Dreams of Maryam Tair

by Mhani Alaoui

  ~

  Something else happened during that one day and night when Hamza grappled with his despair: he forgot his sword and his mission. He wiped out djinns, ghosts, and giddy gardens from his mind and postponed the protection of the house and its inhabitants.

  In the early morning of the fortieth day, the orange tree lowered its branches toward Hamza’s sleeping body and shook his limbs this way and that. Hamza woke up from his dreamless slumber to the sound of wailing women. He pulled Zulkitab from the earth and ran toward the house. He pushed through the people gathered around and found Leila lying on the terrace with slit wrists. After an interlude of whirlwinds and icy rains rattling his brain, Hamza turned toward Zohra and fell on one knee.

  “I failed, my lady. I did not protect her, and now she is dead. Grant me a punishment that I may expunge my guilt.”

  “No, Hamza. She chose this for herself. This is as it must be. You have protected this household as you should. You have allowed the child to get stronger. I thank you.”

  “I was weak. You do not know my weakness.”

  “You too are allowed weakness. You may be immortal, but you are not infallible. And your infallibility was written into the story before you yourself encountered your own destiny in our midst. You’re free to go. We are even.”

  “Thank you, my lady. You may call on me for Maryam’s protection as needed, and I will come.”

  “Goodbye, Hamza. Zulkitab, protect our friend from harm. May the forces inside you balance one another once more and for the good of all.”

  Hamza kissed Zohra’s hand and left the house with heavy step and filled with doubt. His sword became soft in his hand and curled around his wrist, lapping at his arm like a dog seeking to comfort a beloved master. As he left, Zohra felt the ghosts leave the house as well. They had had their sacrifice after all. A first wife, a daughter of a first wife who kills herself, what greater vengeance, what greater delight…They giggled and sang as they ascended or descended, depending on your preference for their fates. All were joyous except for the young ghost who had come to love Leila and their midnight talks.

  ~

  Adam sat in an armchair in a darkened room. His head was bowed, and he looked, once more, like an old man. He did not feel regret or sorrow as you may imagine, my child. No, he felt awe. His mind had submitted to external pressures and disappointments a while back. He had curled in upon himself and let the darkness and the fantastic in. By the time he was taken, he could no longer rely on logical arguments or ethical syllogisms to guide him. He had collapsed because Leila was not there to help him through. Upon meeting Shawg, he had mistaken his own frailty for Leila’s. He began to think of her as the chains holding him back from greatness. Today, while others were mourning Leila’s death or whispering about its sacrilegious nature, he understood it fully. It was an antireligious, anticlerical, and antisocial act, but it was not surrender. It was an act of defiance whereby she exercised her power to say no. It was, most of all, an act of love. She was the strength to my weakness, and now I must bear the load of living in solitude. I must also show a new woman that I am all she thinks I am: strong, brilliant, misunderstood. His face started twitching, and he raised a mechanical hand to hide the muscular madness. The chair upon which he sat became hard and cold, and the unhinged grandfather’s clock on the wall stroke an ungodly hour. It was time for him to leave this household.

  Shawg was watching him coolly, cigarette embers sizzling between her fingers. She knew, with the desperate instinct of a woman in love, that Adam was changing his mind about her. She said hurriedly: “My love, Maryam belongs with us. We are her family now. We must take her with us. I will take care of her like my own child.”

  He held her hands in his and embraced her. But Zohra appeared before them and hissed: “No one is taking her. She stays here with me. And where she goes, I go. And you do not want me in your house, Adam of the weak ribs. I will eat life out of you, mark my words.”

  Shawg took in Zohra’s fury, but her pride refused defeat. She followed her.

  “This child should not be loved this way. It is impossible. I…”

  “You cursed her? But your definition of love is a narrow one. You equate love to desire and want. But love is the stuff dreams and revolutions are made of. And as for myself, your curses cannot work on me. I am old and your curses are child games to me. Now get out or I too shall curse you, and my curses are worse than death!”

  The family grieved over Leila’s body before exiting the house in silence.

  ~

  A few days later, inquiring through the notary about the state of his daughter’s affairs, Ibrahim found out that her one material good, the Centre Ville apartment he had placed in her name, had crumbled. Further investigation revealed that the fissures in the apartment walls were caused by an invasion of moss and grey weeds. The apartment appeared to have been deserted by its inhabitants for decades instead of the one year that had lapsed since the demons walked in and took Leila and Adam Tair from their home.

  Sheherazade

  Sheherazade is dressed in black. Black leather boots, black leather jacket, black riding breeches, and black silk shirt. She is holding a riding crop, and her hair is long, electric, and silvery white. At her feet is an exhausted flying carpet. The little girl is sitting by the fire carving symbols on a double-edged sword wrought for a giant.

  “Where were you, Old Mother?” she asked.

  “My niece Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, told me in one of her rants of a medium that would one day be invented by a New World wizard. I went to see it. It has a mirror that is as dark as a pool of still water. The mirror begins to shine, and bright blue lights appear. It’s a screen. I wanted to see what lay beneath. So I became a virus and dove inside. The machine has many uses, but the most wondrous and terrifying of all is a use that exceeds it. Pure magic it is. It has the ability to compress and compile all the knowledge of humanity. A Babel of languages, imagery, and symbolisms, it immediately takes possession of you and hurls you into trancelike imaginings, fleeting and dense. Pythia claims that it can flatten time, space, and desires into one plane of windless linearity. She fears that mystery will dissolve into certainty and that her knowledge of the past and future, of human destinies and dramatic flaws, will be made obsolete. She believes that the New World wizard harnessed the power of butterflies and spiders to bolster his magical invention.”

  Sheherazade’s body begins to shake uncontrollably, and her eyes roll upward. The little girl runs toward her, but Sheherazade stops as suddenly as she began.

  “I still don’t see why trances are so important to her. When Nietzsche was born, Pythia also predicted her own demise. Yet there she still is, and Nietzsche is dead somewhere. I’m not certain she gives a good name to the rest of us...I was warned it would be one of the side effects of that magical machine and its weblike quests.”

  “What did you see, Old Mother?”

  “I saw a butterfly leaving Leila’s neck as she fell to the floor. It flapped its wings and circled the world, spreading its golden dust as it went. With her last breath, strange events occurred, and the wizard’s machine recorded them. Stars rained from the sky, meteors hit the earth, hail fell on deserts, and the sun shined in the darkest hours of the night. Women from across the land and from lands beyond the Dead Sea and the Indian Ocean rose up. Women from lands once immortalized by Ibn Batuta and Leo Africanus and since forgotten broke their chains. They wrote, stood, united, marched, refused, denied, negated, rejected, defied, defined, mocked.

  “All households from Timbuktu to Cairo, and from Teheran to New Delhi, were in turmoil. Indeed, the news spread like wildfire—word of a mother’s sacrifice and of the birth of a child conceived in hell and saved by love. A child of destiny who should have been born at the beginning of time but whose existence was elided by other stories and higher scribes. But now figures explode in the firmament, and grey matter laces the black-and-white certainties of the past. Narrative tattoos on feminine bod
ies writhe and the blood-ink fades. Finally, clauses in texts of law disappear or are reformed overnight, while bearded men wipe their glasses or rub their eyes, and perhaps one or two others chuckle.”

  “Is this true? Does this medium record truth?”

  “It records what it encounters.”

  Sheherazade winks at the frustrated child. Sunflowers appear in her silvery-white hair. Opening her arms like a flower in bloom, her pipe curled around her arm, she turns toward the sun. The little girl looks at the symbols she has just carved on Zulkitab, the double-edged sword.

  “Tell me more, Old Mother. Tell me about symbols, words, and the forging of destinies.”

  “You have always been here, my beloved child. Whether as dust, as a repressed memory, or as a mother’s dream, the possibility of you is the reason these stories are told. Your presence now is the pool from whence these words have risen. But now you are no longer trace or shadow, you are here, at the heart of my world. So listen closely...”

  It is 1984. Maryam Tair is three years old, and the twins Shams and Hilal are born.

  Desire

  It was early in the afternoon, and Maryam had fallen asleep under the gnarled orange tree in her grandparents’ garden. An older woman was sitting next to her. She was over two hundred fifty years old. Everything in her stance suggested that she was guarding the sleeping child. Fallen orange blossoms lay on the yellow-green grass. Zohra picked up the dying flowers and stroked them gently. She looked up at the ancient tree and saw the sap bleeding from its bark. The tree was expressing its despair for the state of nature through all its pores.

  Since Hamza’s sobbing, broken-hearted departure, drought had hit the land. Trees and flowers were dying, and crop yields were meager. Zohra’s village and others throughout the country had experienced a relentless exodus toward the industrial cities of the coast. Dry winds cracked the resolve of even the strongest of folk, while the hyenas sobbed into the hollow night.

  In the northern regions by the Mediterranean Sea, the demons had attacked once more. Deaths and nocturnal disappearances became common events, while loud metallic birds dropped destruction on the land below. The pine trees lining the hashish slopes of the Rif Mountains became the demons’ lair. The pine trees had been the ancestral homes of the white owls who, chased away by the demons, told stories of their exile and woe, far and wide.

  ~

  Zohra looked at the sleeping child, and her heart ached at how weak she seemed. Maryam was asleep, but it was not a peaceful sleep. In fact, her sleep had always been an anxious, restless one. Her scent of orange blossoms mingled with the scent of the old tree and of the faded flowers sprinkled on the ground. Zohra had taken off Maryam’s clumsy brown shoes, and her crooked legs lay revealed. A burning light flashed behind Maryam’s closed eyelids, while an acute pain exploded in her legs. She woke up, barely able to breathe. She looked at her uneven, painful legs and called for Zohra. Zohra took in the child’s trembling body and her enlarged eyes.

  “What is it, child? What have you seen?”

  “The brothers are born. They are the sun and moon. They are different but also...the same. They believe they are the alone in the world. No, they believe they are first.”

  “But it is not so. They are no longer first. The story has changed. You are first. The illusions are being dispelled.”

  Zohra rubbed Maryam’s legs to ease the pain that rose whenever there was a change in the fabric of the tale or she saw something new. She then carried her in her arms back to the house. She had sworn to protect her and train her for the unbeaten path ahead. Yet Maryam’s physical frailty and detachment from things at times weakened Zohra’s resolve. The disturbances and the unknowns brought about by her birth were to Zohra like the reigning in of a thousand wild horses. Having been made aware of the existence of the demons, people had started to resist their enchantments. The leaden cloak that isolated the country and provided it with a sense of impunity had been slightly torn. People stretched to see the blue sky that cracked through, and they felt taller, their backs straighter.

  So Zohra feared for Maryam. She began to wonder if she had read the signs correctly, if the stars had not fooled her, or if her ancestral memory had not been distorted by the ages. What if Maryam’s coming were an end and not a beginning? What if the human fury, silent springs, hunger, and poverty that plagued the land were a sign of the end of things? But then the scent of orange blossoms burst in the air, and it became difficult for Zohra to doubt. She looked down at the little girl in her arms and thought of what lay in store for them. Zohra pushed her hair back into the black-and-gold scarf wound around her head and felt a rush of liquid energy flow into her veins.

  ~

  In three years, the Nassiri house had aged beyond recognition. Leila’s death had marked its walls and soul. The greying mosaic and crumbling cement told of a father’s rigid reading of duty and a mother’s fall into the shadows of revenge and hatred. Leila’s sacrifice was a rupture with the old ways and an act of passion and excess. It was also the tool with which she cut out a piece of blue sky for her daughter. Her absence overflowed into the household’s architecture to bare its lies and unspoken betrayals.

  Beyond its own history, the house was also succumbing to the continued difficulties of the Moroccan plastics industry. The Nassiris, despite all their goodwill and hard work, were unable to gain back their lost market shares. Ibrahim watched his beloved invention, the round plastic comb, be duplicated to infinity on every stand, stall, and market in the kingdom. His sleep was colonized by nightmares of flattened plastic and oily residues. He saw himself as Sisyphus eternally pushing a pink, round plastic comb up the hill, only to see it roll back down again. Success flinched from him, and money melted at his touch. Yet despite his family’s pleas, he refused to sell the factory. His brother-in-law had offered to buy it at an absurd price and transform it into a modern factory—rather than the horror museum of industrial failure it had turned into—for the processing of meat and poultry. But, more out of snobbery than actual business strategy, Ibrahim refused. Now, incapable of keeping the house afloat, the family had closed down entire wings, let leaky pipes leak, and allowed the blue-green mosaic to fade and break.

  The refusal to forfeit was madness, of course. But one could also think of the refusal to admit defeat as a weird kind of resilience. An unpractical, illogical, and doomed resilience perhaps and yet...There was still hope in this house. Absurd ideals and crazy plans were concocted to stay on top because, well, Ibrahim and Aisha did not feel like giving up. So, it may be strange to say, but in this old, decrepit, sorrowful, awful house, there was a lingering joy that could only be traced back to...her.

  Ibrahim and Aisha could never look at their granddaughter without thinking of Leila. They saw in her the same light and curiosity. But Maryam did not have her mother’s beauty. There was a broken sensitivity about her that confused a family who still thought of themselves as lords and masters. Ibrahim cringed at her dark skin, blue-rimmed pupils, rough hair, and uneven legs. He saw in those legs the hoofed demon that could be Maryam’s biological father. But Aisha saw in her the blood of her mother’s tribe and the beauty of the Sahel. She saw in her physical handicap the ability to understand others’ pain and imperfections. She also saw in her granddaughter the constant reminder of her own shortcomings and mistaken turns. Finally, both Ibrahim and Aisha secretly believed that as long as Maryam was under their care, no real harm or catastrophe could ever befall them. They felt protected, graced with a perpetually blue rag of a sky.

  Today, something was amiss. Ibrahim and Aisha watched as Zohra brought Maryam into the house. Zohra laid her in her bed and prepared incense for burning. She hurriedly mixed a bowl of scented henna and drew ancient symbols on Maryam’s legs and feet. Gradually, the pain subsided and Maryam was able to stand up. Zohra turned toward Ibrahim and Aisha.

  “The twins are born. They are boys, as was expected. Maryam saw a sun and moon. She does not yet know that they are h
er brothers. Adam and Shawg will soon send someone here with the news.”

  “What will these births change?” asked Aisha.

  “Oh, Adam will taste paternity. Sons will make him feel like a man, and it will be easy for him to deny his daughter. He finally has the justification he has been looking for.”

  “You do not discard a human being without consequence. The forgotten will come back to haunt you, one way or another.” Ibrahim interrupted.

  “Yes. But Adam has been seeking for a way to absolve himself. Strong, healthy boys may give him just that excuse.”

  “These boys, they are the sun and moon, you say. The sun and moon rarely shine side by side,” said Aisha.

  Ibrahim left Maryam with Aisha and Zohra. They waited for her to be fully at ease that she may sleep, but Maryam was restless. Aisha strummed the ‘oud and hummed an Andalusian ballad. Still Maryam was restless, her body cold and her knuckles white. Finally, Zohra asked her, “Did you see anything else, my little one? Don’t be afraid, tell me.” Maryam stared at a corner of the room and said, “I saw two brothers who loved each other kill each other. I saw death. It was sitting in a chair near the window, with high heels and red nails....I saw pain.”

  Zohra wanted to explain that Maryam’s description of death did not quite fit and that what she saw may well have been a bored storyteller come to sit in on her characters while relaxing at their balcony. But instead she held her close and told her a story. “Oh, what you saw is indeed complicated. Listen to my words that you may go to sleep.”

  A long, long time ago there was a king called Adam who had two sons. One was a shepherd and the other a farmer. The shepherd roamed the world freely and went where the pastures were greenest. He respected all things, ate frugally, and howled at the moon when the call of the wild was at its strongest. His time belonged to nature, and he gladly succumbed to it. But his brother, the farmer, planted crop after crop, year after year. He tamed animals, built tools, stocked crops, and planned ahead. He began to impose his own time on nature and expected nature to succumb to him.