Dreams of Maryam Tair

by Mhani Alaoui

  “What happened here, uncle?”

  “…Time, poverty, old age. This is the house of people who quit years ago. You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I was gone for only a couple of months.”

  “You were gone for five years.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You roamed the world, went to the land of cedars.”

  “Yes, only two months ago. And I came back.”

  “You came back. But time spent with the cedars is not the same as time spent with human beings. It may be that the five years seemed only months to you.”

  He urged her to find a place and make a life of her own. The house had been sold to a flushed real estate tycoon who bought it for his eldest son, still a student in the United States. The Nassiris and the tycoon had agreed to wait until the death of the old couple before the boy moved into the house. However, the new buyers couldn’t contain their enthusiasm and had been coming by regularly to gauge the house and make plans for its remodeling into a neoclassic villa. Surprisingly, they liked the garden and were thinking of keeping it unscathed, except for the great orange tree whose roots sprawled above ground and which they found hideous and overbearing, and wanted to cut down. But before they had a chance to do so, a giant man with rough hands and Odin-like step came by one early morning and scooped up the tree in his arms like a sapling, loaded it onto a running truck that was waiting for him outside, and drove off, never to be seen again. Mehdi interrupted his chronology of events to dig around in his pockets.

  “The giant gave me this for you. He knew you would come back. He also knew when. He said it would be when the new law regulating men, women, and families was passed. He said the law was a grand deception, but he was happy because it would bring you back to our city. Just as certain as the bell tolls in the Vatican and the muezzin calls out from his loudspeaker in the mosque, she will return when the law passes,” he said.

  Mehdi gave Maryam a leather pouch whose softness marked the work of the artisans of Fes. She unrolled it and found a sapling. “It comes from the orange tree. It’s yours to keep and grow. He said to plant it in your new home. The tree will grow firm roots and look after you.”

  She rubbed the young leaves between gentle fingers and buried her nose in her hands. She remained in this humble pose for a long time, her eyes closed, struggling against tears that threatened disclosure. All I ever wanted was to be anonymous. The anonymous is forever yearning for a platonic ideal that she can never reach. The anonymous stays outside the fold looking in. It is the only perspective I ever found bearable.

  Her empathy was pure, she could see into the heart of suffering. But this very empathy paralyzed her, while any action seemed futile to her. She was detached to such a degree from the rest of the world that she began to doubt the reality that surrounded her and her own existence. Her only hooks to reality were her empathy and her own growing powers. Zohra had guided her through her loneliness onto the path of magic and the surreal. But now she was on her own. She had chosen to take her second gift and the sacrifices that came with it. She felt dizzy suddenly. The world swirled around her, and its colors and shapes blended and faded until she almost lost her balance.

  “You must leave now, you’re not safe here.”

  “Why? Who would come looking for me after five years…”

  “They sniff the air and smell your return. They hear it everywhere. They will come for you.”

  “I’m nobody.”

  “You’re a nobody with extraordinary powers. You’re the greatest threat. Anonymity feeds the coming insurgency.” Mehdi laughed bitterly. “As for me, I think they got me. I think I’m finally going mad.”

  He gave his niece a key. It was the key, he told her, of a small bachelor pad he still owned in the Centre Ville not far from the Wilaya and the Tour de l’Horloge in the United Nations Plaza. “It’s a studio, nothing fancy,” he explained, blushing. “It was my shelter in my wilder days. I still go back sometimes, to vent my regret. It’s yours now. No one knows about it, not even the demons. Now go and don’t look back. Forget about us, about this house, about the past that is slowly killing us.”

  Zeinab watched as Maryam left the house. She then walked to Mehdi and, her eyes fixed on him, asked him a question that left Mehdi dazed and confused. Zeinab and he had barely spoken to each other in the near-decade he had lived in this house.

  “Was Hamza here?”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s his name. Do you know him?”

  “Did he ask about me?”

  “No, he didn’t. Should he have?”

  Zeinab ran out of the room. Mehdi sat thinking how strange, unpredictable, and unknowable people were. She ran up the external staircase leading to the roof, spread a sheet on the floor, and poured unsifted lentils on it. She held the flowers he had once given her. She then raised her head to the sky and whispered to him.

  “If you are there and you still remember me, come. I am ready for you.”

  Grand Tribunal

  Clockmakers’ Town

  Casablanca, February 2011

  The charges plough on. They plunge deep where it hurts the most. Every word pronounced is a hammer chipping away at her humanity, her self-worth, her intimacy. Maryam understands the tactics, and her body still aches from where they broke and invaded it. She has never been stronger. She feels the magic coursing through her veins. The three gifts have merged into a triangle of diamond-hard power, trembling for release.

  She looks around the courtroom. Hostile faces surround her. But she is finally starting to see. This is what she observes. Two dark-haired women sitting in the back of the courtroom are whispering excitedly to one another. They are dressed in red summer dresses, and both are carrying white canvas bags over their shoulders. She looks more attentively and realizes that the two women are not sitting on the bench, they are hovering above it. They look up at her and wink.

  Then she notices that, in the indistinct sea of angry faces, sprinkled in the audience, are masked figures. The masks are an ethereal white with rosy cheeks and a thin, long mustache atop a smile. They look like turn-of-the-century gentlemen of most enigmatic and baroque composure. Maryam had become good at reading minds and deciphering intentions, but these minds were not like others. They were wired slightly differently. They thought in networks and digressive clicks. They thought like pirates who had never gone to sea. She was assaulted by the symbols that lived in their minds, the codes, the very new abstraction. They were a new kind of army, a legion perhaps, but they chose to act as one.

  What troubled her most was the constant refrain of resistance and insurgency that their minds were polluted with. What interesting, dangerous creatures, she concluded. As if hearing her thoughts, they stood up slowly, one by one, bowed slightly, and sat back down. “Finally,” said one of the gentlemen, who was really a girl. “Twas time she noticed us,” another voice harped. “Yup-yup,” a third nodded vigorously.

  A bearded policeman screamed from the back of the room.

  “Silence in the courtroom. We tolerate no disruption here! One more sound and you are out of here, the lot of you!”

  “Death:

  for perverting our sacrosanct history,

  for desecrating the Holy Book and the story of our prophet

  Adam, his one wife, Eve and their children Cain and Abel,

  for doubting the divine right of the Great Patriarch to rule the land,

  for wanting equal inheritance and marriage laws,

  for feeling outrage where submission is scripture,

  for saying no,

  for being a homosexual,

  for refusing to marry,

  for refusing to have children,

  for wanting to be an individual,

  for reinterpreting good and right,

  for saying no,

  for being provocative,

  for being subversive,

  for saying yes to secularism,

  for saying yes to freedom,

>   for saying yes to choice.”

  Maryam closes her eyes, her heart beats faster, and her lips open slightly as she remembers how once, a lifetime ago, pleasure made her faint, and she said yes.

  Betrayal

  They kissed on the mouth. The tips of their tongues touched, and Maryam closed her eyes. She held the long, tangled hair in her hands and brought the body in closer to her. After a time spent surrounded by the falling light of day, they released each other and lay still on the floor. Their skins continued to touch as they lay there, content and quiet. Maryam lit a joint, which they shared over the jazzy ‘oud sounds of Anouar Brahem. She turned to look at the body lying at her side, only to feel her stiffen. This was not the first time she felt her stiffen after sex was over.

  Voices and chanted slogans rose from the street, loud enough to be heard from the ground-floor studio in the Centre Ville in front of the Wilaya. Maryam got up and went to the window. She listened to the unions’ calls for strikes. She sensed the demons circling around them, sniffing their prey. It was the spring of 2009. They had gotten more sophisticated, more modern. They no longer simply disappeared people or tortured them, though they did that too, of course. They corrupted them, turning one against the other, creating disunity where previously there was conviction. She could feel them disrupting the air around the protesters, using invisible waves to pass divisive messages and tantalizing promises. Neither will win in the end, Maryam thought. The demons will erode the protestors’ will power, while they in turn will create deceptions that will return to haunt us. And the time of the haunting will be upon us soon, a voice whispered in her ear.

  Maryam felt a strange sorrow take over her. And the woman with her now was adding darkness to her sorrow. She raised her head to find she was looking at her. She was slightly younger than Maryam, extremely delicate physically, and cruel. There was a roughness about her that, because of her young age and beauty, came out as bravado. Maryam had seen her primal hardness since that first day when she had seen her in the street, but she had chosen to ignore it. Great powers are not always a protection against ravaging crushes.

  She had let herself be seduced because her solitude was too harsh to bear. She fell for her with the burning need of the thirsty man who, having crossed the desert, finds an oasis filled with crystal water, only to realize it was a mirage. She often wondered whether she could have fallen for a man, or whether desire, for her, was cluttered around the female form. Unable to find answers to her questionings, she chose to see her lover as simply that, her lover.

  Today, Maryam could sense that she was nervous and on edge, as distant from her as ever.

  “What’s wrong, habibti?”

  “The blues. The dumps after coitus. Hate this moment. Tell me a story.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “A love story. The story of Adam and Lilith. It soothes me.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a love story. It’s a painful story for me to tell. I told you the story once and you promised...”

  “Don’t be an old bore, tell me the story.”

  Maryam eased into a wooden chair in the sparsely decorated studio. She had rarely felt so alone in her life. This is the story she chose to tell her.

  Adam and Lilith were star-crossed lovers. They loved each other deeply and freely. Their love was so intense that it made the demons restless. The demons decided to destroy their happiness. They took them to the place that is not to be named and kept them imprisoned for centuries. When they returned from the place that is not to be named, Lilith and Adam tried to reunite and rebuild their lives. But the fates were against them. A beautiful woman by the name of Eve, flanked by archaic angels and sceptical stars, conspired to break them apart.

  Under the spell, Adam fell in love with Eve and forgot Lilith. Eve was a beautiful woman, seemingly soft and gentle, sensual and willing. She was desire personified. It was easy for her to take Adam from Lilith. She announced that he had always been hers, that Lilith was a she-demon dressed like a woman, that their child, a little girl, was not his daughter but the daughter of nameless demons. She backed her claims with written sources and the highest authorities to prove that she, Eve, was Adam’s legitimate wife. Adam cheated Leila, no I mean Lilith, of her place in the world and in his heart. He let the archaic angels and religious scribes rewrite his story and erase from our historical memory the first family.

  His marriage with Eve gave him two sons, Cain and Abel, and daughters, all forgotten, all insignificant. But Adam and Eve became curious, greedy. They became intrigued with the mysteries surrounding them. Eve tempted Adam with the unspeakable. They committed terrible crimes in the eyes of the black-and-white order they had helped establish. At last, they found themselves in perpetual exile, endlessly seeking a homeland that they would never again find.

  Maryam’s cold lover crushed her joint in an ashtray, took a crisp almond from the plate set in front of her, and commented sarcastically:

  “The story of Adam and Lilith is a story of sex, not love. Of crotches and vaginas, not doomed passions and bitter dregs. The only spell he fell for was his erect penis.”

  “You see what you want to see.”

  “Say it, say I’m a bitch. Ah...but you like it when I’m a bitch.”

  “You’re being cruel. With you, I feel old.”

  “And powerless. I hold your fate in my hands. I’m your Eve.”

  She shook her blonde hair and threw herself on the coach. She became serious. Her nervousness had returned. She bit her lower lip, then asked her abruptly:

  “How would we fit into this kind of story, Maryam? How would our affair look in the book of revelations? Two women, that’s unnatural, impossible.”

  “There’s nothing evil in our story unless you choose to see it so.”

  “We are a humiliation to ourselves and our families. What we’re doing is wrong.”

  “That’s not the problem, honey. The truth is that you don’t love me enough. You never have.”

  “You’re thinking of your curse again, aren’t you? You think you’re cursed! But there’s something about you, something strange and different that can be terrifying, isolating, and that makes it easy to reject and forget you.”

  “You’re harsh.”

  “You leave me no choice. I have to get it through your head. Your powers, they horrify me. There’s something evil and unnatural about a simple mortal having so much power. You are, yes you are...dissonance.”

  “Whoever said I was a simple mortal? Whoever said I had all that power? Yes, dissonance, that’s the curse. I am dissonance. I ring at an angle, never completely right but never completely wrong. I’m always at odds with harmony. People never love me, and they never quite know why.”

  Maryam paused, for suddenly she understood.

  “Who is it? What’s his name?”

  “Does it matter? He’s rich. He’s building me a house. He wants a family. He is giving me a monthly allowance and promises two expensive vacations per year. One in the summer and one in the winter.”

  “There is no summer or winter in our country. All the seasons are the same.”

  “The world is full of seasons, and I want to see them all.”

  “You’re making a mistake. Seeing the world is not worth being dependent on someone else.”

  “And this, this isn’t a mistake? It’s shameful and unwomanly. Can you fill my womb, can you give me a child, a name, a status?”

  “No.”

  “What can you give me?”

  “Nothing.”

  Maryam spoke softly because she knew it was already over. But the exchanged words shielded her momentarily against the pain of the break up. It’s not that this...affair had ever been a relationship. It was more a game of cat and mouse in the dark. It had lasted years but remained superficial and, often, contrived. Maryam didn’t know what attracted her to this younger woman in the first place. She suspected it may have been a matter of luck. Her own body had procured her so much pain that sh
e had never thought of the body as a source of joy. She had been starved of physical pleasure since she was a child. She had been treated, and now treated herself, as a vehicle to higher, more abstract goals. Physical pleasure was unknown to her. When this confident young woman appeared to her in the street that day, over seven years ago and smiled at her with her cherry-red lips, Maryam realized how starved she had been.

  Her dark thoughts were interrupted by a flow of words, panicked and sharp-edged. What got her attention, however, was the rare sincerity she sensed in the other woman’s tone of voice.

  “I’m scared, Maryam. I’m scared of being caught. I’m sorry. I believe in God, I believe Islam is the right path. I’m not like you.”

  “I know.”

  “People say there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not natural. They say you will bring destruction in your wake. They say that those who are associated with you will all be punished. You and I can pretend that I control you, but you know you will soon be elsewhere. That’s who you are. That’s what God, or Satan or whoever is behind you, intended for you.”

  “It’s not about me, don’t you see? Our lives are a string of wrongs we are made to commit toward others and that are committed against us. It’s become unbearable, and it must stop. We can choose a different path, a moral one…We must.”

  “No, that’s terrifying. Change terrifies most people. You’ll see. You’ll soon find out how terrifying you are to people. People just want to forget you exist, and the demons, well, they’re lying in wait for you. You’re in danger.”

  “We’re all in danger. We live in a time when we have given up our lives to chance, evil magic, and illusions. Violence is everywhere and in everything. But there’s hope, still. Where there’s resistance, there’s hope, and where there’s hope, we can begin to heal.”

  “That’s absurd. Where there’s resistance, there’s destruction. You will lose.”

  “No. There will be change. The world is now wired to such a degree that change will happen so fast that it will be unstoppable.”