Free Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser Page A

of Red and Grey long before you. He was rather like the hero of that novel. He was highly sexed and lecherous, crazy about firm white flesh. He would salivate at the sight of the calf of any woman who passed by. Although you had nothing in common, ‘the Hunter’ (not his real name but a nickname you invented to make fun of him) was your favourite companion in long drinking sessions that were cut short by the last-orders bell that rang at a quarter to eleven in the evening. In fact this friend of yours did not come to the city as an invader or seeking revenge, but rather as a fugitive from a military coup, along with the financial and political elite of his country. He opened a restaurant serving Middle Eastern dishes in the city centre, and had his share of success. A perpetual bachelor. Middle-aged but with the vigour of youth. He did not confuse his lust, which was insatiable judging by his own accounts, with symbolic revenge through the bodies of women. At least in what he said to you he did not connect the two, because sex for him was an act essential to life. Like food. Like water. The body’s rhythm incessantly revived the need for it. In his case the motive and starting point for sex was sex itself. Or perhaps the pleasure of the hunt. It may have been chronic repression. You’re not quite sure of all the motives that emerged from what he said. Sometimes you didn’t believe the stories of his pursuits, because the hunt seemed much too easy. ‘Hunt’, ‘chase’ and ‘prey’ were the exact expressions he used: you would reject them and discourage him from using them, but he would not mend his ways. He would say, ‘Forget about the veneer of culture and spurious refinement. Hunting is a perpetual human condition even if you wear the finest clothes. Because underneath the suit, or gown, and the neat hair there is the hunter and the prey, the male and the female, negative and positive. Men leave home in the morning as hunters, and women as prey. Men sharpen and unsheathe their weapons, women display the allure of the prey, cunningly defended. All our daily activities stem, without us knowing it, from this eternal root.’ Your friend’s stories about his sexual exploits sometimes sounded like fantasy to you. But you knew he wasn’t lying. He might have embellished his stories but he did not make them up. You would ask him, ‘So what happened, that people now walk past us without seeing us? Look. Here we are, sitting secluded in a dark corner that stinks of beer, and no one comes near us. We’re like pariahs or lepers. That’s not what happens in your stories about nights of passion.’ He would answer, ‘Firstly, you don’t have the instinct or the inclination for hunting. Politics and culture have rotted your brain and distorted your senses. Secondly, I came to this city long before you, at a time when life here was more relaxed, safer, more carefree. There weren’t these vast numbers of immigrants from all over the world. Most importantly, that horrible disease was still unknown.’ You would later remember, remember for a long time in fact, what your friend ‘the Hunter’ said about immigrants, disease and fear of strangers. In the city’s tunnels you would see large posters saying, literally, ‘Don’t speak to strangers.’ Like most who come to this city from your world, your friend – with his old memories that he would flick through in the corner of a dark bar stinking of beer – had read that novel with the hero who cries, ‘I came as an invader into your very homes.’ In fact he knew the writer, who used to frequent his restaurant. He told you that the hero of the novel and the author had nothing in common. That didn’t please him, because he had imagined they would share a common interest.
    But you didn’t come to the City of Red and Grey in the same way as the hero of the novel. Your personal situation wasn’t the same, nor was his era your era. He came as a student, plucked from a