Land
Novel
(Chapter
1; translated by Michael Wutz)
HE
PAID AND WAS HELPED into his raincoat, which he soon took off again and
carried over his arm once he was outside in the dark. Tired from the food
but helped by a cooler and stronger sea breeze blowing from behind, he
walked up the street and shortly thereafter reached a large square
illuminated by floodlights. He must be in the neighborhood of the train
station, the voyager thought and tried to visualize his position on the
city map of Alexandria, which he left on the nightstand of his hotel, but
the station was nowhere to be seen.
Several
dozen long wooden benches were lined up in front of the stage. The voyager
observed the young and the old, families and small groups who, judging
from their appearance, must have traveled from the villages and
settlements along the Nile in the interior. Colorful bulbs and lamps; in
stalls on the perimeter of the square merchants roasting nuts and frying
corn on the cob, he surrendered to the bouquet of aromas and bought a
handful of pistachios. That’s where the music came from he’d been
hearing for a while, still blocks away.
It
emanated from stacked-up speaker boxes - from man-sized, black towers
attached with ropes to the fully-grown gum trees and palms haphazardly
lining the square - to the left and right of the stage, as well from
behind the rows of seats, which started filling as if by command; they
started filling with blinking spectators because many of the stage lights
were directed onto the audience and the merchants’ stands where people
had gathered shortly before.
He
noticed how people lip-synched to the song, how they closed their eyes,
and how they kept the languid rhythm by beating their knees with their
fingers or by stomping the soles of their dust-covered shoes onto the
sandstrewn stone slabs. He knew this music, he recognized it; his father
owned one, no, several cassettes of the singer with her scratchy alto,
each with blue and red Arabic lettering on the cover. Once out of
curiosity, he had played them one after the other - he must have been
twelve or a bit younger at the time - and the fact that this music,
like so many other songs and tunes, made him dance and gyrate his hips
with abandon and throw his arms into the air gave him pause afterward.
Wasn’t he closer to this strange music than to the school songs and to
the pop hits he heard on television, which were sung by native Swiss
performers - people he only knew outside of his parents’ home.
He
spliced open a pistachio with his thumb and peeled it before flipping it
from a short distance with a quick flick of his wrist into his mouth,
following the example of the local men. He chewed the pistachio and put
the shells into his pocket; once full, he shook it out next to a very tall
palm tree. He made sure he still had his wallet in his jacket pocket, but
he felt childish doing so; nobody was after his wallet, after all. He
walked a little further and sat down at the edge of a bench; here in the
Orient, at precisely the place where he was finally able to see himself as
being different, those differences allowed him to feel what he wasn’t:
clearly identifiable.
An
older man walked up to him carrying a kind of samovar on his back. He was
insistent and kept offering him an empty glass. He drank the tea, returned
the empty glass, and found himself digging for some bills in his jacket
pocket seconds later, this time to pay for a ticket an old man in a brown,
worn suit handed him. He felt once again like a barbarian, as he looked at
the small, red strip of paper and tried to read it; it pleased the voyager
to remember a moment that he thought he had forgotten: the moment, at the
age of twelve or thereabouts, when he began realizing that, all his
efforts notwithstanding, he could not possibly know everything; all the
while generating the thoroughly silly energy which ballooned in him,
without registering anything different, often into a kind of megalomania
or at the very least into a highly personal mania that demanded to be
exercised. He used it at home, under the bed, his favorite spot, or on the
bed, made in the French way with one sheet on top of another, a thin green
blanket underneath a blue sleeping blanket, covered at night with a thick
down comforter and during the day with a winered day blanket, while the
comforter and the down pillow were stashed away in the bed box at the head
of the bed. That’s where he lay and stared reflectively at the ceiling.
During
a visit to Zurich the boy had experienced a city, and he had not been able
to forget the impression. Sooner or later he would move there, or to an
even larger city such as Chicago or London or, eventually, Berlin. They
had streetcars in Zurich; everything was illuminated, the large department
stores; there were faces he had never seen before. In the small capital of
the canton in which he lived, there was nothing of any of that. All the
people he knew, knew him. As fond as he was of his small town, as much as
he was attached to the seasons with all their changes and rituals which
he sensed rather than understood - he wished with the same intensity
to move into the city, where he could swap the ceiling of his room for the
many streets and squares, the mountains for the large buildings.
With
the precision of a resolution, it dawned on him that he could hold himself
above the morass of self-castigation only with the help of his knowledge
about as many things as possible but, preferably, about everything, a
morass into which - with or against his will - he would be pushed
by an environment that knew of him only what he was willing to reveal. The
voyager congratulated himself on his great success during his teenage
years in imitating the locals in Switzerland - he just felt like that
at that moment. He munched on his pistachios and looked around.
He
wondered what this hunch had in store for him, the altogether undefined
expectation that took a hold of him and almost made him leave the square,
now that he saw the empty stage. He pondered whether it was something like
an instinct, an instinct one is increasingly more willing to follow and
which eventually ripens into something like a de facto knowledge of
one’s fellow humans; this instinct made him gravitate toward or pull
back from others, mostly for good - no, if truth be told, without
exception and, he thought, pointed to its animalistic element, to
dogs, which were his favorite animal. His father, who too had been a bit
of a dog nut without ever having owned one, would never tire of telling
him the life story of Glenn Miller. It started with the big successes
during the war and ended, as if it had been its inevitable conclusion,
with the battle of El Alamein and the small combo or band where he, his
father, played the drums in nightclubs and for weddings. The boy only
understood that Miller’s wife faithfully waited for him at home, while
he played for the troops overseas, as he had done here in Egypt. A record
with a red cover showing Glenn Miller in a night-blue suit, a trombone in
his arm: that’s what the voyager still remembered, and he would have
given much to learn, why.
The
other story his father was fond of telling featured the Egyptian singer Um
Kalsum, who died in the seventies. In the boy’s recollection, Um Kalsum
had a voice like out of a fairy tale; when Um Kalsum sang on the radio,
people would hold their breath. They would drop everything and gather
around the radios, which were frequently held out of the window so that
the passers-by would stop dead in their tracks and traffic come to a
standstill, if the cars had not already been abandoned in front of
hair-styling salons, on plazas, and in market squares and drivers did not
already listen to her voice in the coffee houses. Following an overture - nervous strings, simple tambourines, bells
-, this voice would rise
and elicit a thousandfold echo: Ya-habibi. That was the opening
phrase and welcome all in one: Oh, my friend. Um Kalsum’s tearful,
as maternal as seductive performance would last half an hour and transport
the men into a wordless high that filled them with gratitude, turned them
inside out, and carried them off into the tarab. Far from being a
spiritual leader, she was the woman who could do that best. Singing to an
oriental beat and accompanied by flutes and celli, interrupted by the
calls of sound engineers and studio employees, she was, for the duration
of her song, the be-all and end-all of all possible yearning.
It
was Um Kalsum’s voice, which the voyager suddenly heard; he could also
tell from the fact that the entire audience sat down; they sat there
motionless in the stands, some with their eyes closed.
Nothing
happened on the stage, which was empty except for a microphone stand. That
Um Kalsum would appear was impossible. Nevertheless, people seemed to have
come with that expectation, in hopes of seeing or hearing somebody who
could soothe the ensuing silence - a total silence interrupted only by
an occasional honking of a car - and absorb its emptiness and void: Ya-habibi.
That wasn’t a recording. Again: Ya-habibi. Then, suddenly the
high pitch of the strings resounded; they, too, were not a recording but
played behind the stage as if the large and stable stage had been built
for only one person: a small, diminutive person in a white evening gown
holding a yellow satin cape.
He
quickly followed suit and saw the girl with a microphone on the stage, a
young woman in her mid-twenties as she was about to sing. Ya-habibi, she
sang, and the crowd responded. The young woman sang, she sang Um
Kalsum’s song, which he had heard as a recording earlier. And the longer
she sang it, the more the audience approved. He felt that they had been
starving to hear that voice; they listened attentively, they began
clapping, they applauded; that was what nobody thought possible. Quite
obviously, people saw in her a revenant of Um Kalsum. The age was about
the same; it was Um Kalsum twenty-three years earlier.
People
cried and embraced as soon as the young women left the stage. They could
take pleasure in the fact that they were witness to Um Kalsum’s
successor - at the moment when she became it.
The
voyager inquired in English about the name of the young singer, and
eventually was told, in Greek, that her name was Amal Maher. The square
emptied, and word spread quickly. The town seemed on the verge of
jubilation, people were seized by a feeling of exhilaration, and he
negotiated his way through the dispersing and recomposing masses back to
the hotel, where he was welcomed by the receptionists. As they handed him
his key, they commented on how they regretted that this had been the third
event of that kind in ten years: they couldn’t believe that it was Amal
Maher of all people who was supposed to be the reincarnation. They looked
at him as if he possessed something valuable.
© Ammann Verlag & Co., Zurich 2007. All Rights reserved.
|
Hauptseite |