Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  They stopped speaking.

  London needed someone to talk to. But she didn’t want to expose herself to Hanan’s irritation and sarcasm. She knew Hanan’s opinion well enough. I warned you, Hanan would snap at her. Every new poem is dedicated to a new girl. Why did you allow him to insult you like that?

  Hanan didn’t understand. London was certain he loved her, and that he was telling her the truth. What business did she have with his previous life? It didn’t concern her a bit. The important thing was their future together, and she didn’t want to fail. She was afraid of failure, it terrified her. It was three o’clock in the morning and she called him.

  The next day they went in his car with the darkened windows for a long drive on the shore. He rejected her suggestion that they get out and walk, because it was so hot. They ate ice cream and talked about the future. As soon as I finish my intern year I’ll open a private clinic, and then after you graduate you can join it. Your father will help us start it. Once I’ve got more famous for my poetry, I’ll leave the whole thing to you so I can free myself up to follow my talent. You’ll be the wife of the greatest poet of Oman! For that matter, the most celebrated poet in the whole Arab world. In the darkness of the car, he embraced her.

  London’s dream was somewhat different. After finishing her intern year she would work in the government’s hospitals long enough to get experience. Then she would travel to Canada for a further degree in paediatric medicine. After that she might consider the clinic idea. But she couldn’t discuss any of this. The smell of his shampoo filled her nose and she gave in to his hugs. She imagined what their children would look like and she put her arms around him. London wasn’t blind. She did see all the signs, but she wouldn’t let her mind accept them.

  Look here, Hanan said. This romance thing. With all due respect for love wherever it is, to lovers, songs, Nizar Qabbani’s poetry, flowers, the moon, nights of conversation, stars, and every poet who has ever existed – this isn’t big on rationality. No listening, no looking, no thinking or real planning. A guy you saw a few times in lecture halls and at poetry evenings and you talked to him in the hall for a few minutes and then on the phone a few nights. You split a sandwich in the hospital cafeteria on your break and you drank a Pepsi together in the med college parking lot. And then you say, I’m crazy about him? I can’t live without him? He is my air and water, my sun and moon? What’s this nonsense? And it turns out his grandfather was a shepherd for your grandmother’s father fifty years ago and your grandmother swears she’ll slit your throat if you marry him? They hit you and break your phone and forbid you going to classes for several days, and why? For some guy who is no different than thousands of other men in this world? He’s not even as tall as you are. And you say to me ‘love’ and patience and sacrifice and if I don’t marry him I will kill myself? If I can’t talk to him I can’t breathe and if I don’t see him I can’t live? What love, London? Did you, like, walk into him deliberately so you could fall in love, in the first place? You’re always saying to me, it’s the phone calls, the emails . . . well, this is exactly your mistake, London. When you are not truly with someone, and you only hear his voice, and then all he talks about is himself, you form the image that you’re already hoping for. You don’t exactly get a true picture. See, you don’t know him at all. Poetry and dreamy phone conversations wa salam! That’s all you’ve got! And then – either I marry him or I kill myself? And I’m so great because I’m rejecting the hateful class system? You don’t need his slogans in order to trust your own principles, London. What has he done for your sake anyway? He lets your mother torture you and your grandmother threaten you, and all he does is just sit there watching, waiting to see what the outcome will be. This is a man? This guy? As far as I’m concerned what marriage is doesn’t have a lot to do with love. Love is dreams, marriage is for real: life, responsibility, child-ren. No illusions. The right person is the one who respects and honours you, and you feel totally comfortable with, the one who will be a father you can be proud of, for your children’s sake. Not someone with a stupid inferiority complex who makes you feel jealous. Love, he said. Hah! I swear I thought you had some brains, London. I thought your mind was on graduating, and on Canada, your specialization – until all of this happened. What are you going to do now, if your mother keeps on slapping you, if they don’t marry you to him?

  I will kill myself.

  Hanan left. She was assigned to a school in Dhofar. Refusing was out of the question. If she turned this job down she’d lose her chances, probably forever. Where would she find a fixer who could get her appointed in Muscat so that she could stay with her family? She didn’t know anyone with any influence, and if she said no and the job flew out of her hands all the dreams of her family would go up in smoke – her father, retired now, her mother, who was ill, her brother who had gotten engaged seven years before but on his miserable salary had still not been able to pay the dowry. She packed her cases and travelled south, dreaming of her first salary and her brother’s wedding.

  London began phoning her every other day, in tears.

  Hanan, I hate the words freedom and culture and classism. I’ve started doubting myself completely. Can you imagine, he searches my phone every time we meet, he goes through all the numbers on it to make sure there is no new one that he doesn’t know.

  Hanan sighed. I don’t know what to say to you, love. This man doesn’t deserve you.

  I don’t understand anything any more. It’s as if I’m living inside a tornado. Suddenly he started noticing how dark and thin I am, as if he never saw me before.

  I swear that guy has no shame. Why don’t you stand up to him? Talk to him about all of this.

  I’ve tried, and every time I start, he says to me, Don’t think you are better than me. I’m the man here, and your family and all the real estate your father owns and his business don’t concern me a bit. Even though, Hanan, I never said anything about my family to him. Not even once, not at all.

  Allah Allah! This man is sick, sweetheart. Give it some thought before you get any deeper into it . . . you’re still just in the contract period, meaning, it’s just an engagement, really.

  You want us to break up, Hanan? Ahmad is my darling, the dream of my life. We have to solve our problems, I don’t want my first love to fail. I don’t want the way I’ve resisted my family to go in vain. I want to prove our success to the world, to my mother and father and grandmother and our classmates, the whole world. I don’t want to be a divorced woman.

  But her first love did fail. It had failed long before she could admit it, and after a lot of insults and pains. Finally she demanded an annulment and refused to see him. He stood at her car door in the College parking lot and begged her to speak to him. He blocked the car door with his body to prevent her from getting in. London, my London, don’t leave me . . . you are mine. You are the girl of my dreams. I swear to God I am sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you. I was just angry, I swear to God, I’m so sorry, forgive me. I kiss your feet. I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t want to lose you, and anyway, you are my property, my London. You are my victory and my inspiration. You are mine. You would leave me and belong to someone else? wAllahi it won’t happen, you belong to me. You are my girl, my wife. I kiss your hands, don’t leave me. We’ll get married, the date’s been set and we’ll go on honeymoon to Europe. We’ll open the clinic together. Have you forgotten our dreams, London? You’re mine, my London, my muse. My love, mine. You belong to me.

  London left the parking lot and went back into the College. It wasn’t enough to keep on saying to herself, I am not your possession, and I do not belong to anyone. It wasn’t enough, any of this, to heal her. She knew you couldn’t treat a wound just by cleansing it with an antiseptic or pretending it was only a scratch.

  The desperate longing in his face and voice as they’d been before was a weapon her heart waved in her face. I hate you, I hate your voice, I hate the look of you. She tore up all the pictures of him she could f
ind. But she couldn’t feel the kind of hatred that might pull her out of this. She just felt the sharpest, most violent bitterness and pain.

  Khawla

  After Nasir had truly settled down in Oman, and once Khawla’s two last children had arrived, and now that Nasir was hardly ever leaving the house except when he had to go to work, she decided. She wanted a divorce.

  Everyone thought she had gone insane. Or perhaps she was concealing some terrible set of secrets that had pushed her to this crazy decision.

  But Khawla wasn’t hiding anything.

  It was just that she couldn’t bear the past. Everything was calm and well-ordered now. Fayiz, the youngest of her five children, was in high school. Mona was engaged to a respectable engineer, and the others were all doing well. Everything in her life was so calm, in fact, that it was like existing in a still and soundless landscape. All of it: her married life, her motherhood, her friendships.

  She was at peace, so her heart stopped forgiving. She couldn’t bear the past any longer. All of it seemed now to have grown to an enormous size inside her, and it choked her. Every night, the portrait of the Canadian girl on the key ring got bigger, and went to sleep on Khawla’s pillow. Every day, all of those hours she had spent alone in maternity wards marched out in force to pounce on her. Every day, she could see the clothes her children never wore because their father didn’t even know how old they were. Every day, she saw the years that had passed with her bed cold, her beauty wrecked, the neighbours taking her children to the hospital if they fell ill, her sisters loaning her money when she needed it, her mother scolding her, and neighbours’ eyes full of pity. The past came back every single day, a warrior’s lance that stabbed her through. Oh, Khawla! That wild forest inside of you, full of rough underbrush. Had it been asleep all these years, and was it you who closed its eyes? Who covered over its poisoned plants? You can see it now, though, as it rips through the old sheets with which you tried to cover it and choke off all those thorns. What does it want? You don’t know, of course. How would you know? As you take a step on the staircase that leads down into it, the step before it splinters and the way back is gone. The white sheets that covered it are gone.

  What she saw now was not Nasir’s sweetness, the gentleness he could show, the way he did lose himself serving her and the children. She couldn’t see his loyalty, his perfect respect. She saw the birthing rooms, empty except for her moaning and the newborn. She saw the long mornings of pregnancy, as she lay there sick and cold. She heard the ringing of his telephone after midnight. She heard his whisperings and his sighs into the phone, she heard the screech of airplanes lifting off the runway, heading for Canada, year after year for an entire decade, never stopping. She heard the children’s screams, the clatter they made, and she felt the coldness of her bed creeping into her body. All of it, Khawla carried on her back, and the load grew heavier every day, and her back began to break.

  Trying every possible argument, he begged her to take back her decision, but her ears were stopped up now. She no longer even heard his voice. She hadn’t heard his voice for a long time, in fact. He pleaded with her. Words that undoubtedly would have once melted her ricocheted against her eardrums like rusty bits of iron. The fault wasn’t in the words but in the years. In all those winter nights and summer days. The years dragged all of those words behind them and when the words tried to take root on her burdened back, the stony ground there threw them off. Or she ate them to the bone, the way some creatures consume their young. The years were live creatures. Khawla did not forget anything she had gone through, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, everything inside her sapping her spirit. Every day plunged another blade into the deep earth inside of her, turning it over mercilessly, sowing it. At the lowest point, at Khawla’s bedrock, there was no fresh soil fit for planting.

  There were words she wanted to say to him. Anything at all, that would have been enough for me, anything that would have watered the fields of my heart and made them flower. Anything to fill those baskets held out to you. Only to you. Anything. A letter. Just a single page with one single word, in your handwriting. The ring of a telephone after midnight, a snatched dream in which you didn’t turn your back, a small step, a single slow turn to face me. Anything. Even an angry scolding! A sigh of exasperation. A cheap gift. Anything would have been a lot. But that anything never came. Nothing, ever. And now, everything is not enough. Everything is a lot less than a single bud, a single leaf unfolding in a field whipped by winter.

  But she didn’t say any of it. How to say it, to a man who had spent the last ten years working himself hard to serve his home and children, how could he understand that the seed planted in those first ten years had suddenly erupted in her body, growing thorns that tore her into shreds?

  Abdallah

  We were on the shore at Sib. My Lexus was parked at one of the new lamp posts that vaguely resemble the Burj al-Arab in Dubai.

  Muhammad was sitting next to me. He said she was being insanely jealous, and preventing him from doing what he loved. She was spying on him, looking at his phone. The car seemed to lean into the lamp post. Who? I asked Muhammad. Who is she? He looked at me, startled. My wife, he said. Mayya.

  I heard a faint laugh coming from the back seat. Suppressed and derisive, it was a laugh I knew very well. I brought my arm in from the car window and said without turning around, Don’t laugh at me, Papa. You aren’t even here any more. You died the year Muhammad was born. The laugh only grew louder and in the car mirror I saw my father’s white beard shaking.

  Salim passed by the car window, running, followed by two young fellows, but older than he was, chasing him in a Porsche. I turned toward Muhammad but I found London, crying. Yes, Papa, she said. I am successful, yes. Muhammad was a baby in her lap, shaking his head hard in one of those endless jerky movements he always made. The car faded away and Muhammad and I were sitting on the beach. Muhammad looked like a totally ordinary strapping young man. He was whistling happily, and suddenly he said to me, I can’t stand it any more, Abdallah, her jealousy will kill me. I turned to him. Who is she? Who do you mean? My wife, he said. I grabbed the sleeve of his grey dishdasha. But you are still little, and you are sick, and you do not have a wife.

  He screamed. My wife will kill me! She keeps her eyes on my phone, she surrounds me. He collapsed, still shouting. She is always bent over that damned sewing machine, she strokes it, but she never once bends over me. The saliva began to drip from his mouth as his hand made those repeated sharp nervous movements. I slapped him, saying over and over, Shut up, you’re making a scene, you’re scandalizing us.

  My father snatched the whip from my hands. He threw it into the sea. But you are dead, Papa, I said to him. How can you come back like this?

  He went away, not turning back once. I shouted after him. Take him with you, Papa! Take Muhammad with you.

  Everything went dark. I heard the sound of my car starting, I heard it leaving. I caught a glimpse of London at the wheel. I scooped Muhammad into my arms. He is like a fish, Muhammad is, I suddenly thought. I walked down to the water. The waves were welling up, and I went in up to my chest. When I opened my arms Muhammad slipped away like a fish. And I came out of the water dry.