Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  My father did not lift me out of the well.

  Pull, Father! Haul up the rope. Tug hard on the end you are holding until the other end tightens around my waist enough that I come up. The well is dark, Father, and snakes live in here. Lift me out, I won’t steal your rifle, I won’t go off with Marhun and Sanjar, anyway, Sanjar is working as a porter in the souk now, Father, and Shanna works as a school janitor. Zarifa is the one who left, she left them, she couldn’t stand life in Kuwait.

  Get me out of this well, Father. I won’t be longing for those magpies and I won’t play ball with the boys. I won’t stay up late listening to the bewitching melodies of Suwayd’s oud, I won’t scream into your face, and you in a coma, that Sanjar ran away just like his father, Habib, and that I’m the only one who didn’t run away. Raise me out of here, I won’t leave Zarifa, your beloved, your mother, your daughter, your slave, your lady. I won’t leave her to die alone in some forgotten hospital.

  The diabetes got worse, Father, it was terrible. Do you know what it means, the sukkari? It went through her whole body, it was horrible, and they amputated her leg. Her relatives said, We aren’t going to keep supporting a crippled woman. Then they cut off her other leg and the neighbours said, Who is going to take her to the bathhouse? Who is going to drag this enormous body with no legs over there? The hospital director was kind. He let her stay in there for good, and the nurses took care of her.

  Hoist me up, Father.

  Zarifa, bring me up from this well.

  I’m afraid.

  I am so, so afraid.

  Azzan and Qamar

  Azzan brought her close. Najiya! My Fullest Moon, I want you, mine.

  I am yours, Najiya whispered. Already.

  He moaned. No, not completely. Others are always other.

  She slipped out of his grip. What do you mean?

  I mean, people are always apart, Najiya, they’re separate in the end, even when they think they’re one. It’s the harshest kind of aloneness there is.

  She gave him a disapproving look and at that, he grinned. Do you remember Ibn al-Rumi?

  Now Najiya smiled. The pessimist? Yes, of course.

  He hugged her close again. Do you know what he says?

  Though I hold her close, my soul still yearns

  yet how can I be closer than in her embrace?

  I kiss her mouth to chase my fever away

  but my mad cast-off love-thirst burns ever more

  The reach of my passion! May that craving be cured

  by the sweetness of that which my lips do absorb

  My exposed weathered heart will never heal itself

  until these two selves are seen as one mingled

  At the same instant the two of them sighed.

  Those poets who sang about the pleasure of possession weren’t lovers, he said flatly. They were hunters.

  Najiya’s smile turned lightly sarcastic. Hunters?

  Yes, that’s right, Azzan said firmly. A lover, Najiya, doesn’t possess the beloved, however much pleasure the lover feels, and however close to the beloved. A true beloved is like you – someone who can’t be owned.

  Najiya looked uneasy. She’d never known how to hide her feelings, and it made her especially uncomfortable that Azzan was spoiling their togetherness with words like these. Why did he have to start talking about ownership? He was the one who had a family, children – and she wasn’t demanding anything of him. She was perfectly happy like this. It didn’t occur to her to think about things like ‘possession’ and ‘hunting’. Her desire was to be his lover and she was, and she didn’t want anything else. Why did he always appear so tortured by cryptic feelings that she couldn’t grasp?

  The Bridal Procession

  Asma planted herself in front of the mirror, imitating Khawla. The figure she stared at was a young woman of middling height, barely twenty years old, with wide brown eyes and a short nose. Her eyelashes felt heavy – all those layers of mascara – and the red lipstick she thought made her face look like a clown’s. She glanced quickly over her body, squeezed into the wedding gown picked out by the two mothers together, its glossy, glittery, form-fitting dishdasha with its generous embroidery at the throat and down the long sleeves, as well as the length of the train. Traces of the indeterminate anxiety she’d felt earlier returned. She tried to distract herself by studying the elaborate henna designs that scrolled along the back of her hands and around onto the palms. She glanced into the mirror again and smiled nervously at the sight of her bosom, so high and prominent under the close-fitting gown. She remembered how frightened she had been, a few years ago, when the first visible traces of femininity had taken her by surprise. She had loathed seeing the derisory swelling on her chest and every evening she prayed that by morning it would be gone. Then, and for the next few months, she submitted to her sister Mayya’s advice on how to hide this new protuberance. On that evening as she listened to Asma crying at the falaj where they were washing clothes as it grew dark, Mayya said, Don’t be so scared, Asma. It’s just a new fatty bulge. If you give it a good rub with some salt dissolved in warm water it will melt away. If it’s really stubborn like mine was, I’ll take in all your undershirts, they’ll push it all back and no one will see any of it. But, wearing her altered undershirts, sometimes Asma couldn’t breathe because they were so tight. And all the salt did was to make her small chest peel, and it kept on growing anyway, until her mother ordered her to start wearing a head wrap. She taught Asma how to wrap it around her head and neck leaving some fabric so that it would cover her chest too. Once again she could breathe freely, and she stopped saying those special, pleading nightly prayers.

  Now, Asma lowered her eyes to stare at her stomach, flat and taut in the mirror. She couldn’t keep back a grin as she imagined it rounding out. And then, as soon as it was vacated, she hoped, it would grow big and round again. She didn’t have a specific number of children in mind – it was hard to imagine any of this, really – but she could see herself vaguely as an old woman standing beside an aged Khalid as dozens of sons and daughters and grandchildren gathered around them.

  She looked the mirror-figure in the eye, and both of them shivered. It was the thought that she was about to join the other half of her, the self which had been separated from her self ever since earliest creation. In her mind she recited that favourite passage of hers, describing how humans were only halves of a whole, long ago detached one from the other, and no half could be truly complete or at peace until it was united with its missing part. What was Khalid feeling right now? Was he as anxious as she was? Was he feeling happy? Oh! Despite all of these worried thoughts she could not wait for them to be together.

  At sunset, women began to descend in groups on Salima’s house. They crowded around the huge platters of rice and meat, and the trays of fruit, that sat on cloths stretched across the courtyard. Singing and the sound of drums rose, and the circles of dancers expanded. Zarifa joined the group dancing the hambura. The bridegroom’s mother arrived with a group of kinswomen in tow, their gleeful shouts adding to the mayhem. We want our bride! Give us our bride! They didn’t tarry, turning immediately toward Asma, a seated silhouette draped in a green silk shawl. Salima helped her to her feet and hugged her before manoeuvering her arm into the grasp of the groom’s mother, who marched her proudly to the decked-out bright red Mercedes that was waiting at the door, Emigrant Issa himself at the wheel. All the women followed the procession out, climbing into the buses ordered specially for the wedding. They would follow the bridal car all the way to Muscat and the flat Khalid had rented as a bridal retreat, and their new home.

  With the bridal procession’s departure a sudden stillness fell over the house, sending fear into Salima’s heart. She collapsed on the reception-room steps. Here was the second of her girls leaving the house, and this was the daughter who tried her tenderness the most. We raise them so that strangers can take them away, she whimpered. She left everything just as it was; in the morning, there would be peopl
e here to help her clean and put everything right. Now, though, everyone was caught up in the ongoing singing and dancing, first in the buses and then at the groom’s home. She wished she could be there when Khalid lifted the silk shawl from Asma’s face, but she respected the tradition that the mother of the bride does not go to the groom’s home on her daughter’s wedding day. In the middle room, where she had slept ever since Azzan abandoned her bed, she rolled out her bedding and lay down, still thinking about Asma, and suddenly overwhelmed, too, by memories of her own wedding and the day she was taken to Azzan’s home.

  She was thirteen when her uncle Shaykh Said’s wife urged him in no uncertain terms to send her to her mother now. But only after his brother’s widow begged him one final time did Shaykh Said agree that Salima could live with her, on condition that Muaadh remained in his house. So Salima moved to her maternal uncle’s home, where she spent the loveliest years of her life, enjoying her mother’s warmth and her maternal uncle’s affection. Her mother’s brother had not been blessed with children and he welcomed her with open arms. His home was nicknamed Orchard House because it was a tangle of fruit trees and bushes – mango, lemon, orange, quince, jasmine, roses. The rooms had been built in a crescent shape to accommodate the trees. This small orchard was the centre of the house, its pivot onto which every room opened. The fresh, moist breezes that this unique building let in soon filled Salima’s spirit. She especially loved sinking her feet into the series of small canal-streams that kept the orchard watered, flowing into a larger underground channel that went on for several metres before pouring into al-Awafi’s main canal.

  Salima’s rapture didn’t last long. Very soon her paternal uncle informed her mother that he was going to marry Salima to his kinsman Azzan, a green and heedless boy a few years her senior. Her mother was not keen on this marriage and her own brother took her side. They opposed this match strenuously and persistently, objecting on the grounds that Azzan was still a tender youth, and still a young apprentice-follower of Judge Yusuf’s. Moreover, they insisted, it was very possible that he would decide to follow the family members who had emigrated to Zanzibar, leaving his wife behind. But Shaykh Said put his foot down and warned Salima’s maternal uncle that if he didn’t open the gate to Orchard House to allow her to leave, he would get her out in his own way. Her mother’s brother felt his honour humiliated by this threat. He bolted the front gate.

  On the day that Shaykh Said had set for the wedding Salima was eating the midday meal with her mother and uncle when, from the big canal in their orchard, swarmed a cluster of slaves, men and women, who belonged to Shaykh Said. Water dripping from their bodies, they formed a tight circle around the startled, and then terror-stricken, family. Salima had to go with them right now, they said. Otherwise they would have to take her by force, making her swim through the orchard canal to the main falaj outside. At that, her uncle opened the gate. The men and women who had invaded his home took Salima away, and a few hours later she became Azzan’s bride. People would go on calling her the Bride of the Falaj for years afterward. Many, very long, years afterward.

  Abdallah

  Why do people say my grandmother died bewitched? asked London.

  Because that’s how they explained any death that happened suddenly and any illness they couldn’t explain, I responded.

  Do you know what she was ill with, Papa? London asked intently.

  I don’t know, I mumbled.

  But I’m a doctor. So maybe I could figure it out. Did anyone tell you what her symptoms were, and how long she was sick?

  Yes. People say she got sick very suddenly, two weeks after I was born. Her skin turned blue and her pupils contracted. She started sweating very heavily and she couldn’t stop shivering. People said the spirits were fighting it out with each other on her body and that’s why she was shaking so hard and giving off so much sweat. Then, they said, the strongest spirit won her from the others, and so she quieted down and got very cold. People assumed she had died so they buried her.

  London’s face looked very pale. What’s wrong? I asked.

  These symptoms are common to a number of illnesses but most likely they indicate poisoning, London said, her voice edgy. I remember what Gramma Salima told me, she said a lot of poisonous herbs, like habb al-muluk, and red and yellow dafla, grow in the desert around al-Awafi. She told me that sometimes women slipped traces of these into their co-wives’ food to make them ill. Then they’d have the husband to themselves.

  I put my arm firmly around her shoulder. London! My mother didn’t have any co-wives.

  She nodded her head. Yes, that’s true. Where was my grandfather at the time?

  On a trip to Salalah for his trade. That’s why no one took her to Thomas, the American missionary who was famous because he treated people’s illnesses without taking any money. People lined up from dawn until late at night to see him.

  It’s very odd, muttered London. They could be symptoms of another illness . . . maybe . . . who knows?

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Everyone had similar things to say about witchery and the jinn. Only Zarifa never joined in when people talked about my mother’s illness. But Zarifa was dead now. Did questions like these have anything to do with her insistence on tasting every dish before I ate from it, all through my childhood? I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . How would I know, anyway?

  Azzan and Qamar

  As the last drumbeats sounded at Asma’s wedding Azzan was rolling about on the cool sand with Najiya. He stared into her face – the most beautiful sight he had seen in his life – and recited some lines by al-Mutanabbi that had come to him just then.

  I stake my word on the desert gazelle and what she’s free of –

  no slur in her speech nor pencilled-on eyebrows

  The faces of city girls seen as pretty are nothing

  to the faces of the Bedouin, those ra‘aabib

  What passes for handsome in the eyes of settled folk

  happens with perfumes and padding but nomad girls need none.

  Najiya’s deep laughter rocketed through the desert silence. That’s your friend, the one called al-Mutanabbi, the one you told me about?

  Yes, he’s the one, Najiya, Azzan replied with a sigh.

  She started laughing again. So, what are these ra‘aabib he talks about?

  Azzan sat up and brushed the sand off. A ra‘buba, Najiya, is a woman with a gorgeously full body. And the gazelle of the desert – that’s you.

  Oh, really. She sounded annoyed. Do I chew my words, then, like a gazelle chews her cud?

  You chew my heart, Najiya. Aah, Najiya, Judge Yusuf – may God’s mercy surround him – used to talk to me about hearts. On and on he would go, and I didn’t understand any of what he was saying. Now I think I do understand it all.

  All?

  Azzan, my boy! Judge Yusuf would say. Your name is a word that holds secrets – it is a secret in itself. Listen – the first letter in your name, ayn, is a cold letter in the fourth degree, and it holds two levels of cold moisture, which is the first of the secrets of the throne, the ‘arsh, which also begins with the letter ayn, just like your name. Ayn is the first of its letters and the first of the worlds it invented – and worlds, awalim, starts with ayn too. Your name holds the cosmos, Azzan.

  Najiya didn’t understand any of this. Hearing Judge Yusuf’s name didn’t bring her any comfort, either. But Azzan went on.

  When he married Maryam, he told me, his heart was no longer just a mirror in which the beauty of the universe shone, like it was before. Now his heart was completely taken up by Maryam and the children. One time he mentioned to me that he regretted having ignored the advice of the great master al-Ghazali, who told his disciple to keep well away from marriage. To refuse it when his family insisted, to turn it down in the time of its asking, when his family presented it as his work in the world.

  Is this Ghazali the fellow who wrote the book that turns readers insane? Najiya grumbled. Who is this disciple, and wh
at does that mean, in the time of its asking?

  God show you his mercy, Judge Yusuf! When that man died not even a single hair on his head had gone white. Al-Ghazali – Najiya, he wrote a lot of books, and they don’t make people go insane. But most people don’t understand them. They want to be kept happy, to stay comfortable, so they don’t usually try to meet all the conditions that someone like al-Ghazali sets for them.

  Are you happy and comfortable, Azzan?

  He smiled and closed his eyes. How could I be, when my heart is chewed up in your beautiful mouth? How will my heart become a pure mirror, Moon of mine?

  I am your mirror.

  They fell into silence.

  The hills around them were silent. In Azzan’s ears echoed remnants of sounds: the drums at his daughter’s wedding, Qamar’s silver anklets, her laughing that seemed itself a stream of blessed musk, and her stories about the hand-worked fabrics that merchants bought from her to sell to tourists in Matrah. The voices and sounds faded, even al-Mutanabbi’s voice, declaring himself to all in a famous line as the voice known to steeds and the night, to the desert and the sword and the spear, to ink and the pen. All the voices, all the sounds became fading circles spinning in his head before they quieted, making room for a single deep voice. Judge Yusuf’s voice.