. She didn’t often smile, but her bright, beautiful eyes were still a source of joy for me. I remember this: there was a certain sadness in the way she looked at me, a worrying silence. I could vaguely make out two dark crescents underneath her bright eyes. They suggested that she didn’t sleep well, that at night she suffered from persistent insomnia, or deep pain. I wonder, dear Captain of the Ship of the Dead: why did she stare at me like that? A silly game? A strange love? Did she want to divulge something? Why didn’t she smile, even once? When I slept on our roof right beneath a sky overflowing with stars, it was Hawiya’s face that filled the night. Before I fell asleep, I always stared into it and told her all the things I could never say aloud when we met in the blind man’s shop. I never dared to stroke her face or kiss her, not even in my imagination. A stalwart party sergeant would appear, holding a sign with the words: Planck Era. On one of our last encounters before I left to study in Paris, the game of statues ended with a silent, resounding tremor, and intense, jostling emotions. Two tears glistened in Hawiya’s dark eyes, and then streamed down her face. Two tears secretly, silently streamed down inside me too, unseen by my little sweetheart Faten – sorry, I mean Hawiya! I promise you this, dear Breaker of Desires and Ender of Delights. In all the nights I slept on the roof of our house, staring up at Aden’s starry skies, conjuring a conversation between two silent statues in the blind man’s shop, I never dared to imagine holding Hawiya, or even kissing her. I didn’t want to be a criminal, or violate an innocent child. And besides, when it came to the flesh and its desires, I had flown straight into the arms of Ms. Doctor.