Call Me Zebra(31)

I woke up in a terrible confusion, covered in sweat. At first, I wasn’t sure where I was or how long I had slept. I got out of bed and walked through the apartment. A grainy light was filtering through the window at the end of the corridor, revealing a lead-colored sky. I looked at my reflection in the glass. I couldn’t remember how old I was. I might have been any age. I was young and old at the same time. I looked down at the street where Ludo Bembo had dropped me off. It looked ghostly, deserted. Suddenly, I was struck by the gravity of the situation: I was adrift in the world, alone with my notebook. Who was I retracing my past for? Even if I recovered its shattered bits, even if my disparate selves appeared in my notebook, witnesses to life’s reckless blows, there would be no one to share it with. I looked around. The apartment was flooded with a feeble light. I walked into the kitchen and took a drink of water. I grabbed a knife. I grabbed my notebook. I carved the title of my manifesto into the leather binding: A Philosophy of Totality: The Matrix of Literature. The telephone started to ring. I let it ring on and on. I wondered if it was Ludo Bembo. Or maybe it was Quim Monzó calling from Greece. I looked around for Taüt, but the bird was nowhere to be found.

I went back to bed. Immediately, I fell into another dream. I was swimming in a sea of ink. I climbed onto a rock. My chest-shaped suitcase was bobbing along near the rocks with its lid open. It contained a map of the Mediterranean. I wondered if my father was lying beneath that map, but as soon as I craned my neck to look, the chest sank to the bottom of the inky sea. I looked up at the sky. It was dark. There were books suspended like stars in the air. Ink was dripping off the books into the sea. I sat there perched on the rock until the sun came up, until I was drenched with the blood of literature.

In the morning, on the edge of wakefulness, before I opened my eyes, I thought to myself that books, like the catacombs of the world, contain the ruins of humanity. I turned that word—humanity—on my tongue. It repulsed me.



During that first week in Barcelona, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the apartment. I felt more directionless than I ever had. My thoughts spun and staggered, contaminated by the shadowy sheen of my dreams. I was afraid that if I went walking through the city I would get dragged along a current of human bodies and, eventually exhausted and uncertain of my gait, fall over and get stepped on by a remorseless stampede of feet. Who would peel me out of the city’s grooves and gutters? No one, I concluded. So I stayed within the confines of Quim Monzó’s apartment and, true to the inky principles of the Hosseinis, reinforced my mind by training in literature.

A week went by during which I slept by day and read by night. I worked on my notebook. I saw no one. No grocer, no Ludo Bembo. I never saw the bird. I kept strict library hours: four-hour segments during which I, formal steward of death, trained in nothingness through intense reading and contemplation. In between segments, I paused to search for the bird. I looked under the bed, under the cushions, in the kitchen cabinets. He was nowhere to be found. I continued to read. I read in order to drag the Catalan portion of my mind out of the mud; with it, certain aspects of my father’s mind came along. I gained access to his Catalan literary consciousness, that part of his mind that came into being during our years in Barcelona.

By the week’s end, my manifesto had evolved. I devised from Salvador Dalí’s Paranoiac-Critical approach an Irrational-Pragmatic methodology that consisted of entering and being consumed by the void of exile in a systematic manner in order to produce writing. My methodology involved writing in five-minute segments with a black band over my eyes. Each time I did this, I experienced déjà vu. I saw the faces of my family, the Hosseinis, as I had seen them in my dream. They would appear before me, composed and full of a strange light, before fading into the surrounding darkness, leaving me alone in the eerie stillness of night. The band, torn from one of Quim Monzó’s shirts, was a tribute to the black band my father had placed over my eyes before we crossed into Turkey while each of the five minutes was a salutation to the most influential members of the Hosseini lineage, starting with me and going as far back as my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini. I wrote for five minutes and rested for five minutes. During the pauses, I received signals from the Matrix of Literature regarding the next segment of writing. I made more than a few entries in my notebook.

In a matter of days, I read all the books in Quim Monzó’s library that I remembered to have been a part of my father’s Catalan oeuvre. I selected the writers that my father had translated during our first months in Catalonia under the shadow of my mother’s, Bibi Khanoum’s, untimely death that, I now concluded, had pushed my father further into the abyss of literature. In his grief—well disguised as it was due to the fact that we, the illfated, have to swallow our bitterness to survive—my father had nevertheless absorbed my mother in the same way that I had absorbed him. This thought ushered in a welcome companion insight: Since I had absorbed my father, I had also absorbed the traces of Bibi Khanoum that had already been absorbed by him. I welcomed the residue of my mother into my consciousness. I saluted her. “Ah, the transmigration of minds!” I repeated into the darkness of the night. It was strange and exhilarating to be in the presence of her residue; an odd euphoria swept over me, a feeling of mild mania. I felt as though time had not elapsed and yet, somehow, everything was different.

Time was a riddle not meant to be solved, I concluded, as I walked into the bedroom and sat bolt upright on the bed. I was flooded with emotions: I thought to myself that the act of swallowing our bitterness and absorbing one another upon death had increased our wretchedness. I pitied myself. I had inherited the stinking pile of rubbish, the unspoken emotions, everything that had ever been discarded by generations of Hosseinis; their unmetabolized pain was rotting in the ever-widening pits of my void. No wonder I didn’t often feel hunger. At that realization, a single question looped through the ghostly chambers of my many minds: When I die, who will absorb me? There was no one left. I was the last of the lineage. I sobbed uncontrollably. I wept until I gagged on my tears. I wiped my face with the sheets.