The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
From the darkness I heard my mother’s voice:
— Khalo, don’t touch every file that has your name on it…
My hand hung between the floor and the file.
For years I could have picked out my mother’s voice from a thousand others, whether it came through a wall, down a telephone line, amid the noise of the street or from somewhere farther away than death.
— Mum, is that you?
There was no answer.
I could hear only the archive breathing. The shelves groaned in the dark, and papers brushed against one another like dry autumn leaves.
My donkey nudged my shoulder with its muzzle.
— Don’t worry. I’ll only look.
It gave a short bray, as if to say:
“I know you. Whenever you say you’ll only look, five minutes later you’re in the thick of it.”
It was right.
Someone who has spent a lifetime peering into forbidden files is unlikely to become an obedient citizen all of a sudden at death’s door.
I took my lighter from my pocket and flicked it on. The small flame trembled and lit the shadow’s face for a moment. Its hand was still on the file.
— Did you hear my mother?
— I hear only your voice.
— But I didn’t say anything.
— You don’t hear every voice with your ears, Khalo. Some come from somewhere inside your heart.
I bent down and pulled the file from under its hand.
— Your mother warned you, the shadow said.
— Mum knew me better than you do. She knew that if she told me not to touch it, I certainly would. She used to call me her contrary little devil.
I brought the lighter close to the file. My name was written on its dusty cover:
“Naser Kamali — Life Number Seven”
Underneath, in red ink:
“A life left unfinished because of an encounter that never took place.”
— What is Life Number Seven supposed to mean? As far as I can remember, I’ve barely managed to run this one life. If you mean I’ve escaped death seven times — from a car accident to a mock execution and the brink of suicide — even that doesn’t add up to seven.
The shadow said:
— People remember only the lives they’ve lived, not those they might have lived.
— You mean I have other lives?
— Had.
— How many?
— According to the files, twelve.
I whistled.
— Well! I can’t have become rich in any of the other eleven either, or I’d have kept one aside for a rainy day.
The shadow did not smile.
I could never understand why creatures from the other side were so resistant to jokes. Perhaps death begins at the very point where a person stops laughing.
I opened the file.
At that moment the little lamp around the donkey’s neck came on. Its yellow light fell across the first page, but instead of words there was a moving image inside the paper.
A street wet with rain.
On one side stood a younger, thinner me, with a thick moustache and more hair than I have at my disposal today. On the other, a woman waited beneath a small awning. She wore a dress the colour of a pomegranate and held a book against her chest. Perhaps she had laboured to write and publish it herself. It did not look thick. Perhaps it was for children.
I could not see her face.
I was about to touch the page when my mother’s voice came again:
— Khalo, not every beautiful thing you see was meant for you.
— Mum, can’t a person at least see what wasn’t meant for him?
Her voice was closer this time.
— Looking is easy. Coming back is hard.
— It’s easy to look at the lives you missed, Khalo. But if you step inside them, you may never find your way back to the life that’s yours.
The shadow sat down beside me.
— Who is she?
— A woman you would have met if you had left the house three minutes later that day.
— Only three minutes?
— Sometimes three minutes is all that separates one life from another.
I stared at the image.
She was still waiting in the rain. Buses came and went. People passed her, but she remained there, as though she were waiting not for the young man in that street but for the old man who, years later, would open his file in the archives of death.
— What would have happened if I’d met her?
— Perhaps you’d have fallen in love.
— Perhaps?
— The Department of Death gives no guarantees when it comes to love.
— Then what are all these files for?
— We record possibilities, not outcomes.
— Like a job centre. It doesn’t give you a job; it merely confirms that you’re unemployed.
The donkey brayed.
This time I was sure it was laughing.
I turned the page.
A small café appeared. The same woman and I sat opposite each other. Two cups of coffee stood on the table, and an open book lay between us. She said something and I laughed — not the brief sort of laugh you offer out of politeness, but one that rises from somewhere deep inside you and, for a few moments, drives off every guard posted by grief. It was the sort of conversation whose repetition would itself be a new beginning, never a tiresome one.
My heart gave a little lurch.
I had not seen myself like that for years.
— What was she saying?
— The file has no sound.
— What a backward department! You have a three-page form for dying, but you couldn’t put sound in love?
I put my ear close to the page.
At first I heard nothing. Then a very faint voice rose from the paper:
— Write, Khalo. There are still things no one but you can say.
My hand shook.
I knew those words.
Perhaps they had not been spoken exactly like that. But years later someone had said something much the same to me. Without knowing it, that person had put a hand on my silent shoulder and woken the writer who had been buried beneath the rubble of years.
I looked at the shadow.
— Didn’t you say this life never happened?
— People don’t always enter our lives by the same road. Sometimes you lose someone in your youth, and years later the same light comes to you in another face.
— Does love change its face too?
— Real love doesn’t die when someone goes away or is lost. The way it remains with us changes. Sometimes it goes on in memory, kindness, writing or the hope of living.
I lit my cigar and watched the smoke. It rose, curled round the lamplight and, for a moment, took the shape of a woman holding a book against her chest.
— Then perhaps no life is entirely lost.
— Perhaps. But no life comes back in precisely the same form twice.
I turned the next page.
This time I saw my own small, modest and pleasant room. It was the middle of the night. I sat at my desk writing. Beside me was a cup of coffee that, I remembered, the woman had given me, and the donkey slept quietly in a corner. A woman stood outside the window, but I did not look up.
She neither knocked nor called my name.
She only watched.
— Why doesn’t she come in?
— Perhaps she’s waiting for an invitation.
— Well, for certain reasons, and in her own words, I said we should speak only on the telephone. But that doesn’t mean she has to wait outside if she comes here. My door has always been open to her.
— Then why doesn’t she knock?
— Perhaps she knocked once and you didn’t hear.
I leant closer to the image.
The woman stood at the window, waiting for me to raise my head and see her. But the version of me inside the picture was so absorbed in writing that he did not notice her. A few moments later she gave up, took her hand from the glass and slowly moved away from the window.
But no — she had not moved away.
Suddenly I realised that with each word I put on the page, part of her figure faded.
— Stop! I shouted.
But the younger — or older — me on the page could not hear. He kept writing, and she gradually disappeared.
I reached into the picture to pull the paper from under his hand.
The shadow caught my arm.
— I told you. If you enter the file, you may not get back.
— She’s disappearing!
— Perhaps she’s always been disappearing.
— Then I have to save her.
— Her, or yourself?
I had no answer.
The donkey came forward and caught the corner of my shirt between its teeth. It tried to pull me away from the page, but my hand had gone into the paper as far as the wrist. I felt rain on my fingers. The smell of coffee and wet paper rose around me.
The woman at the window looked up.
This time I saw her face.
It was neither wholly young nor old. It seemed to hold the faces of all the women who had lit a small light in my darkness at some point in my life: my mother, a lost comrade, an unfinished love, and the person who had brought me back to writing.
Her lips moved.
— Khalo, let go of the life you didn’t have. Part of the life you do have still remains.
— How much?
She smiled.
— As much as the words you have yet to write.
Suddenly a hand came out from behind the page and seized my wrist.
It was not hers.
It was cold, bony and merciless.
A man’s voice came from inside the file:
— Naser Kamali, you are under arrest for unlawful entry into a life you did not live.
The shadow stepped back.
The donkey pulled harder at my shirt.
I took the cigar from my mouth, flicked its ash onto the bony hand and said:
— Khalo has been arrested plenty of times for living. You’ll have to find a new charge this time.
The hand loosened its grip for a moment.
That moment was enough.
I pulled myself back and the file slammed shut.
The archive lights came on again.
I was breathless. The donkey still had my shirt between its teeth. The shadow stood opposite me, and the man with the trolley had vanished at the far end of the corridor.
But the file with the red star was no longer on the floor.
From behind the shelves came footsteps, slow, regular and drawing nearer.
The shadow picked up its black briefcase.
— They’re coming.
— Who?
— The officers of the Department of Unlived Lives.
— I have no unlived life. I’ve lived my life. If I could go back, I would eagerly live that same life again. My past made me as strong as I am.
Then I asked in surprise:
— Is there really a department for that too?
— Khalo, everything a person loses gets filed away somewhere.
The footsteps came closer.
The lamp around the donkey’s neck trembled.
And just before the first officer appeared from behind the shelves, my mother’s voice echoed down the corridor one last time:
— Don’t run this time, Khalo. Some files have to be read to the very end…
To be continued.
Naser Kamali
London, in my small, modest and pleasant room
Undated; around an hour after midnight
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