Carnival by Rawi Hage Page B

need, she had no one, no family to take care of her. That night she fed me and never looked me in the eyes, but towards the end of the evening, when the kids went to sleep, we both retreated in silence to the bedroom. Her husband’s clothing still hung against the wall. I was nervous. I had never touched a woman before. But here she was all naked under the covers of the bed. I decided to get under the sheets with my clothes on. But she stopped me and started to undress me and touch my chest, looking me straight in the eyes. When my organ got strong, she held it in her hand and directed me slowly. She knew that I didn’t know how. The Sheikh, I thought, must have briefed her. I ejaculated almost as soon as I penetrated her. She pulled me to her side and said, If you come back alive, this is your home and this is where more pleasure will come your way.
    During the battle, I pitied those poor Australians. They threw themselves onto the beaches and under our guns, and we massacred them by the thousands. We were triumphant . . . Long live Ataturk, everyone shouted, the mighty commander who has saved our land!
    As my father’s carpet reached the ceiling, I looked at the shores and I ejaculated in between the two colliding histories and felt fortunate to be alive, lucky to have water and to be able to clean myself after these horrific battles that leave you smeared with mud, blood, wire cuts, and bruises.
    I finally slept. I woke up in the late afternoon. The sun was already starting to weaken and prepare for an early retirement into the sea, or behind a mountain and a cloud or a silhouette of a couple holding hands and cones of ice cream, or bags of peanuts or bananas to feed the monkey urges inside them and make them hop from one palm tree to the next, until they reached the shore and then held hands again and shared more peanuts. I still had a couple of hours before my shift, and I hesitated between leaving the bed and brushing my teeth, extending my arm to the nearby bookshelf to arbitrarily grab a book and read, or completing the fantasy that I’d started and spreading my semen against the sunset and the crooked, wobbly shore. I read. Then I stood up and brushed my teeth and relieved myself from the burden of liquid I’d amassed during my day’s sleep while the kids played and shouted in the neighbourhood’s backyards.
    Around six in the evening, I poured myself a glass of red juice. All was quiet; the large spider had captured a moth. I turned off the light and decided to leave before the spider struck with its fangs and extracted the liquid from its mummified prey. One big meal is enough for one night of feeding, I thought. Too much food will make you fat as doctors, complacent as accomplished writers, sluggish like Roman orgy-goers, round like dictators’ wives, wobbly like elephants,circular like tents, spherical like lanterns, and cylindrical like machine operators.
    But I also left because the books were starting to move and the mice in my place were getting restless in between the covers. Before the characters started to leave the pages for fear of their ears being nibbled on or losing their toes to those rodents’ teeth, I went down to the basement to prepare my ship for the evening sail.
    RAIN
    I DROVE MY car through a night that was still and calm. The light rain wet the asphalt and the roads shone with the grey shades of people in long, slippery shadows. I could see the colour of my car moving above the water beside a floating Jesus and a flight of wild geese. I drove. It was a surprisingly quiet night; usually with the rain come the slugs, worms, and monstrous umbrellas, resuscitated from inside women’s bags, yawning open above men in hats. With the rain, people surface at the edges of the sidewalk, staring into the puddles like hesitant suicides. What has happened tonight, I thought. Where are those seekers of dryness, those god-fearing souls fleeing the apocalyptic floods, where are the wetted carcasses