Between the gavel and the anvil: A new short story about a Libyan author who starts changing her story to please neighbours

The Fish Market

Najwa Bin Shatwan

OUR NEIGHBOUR’S DAUGHTER wrote a story that was broadcast on the radio; we didn’t hear it ourselves, but the neighbours heard it, and waited out on the street for us to return so they could tell us about it.

We had been at al-Bankina market that morning buying fish, examining the different types, and asking the fishermen about the prices, and fish of all kinds replied to our questions, because the fishermen are often drunkards and liars.

We asked them: were they fresh, or not? Had they been injured by the dynamite used to catch them? Had they nipped at the flesh of migrants, historically or recently?

The fish told us “no” by shaking their tails, and “yes” by closing their eyes. None ever lied or gave the wrong answer!

And after that, how could one believe what people say?

We took the fish home in a bag, and they listened intently to the story about al-Bankina that our neighbour #6 told. Like us, they could hardly believe that our neighbour was speaking about the same al-Bankina from which we had just returned; even the cuttlefish itself gaped in shock and astonishment, and from its mouth emerged secrets of the deep seas, mixed with a bit of our sewers, while the wrasse gave its last wriggle as the story was told.

It was the story that killed it…

Of course not, it was the writer!

And after what we heard, we were no better off than our fish; the writer had tested our patience and stoked our anger. She mentioned neighbour #7 in the story, but skipped over us, and neighbour #4, and neighbour #5, and neighbour #6 (the one who lives on the roof of house #5, and who told us the entire tale).

Why had the writer excluded us all, instead mentioning a neighbour who shamelessly wears secondhand clothes, whose body survives on rotting vegetables, and who showers with Yugoslavian shampoo?

So I approached this writer, on behalf of everyone angered by her story (which we greatly disliked), and knocked on her door. The doorbell looked at me with deep respect and asked: What do you want, Sir?

I looked at it crossly and spat at it, and it got frightened and fell quiet; I think its voice withered in that moment and hasn’t grown back since.

After I’d knocked several times with my hands and feet, making a crack in the door which let in the light and revealed the left half of the writer’s torso, she finally opened the door.

Writers’ houses are fragile as soon as you treat them with a bit of strength. She emerged drenched in words, and could hardly pay attention to anything; of course that was nothing — new. She looked at us as if peering out of a photography darkroom. In sum, she was a woman who lived in her own special capsule; otherwise, such an unnatural being would never survive in our very natural society.

I began without greeting her, just as the saying goes (though I don’t know who said it): “Never give writers room to speak, because they’ll convince you that you’re wrong, and their words will convince you you’re stupid.” So, I struck first, saying:

“Why do you write about the whole neighbourhood with no mention of us, the people who offered you a helping hand time and again?”

I held a copy of the story in my fist and waved it as I spoke.

The writer replied calmly:

“The story was about our former neighbourhood, where Bankina is – that is, before they moved us here, from the water to solid earth.”

“Well why didn’t you mention that one neighbour gave you shoes? Even if the story is about somewhere with water, and our only relationship with water is the siphon, and the rain on the roofs in winter, why didn’t you mention that someone gave you shoes?”

“Because, my friend, you gave me size 39 shoes, while the child in the story is too young to put on your shoes herself.”

“What does that mean? You should change the story to fit her feet. A creative writer can adjust the story as the situation requires.”

“All right, don’t get angry, I’ll change the story for the second printing, and take your observations into consideration.”

I closed the door of animosity and my anger calmed, until I glimpsed my house above all the others in the neighbourhood, and saw my underwear spread on the balcony, flying as high as the houses like a plane with no pilot.

When I read the second printing I saw that the story had been changed, but I couldn’t be bothered to read all the edits. The important thing was that the part about us was there, and the way I wanted it; the rest didn’t really concern me.

But one of the neighbours took the part that didn’t concern me in hand, and angrily went to the writer’s house. He was so cross I think he must have knocked on the door with his feet, because she opened it quickly, as if she’d been behind the door, waiting for whoever knocked on it – or knocked it down. And his knocking was as immense as the part of the story that concerned him. The neighbour protested that the house in the story sat where his family’s historic home was. The spirits of their forefathers ambled through that house and shouldn’t be ignored like the souls of cats. The neighbour stressed the importance of history, and that someone should write and not be discouraged by the scarcity of readers. God would favour those who read this, and this someone must come, and then tell everyone else so they could read it, at which point, he figured, culture would spread through society like fire through hay.

OPEN IN VIEWER

CREDIT: Alex Green

Cultivating hay is important, we can’t not cultivate hay.

The writer surrendered to the spittle flying from the neighbour’s mouth, and promised him that she would amend the relevant paragraph in the next publication, and make the changes – not to the house he thought was their house in the story, but to the house next to it. She would take advantage of the fact that the owners of the neighbouring house had fled without mentioning that the reason they did so was because their son had joined an extremist organisation and dared to slaughter some soldiers.

And she didn’t include mention of the city of Zliten, which sheltered the organisation, so the people from Zliten wouldn’t hate her if they happened to read the story.

The writer made the changes requested by her neighbours, one after the next, and she also introduced changes she didn’t hear requested, but that she expected and speculated she might hear from neighbours who had been displaced during the Civil War, who would surely ask her for their share of edits when they returned.

So, to save time, she considered what might be on their minds, and quickly found a suitable place for them.

She thought about Mkhenib with Mkhenib’s mind, about Bouajila with Bouajila’s mind, about Zarkoun with Zarkoun’s mind, and about Halima with Halima’s mind. She even thought about Haj al-Lavi, from whose body they had taken a final platinum piece after he breathed his last. This she did as a precautionary measure; if he hadn’t used up all his seven souls, he might employ one to come back to life and surprise them.

The writer would satisfy everyone, accommodate their demands, and keep her door intact too, though it would be difficult to protect her door from their knocking hands, her face from their spittle, and her mind from their trivial concerns. But if she did, and if she stopped leaving the house through it, the door’s cracks would diminish, and it would regain its character.

Last Friday we saw the writer in the mosque, and she seemed serene. Since it was the first time she’d appeared there, we assumed she came to repent before God for what she had written. Everyone was filled with the same emotion, as if they had all eaten and been poisoned by the same toxic rabbitfish that was available in Bankina – all except for an old woman, who had apparently been poisoned by something else, and who burst out cursing the author!

Everyone rushed to the mosque’s walls and columns to support themselves, for fear that what the old woman said would weaken their knees:

“In your story you said that I’m toothless, and that I soak my bread before chewing it. Curse you! Do I seem toothless to you?”

“Of course not… I wasn’t describing you in my story, dear Hajja. Who convinced you that this character is you, and those teeth are yours?”

“Well it sounded like me, down to the last detail. You described a greying old woman, her teeth falling out, who conscientiously performs her prayers in the mosque, wears traditional clothing, and uses a cane. You wrote all that and think I won’t recognise myself in your story?!”

From her breast, the old woman took the part of the story she had clipped and waved it around like conclusive evidence.

A coin and a Nokia 1011 mobile also fell from her breast, and the writer handed these back to her, saying:

“Don’t be angry, dear Hajja. How should I change this central character so that it won’t upset you, and won’t make you complain, when your grandson reads you the story, that you’re the inspiration? Help me out, and tell me how?”

The old woman rubbed her nose so hard she jostled herself. She stared into the writer’s eyes for several seconds, then said humbly:

“Since you want my opinion, you can make an old woman in the story resemble Um al-Khair. She’s also an old woman who performs her prayers, whose teeth are falling out, and no one in the neighbourhood knows her. Even if you write that she’s Um al-Khair, like this in bold, no one will know it’s her. Try it. try it. Writing is very freeing and liberating.”

“Oh, dear Hajja! The work can’t handle me inserting another character into it.”

“Why not? Successful writers can make room for new events or unexpected characters to appear in a story. Where two can sit, so can three. You’re a great devil; you can fill a six-person bus with a hundred and one passengers.”

“And who’s number one hundred and one?”

“Oh I don’t know! You know. you’re a great all-knowing devil: you wrote that Um al-Saad is heating by getting two salaries from the state. You knew about the two salaries, so how hard can it be for you to figure out the final passenger? And why so jealous? My husband dies and I inherit his pension, then Ibn Barr gave me his position in parliament, another salary for being the candidate’s mother? These character traits have been carefully studied, you can’t have just put them into the story by chance, so stop messing around. You don’t yet know Um al-Saad Deghm.” —

The old woman calmed down, and everyone relaxed their hands from the columns and walls they had embraced, except for one person, who rediscovered comfort in the column, so his prayer was embracing the column. The third printing:

On Sunday, the writer entered her house, carrying the new edition to which she had made the necessary changes to appease her angry neighbours. She found her neighbours who had returned from displacement sitting in her mother’s living room. The writer asked:

“Mother, what happened?”

Each one of them had dictated to her mother the changes they wanted made to the story. And their requests successively accumulated on the table, where Becky the housecat was sleeping underneath.

The story became completely different; the writer needed a wheeled cart to transport these from the salon to the basement where she secluded herself to write.

She stood in front of the table of requests with her hands behind her back, the way Beethoven did when music played in his mind that his ears could not hear. And if Becky hadn’t suddenly leapt down to the basement in a panic at the violent knocking at the front door, the writer wouldn’t have sensed what was going on around her.

“Open up, quick! Open up, if you don’t we’ll bring the house down on your heads!” called a voice from outside.

One of the neighbours opened the door, since the writer’s door now belonged to everyone, free of charge. Al-Kani militia entered, and grabbed the writer by her clasped arms. They recognised her from the position of her hands, but the writer didn’t pay attention to them… she kept gazing at the papers on the table and the requests flowing out of them… and she floated along with where they took her, as if moving to the beat of traditional Libyan music, whose rhythm no one can escape.

One of them said:

“She mentioned the militia in her story verbatim, and didn’t call them a national army, so she was arrested.” Another said:

“That’s exactly what she did. Al-Kani militia is a bunch of bandits and criminals.” Another:

“The Seventh Brigade took her to an unknown location.” Another:

“Psshhh… there’s no such thing as an ‘unknown location’, Libya’s a small country.” Another:

“We must deny having anything to do with the story and its writer, and get rid of the requests for edits immediately, before the militia searches the basement. And by that we mean the Seventh Brigade, God forgive us.”

Another:

“What should we do?” Another:

“Make the sewers flood the basement.” Another:

“No, not the sewers. Sewers flooded a bank before, and damaged the money deposited there. The sewers themselves don’t have a plan, until you use them twice, with the bank and then the basement. No, I’m begging you, forget about the sewers; that’s already been done often enough.”

Another:

“What you’re saying is true; the river of sewage can’t be unleashed twice, we have to change tactics: to burning.” Another:

“Let’s burn down the basement.” Everyone whispered:

“Good idea. Let’s burn down the basement.”

For the first time in the history of stories, a story cried over its characters and plot, and short and long stories of the world heard how she moaned:

“No one can finish me off. I’ll be honest with you, I hate you all, everyone who put your characters inside me. I’ll expose you all and say that everyone whose names and characters appear in the story are identical to reality, not simply a coincidence.”

The story cried extensively, and Becky suffocated in the basement. Then a week came in which old Um al-Saad Deghm was appointed cultural attache to Egypt, and the United Nations considered Libya’s sewers to be an environmental danger, which should be put under international protection.

Then a week passed in which nothing happened, and the fish in al-Bankina were so shocked, so astounded, that they figured there must be some kind of conspiracy.

The writer, however, has been taken to a psychiatric hospital and is currently undergoing elec-troshock therapy in good hands.

Her treatment is free, though the electricity is costly.