Story for performance #715
webcast from Madrid at 09:41PM, 05 Jun 07

The strawberries are piled high ready for market. They look to have half a mind to topple over. The swifts hurry the breathless air above. Newsprint, new and old, offers wrappings, homes, rubbish.

‘I have to go out Layla-bella’, Aziz says to the daughter he named after the night. ‘I will be six days gone, as the crow flies.’

‘I can’t start thinking about what you mean,’ says Layla. ‘I will wait, I will hold my arms up every day to test the air for your return. I will look into my hands. I will cover my eyes. I will count the fine hairs of the almond fruits. The force of my prayer will give me an image of you that will be my comfort.’

The others said simply: ‘We will wait for a telephone call’, and that was that.

The telephone call never came. In the time they were waiting they tried as hard as possible to keep the line free, they went outside to check birds were not perching on the wire. Resulting in exchanges such as
—May I speak to my mother?
—You can speak to Ibrahim, phone another time.
—May I speak to Naima?
—Who? NO, please goodbye.

Names no longer exactly evoked a person. First they stood in for the face, then they released a flow of unconnected features—a mouth, an eyelash, a hairline, then nothing but the names themselves, the sounds of them: Lay-la, Az-iz, Han-an. Later Aziz would ask why they never answered his calls. In truth he was a man with large hands, he found it hard to always dial the right number, he stumbled daily from phone to phone, they were always different. Dialling the number each day became a sort of catechism. He performed the act of phoning by movements of fingers either dialling or pushing or hollering the numbers for someone else to dial. Knowing that these diallings themselves were almost the conversations. He trusted his body to perform the correct numbers, no longer knowing whether he knew them himself.

The house knew its own silence, it was now a shell protecting a telephone, some sound, some careful piles of twisted leaves and feathers, precious little else. Layla would pick up the phone and listen to the sounds of nothing, hisses, cracks, snickers and deep whining sounds that implied distance but meant nothing. These sounds came to stand in for her father’s voice. They contained his exact location in the world, the sounds on the line. A splutter of snip-snip-snips and a creak-whine became West of the Jordan river, a market town piled high with produce, a deserted area within reach of water, a northern capital with red wind, a yellow land with familiar people and balustrades.

In the tough neighbourhoods now he finds his sounds no longer match the look of the houses. He practices walking on the outside of his feet then the insides. His daily reports become longer, less shouted and sometimes he dares not touch the telephone, instead performing a sort of dance to it right inside himself, inside his eyes and hands. The words fall from his mouth as objects that he tries to shape and direct to take flight. He finds failed homes in these words, they form around him and he feels their heat, shielding him and wounding him at once.

Layla called out her report to the others: ‘Today he reaches out for a shoulder to rest his hand upon, he recognises his face in a photograph in the newspaper, he repeats our names, we are blessed to hear his journey home, his noise is a blessing, I raise my back straight to receive his news, I carry his sounds out into the night, I’m into your heart now.’

Aziz whistled and chattered to himself, his breath leading, his mind and memory a shadow. In clarity now he whispered: ‘Today is my birthday,’ then he said quickly, ‘I left my home.’ His latest town was all wild west, a feeling of burnt out newness, ring-roads, hedges. ‘I left my home’, he repeated to the nearest five faces. ‘I became their dream’, he went on. They looked at him from five slightly different angles and none looked at him. One offered his hand, the dirt underneath his fingernails and all, and Aziz caught the scent of it, a hand smell of work and home. ‘Who are they?’ another one said. ‘Why are they even there?’

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Hannah Chiswell.