The Reading
A colleague passes on a book: the first English translation of The Crown, The Serpent, The Knife, The Bone (New York and London, Parallel Press, 2013)— the collected short stories of Ibrahim el-Amin, Iraqi writer of some renown, though Spenser has never heard of the collection or its author. He isn’t all that interested and accepts the book only to be polite.
Nevertheless, he has some empty, hazy space that he wants to fill on a Sunday morning and so he picks up the book and starts with the introduction. el-Amin was born in Najaf. This, his only collection, was first published in 1977. The composition of individual stories is hard to date with accuracy and is the subject of much scholarly dispute. el-Amin has been missing since 2003 and is presumed dead.
The first story is “The Gift.” It begins with a narrator who is alarmed to find himself alone in a nondescript room. In the room is a single wooden table. A man sits at the table but the narrator somehow knows that this is not actually a man but a demon. Knows this fully. Perfectly. A demon to the very marrow of his bones. This is not a dream.
Behind the man who is really a demon is a door — the only way out. The narrator is free to pass through, but the man who is really a demon informs the narrator that before he can use the door he must give the man who is really a demon a gift. The narrator (he does not have a name) rummages in his pocket and pulls out a near-empty pack of cigarettes. The man who is really a demon takes the cigarettes and beckons him through the door. The narrator then enters another room, identical to the first. When he looks back, the door through which he has entered is no longer there. The only way out is forward, through another door, identical to the first, and in front of it, another table, and at the table, another man who is really a demon.
This man who is really a demon also asks for a gift. The narrator digs again in his pockets and finds some loose change. The man who is really a demon accepts the coins and beckons him through the door.
On and on it goes. In every room a man who is really a demon sitting at a table in front of a single door. Every man who is really a demon asks for a gift, and as the narrator advances through the rooms he finds items harder and harder to come by. He gifts a hard candy. He gifts his watch. He gifts a short note from his daughter. He gifts a small pocketknife. After much lamentation, he gifts his wedding ring. Eventually he carries nothing else on his person but he is told yet again by a man who is really a demon that he must provide a gift to move forward.
The narrator gifts his shoes, his clothes, his undergarments. On and on. Another door, another room. Naked and cold, the narrator claws hair from his head to claim his passage. This tearing of his hair gets the narrator through several rooms, as many different men who are really demons accept clumps of black hair. Naked and cold and bald, his scalp bleeding, the narrator pries teeth from his mouth and gifts these. Then he pulls his eyes from his sockets. He gifts his tongue, ripped from his mouth. Naked and cold and bald and blind, nearly crippled from pain, the narrator stumbles to the table of another man who is really a demon. This is the fifty-second room.
The narrator wants to say, “Please. Have mercy. I have nothing left to give. Absolutely nothing. I have given you everything. Are you so cruel as to take my heart? My mind? My soul? I just want to get home. To my family. I’ve been trying to get home to my family,” but without his tongue he can only make bloody, foamy grunts.
The man who is really a demon surveys the awful ruin of the narrator, who now stands as an incomplete husk of the man he used to be. “You know what I want,” the man who is really a demon says. “You know what I’ve wanted all along. You’ve known since you set foot in this, my room that is not a room, my riddle that is not a riddle.”
And the ruined man who used to be the narrator does know. The ruined man who used to be the narrator leans across the table and embraces the man who is really a demon and places a gentle kiss on his cheek. His bloody mouth leaves behind a memory of his kiss in the form of a red scrawl. The man who is really a demon begins to weep and points to the door.
The ruined man who used to be the narrator limps through the door and finds that it opens on to the Ninevah Plains. His family stands off in the distance, half hidden in a place where tall grass meets the shadow of a low, rocky hill. The ruined man who used to be the narrator waves to them in desperate happiness, but his family turns and leaves. They do not recognize the ruined thing he has become. They walk up the low, rocky hill and they do not turn back.
Spenser finishes the story and puts down the book. The story sits with him, all around him, in the silence. He opens the book again and returns to certain passages. The description of the first room and the gifting of the cigarettes. The tearing of the hair. The unvoiced plea of the ruined narrator. The description of the tall grass, “oceanic in sway and timbre.” The red kiss.
Why didn’t I think of that? is what drifts across his mind. Why didn’t I think of this?
←PREVIOUS EPISODE← →NEXT EPISODE→
_________