A writer from Cairo imagines a chance encounter between two writers in Prague enamored of Kafka.
Mansoura Ez-Eldin
Translated from Arabic by Fatima El-Kalay
Imagine a wooden seat in the front courtyard of a house on the banks of the Vltava, close to Charles Bridge. Upon this seat, a plump woman sat, her hair dancing in the cold spring breeze, her attire black and austere. The woman was deeply pondering a tiny space of ground between her slightly spread feet, her mind blank, her heart beating fast.
Near her was a man of similar age with dark hair, sharp features, and sullen eyes. He did not look at her but stared at the ground like her. Still, it felt to him that she was within his field of view.
They were alone together in the early morning sunlight. The woman was there from Cairo, on a visit to one of the cities of her dreams; the man had flown in from Seattle two days earlier to participate in a literary festival in a city he never grew tired of roaming.
Both were writers, so it was not strange that they met while each was separately visiting Kafka’s House, the Kafka Museum, to be precise. Until then, neither of them knew of the other nor the similarities between them; each was but a ghost who could only guess that their partner existed, without their paths having crossed or them being introduced.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?”
This was a well-worn phrase that the man from Seattle used to try to begin a conversation with the woman next to him, a woman lost in nothingness.
She nodded but didn’t lift her eyes from the space between her feet. The man almost lost interest in small talk with a woman whose features didn’t give away her ethnicity or nationality.
She straightened up and came back at him with perfect English: “I’ll write about this moment one day. There are moments when time thickens until I can almost feel its weight and texture. I stare at it and find that it is staring back. Such moments have inhabited me for a long time. I can only get rid of them by emptying them out on paper. Here and now, I see time as I’ve never seen it before. I see it embodied in the space between my feet.”
“You’re a writer?! Me too. I visit Prague regularly, and every time I come, my feet bring me to this spot as soon as I place my bags in the hotel room.”
“This is my first visit. But would you believe me if I told you that I see Prague in a recurring dream and that right now, it is exactly as I dreamed of it before?”
He didn’t reply, but the curiosity in his eyes compelled her to continue.
“In my dream, I’m writing a story where I’m both a spectator and participant in its events. It’s about a Russian woman, a writer who lives in Prague, who in turn is writing about a little girl who has survived a massacre. A pianist lives with the Russian writer. In the dream, I want to choose a nationality for him but decide to postpone this until later! There is also an old man in the dream, who walks back and forth, nonstop, on Charles Bridge. I follow his movements from the balcony of the Russian writer in a building overlooking the Vltava.
“In his never-ending steps, the old man stares intently at his footprints, as if staring would help him keep his balance, before staring at the stretch of river on either side of the bridge.”
“Sounds more like a movie than a dream!”
“Perhaps, but the geography of the city is very clear in my mind, and it’s a carbon copy of what I see on this visit.”
Since her arrival, she’d been walking for hours, back and forth, on Charles Bridge, lingering for a long time parallel to the Vltava, in search of an old building that she saw in her dream, including the apartment of the Russian writer. Certain that it existed, she waited for it, with all its details.
She walked without fatigue. Her thoughts were of an old man watching her from the balcony of an apartment in a very old building. His back was to the 60-year-old writer inside, who was engrossed in a marathon of words and thoughts, and to the pianist — of unspecified origins — seated by a piano close to the writer, gazing at his fingers stretched out upon the keys, trying to overcome the fear that he had forever lost his ability to play.
The old man wasn’t paying attention to what was happening behind him. He wasn’t thinking about the problem of his two companions. He only watched the person who spanned the bridge unrelentingly, certain that he was with her in a previous life and that if it weren’t for his illness, he couldn’t have chosen another activity to kill time better than this ritualistic walking from one bank of the Vltava to the other.
What if we chose the name Camelia for the Cairene sitting in the front courtyard of the Kafka Museum? And Adam, for the man from Seattle standing close by and listening to her?
I’m late for this? I know, but things like this can be forgiven in games of the imagination. Camelia told Adam about things she hadn’t even shared with her nearest and dearest. But she kept to herself the secret that was simultaneously a lesson in empathy and a painful slap. Both the lesson and the slap were centered on the seed of a child, growing inside her for six weeks before she took the hardest decision ever of getting rid of it. She spent only a few hours in the hospital and left without any outward change, though she knew that she would never again return to who she was. She believed then that a literal hole, not a figurative one, had been dug into her. In the nights that followed, she was besieged by nightmares and afflicted by weakness for which the doctor couldn’t find a physiological cause. She abandoned writing and spent days loitering in the streets of Cairo until she was crushed by exhaustion, so that she needed to sit down in a bus station or on a seat in a public park, gazing at the spot between her feet, or contemplating a crow snuggling in a neighboring tree.
Camelia sat in a park called Hurriya across from the Opera House, her thoughts astray. It was a few weeks before her trip to Prague. She took out her cell phone and took a selfie; the woman looking back at her from the screen was unrecognizable. She was shocked by the sorrow overshadowing her eyes, by her droopy eyelids, and the premature wrinkles invading her tired face. At 39, Camelia looked alone, exhausted, and ten years older than her actual age.
This wasn’t an image but a precise kick that toppled whatever reason and composure remained within her.
Let’s now imagine a violent kick that made a little five-year-old girl go flying, so her head crashed into a wall, all this without her understanding what crime she had committed. Let’s remember this kick, for it’s important in our little game. Camelia never forgot it since it knocked her down, teaching her that the worst slap came when we least expected it. She believed that she only wrote to understand this small incident from her early childhood.
“Perhaps I write to give reasons for life’s unexpected collisions, for the kicks that I received from people I never hurt in any way and who I never imagined my mere existence was so troublesome to,” she told Adam, shrugging her shoulders to seem as if she didn’t care.
He listened, then told her that he had dreamed of becoming a writer ever since he read a story by H. P. Lovecraft as a boy, or rather, ever since he saw Lovecraft’s name on the cover of a book.
What an amazing name! How he shivered as he remembered that distant moment!
“Lovecraft: the craft of love.” It dawned on him then that writing was the very craft of love that was implied here. It called out to him like a seductive siren on a rock as he made his way to an Ithaca that didn’t exist.
He spent the following night in a sort of delicious quiver, devouring Lovecraft’s stories while dreaming of outdoing their creativity.
None of this would seem strange if we assumed that this particular Adam was the grandson of a Middle Eastern refugee who married a Greek sailor and moved with him from one port to another until they settled in Seattle. As you know, all things are allowed in a game of suppositions, and we are merely playing right now.
What business do we have with storytelling anyway? Let’s leave it to the writers, busy with their meaningful tales. Let’s immerse ourselves, instead, in things that may help us wrestle time or ignore its iron grip on our necks.
No one would understand all this except these three: a woman haunted by the memory of a certain old kick, a memory that is like a phantom gnawing at her nerves and gradually expanding a hollow within her; a man who is the progeny of a massacre survivor; and a seaman who grew tired of travel and settled in a cold city, surrendering to a life that promised little.
“The dream and the nightmare are spun from the same thread; my dreams and nightmares are from the same fabric. With my words, I have set traps for myself. I was the hunter and the hunted; Lovecraft was just an excuse to embrace fear. In my dreams, a little girl with the eyes of my grandmother chases me, a small exhausted child, on the march to death. She does not cry, nor does she scream; she only looks at me with eyes filled with terror of the whole world, its oldest and most primal fear. My grandmother wasn’t the daughter of a massacre, she was its orphan.”
Adam said these words to Camelia as if speaking to himself. When he received no reply, he fell silent, staring at a portrait of Kafka hanging in the museum’s entrance.
As a child, he often opened the atlas, staring at the world map in search of his grandmother’s birthplace, following a route and imagining her departure from it to Beirut, where she met his grandfather and married him. He would also shade in the city of Thessaloniki, where his grandfather was born, with a red pen, marking every port his eyes fell upon, for he liked to imagine that his grandfather passed through them all.
The grandfather had no difficulty as long as he could talk about his past and the places he visited or lived in. But when it came to the grandmother, things were always subject to imagination, leaving the grandson like someone lost in a dark forest.
Adam had thought that his next story could be about a “survivor” of a disaster. He would wake to find himself amidst the rubble, then isolated in a forest of oak trees, not knowing exactly what had happened to him or what brought him to the darkness and dampness of the forest. In this forest, in an atmosphere overcome by shadows, where there is no place for true light, the survivor sensed a dark ghost that resembled him, a ghost walking on the paths, between the trees, without growing weary. From a distance came the whistle of the wind and a rumble that warned of danger, as if the universe, by capturing him, had created an invisible storm of sound.
Adam thought about the protagonist of his potential story. His image crystallized into Adam’s grandmother in her old age as she hummed songs in a language he didn’t know, songs closer to funeral hymns that would pull her into a shell every time, isolating her from everyone.
She told no one at all what she went through. The life she was allowed began the moment she met the Greek sailor, who was crazy for her, she traveled with him, and they were inseparable until he passed away. All of the above is open to speculations, speculations that the child Adam obsessed over as he ensconced himself in the basement of the family home.
In the basement, Adam learned all he needed to learn about life.
He realized, for instance, that the ideal way to overcome fear was to surrender to it absolutely, to align with it, so that it became you, and you became it — one body. Only then, when it permeated you, would it lose its authority over you, becoming a comical monster without greatness or the power to scare.
In the dark basement, he stared at the face of his fears, and his pores absorbed them. He laid on his back, waiting for his make-believe demons to take shape before him and escort him to everything that terrified him. But he only heard the muffled sounds of rats, hiding in the darkness, listening to his thoughts and his silence.
He dived into the worlds of Lovecraft, which seemed very distant from his reality at the time, but he nevertheless chose to live in and believe in them. Like Alice falling into the rabbit hole and landing in Wonderland, he spent his time in the darkness of the cramped, cluttered basement, covered in dust, and became proficient at exploring the hidden caverns of his own self.
He once read about a primitive tribe that would put their little ones in closed tombs for hours, killing their children’s fear by immersing them in it. The article never mentioned the fate of the children who experienced this. He never found out how they lived their lives after their temporary “death.” He only knew that the child who slept in a dark basement for the first time was changed after lying side by side with his nightmares and taming them.
In the silence of the basement, his mind was enlightened to the thought that the worst of evils are, in fact, planted within us, and that ghosts and devils are exaggerated to scare us and mask the evil that is hiding in our hearts.
Those who poisoned his grandmother’s life and exterminated her family weren’t ghosts or devils but humans. A new fear invaded him — that life would force him to bring to the surface his dark side.
His grandmother never ever told of the atrocities of her childhood. It became like a talisman hidden in the depths of a vault. She would sit him next to her and sing, in an impassioned voice, songs that he didn’t understand while his mind wandered as he imagined possible scenarios of what she concealed and refused to confess.
He would see her in his mind’s eye — small, trembling, holding her breath in a bedroom closet, pretending to be dead until the danger passed. He liked to imagine that she pretended to be dead for just a short while, after which she lived pretending to be alive.
In her assumed hideout, the wailing of her mother reached her, and the screaming of her sister mingled with the sound of beatings and harsh orders given for the abusers to depart. Surrounded by the smell of smoke, she came out of her hiding place with a shivering body and eyes that could not see. She could barely perceive the corpses of the women in her family — naked, drenched in blood. The flames swallowed everything in her path, a hallway choking in dense black smoke, the frenzy of flames competing with the smoke in a color the little girl would never forget. Until her dying day, she refrained from wearing orange in all its shades and avoided fire at all costs.
She stood for a moment, hesitating between falling into the arms of her dead loved ones and igniting with them, or escaping. The scorch of the fire decided for her. She rushed back to the bedroom and jumped from the broken window, running without knowing distance or time, until she grew weak, and her tears began to fall heavily, and she cried for everyone who had been killed since the beginning of time.
In the basement, too, Adam experienced his first sexual encounter. The girl was a few years older than him. She guided him to the hidden parts of her body and his, leading him to pleasure in haste. She was an irritable, impatient girl, growing angry when he came too soon. He thought for a while that impatience and anger were two linked characteristics of women during intimate moments. The girl’s uptightness created in him a fear of sex that resulted in years of self-doubt and anxiety that he would never be able to satisfy a woman.
He often thought about the girl in the basement, seeing the phantom of a young woman with coppery hair, a face almost entirely hidden by freckles, and eyes confused in color between pale green and hazel. But the hair, like a cloud over a body that was as taut as the sky, is all that remained of her in his mind. He spent years conjuring her as she left him, in a silence that was more like a scolding. She put her clothes on quietly and left without once turning round to him while he was still lying down, hiding behind a cigarette, pretending to be engrossed in his smoke and staring at the ceiling.
The basement light was certainly not good, and accordingly, it wasn’t clear if her hair shone radiantly; it was just that he only remembered it as being so, swaying behind her to her dancing steps. He would never remember this teenage girl except with her back to him, as if repelled by him and leaving him for good.
Shortly thereafter, she moved to a different city, and he never saw her again. Still, he continued to see her in every woman with the same hair color and remained sensitive to any gesture of someone turning away from him.
He didn’t know why he told Camelia this old story or why he told her the secrets of his childhood and adolescence as they sat together in the front courtyard of the Kafka Museum. All he knew was that the conversation thread extended between them smoothly and spontaneously. It was as if they were each competing to see which of them was more courageous in laying their selves bare and exposing the depths of their fears.
The sun appeared behind the clouds. The breeze stirred the palm fronds. The hoopoe pecked the grass with the confidence of a fool. Camelia sat on a bench in Hurriya Park, her eyes intoxicated. She remembered sitting elsewhere, in the courtyard of a house on the banks of Vltava, and an old memory that renewed itself and chased her wherever she turned. The park, though almost terrifying, was her refuge whenever she felt distressed and wanted to drown inside herself. Ever since she sat here weeks before her trip to Prague, when she stared at her selfie on her cell phone, she has felt an affinity to this marble seat so securely fastened to the ground of a public park, a park rarely noticed by pedestrians between Qasr el-Nil Bridge and Galaa Bridge, or rogue cars in front of the Opera House.
She closed her eyes and was confronted by a black hole expanding inside her body. It consumed first her uterus, then her ovaries, then her liver and kidneys. She opened her eyes, shivered, and stared at the receding clouds, scared that the hole would grow and expel her heart from its hollow space. But the clouds formed the image of a crawling child, so she avoided looking upward.
She noticed that the park was almost empty of strolling people. The sounds of the street outside reached her. A bird, whose name she didn’t know, chirped. She looked to her right and found the apparition of a dark man with grim eyes sitting next to her. She said, addressing him, in the hope that her words could erase the image of the child and the black hole.
“Quite often, I feel that I’m not a woman of flesh and blood, but an idea that a writer came up with, an idea upon which she ruminated, without wanting to deepen, expand, or even write, a light sketch of a painting difficult to complete. I write in search of my own completion, eager that the passing idea that is me be transformed into a tangible entity with real presence.”
She then added: “It isn’t that I borrow the lives of my characters and mix them with myself, but rather that my life is borrowed and not mine, nor does it resemble me, as if I took it from a hurrying passerby. It’s as if I left the child I was and the woman I was meant to be in an old place, a dark corner, collecting dust.
“On train trip after train trip across European cities, I became overwhelmed with the feeling that I was living the life of another woman. I would watch the passing forests, lakes, and mountains from the window of the train, and the feeling that this life was borrowed would increase in me, and I would become more detached from it.
“I am not supposed to be here! I would say to myself throughout the month that I was there, but then I remembered that this sentence was the destructive title of my very life since the beginning. I have always been possessed with the feeling that I am always and forever in the wrong place.”
When she didn’t receive a response, she pondered on how writing at its essence is like chasing a mirage, toying with it, inventing it even. It was transforming a certain reality into deception or believing the delusion that a mirage resembles reality and awaits us to quench our thirst with its spattering waters.
She turned to the right once more. The apparition with the dark hair and grim eyes dissipated, proving he was an illusion. She looked around her and noticed that the few remaining park-goers were watching her with astonishment before pretending in embarrassment that they were busy with other things.
Sitting on her bench in Hurriya Park, Camelia closed her eyes again and raised her head. Visions came to her — a tumultuous flood of images and scenes. She saw another sky that was more like a projection screen, displaying dancing carnivals; an orchestra playing nonstop, horses prancing to its tunes; children running happily; lit fires around her; people listening to endless stories, their staring eyes reflecting the burning flames.
She immersed herself deeper in the successive images and saw herself as a young woman on a dark balcony in the arms of a man twenty years her senior, then after a few moments, on the same balcony but in broad daylight. She sat, embracing an infant that clung to her while she was busy watching the carnival on the screen in the heavens. The scene then changed, and the air of festivity disappeared. All of a sudden, there was a carriage drawn by galloping horses that cut through the sky, then vanished like a burning comet as it made its way toward Camelia. From the window of the carriage, a powerful hand extended and reached out to snatch her baby away from her.
Camelia was roused from her imaginative reverie with mixed feelings — panic at the thought of her baby being snatched from her arms, then relief at him not existing in the first place. The relief was followed by sadness at losing him before he even was.
She raised her eyes to the sky and contemplated the shapes formed in the clouds. This time she saw vague formations that didn’t look like anything in particular, but then, with scrutiny, she found what looked like a mare with a filly next to her. They were like a mother and her little one walking side by side, just as Camelia used to walk with Mama Dawlat on brief errands, shopping, or visiting one of her friends. These visits were full of endless warm gossip in a ritual of drinking Turkish coffee that was always rounded off with Mama Dawlat reading coffee grounds or tarot cards for her friends. In those moments, Camelia would watch her mother in awe, as if she, all of a sudden, had magical powers, even if her predictions weren’t always right. It was enough that her friends held their breaths, waiting to hear what their friend, who learned to read horoscopes from her Nubian nanny, would say.
On her way home, Mama Dawlat might tell her daughter the reason she chose the name Camelia for her. She might promise to teach her how to read coffee grounds and tarot cards when she grew up. No matter how the mother’s conversations varied, they were always at their warmest and most intimate moments. In the street, as they walked together, Mama Dawlat would be her most tender self, as if something at home would chain her, creating a barrier between her and her little girl.
She called her Camelia after the beautiful forties actress. When they sat together watching the star in the movie Amar Arbatashar, “Full Moon Beauty,” little Camelia felt that the name she shared with the actress was an act of wicked irony from her mother. It didn’t match reality — the forties actress was just a pretty face with no talent worth mentioning. That was consolation enough, for it didn’t reduce the outstanding difference between our average protagonist and her seductive namesake. The latter’s real name was Lillian Cohen, while Mama Dawlat and her friends called the little girl Melia.
The mother didn’t like this actress specifically. She had only watched two of her movies. But she spent her adolescence collecting photos and information about her from celebrity magazines for no reason other than liking that the beautiful actress was involved with the director Ahmed Salem.
Let’s say that her core infatuation was with Ahmed Salem himself, the most sexually attractive man in her opinion. She often wished she belonged to his era and had met him. Her interest in Camelia, the actress, was not genuine, then, but an accessory to her teenage infatuation with a man she never encountered except through old photographs and in black-and-white scenes in rare movies that nobody remembered. She knew nothing about him except things she read, the details of which were entirely dishonorable. He was the antihero who carried within him the seeds of self-destruction, igniting with his own hand the wood that would later burn him. Since her youth, she had been enamored with this type, her favorite actors being the ones who excelled in playing this kind of character, let alone it being embodied in a real person away from the silver screen.
Hers was a dangerous adolescence that led her to marriage at 20 to a man who was closest in resemblance to the man of her dreams, the gambler.
Between a dreamy mother from another era and an ill-tempered father who saw his daughter’s absentmindedness and the slowness of her movements as signs of mental retardation, Camelia lived, waiting for the next kick from a father who was transformed through episodes of insane anger into a terrifying creature who didn’t resemble what his daughter considered fathers to be.
The fact that the kick that sent her flying into the air when she was five years old was never repeated didn’t make Camelia’s fears subside, nor did it convince her at all to abandon her panic every time someone lifted their arm or suddenly moved their foot. The reason for this was that her father substituted kicks with a variety of other physical punishments, sometimes light, mostly painful, a variety that left Camelia always feeling that she was falling from a height.
After all these years, she often woke from her sleep with the feeling of falling downward, hurtling toward a bottomless pit. Other times she could almost feel her body flying in the air until her head crashed into a wall. Hundreds of times, the kick was repeated, her father’s kick that chased her like an eternal punishment.
She could never understand how this single event could dominate her unconscious mind to such an extent. How was it that she didn’t fear the intensity of crashing into time!
She always suspected that her ability to remember would allow her to squander her memories. Now, she prayed that particular memories would etherize and depart from her head, but these memories were almost engraved in stone, like a kick that left behind a scar resembling a tattoo.
