He bent down and unplugged the phone and then switched off the light.
’The light, fine, but why unplug the phone?’
’So that you and I both sleep. I’m tired. Very tired.’
On Nahid’s death, Amira insisted that she wanted to call Samir Nahid, and his answer was ’On one condition - that I call you Cappuccino.’ Cappuccino had been adopted by Monkey World in Dorset, and Amira and Samir both knew that they could not go on with their lives unless they felt attached to somebody day and night.
Samir, with whom Amira was as close as a comb is to hair now that his family had left for Lebanon (and he had moved in to live with her full-time again), worked all hours. He went round the streets looking for cars parked in spaces where the meters were about to run out; he fed the meters with coins, then waited for the car owners to appear so he could inform them that the heavens had sent him in the nick of time, and if it hadn’t been for him, they would have had their wheels clamped and been fined hundreds of pounds. The vehicle owners were happy at their lucky escape and gave Samir ten pounds, or sometimes twenty. At night he went around the Arab haunts entertaining customers with tales of Cappuccino, playing Cappuccino and himself in turn: acting out what Cappuccino had done at the wedding and how he, Samir, had responded.
Amira tossed and turned in bed. She wasn’t sleepy. The truth was, she felt like eating another lettuce heart. She got out of bed and heard Samir talking in a whisper to an escort agency.
’Do you have a man like the athletes on TV? Did you see them this evening? The big strong one doing the - what is it - high jump?’
Laughing, Amira switched the hall light on. Samir was crouching on the floor and he jumped and mumbled into his mobile, ’I’ll speak to you in five minutes.’
Weeks had passed since Lamis had gone into Nicholas’s flat. She tried to encourage herself with blind hope, and she indulged herself in chocolate-eating, and making telephone calls to her son. She worked on her homework for college, and at the flower shop, where she had found a job the day after her trip to the BT tower among the flowers, the buds and pots exactly the way she would have wanted it in Dubai. With one difference - that here she was surrounded by some flowers and colours she was seeing and smelling for the first time in her life, while in Dubai she would have worked with dead dry branches and flowers that had no veins, no oxygen, no vigour ... At the end of the day she took the tube back to her flat, exhausted, in order to sleep.
But a certain letter that arrived, bearing unfamiliar writing and an English stamp, stormed her heart one morning and turned her life upside down.
Darling Lamis,
I have discovered that the Venus flytrap is a shy plant that likes a sweet taste, and not the evil carnivore it is reputed to be! But what reminds me of you is the tulip. Anyway, I want to explain, or rather excuse myself for my behaviour. I’m paying the price for it and have been far too ashamed to get in touch with you.
A lover is convinced that his beloved has entered his feelings and even his past life - indeed was present at his birth - which is ridiculous when I’ve never even seen you with wet hair and the curls that you’ve talked about.
I never thought I wanted to be in a relationship with a woman and stay in it. I used to think that I was still at an age that made it impossible for me to contemplate sharing my life with one woman. I was always aware of my eyes having a life of their own, eager to be stimulated. I’ve told you about Liz and others. Instead of repeating the old phrase, ’I don’t know what happened to me when I met you,’ I want to tell you that I know exactly what happened. All of a sudden I became a thirty-five-year-old man, someone made only for sharing his life with one woman - you. My eye turned into a compass directing me towards you.
I felt for the first time that, if I sat confronting space through the telescope and observing the stars and constellations, I wouldn’t be filled with that dreadful terror that paralysed my limbs and prevented me from leaving the chair, as had happened sometimes in the past when the question of existence aroused a deep sense of loss, and those clichés about a person being a drop in the ocean or a mustard seed in the forest took hold of me.
It got so that we were only half there when we made love to each other: the contentment, the communication, the opening up was replaced by a sense of your absence and my lack of trust.
I began to see you as a tourist who’d come to London on holiday and decided in advance to enjoy herself while she was there, and have the adventures she’d only dreamed of, that had no connection with life in her own country. So she’d got to know an Englishman out of the blue, behaving just like an Englishwoman who goes on a package tour to a hot sunny beach, and has a sense of complete freedom, which prompts her to have a fling with a local man. I convinced myself I was just another Englishman to you, someone you identified with London, and that as soon as your holiday ended, I’d become a ghost, or someone in a photo standing by Big Ben, or perhaps I should say by the Queen Mother’s Gate, the one you like - which, by the way, is dreadful, though I couldn’t say that to you before.
I felt that our relationship was a burden to you and that I was putting pressure on you, to the extent that you felt you had to lie to me. You had to pretend that you wanted to move in with me, to a place of our own, where we could start a new life together. Two drops in the ocean, or two mustard seeds in the forest. But I found myself assaulting you, when all I wanted was to get closer to you. I didn’t have any desire to be parked in a drawer and brought out at specific places and times, then stuffed back in the drawer again because the circumstances weren’t right - the ex-husband, the ex-husband’s mother, the Arab community en masse. I won’t go on about Khalid, since I promised I wouldn’t come between you and him but I would at least have liked to have met him.
I felt there were matters you needed to sort out and think about, but my existence was making this more difficult for you, perhaps taking you in the opposite direction from where you wanted to go. In short, I was complicating things, muddying the waters. You could accuse me now of not being direct with you, and say that I should have talked to you about whether we should live together or separate. But how can I force you into a situation? How can I urge you to have certain feelings towards me, knowing that I took the initiative, not you?
I didn’t answer your messages because I was scared they were the result of other emotions masquerading as love: a sense of loss, the attachment to a habit, a feeling of waste, pride, not wanting to turn your back on a challenge, even mere curiosity. Am I right? You still live in your husband’s flat and who knows maybe deep down you want to go back to him; there was no path we’d taken together - no leap. I confess that I was greedy, impatient, but people in love always are. I know I was in a hurry, but if I hadn’t been, would I have been a proper lover?
Nicholas
PS. I am in Oman. I asked someone to post this for me in London - the envelope and English stamp were to trick you into reading this.
Nicholas was so close to her that she felt he must be in her bedroom, in the kitchen; she would hear his key turning in the lock at any moment. The long-awaited Mahdi was returning. When, in religious studies class at school, Lamis heard how the Mahdi disappeared in the cave of the great mosque at Samarra, she asked her grandfather whether, if the Mahdi turned up, his mother would punish him because he’d vanished without telling her where he was going - or would she rush to kiss him, glad he’d come back?
London went to bed without undressing or bathing. Only at seven in the morning, after it had yawned through the mist, did the workers begin cleaning the city, collecting the rubbish, removing the empty beer barrels left on the pavement outside pubs and making the place ready for the day. And so the city prepared to be narcissistic again, circling its reflection reflected in its shop windows, with its flowers and green grass. It looked at the trees and the trees looked at the clouds, and the statues and the figures on the façades of buildings exchanged greetings with one another.
Lamis ca
lled Sotheby’s and double-checked with them that he was out there at the moment. She was afraid she wouldn’t find him, that he might even be coming back in the same aircraft, taking the same seat as hers, on the return flight to London. Should she leave him a note? - but would he look in the pocket in front of him? She began to be certain she wouldn’t find him in Oman. He’d probably gone to the beach with some members of the diving club, or else she’d see him in the distance sitting with an Englishwoman under the coconut palms.
She picked up the little packets of airline pepper and salt and the tinfoil sachet containing the scented tissue, and read the names in Arabic. She held them affectionately, fingering the words. Had she really once considered substituting these for others and doing away with her heritage, no longer seeing, hearing or speaking, and consequently ceasing to breathe?
In the last lesson with Alison in Primrose Hill, Lamis had confided, ’If there is really a Queen of Words, please help me, for I seem to have forgotten my Arabic too.’
But the teacher always loved the way Lamis bewailed her plight. ’Don’t lose that,’ she implored her. ’It’s what distinguishes you from us.’
Lamis asked the teacher, when a big fly came into the attic room through a half-open window and its buzzing took Lamis back to Najaf, ’If flies sound the same in both places, why don’t people all speak the same language?’
The plane flew over the mountains of Muscat and Lamis did not hear the Beethoven that had blared out of Nicholas’s car earlier in the evening and rolled down the mountains or been blown back inside the car by the breeze, although he had not been alone. His clothes were impregnated with frankincense from the Bustan Hotel, where it burned day and night, and a Tunisian woman with a pretty face and radiant smile was at his side. Her English was excellent, and she talked vivaciously, gossiping about the British employees, or discussing local and foreign politics, on the strength of her job as a journalist with the English-language weekly.
Although the beauty of the place often accentuated the loneliness felt by the single men and women there, and made them draw close to one another, Nicholas had avoided flirting with her, so when he heard the sound of her car brakes followed by a knock on his door, long after he had dropped her off at her place, he turned out all the lights and sat in the darkness until she drove away again.
The aircraft was approaching the Gulf of Oman. Lamis promised herself she wouldn’t bother trying to make her accent fit her conversation; she would translate on the spot from Arabic to English, even if her logic appeared convoluted; she wouldn’t put off talking about a subject for fear that explaining it would involve a lot of terms whose English equivalent she couldn’t find. She would copy Samir, who could carry on a discussion, even when instead of ’et cetera, et cetera’ he said ’in cetera, in cetera’ and added ’innit?’ after every sentence.
In the days before he disappeared Nicholas tried to discuss their relationship with her, to hear her view of the future. He was painfully sincere: ’I don’t want an affair. I want a commitment, a framework for my life.’
And she’d sat looking at the lines on the carpet, trying to work out if each colour had a border and how the colours were combined. She’d not been able to find an answer because she’d not dared to think about the question.
She gathered up her history and English exercise books to put them back in her hand luggage, and read the first sentence of the essay she had written for her new English class: ’I have to sit and write now to record what I feel, because London is a vacuum cleaner that sucks up everything, even the air.’
Lamis looked down and saw the rugged mountains, the blue expanse of sea, the white houses and the sand.
She noticed a red plus next to the Grade A that the teacher had given her: her son must have added it when he wrote a list on the facing page of the things he wanted her to get him from Oman or, even better, Dubai, if she could summon the courage to make a stop there on her way back to London. Then she checked her passport that the English passenger, Nicholas, had found.
The man who had brought her back came from the green Atlantic, the sea of shadows.
HANAN AL-SHAYKH
Only in London
Hanan al-Shaykh was born and raised in Lebanon. She is the author of three novels—Women of Sand and Myrrh, The Story of Zahra, and Beirut Blues—as well as a collection of short stories, I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops. She lives in London.
ALSO BY HANAN AL-SHAYKH
The Story of Zahra
Women of Sand and Myrrh
Beirut Blues
I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2002
English translation copyright © 2001 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: GOLDEN BELL SONGS: Excerpts from “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” by Bob Merrill. Copyright © 1953, 1982 by Golden Bell Songs.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Shaykh, Hanan.
[Innaha Landan ya’azizi. English.]
Only in London / Hanan al-Shaykh; translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham.
p. cm.
I. Cobham, Catherine. II. Title
PJ7862.H
892.7’36—dc21
2001021574
www.anchorbooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42713-7
v3.0
Only in London Page 29
