I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Ingrid looked at her watch: Mahyoub was late. Only an hour late; that was nothing. She had grown used to waiting for people for hours. She was even mentally prepared for people not turning up on the right day at all, perhaps even arriving several days later. Time lay like a swamp, and people had stopped winding their watches long ago. This used to annoy her at the start. She had tried to fight it without success, not giving up hope until she had finally acclimatized herself to the way life was here, and begun to understand how a traveler relied on luck to move from one area to another. By that stage she was able to picture the empty, winding roads that appeared to lead only to more dust and more bare hills, and where there was rarely another vehicle in sight. Problems with transportation had themselves played a part in her becoming friendly with Souad, Mahyoub’s sister. Ingrid and some other teachers from the school where she taught had set out to visit the village closest to Sanaa as a first step toward discovering what lay beyond the city.

  Like the rest of the staff, she had spent the first month after her arrival skating on thin ice, treading on eggshells. When they ventured beyond the protective embrace of the city they felt as if they were at the edge of an abyss and were relieved to encounter two men hitching a lift. As a result they were guided for nothing to the village that was subsequently to become the focus of Ingrid’s life and change her from a European woman into one who wore Yemeni clothes, baked bread on an outdoor clay oven, spoke Arabic and hennaed her hands, a custom she was told went back to the Prophet Muhammad, when he wanted to differentiate women’s hands from men’s.

  Ingrid used to notice one particular woman who always came into the shop opposite her home in Sanaa. She began to identify her by the colored cloth bag she carried, as all the older women veiled themselves in an identical fashion: the sheet hanging down either side of the head and the soft black silky material, patterned with red, covering the face. This cloth bag never left the woman’s hand. At the beginning Ingrid was certain that she came to beg, as people like her shopped at the local markets, not in these expensive shops, which were patronized mainly by foreigners and government employees. How naive she must have been to believe that this woman was suitable territory in which to sow the first seeds of her mission! She actually went up to her and invited her to her house and the woman went along with her at once, as if she’d been expecting her. Once inside the house she wandered around the room and finally came to a stop in front of the mirror, where she spent some time examining her reflection in amusement. Then she went over and patted the sofa, picked up an ashtray and viewed it from all angles before returning it to the table, stared at the photos of Ingrid’s family, and felt the curtains. She went into the bedroom and sat on the bed and bounced up and down like a child. She drank a glass of cold fruit juice in one gulp, and then seemed content to gaze at Ingrid’s face, not understanding a word of the other’s attempts to talk to her in Arabic. Ingrid was afraid that this opportunity would slip through her fingers and hurried to fetch the woman a picture of the crucified Christ. The woman drew her breath in sharply, putting a hand up to her mouth, but her attention was distracted by the knitted tea cosy. She mumbled a few words and seemed to be asking whether Ingrid had made it and laughed again, pointing at the teapot, apparently finding it strange that it should have a cover at all. Then she smiled broadly at Ingrid, nodded her head as if to say she’d be back again soon, and went out the door. Later Ingrid discovered that she came to the shop only to curse the cigarette display, because her daughter’s husband had left her for another woman and he used to buy his cigarettes there. It was then that Ingrid realized that her task was not going to be easy, as she would need excellent Arabic in addition to trying to understand the culture of the country.

  Many months had gone by, in the course of which Ingrid believed that she had begun to be able to understand the people’s mentality and decipher their behavior. But whenever she went deeper below the surface, she lost her way inside their compact heads, intelligent eyes and smiling mouths.

  Mahyoub’s car finally came in sight and he drew up and got out, but instead of returning her enthusiastic greeting he stood talking to the owner of the shop. She tried to attract his attention by waving her hands about, but he ignored her until she opened the window and called to him to help her out with some of the luggage.

  Usually it was made up of bundles of cuttings from European magazines, small cheap mirrors, paper, pencil stubs, tins of food and packets of cornflakes, but today it included far more important items: a sewing machine, a sterilizer for babies’ bottles, boxes of tools, secondhand cooking pots and matches.

  When they had finished stowing them in the backseat of the car, which was buckled from a previous accident, Ingrid climbed into the passenger seat. She was worried because she was sure that Mahyoub wouldn’t give the load in the back a second thought, but she soon became more concerned about his unsmiling face and abrupt way of talking. The day before, a truck driver from the village had passed on a message from Souad to say that Mahyoub would give Ingrid a lift to the village. This had surprised her, as she hadn’t forgotten his hostile attitude toward her the last time she visited them before her trip back to Denmark. She had introduced the head of her school to the men and asked them to invite him to spend a few days there while she was away. They had agreed with a collective nod. their cheeks bulging with qat, all except Mahyoub, who, to her astonishment, had asked why he should be invited. She had grown used to their impeccable hospitality and the way they agreed to all her requests even if they did nothing further to carry them out. She felt herself flushing, but answered: “So that he can get to know you and understand your culture better.”

  “You mean he’s coming to inspect our dandruff and daggers?” he mocked.

  Then he had asked why she kept her head covered when she wasn’t a Yemeni, or even a Muslim, and held out some qat leaves to her, inviting her derisively to chew qat with them. The other men had silenced him and the oldest man present had risen to his feet in anger, his eyes blazing and threatening violence.

  Ingrid felt heavy, as if her luggage in the backseat were weighing her down, making her tongue-tied and even restricting her freedom to breathe. She guessed she felt this way because she couldn’t talk to Mahyoub; she wanted to ask him not to drive so fast around bends and not to crowd other cars, but she couldn’t even bring herself to ask after his sister and everyone in the village. Her spirits lifted when a haunting song came through the crackle and interference on the car radio but she didn’t feel at ease with him like before. Besides looking morose and talking in monosyllables, he drove recklessly and sighed and grumbled and gave her mutinous stares.

  Her feeling of awkwardness was justified. After some time, Mahyoub gestured toward her head scarf, saying in bad English, “Either you’re bald or your hair’s gone gray, Ingrid.”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “And it shows respect.”

  This time he actually touched her scarf. “You don’t have to respect the car,” he said, “or me.”

  And suddenly he was pulling the scarf from her head and allowing her blond hair to fall onto her shoulders. It was thick, and the color of the sun. While she was still recovering from the shock of this unexpected behavior, he shouted, “Now I believe! Glory be to God! Now I believe, Lord!”

  She was even more confused, impressed by the emotion and sincerity of his words, yet outraged by his boldness. But she recovered quickly, attributing his behavior to childishness rather than male cunning, and felt justified in this view when he warned her not to let her hair down in front of the village women or they’d be jealous and cut it off while she was asleep.

  She tried to divert him, as she had done in the past, by teaching him some English, the language that he saw as a passport to a better life. She asked him to construct sentences with a verb, a subject and an object, using conditional particles, negatives, and past, present and future tenses. This made her feel that she was being useful, but she also derived pleasure and amusement from
the examples he gave her, which were at once strange and simple. She remembered some of them: “I will not tell anyone my secret even if my head is separated from my body and my limbs are cut off.” “I have an aircraft.” And he wouldn’t leave that sentence there. The blood had rushed into his face and he had refused to continue the lesson, shouting, “I have an aircraft! I have an aircraft! And yet I let myself rot away here.”

  But now he wasn’t responding to her. He sighed deeply, and she wasn’t able to persuade him to become involved in the lesson, or give him advice about his work as a low-grade accountant in an airline company. Not that she had a special interest in him, but she had taken it upon herself to hand out advice to the villagers who had adopted her. She used to urge them not to be satisfied, not to surrender to their fate, repeating, “It is written,” but to transcend their circumstances, which means she encouraged secondary-school pupils to go to university and small farmers to grow crops they hadn’t tried before.

  Mahyoub sighed again and Ingrid guessed he was going to return to the subject of emigrating.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked finally.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he answered.

  She didn’t ask him what it was that he didn’t want to talk about. She knew it was hard for him to earn enough to live on, his prospects of promotion were poor, and he had been waiting for a year for a visa to join a relative in Saudi Arabia.

  The car jolted and bounced over the potholes and around the hairpin bends and Ingrid recovered her equilibrium, lost momentarily when her focus on what she represented here, and what she wanted from living here, had been blurred by a trivial gesture toward her hair. Mahyoub’s behavior had made her think again and she realized that she had to allow some unspoken complicity to exist between herself and the village. She could not become part of their lives and identify with their particular ways while she remained in their eyes as remote as a heroine from one of their folktales, or a princess imprisoned in a palace that no one could enter. But she said nothing. The days were gone when she used to try and persuade him that he was better off here and should give up his ambitions to go to Europe, and she no longer criticized the men who migrated to Saudi Arabia and left their wives and children for years on end.

  She would have loved at that moment to tell him about her recent experience when she went back home: how all she had thought about was these mountains, this earthly paradise, this secure life, remote from outer and inner turmoil and moral decay. Here it was possible to while away the time without being troubled by modern civilization. Peace of mind existed in these half-empty houses, which contained only mattresses to sleep on, dishes to eat off, a toilet, a lamp. This was paradise.

  Ingrid turned toward him calculating whether, if she said this out loud to him, he would fly off the handle, and shout, “What’s the point of being in paradise if you don’t have enough to eat?”

  Or would he nod his head in agreement? “I know. I know. But we have to try the other life. See what it’s like working there, then choose.”

  What? You want to try working over there? Pitiless work which will rob you of your pride as you scrub toilets and sinks, and sweep up the dogshit in public parks, then spend hours purifying yourself from their filth?

  Mahyoub was the one man who didn’t accept what she said open-mouthed, content merely to stare back at her captivating features like the rest of them. He argued with her and lost his temper, especially on recent occasions, and once, when she was envying them their happy life, he had shouted, “It’s all right for you. You’ll go home and turn on the hot tap, sleep with your head on a pillow, eat off your individual plate, drink milk and Pepsi from bottles.”

  Then he had criticized her for not giving the women advice about their medical and social problems. Ingrid had paused to collect her thoughts and laughed a series of short, irritable laughs. “Who am I to tell them to wash their hair?” she had said finally. “I’m here to speak to the mind, the heart. I’m here—”

  He had interrupted, his fist clenched: “You’re talking to the soul? The mind? While the mosquitoes and bilharzia worms run riot and qat dries up the mothers’ milk?”

  Something he had said on another occasion had sprung into her head, something quite different: “Qat, Ingrid I God sends it down like manna from heaven. He knows all about our poverty and gives it to us to chew so that we don’t want meat and chicken. We chew qat and its bitterness makes us forget the delights of food. Have some. It’s fresh. It’ll make your eyes shine!”

  She hadn’t reminded him of this piece of popular wisdom, but answered defensively, “I’m not part of a medical mission, and I don’t have the money to improve conditions. I don’t work for a government organization. But can’t you sense how happy the women are to have me here? Don’t you think I’m having some effect on this village? Do you remember when I wanted to revive beekeeping? I went to—”

  But he had interrupted her sarcastically: “You talk to the soul? You’re so vain I You must be under the illusion that everyone listens to you and believes what you say and acts on your suggestions. Don’t you realize that the moment you walk out of the men’s sitting room we discuss why you’re not married and whether you’re still a virgin?”

  Ingrid had suddenly felt afraid. Was her relationship with the village so one-sided? It couldn’t be. She had tried to convince herself he was sexually frustrated. She had a great relationship with the women, and the men too. When she was away, they all missed her.

  Mahyoub stopped sighing and broke the silence, interrupting her internal debate with a blow to the solar plexus. “I didn’t think I’d miss you. I felt as if my hand had been cut off. Every couple of days I went down to Sanaa and knocked on your door.”

  Ingrid attempted a laugh, and tapped him reprovingly on the arm like an older sister. She tried to explain to him that she had become part of his family, but soon lapsed into an uneasy silence. He reached out his hand, imprisoning her hand in his, then turned his face toward her, taking his eyes off the road. “I’ve fallen in love with you. I can’t change that,” he said emotionally. “If you turn me down, you’ll break my heart.”

  Her hand fidgeted under his. It was a measure of her rebellion that showed plainly in her eyes, in the reddening of her nose, and the uncomfortable pounding of her heart.

  “I want to do it properly, Ingrid, the right way. I want to marry you and have children.”

  She shuddered. This was what she had feared. He was clinging to her as if she were a life preserver, trying love as a way to escape to Europe. She was like the others, then: like Yvonne, like Ferial, the Turkish girl, whom Ahmad had made a fool of, lavishing words of love on her. They had married and gone abroad and he had disappeared in the airport in Geneva.

  One foreign woman here obviously appeared indistinguishable from another. All she amounted to was a passport.

  She didn’t answer him. She let him talk on in his own language, which she understood fairly well, about the void she had left behind her, how angry he had been with her because she hadn’t left her address or phone number, how he had gone to the head of her school, who had claimed not to know them either. He had been scared she wasn’t coming back and had thought about finding a way of going to Denmark to look for her.

  Ingrid couldn’t help responding with scorn: “You know Denmark well, do you? You’d have stood at the top of a hill and called my name and I’d have come running?”

  The sentences flew out as images crowded in on her: when she had gone into the men’s sitting room Mahyoub had not shaken her hand. He had ignored her and looked at the school head, Marcel, suspiciously and without warmth. His sister Souad had welcomed her even more eagerly than on previous visits, trying to work out if Marcel was her fiancé.

  How could Mahyoub make advances to her now? Abandon his morals and try to seduce her? He wouldn’t be able to act like this with a Yemeni woman, or any other Arab woman. The blue of her eyes obviously gave him license to be bold. Too bad. But wh
at if he had known she was a missionary?

  Ingrid’s eyes were wide and blue, but they filled up at the slightest pretext: a sudden breeze, bright sunlight, onions frying, a tender word. Her small nose was permanently red, but her mouth was impossible to describe. It changed rapidly depending on the situation: shut tight in a smile, pursed as a sign that she was deep in thought, moving all ways as she talked or expressed surprise; and when she threw her head back, laughing uproariously, it was like a cave full of uneven white rocks.

  It wasn’t her height that distinguished her from the other women as much as her strange coloring. Even the animals in the village were attracted by it. Iftikar swore that her cow never took its eyes off Ingrid and watched her wherever she went, and Husniyya too reported that her chickens were rooted to the spot in Ingrid’s presence and the cock crowed at odd times of day.

  Ingrid was quite content to have acquired this image and compared it with the other buried inside her, concealed from everyone, even her colleagues at the school: her own image of herself as a Christian missionary. Certainly, she used to tell the men of the village stories from the New Testament and the life of Christ, discussing and comparing those common to the Bible and the Quran, but this was in the context of informing them about all the subjects they were ignorant of: that the earth was a ball floating in space, that man had walked on the moon, that there had been periods of famine in Europe too, and social breakdown, unemployment, housing shortages—even in America itself. She would illustrate this information with pictures from magazines, newspapers and books.