The Last Rectangle Page 5
Shooshoo was elated and exploded in terrific one liners that had the banker laughing with tears in his eyes. Shooshoo told him that these were the first banking jokes in history.
The plays ran for around 2 months each. I attended most of them. As he perfected each play, they became more daring, more biting but always hilarious. No one stood in his way. One mention of the number of members in the Parliament and the house would explode. Various politicians got given nicknames, innocent but too obvious. He kept his distance from the President of the Republic but gave his all to ventilate corrupt government employees, the police and army, many of whom religiously attended his plays. His biting wit was sharpened when he knew that a specific minister or notable was present. He tore apart the cities they came from, their names and those of their sons: Is your son with you? When will you give him your “seat”? He can “see” better from there. He chewed as he pronounced the word “see” to make it sound like “steal”. The notables laughed the strongest and would nevertheless go backstage and congratulate him, the poor victim. Once or twice, opponents of the President would go backstage and gently chide him for being one sided and not making fun of the President until one day he let out a one liner equating our President with a shoe. The laughter would not cease. The joke was so fierce that some members of the audience took off their shoes and threw them onto the stage in merriment. Shooshoo stomped up and down playing hopscotch with the shoes calling out with his high pitched shriek: where is number one, come out number one, let me give you a new sole. Out of nowhere, three or four policemen moved up to the stage on either side. They did not stop the show but waited for the curtains to come down. They moved fast and arrested him, out of sight of the audience, making so much noise that no one saw but everyone knew.
Next morning, it was out in the papers. The strikes, the demonstrations, the serious graffiti “What are they doing to us?”, “If you laugh, don’t wear shoes”, “Article 99 of the law: citizens must not breathe lest they accidentally laugh”. Shooshoo stayed in jail for 3 days and nights with a constant vigil right outside the gates of the prison. There were certain members within the crowd who encouraged the rest to stay on but went home themselves to be replaced by others. No trial was promised. Shooshoo was let out at 6:00 in the evening but not without enough rumor mongering to ensure that half the town was there at the time of his release. Everyone jeered at the police. Shooshoo got into his car after warmly embracing his son and mother who were brought in to attend the orchestrated release. He was driven away, visibly perturbed and perplexed, looking like he needed a good explanation and a long sleep. I could see the banker behind the crowd eyeing the whole planned process with glee.
Four days later, the media organized a press conference where Shooshoo recounted his 3 day ordeal. His utter disdain at the way he was treated, the filth in which he was made to wallow and the final insult he was subjected to when the District Attorney asked him, just for the record, to re-enact some scenes of the play, all of these were enunciated by Shooshoo with care and accuracy. He looked vibrant. One week later, Shooshoo was back on stage performing to a full house. The audience was jubilant. He marched up and down with a brand new pair of shoes which he kept taking off and putting on without any relevance to the actual flow of the play. The audience screamed and kept looking sideways to see if the police were around, but they never showed up. Of course, I was there and I was one of the first to go backstage and congratulate Shooshoo on his daring “feat” and asked him if that is why they called him Shooshoo. For once he laughed at one of my own jokes. He hugged me hard and said: had you known it would lead to so much trouble, would you have introduced me to your banker friend? He grabbed hold of the lower part of my necktie and shook as if he were ringing a church bell.
5. My Final Project
It took a while before I could go inside a theater without the feeling that if it were not my plan, then it must have been someone else’s. Such was the success of my project that lesser agents scrambled all over the agency, begging and pleading and finally managing to pick up projects that looked like watered down versions of my own. I often wondered if any of these beginners had access to my initial presentation copied and archived in the heart of the agency’s information system. It did not bother me much in any case. I had left my mark and was on the way to better things.
Having satisfied my initial work to have a challenging job, I was now getting uneasy about repeating myself. I decided to start my own show. If I could fool the agency long enough to get some outside success then I can leave it and stay on my own but I knew that one could not leave the agency. I had enough confidence in myself for was I not immune to the traps of my own project? I had to devise a method to make them ditch me without physical harm. All I had to do was to bombard them with silly projects that were both useless and designed to make them think comedy had got to me and that I was trying to make them laugh. Why not create means by which jokes can be subliminally fed into people’s minds? The proposed purpose was to divert people, test them, numb them and get them to work against each other. The techniques were abundant and I had my fill of front edge technology in the back rooms of the agency. Laser beams would be aimed at window panes and modulated by jokes in such a manner that the pane itself acted as a heterodyning element and demodulated the jokes during sleeping hours so softly that the jokes pervaded their sleeping consciousness and stayed on in the minds of the sleepers as if they had been there since the jokes were heard in a party. Why not resort to genetic engineering to manufacture viruses that worked their way through the blood system feeding enzymes to the brain that managed to create the right stream of chemical impulses resulting in specific jokes being imported into the brain? Why not use traditional methods of dissemination where the medium would be the network of information highways, electronic bulletin boards and huge databases? The agency would post jokes as and when it saw fit for anyone to recall at anytime and without restriction.
Soon enough, I was handed a memo in which I was informed that I was to impersonate a comic in a town in the north. The man in question had been placed under detention because his banker took himself too seriously and started to assess the financial feasibility of the project only to end up refusing him any loans, whereupon the show collapsed. The request coincided with my own wishes. I packed my bags and went north loaded with books, one liner anthologies, comedy show scripts, CDs and DVDs, everything that would inspire me. The stage was perfect, large enough to take the movement of five or six actors but small enough for the intimacy of joke telling. In one week, I wrote my script, a play called: The King and the Joker. Six actors were dressed up as playing cards: an ace, a king, a queen, a jack, a joker and a little girl playing the 2. The response was massive. There was something about the flatness of the characters that made them appealing to the audience. The symbolism of the six cards was also not lost upon them. The press saw through the audience’s wishes and starting calling the play, “The House of Cards”. I was transported into a world I had not expected nor had planned. I gave it my all and it was responsive. At last, I was doing something sincere, something I felt at home in, something comic. Each night after the performance, appreciative members of the audience would come back stage to chat and congratulate. One day, a banker came in and offered to support the season.
The Scent of Pine
For weeks, M could not be buried. One evening, his blood pressure dropped low and before the disease could be diagnosed, he went into a coma and never woke up. He died at 2:00 in the morning, in the hospital. Next day, the funeral was arduous. Everyone came and from all neighboring villages. The burial was to take place at noon. A long walk started towards the family grave just down the hill. The six bearers of the coffin walked ahead of everyone, heads bowed down. They walked with a solemnity incongruous with the freshness of the overhanging pine forest. As the bearers descended around the corners of the narrowing path, they kept the coffin straight and level. Several times, they
faltered as they stepped on batches of slippery pine needles. The walk took around twenty minutes. The coffin reached the flat promontory in front of the mouth of the grave. The sheikhs gathered in a semi-circle and prayed. They shifted their weight from one leg to the other. As they chanted, some of them stepped on pine nuts strewn on the grounds which gave out crackling noises. Some fiddled with the barks of the pine trees and broke away the flakes getting their fingers sticky with pine resin. They waited while a few young men opened the gate of the grave. They had to clear the accumulated mass of broken pine branches, needles and cones to make way for the entry of the coffin into the grave. A strong scent of pine shot out of the grave with an intensity that scared everyone. They all left the grounds leaving the fumes behind. Only the coffin and its six bearers stayed on in facing the gate. The coffin could not enter the grave so it moved on, downwards into the valley following a path which led away from where the grave was. The arms of the six bearers rose and fell like shock absorbers to keep the coffin straight and level. The descending coffin disappeared under the canopy of the pine trees. It went down the side of the hill and across a little stream at the bottom of the valley. It climbed up the opposite hill until it met with a mountain road. Heads in cars would turn and people on the side of the road would stop to watch the coffin held high. The coffin passed through several villages then headed back towards the village where the grave was. By this time, it was getting to be dark. The night turned onwards, too slowly. The coffin parked in a bend in the road just at the entrance of the village until sunrise, oblivious of the traffic and walkers by. It then descended down the road leading to the grave. As it reached the gate for the second time, fumes started coming out of the still open mouth of the grave. Three men from the immediate family of M had come back and were sitting side by side shoulder to shoulder on the grave, waiting to see what the coffin would do. Unable to enter, once again, the coffin moved on following the same road down the hill, up again and back towards the village.
For days to come, various villagers reported sighting the coffin in different parts of the village. Some reported seeing it moving fast along surrounding mountain roads, or parked in little bends ready to start or scrambling up and down little paths, straight and level, high above the arms of the bearers.
More failed attempts to enter the grave were made. The coffin then widened the circle of its attempts and tried other graves, some in nearby villages. Invariably, it was unable to enter as it met with the strong scent of pine. Some graves, it never tried more than once. Others, it avoided altogether. The villagers tried to analyze this pattern of attempts but were soon preoccupied with the death of another person whose coffin immediately fell into the same frenzied search. Every now and then, villagers would spot the two coffins crossing each other’s paths or even racing along the same road. Soon, there would be other coffins, all made of pine wood, all of them pacing the hills unable to rest in peace. As is well known about pine wood, with time, the light color of the boards would darken. The villagers started to guess the age of coffins moving around the villages by the color of their boards until it was pointed out that exposure to the sun created the same effect as aging. The entry of this second factor threw everyone’s calculations out of the tracks of reason. This created an anxiety further aggravated by small rumors that M’s coffin was not the first coffin to be inhibited by the scent of pine or that some coffins were not even made of pine.
On a clear day in winter, especially on Sunday mornings, if you happened to be standing on the balcony of a house, high on the hill overlooking the main square in the village, you would have seen many coffins heading every which way intermingling with villagers on their regular walks. The boards, for whatever reason you chose to believe, were of different shades of pine.
The villagers started worrying about the rates of births and deaths. If birth rates increased, the villagers should be worried about hunger and crowding. If death rates increased, humanity will become extinct.
So, they put their heads together and thought:
If more people died than were born, there would be an increase in the number of coffins. More coffins would reduce the number of pine trees. There would then be less fumes. Less fumes would mean more burials can take place. This would relieve bearers from the task of carrying coffins that could not enter into the graves. With bearers relieved, more time would be spent with their families which would result in having more children. So an increase in the number of deaths would result in an increase in the birth rate, stabilizing the population.
If, on the other hand, less people died than were born, there would be a reduction in the number of coffins. Pine trees would be spared and would prosper and grow. More fumes would result leading to fewer burials. This would increase the number of bearers needed to keep the coffins afloat on their arms. With all the bearers on the road, families would shrink and fewer children would be born. So a decrease in the number of deaths would result in a decrease in the birth rate, again stabilizing the population.
This, the villagers were not ready for. It preoccupied them too much and to such an extent that to them, death became a secondary concern.
The Building
Floor 1 Left - Jinal and Maissoon
Jinal and Maissoon lived on the first floor on the left hand side, the noisiest flat as it was almost on top of the traffic. They shut off the life in the front of the building by closing up the windows on the traffic side and draping them. They kept all windows open and completely undraped on the backside of the building. You walked through a long corridor to get to their flat since the lower part of the building did not have the same structure as the rest. They were a popular pair and many young people would be seen coming in and out of their flat. It was not long before their harmony would be put to the test when Jinal had a double date in the flat at the time when Maissoon was back in Iraq for the summer. That double date resulted in one pair disappearing into the bedroom while Jinal sat in the living room with Jihad, the choice of her evening. The atmosphere was charged with sensuality as the two laughed over the silliest things. He held a ruler in his hand whose other end was soon held by Jinal and as they both rocked with laughter, they shook the ruler sideways. Soon they would be on the floor, regretting not having taken the bedroom before the other pair. Jinal kept on seeing Jihad as if there were no relationship. Sometimes lunch, sometimes a walk in AUB, often sleeping together as if this were a side issue. Yet both were living the present in the hope of repeating a relationship in their immediate past which had not consummated itself well and was incomplete and much more important to both than this relationship. Maissoon came back and Jinal insisted on seeing Jihad in the flat. He would often spend the night sleeping in the same large bed as Jinal and Maissoon. Jinal would sleep in the middle while Jihad silently stroked her, often getting her to reach a silent climax while Maissoon turned her back to them covering her ears with a large pillow. They would wait till the morning while Maissoon was having her shower to make the quickest possible love. The strain this put on Maissoon was soon exhibited in her letting go completely and having her own affair with a professor who had a short lease in a flat in the building. She would often get into her nightgown and walk upstairs to spend the night with him which was convenient for all concerned until one day she bumped into a Turkish girl from AUB who was leaving the professor’s flat at 2 in the morning. This broke her which in turn broke the professor who was in all of this up to his ear tips only because he had recently separated from his wife and family in the States. Jinal and Jihad soon drifted apart with the same ease that brought them together and the flat went back to its regular pattern.
Floor 2 Left - Timoshenko the Russian and His Aunt
Sergei Timoshenko was an architect and a successful painter too. He lived on the second floor on the left side. In the past few years, he had had a few exhibitions where he sold his water colors. These were brilliant and very original. He had managed a style which knocke
d the on-going trend, to paint pine trees and red roof tops like Omar Al-Unsi. His paintings were wonders but it would have been best to buy the whole set since they were part of the same panorama. The water colors were of strange large green flowers each of which covered an A4 sized canvas. The colors were not in great contrast. On the contrary, he used an infinite variety of shades of green. One was tempted to say it was only one color, but you would not dare. The absent colors jumped out at you while the various shades danced on the paper producing colors between the lines, so to speak. Timoshenko came from the Ukraine but everyone called him the Russian. His father and aunt had left their troubled country and traveled west to Turkey early this century. They took little Sergei with them. Once there, they stayed on and did not wish to go back home. Eventually they left Turkey for Beirut and remained here. His father died after a miserable life whose only drive was to get young Sergei through high school and then university. He died a few months before the graduation ceremony which pained Timoshenko so much that he requested his dean to allow him not to go through it. His friends and teachers who were all very attached to Timoshenko, prepared a mock and surprise graduation ceremony in Timoshenko’s house on the following evening. The day after that wild party where young architects stood on window edges and bottom-upped their Arak, Timoshenko started work on a double path: architecture and painting. Timoshenko never married. His aunt lived a life that was not a life. She was probably not even aware that she was in Beirut, not that it really mattered at all where she was. Her fiber broke down with the move from Turkey. And if it broke with the move to Beirut, it completely disintegrated with the start of the civil war. She lived in fear of estrangement which was translated into collection or rather retention mania resulting in Timoshenko being slowly edged out of the whole flat into his bedroom where he painted and worked. Marriage was therefore not an option. No one came into their house. It used to be an event if someone could get a glimpse of what his aunt had. When she saw fit to sell some of the things she had collected, she would spread the word until a buyer came to the flat when Timoshenko’s aunt would stand by the half closed door arguing the price. That was the practice until Jinal and Maissoon (First floor left hand side) came to see her together one day. They tricked her into arguing with Jinal while Maissoon crept through the house trying to photographically memorize all she saw: empty flour bags, single spoons, nails, broken lampshades, ball bearings. The haggling between Timoshenko’s aunt and Jinal over an old stool stopped when Jinal took one look at the open eyes of Maissoon who must have betrayed her fascination. Jinal quickly broke the only rule with Timoshenko’s aunt, namely, you do not pay her the price she asks for. That turned out to their advantage in many ways. She believed in them after that. As the two ran down the stairs to their flat, carrying the putrid stool, they overran themselves with their plans. They went back to her next day with a stack of 100 dollar bills. She opened the door to them and immediately understood. In no time, they moved everything out of her house and into their own. Out of respect for Timoshenko’s aunt, they moved her things to a small house next to the University. There, every Saturday morning, Jinal and Maissoon had a small sale.