Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  Cocooned in a big green wool shawl, Mayya was nursing her baby girl. Asma was with her, patting the newborn girl’s swaddling into place, and avoiding raising her head. Salima was hunched over, but in her crouching posture she still glared at him. He took off his shoes and sand dribbled from his toes. She did not stand up and come over as she usually did. He rubbed at his beard once or twice and asked, What’s going on?

  Your daughter Khawla shut herself up this morning and refused to talk to anyone until you were back, Salima said. Azzan put his shoes back on and returned to the courtyard. He knocked softly on the door to his daughters’ room.

  Salima sighed. A puff of cold breeze, a gentle brief rain pour. Winter reminded her of her childhood, though when she remembered childhood she felt a thin thread of bitterness wrapping tightly around her heart. She was floating in a soft gloomy cloud; no, she was lying on jagged rock. She saw her father. She always saw him in two images that came to her in a dream. He was bending over her, drops of cold ablution water dripping from his beard, to hoist her onto his shoulder, with her brother Muaadh on his other shoulder. In the other image he aged and then died, all in a cold winter. Salima hated the wintertime. It seemed to carry the smell of the rough wool blanket and the sheet that shrouded her father, and also the coals that warmed the room where he was dying.

  Khawla’s eyes were puffy, her nose bright red. Her father had betrayed her, she sobbed. Betrayed his promise to his brother on his brother’s deathbed, and now he meant to sell her off to Ali, son of the Emigrant. How could anyone think of coming to engage her when she was already engaged? How could her father even consider the idea of accepting this suitor and betraying her late uncle?

  Khawla talked and talked. She would never stop talking, she said to her father, the way Mayya had stopped talking when they married her off without anyone asking her opinion. Mayya had not had an education but Khawla had, and she would kill herself if her father insisted on this marriage. She was vowed to her cousin, the son of her late uncle, and he was equally vowed to her and no creature on earth had a right to overlook this fact.

  Azzan listened to his daughter until she had said all she had to say. It hurt badly, listening to her and knowing how little he had gotten to know this daughter who was barely sixteen but knew herself well enough to want to kill herself for the sake of a cousin who no one had heard from for several years.

  Khawla, try not to worry, he said to her. It will be all right. He left the girls’ room and returned to the sitting room. He did not stop or turn to speak to anyone, but continued on, into his own room. The rain stopped and Azzan lay wide awake until morning.

  Abdallah

  My uncle’s wife stood in the courtyard of her modern poured-cement home in Wadi Aday. Hands planted on her hips, she screeched at me. Your father raised you with an iron fist and it certainly didn’t do you any good! You can’t even raise a finger to name your own daughter, huh? Loondoon! This name – what is it? I don’t seem to recall seeing anyone naming his girl baby al-Awafi or Matrah or Nizwa or Wadi Aday.

  I felt a laugh coming on but I managed to suppress it. My cousin Marwan, who was also known as the Pure, was sitting on the bench just inside the entry to the courtyard and gazing at us, not saying a word. Marwan was always silent, unlike his brother Qasim who was closer to me in age. So I was partial to the littler Marwan, to his silent wanderings and the way he lost himself in thought. I didn’t say anything to my uncle’s wife, who had browbeaten my uncle years before to get him to move the family away from al-Awafi out of fear of my father’s heavy hand. My uncle’s wife sold that house in Wadi Aday surrounded by tiny shops after my uncle’s death. My uncle’s wife did not return the corpse of Marwan the Pure to al-Awafi to be buried in the graveyard there, where everyone else was buried.

  I didn’t actually hate my uncle’s wife. When I was small she lived with my uncle and their children in the north wing of our house but she insisted on doing her own cooking for her children while she left my uncle to share our food. All the time, I heard the sounds of quarrelling between her and the sister of my father and uncle, and my uncle’s attempts to reconcile them. I would be sitting on the bench next to our front door after the dawn prayer when she passed by, a bundle of laundry balanced on her head, going to the falaj. It was a rare occasion when she turned to speak to me and then it was always to ask the same question: What did you have for dinner last night? I would never answer. It embarrassed me. Talking about food was considered shameful in our house. If I were to ask Zarifa, What are you making for lunch? the only response I would get would be, You’ll see. That was the way it was with food in our home. We saw it when it was in front of us, and we ate it quickly without any conversation, washed our hands and thanked God and didn’t say a word, and heaven forbid we criticise anything! But my uncle’s wife asked me this strange question, so odd when she must know that our house – packed as it was with slaves and guests at every meal – was not the kind of place where food could remain a secret. Why would anyone ask about it? If it wasn’t rice with lamb and spices it was fish with onions and lemon and dried sardines. So much was certain.

  One day I sat watching the other children playing ball. I was hoping to get in there with them but my father had forbidden me to leave the house unless I was with him. My heart leapt with every goal and I would scream, GOOOAAAL! as I jumped up from the bench. My uncle’s wife came outside, the water from the bundle of newly washed clothes running down into her hair and her body a mass of energy and balance. Seeing me, she laughed. Did someone tie you up here, my boy? And then: What did you have to eat last night? I jumped up so fast, and I was so close to her, that I knocked the wet clothes she was carrying out of her grip and they tumbled onto the dirt as I shouted, Poison! We ate poison, are you happy? The sparks flew from her eyes, but Masouda came at just the right moment and hustled me away.

  Masouda was panting under the load of firewood on her back after spending the early dawn hours in the desert outside the farms of al-Awafi, breaking off dried branches from the acacia trees and wrapping them in bundles. Later in the day she would turn this firewood into coals that could be set beneath the cauldrons that held our dinner. Early the next morning she would be out there again, bending low to pick up a new bundle of firewood. Don’t speak to her, she said to me, panting. Come on, come inside. From that day on, my uncle’s wife ignored me completely and a few months later she took my uncle and the children and they settled in Wadi Aday in the capital city.

  I didn’t hear that question about what we were having for dinner ever again, until I grew up and travelled. Then, I discovered that people would talk for hours about their food. Television ads showing open mouths happily consuming various dishes shocked me. Around me, people asked each other in all simplicity, What did you have to eat? Or, What are you going to have for dinner? My son Salim returns from college and before he says Good evening he asks, What’s for supper? If his mother’s response doesn’t please him he turns around and leaves the house, heading for the pizza takeout or McDonald’s.

  Khawla

  As soon as her father left the room Khawla hurried to the door, pulling it tightly shut as it had been before. She stood leaning against the window, breathing heavily. It took her a moment to notice that the rain was coming down hard, and then she sat down on the floor, her face toward where Mecca would be. Her mother had always said that your prayers are especially powerful when rain is coming down. Lifting her hands high, she repeated the same supplication that she uttered at the end of every set of prayers, and whenever it rained, and when she was fasting. O Lord, bring Nasir back to me. Bring him back before I die of grief.

  She rested her head on the open palm of her right hand and curled up in the foetal position. She loved listening to the sound of the rain, and she loved even more running beneath it and feeling the wetness seeping all the way into the roots of her hair. Just then, though, she knew she wouldn’t dare go anywhere near the sitting room if she were to go out into the rain first
, and there was no real way to hide. One way or another, her mother would catch sight of her. If she were to go outside, it would even be difficult to slip by unnoticed into the girls’ room to dry herself off before someone saw her. She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling, the white fan, and the neon strip, her mind on Nasir.

  When they were little, they had played together every afternoon with the other neighbourhood children. They formed teams: one from the eastern quarter and the other from the western quarter, each team chasing the other through all the little streets and dead-end alleys of al-Awafi. Khawla always tried to avoid Zayid because he was forever catching hold of her braids and yanking them. She stayed close to Nasir wherever he went. Most often, the two of them slipped away from the collective tag game. Nasir would dart over to the muezzin’s house to pluck a red rose from the lone rosebush in the courtyard. He would poke it into her braid but he always forgot her words of caution: Take the thorn off the stem first! More than once a rose from the muezzin’s house scarred her forehead.

  Khawla turned onto her side, laying her head on her left palm, with the one picture on the wall staring at her. Mayya had hung it there before she left this room to get married. A thin gilt frame enclosed a broad pasture, the green grass extending into the distance and massed clouds overhead. Of course there was no such thing in the world! Mayya always protested that there was, in England. All of these enormous green spaces? How could that possibly be? The biggest expanse of green Khawla had ever seen was their farm, where she’d hid the envelope containing Nasir’s picture by shoving it into the split in the palm-tree trunk.

  Her memory of that day was vivid. As the light began to fade, the group of boys and girls were tiring of their games, and most headed home. Nura proposed another game that they sometimes played: Names and Jobs. Each child wrote out a list of names, numbered, and likewise of jobs. Then each chose a number, and that would yield the name of a future husband or wife, and a job. When Abd al-Rahman, Judge Yusuf’s son, chose number twenty, Khawla was the name that came up. Nasir said, Change your number! Abd al-Rahman refused. Nasir got angry and fought with him, leaving his nose bloody, all the while yelling, Khawla is my cousin and my wife, mine, we are engaged!

  How old had she been when that happened? She could not have been more than nine. And Nasir? Perhaps twelve, or maybe even thirteen. She remembered how he had led her by the hand to his home where her uncle’s widow offered her dates in clarified butter, and how, before she left, he had pressed the envelope into her hand. Inside was his picture, which he had torn off his school certificate. She remembered, too, how her mother beat her when she returned so late, darkness already filling the world around her.

  Khawla turned onto her back, interlocking her fingers beneath her neck. She did not much like this glossy milky blue paint that the room had been covered in but even so, it was a room where she could feel at ease. Mayya was no longer a little girl when her mother began talking about adding a special room for the sisters, one that did not open onto the other rooms and that especially remained apart from the sitting room. Their home was madkhul as her mother always said – a house people flocked to, a house that was always full of others. Women were always coming and going, and especially, sitting and visiting in the big room. These girls were getting older, their womanhood was beginning to blossom, and their mother wanted to keep them invisible to her visitors’ ever-curious eyes. Anyway, their mother knew, it simply would not do for these growing girls to hear the conversations the older women were always having, which Salima referred to as women’s foolishness.

  Khawla and her sisters welcomed the idea. A room at the other end of the courtyard would mean Asma could be alone with her books, as she preferred, and Khawla with her mirror, as she liked. As for Mayya, usually she did her sewing in the sitting room, anyway, except when it was filled with women and her mother signalled that she must leave. She must go to the girls’ room. Khawla sighed. That was before Mayya had gotten married. Since then she had begun to share in the women’s gatherings, bringing her scrawny little one with her.

  A large red carpet covered much of the room. Lined up against one side of the wall stood three wooden wardrobes, one apiece. Her mother had gone to the carpenter to order them specially, choosing the dimensions and the decorative carvings for them herself. That is why Khawla didn’t have a wardrobe with a mirror the height of the door. In fact, the only mirror she had was this small rectangle in its thin wood frame hanging on the wall facing the wardrobes. She had to stand tall to comb her hair or to apply the new lipstick that Mayya had managed to get for her in Muscat. On their wedding night, what would Nasir say when he saw how long and soft her hair was now?

  Asma’s books spilled over from her shelves onto Mayya’s shelves now, because she had so many of these books. Khawla was astonished at how oblivious Asma seemed to the awful boredom these ancient books induced. The only books Khawla could bear to read were translations of Harlequin Romances, books that Asma scorned, refusing to be seen holding them for even a few moments.

  Her friend Nura had discovered these novels on a visit to her relatives in Muscat. She brought a few to Khawla, who was soon addicted. These books were beautiful stories about love and they always took place in forests or green pastures or verdant plains. The heroine always had a delicate prettiness and the hero was always strong and handsome and noble. Lying in bed before she dropped off to sleep, Khawla would imagine herself with Nasir on that remote and lush island she had read about in one of these novels, the two of them surrounded by animals and birds and the magical sounds of nature. Nasir’s photograph remained in her wardrobe, concealed among the folds of her clothes, for several months, before Nura warned her that her mother might stumble across it. They agreed that the best spot for it was the biggest palm-tree trunk on her father’s farm. There the picture lay stuffed inside its envelope in the tree trunk, hidden by the palm fronds. Khawla made her pilgrimages to that tree throughout the years of adolescence. That day, when her uncle’s widow disappeared into the kitchen to get the dates and samna, Nasir grabbed her hand and said, Don’t ever marry Abd al-Rahman! You are engaged to me. I am the son of your uncle, after all, not him.

  Khawla did not forget Nasir’s words. Certainly Nasir could not have forgotten them either. Two years, or three, or five, who cared! So what if his circumstances had kept him from returning? He must be very busy with his studies, and he couldn’t send letters to Khawla out of fear of her mother’s anger. Of course not. He hadn’t forgotten her. She was engaged to him, and she would wait for him.

  When Nasir passed his secondary school examinations and cans of soda pop were handed round to the neighbours to celebrate the occasion, Khawla was still in middle school. Deliriously happy, she drained three entire cans of soda all by herself. She gave him an eye-catching silver pen that Nura had bought for her in Muscat. As she looked on, he kissed the pen, and she was so embarrassed she almost hoped the earth would open and swallow her up. He told her he had gotten a scholarship to Canada, and she should start now to prepare for the wedding, which they would have the next summer, then he could take her back there with him. She cried, and she drew red hearts pierced by arrows on the long letter she wrote, and when she found she had no picture of herself to give him (that’s what the heroines in romance novels always did), she imitated what he had done years before. She tore the photo off her sixth grade school certificate and gave it to him. It was an old picture; what he saw was a dazed-looking little girl in long braids with a blue amulet hanging protectively round her neck.

  Lying on the red carpet, Khawla tossed restlessly and moaned. The rumours whirling around refused to disappear. People said Nasir had failed his first year; they said he had gotten involved in things that had nothing to do with study and couldn’t get out; they said he wasn’t in touch with anyone here now, not even his mother; they said the Ministry in Muscat had cut off his scholarship money because time after time he had failed his exams. They said he would not be coming back.
Well, let them say whatever they wanted! Nasir would come back. He would come back to her, to pretty Khawla who had waited for him, who still waited for him, always taking good care of herself, preserving her looks for his sake and the sake of their upcoming marriage.

  The brown plastic bank moulded into the form of a house sat on the shelf in her wardrobe. No one knew it was a gift from him, on the day she passed her first year of middle school. Every time she dropped a hundred bisa into the slot that bisected its roof, Khawla swore that the money would reappear only to pay the costs of their wedding. So then, who was this son of Emigrant Issa who dared to try to win her hand? Didn’t he know that she was already engaged? How could he be so insultingly bold? And how could they engage her to someone when she already had a first cousin and was vowed to him?

  WAllahi wAllahi wAllahi! May my throat be slit, my neck carved like a lamb, sliver by sliver, if my family insists on marrying me to the son of Emigrant Issa. I will kill myself, I swear to God I will.

  Abdallah

  Through the airplane window I see streams of light far below, spilling from cities along the coastline to arc into the sea. The flows of light follow a quiet, meandering course, not at all like the fierce spills of water in al-Awafi that drowned Zayd.

  The floods came about a year before I first saw Mayya at her sewing machine. The image of Zayd’s body swollen by floodwaters haunted me, chasing me through every dream I had. Returning home on those evenings when I had stolen away to hear the wails of Suwayd’s oud, I would find Zayd’s ghost looming in front of me all of a sudden, blocking my way. It was only when I saw Mayya, so sad and pretty and pale, bending over the sewing machine as if she were putting her arms around a tiny child, that I stopped seeing Zayd, whether in my dreams or on the dark path leading back to my father’s house.