Falsipedies & Fibsiennes

By Ali Eteraz

Ranging from the Persian Gulf to the American South, from ancient Greece to pre-Islamic Arabia, Ali Eteraz's stories observe the clash of civilizations through the surrealist's monocle: lovers playing with Koranic numerology; the sorrows of the Minotaur; the innocence of a genie; a woman obsessed with wine and virgins; brothers caught in a national security dragnet. Sensual, fabulist, mystical, gothic, the stories in Falsipedies & Fibsiennes search for love and solidarity within madness and oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781550718836

Ali Eteraz

Ali Eteraz was born in Pakistan and has lived in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the United States. A graduate of Emory University and Temple Law School, he was selected for the Outstanding Scholar's Program at the United States Department of Justice and later worked in corporate litigation in Manhattan. He has published articles in Dissent, Foreign Policy, AlterNet, and altMuslim; and is a regular contributor to The Guardian UK.

Book preview

FALSIPEDIES

and

FIBSIENNES

ALI ETERAZ

Guernica - Essential Prose Series 106

Toronto • Buffalo • Lancaster (U.K.) 2014

for Razi

There never was a war that was not inward.

—Marianne Moore, In Distrust of Merits

The death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination.

—Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du mal

CONTENTS

The Woman in the Scorpion Abaya

A Lawyer in Islamistan

A Beautiful Woman

Honey

The Invasion of Mecca

The Monste

The Art of Becoming Snow

The Art of Becoming a Jinn

Volkodlak

The Conversion of Hajj Abdul Rahim al-Biloxi

The Hunter of Virgins

Tyranny

About the Author

THE WOMAN IN THE SCORPION ABAYA

Awoman with a large sequin scorpion on the back of her flowing black abaya started coming to the Lagoon, the mall on Amwaj Island in Bahrain.

Ishaq Rahman was a swarthy American of Pakistani descent, tall, with lightly tattooed arms, who lived in al-Firdaws Towers and spent a great deal of time at the mall. He went by the name of Aesch. He became intrigued by the woman in the scorpion abaya.

As he sat outside the Tea Club, drinking a brew of Silver Peony, Aesch watched the woman walking around the artificial lagoon. She kept the front of her abaya fully open, stepping forward in tight black leggings and silver heels. Her torso was slim, but her hips were big and full and sat on legs so thin that the knees were persistently knocking together from the weight they supported. (This was a popular body type along the Persian Gulf). Her face was round, with a pointy chin, and she wore heavy foundation to make herself appear plaster white, ceramic.

I have to find a way to talk to her, Aesch said to himself.

A lawyer turned painter, in his early thirties, twice divorced, he had come to the Gulf after his first and only exhibition in New York—a series of surrealist self-portraits juxtaposed with the faces of suicide bombers—had gotten reviewed by the papers not on the basis of artistic merit but whether they might be useful in reducing the radicalization of Muslim males. None of the paintings sold. The final straw came when the State Department offered to take him to at-risk Muslims around the world. Shamed and broke, he fled America and took a job with the Bahrain Foundation for the Arts. If he was going to be a state-sponsored artist, it would be for a foreign country.

One evening at the Tea Club, Aesch was sitting and enjoying a glass of mint lemonade when the woman in the scorpion abaya sat down diagonal to him and ordered a notoriously sticky basbousa. He noticed that after normally going bare-faced, today she had come in wearing a niqab—a gauzy veil across her nose and mouth. He wondered if its sudden appearance meant that she was inciting in the onlookers a desire to discover her. If so, he was glad, because such duplicity was usually the work of the lonely.

"Ana ma atakallum arabi," he said after weighing his words.

She looked up at him. "Law samaht?"

I said, I don’t speak Arabic, he repeated in English, smiling a little.

The joke made her laugh and she lowered her eyes. But you have good pronouncement. Her voice was deeper than he had expected, coming out of a clear throat.

Thank you. I am new here. But I am trying to learn.

You’re American, yes? How do you enjoy Bahrain?

It beats Doha.

This is right, she said, laughing. Please, I do not understand how Qatar get the World Cup. What will anyone do? Ride down up down on the escalator maybe? She covered her mouth with her hand and then realized there was cloth over it. Also, we have the Shi’a protests. That is always exciting!

"I have not seen you in a niqab before."

Sorry, she said while removing it. I do not normally wear, but I just come back from Saudi Arabia.

I am sorry to hear that. That place is hell. Bahrain should’ve never built that causeway.

Bahrain didn’t. Saudi gave it to us. So they can send their party boys. Or their tanks.

I won’t ever go to Saudi, he said.

Why not?

I’ve seen how the Saudis drive their cars!

This also made her laugh. Aesch grew silent. On account of the mystery that she gave off through her walk, through her clothes, through the way she pushed her hair back under the shayla, he had not expected their first conversation to be so casual. Soon, however, their silence grew awkward, as a pair of Bahraini men in starched white dishdashas passed by and sat down near them, lighting up cigarettes with cupped hands. Their presence made Aesch’s heart beat hard. He imagined them commenting to each other about how an outsider was trying to talk to one of their women. Had they already classified him among the Pakistanis and Indians of the world? Or could they tell he was an American and therefore outside the ambit of their revulsion?

You always walk around the lagoon, Aesch said loudly, so his New York accent was nice and apparent. I like it too, that lagoon.

So you notice? she said.

Your scorpion. It is hard to miss.

Do you know the scorpion? It is the one animal that kills itself instead of letting another kill it.

You have taught me something! Do you live nearby?

She shook her head, not offering anything further, regretting the somewhat revealing comment she had just made. He noticed her hesitation and pointed to al-Firdaws Towers.

I live there, he said. That is my balcony, second highest, facing the water. He dropped his hand as quickly as he raised it because the two onlookers had followed his finger and now knew where he lived.

That is very close, she said. You may be here very much. There was hope in her voice.

They sipped their drinks with purposive slowness, hoping to elongate an encounter that had begun so well and yet seemed condemned to end in estrangement. They were rescued, temporarily, by the capitalist zealotry of the Filipino waiter, who came and asked if they wanted another drink. The joint affirmation of the refill felt like a conspiracy and they smiled at one another. They talked about the lights in the lagoon, the way it looked like a bowl of dark milk, or mystical wine. She said it was her first time visiting Amwaj. This admission allowed him to inquire about her person. He learned that she had attended the top schools in Bahrain and gone west to study in Paris, but circumstances had brought her back a few years before. Her name was Maryam bint Mudatthir.

Do you miss Paris?

Very much, she said.

Aesch wanted to hear more but didn’t press her. The men were staring quite intently now. Were it not for his latent fear of Arab mystique—which led him to think that any man in a dishdasha could cancel his visa at any time—he would have confronted them. But then Maryam asked him a question that sank his heart because it seemed to suggest that the endless staring by the two Bahrainis had gotten to her.

Are you American, basically?

Basically?

Yes, she said. "I mean, asli . . ."

He shifted in his seat. It was one of the first Arabic words he had learned. Asli meant originally. It was a favourite question of the Bahrainis. Whenever previously confronted with it, he had lied, having been everything from an Iranian to a Turk to an anglicized Saudi—everything but what he was. However, he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her.

Originally, I am from Pakistan. I moved to America when I was ten.

She laughed. "You had to think. But it is good you did not pretend to be something. Some Pakistanis, they say they are Arab. They even begin wearing the ghutra and dishdasha. And they become so Islamic, like Wahhabi. Ukh!"

Maybe they are ashamed, he said, not looking at her.

Pakistanis are very smart, she said. They make the nuclear bomb.

They spoke some more, and then she called for the bill. He longed for the moment when he might see her again—the disapproval of strangers be damned. But then, just as quickly as she had enlivened his lust, she trampled it.

It was nice to meet you! I must go and make prepare for my husband.

Likewise, he said. Not my husband I mean, I don’t have one. Never mind.

The villas, she said, with red spots of shame drifting in her cheeks like buoys in the Gulf. We are renting a villa for winter.

Aesch watched her go and thought how he would have to avoid her in the future when she would be out with her husband, who was no doubt a wealthy and powerful Bahraini if he could afford one of the villas for the entire winter.

And yet, the distance he would have to keep from this woman—a separation that was imposed by the protocols of convention and modesty and morality—suddenly heightened his feelings for her in every way. It would be quite an achievement to be with such a woman, he thought—and fell asleep.

* * *

For a week Aesch watched her from his balcony. She strolled around the lagoon with her husband—always in the afternoon, when the air was still warm and tinged with the orange and gold of the Gulf during winter.

Her husband was a bulky man, more muscular than chubby, who wore dark T-shirts and shorts and gold-rimmed sunglasses. She, meanwhile, persisted with that scorpion abaya, left open at the front, though lately her tights only reached mid-calf. Her husband’s presence allowed her to be freer with her body.

Aesch started noticing certain patterns in the couple’s daily excursion: the way she watched the sunset from the bridge over the lagoon while he withdrew to a bench and smoked; the way she slowed down to inspect the bougainvillea vines that the gardeners in their blue overalls were always curating; the way the couple took their tea at the Lebanese shisha bar on the courtyard above the Tea Club. There was a repetition, a ritual, in their actions, and it suggested that they had been married for some time.

These scenes became black and white drafts that littered his bed until he was tucking his feet under them. He couldn’t bring himself to add colour to them. Such a thing would lead him to imbue the paintings with weight, with substance, and then he would begin living within the illusions without ever having experienced the real.

The winter deepened. The pitying clouds rubbed their grey emollients upon a sky that spent the summer getting scorched. The Western holiday season brought the expat visitors. They tended to move between the rentable condos, the marina and the mall. The older British women in skirts and slippers, the younger ones in sarongs and flip-flops, led around their bemused friends who were pointing and smiling, their skins pink and red like foetal pigs. For many of them this was a first experience of the Middle East—and an enjoyable one because, in its neutered antiseptic calm, the Gulf was no more startling than going to a suburb in America, while the presence of dark-skinned people in positions of subservience still permitted one to go back home and report about the Third World.

With more people around, Aesch felt he could venture to the mall and be less conspicuous. He took a marker and went to the bridge where Maryam watched the sunset. At the spot where she liked to stand, he wrote the Arabic word hubb on the railing. And then he rushed back to the balcony and waited for the sunset to arrive, for Maryam to discover his game.

Gauging from the length she lingered on the railing, he was certain she had seen it.

Over the next two and a half weeks, he wrote a different word each day—the nineteen words for love in Arabic. From tarrafouq to wajd, from gharam to ouns. He surprised himself. In previous romantic dealings he’d always been circumspect about that word. What prompted the change with Maryam? There is something old-fashioned about her, he told himself. It was as if she was caught on the cusp of some unknown transition, which imbued her with a strange charm.

The first time Maryam saw the calligraphy she thought it was just some amusing graffiti. She almost showed her husband. But as the pattern became evident, she was glad she had kept the discovery to herself.

Each day she read a new synonym and smiled. And to remind herself that this was not just an astonishing dream, she would stand upon the bridge and rub her palm against the railing until the ink soaked into her skin. She liked the thought that a man was coating her body in love … in love … in love.

Around day fifteen, realizing that the end of the messages was imminent, Maryam became melancholic. She thought of a way to make a gesture of appreciation and came up with the idea of leaving him a miniature Quran, smaller than her palm, at the railing. She had bought it in Mecca.

Aesch saw the offering she’d left and went to retrieve it. He opened it and saw that it was bookmarked at Chapter 19. The name of the sura was Maryam. He looked to the sky and smiled. She had taught him something else.

Thus, with the epiphanic telepathy that seems to be the purview of the newly in love, Aesch and Maryam both turned up at the Tea Club on the twentieth day, sitting near one another on separate golden brocade sofas, but back to back out of caution. There were a few patrons: some watching football on the flat-screen; others moving across the shelf sniffing tea, much to the ire of the young owner.

I am ordering Jasmine Dragon, Aesch said into his hand.

I will do same, she replied.

I like to hold my cup in my left hand.

I can copy.

When they received their white pots, they waited the requisite four minutes of steeping time indicated by the tiny pink hourglass and then poured the rose red confection. They raised their cups, imagining that they were drinking from the same primordial chalice and that their lips rimmed at the same place and at the same time. And then they set their cup down and looked at the ancient Confucian man etched in blue and red on its surface and sought to travel through him into his doppelgangers on other cups around the room and see from different vantage points the face of their near-far beloved. Eventually, the lovers abandoned the psychic approach for a more conventional and tactical geometry. They both turned their bodies towards the outside window, where they could see their faces reflected on the sun-streaked and dust-smattered glass, more muddy shadow than crystalline daguerreotype.

Should we meet in Dubai?

Can’t leave the country without husband’s consent.

Here then, he said.

Drop your key near me.

Aesch lowered the key at his feet and then back-heeled it towards Maryam, under the sofas, where it slipped beneath the edge of the Isfahani carpet. She put her foot over it.

He paid and left the cafe, taking a circuitous route home through Floating City and then past the marina where sat the enormous yachts belonging to the wealthiest men in the Gulf. They had been here for weeks now, stuck because the silt had risen in the lagoon. In each of these natatory sculptures sitting idly before him, Aesch saw something of Maryam. This steel hull was her rump; that aluminum superstructure was the scorpion abaya; that varnished teak cabin was her red mouth; the glinting chrome was her alabaster skin.

So, as he walked, his mind was only on light, supple things. He made eyes at an ash blue drongo sitting in a branch wearing its heavy mascara. He identified in the shrub an olive-eyed dragonfly with paddle-shaped wings, its blue stick-like abdomen erect to three times the length of its body. He composed in his head a double abecedarian about Maryam, in which the first line started with the first letter in her name and the last line ended with the last letter. Through these gestures he could forget that he was seducing a married woman. The obscenity of his hunger became an innocence.

She came that night, wearing the scorpion abaya with lingerie underneath and saying things in French. She brought new scents, so unlike the pink bubble gum and razor-sharp chemicals of Western girls. Top notes of saffron, heart notes of rose and cedar, base notes of henna and frankincense, all of which, after love making, turned into an animalistic black musk.

He became fond of her. All his life women had tried to enter him, using love as a letter opener to see what was inside. And when a little peek revealed there was nothing, in their disbelief they stuffed their fists deeper, permanently mangling his edges and leaving him misshapen. Maryam didn’t seem interested in—or capable of— removing the waxen sigil with which he sealed the envelope of his soul. She had no magic—dark or goodly—to call upon. She seemed curious, sure, but not enough to prod him. She seemed passionate, but she never made tedious inquiries about the future of their sentiment. And she had a big fulsome rump, which she was eager to turn and present so there was never a need to engage in emotional gymnastics, like role play, to augment the erotic.

Their affair carried on for two weeks. Then she had to go back to her life somewhere else in Bahrain. She said she didn’t know when she’d get a chance to come back to the island.

I don’t want to be in touch, she said, squeezing his hand. My husband has a sick sense of vengeance.

Aesch laughed. I have a blue passport. He can’t touch me. And yet, he felt unmanly hiding behind America like that.

* * *

Claire was a Frenchwoman at the Foundation where Aesch worked. She was a colleague with whom he maintained a sexy friendship. Now 40, she had arrived in the region as a 23-year-old, carrying a copy of The Exotic True Life Stories of Isabel Burton, Aimée Dubucq de Rivéry, Jane Digby and Isabelle Eberhardt and in search of an Arab prince. This simply meant that she was available for any mildly wealthy man with a Muslim name who wanted a temporary companion. One has to be loose to find love, she liked to say. Playing revolving door with emotion had left her a bit beaten. Her magenta nail polish was often chipped and she had a