by Mhani Alaoui
She returned to the house and locked herself in her room. She stayed there for many days. During that time, she didn’t sleep, eat, or talk to anyone. When she finally emerged, she was holding a small, soft rounded object with undecipherable Semitic writing on its surface. She slipped the object into an immaculate white cotton pouch and hid it in her robes. Then she tied her hair in a bun, slipped on a simple black dress, and slid her feet in old-fashioned square heels. She opened the front door and inhaled the fresh air, wisps of freedom blowing her way, she who had barely left her house in half a century. As she was about to step onto the street, she heard footsteps behind her. It was Zeinab running across the pebbled driveway with a concerned expression on her face. “For an end to apathy,” Aisha called out to her before disappearing through the doorway, her eyes large and excited.
~
Shawg was still a beautiful woman. She had prospered. Her prosperity had eased her into maturity with a vengeance. Her taste in furniture was as sentimental as ever: lavender couches adorned with lace cushions, pink marble floors and bathrooms, gold-plated faucets, and intricate bronze frames. These pieces screeched gentility. Yet if one were to enter Shawg’s and Adam’s home, one would feel oddly uncomfortable. Behind every luxurious item lurked a crudeness that grabbed the visitor by the throat.
On that particular day, Shawg waited in stillness for the twins to return from their mission. Her teeth were long and white, and scratched at her half-open lips. There were some people, she knew, who would always heed a call for help. It was her idea to convince Maryam to come to them by saying that her father was ill and in need of her. Shawg had dreamt of her stepdaughter every night since the day of her birth. Her days were spent with barely a thought for her, but her nights—and how could she help her nights—were filled with her. When Adam, trembling, told her that Maryam must come to them, she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said to him, “You must be dying.”
“I’m not dying.”
“Oh, of course you’re not, but she won’t come otherwise.”
There was something macabre about his wife’s plan. But Adam had secrets of his own, and today he had no choice but to bring Maryam back into his life. He began to shiver uncontrollably, and tremors wracked his face.
While Shawg sat with the stillness of a woman waiting once too often for a happiness that never comes, Adam remained in his room poring over a yellowed mathematics treatise. He had not opened a mathematics treatise in over a decade. Math, once the regulator of his days, had become a painful reminder of his failures. Today, he understood that its logic, its graceful constructions and abstract beauty still had a hold on him. He buried his face in the pages, and fragments of his past self knocked against his ribs.
Adam had that detachment of people who have been imprisoned, broken, tortured, then made to return to the world. He seemed to say: “Why am I here? Is this real?” He floated above reality, unobstructed by the chores or constraints of the everyday. He often bore a quizzical expression on his face. It was the kind of expression common in children and childlike adults unable to process their surroundings.
Where once mathematics had kept his inner demons at bay, now there was nothing to hold the darkness in check. He lived his life lost in the childhood trauma that he had repressed his entire life. The darkness and demons lurked around him, ate with him, slept with him, conversed with him. He was a small child again, left alone in the woods near his uncle’s farm. The spasms in his psyche had invaded his body, and his face was now contorted beyond recognition. Was he to blame when the demons asked for Maryam and he obeyed? Could a child stand up to the fears that had made him who he was and robbed him of what he could have been? Adam’s answer was no, he couldn’t be blamed for what had been done and what was about to be done. And their promises in return…oh, what they had promised him in exchange for Maryam. Soon they would all see him for who he truly was.
He let his tears fall on the treatise. The wait would be over soon.
Shawg entered his study.
“The twins are back. She is coming.”
“Good.”
His voice was slow, matter-of-fact. There was no regret or confusion in his answer. As for Shawg, her mind was reeling at the coming of Maryam Tair. Her home had always been vulnerable to storms, an open wound, a scarred cocoon. She didn’t know what having a real family, a safe home, meant. Shadows from the past, a jilted wife who commits suicide, and a daughter denied, all haunted her nights. She never felt guilty. No, why should she? If anyone should feel guilt, it should be Leila, for meeting the darkness so soon, or Adam, for giving in so easily. The tension subsided. Adam looked at this dangerous woman who was his wife.
“Maybe I am dying.”
“What?”
“You told the twins that the only way to convince Maryam to come to us was by telling her I was dying. Maybe I am dying.”
“Nonsense. You look better than you did in a long time. And you’re working again.”
“This? This is to stop my heart from breaking. It’s simply my way of passing time while I wait for her.”
Shawg did not ask why Adam had called for his daughter. She decided to hold her breath and wait. She was undoubtedly a strong woman. She had cultivated her strength on a daily basis and from a very young age. She was not born strong. She often wondered if anyone is ever born strong. Perhaps everyone is born weak, afraid, and only rarely able to transcend that fear. Perhaps when you only have one tool at your disposal, like an artist or a genius mathematician, you are more likely to succumb to that fear. But not she. Shawg had drunk her strength from the powerful image she created of herself. Her only reminder of the lurking chaos was Maryam.
She all at once wished for her disappearance and yearned for her proximity. Maryam was both the negation of Shawg’s family and its condition of being. She was the living proof of its frailty, its breaking point. Today she would come to them, and there would be a miracle. An extraordinary element would be injected into their lives, of this Shawg was certain. A most beautiful butterfly would finally emerge from the cocoon, and all would be okay.
Locked in her fantasies, she missed the only question she should have asked: Why now, Adam? Why are you calling for Maryam now? Twenty-eight years have passed, and now you are calling for her. These questions hovered around them. Shawg might eventually have grasped these essential questions, but the doorbell rang.
The moment had passed. They both walked toward the front door, but Adam stopped Shawg. “I believe this is something I must do on my own.” He continued alone, opened the front door, and instead of the young woman he was expecting to see, there, on the front porch, stood a woman with a saintly aura about her. Her hair was tied in a modest bun, and her black dress and square shoes were elegant in an old-fashioned way. Her eyes were gentle and kind, her face soft and lovely, her smile infinitely compassionate.
Adam felt the perpetual blues slip away from his body and soul. He closed his eyes to hide the sudden emotion he felt, and his lashes curved shadowy on his cheeks. The woman was quiet, but he knew she held all the wisdom of the world in her hands.
“Umi, Mother, Mother,” the yearning vibrated within and without. Beyond a lover, a companion, a child, what Adam craved was a mother—he the orphan, the illegitimate, the lonely country boy. There, miraculously, there she now was. She opened her arms to him and he was irremediably lost.
“How are you on this day of days, my child?”
“The world has been crumbling around me till today…madam.”
A joyful laugh like a bubbling river in the summertime: “Madam? I believe you know that I am more than that to you.”
Under normal circumstances, Adam may have started to have doubts about this woman standing in his doorway. There was something oddly familiar about her, and her words rang emptily. But today, he chose to believe in true magic. Only a mother could make him feel this safe. The woman took a soft round object from her pocket, which she handed to him.
&
nbsp; “I must leave, my son.”
“No, Mother…”
“Only for now, for a while. I will return. I came to you on this day of days to protect you against the harm that is coming your way. Here, my son. Take this talisman, for it will protect you against all evil. By the ancient knowledge of Timbuktu and its children, this I swear to you!”
Adam hesitated, but his soul was at her feet that had stepped over the threshold into his home. A high screech pierced the air, and he turned to see Shawg running toward him: “Don’t touch it. It’s a trap! It’s not what you think it is…”
But it was too late. The rounded object had touched Adam’s palm. It popped, melted, dissolved, no it disappeared, absorbed by the skin, absolved by it, fused, diffused, mingled, flourished, married, embraced. The ancient Semitic writing sizzled, crisp on the skin, before whispering its incantations and turning black.
“What is this?”
“She’s a witch, you fool. She has bewitched you, entrapped and ensnared you.”
Adam and Shawg looked at the sedate woman standing at their front door, her very thin feet quite at odds with the old-fashioned shoes. The maternal woman of Adam’s yearnings had disappeared. There, her eyes desolate as an abandoned cemetery, was Aisha Nassiri.
“She’s a witch, Adam. She came to kill you.”
“I do not kill. I facilitate death’s labor. I bring justice where there is injustice, balance where there is imbalance.”
“You are death.”
“I am what others have allowed me to be.”
“You are Aisha Qandisha. I’ve always known you weren’t mortal. In your house, at night when everyone was asleep, I could hear the beat of hooves on the cold mosaic floor.”
But Aisha was already far gone.
Shawg’s anxious words followed her into the distance, and to Aisha they were as sweet as honey and as delightful as the first ray of sun after the endless winter. The witch can also do math, the words swirled in Aisha’s head. All these years, I’ve counted, analyzed, imagined. I’ve deciphered, worked, studied, remembered what my mother once taught me of the manuscripts and the power of writing beyond the pillaging of brute contemporary forces. The magic of Timbuktu transformed, for and by me, into tools of vengeance. I’ve kept myself in check and considered the chances. I was told to stop for the sake of Leila and her daughter.
But my daughter has been dead for twenty-eight years now, and her daughter has been my own intimate stranger. She, the cause of Leila’s suffering and disappearance…But there’s a nature in all of us we cannot escape, a destiny perhaps or a particular skill. Mine could have been alchemy, it could even have been theology. But death chose me and gave me no respite. Death claimed me for itself, and the murderer’s blood flows in my veins. I have chosen to be a killer. It’s the only activity that gives me pleasure. It’s my respite. It can be planned in the dark, honed in bathrooms, executed in private. Death knows no boundaries, no public or private spheres. For the prisoner, killing is the ultimate liberation from the chains that bind. Adam will pay. He, the core of everything, the apple of the world, the witness of all disillusionment, and of all that has gone wrong.
Adam was silent, his head was bent. How could he have not recognized his formidable mother-in-law in the candid lady at his door? He reasoned that it was because she had come to him as a mother. There was no magic on her end, only foolishness on his. The sizzling and whispering in his body subsided. Adam imagined that it was all a dream. But he could not always follow his imagination in its fantastic whims and escapes. He could not brush aside what had happened. A part of him was fascinated by the lasting naivete of his relations to the world. He had chosen to believe that a miracle had sidled into his day to save him from the inevitable. But he knew, didn’t he, that miracles didn’t exist, and if they did, they wouldn’t happen to him.
Shawg was looking at him with a strange expression in her eyes. He was as unable to decipher it as he was incapable of understanding what she was thinking or feeling. In fact, he was beginning to believe that he had spent his life merely guessing at the possibility of others’ inner lives.
“I’ve changed, Shawg. I used to have talent, I had potential.”
“You’ve been tricked by a woman who blames you for the black cloth she wears around her heart. She was too powerful for you.”
Adam tried to feel that dark magic in his veins, but still he was met with a deafening silence. It’s all a great illusion, he thought to himself: life, death, reality, magic. And I’m trapped inside it. Nothing has happened, nothing has changed. Yet here is my wife convinced that a sad old woman has the power to bewitch and kill.
“Nothing is happening, Shawg. She’s mad. You’ve nothing to be afraid of.”
“You deny feeling that thing melt inside you?”
“I recognize a melting feeling inside me.”
They stared at each other across the abyss of their mis-recognition. Soon she will see me for who I truly am. And she will respect me and adore me once again.
The twins entered the foyer and sat on the sofa in front of the empty fireplace. They were engrossed in their own designs, oblivious to the strained atmosphere in the household. Adam paced restlessly.
“Where is she, boys, where is she?”
“Who? Ah yes, she will be here soon.”
“She will soon be here. Mousy little thing. She strikes me as the kind to keep her promises.”
“And to be on time.”
“Well, she is late.”
“Late for what, Dad?”
Adam paced anxiously. Time was running out. They would soon be here. Would he have to go to her? She may have tricked the twins into believing she was coming. The twins were unused to the ways of this land. They were too modernized, too Western, too hopeful. They believed in progress, in logic, in simple causal equations. They lived in clarity, in success, in optimism and optimization. They knew nothing of love, of pain, of betrayal. But she knew it all. She had that knowledge buried inside her since she opened her eyes to the world. She was graced with extraordinary powers and a unique spirit to face the repeated assaults against her. But she was trapped in ways they would never be. Adam winced, spasms deformed his face, and that is when the doorbell rang. There she is, he breathed. He felt no guilt, only anticipation, taut as a bow about to be strung.
The twins smiled, and Shams rushed to open the door.
Heart
Maryam stood in front of them, in the middle of the living-room. They asked her to sit, and she did.
There they all are: Adam, Shawg, Shams, and Hilal. They are looking at me as though I were a queer animal caged for their benefit. My skin is prickling, but I don’t need to wait for what will be revealed to me through those channels, because I already know. I’ve known all along, and still I came. I came. I’m here in this home that could have been mine or that should never have been at all. I’m here in this family that left me out in the cold to fend for myself with grandparents trapped in reminiscence and regret. There was Zohra, my warrior godmother, but she left me before I was ready to be left again. There was Zeinab too, but she kept searching the stars for Hamza when she wasn’t on her knees scrubbing floors. Here I am with the ghost of a past that eluded me. I had a garden. Do they have a garden? I had a tree. Do they even know what trees truly are? Do they know they are spirits holding us to our sanity, forcing us to breathe fresh air?…
I came because Shams and Hilal asked me to. My brothers. People think they are first. Stories make them out to be the kernel of everything that followed. They have erased me, my primacy, my oneness faced with their strong duality, their complex dualism. I am here. My powers are vast, and I am their inferior. They see me as a charity case. Shawg doesn’t. Adam is always and already elsewhere. He can’t be pinned down or made responsible. He is the unpinned, egoistical butterfly. He’s not ill. He’s not dying. But I knew all along. I know death too well and departure too intimately. I didn’t see it in the twins’ virgin eyes. Not yet, but one
day they will, and they will understand it too. I know why I’m here. I chose to be here. There is something else…I’m here because of the love I crave.
“You came, Maryam.”
“I came, Adam.”
“You must be confused, full of questions. Your brothers told you I was ill.”
“And you’re not.”
“Not in the physical sense.”
“You needed me, then.”
“I did need you here. I’m grateful you came.”
Maryam sensed the awkward pause in his sentence. But she didn’t feel like digging deeper into its meaning just yet. The truth was, she knew why Adam was uncomfortable, and yet she still hoped he wouldn’t carry his plan to completion.
The muezzin’s call to prayer echoed across the city. From mosque to mosque, the call rose and grew. The words threaded into phrases and lengthened into exhalation. Birds stopped their flight in midair to listen to the familiar recordings of the prayer-rite. Their calm, rhythmic beauty was in utter discord with the broken scene within the Tair house.
Shawg watched Adam and Maryam with trepidation. Her round body, her warmth, her red pomegranate lips, her pearly skin had dried up in that brief exchange. To be precise, it was not the exchange that drained her so. It was Maryam. Her attraction to her was violent, quasi-ecstatic. She could neither define nor explain it. It was of a deep, mysterious nature, like the craving of the mystic for the divine. She had spent her life haunted by the elation she felt when she first saw her. “Go on man, tell her why you sent for her. Tell her why she’s here…”
Adam looked at Shawg, his eyes dark as night. Tell her what, Shawg, he asked silently. Tell her that I love her, that I’m sorry. But that wouldn’t be true. Because it is your nature, you forget that once you cursed Maryam. You cursed her with a loveless existence, a solitary, marginal, humbled life. Leila knew that I would never love this child. She knew my inability to love her. She would have left me eventually. But I left her first, and I’ve been looked down upon ever since. This child is not mine. I was forced to give her my name, but everyone knows she was never mine. Leila would never have let me have that knowledge, that respite. Her love for me would have abated without any possibility of return. She was loyal and frank. There were behaviors she was unable to accept. And I am beholden to all those behaviors, and have been for decades now.
