Land of No Rain Read Online Free PDF

backgrounds under a single roof. You were living your present, that moment when you met her. This is true. You never thought about the fact that you were not the first man in her life, because she too was not the first woman in your life. What mattered to you was that you should have nothing in common with that young revolutionary who had sold out as soon as he went back to his country. You would analyse with her the contradiction between the principles and behaviour displayed by the revolutionaries in our region. As though reciting from a sacred text, you attributed this to the fact that objective circumstances were not yet ripe and that ingrained traditions vigorously resisted new ideas. But this was only what you said at the start of your relationship, before you got married. You liked that. You praised what she said without reservation. You endorsed her arguments and her conclusions about the double standards of intellectuals. In fact you would even go a step further. You seemed to be in complete agreement on these matters. After living under the same roof you changed somewhat. You changed gradually. You no longer wanted to take part in these discussions. On such issues you were terser, less enthusiastic, less effusive than before. She was more lucid than you, and she remained so. It was you who still preserved inside you areas shrouded in darkness that, with the passage of time, you surrounded with barbed wire.
    *  *  *
    In your final years in the City of Red and Grey, you had the impression that she had the upper hand in the household. It was an impression rooted in traditional attitudes that you hadn’t completely shaken off, but it was not necessarily the reality of the situation. Having studied sociology in that same city, she had found a good full-time job in an organisation that dealt with immigrants. You had a sporadic income. You helped set up a magazine – along with others who had escaped from your part of the world with their writing skills and their ideas (and with their skins) – as a platform for freedom, to expose the corruption and despotism of the forces in control there, but you left the magazine after it was co-opted. With their vast amounts of money or their pistols with silencers, those forces penetrated countries of refuge and asylum to bring to heel those who had strayed from the flock, those who had fled the hell at home. Some gave in under the pressure of making ends meet, while others said with derision, ‘If that’s how it is, why don’t we work with the very source instead of with its agents?’ That magazine was almost the last of the publications to join the choir in which the fugitives from hell raggedly sang the infernal national anthem, turning sour milk, as the proverb goes, into cottage cheese. Needless to say, you stopped working at the magazine and started to write here and there, leaving one failed project in order to embark on another. Which made you even more reclusive.
    When she was going over, for some reason, some of her old stories about her young revolutionary husband, she would ask you whether the subject bothered you. With just one or two words or a shake of the head you would say no. She didn’t like that. She thought it showed that you weren’t interested in her, not that you believed that her right to her own past was non-negotiable and required no apologies. Because there was nothing she needed to be embarrassed about or apologise for. Her suggestion that you weren’t interested would annoy you. But was it without basis? Did it occur to you to analyse the components of your alleged position? It didn’t. You seemed to be afraid to go deeper into the subject, in case you might be included among those comrades that the great revolutionary once likened to radishes – red only on the outside.
    Your marriage wasn’t bad. You didn’t completely fail to live up to the adjustments, concessions and promises required when two people live under the same roof, but