Jannah: Part 1

Andy always sat in the same place when he went to write in the little café on the corner. He always chose one of the metal stools beside the window, notebook open on the metal table. He liked the way the hazy Milan light came in through the lettered glass. He liked the way it showed up the warped texture of the notebook's pages, creased by folding and the cantankerous drying of spilled beer. He liked the jagged anarchy of his own handwriting — so much so that he sometimes stared at it until the scribble-outs and smudges and blobby threads lost their already tenuous connection with written language and became a kind of undergrowth of blue ink. He liked the shiny, tessellated surface of the table, which reminded him of the junk sold by Chinese hawkers in the underpass to the central station.

He liked a lot of things, but writer's block wasn't one of them. He could hardly pick his pen up without throwing it back down and running a reassuring hand over his cropped head. He couldn't blame his lack of productivity on fatigue either. He had already had three coffees — the last corrected, as the Italians say, with Grappa — and his leg jiggled continually under the table.

He turned a fresh page and looked out the window. A few Arabic men were sitting out there, in the little garden staked out on the pavement by round-leafed plants in oblong pots. They were taking turns on a water pipe. The sweet smell of shisha tobacco reached into the café.

'The ineluctable sweetness of shared tobacco,' Andy wrote in his notebook, before throwing his pen down so hard that it clattered off the table.

When he finally retrieved it, red faced with exertion and shame, a man of about fifty was standing beside him.

"My friend you are nervous," said the man, in thick north African Italian. "It is not good to be nervous."

The man sat down and put a hand on his shoulder.

"You are young. You should be enjoying yourself. Life is too short to worry."

"Si, si," nodded Andy, a little defensively. It wasn't the first time a strange and swarthy man had insisted on joining him in a café.

"I know something that will stop your leg shaking," said the man, moving his hand to Andy's knee.

Andy put the lid on his pen, closed his notebook and picked up his bag.

The man said something in Arabic to a friend of his who was walking by and both of them burst out laughing.

Andy knew he was something of an oddity in that café: an Italian would have been strange enough, let alone a pale, red-headed Scotsman. But for the most part the locals paid him no mind. It would be a shame if they started now, since in other respects it was an ideal place to write. For one thing, there weren't any women to distract him. For another, hardly anyone spoke Italian. Andy's grasp of that melodious language was still crude after two years in Milan, but his comprehension had reached a point where he found it difficult to filter out the interminable conversations about football and food.

"My friend," said the man, still laughing and showing a row of tobacco stained teeth, "you must go to Jannah."

"What's Jannah," asked Andy, curious enough to leave his bag on his lap a moment longer.

Another eruption of wheezy laughter.

"What's Jannah?" the man repeated to his friend, who was hovering by the table, "What's Jannah?"

"Jannah," said the friend, "Is a very holy place."

"Yes," said the seated man, "Jannah is a very holy place. You go to this house"—he asked for Andy's pen and pulled a napkin out of the dispenser on the next table and wrote an address on the filmy paper. "You go to this house and ask for Jannah. Then your leg not shake any more!"

Andy grinned, the tension visibly leaving his body.

"Yes, yes," he said, as the man stood and patted his shoulder, "I ask for Jannah. Then my leg not shake any more!"

Andy watched the man leave the café and sit down with the others outside and say something that made them all laugh.

When his smile had faded he opened his notebook and placed it in the centre of the round table. He shifted his weight, planting his feet on the metal tube encircling the stool's legs. He had had his little divertimento for the day; now it was time to get down to work.

As he stepped out of the café into the soporific May heat, Andy promised himself he'd be back within an hour. He'd spent too many evenings with the guilt of not having written anything clinging to him like a bad smell.

A few minutes later he stopped in front of a one Euro bargain shop. He made a mental inventory of everything he could see through the window: plastic horses, fluorescent handled skipping ropes, racing cars, armed figurines, ballpoint pens, cheap glue, chopsticks, fans, pickup sticks, dominoes.

This meaningful operation complete, he left the shop and turned down a narrow sidestreet, leaving the traffic noise behind him. He didn't usually come here on his walks. He usually continued along the main road, glancing at his reflection in shop windows, maybe stopping in one of the tiny parks where dogs fouled the grass and old men talked about the shocking state of the nation with their hands behind their backs.

Halfway up the alley he noticed a squeaking, hustling sound — like shoes on a basketball court. Glancing about, he saw that two boys were playing football in the entrance to a courtyard. The space was compressed, a few square meters of concrete between the street and the gated arch that led to the courtyard. And the same concentration showed in their faces. They played their bunched up game of feint and shoot, trap and tackle, with the beetling focus of chess grandmasters. And they didn't speak. They didn't make any sound at all, except the high scuffing squeaks of their shoes and the echoey thud of the ball.

Andy was mesmerised. The drum-tight rhythm of their game stood out sharp and clear against the sluggish mediocrity of his afternoon's work.

Writing, he mused, when he finally managed to drag himself away, was a terrible thing. It fed on life and experience like a vampire; and the harder your feelings the tastier their blood. But at the same time it stopped you from living at all, trying so hard to shape your world into something beautiful that you only half existed in it.

He pulled a scrunched up napkin out of his pocket, inspected it, and turned down another sidestreet.

Andy's problem was not that he didn't have a life. He could have handled that. His problem was that his lack of life enervated his writing. It seemed so cruel to him that the very thing he had sacrificed his vitality for was what punished him most for his listlessness. He felt like one of those men who fall in love with an indifferent woman, and are doomed to become ever more invisible the harder they try to impress her.

He stopped in front of a doorway and checked the napkin again. Then he backtracked a little way and turned onto a short pathway leading to a large apartment block.

It was an awful situation, but there was nothing he could do about it. Whatever Art commanded, he was damned to obey — even if her order was, paradoxically, to ignore her, and wallow instead in the ugliest and most prosaic kind of reality. Any price was worth paying, so long as it kept alive the hope that his beloved would one day open her arms to him, that he would finally progress from being Art's spurned suitor to her sated lover.

The buzzer looked like all the other buzzers, in two grey columns above the intercom.

"Jannah," he was about to say, but whoever was on the other end buzzed him in without speaking.

As he climbed the chipped marble stairs he felt like he could see the changes taking place in his body: his heart's valve opening and throbbing, his pupils dilating, the hairs rising on his skin.

He rang the doorbell outside flat 17. There was a semi-circular doormat in front of the door, with a faded rainbow dyed into the tawny weave. For some reason this struck him as immensely funny.

His amusement evaporated when the door opened and a tall blonde woman ushered him in.

Andy glanced around the cramped living room, the two armchairs with the dingy floral upholstery, the sterile watercolour of a Greek beach framed on the wall.

"I look for Jannah," he managed to say.

There was something almost mocking in the way the blonde woman smiled.

"No problem," she said, her voice chromed with Slavic consonants. "You wait here."

Andy sat in an armchair and watched her leave through one of the three doors opening off the hall. As his eyes followed the slim hard curve of her body, the dance of her black dress against her thighs, he wondered if he had been too hasty about mentioning Jannah.

But she must have been recommended for a reason.

He imagined opening the three doors, finding a more beautiful and exotic woman behind each one. And Jannah behind the last, like something from the Thousand and One Nights. As he settled further into the armchair, the doors began to multiply in his head. Row after row of silent chambers, where women whose sole occupation was to make themselves beautiful awaited his knock, his pleasure. Where women could be undressed like life-sized dolls, kissed, caressed, bent over, used. Where women were fascinated by everything he said. Where they draped themselves over his glossy words like bimbos over the bonnet of a car.

Heaven, he thought, must be something like that.

A long time seemed to pass. Andy heard voices, the clack of high-heels on a parquet floor. Breathing was like gulping down whisky. Soon he would be fucking. He would pay money to a strange woman and she would let him fuck her. Why had he never thought of this before?

The blonde came back.

"Jannah's in there," she said, gesturing to one of the doors. She sat down in the other armchair, and Andy couldn't help lingering as she crossed her legs. He stood up with one hand in his pocket.

He crossed the herringbone pattern of wooden floor strips and opened the door. Suddenly he understood it all: the mocking look in the blonde woman's smile, the laughter of the men in the café. The woman in front of him must have been at least eighty years old. The wrinkles on her gaunt black face made him think of elephant hide, and something else, something older, ripples in desert sand. Her ribs showed waxy and sharp above her empty white crop top. The legs that jutted from her tiny skirt did not look thick enough to support her.

"Ah," said Andy, "I think there was mistake. I…"

An ancient hand reached between his legs and he never finished his sentence.