Free Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser

visit to the City Overlooking the Sea before a series of wars broke out, paid a prostitute three hundred pounds to piss in front of him just so he could see the yellow liquid pour out between her legs, or, as he put it, to see how women differ from men when they piss.
    But all that is one thing, and the norms of public behaviour in the City of Red and Grey are something else. Call it politeness, aloofness or social hypocrisy. The appellation doesn’t change the fact that staring at people and intruding on their private business are not approved of in this noisy Babel, where faces from all over the world ebb and flow, where people babble a hundred and one languages in the streets, bars and underground tunnels, in this conurbation that is tangible and abstract, simple and complicated at the same time.
    *  *  *
    You and Mahmoud walked past a group of young men and women who were standing in front of a fast-food restaurant, eating sandwiches and laughing together with infectious good humour. They had clearly come out of one of the offices nearby. Mahmoud pointed to the group and asked you, ‘How’s the invasion going?’ At first you didn’t understand. You hardly noticed the crude gesture he made with his hand but after a while you understood what his words meant and where they came from. He was referring to a famous remark by a fictional hero who came from your world: ‘I came as an invader into your very homes.’ For a moment you thought about the virility implied in this remark by the character, who turned his bed into a field of battle where symbols, natural impulses and eternal opposites fought it out: white and black, lust and revenge, sand and water, superiority and inferiority, Othello and Desdemona, strength and weakness, penis and vagina, hot and cold, Muhammad and Christ. An endless chain of binaries that met only across a chasm. An eternal relationship of collision and confrontation. In your opinion the causes lay in the nature of exploitation, not in human nature itself. East is not always East and West is not always West. They are not two parallel tracks that never meet. The world is more complicated than a railway line.
    Is invading a bed, you wondered, the same as invading a territory? Is a penis like an occupier? You were not unfamiliar with the practice of likening occupation to sexual assault, to ravishment, because in your language you do compare the occupation of territory to rape. In this respect you may be unique among nations. You don’t know of any other language that treats occupation as the equivalent of sexual violation. But, because of the drop of poison that the real invader had injected into the veins of history, the hero of the novel did not give free rein to his vengeful virility in front of the monuments to empire or in the corridors of power where the fate of nations was decided, but rather in the beds of the women who landed on him like flies. Landed on him like flies! You almost laughed when you remembered that phrase. Someone had used this tacky analogy when writing in praise of the fictional hero’s invasions. Clearly the person who wrote that, or dreamt it up in his sexually repressed imagination, had never set foot in the City of Red and Grey. You had not seen women landing like flies on men from your world, or on anyone else. Did that ever happen in the past? When a face like yours was not often seen in the city, before such faces had become everyday objects, so to speak? Days when the East really was amber and incense, a metaphor for gallantry and ardent desire, to an imagination shaped by the tales of travellers and of people seeking a pristine world of wilderness and outlandish languages. Was there really such a legend among the people here? I have heard something of it: the echo of the legend even reverberated in your country among young men who had never left Hamiya.
    You remembered the old files a friend of yours used to thumb through in his memory. He had come to the City