Arabesques by Anton Shammas

Author:Anton Shammas
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

The Teller: Mayflower I

Still, writers are not terribly reliable as

witnesses for either the defense or the

prosecution. They are also not to be relied

upon as lovers. They lack patience. They seem

to have certain difficulty in taking pleasure

from what they are doing. Like chess players,

they are inwardly preparing themselves for the

inevitable end game.

Walter Abish, How German Is It

Iowa City, September 2

I left my room at the Hotel Vaneau only to visit Père Lachaise. Nadia and her husband, as I later found out, hadn’t come to the airport because she had been hospitalized that day for a suspected ectopic pregnancy, and she underwent surgery the following day while I prowled the paved walks of Père Lachaise. In my search for Proust’s tomb, I arrived at Division 85, as it was marked in the map of the cemetery given to me by the guard at the gate. Skirting the columbarium, I found myself near what at first glance looked like a small Muslim cemetery, surrounded by a green hedge. Two layers of black marble, the work of Lecreux Frères, formed the tombstone of one Mahmoud Al-Hamshari, a PLO representative, who—according to the gilded French engraved on the marble—was born in the village of Em Khaled the twenty-ninth of August, 1939, and died in Paris on the ninth of January, 1973. A verse from the Koran at the head of the tombstone promised, in elevated Arabic, eternal life in the world to come to those who died for their country. Beyond the hedge, ten graves to the west, Marcel Proust lay buried. It must have been the French sense of humor that granted both of them, the man of the lost country and the man of the temps perdu, nearly identical graves: Lerendu Cie. had bestowed upon Proust, about fifty years before the death of Al-Hamshari, two simple layers of shining black marble. Fifty years separate the two lost times, the two darknesses. But both are equally lost under the flowers of remembrance.

I stood there by the green hedge and thought about Yehoshua Bar-On, whom I had called from a café not far from the main gate of the cemetery. I had apparently disturbed his Schlafstunde. I thought about Shlomith, and about the two of us, as possible protagonists in a story by Bar-On. Two lost characters whose fate, on paper and otherwise, is in his hands, at the mercy of his whims. But he will never put himself at my mercy, because he is off limits for me, beyond the limits of my life and my writing. A restricted zone of sorts. Then I imagined a parting from Shlomith, and I said to myself, Well, everything has come to the end that was destined by its beginning, and nothing but a squeezed honeycomb separates the beginning from the end. And under the black marble lay the two lost men, each in the darkness of his own tomb, a Jew of Time and an Arab of Place. And apart from the almost matched graves

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