Dreams of Maryam Tair

by Mhani Alaoui

  But Maryam was different. She was not breaking and she was not resisting. They began to think that she was either uncomprehending of the situation or...she was a real witch. They had never held a witch in their barren claws. Witches were not interested in revolution, their manuals told them. They were interested in twirling mystification throughout the land. But if she were a witch, why were her ideas so clear and her body so young?

  Maryam was able to decode their brutal logic in the way they looked at her, threatened her, and tortured her. The demons believed their youthfulness had made the new subversives reckless. The demons thought that these kids, who had been raised on Hollywood, Coca-Cola, and sun-packed afternoons, would surrender after a day in the dungeons of fear. How surprised they all were—including the makeshift revolutionaries—when they discovered the peculiar brand of toughness some were made of. They neither quickly folded nor immediately cowered in submission. Though they were tough, in the end they did lower their heads. But these experiences in imprisonment and repression had brought to light something new and utterly unexpected. It was revealed, in the midst of all the terror and confusion, that previously free-spirited kids with all their cool and their style, were capable of coming up with tough attitudes and resistance, which indicated one thing and one thing only: presence—undeniable, unavoidable presence. What all parties discovered in the dark dungeons was that courage can spring from the most unexpected of sources in the most unexpected of ways. And that, my love, is a discovery that cannot be occulted. It brings to light surprising truths about the human spirit and the passing hold of consumerism and tyranny on individuals once they have discovered that they are individuals. But in the end, most folded, were let go, or disappeared forever. Only Maryam remained.

  Her frail, unbalanced body, blue boots, and thoughtful blue-rimmed eyes came with a warning: do not treat this prisoner the way you would treat any prisoner. She is the child of Leila and Adam, the elder sister of Shams and Hilal, and the living sign that history is the fruit of a willful manipulation of texts. It is she, Maryam, the enemy, the witch, the forbidden one. These dungeons were her first home. Yes, even demons must consult their archives. The seed was planted in one of our cells, perhaps the very one she is now being held in. She may be your child or even mine, for Leila, her mother, remained our prey for many a long night. A moment of suspended violence, of pure pleasure upon which we fed our crimson delight...Her destruction must be complete. She is the anomaly, the forbidden fruit that blossoms into hope, the accident that brings history in its wake. Her judgment and sentencing will be made public so that the world can see that hope for change is dead.

  Since she was taken into the demons’ cells, Maryam had understood the true meaning of darkness. It was as though the light, sun, and air had been sucked into a vacuum, and she was forgotten in the emptiness that remained. She was imprisoned in a black hole, leaking pestilent fumes and tortured with mad water, but her mind was elsewhere. She was lost in absence, condemned to oblivion. And yet it was all strangely familiar. Maryam did not lose her mind nor did she submit. In this very moment, forgotten in the dungeons of time, she thought of her life. Barely thirty years old and as old as the world. In this place bereft of compass, she was finding her true north. She could not be broken, for her magic lay in the void left inside her solitude. You can try to destroy my powers, but you will fail. They reside in lack rather than in plenty. I know how to bend time and events, and I have learned to perceive the imperceptible, think the unthinkable, and love beyond love itself.

  But a mother’s tenderness I have never known. Two strong arms made soft to hold me in, I have never had. There is nothing to be taken away from me. I have known one rough, wild, inscrutable woman who taught me the ways of the witch and a matriarch who believed revenge and irony were a woman’s best weapons. They were dominating, elusive influences in my life, but mentorship was a relationship they never understood. They were inconsistent in their training and filled me with doubt rather than knowledge. A father’s acknowledgment, I have never found. I have known one old man roaming in the path of Boabdil, sighing over a lost greatness and obsessed with the sound of rusting tin in the pantry. There is nothing to be given back to me. My life has been a succession of failed attempts at finding love. I believe some may have tried to love me, but there is a curse on my head and I am doomed to roam all the worlds in solitude.

  “Death:

  for eating during Ramadan,

  for drinking alcohol,

  for eating ham,

  for rejecting Islam,

  for praying in a Mosque alongside men,

  for saying no,

  for being physically deformed,

  for doubting absolute power,

  for disagreeing with the majority,

  for sitting on the moon and confirming there was no God,

  for flying higher than an airplane,

  for saying no,

  for thinking,

  for calling herself a citizen,

  for considering herself equal to men,

  for disrespecting our traditions,

  for being different,

  for saying no.”

  Maryam looks down at her magical, weathered boots and shuts out the angry crowd. She is searching within for that kernel of calm to protect her from the ambient evil. All she ever wanted was to be anonymous. Her magic had been a burden and a responsibility, rather than a blessing. She had not yet understood that her desire for anonymity rendered her gifts greater, more miraculous.

  In the midst of the rage-filled room, she hears the crisp rustle of turning pages and looks up. There in the back of the courtroom, near the heavy bronze doors, sits a woman with round glasses resting on white hair tied in a bun and a young girl with heavily made-up eyes. They hold a large book in their arms, and their heads are lowered. The old woman is busy reading to the young girl, oblivious to the violence of the courtroom and the finality of the sentence. Maryam is swept with longing for this scene, which she dreams has been created for her.

  Yasmine

  It’s July 1999, and Maryam has just turned eighteen years old. The new millennium is around the corner, but the land is in mourning. The Great Patriarch, lord of all warlords, has passed, leaving his children fatherless. Or so the state radio and official TV stations stated. When the Great Patriarch’s soul left the earth, the cities closed in upon themselves, and the tribal countryside dreamt of raids and looting once more. Or so the state radio and official TV stations stated. The many lords ruling over their families, farms, or factories were weakened, or pretended to be, until further assurance that they would retain their power over their dominions.

  Maryam did not know what having a father meant. She lived in a house where patriarchal authority was represented by a slumbering old man who recited Andalusian poetry and sighed his longing like warm air on a hot summer day, and where women used magic to transform their decrepit household into a battle of good against evil. In the Nassiri household, things were not—were never—what they seemed to be.

  So it was that she turned eighteen when the land was mourning its feared leader and perhaps secretly hoping that change was around the corner. As for Maryam, she was holding her high school diploma in her hands and realizing that this piece of paper would be the only acknowledgment that she had crossed from childhood into adulthood. The breeze touched the great orange tree at the center of the garden. The leaves rustled, the branches swayed, and Maryam’s body yearned for a return to the dark earth.

  Then the familiar tingling took hold of her body, and her legs began to ache. She waited for the vision or the magic to appear in front of her, but instead she saw a hawk-like woman coming toward her. The woman was smoking a long cigarette with a gold holder, and a boyish haircut framed her thin, haughty face. She tapped the cigarette, and ash fell on the ground by Maryam’s feet. The woman’s shoulders sagged a little as she crossed her elbows on her chest.

  “There’s no need to stare. I am your great-aunt, tho
ugh you probably have no recollection of me.”

  “You are Yasmine. Your brother speaks of you in his sleep.”

  “Yes, I heard of the way you saved Mehdi from the asylum. Your feat is legendary. People believe again. Maryam the Savior, the Compassionate, my ugly little niece who saved a weakling from the claws of fate.”

  “I was helped.”

  “So it’s true then. Are you who they say you are? Are you the One?”

  “I’m nobody. I have things inside me, and they seem extraordinary to others, but I don’t know who the One is.”

  “I had a dream last night. There was an old woman in it. She told me it was time that I come for you, that you had reached that age. What is your age?”

  “I’m eighteen years old.”

  “The age when women of our land are officially told that they are now, and will always be, minors. Adulthood is not for us: our rites of passage are from one prison to another and are leaps of faith. We pray for a husband, then we pray our husbands are kind to us and feel blessed when they are. If they are, we believe in magic and take pride in our uniqueness. We live our lives as twirls of witchcraft and fated chance, and only succeed in tightening the bolts on our cages.”

  “Was that your fate?”

  “No, it was not my fate. And if you so desire, it will not be your fate either. I can teach you how to be powerful, how to fool the powerful and elude consequence. Do you want to know how?”

  Yasmine pulled on her cigarette. From the corner of her almond eyes, she watched her niece. She was not at all as she had expected. She had expected a strong, beautiful woman with the arrogance of a princess and the fire of a commander. Instead, here was a young girl with the bearing of a child and a disharmonious body. Maryam was humble and quiet, and seemed detached from her destiny and abilities. Who, Yasmine wondered, would this girl ever lead into battle?

  Maryam looked at the dry seventy-year old woman and smiled at her. Her smile was gentle, kind, and, to Yasmine’s surprise, amused. Yasmine looked into her niece’s eyes and saw what she had failed to see before. Maryam had seemed frail and unassuming to her—a person who could be cast aside without a second thought, for her presence or absence created barely a ripple in the room. But as Maryam stood there quietly smiling at her, Yasmine caught a glimpse of the unbreachable strength beneath. She began to understand that Maryam was not what she seemed, and she felt shame. Her mouth was filled to bursting with the scent of orange blossom, and she could taste its fragrant acidity. At that very moment, she also understood that Maryam could see straight through her into her darkest thoughts and most unspeakable desires.

  Yasmine had always been a tough one, a hawk, a queen, a bully. She held most people in scorn, her husband and family included. She thought men were greedy and women meek. As a lawyer, she had chosen to fight for women’s rights, only to come to the conclusion that laws befitted the people they served and that most human beings preferred to be numb than to be free. Simply put, she had given up. She was now a high-society woman who defined life as afternoon teas and frequent trips to Europe. She was a poser whose cynicism shielded her from her own bitterness. Her distaste of others deepened with age, but she drowned it in pleasantries and whiskey. She had taken a liking to luxury and status. There was a very specific kind of power granted to people like her in a country like hers. She was married to a wealthy man and had an old name. In her city, these guaranteed almost absolute privilege and, with time, had dimmed her desire for personal achievement and excellence. In the end, she shrugged her shoulders and, with breath warmed by alcohol, decided: Why bother?

  Yet at the back of her mind, in that place where long-forgotten memories choose to lurk, were images of that child she had once held in her arms and who had forced a strange prophecy from her lips. Those words had come to her, rushed through her body, and found life on her tongue. They had changed her. She did not know where they had come from or why they had chosen her as a vessel. She was haunted by these words, by the paths they created. You are thought, she had whispered to the baby, her mouth touching her ear. Did these words then release her from her own obligation to thoughtfulness and analysis? Had she sacrificed to this child her own ability to think and question?

  Yasmine heard that Maryam Tair was a magical being. She heard of the ten-year-old girl who had flown into the demons’ asylum and freed the damned. She heard of the bicycle Aoud Errih circling the moon, and of Zohra the old witch who became tame to protect her. She believed that these legends would die down and that her niece would soon be forgotten. She gave in to vanity and to the pleasure of being respected for one’s wealth and origins. She began to believe in her own greatness. There were times, admittedly, when she would stay in the half-dark of her room and drink herself to oblivion. But she would soon remember what mattered, and what mattered were people of her station.

  Yasmine did not know her niece. She barely noticed her the few times she came to her brother’s house, when Maryam was still a young child. In fact, she still shuddered before going for a visit. The smell of lavender and naphthalene, which she once so despised, had faded, but a new scent inundated the house and filled her with an inexplicable sadness. It consumed her with nostalgia and an unbearable depth of feeling. She smiled when told, “That scent, Yasmine, what you are breathing into your lungs, is Maryam. Remember her birth. The scent has not left her since.” Yasmine had chosen to forget about her niece and deny all stories she heard about her.

  But lately, a recurrent dream was cutting through her sleep. Night after night, the dream came to her and emptied her days of their flavor. The dream was a message for Maryam. She would not be granted peace until she delivered it.

  So Yasmine came to her niece to deliver the message. She also came because the rough, alive side of her wanted to cross swords with Maryam. Yasmine wanted to convince herself that Maryam was nothing more than an old wives’ tale. Standing near her niece and taking in her steadfastness, Yasmine understood that Maryam was not easily swayed. It was almost strange. It was as if her words had had no effect on the girl. She had opened a door for her, but Maryam did not even deign look through it. Why?

  Maryam looked at the older woman and answered her silent question.

  “Resistance is one way of dealing with fear. I am not interested in power. Why? How can I explain to you something I don’t understand? I’m made this way.”

  “Aren’t you ambitious? I hear that your powers are great, and you are only at the beginning of your journey. Do you mean to throw your potential to waste?”

  “People are always hungry. They hunger for more, they want more. Then they get lost in their hunger and want. I am looking for something else. Something beyond the vicious cycle of greed and anxiety.”

  “You are still so young and self-righteous. Know that greed is not why I started this fight for women’s rights. But that’s where it has led me.”

  “That is where you have chosen to end it. Tell me, venerable great-aunt, why have you come to me on my eighteenth birthday?”

  Yasmine had come with a dream-message and with cruelty at the tip of her tongue. She was about to deliver her message without a second thought for its consequences. Dream-messages rippled through time and space to create unforeseen, uncontrollable events. Yasmine did not care what Pandora’s box she could unleash onto the world by talking to her niece. She had reached a point in her life where evil had become an exit from boredom. She had hoped to dominate this frail, handicapped young woman, but instead she found something she had not expected. The simple features were not closed, and the large, clear eyes were not shy. There was a detachment in Maryam’s face, a rare distancing in someone so young. Yasmine thought of the right word to describe the expression, but she could only think of things it was not: it was not greed, or want, or envy. It did not exude vanity, power, or hunger. It was, yes it was, the expression of someone aspiring toward something—toward an unknown beyond the farthest horizon into the infinite radiance of the world. Yasmine understood
then that she would never control Maryam’s destiny, and so she delivered the dream-message, adding her narrative drop into the story unfolding before her eyes.

  “I am the bearer of a message. In a dream I saw a raven sitting on my windowsill. It spoke to me about a prophecy that was made once, a long time ago. The prophecy spoke of a woman, the daughter of Adam and his first wife Leila. This woman has an extraordinary destiny, but her path is fraught with danger. That woman is you, Maryam. And I am here to tell you that you must leave, for you are in grave danger. You must go find your second gift before it’s too late. You are now at your most vulnerable. You are eighteen years old. There is no rite of passage for women in this land. If you do not leave now, you will perish. You will fall into the legal swamplands of subjecthood. You must go to the land of the wild cedars and the great, grey mountains of the north and retrieve your second gift. That is the raven’s dream-message.”

  Yasmine crushed the cigarette under her feet and took Maryam’s face in her hands. She gave her a deep, long kiss on the mouth and whispered in her ear: “Alas, for you have rejected me. You would have enjoyed my company, and you and I would have had a grand time. My protégée…” A voice rose behind them: “Let go of the child, you used-up hag.” Mehdi was standing behind them. Yasmine laughed at the frail old man who had uttered those words.

  “What are you scared of? She’s a legend, all eyes are on her. How could I possibly want to hurt her?”

  “You’re a predator. A spent-up, washed-up old lizard, but a predator nonetheless. You would feast on her, prey on her if you could. Why are you here?”

  “Perhaps this is my atonement. My last noble deed.”

  “Come now, sister. We are too old for these manipulations. Why did you come?”

  “I had a message for Maryam. A raven in my dreams was its carrier.”