Sharing the Evening with Prayers and Giant Bats

In the evenings here sometimes a breeze comes, bringing slightly cooler air in from the sea. That is the time to sit out on the front porch, thinking blank thoughts and letting the day’s sweat dry on your brow. If the electricity has been on the soft drinks in the fridge are cold, but some days I’d give anything for a cold pint of lager or a chilled gin and tonic with ice clinking in the glass and the cold water condensation dripping down my hot knuckles. I’d probably give even more for someone to come out and sit beside me and just understand, but all that remains of God’s human form are the stories, and so far there's no other company.

The sky is turning oyster pearl and soft rose pink, deepening to the colour of a bruise. The cars on the main road up past the fields and the houses thrum like bluebottle flies and the motorcycles wind up and whine, mechanical mosquito noise mixing with the laughter of children next door. The evening call for prayer shimmers up from the minarets around the city like a mirage. My favourite description of the call to prayer is in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet:

"... a voice hanging like a hair in the
palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I
praise the perfection of God,
the Forever existing’ (this repeated thrice, ever
more slowly, in a high sweet register).
‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the
Existing, the Single,the Supreme: the perfection
of God, the One,the Sole …’"

If I could pray I would, but I lack the effort, the discipline, the habit of mind. God, the Desired, the Existing, will just have to understand tonight, or write me off. For the last six months I’ve tapped on his door with my prayers like the poor widow at a late hour and I’m tired of tapping. He has given me enough to live for now, so for now I will simply exist in this evening air filled with the prayers of the faithful, in the midst of a people who close their doors, face towards Mecca, and kneel. I hope that my resigned acquiescence in the middle of this is enough for Him.

Like tired Ezekiel, sipping his G & T in the valley of bones, my only prayer is a sigh: ‘O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ What else do you say to a God who takes everything and leaves only a promise behind? ‘Maybe in the end it will all be clear,’ you let the thought seep through you like a drug and settle your body back into the porch chair to think no further and watch the sky harden into a dark gunmetal blue. Muslims have a word for this. ‘Inshallah,’ they say, and usually shrug. A Huckleberry Finn existence: drifting on the river and calling it God, or Life, or Fate, or whatever you prefer. This is the realm of religion, and we do not know our way here. There is only a Name – if you believe in such things - to keep calling out, or whispering depending on your strength. There are times when I hope it’s enough only to remember that the Name exists. Maybe you are stronger than that.

Above the world the foxbats fly over when the sun drops, gulping the air like a thick drink with rubbery flaps of their translucent beer-bottle-coloured wings. They do not flit like fruit bats, but fly in steady straight lines like a race of dragons, hundreds of them. So here giant bats share the air with prayers, and perhaps they collide sometimes; perhaps some prayers are gulped like flies before they reach heaven; perhaps some prayers tear through the fruit-leather wings and a black bat falls to earth like an angel cast out of heaven.

I don’t know.

Tonight I am only a bystander to the struggle of the universe. Today I made a schedule for the vehicles and mostly got people to follow it, and I connected the fax machine. That was my effort, my blow struck against the chaos. Greater powers than me will have to decide how it weighs in the balance of good and evil.

‘O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ I will just sit here in my cooling skin under drifting clouds of prayer and the black shadows of bats, and close my eyes.