Muhidin stayed by his bed, looming like a mother ostrich, dabbing scent and blended herbs to pressure points, nerve points, and soul portals. He stroked Ziriyab’s forehead, cajoled and consoled, addressed him as he would an infant. Lala, mwanangu, lala. There is a cure for every one of life’s ailments. Muhidin’s problem was an old one—discerning how and when to recognize the elixir when it offered itself.
* * *
—
Ayaana and Munira had kept away from Muhidin after the first commotion of encounter. Ziriyab had tumbled into the water from the boat at the jetty in a faint. Muhidin had ambled over to join some other men in hauling this stranger from the water. A man had pulled out and read a name from a drenched passport. And, hearing the name, Muhidin had found his son, upon whom he fell, whom he lifted and carried to his house, refusing all assistance, wailing, “Leave me my boy, leave me my son,” to would-be helpers. Later, Muhidin had sent a note to Munira and Ayaana: “He needs time. I need time. We will look for you when we are ready.”
A day, a week, Ayaana waited. She peeked into Muhidin’s house from all available angles. She lurked beneath windows and tried to interpret the sounds and movements she heard. Munira pretended not to care. But, one day, she gave in to ask Ayaana, “What do you see? Did he say anything?”
In the middle of an evening in the third week, Ayaana dragged Munira to Muhidin’s door; Munira let herself be dragged. Munira carried rose attar, her famed halwaridi, for Muhidin. When Muhidin opened his door, Ayaana at once shouted, “Even me, aren’t I yours?”
Muhidin lifted her up and hid his face in her neck, recalling beautiful things—like songs in the sea—as Munira’s eyes danced for him. He almost wept when Munira handed over the attar to him. He covered her hands over the vessel. “You took long enough,” he said. “Come in.”
* * *
—
Inside the house, Munira launched into cleaning, dusting, adjusting objects, rearranging furniture. “Ayaana! Water,” she called.
Muhidin protested, “Let us sit, let us talk. How is the world coping without me?”
Munira said, “Better than usual.” She giggled. Then she rubbed an already clean shelf. “Such dust.” That way, she did not have to attend to a heart that was beating so hard, or to the unreliability of her emotions about this ungainly, hairy creature she had needed to see.
Ayaana produced a book of Hafiz’s poetry she had taken off Muhidin’s shelves. “Read,” she said.
He rapped her head. “Say ‘please.’ ”
“Nope,” she answered.
“Nope?” Muhidin asked, his brows rising.
Ayaana glared. Muhidin took the book. “Let us see…Something about manners.”
“Nope,” Ayaana replied, “something about disappearing.” She added defiantly, “And…and forgetting.” Her voice shook on the word.
Muhidin bent to gaze into her eyes. He touched the side of her face. “I’m here.” He picked a passage to read:
“Pour the red wine with control
Like rose water into the bowl
While fragrant breeze will roll…”
Somewhere outside, a cock crowed; the muezzin summoned humanity to prayer; donkeys brayed; children giggled. The sea flowed with the sound of a storm passing elsewhere. Rain spattered. Inside, Muhidin pulled a window shut, enclosing them in their world, their love, their words, their Hafiz.
“How is he?” Munira whispered.
“His life’s a wildfire. I gather soul ashes with my hands,” Muhidin said despairingly. “My boy’s dying.” Ayaana rushed to wrap her arms around Muhidin’s waist. He stroked her head. “Let’s sit…for a little while. Tell me things of goodness. How are my girls?” His voice was brusque.
* * *
—
Upstairs, Ziriyab Raamis stirred. Soft voices were floating toward him. He did not yet have the power to open his eyes, but he could smell the salt of the sea, and a hint of jasmine and roses. Sounds he deciphered. A child’s voice, awed, high-pitched: “The sea done bringed…uh…bring him?” A deep voice, now familiar, saying, “My son.” A woman’s breathy answer: “He’s prettier than you.” The deep voice repeating, “My boy.” Ziriyab clung to the resonance of that deep voice as he very, very slowly winched a way out of thick, black-mud dreams.
* * *
—
Five days later, a gale settled on the island. Driving, warm rain fell in broad sheets that flooded the land and whipped up the sea into a raging lather. Munira, Ayaana, and Muhidin sat on a reed mat in Muhidin’s gallery with its sea-view balcony. They shared halua, and coffee flavored with ginger and rose water. Muhidin spun tales of sea monsters, his many ways of challenging storms. He explained that, when he had dared waves larger than mountains to swamp him and sweep him off the deck of his ship, they had, at the very last second, collapsed and retreated. He talked about the pleading cry of djinns that had fallen in love with him, their longing to grant him anything, if only he would grant them a glimpse of his face. In these stories, Muhidin never flinched. In his narrated battles, he never lost. In these encounters with strong, brave men, he was the stronger and braver, and for women of assorted beauty, he was always the prize. In the recklessness of that day, he went upstairs and returned with a yellow-brown parchment map in a book within a book.
What they saw: a dream poem in Kufic script.
نجمة. A star. A map. A road. A journey. A destination. Something. Muhidin told them—in half-word, half-song—how he had retrieved it from the inside drawer of an inside chest in a black cupboard within a crumbling house found at the bottom half of a doubling-back labyrinth. They stared at the fragment, willing it to speak. Munira then whispered about the fear of rusting in one place, of stagnating and of never traveling to experience other points of the world. She stroked the map. And outside: Hooooooo! howled the wind. Whaaaaaa! The ocean answered, and as night started to sneak in, they learned they were not yet ready to leave one another.
* * *
—
Ayaana cried, “Not yet.”
So.
Muhidin roused himself, reached over, and dragged down one of the dangling soft blue cloths, which he draped around his body. Eyes rolling, body stiff, he attempted to rotate his hips. He began a growl that was soon deciphered by his hysterical audience to be Amr Diab’s previously dulcet “Habibi”:
“Habibi ya nour el-ain
Ya sakin khayali
A’ashek bakali sneen wala ghayrak bibali….”
They were giddy. Munira, feeling as she had not felt in nineteen years, arched her back as a child reading stars might, taarab melodies mixing and brewing within her. She seized Muhidin’s idea of song, added the exaggerated warbles of a Zanzibari singer notorious for elongating vowels in music to make it wobble, wiggle, and hyperventilate. Munira sang:
“Ua langu silioni nani alolichukuwa?
Ua langu lileteni moyo upate kupowa
Ua langu la zamani ua lililo muruwa…”
Even in mimicry, Munira’s contralto blasted open recondite portals, revealed salted-and-preserved tragedies, and shook stability. As she sang, incandescence exploded to open pebbled-over lives. Muhidin ended his baying accompaniment. Ayaana lost her hysterical cackles. They simply listened, while portions of their beings fluttered over to the balcony to peer through mists into the wild blue-silver waves of a foaming ocean, searching for something they could not give a name to.
* * *
—
From his canopied bed in his room, Ziriyab Raamis also eavesdropped. A book of Tagore’s poetry lay open against his perspiring head. His body, which had been shaking with fever, added fury to its vigor. Only later would he admit that he had been jealous about being left out, stranded in emptiness while life flowed on without him. From his pillow, he smelled their coffee, heard their laughter, their raucousness. A
woman singing: her voice cut him up; he hated her. He grunted and thrashed around the bed. He tried to block his ears. He retched three times. Wrath lifted him off the bed.
* * *
—
Ziriyab Raamis seemed to materialize in the room. Sunken cheeks, long yellowish face, long lashes, almost hazel bloodshot eyes, and slender hands: he was a wraith. His sudden presence shocked Munira into silence. With extra weight, she thought, this would be a most exquisite being.
Ziriyab’s face became distorted, as if a hooded entity lurked beneath his skin. Outside, thunder. Ziriyab’s eyes moved across the three others. They perched on Munira. “Perverse leeches. Harlots!”
Lightning.
Munira scurried into her mask as a hermit crab would. How had she forgotten? How had she slipped into happiness? How had she lost the sense of foreboding that kept her alert? How could she forget the pursuing, bullying thing that always turned up to disrupt her tiniest joys? Here was its loathsome manifestation. How had she forgotten?
“So. A brothel?” Ziriyab’s hand gesture took in the tableau. “After you’ve finished with him”—a chin jutted in the direction of Muhidin—“look to me. How much for your services?” He dipped a finger into his shirt pocket and dangled a foreign note. “Or will it cost more?” The money floated to the ground. Ziriyab Raamis’s gaze crawled over Munira’s body.
Munira reached down for her empty coffee cup and hurled it at him, clipping his ear as the cup bounced off his head. The coffee remains stained his kikoi. Then she was in his face, grabbing his throat, hands around his neck; her teeth bit his hand, and her voice was smoky with tears: “I’ve died before.” She seized his hair. “Insult me, mie langu jicho, but in front of my child? You diseased maggot!” They grappled.
“Munira!” Muhidin grabbed her.
“Ma-e!” Ayaana kicked over the coffeepot to reach Munira.
Muhidin and Ayaana dragged Munira off Ziriyab. The outside storm was inside the room: Ziriyab’s flaming eyes, a bruise on his jaw; Munira gulping air, hair unkempt. Muhidin dropped a firm arm around her shoulders and with the other drew Ayaana to his side. He glared at his son, his choice clear. Muhidin stared Ziriyab down. “Mtupie Mungu kilio, sio binadamu mwenzi,” he snarled—Cry to God, what can a human being do? Suddenly still, they breathed, they waited, and they watched one another.
Munira wiped her sweating face; her voice shaking, she sniffed, “Ba…now we leave. We’ll borrow your umbrella. Come see us when you need to. Come, lulu.”
Ayaana was hunched, watching Ziriyab with panicked eyes.
Outside, lightning. Muhidin said, “I’ll go with you.”
No one moved. Thunder. Lightning. Thunder. The outside storm was inside the room, and then, unexpectedly, it struck two hearts.
* * *
—
Glowing senses. Inner portals opened by a decision. Within Muhidin, newness sparkled like many diamonds set alight. He looked at the world light-headedly and looked through Ziriyab. Twinkling revelation, terror, and surprise. Muhidin then turned on his heel to gape at Munira, startled by his own breathlessness, his racing heart. He reached for her, but stopped himself, readjusted his reaction. A sheen of perspiration was on his brow; his lips were dry, and blood rushed and swirled in his head. Thunder. Lightning. Thunder. Muhidin draped his large arms around Munira and Ayaana again, to lead them away.
Yet.
His feet hovered above the earth and its lucent light.
Munira, Munira, Munira.
Heartbeat. Munira.
* * *
—
Dizzy, bracing himself against a pillar, Ziriyab panted. Then he laughed, his voice cracking and rising. He frowned. His limbs were quivering, and his heart beat to the rhythm of his single-word thoughts: That. Woman. That. Woman. Nothing could offend him now, not even his grief. Euphoria surfaced as a slow-burning buzz on his body. He garbled “Thank you” for the voice, song, scent, temper, skin, and eyes of a woman, that woman.
When Ziriyab first entered the room, Munira had just flung out her arms. Her face tilted backward toward him, and a light hovered near her head. Her face: 53 freckles. Though he had spat at her, he was bemused. Beyond his distress at his father’s rebuff, he knew yearning. Ziriyab’s suddenly gleaming world was made out of an effusion of fragrances and emotions: rose, jasmine, vanilla, earth, water, salt, hurt, fury, and desolation. He read her look of sorrow, for it came from a book of wounds he had known. He had wanted to cry to Munira, Let’s start again, as if he were speaking to his original self. He decided he would be her scapegoat, her fool. He would earn her mercy. He would plead with her heart until she recognized that she was his restart. As the house returned to its groan-, creak-, thump-filled, in-between existence, Ziriyab knelt down to retrieve the money he had scattered. He limped over to the balcony, and dropped it over the balustrade. A wind swooped down on it. He reached for a cloth and knelt on the ground to wipe the spilled coffee.
* * *
—
Heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
Ziriyab waited.
Muhidin reached the gallery, eyes popping and mouth open. But before he could pronounce a word, Ziriyab fell prostrate before him, arms stretched above his head, supplicating, words breaking off, starting again, returning, repeating themselves, so that when these came together, minutes later, he had wept. “Today I shamed you…offended your people…I beg you…forgive me. Please, let me stay. I’ll change, I promise. Mercy. Forgive me.”
He punctured Muhidin’s ferocity.
A brief silence before Muhidin offered his son the smallest of nods and helped him up. He looked into his son’s face and understood. For less than the length of a sigh, the deep fingerprint of loss poked into Muhidin’s spine, and he might have stumbled. He knew. From the new will-to-live shine in his son’s eyes, he knew.
Little by little, his son’s consumptive shadows disappeared in tender-voiced tell-me-about-her—Munira—requests that made his eyes sparkle. “I dreamed that we danced last night,” Ziriyab confided as he guzzled down milk and juice and herbal blends. Tell me what she wore today. Muhidin struggled to forget Munira’s manners, her beginnings, her perfumes, her garden, and her scattered, silken, low laughter. Every detail he offered his son was as a eulogy. Verbal amputations from one unexpected love that had surfaced and changed the geography of his soul forever, far more than the seas could ever do, to feed another unexpected love. Muhidin was dying. Muhidin was giving life again.
[ 17 ]
As soon as his body could stay up, Ziriyab had shuffled over to Munira’s house, wearing Muhidin’s best kanzu, shaven and elegant, carrying a basket of household supplies. He stood outside Munira’s house, afraid to knock. When she opened the door and saw him there, she slammed it shut again.
He stood outside to wait.
Ayaana opened the door almost an hour later. She studied him, wide-eyed. “You’re the bad man?” she said.
“Yes.”
“What are you carrying?”
“Food and an apology.”
“Can I see it?”
“It’s for your glorious mother, that perfumed queen, enchantress of my heart. I, a prisoner of her song, throw my tormented heart beneath her beloved and merciful heel.”
Ayaana giggled.
Munira re-emerged, glared, dragged her daughter in, and slammed the door.
In the soft orange light of dusk, he was still there, seated as a Buddha might be, with his basket of offerings close to his feet, his pensive focus on Munira’s door. From time to time, Ayaana peeped through the window to stick out her tongue at him.
“Stop humiliating yourself, fool,” hissed Suleiman’s mother, Bi Amina Mahmoud, to Ziriyab on her way to shop for fabric and pasta. “Why beg for what’s offered free? Grow some testicles!”
Ziriyab did not react. He reflected on the sound of pl
acid waves and an arcane stillness that persisted on Pate, now hearing the rustling of night leaves and smelling the wavering scents of dill, rosemary, mint, and sage, until close to midnight, when Munira stepped out with a glass of rose-scented coconut water for him.
He reached for it with both hands, enclosing hers in the act. “I was jealous…” he began. She dragged her hands from his.
She said, “I accept your apology. Now go away.”
He jumped up, stretching cramped legs. “Please, take these, my Huma, and…”
She turned away.
He called, “Marry me then?”
Munira fled. Ziriyab heard the door slam again. Sipping the juice, he thought, My Munira, my Buthayna, my Ghazalah, my own soaring Huma. He glided back to Muhidin’s, leaving his basket behind, grinning at night stars and cradling the glass as if it were a jewel.
* * *
—
Weeks later, Munira, in a pleasant tone, informed Ziriyab, who was dogging her footsteps among the fishermen as she sought to buy fish, “You’re an ox and an indulged donkey.” Munira added, “Your ears are the shape of shark fins, and you are rude, thin, and ignorant. You bite your nails and chew gum like a masticating cow.” Ziriyab agreed with her. He told her of other flaws she did not know about: his bullfrog snores, sleeping with his mouth wide open while saliva drooled, and that, even though he was trying to be a fisherman now and scraping off the accountant’s skin, he was unable to bear the floundering of fish in nets, gasping for breath and screaming in silence, big golden eyes pleading for mercy, so he let them go. And then he called her his Munira, his Buthayna, his Ghazalah, his own soaring Huma.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 11
