Free Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser Page B

tree at the height of the colonial age. You and your wife came as political refugees in the time of the nation state, when the authorities in the Island of the Sun asked your group to leave its territory, under pressure from your government, which wanted to make the world as uncomfortable for you as possible, to drive you away as far from the skies of your country as it could, to have you bark like stray dogs on cold and distant pavements. The difference between you and the hero of the novel was not just one of personality or epoch, but also ideological. Your idea of yourself and the world was different. You didn’t start with the idea of two worlds that are always separate, always in conflict and that never meet, but from another concept, a concept of history as the arena for power, social classes and exploitation, regardless of skin colour, brain size, religion, or whether one is circumcised or writes from right to left. This concept with which you came to the city was a different idea you can call internationalism. Now it’s called utopianism. Your concept has been shaken by the collapse of the models that tried to put it into practice, by the obsolescence that afflicts ideas just as it afflicts the real world, and by the fact that the journey grew longer and longer. But your concept did not collapse. You didn’t want it to collapse, as so many other things had collapsed along the way. The idea that the concept might collapse frightened you, because you personally had no alternative, and because the alternative, at the broader level, was to have worlds that were set apart for ever and that met only on the battlefield.
    But what of the fate of that invader who adopted the bed as the arena for his quixotic battle? He went back to his birthplace and disappeared entirely. As though he had never existed. As though the struggles he had fought in bed were just a quick revenge, fragile, recorded in police reports rather than in the annals of liberation. If revenge on the invaders took the form adopted by the hero of the novel, then the grandchildren of the judges and jurors who put that sexual hero on trial hoped it would stay that way. Then they wouldn’t come to know suicide belts and men that embraced death in the way they embraced life. That’s the form of revenge now: blind suicide belts, planes that crash into buildings and towers with everyone in them, and pound them into dust. No words, no greeting, just death floating on the scent of paradise, with dancing phantasms of houris in the afterlife. What’s your stand on that fictional hero who invaded beds and cunts? What’s your stand on those young men with suicide belts, armed to the teeth against historical subjugation, thwarted aspirations and the decadence of the real world?
    When it started to take shape in your mind, you suppressed a question that countered what Mahmoud had said: ‘Did you come to this city in defeat?’ Invasion never occurred to you, neither in Mahmoud’s style nor in the style of the fictional hero. What kind of invasion would that be? But why did you think about defeat? Your damned friend planted a seed of doubt in you. Whenever you dodged the question of invasion and defeat, it stuck its head up again. Your old friend’s tasteless question and his embarrassing gesture towards the girls who were standing in front of the fast-food restaurant, oblivious of your existence, stirred an old question inside you, a question you avoided as usual by prevarication and obfuscation. It was the question that had started to nag like a whisper in your ear, faint but persistent, ever since you left the City of Siege and War. ‘What went wrong?’ it asked.
    Mahmoud kept talking but you weren’t following. He put his hand on your shoulder, as he used to do, and you moved your shoulder aside, out of his way. In the City of Red and Grey a gesture like that might be misinterpreted, because the men in this city do not touch each other. But that’s not why