Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  At the furthest point to the right from the courtyard was a tiny room – once used as a threshing floor – with a toilet attached which was nothing more than a crack the length of the dirt floor with a metal pitcher next to it. Ever since her daughter had announced that Masouda was mad, the old woman had been confined in the tiny room furnished only with a reed mat covering the pebbles. She improvised a makeshift window from an opening in the wall where three metal skewers formed bars and a wooden shutter hung. There was nothing in the room other than the column to which Masouda would be tied when her screams were at their loudest and she seemed almost ready to smash open the locked wooden door by throwing her body against it. Whenever she heard the low screech of the door she would grip the window bars desperately and shout, I’m in here! I’m Masouda and I’m in here!

  Twice each day her daughter Shanna came in with lunch and dinner, from the home of Merchant Sulayman. She almost never opened her mouth in response to Masouda’s cries as she handed her mother the heaping plate and took the empty one. A neighbour woman might come by, earning herself a good deed by stopping sometimes beneath the barred window for a chat. The young boys from the village crept in periodically to relieve themselves at the foot of the wall or to threaten Masouda if she didn’t stop screaming so loudly.

  Now and then Shanna showed up for an unexpected visit, looking in on her mother, filling the pitcher in the toilet. Exactly a fortnight into each month she gave her mother a bath, washed and plaited her hair, swept the place out and sprinkled water across the dirt courtyard.

  I am Masouda! I am Masouda and I’m in here . . .

  On some days the breeze was vigorous enough to budge the rusty metal door. It wasn’t Shanna or a neighbour woman or the boys, but without any lamp, how could Masouda know to stop shouting as long and as loud as she could?

  I’m in heeeeere! I am Masouda . . .

  Abdallah

  Salim worries me. After his poor showing in the high school exams, one of the private colleges did give him a place but even that was difficult to secure. I’m not pleased with anything that boy does or who he is.

  London says to me, Negative! You are just so negative, Dad! Soon she will really turn into a mature grown-up. Now that she can regain some peace of mind after her bad love affair, she’ll start a new page. How happy I feel when I see her smile, on her way to the hospital, pulling on her doctor’s coat. Praise be to God who has blessed humankind with the ability to forget!

  As a little boy I got used to hearing Habib suddenly bark, Forgetting? Where is it, this forgetting? I never liked Habib, not at all. Whenever he saw me with Zarifa he gave me a shove. He knew I wouldn’t dare tell my father. Zarifa never defended me when it happened. I was very happy when Habib disappeared for good. His son Sanjar was no more than six when people started whispering that Habib had escaped. Habib’s ancient mother screamed and rolled herself madly in the sand and tore her clothes to shreds. She seemed to know, somehow, that he would never come back. But it didn’t surprise anyone to find him gone. He was always saying that he would go back to that land from which he’d been snatched away, back to his freedom, plundered by pirates and merchants. Some years later, someone said they’d caught a glimpse of him in the Baluch Café in Dubai – that was when every nation had their own café there – but others were certain he really had gone back to Makran, in Baluchistan, that he’d married and had children there. Still others said he had died of tuberculosis not long after escaping, and before the change in regime that brought with it a rush of new hospitals.

  Zarifa didn’t shed one tear over him and I never heard her talk about him. Once when I was older I asked her why she didn’t try to find anything out about him. She answered with her favourite line. The proverb-maker says: Knowledge means pain, not knowing keeps me sane. But raising Sanjar, she couldn’t keep him ignorant. When he had grown up and had children, he emigrated to Kuwait. She didn’t roll in the sand or tear her clothes to rags, though. She waited eight years, until my father was dead, and then she went after her son. Very soon she was back, spitting and swearing at the viper whom her son had married. After that, I had no more news of her. I was completely preoccupied with the nosedive in the market, with real estate, with building the new house in Muscat, with London’s marriage and divorce, Salim’s studies and Muhammad’s illness, and all the worries of the world. Then I heard suddenly that Zarifa had died.

  I went to my father’s funeral after he died in hospital. When my uncle died of a heart attack, and Zayd drowned in the flood, and Maneen was killed by a bullet, and Hafiza died of AIDS and Marwan killed himself with his father’s dagger, I went to their funerals, and I also attended funerals for my friends’ fathers and mothers, but I didn’t go to Zarifa’s. Simply, no one told me. She got ill without my knowing and she died and was buried and I still didn’t know.

  I saw my father in my dreams, his eyes red from so much anger. He was brandishing a palm-fibre rope in my face as he asked me about her. Ahh, Habib! Your mother is very old, but she is still alive, even now. Where are you, and your shouts into my childish face? Forgetting? Where is this place called Forgetting?

  Mayya and London

  The visitors are giving their full attention to the sweets and fruits. Zarifa pours out coffee for the women and doesn’t let a sentence go by without commenting on it. Laughter rises, voices mingle, repeating complaints about husbands and children, news of marriage, divorce, and recent childbirths, commentary on the startlingly bright fabrics flooding Hamdan’s shop, the televisions whose presence was no longer limited to the homes of Shaykh Said and Merchant Sulayman, or which mudbrick house had most recently been replaced by a cement-block rectangle. They had things to laugh about, and their hostess, Salima, smiled to show that she shared their good cheer.

  Yesterday – and for the first time ever in her married life – Azzan had given her a gold ring that held an enormous blue stone. Everyone knew Salima despised gold and scorned any sort of adornment. What she had been obliged to buy as a bride she had kept in a locked steel box buried deep inside her large wooden wedding chest. She and Azzan had never exchanged gifts. He always gave her what she needed and he never asked her about household expenses: but gifts were another story! Salima felt uneasy about her husband’s impulsive offering.

  As she disappeared into the kitchen to prepare more fruit, the muezzin’s wife and Judge Yusuf’s widow bent their heads together to whisper. Sister, what kind of man is Abdallah, allowing his daughter to have this odd name? Seems he doesn’t get to say a word about it, doesn’t his woman Mayya listen to him? If he had any balls, if he could make her listen, he would never have left it to her to name the girl for a city in the land of the Christians. London! Since when does anyone name his daughter after a place anyway?

  Mayya eats dates alone in bed. Asma’s attempts to convince her mother that they should always eat together had fizzled. The prophetic hadiths she recited had no effect but to anger Muezzin-Wife, who accused her of deliberately attempting to revise the faith and corrupt it with evil innovations from books. None of this bothered Mayya. She wasn’t particularly concerned about food and whether she consumed it in others’ company or not. She did not understand how women could spend so much time eating and talking. She, on the other hand, was silently watching her little daughter make a tiny triangle with her lips, and open and close her eyes. London’s crying lessened and she began spending longer periods batting at the air with her hands and feet. Mayya loved watching her swatting at the air, but her mother insisted on swaddling the baby. Mayya had chosen the white swaddling herself from Ruwi Souq when she’d gone to Muscat to give birth. She also bought tiny white undershirts and two little yellow gowns that would suit either a boy or a girl perfectly well. She hid Khawla’s lipstick among her clothes, hoping her mother wouldn’t spot it.

  She didn’t know what it was that worried her mother so much about Khawla. Mayya saw her as a gentle person, quick to sympathise with others, the prettiest and sweetest girl in
al-Awafi. What was the problem if she insisted that her father buy her a ring and some gold bangles? She deserved them, and her father could afford it. Mayya was uncomfortable when her mother attacked Khawla for what seemed the most trivial of reasons. If her mother didn’t like jewellery, that was her business, but couldn’t she let Khawla alone? If only London would turn out as pretty as her aunt!

  Mayya sighed and looked closely at her tiny daughter’s black hair which had slowly begun to grow. Her gaze settled on the baby’s forehead, slightly more wrinkled than it should be, she thought. She asked herself whether it was true that a person’s fate was written on their brow, as people always said. What was written on the tiny forehead of this new little creature?

  How could Mayya have seen, on her baby daughter’s brow, the evenings of sleeplessness that would come as she reached her early twenties, all of those nights to come when Ahmad’s face visited London insistently before his features faded so completely that she began doubting he was a real person with whom she had had a real relationship, that they had actually met, then also that they had really and truly broken up. London would try to hold his image in her mind but at the same time to banish it. It was usually just before dawn that her memory would bring up a certain image, always the same one, the portrait published in the university magazine. She saw something in that image that she hadn’t noticed in person. In the photo, his eyes shifted away from the camera. Eventually London had understood that look as one she could not trust.

  Mayya stroked her daughter’s forehead and touched her wiry hair. Early in the morning Abdallah came in to see her, bringing cases of baby food in little jars. Mayya found this unnecessary and slightly disgraceful, but she didn’t say anything. First of all, this brand-new baby girl wouldn’t eat actual food for at least three months. Second, it wasn’t as if she, Mayya, was incapable of cooking for her daughter and had to have him bring her jars of Heinz and Milupa which had been canned only God knew when. No one in al-Awafi fed their babies such things. If he thought she was going to imitate his uncle’s wife in Maskad he was wrong. Mayya did not speak much but she would not imitate anyone. She would cook, herself, for her daughter. She would sew her daughter colourful frocks that no one had seen the like of on a little girl before. This girl would never leave the house without her hair combed and shoes on her feet and a frock with long bold stripes down the middle. Mayya would really prove now how truly skilled she was at sewing. London’s clothes would not look like anyone else’s just as her name echoed no other girl’s.

  Abdallah

  On the day we moved to the new house I saw my mother in a dream. I saw her wrapped in a long, loose-fitting white garment, walking over the water. I was walking behind her and calling out. Mama, Mama! But she did not turn around for me and I did not see her face until I woke up. I wish cameras had reached al-Awafi before she died. Zarifa always told me that I looked like her, though my paternal aunt was constantly insisting that I looked like my father.

  The day London got the divorce she asked Ahmad for, and we returned the dowry, I saw my mother in a dream again. I saw her walking calmly ahead of me. I was gripping the hem of her veil and saying, Mama, why did you pull up the basil shrub? But she did not turn around for me. I didn’t hear her voice.

  When I learned that Zarifa had died I saw my father first in a dream and then I saw her, tall and thin. She hugged me tightly. I was very short, barely reaching her middle, and she bent over me. Her hug was Mayya’s and her face was Zarifa’s.

  As usual I found Mayya asleep. When we all stay up talking in the evening, she leaves to go to sleep as soon as my conversations with London or with Salim grow tense. When I come home from work in the late afternoon more often than not I find Mayya asleep.

  Way back when I was a boy, if I ever dozed in the late afternoon Zarifa would fume. She would shout at me. The proverb-maker says: Quarrel with your neighbour if you must to make your mark, but never ever nap before dark! Mayya never formed the kind of serious bonds with neighbours that one would have to have even to quarrel, and she would drop off to sleep whenever she chose.

  In the first years of our marriage she always woke up early and almost never took afternoon naps. After Muhammad was born, you could measure her sleep with his years. At first she would go to sleep beside him in that narrow little bed of his; even later on, once he had gotten older and his body filled the bed, she would lay down with him though then she would leave him on his own. Many times, when I came home in the evening I found them lying together on the bed, gazing at the ceiling where the electric fan spun. Muhammad was completely fixed on watching the fan move. If it stopped he would start crying, and he wouldn’t stop. So of course we kept the fan turning no matter what the temperature was. Mayya stayed in bed lying at his side for hours on end until he dropped off to sleep and she could leave him, to sleep herself.

  Husbands

  Salima spoke to her daughters about it. Asma, Khawla, look here! She told them that Emigrant Issa’s two sons, who were in town now, had asked for the two of them. Khalid and Ali wanted to marry the sisters. She and their father Azzan could find no reason to turn them down, she informed them.

  Asma was unruffled. She would think about it, she told her mother coolly. But she instructed her parents not to respond before she informed them of her own decision.

  But Khawla, listening to her mother and sister, dropped her jaw, unable to hide her astonishment. When they were finally silent, she began saying no, faintly at first but then fiercely. No, no, no, no. They had never seen Khawla like this, never seen this semi-hysterical edge to her personality. She ran toward the girls’ room at the other end of the courtyard and shut the door behind her. She refused to open up to anyone before her father’s return. She would talk to him herself.

  Asma continued as usual, helping her mother in the kitchen and in all the duties of the household, making coffee every morning and in the late afternoon for the women who were always visiting, dandling her sister’s nursing baby, discussing books with Mayya, listening to the radio, reading, and washing clothes for her father, for her sister just out of childbirth, and for the baby, the constant nappies of the newborn girl. But not for a moment could she stop thinking about this engagement. A few days later she said to her mother, just offhand as she was pounding cardamom seeds for coffee, Mama, okay, fine, I will accept this Khalid boy.

  As she spoke, Azzan was hurrying home. He had returned unusually late from the Bedouin settlement. The cold wind slapped at his clothes. The recent events in his life had tugged him hither and yon, until he no longer knew where he was. Insinuations and sly suggestions seemed to meet him at every turn. The day before, swapping instantly-composed lines of poetry in playful competition with his daughter as they often did, Asma had disobeyed the rules of the game. He had declaimed

  The beloved’s face gives yours more beauty

  The more you give it your gaze

  Asma shot back two separate lines in response, openings to famous poems by the ancient poet al-Samau’al and the ‘Abbasid poet al-Buhturi, but neither was composed on the same rhyme scheme, as they should have been, in the spirit of the game.

  If a person’s honour is not sullied by base acts

  then every garment he dons is beauteous

  and then

  I guarded myself from what would soil my self

  and held myself above the paltry offerings of the scoundrel

  So were people sensing Qamar’s presence in him? This beautiful Moon, Najiya? This wondrous Qamar had taught him his own body, as though he’d been completely clueless about it always before. This Qamar had taught him enticements that shattered his old existence to pieces. The way he felt about it, he hadn’t known anything at all about anything before he knew her. Every evening when his feet sank into the sand as he hurried toward the fragrance of her, whether he wanted it or not his whole being was driving him to this presence that was so extraordinary and had transformed his life. Coming to meet her like this simply intensi
fied his thirst.

  From the start they shared a clear sense of what this was. A free relationship. Freedom, yes, in this bond they had made. At first it did really seem that they had climbed to the summit of pure desire, free of artificiality, concealment, or deception. Between themselves, anyway. No promises made, no aspirations hinted, just each moment’s blaze of passion. No ties from the past and more important, no ties to the future. That’s what they wanted and worked for. A few weeks later Azzan discovered that this free relationship was collapsing into the roughest and most violent sort of slavery, driven by need, binding them in irons. It distracted him from everything else, as he saw this unending cycle of union and separation enveloping them, slaves to a vicious cycle of never-ending demands and doubts. His need for her was profound, as violent and as obscure, too, as it seemed, all the more so when he was actually with her. But now, reaching home, Azzan opened the massive wood door calmly, thinking, That’s the way it is. There’s no freedom in love, and you can’t choose – others are there, or they’re not. He walked through the courtyard without noticing the lamp lit in the girls’ room. Entering the sitting room, he found everyone there, alert and tense, waiting for him to come home. Except for Khawla.