Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser

Author:Amjad Nasser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
Published: 2014-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

VII

Hamiya came first, but once the stone wall had been built it wasn’t long before the first shop opened in the downtown area. This detail is important: apart from that, society vouches for the rest of the details, which are hard to enumerate. Your father knows how the covered market began. Before that there were shops scattered here and there, built out of concrete blocks that were not commonly used at the time. He also knows the owner of the covered market, which was named after the man. You used to make forays into that shady, tunnel-like, half-dark market, which was hardly wide enough for someone going in to squeeze past someone coming out (so much so that men and women sometimes contrived to meet there, in the knowledge that they could safely come into close contact in a way that outside the market would have been scandalous enough to merit a flogging). Close to the gateway to the covered market, the Black Iris café began as a wooden stall selling tea and coffee. The stone building was built later on the same spot. You heard this detail from your father, because you knew the café only when it was already thriving.

It was the first café you sat in as a young man. You would read there. Smoke. You’ll never forget the metal board with the name ‘Mr Ihsan al-Shatti’ written in a modern naskh script. You and your peers all thought that Ihsan was only a woman’s name, but then you discovered it could apply to both males and females. And here was the proof: Mr Ihsan al-Shatti, whom you knew as a man of medium height, stout, with a white face and short soft hair parted to the right and streaked with grey. He shaved once or twice a week and always wore a white shirt and tightly fitted black trousers. He was helped in the café by his son Taysir, who was four or five years older than you. To be free of the misery of school and school books, you would have liked to be Taysir. His age. With his freedom to smoke. His ability to buy a cinema ticket from his own money. To work all day alongside his tolerant, easy-going father. Your father wasn’t cranky or irascible. But when it came to studying and learning he was stricter than his chess partner, Mr Shatti.

The café was still in the same place. It’s true it had grown shabbier, but the metal board, penned by your father, was still at the entrance, coated with soot from the exhaust pipes of vehicles and the emissions of small workshops that were holding out against the ravages of modernisation. There was no sign of Mr Ihsan al-Shatti. There was a man of about the same height, the same stoutness and the same complexion, with the same hairstyle. It was Taysir. He saw you, stared at you a while, but did not seem to recognise you.

When you were living in

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