The Promised Land Read online

  Home After Five Years

  My father’s head peers over the couch in the dark

  and whispers, ‘Are you awake?’ I don’t know,

  am I? I’m lying on a mattress on the living room floor,

  my hands dank and trembling, wondering if my parents

  will survive their mistakes. Nothing like cold sweats

  on a warm sulphur Christmas. Outside, the city spills

  past the contours of reality. Each time I blink, an island

  surges out of the sea: some mad oligarch’s wet dream,

  or luxury villas for sun-seeking Russian gangsters …

  At dusk, I stroll along the sliver of beach spared

  by the quicksilver illness we call cement.

  The boardwalk’s semi-deserted, but by the railings,

  the lonely Natashas sink their long nails into mangoes

  and sigh. ‘This is no place to live,’ a woman

  says to her boyfriend as they puff on their cigarettes:

  ‘Not a place you call home.’ I can’t argue with that.

  All I see are skyscrapers and cranes that raise

  even more cranes. As a child, I imagined

  those cranes were beanstalks connecting the Earth

  to the heavens, but there was no golden goose or giant

  in those clouds. Back at the flat, my mother sweeps

  gypsum and rubble while crouched on the last

  powdery bit of wall that once separated her bedroom

  from her kitchen. When we wake up in the morning,

  she stares at the sky and looks for rain clouds,

  but there’s not a single one in sight. The storm

  is in her head and her heart. It could be worse;

  even flowers still bloom in graveyards …

  Through the paper-thin wall an inch from my head,

  I can hear Hitler ranting and raving to ‘Gangnam Style’.

  Sharif, our neighbour from Cairo, works at IKEA;

  he takes three buses to work and is plagued

  by the burdens of bribes, permits and slave wages,

  and bears it all with a smile, but why speak of it?

  Happiness vanishes the moment it bursts

  the levee of the lips; his shivering wife

  keeps watch from her balcony like a sailor

  forced to weather a storm in a crow’s nest.

  Starting tomorrow, I’m off again, free as a bird

  of passage. Aboard the plane, I’ll watch

  the island that once looked like my home

  continue to grow, swelling like a cancer

  on the soft skin of the sea … Come, come, that’s

  enough now: remember you chose to live in the fire.

  Infidelity

  The bin-man lifts the lid

  on the hungry, scurvy cats,

  and waves a weak hello

  as he combs the trash for snacks.

  I sit on the balcony semi-naked

  and wave back. My cold,

  Olympian brutality stirs

  with my first cup of coffee

  and I catch myself wishing

  this town would burn to the ground.

  The inexorable sun rises into view

  and greases the palms with its light.

  A removal van beeps into position.

  The piano teacher, my mother’s rival,

  is preparing herself to move. For months

  the two have waged a guerrilla war,

  my mother flicking ash into her garden,

  the other making clothes slip from their pegs

  and mysteriously disappear.

  After three years in Florence, my mother

  returned to her husband and suddenly

  found herself the other woman,

  displaced by my father’s fear of death –

  a male disease that only knows one cure.

  Now their conjugal life lies in limbo,

  and I watch these people, once jovial,

  become slowly infected with nihilism,

  hermit crabs too poor for new shells.

  But how lasting is love anyway? As Churchill

  once said to the King of Bahrain, ‘We try

  never to desert our friends – that is, unless

  it’s in our interest …’ The sun reaches its peak

  and a kitten climbs to the top of a small dune

  in the half-empty parking lot. It spends an hour

  attempting to defecate, but can’t: it hasn’t eaten enough.

  I’ve seen too much. I shut my eyes and dive back

  into the murky ocean of memory.

  Flying on New Year’s Eve

  for my father, again

  ‘Please try to forget us,’ my mother said, as I hoisted

  myself into the truck with my one good hand.

  The other hand was swollen, the size of a dragonfruit:

  that was the one I had beaten my brother with.

  Our family’s falling apart, and he won’t even lift

  his gaze from the screen. None of this matters,

  goes his sad generation’s motto; ‘I’d rather stare at a wall

  than read a book,’ he told me. All hell broke loose. My

  rage wore me like a glove and I landed a right hook

  on him, again and again. Later, on the way to the airport,

  my father stopped for a pound bag of ice where I buried

  my bruised spider. Near the border with Dubai, we passed

  a rusty bus crammed with skinny men in blue jumpsuits.

  Such men’s lives are as cheap as the cloth on their backs,

  if not cheaper. Some reward for the follies they build …

  Now, all along the drive, I try to spot some familiar sight

  from my youth, but anything over twenty years old

  is a historical landmark, or gone – mostly gone. I could

  murder a drink, but that’s out of the question … Just then,

  like a mirage, a round building of the government’s,

  shaped like a hip-flask, looms from the heat-haze;

  the cap won’t come undone. When we reach Departures,

  almost too late, my father starts to tremble again. It’s

  his heart-spells: he hasn’t eaten anything today and is kept

  on his feet by the patriarch’s insatiable need to provide,

  to appear impervious to ageing. How long will he last?

  Old men, unlike old women, seem to wobble into their dotages

  like panicky toddlers. I smile like a Sunday drunk and hug

  my father goodbye, at which point he says, ‘Please

  don’t forget us.’ Then I hear the last call and dash off,

  dragging my reluctant ronzinante of a suitcase.

  Allah’s moral monotony oozes from the loudspeakers.

  The Promised Land

  Speeding home through a snow-storm,

  after a night in the city, my shivering

  wife and mother in tow, it occurs to me –

  this is not where I should be. Over half

  my heart’s still buried in sand, the promised

  land of oil and honey where father thought

  his fortunes would ignite. This night is black,

  too black for clarity, and after the autumn’s

  hunting season, the woods outside the cabin

  are devoid of deer. For months I heard

  the sound of butchery, heard gunshots mark

  each hour’s passing while the blurry screen

  inside the house related news of death

  and misery. Thirty years of sweat and toil

  in that curséd desert only for father to hear

  a German shout at him: ‘Work, nigger, work!’

  This is life in Abu Dhabi, a place renowned

  for the biggest this and of course the biggest

  that. Oh, sure, they got it all: the Louvre,

  the Guggenheim, every last acco
utrement

  of Western snobbery their oil could buy. As for

  the biggest heart? After years of exploitation,

  of work camps, beatings, and incarcerations,

  they tell you, If you don’t like it, leave. So I left.

  Now my father, the old industrious Iranian lion,

  his mane reduced to baldness, squats and empties

  one bladder of blood after another. It’s cold here;

  I hate my life; sometimes I also hate my wife;

  but mostly I hate this sad, deluded, friendly country:

  the USA, with all its lies and all the kids

  it shoots in parks and all the men it chokes

  to death for selling cigarettes, and all the speeches,

  all the acquittals. Go west, young man, go west

  was sound advice once, but is it any longer? I went

  as far west as I could, went south and north

  and east only to face the same despair. Dawn breaks,

  and while I smoke inside my covered porch I see a deer

  press its nose against my window; the trees begin to shake

  and soothe me with their music, light slips past the blinds:

  even hell is often bright enough to keep some hope alive.

  II

  * * *

  It was neither true nor false, it was lived.

  ANDRÉ MALRAUX

  A Kind of Love

  We loved luxury and ate like pigs,

  but our room, unborn as yet,

  was bare; it was a new building,

  and when we moved in, the landlord

  looked us over and said, ‘No noise

  after eleven, please.’ Obediently,

  for the most part, we adhered,

  and kept the ancient record player

  (among the only things of mine

  to survive the neglect and the moths)

  at its lowest; although money

  was scarce, vinyl records were cheap

  and we took advantage.

  Halfway through the tenancy,

  I got your name mixed up with

  another woman’s and, quite rightly,

  without a word, you left me there,

  taking little else except the needle

  you knew full well was irreplaceable,

  unlike our short-lived kind of love.

  N16 8EA

  It’s comfortable here. The floors are soft

  and up three flights there’s a view;

  the rent hasn’t gone up in years and tomorrow

  they’re planting trees. If this paradise

  were pocket-friendly, I’d take it anywhere …

  Still, if I keep this patch for some time,

  the postman might even learn my name.

  How long will my luck hold? If this

  were a casino, I would cash my chips in,

  but stability, it seems, is a dream that you have

  in between one address and another.

  This is where my love of roaming led me.

  The Translator

  for Michael Hofmann

  Unshaven and barefoot, as if on a pilgrimage.

  His house is blue: the walls, the carpet, the cups;

  the kind of blue you see in sad monasteries,

  the paint veined and peeling, with brittle bits of gold

  hanging on in the rims. Like Gottfried Benn –

  a spiritual father figure – he likes to stay home,

  where the coffee’s better and there’s no small-talk.

  He seems scattered, has lost a book somewhere:

  a translation. All his life he has hidden a language;

  now he eats, breathes and interprets it. Later,

  our awkwardness spills over Hampstead Heath,

  where we walk, mostly in silence. We have soup

  and beer around the corner, then take a short-cut

  to the bus stop, and he’s gone; brought by the wind,

  taken back by it: the soft-spoken wunderkind of despair.

  Forward March

  for my grandfather

  You were an odd sight, efficient and pasty-skinned

  in the land of perpetual sunbathers. You hated the sea;

  love was an unapproachable coastline. Instead,

  you preferred mountains, dug-outs, old shells. You had

  one overruling obsession, the war: the Second World War,

  the one you were too young to fight in. Unfazed,

  you brought it home. Your enemies: your Hausfrau

  and two daughters. Unlike soldiers, they couldn’t surrender.

  Films on Rommel, your hero, electrified your frame,

  yet despite reading his letters, you overlooked Krieg

  ohne Haß … When senility tried you before its tribunal,

  it offered you life (with limitations). You refused.

  The Carpet that Wouldn’t Fly

  for my brother

  You sport the sickly ecstasy of the exiles

  that people your mother’s favourite novels:

  quiet, pale-faced, consumptive dreamers.

  Your feet, once accustomed to soft sand,

  fall heavier now. You lament the peculiar

  European fetish for marble, its coldness.

  Sometimes at night, in between cigarettes,

  you pace the balcony, clap your hands,

  as if expecting the cheap rug beneath you

  to flout reason and fly you back to the past.

  This Most Serene Republic

  The marble lions are tarnished and when it rains their once mighty roaring is reduced to a mewl; they’re in dire need of a polish, just like the rest of this sad floating republic. My father arrived here in the 1960s, a straniero: strano e nero. When the lagoon rose through the fist-sized holes in the floor of his flat, he would huddle atop the immense wardrobes on a mattress and grit his teeth through the winter. Those old, porous palaces, whose upper floors housed the few penniless nobles whose hallowed ancestors once terrorized the Mare Nostrum. Those palaces, much like the one I’m sleeping in, smelt like Latin jungles: mahogany everywhere. I love this tiny room and its Franciscan sparseness. All my life, I’ve felt like a Jew, or a Gipsy, or some hapless scion of a lost wandering tribe, but they, at least, have Bar Mitzvahs, music … all I’ve left is this room. This was an empire ruled from rooms: chambers decorated for a single, specific purpose: to impress its numerous enemies. I can’t sleep. There’s a ghostly halo above my bed where a clock used to hang. One way, I suppose, to stake a claim on timelessness, if not serenity.

  Venice

  Auroville

  It was an enlightened apartheid: the spiritually and materially liberated on one side, and we barbarians on the other. Posters along the shaded paths spoke of THE MOTHER’S VISION, but nobody seemed to know what it was. Every other sign read FORBIDDEN. There was a giant golden sphere atop an impossibly manicured lawn: it was a meditation centre, and it too was off-limits. Everything looked shiny and clean, but there was a spiritual sickness in the air. We could see white acolytes prowling around in the distance, their spotless robes gleaming in the sun. All manual labour fell to the lean, chocolate-skinned Tamils; their resentment was palpable. We followed the paths back to the tourist centre and decided on lunch. The visitors’ complex looked like a hippie IKEA, and while Aurovillians made no use of paper or coin currencies, we paid for our incense and soap with our dirty rupees. Manufactured to subsidize ‘Auroville’s plans for a sustainable future’, their products are available online, as well as in select upmarket outlets in London, Tokyo, Paris and New York.

  Tamil Nadu

  Mounting Mileage

  I have just arrived in Kolkata after a thirty-six-hour train journey from Chennai: a distance of fifteen hundred kilometres which, according to my ticket, has cost me a rupee per kilometre. I pull out a couple of these coins from my pocket. They’re incredibly slim, flimsy almost, like the tinsel-wrapped chocolate doubloons I used to get given at Chri
stmas. Back then, I fantasized I could use them to fund a lavish lifestyle on some tropical island. It wasn’t long before I learned that travel required real money, and lots of it. Over time, I have worn countries like shirts or shoes, and shed bits of myself in each. I’m still young, but it already seems obvious that the places I visit and come to love will die before my very eyes, replaced by different versions that, soon, someone younger will come to know and appreciate. This frenetic sort of travelling may simply be my way of ‘appeasing the fear of the fugitive’, as a German philosopher once put it, but my mounting mileage has only increased my inclination to move; not merely in order to scatter my dust, but because I know that whatever the soul is, travel feeds it.