Part 16 (1/2)

Beautiful. Terribly beautiful. No longer cinders, the heat growing, sparks whisper, surfaces burn.

”Hey!” shouted the demon. ”You can't do this!”

He blazed and burned and melted and reduced and disappeared.

I went.

They say you should always start small. Burn a tree, perhaps; a parked car, road signs, a traffic light. Not us. We, for starters, burned Mr Liberson's flat--including two fine leather chairs, forks and knives (one dozen pairs), a life-size (ugly) china horse, and Mr Liberson himself.

Of course.

”The Allah Stairs”

Jamil Nasir.

Jamil Nasir was born in Chicago to a Palestinian refugee father and an American mother. He grew up in Jerusalem, where the following story is set. His short stories have appeared widely, and he is the author of five novels, the most recent being The Houses of Time. His third novel, Tower of Dreams, set in a future Middle East, was nominated for the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award and won France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire.

When my brother and I were little boys, we had for a neighbour a littler boy named Laziz Tarash. Laziz lived in a second-floor apartment next to ours with his large, loud mother and small, quiet father. Uncle Nabil lived downstairs, and Grandfather lived down the street. Outside our front windows was an empty lot where a stonecutter sat all day under a corrugated iron shade and chipped blocks of stone, and beyond that, over the roofs of the stone houses, the land fell away in rocky hills grown with camel thorns and dusty-green scrub.

Laziz was a pale, puffy boy whose cherubic face turned pink in the winter cold. His mother was pale and puffy too, but his father was dark and thin, silent, serious and bald. We used to see him hurrying out in the mornings whilst we waited for the car that took us to school, wearing a baggy suit and clutching a scuffed leather satchel. I had the impression that he worked at the bank. I don't think I ever heard him say a word. But Mrs Tarash said many: all day you could hear her piercing nasal voice through the apartment walls, raised in command or complaint against the maid, her husband, the tradesmen, or Laziz.

Laziz went to our school, St. George's, where my father and grandfather had gone. He was too young to be studious, but he wasn't loud and unruly like the other little boys. In winter, during playtime, he would huddle in a sheltered corner against the wind and rain, hands in the pockets of his blue sailor's coat, standing first on one foot and then on the other. He didn't have any friends. If you asked him to play he would just give you a shy, faraway smile and not answer. But there was a tree in a courtyard at the very end of the playground, and sometimes when it rained, or when it got very windy, Laeth and I would find Laziz standing under the tree, his nose running and his cheeks fiery pink, and he would tell us stories.

The stories were about his father, about how Allah had punished him for doing bad things to Laziz.

There was one that he told over and over in his lisping baby's voice: ”Last night my father spanked me for not doing my schoolwork. And then I knocked on Allah's door and climbed up the Allah stairs, up, up, up, up, up. And I talked to Allah and told him. And I went and got the monkeys. They took my father and tied him to a tree and hit him!” Here there were sound effects and the waving of a fat little fist. ”And they kept hitting him and hitting him until blood came out and he died!” Then he would laugh happily.

Of course, when we teased him he shut up and got his faraway look again.

Time went slowly for a whilst; nothing ever changed in our little town. Then we moved to a different country, where we lived in the city and had city friends. We went away to college, Grandfather died, and I got married. It was almost twenty years later before Laeth and I stood again in the dusty playground of St. George's Boys' School. I was a lawyer, getting a stoop from leaning over my desk all day. Laeth, who had been almost as small and cherubic as Laziz, was now broad-shouldered and bearded and losing his hair. The town had changed too. There were big buildings and smooth roads, was.h.i.+ng machines and colour TVs, and hardly anyone rode donkeys anymore. Someone had introduced a machine that could chip stone smoother and more quickly than any stonecutter.

We walked around the playground gingerly, hands in our pockets, as if we might break something. It was morning cla.s.s period, and a kindergarten song came faintly through the sunlight from the far end of the school building. Everything was smaller than I remembered--olive trees that had seemed towering were scarcely over my head; the long, long playground was a walk of fifty paces.

”Here's where we used to play marbles,” said Laeth.

”And cars,” I said.

”Remember the moulokhia they used to serve in the cafeteria? That was like mucus?”

At the end of the playground was a tiny courtyard. In the courtyard stood a tree.

”Laziz Taras.h.!.+” we both said when we saw it.

”The Allah stairs,” said Laeth, and we laughed. At that moment there was a rustling in the tree. A pair of beady eyes peered at us, and a small brown shape scampered up a branch and out of sight.

”A monkey!” said Laeth.

”Can't be,” I said. ”There are no monkeys around here.”

We went into the school building and collared a boy on his way to the toilets, made him tell us where Mr 'Odeh's cla.s.s was, and when the noon bell rang we met Mr 'Odeh in the hall. We shook hands and told him who we were. He had diminished in size along with the rest of the school; he was now just a round-shouldered, potbellied man whose bald head barely reached my chin.

”Have lunch with me,” he said, and led us across the playground, which was now filling up with boys, dust, and noise, out the tall iron gate, and down the block to a little apartment with an arched ceiling and thick stone walls.

”Of course I remember you,” he told us as he took plates and cups from a cupboard. ”I remember all my students. I remember how many times I had to slap their hands to make them learn their multiplication tables.”

”Then perhaps you remember what became of Ramsey Abu-Nouwar, sir,” I said.

”Ah, that one...” said Mr 'Odeh, and we were off on the life histories of ancient school friends, forgotten long ago and not remembered until we set foot back in St. George's. Laeth wanted to know about Kais Najjar and Gaby Khano. I was interested in Haseeb Al-Rahman. We were sipping tiny cups of coffee before we came to Laziz Tarash.

”Ah, that one,” said Mr 'Odeh, shaking his head. ”A sad story. He works in the Gulf Bank here.” He tipped his head in the direction of the market.

”What is sad about that, sir?”

”His father. Didn't you hear? It happened many years ago, soon after the war. Your uncle didn't tell you? Died, yes--a strange case. Ran into the street at two o'clock one morning in his nights.h.i.+rt, screaming. Yes, they were still in the same building where you lived. He fell in the middle of the street and died. A man who got to him said he was raving on and on. About monkeys. Monkeys chasing him or beating him, I don't know. Yes, monkeys.

”Laziz was still a small boy then. He and his mother moved in with the mother's family in Abu Ghair, up the hill. Poor boy. Many years ago.”

We had walked Mr 'Odeh back to his afternoon geometry cla.s.s and were outside the school gate before Laeth said to me: ”Monkeys.”

”Strange,” I said.

The next day we visited our old apartment building. It looked small and shabby next to the modern edifices that now lined the street, and the little shop on the corner had become a supermarket and petrol station. We knocked at the downstairs apartment (Uncle Nabil had long since emigrated to Australia); the old man who answered told us that the two upstairs apartments were vacant, and gave us the keys. Climbing to the second floor, it struck me that the building stairwell was the only part of the whole town that hadn't changed in twenty years--the echoes of our footsteps, the dusty smell, the afternoon sunlight through dusty gla.s.s--I half expected to open our apartment door on the faded woven rug and dark, elderly china cabinets, to see my mother in the kitchen as she used to be when we came home from school, humming obsolete songs as she swept or washed dishes.

But the apartment was empty, sunlight lying silent on the dusty floor tiles, whitewashed walls echoing our footsteps. I went onto the tiny veranda behind the kitchen.

”For years and years,” I told Laeth, ”there was a big tin back here with a label that said 'Vegetable Ghee.' That's my most vivid memory of this place.”

”Don't you remember mum and dad screaming at each other, and dad bringing flowers later?” asked Laeth.

We had the keys to the Tarash's apartment, so out of curiosity we took a look.

”Watch out for monkeys,” Laeth said as the lock clicked open. We had debated the monkey question the night before, sitting under the pine trees in Grandfather's garden, breathing still night air perfumed with jasmine. Laeth had read that delusional episodes or images could be pa.s.sed subliminally within families, especially from parents to children.

”Probably Laziz picked up a delusional paranoid complex about monkeys from Mr Tarash, and combined it with the father-hating phase of the Oedipal cycle, resulting in the stories he told,” Laeth said. ”Later, Mr Tarash's complex must have blossomed into a fully-fledged psychotic episode, causing him to have a coronary or stroke.”

Laeth is a psychiatric intern; I never argue with him for fear of being psychoa.n.a.lysed. And anyway, the Tarash's apartment seemed to bear out his theory of perfectly normal mental illness. There were no signs of monkeys, Allah, or stairs that went up, up, up, up, up.

At least not until we came to Laziz's bedroom. It was a tiny room facing out over the fig trees and clotheslines in the backyard.

”Where are the Allah stairs, do you suppose?” I joked. And suddenly they were there, rising from the centre of the floor into a bright rectangle near the ceiling, rough stone steps that an intense radiance poured down, paling the sunlight.

As soon as Laeth and I let go of each other and I could think again, I waved my hands at them.