A Land Without Jasmine Page 7

  I picked up Jasmine’s belongings and retreated to my room where I stretched out on my bed without removing my clothes or shoes. I placed the bag and notebook under my pillow.

  They followed me and sat on the edge of the bed. My father tried to discover how I had acquired these two items, where I had found them and why I had brought them home.

  His questions came in quick succession but a thick fog enveloped me and in only a few seconds I lost first my ability to hear and then the rest of my senses. My eyelids closed and I sailed away on the ship of sleep, surfing as many dreams as there are stars.

  _______________

  1 Sheba

  2 A Toyota Land Cruiser

  3 Qishr is a Yemeni infusion made from coffee bean husks and spices

  5

  THE SCEPTIC WHOSE SCEPTICISM DISAPPEARS LIKE A SCATTERING CLOUD

  At noon on February 19th we arrested the individual known as Ali Nashwan on his return from school. Inspector Abdurrabbih and I were in an unmarked car. We stopped him in the al-Qa‘ neighbourhood and asked him to climb into the vehicle. He obeyed without any objection. We took him to the Criminal Investigations Headquarters and interrogated him.

  My name is Muti‘ Radman and I’m a police officer with the rank of Deputy Inspector. I work with Inspector Abdurrabbih, assisting him in the field and writing up reports of investigations for him.

  Ali is an adolescent of average intelligence; naïve. His eyes are almond-shaped and frank, and his mouth is small and pursed. His lips are rose-red and firm. He has bushy eyebrows and on his left cheek a broad scar extends from his cheekbone to below his earlobe, but this memento from a past fight doesn’t detract from his handsome appearance.

  When we asked how he had acquired Jasmine’s handbag and course notebook he told us a long and incredible tale. He said that a jinn wearing an extremely chic modern suit had given him the bag and notebook. His words were disjointed and confused. He would stutter, run words together and occasionally start babbling. Then we were forced to comfort him, stroke his head and give him a glass of water to clear his throat.

  He is a pampered boy who is afraid of his own shadow. Over and beyond all this he was perspiring profusely and smelled bad. I fully expected Inspector Abdurrabbih to command me to take him to the electric room and shock him to loosen his tongue so he would confess the truth. He was definitely lying. His statements wouldn’t deceive a child. It was clear he was embroiled in something momentous. His conduct proved he knew a lot he didn’t want to reveal. Surprisingly enough, Inspector Abdurrabbih ordered him set free! Perhaps he took pity on him because he’s a minor.

  I broached the topic with him while we were chewing qat in a qat den and he replied that imprisoning Ali wouldn’t help us at all and that the best thing would be to keep track of his movements and contacts because he was the thread that would lead us to the missing Jasmine.

  We served Dr. Aqlan with an official summons but he didn’t respond. Then I telephoned him and informed him that we were expecting him to appear at such-and-such a time. He repeated his pompous refusal to obey and hung up on me. We can’t get back at him because he has influential connections in the government. If we try to show him our fangs he’ll fall upon us with his talons and hurl us beyond the sun.

  We went to his office in the Faculty of Science calculating the time carefully to prevent him from escaping on the pretext of one or another of his lectures. He proffered us a smile several kilometres wide and a hand as cold as a corpse. Without his noticing it I turned on my mobile phone to record his statements. His attention was focused on Inspector Abdurrabbih.

  We emerged with extremely important information. He had seen the same man Ali had told us about. I was astonished at how closely the descriptions matched. So the boy hadn’t been inventing fantastic things from his imagination.

  Dr. Aqlan said that through his window he had seen Jasmine sitting with a mature man who had a handsome face, which was clean shaven, and that the sun had tanned his skin till it was almost the colour of gazelle’s blood. He wore an expensive light brown suit with a white shirt and his gold necktie had red stripes.

  He made a curious observation, saying that al-Utmi, the proprietor of the snack bar, had gestured cryptically to that man, who had then shown him a book bound in gleaming white paper.

  I expected Inspector Abdurrabbih to inquire about the rumours that the professor had failed Jasmine in his subject to force her to come to his residence. He himself had been expecting that question and for this reason remained tense, answering us with terse replies and in a hostile, haughty tone.

  Inspector Abdurrabbih didn’t dare ask because the man has support from above. Any faux pas might bring down upon us a stern reckoning; in the final analysis we’re nothing more than low-ranking policemen who lack any clout or power.

  We said goodbye to him, thanking him for graciously answering our questions and departed, praising God for our safe deliverance, as if he were the one who had been interrogating us, not the other way around.

  Who was this adult male three people had already seen?

  We asked the forensic lab’s artist to prepare a composite sketch of that mysterious middle-aged man based on the descriptions furnished by Dr. Aqlan, Ali Nashwan and al-Utmi, the snack bar proprietor.

  We showed the composite drawing to the three of them and altered it to match as far as possible the image imprinted in their memories. Then we distributed the man’s picture to all the other police departments and squads and issued both an all-points bulletin for his arrest and a travel prohibition for him at any border crossing, airport or seaport.

  We searched for Jasmine in all of Yemen’s provinces and achieved nothing. It seemed that a sorceress had turned her into a mare! We received the bodies of unidentified women but none of them matched her description.

  We assigned detectives in shifts to monitor the garden of the Faculty of Science twenty-four hours a day and provided them with mobile phones with cameras, charging that to the agency.

  Jasmine’s tribe was pressuring us and complicating our work. Dozens of armed men flocked to the station to inquire about the latest news. I don’t know how the picture of the unidentified, middle-aged man was leaked to them but they began to search for him, threatening him with a hideous death.

  Toward the end of February, the case began to take on tragic dimensions; events were heading in a violent and bloody direction but all we could do was shrug our shoulders and wiggle our hips.

  Our scouts scattered through the Faculty of Science advised us that Ali Nashwan never left the garden, not even at night. The university guards would encircle him at sunset and expel him by force, securely locking the gate, but he would secretly scale the wall and spend the whole night by the pomegranate tree. In the morning they would find him clasping the tree’s trunk, snoring in his sleep like a contented cow.

  We kept him under surveillance overnight and found that he spent the whole time in worship. He would pray facing the pomegranate tree. Had he lost his mind? Was he well on his way to insanity? We didn’t know what was transpiring in his weak, childish brain.

  The inquiries we made about him indicated that Ali Nashwan was rather pious and keen on performing the five daily prayers at the right times. The clique he hung out with was made up of religiously committed young men.

  Unbeknownst to him, we photographed him kneeling in prayer and prostrating himself before the tree. He would also embrace its trunk and kiss it reverently and respectfully. He circumambulated it submissively and piously while mumbling arcane, incomprehensible words, which our translators failed to recognize as belonging to any known language.

  I clapped my hands together; Ali Nashwan, the upright, prayerful boy had become a heathen!

  On the night of February 27th something weird happened, something we’re unable to explain logically. The problem was that our surveillance of Ali Nashwan grew a little slack when the agent tailing him succumbed to a peaceful sleep. When his replacement arrived at
2 a.m. he found the garden empty; there was no trace of Ali Nashwan, who had departed and passed through the faculty gate without anyone noticing.

  The only person to provide us with useful information about him was the night watchman stationed at a corner from which he could see people entering and leaving the apartment building inhabited by Jasmine’s and Ali’s families. This agent mentioned that around 1 a.m. he saw Ali Nashwan open the building’s door and enter; he had also noticed that Ali was hiding something under his overcoat.

  We weren’t able to exploit this valuable piece of information because we dawdled and arrived after it was too late. The next day Ali Nashwan was missing too, and his family began searching for him. We, for our part, wanted him to help solve the riddles into which he had plunged us. But neither we nor his family were able to locate him.

  On March 10th, we received a report that a boy’s body had been found in one of Sanaa’s suburbs. Inspector Abdurrabbih sent me to investigate, accompanied by a medical examiner and a photographer.

  Three police vehicles had already arrived at the scene and policemen had formed a ring to prevent curious onlookers from coming too close. When one of the policemen pulled away the black army blanket, I immediately recognized the corpse of Ali Nashwan. I contacted Inspector Abdurrabbih and informed him of developments.

  After a quick preliminary examination the medical examiner affirmed that the cause of death had been extreme torture. Ali Nashwan’s face was swollen and covered with wounds. There were contusions on his head, his bones were broken and crushed, and his ribcage had been completely demolished. His male organ had been chopped off and his groin area had been stabbed repeatedly. Tucked between his buttocks was a wilted bouquet of qat.

  When Inspector Abdurrabbih joined us he was glowering and there were tears in his eyes. He may have felt the pangs of conscience for releasing Ali Nashwan. I also privately blamed him.

  We devoted six hours to examining the site and searching for clues. All the same, we turned up nothing of value.

  The suburb consists of repulsive-looking, rocky hills on which stand a few, widely spaced houses. The whole area is forlorn and desolate. It is reached by a winding dirt road that falls and rises as if a person were travelling through the land of the jinn.

  Once we had completed our procedures we delivered Ali’s body to his family, who held an abbreviated funeral that lasted only a day. Then they buried him. A few days later, Ali’s mother died of sorrow and grief over the loss of her eldest son.

  The case grew more complicated by the day. Jasmine had already been missing for a month and we had been unable to gain any information about her whereabouts. In the meantime, we had been responsible for the blood of a victim murdered in the prime of his youth. As for the unidentified, middle-aged man dressed like a foppish bridegroom, we had grown dizzy trying to determine his whereabouts. We virtually died of fatigue while attempting to discover his name and identity. No one the length and breadth of Yemen matched the composite portrait of him!

  In the end, I personally became convinced that he wasn’t human. He was one of those jinn who love to play with our nerves.

  Now I’m trying to erase his image from my imagination. Whenever I think of him I feel my spirit is fluttering, attempting to free itself from my body. Was he Azrael, the angel of death, in disguise? I’ve seen hundreds of mutilated corpses – lacerated, dismembered and mangled – without that ruffling a single hair of my body, but the image of this unidentified middle-aged man is driving me crazy. He passes before my eyes all the time, even in my dreams!

  I don’t know any reason for this persistence, for this overwhelming presence. Occasionally I see his shadow on walls. At other times, when I’m walking I notice a puddle of silver water that undulates and emits a blinding gleam.

  A glowing light follows me everywhere, almost as if something wanted to materialize before me, to emerge from its numinous world into my visible one. I don’t like these supernatural apparitions. I hate them intensely. I fear that I’m losing my mental equilibrium and that I’ll find myself racing through the streets with my privates uncovered while I preach to the thin air.

  I consulted a shaykh who treats people with the Qur’an. He recited the Qur’anic sura ‘Ya-Sin’ over some water, which absorbed the words with his breath. Then he handed this to me, telling me to take a sip each time I finished praying for the next thirty days. He also cautioned me against eating onions or garlic and told me not to sleep on my stomach.

  So now I’m trying to cure myself of these sick imaginings.

  6

  THE ASCETIC

  When locusts attacked Sanaa, children and adults went out to collect them alive in empty metal water buckets. I gave my daughter Jasmine a clean water bucket and she descended delightedly to the street, setting off with her little girl friends to collect locusts, bounding after them.

  I asked her to do that because I felt like eating some. We sauté them with a little salt and they make a delicious, nutritious dish. A few people eat them live without salt.

  Salma, the metalworker’s daughter, brought a light plastic ball. So the girls put the buckets aside and began to play football. They may have played for as long as twenty minutes before they tired and returned to their homes. But my husband, may God forgive him, had a fit, blew everything out of proportion, and turned it into a huge issue.

  Following this incident, he forced Jasmine to wear the niqab, prevented her from playing in the street and forbade her to associate with any males who are not part of the family group.

  My name is Wahiba. I’ve borne three sons and one daughter and suffered seven miscarriages.

  Jasmine began to write a diary after she was secluded and her movements were restricted. That notebook became her consolation in her wretched isolation. She was quite concerned that no one should look at her diary so she thrust it in a locked drawer and always kept the key with her.

  For my part, I respected her privacy and saw nothing wrong with her keeping her secrets. I felt confident about my daughter’s conduct and had absolutely no doubts about her purity because I’m the one who raised her and her brothers. I know that she’s superior to them culturally and morally.

  It definitely never crossed my mind to steal a look at her diary, even though I had my own key to the drawer. She didn’t know that. I’m a woman who had an honourable, rural upbringing. That’s why I think it’s wrong to look at things the owner has shielded from prying eyes.

  A year after Jasmine disappeared, when I had totally despaired of her ever returning, my longing for her tempted me to open her drawer and to take out her fancy diary, which has a leather binding. My feeling of loss prompted me to seek consolation in reading what her pen had written.

  I wasn’t disappointed; she had recorded her feelings and her opinions about the people around her on the brown, burnished paper. She said of me that I’m a woman obsessed by cleanliness and hostility to spiders and their webs, and that the smallest amount of dust in the house makes me gasp for breath and inflames my eyelids. I admit this is true.

  She said that I worry about what people say, fear their envy and believe in the evil eye and the harm it causes. That’s why I burn incense in the apartment every day and hang Qur’anic verses in each of the rooms and hallways.

  She mentioned that I favour her brothers over her. (This isn’t true, I swear.) She described me as an affectionate, tender mother when pleased and a stern, harsh one when angry.

  She said that she loves me more than she loves herself and expressed her love for me in hundreds of places. Each time I read this, tears streamed down my cheeks.

  She said that her father is gruff and mean-spirited on the outside but that deep inside he is good and generous. She said he is forced to adopt an exterior like that of a hedgehog with sharp, defensive quills because society respects a man whose behaviour is belligerent and petulant and mocks a man who is complacent and chaste in expression. She said he is an ignorant, domineering father but that in s
pite of his many faults she loves him dearly.

  She mentioned many of our male and female neighbours and recorded her memories of them. Her diary revealed some things I hadn’t known. For example, the shopkeeper Hajj Sultan used to flirt with her!

  What Jasmine recorded corroborates the rumour that women in the neighbourhood have spread about him. The substance of it is that Afiya, a poor but beautiful widow with six orphaned children to support, receives food from him to feed her children and then, when no one is looking, slips into the shop’s stockroom to settle her accounts!

  She mentioned our neighbour’s son Ali in her diary more than seventy times. Ali is like a son to me. At first we were on intimate terms with him and had our own pet name for him: sweet Ali. When I remember this charming boy I sigh because we wronged him. We killed him, even though he was innocent. I still have a photo of him (I don’t remember now how I got it) and whenever I look at it my eyes flow with tears of regret and remorse.

  When I’m all alone by the trunk of the pomegranate tree, I occasionally recall the way the doorbell rang continually at 1 a.m. one morning. That was ten days after Jasmine had disappeared. When we opened the door, Ali entered, breathless, his face beaming with joy and delight. He handed us all the clothes that my lost daughter had been wearing, including her underclothes.

  We asked him roughly where he had obtained these garments. Then he told us a strange story. He said he had gone to search for Jasmine in the Faculty of Science. In the garden, near a pomegranate tree, he had seen a medium-height, middle-aged man wearing white clothes with a golden gleam and holding a luminous white book. He had looked carefully at Ali and then disappeared. When Ali had approached the tree he had found a crevice in its trunk. Then he had stuck in his hand and had pulled out Jasmine’s handbag and course notebook.

  When my son Jamil, who had just arrived from Hadramawt, asked why Ali hadn’t delivered those items to us, he replied that his father had given them the next day to Inspector Abdurrabbih and that they were now in the custody of Criminal Investigations.