‘A City with No Secrets’
Later today, our monthly publishers’ newsletter comes out; this month, we put the spotlight on Oman. Amal Alsaeedi’s Side Entrance to the House is one we commend for translation. You can read another excerpt of the novel at The Common.
A City with No Secrets
From Side Entrance to the House
By Amal Alsaeedi
Translated by Nashwa Nasreldin
The problem with this city has always been not a lack of love, but that intimacy, affection and love hang in the atmosphere and suffocate, just out of the population’s reach. Whenever I walk around its wide and ordered streets, I imagine myself colliding with tiny particles of human warmth, but never grasping them.
In this city, days spread out across open spaces; nothing appears closed off. What space hates most is ambiguity, which is the most shameful absence. Questions are resolved before they are asked. When a café closes, after it had only been open for a year, our eyes cling momentarily to the fact, but after less than a minute, we move on. Where to? To the next distraction, without any concern or interest in the fact that what just happened won’t be the last. We could never bear the burden of attachment, oblivious to such a desire.
Since the start of winter—which I struggle to really think of as winter—I’ve been hearing the sound of children karate training from my window. It’s possible that I’ve been hearing these sounds since I was a baby, but I’ve only become aware of them now. I can hear the coach shouting, then the voices of his students, some after a pause. At first, this was all I paid attention to. But as I grew more irritated by it, I decided to get out of bed and watch them. With his messy uniform and sloppily tied belt, the coach was a sorry version of a sensei. The children were dressed modestly, and I could tell from their complexions that they weren’t originally from this city—I realised that they must be practicing here as a way to cross this void, something they chose only because they lived close by. They were most likely from the space beyond the wall of my building. What did they call these kinds of homes? No, not a neighborhood. It isn’t what you’re probably thinking. If it relates to this city, then it’s nothing so notable.
The Smart TV in my room played non-stop music for an entire hour and a half, while the screen displayed a tedious header: “Peaceful music,” joined by an image of a lonely yellow lily on a blue background dotted with clouds and threads that resembled light. As soon as the clips ended, I was suddenly transported to the famous soundtrack of the movie, Amelie. At the time, I had been reading Pavese’s Il Compagno. After I finished his novel, The Beautiful Summer, I found it difficult to move on to a different book. I tried The Pope’s Daughter, by the Italian author Dario Fo, and the novel Three Strong Women, by the French author Marie Ndiaye, whose novel Bad Weather I had loved. But I am finally with Pablo, outside the store where he smokes and reflects on whether there’s any point to work, since all the faces he encounters are masked by the same misery at the end of the day, exposed to the same cold, naturally. As for me, only one thought goes round in my mind: that it’s been a long time since I enjoyed the early hours of the day, or the chill of dawn. When it’s time for me to take some time off, I’ll pack my bag and head back to the village, wake up at five am, walk over to the farm, wait for the morning humidity to kick in and listen, once again, to the crunching of my footsteps on the dirt path. I’ll think of nothing else. But how can I go through with this silly plan when I don’t fall asleep until seven, when I get no more than two hours of sleep a day.
As usual, I think back to Kuwait, remembering the distance between my rooms and the Starbucks, which wasn’t far enough for an eight-minute phone-call with him. Still, he insisted on staying on the call until I had crossed the single road that I came upon. When I reached my destination, I’d end the call after he blew me a kiss, which was left to hover over the cold airwaves. Sometimes I think about the way he would tease me by changing the lyrics of one of my favourite songs by Fairouz, “Take me my darling.” He would sing, instead, Once there was a princess who got engaged very young. And then I’d always do the same with my reply, and sing: Take me, my darling, to a house with no doors. And now this is Muscat. What will I still remember about it after five years have passed? Maybe I’ll remember that I spent a long time trying to avoid that song by Khaled al-Sheikh, or to laugh at its simplicity at other times, with its opener: the city of my little wounds. Has Muscat really wounded me? Is it capable of that? I don’t think it is; it’s an empty space, its innate warmth wasted. And why does no one sing about our nights here? Is it because our wars are old? Is it because the mountains have locked all the secrets away? Left them there for anyone to find? Is it because I’m as far from the mountains as I am from myself?
I was talking on my radio programme about the impact of neighbourhood design on social capital and horizontal sprawl, which means my home is too far from anywhere I intend to go. What has happened to my country that makes access so difficult? And how can we bury all the questions, extinguish them? Should we walk? Transform into a walkable city? Maybe the answer lies in a side street, a small alley, in Mutrah Port? In the smell of the colorful Kashmiri fabrics sold in the souk, as if we think they’re precious. Or the silver rings that the jeweller claims are Omani? Or maybe the secret lies in the fact that expressions of love and lips meeting occurs between two cold corpses, their footsteps murdered in small villages. Villages where gossip isn’t rife, where no one cares about anything except for one question: What does the latest forecast say about the next rainfall? Like the most tragic of life events, like the last thing that could cause bloodshed, like one possibility of something actually happening and leaving a clear mark, it rains. Will it rain in the summer? Will summer drag on this year? We don’t use big words like “climate change.” We don’t talk about anything that anyone other than us knows. We use our economical vocabulary and hesitate frequently, in the face of that love that can envelop us beneath its wings, while everything on the other side will continue forever; but here, on the inside, we have just the one chance before we die.
I walk in the open streets, trying to catch a warm drop in the suffocating humidity. I know it’s there, but I can’t grasp it with my hands.
Amal Al Saeedi is an award-winning writer based in Oman. She is also a journalist, podcaster and an editor at Alpheratz magazine.