Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  Najiya did not return home. She went to her friend’s. Standing outside the wood door she shouted. Khazina! Khaziiiiinaaa!

  Still arranging the burqu over her face, her friend came out. All well, Qamar?

  Come on, said Najiya. Come and stay at my place tonight.

  They walked for a long time before Najiya’s home came into view. My brother is camped out on the eastern sand bank, so we can sleep inside.

  Khazina didn’t say anything until they had sat down, face to face.

  What happened?

  He ran away, her friend answered quietly.

  Khazina laughed so hard she crumpled flat onto the floor. God forbid! He’s no man! He ran away? Hahaha! He ran away from you, Qamar?

  Najiya did not laugh. She waited until her friend stopped shrieking.

  I want him. I will have him.

  Khazina wiped the tears from her eyes with the edge of her robe and tossed a piece of wood onto the fire. Qamar, this man doesn’t seem much use.

  Najiya stretched herself. But I want him. And he will come to me. When the Moon longs for something, the Moon gets her desire.

  Khazina shook her head. Sister, this man is married to the daughter of Shaykh Masoud, and he’s the shaykh of their whole clan. You think he will leave her to marry you?

  Najiya laughed that famous, ringing laugh of hers that revealed her pearl-like teeth. She really does deserve that nickname, Khazina said to herself. She’s the Moon in full. No wonder people have all but forgotten her real name.

  Slowly and elaborately Najiya extended her arms over and behind her head. Who said I want to marry him? Qamar doesn’t let anyone give her orders. I wasn’t created to serve and obey some man. Some fellow who would steal what should be mine and keep me from seeing my brother and my girlfriends! One day saying, No, you cannot go out, another time saying, No, don’t even get dressed, don’t even think about going out! One minute saying, Come here! and the next, Go away! No, no, Khazina – Azzan will be mine but I won’t be his. He’ll come to me when I want him, and he’ll go away when I say so. Ever since I saw him that evening, sitting with the others, talking and laughing, I knew this man would be Qamar’s. And he runs away? He flees? That man scampered off, like I was a jinni taking him by surprise, so he fled! Refuse me? Qamar? There’s never yet been a man created who can refuse me, Khazina. Azzan will come to me on his knees.

  In silence the friends watched the fire die down until they were drowsy enough to fall asleep.

  Najiya lived in two rooms opening onto a reception room that overlooked the courtyard, with a low wall that went only halfway up to the roofing. But when she was growing up, home had been a tent. Her father couldn’t hang onto money. She had never seen her mother and she never bothered asking about her. She had one love in this world – her little brother. The scars on her body were the traces of old wounds picked up in the fights she’d had defending him from other boys. She would hurry home every day from primary school to ask him who had hurt him today. Stuffing her yellow school pinafore inside her loose trousers she would go and confront them, in another day of fights. By the time the lads stopped beating her brother or calling him Mental, she was already in middle school. That was when she began figuring out that she hadn’t been created to sit in a hot, humid classroom with fifty other girls listening to strange words about grammar and numbers and science from dawn until the late-afternoon call to prayer. She thoroughly disliked the white school shoes they had to wear, with the plasticky soles that turned blackish after no more than a week, and the utterly plain grey middle-school uniform which was always crumpled and damp from the hot, crowded space. The strange dialects spoken by the Egyptian and Sudanese women who taught them made her uncomfortable, and she never got used to the idea of sitting in one little place all day long. Leaving school saved her from having to ride stuffed into a pickup truck with ten other Bedouin girls, their small bodies vibrating, buffeted by the wind and stung by the sand particles it slapped across them, for an hour or more before they reached the school building.

  Her father was oblivious to anything but his raucous sessions – men grilling meat and drinking, and the zar exorcisms – and so Najiya took over. She handled all his property. She tended his sheep and camels, and in a few years their numbers doubled. She fed their thoroughbred she-camels dates, country samna and honey, and entered them in the races until she succeeded in selling one to a shaykh from Abu Dhabi for twenty thousand riyals. She had to get a passport for the camel, whom she had named Gazelle, before shipping her off to Abu Dhabi. When the money came, she replaced the tent with a reinforced concrete house. She bought carpets and fancy wooden trousseau-chests from the Matrah souq. She openly mocked her neighbours, who had built a full two-storey house but still did their business under the desert rush-bushes right outside, even though their new house had five bathrooms.

  Najiya did not give in to her brother’s condition, either. She would not let him stay idle. She trained him to tend the camels and sheep. Her father’s death came as a relief. Now she could truly consolidate her authority over her life, her property and her freedom. As her developing womanhood started to draw attention, and word of her beauty spread near and far, people began calling her Qamar for she was as radiant as the moon. Making light of the suitors who flocked to the house, she devoted herself completely to her brother and to her growing wealth. When she saw the right man, she told herself, she would know him – and she would take him. She selected her friends carefully. She sold her distinctive Bedouin needlework, and her home became a magnet for visitors and a refuge for those in need. Woman or man, Najiya’s acquaintances held her in respect and a lot of awe.

  When her brother suddenly developed polio and couldn’t move, she closed up her house. For months she lived with him in the faraway hospitals of the government, relying on the women she had befriended to take care of her flock. Time after time, the hospital authorities expelled her from the men’s section where her brother was kept. Najiya simply rolled herself up in her blanket and slept in a corridor. The doctors told her openly, as well as by insinuation, that her brother was a congenital ‘Mongoloid’. Now his legs would never work again, and so what hopes did she still have for him? When people urged her to look forward to his salvation through death she turned her back on them. When she lost hope in the hospitals she carried him home and shut the two of them in, closing the doors to others. She treated him herself, for a long time, trying everything that experienced healers prescribed and then treatments she devised anew, concocting various herbal mixtures. She rubbed his legs with hot olive oil and crushed cloves. She tried to get him to stand up by leaning on her. She took his weight on her strong back and dragged his legs around the room, back and forth, trying to get him to walk. She blended colocynth with makhyasa herbs and made him drink the bitter stuff every morning, wiping away his saliva with her sleeve. She would never allow that look of futility in his slit-like eyes to deflect her or to defuse her determination. She shut her ears to anyone who mocked her attempts and she vowed her life to her brother.

  When Najiya bint Said opened the door to her house and slaughtered a pair of camels for almsgiving, her brother was walking on his own two feet.

  Abdallah

  You keep up this aura of friendly care but what are you really thinking and feeling, my hostess of the air, as you spend all your waking days suspended between sky and earth? I was just like you, hanging between the heavens and the earth, when I saw her first.

  I saw her on the day after the Greater Bairam Feast, in the month of Pilgrimage. My father went to pay his respects to her mother, Salima, as was the custom during the important ritual periods, for she was a distant relative of ours. I wasn’t with him but I understood later that he particularly noticed Khawla, the youngest daughter. The next morning he said to me, I want you to go to Azzan’s house for me. I was over there yesterday to give the family our feast day greetings and I left my walking stick there.

  Somehow I knew that my father wou
ld not forget his walking stick anywhere. That rod was moulded to his hand on the very day he was created. What’s more, I thought, he would not send me off to retrieve it when he could ask one of his retainers to go and get it. As usual though, I didn’t raise these questions with him. I went to Azzan’s home, and at the door I called out, asking permission to go in, letting them know I was there. I walked across the wide courtyard and entered the big room. But it seems Mayya hadn’t realised I was coming in, she hadn’t heard anything or noticed my entrance, and so she hadn’t budged. She was sitting at the far end of the room on a wooden chair, trying to thread the needle on a sewing machine. It was a black Farrasha and she was bent over it, a pale, delicate, mysteriously remote figure. I caught a glimpse of her face and the ache there touched the agony inside me. Her short nose and her cheekbones, indeed her entire face, rose and fell with her intense concentration as she tried to poke the thread through the needle eye. She was leaning so far over the machine that it all but supported her entire body. Hunched over it, her paleness shone out in the daylight and the expression of pain across her small face was unbearable.

  Looking hard at me – or perhaps scrutinizing my wandering gaze – her mother said to me, When I find the walking stick I will send it over. I tried hard to concentrate my thoughts on what phrases should be uttered in these circumstances but I couldn’t find the appropriate words.

  Salima looked to me like a woman who took charge of matters. She was still known around here as the Bride of the Falaj. Her skin was very light and her figure tended to fullness, accentuated by a round face, clear, smooth skin, an aquiline nose and piercing eyes. It was immediately obvious that Mayya did not take after her at all. I cast a last glance along the long room. I could not believe how much pain was crackling through the air, generated simply by Mayya’s being there. Haloes of light embraced that presence. If I were to just put my hand out, I felt, I could touch those matchless haloes ever so gently. But Salima, ever her mother, suggested strongly, if indirectly, that it was time for me to go home. So I slunk out.

  I left the house of Azzan not really understanding what had just taken place or what might be expected to happen next or in the future. A few years before this I had begun to field allusions to my ‘flight’ from girls. I wasn’t fleeing, that wasn’t it at all. But I felt no sense of participation, of presence, in any of it. The racy jokes the maids told and the way their hands wandered now and then onto my body didn’t make me feel particularly loved, and I certainly didn’t feel any desire or fondness towards them. Shanna chased me behind the lemon trees in the farm when I was barely fourteen and fell on me without any advance warning. Feeling dizzy and slightly sick, I pushed her away, spattering her with mud as I did so. She swore up and down that I would pay the price for it. Only a few days later, Zarifa was trying to push me into having sex with one or another daughter of the slave families that had long inhabited my father’s household. These forays were sudden and rude, and completely without emotion. Most of these girls were either too afraid to say no, or they were bent on acquiring some gifts. The whole thing just made me turn more strongly inward. It drove Zarifa mad. She had come to see me and the state she thought I was in as an easy target for men’s wayward desires, not to mention those of boys older than me. She was trying to protect me with whatever wiles she had up her sleeve, but her tricks wounded my young adolescence.

  When I saw Mayya, I was beyond all of that. I was nineteen years old. Even so, I didn’t understand what had just hit me on that night.

  Zarifa did understand. I remember a particular day, at dawn. I remember the feeling of fullness I had – such happiness and pain together! Mayya’s pale face distracted me utterly, took me far away from my mundane days, and filled me like nothing else had in my short experience of life. For the first time ever, that morning, I found myself pacing through our spacious home with its large rooms that had accumulated over time, one built up against another, and each one opening out onto the next. Yet I felt like the place wasn’t big enough for me. I felt I was carrying something that was both heavy and precious, but at the same time I thought might just be able to take off and fly, because I felt so utterly light in my skin.

  The night before – once I made certain that my father was asleep – I had snuck out to the eastern courtyard to sit under the enormous acacia tree where I could give myself up to the beautiful wailing of Suwayd’s oud and his welcome company. The more I asked Suwayd, How did you do it, how did you get this oud? the harder he laughed. Hey, the same way one gets one’s children, Shaykh – it’s all a blessing and a gift from Allah!

  For my part, Suwayd’s words seemed to express perfectly my acquisition of the light that broke up the darkness of my days, that gentle fierce light. Was this what people called love? A gift, like the blessed livelihoods God grants to us. Now, I walked out of our house, away from its ornately decorated reception rooms, and I breathed in the blue dawn. I paced the length of the eastern courtyard, bordered by a row of lemon and mango trees punctuated by a single wild native rose bush. I felt such a yearning to sing in exactly the way Suwayd had sung the night before but I couldn’t regulate the quavering rhythms of my voice, so instead I floated in the fragrances of lemon and rose. Somewhere out here had grown the basil bush that my mother had uprooted, and so it had killed her; still, even now, I could almost smell its fragrance. Would my mother have liked Mayya? Might she even have been fond of her? Or would she have exclaimed, as my father would on a later occasion, Oh, but I thought her name was Khawla!

  No, Father, I said to him. Khawla is her younger sister. Mayya is the older one.

  The older one? he muttered. You mean that skinny dark one? Didn’t you see Khawla? Boy, what’s happened to your eyesight, can’t you tell the pretty sister from the others? Anyway, this Mayya you talk about is older than you. I remember Azzan, her father, parading her around on the feast day once, and the little girl was already walking. And that’s when your mother was pregnant with you.

  My voice was hoarse as I tried to answer. Only a year and eight months, Papa! He waved his cane around, the cane he had never once left behind at Azzan’s house.

  A few days later I wrote a letter to my father. I opened it in the customary way: In the name of God . . . followed by the usual stuff: To my dear, esteemed and honourable father . . . and I rounded it off with my signature: Your servant and son who humbly awaits your kindness, Abdallah. By now I have forgotten exactly what that letter said. My aunt – his sister – may have interceded on my behalf, too, and I know for certain that Zarifa confronted him with my inhibitions and my shamefaced attitude to girls which in her view were completely unwarranted. A few days later, he summoned me into his presence. He told me that he would betroth Mayya to me and would pay her a dowry of two thousand riyals. He would build a new set of rooms onto the eastern courtyard, with a modern bathroom. I would live in this annexe with my bride.

  That dawn I walked barefoot across the pebbles, unaware then that most of this courtyard would disappear, swallowed up by the promised marital abode. I followed the line of the trees and turned into the narrow passageway to the western courtyard which was carpeted in sand rather than soft pebbles and seemed smaller than its eastern counterpart. In all of al-Awafi ours was the only house I had ever seen that had two open courtyards surrounding it, on two of its four sides. Was that why the townspeople had named it the Big House? I wondered.

  The Big House is the place I inhabit with my father, where sometimes we are visited by my aunt – his sister – and with us, in one of its many added-on rooms, live Zarifa and Sanjar, and Habib before he fled. Outside the house, but not far away from it, in very small huts live Suwayd and his brother Zaatar, and Zayd – before he drowned in the flash flood – with his wife Masouda and their daughter Shanna, plus Hafiza and her mother Saada and her three daughters whose paternal lineage is not known. All of them slaves, or at least somehow my father’s inherited property.

  The Big House, spacious as it was, hardly see
med to have any empty spaces. Guests of various ages and origins were always arriving and often they stayed on. A bundled cord of wood to the side of the western courtyard and those huge black cooking pots sitting out ready for use, were a familiar sight. Zarifa and Hafiza rarely cooked in the house’s small inside kitchen, for the constant meals that had to be prepared for large numbers demanded the use of cauldrons too big for that narrow indoor cooking space. Similarly, the ritual slaughter, which was generally undertaken by Suwayd and Zaatar, took place here: the carcasses were hung and skinned in the western courtyard so they could be cooked immediately over an already-lit fire in the guest-kitchen where Zarifa baked bread too. Zarifa swore there was no comparison between meat roasted over ‘real fire’ and meat stewed in pots, which she called ‘gas-fire meat’.

  On that dawn I was packed tightly with thoughts, hopes and worries, and at the same time I felt buoyant and festive. Even the soot from the cooking fire that blackened the walls of the outside kitchen – just three walls and roofing held up by wood stakes – I didn’t find ugly. Everything was beautiful: the sand, the pots, the aroma of the baking flat bread rising from inside the kitchen and floating toward the courtyard. I went in to the bare shelter of the open kitchen, doorless to allow more room for the huge pots. I found Zarifa in there, perched on two Nido powdered milk cans, her body spilling over them as she bent over the hot baking brick, pounding out the dough, stretching it across the surface and seconds later dragging it back up off the brick with wondrous skill. She didn’t even turn around as she said, Good morning, Abdallah, my boy. Or should I say, Ya hababi, Milord, since it seems you’ve become quite the big man now!

  Zarifa knew, then. I didn’t say anything. Had she seen Mayya’s name scratched onto the tree trunks and scrawled across the pages in my notebooks? But Zarifa couldn’t read!