The man at the British customs was much sterner than the magistrate who came from the capital to investigate crimes committed in our town. This man would forget the purpose of his visit, at least for a brief spell, and the fact that he was on official business, and drink tea and eat a good meal in the prosecutor’s house, crack jokes and make amiable conversation, and sleep through the heat of the day. The British official behind his high desk asked me numerous questions, which I didn’t understand. When all I could reply were the two forlorn words, “No English,” he asked me if I knew French. I nodded my head to find I had opened Ali Baba’s cave merely by answering all his questions with the one French word oui His features relaxed and he stamped my passport. Without realizing it, he had let me know that using French words, however few and halting, has a bewitching effect upon everything in London, animate and inanimate alike.
I’d woken up the next morning at Aisha’s place, not convinced that I was really in London: her flat was like any flat at home with the same smell, the same colored ottomans and rugs, the same pictures on the walls, the brass tray in the middle of the room, and the loud shrieks and wails of her two children puncturing the air. However, this sensation evaporated as soon as I looked out the window, when I realized how imprisoned I was by my ignorance, which Aisha seized upon, exploiting the fact that I didn’t know how to flush the toilet, work the shower, turn on the oven or boil the electric kettle to make tea, and that I couldn’t understand what her older child or her next-door neighbor said. I couldn’t even answer the phone. Inventing far-fetched excuses, she left me trapped in her flat and made no attempt to help me look for work.
From the window I saw the flats opposite, their even lines making them look like children’s drawings. Noisy voices floated through their windows. I let my gaze wander to the open grassy strip at the side of the block, which was almost completely empty of life, and then onto the red buses and cars hurrying along the main road. Fixing my eyes on them, I couldn’t help cursing Aisha, wishing she were dead, swearing by the Prophet Muhammad that I would have my revenge because it was she who was stopping me from walking those streets and riding in those red buses to find work and a home of my own. When Aisha returned from work, coming through the door weighed down with plastic shopping bags, her coat smelling of perfume mixed with cigarette smoke, I gave a shiver of anger: I wanted to carry shopping bags like that and wear a coat like hers!
Since everything seemed out of my reach I was reduced to making friends with the pigeons, who were everywhere, and whose gentle murmurings I’d grown accustomed to hearing. I put the remains of our dinner on the window ledge to attract them, and when one of them alighted near me I called to it, “Taste this couscous, steamed and mixed with oil, English pigeon, and tell me if it’s nice.”
I’d been amazed that in London you could buy ready-made couscous in packets, and that the English used it in their cooking. I’d imagined that they would eat food fit for kings, and look upon our food with distaste.
I left Aisha’s prison in the following way: one day a woman from the same town as Aisha and me came to pick up her sewing machine. She asked me if I was happy here and I sighed. She responded with an even deeper sigh. I found myself lying to her, although my lies seemed to me to represent the truth as soon as I was out of Aisha’s house. I told her how Aisha kept a close watch on what I ate and drank, and how I had to take care of the house and children to pay for my board and lodging. The woman nodded her head in agreement and remarked, “Yes. Everybody says Aisha’s become like an Englishwoman. She must have saved herself more than fifty pounds a week having you here, because she used to pay her neighbor to look after the two children for her while she was out at work.”
Immediately we joined forces against Aisha, criticizing her and insulting her. The visitor told me things about her that I didn’t believe, but still I nodded my head as if to confirm what she said. For my part, I told her that I was sure Aisha had a lover and we began searching for proof. We broke into the single, locked cupboard, and although we only found some new clothes and shoes with jewelry stuffed up inside the toes, we assured each other that Aisha received money from her lover and liked leaving me in the house with the children because it made it easier to cheat on her husband.
Only the walls heard this delirious talk, but I was suddenly seized by a guilty fear, and became convinced that the two children were taking it in and that it was ringing in Aisha’s ears at work, and I rushed to pack my suitcase before she came back. The visitor left, forgetting to take her sewing machine, and I left with her, convinced that I would never see Aisha again and that news of my forcing the lock on her cupboard would reach my hometown well amplified, so that I’d end up accused of stealing all of Aisha’s possessions.
I took the woman’s advice and looked for work that paid by the hour. I discovered that time was money and threw myself into cleaning offices, restaurants and hospitals. Picturing the pounds mounting up in my handbag, I pushed myself harder, indifferent to the veins aching with fatigue and the bits of my body that cried out with exhaustion and craved sleep. I only stopped working frenziedly hour after hour when I met the English boy I’d just thrown water over moments before.
I left the woman’s house as soon as I found work and a room to rent. When I was told that I’d have to share a kitchen and bathroom with strangers, I couldn’t help thinking how this would astound the people at home, how they would snort with laughter at the idea that this could really happen in England, mother of civilization. The English boy used to work in the hospital for a day at a time, and then be off for several days. At tea breaks and lunch time I never saw him eat more than a bar of chocolate or a biscuit. I never saw him talk to anybody. He would just put his headphones on and close his eyes. He had blond hair, light eyes and a thin face. I suppose I fancied him although I told myself that it was just that I felt sorry for him. I decided to offer him some food. When I approached and held a piece of chicken out to him he opened his eyes and at first refused to take it. I insisted and he put out his hand, asking me if I was sure. I smiled. I no longer took what the English said seriously. “Are you sure?” they ask without fail, regardless of whether you are offering them a cup of tea or paying their bus fare.
After eating the piece of chicken dipped in cumin and saffron, which he seemed to have liked, he asked me where I came from. I told him and it was as if I’d opened Heaven’s door. His face softened, his pupils grew bigger, and his irises went deep green like olive oil. Enthusiastically he told me that he’d always wanted to visit Morocco, live there even, and that our hashish was the best of all. Was it true, he inquired anxiously, was it really cheap there? I answered him with lies, happy that he was so interested after I’d been certain that he’d never say a word to me: I told him that I grew it myself, my family grew it, and it was everywhere, like green grass and empty milk bottles in London; it was really amazing hashish: wherever I threw its seeds it sprang up like flames leaping into the air.
Dreaming of the hashish and the sunshine he said, “You left all that sun for the sake of these gray clouds and this miserable country?”
“What can I do with the sun?” I answered. “Sweep it off the rooftops?”
In my imagination I could feel the monotony of the days in my country, the poverty and the nothingness. I remembered the threatening looks of the men in the family, the attentive stares from the ones in the street, my mother’s harsh way of talking, and I repeated it to myself. “What can I do with the sun? Sweep it off the roof?”
I was happy in London, free, mistress of my self and my pocket. Here it was impossible not to be happy. At home I thought I was ugly. I listened to the English boy singing the praises of my dark coloring and frizzy hair, felt him kiss me on the cheek with obvious pleasure whenever I cooked a meal and when I came in from work, or when we sat watching television together, and found him waiting for me at the end of the road when for some reason I was late getting back.
I encouraged him to move in o
ne evening after he had taken me to a pub, and I felt this urge to have a hold on all the different sides there were to London. Even though I didn’t say a word in the uproar and drank only water, I was standing there like them in the crowds and smoke, proud and glad and sure of myself.
As soon as he entered my room that night, he declared provocatively that I must be rich to have such a bed and quilt, as well as cassettes and a television and a video. He’d expected it, he added, since he noticed that I had my own plate and cup at work, and bought tea for whoever was sitting with me. I smiled, nodding my head, not unhappy if he’d jumped to the wrong conclusions, but surprised that he didn’t know the secret of paying by installments. He flung himself down on my bed, trying it out in different positions. “How clean it is!” he exclaimed. “How comfortable! I’ve never slept in a bed like this before.”
Was I hearing him right or had I missed the point as so often happened? When we talked it was like two people playing ball: sometimes it went into the goal, sometimes it grazed the post, but most of the time it went high in the air and missed completely. He hadn’t slept in a bed like that before, yet there were all those advertisements for them on television, and they were on display in shop windows and in most of the big stores in London so that I’d imagined them in all the houses I could see from the bus.
Quite at home in my bed, he fell fast asleep until dawn.
In the little streets and neighborhoods where I wandered, London did not sleep. And when it did, the billboards stayed wide awake. Billboards about films, pop concerts, milk, drugs and AIDS … AIDS? My mind suddenly became alert: he was going to die of AIDS. I should tell him, extending my finger in a threatening manner: You’ll die of AIDS. Then I found myself shouting, inside my head, I’ll die of AIDS. Oh my God!
Then partly reassured, I thought, He entered me twice, but he came outside me. Then again I cried out in terror, wordlessly, Who knows? Maybe a germ slipped out of his prick and landed on me. And with an involuntary movement I raised my eyes to the sky—where God was—beseeching Him, wanting Him to see my fear and my contrition. But I couldn’t see the moon or the stars, only the gloomy sky. I lowered my head quickly, as if to acknowledge the truth spoken by the old woman Khadija when she heard of my decision to travel to London. “Foreigners have no God,” she claimed, as if she wanted to weaken my resolve and then, correcting herself and asking God’s pardon, she changed this to “Our God, the God of Islam, is different from theirs in the West.”
Then, again asking God’s forgiveness, she said that there was no god but God, and the trouble was that Westerners didn’t follow His instructions or live by His law. At this she rose, washed her mouth ten times to make amends and performed twenty prostrations for her scepticism.
I had to go back to the room, especially now that there was someone following me. As I accelerated my pace I asked myself what I was doing here, and I didn’t know the answer. Why didn’t I go home to my own country, taking with me the sheet that bore the stains of my virginity? I had purposely left it unwashed, stuffing it in a suitcase because I might need to spread it out on my bridegroom’s bed in the dark of the night. Bridegroom? I would save some money and then I would find a man to marry me, especially if I promised to bring him to London. But why was I here? Was it because I was out of reach of the prying eyes of the people in my town, the constant questions from the men in my family about my comings and goings, and my mother’s interrogations about why I slept on my stomach, or why I took so long in the bathroom? The God of my far-off country must bear that in mind, and still love me. Now I had to be on my guard against AIDS and the Devil. I opened the front door and heard the voice of Warda Al-Jazairiyya flooding through the door of my room. Pushing it open, I was confronted by a tall, blond, green-eyed version of myself, the Englishman’s friend dressed up in my clothes, with my kohl on his eyes, wearing a pair of my earrings. He was swaying his head in time to the Arab song.
I stood before my blond other self. Now the haze lifted and all the images became clear. I no longer had to push away the picture of Saad laid out on the floor, or banish from my imagination the sound of his huge voice, louder than the roaring of the wind, dumb forever. The women of the family struck their faces and smeared them with soot. Saad had taken his own life the night the news had gone around that he’d been caught sleeping with a traveling shepherd. He could no longer speak: he had swallowed his voice, choking on the words, while his wife’s voice, which had always been quiet and low before, rose high into the air, followed by those of his daughters and his sisters. When Saad’s note proclaiming his innocence was discovered there was an outcry in the town. Saad’s family rushed to try and have their revenge on the witness who had announced the news like someone possessed, and who now cared less about Saad’s death than about convincing the whole community of what he had seen in the hut that burning noonday. The town was divided between those who wanted Saad’s name cleared and those who wanted the accusation against him proven even after his death. His soul would have no repose and would hover over the place, flying through the night.
As I remembered, I laughed. My blond self laughed at the people of my town. I imagined Saad lying down with the English boy and the two of them flirting and giggling together. The boy came over and put his arm around me, as if he could not quite believe my laughter and my lack of agitation. I smiled at both of them and told his friend my clothes suited him. He asked if I had a caftan he could borrow. I shook my head regretfully—I hadn’t brought it with me, thinking the English would look down on my caftan with its silver belt—although I saw garments like it selling here at huge prices. I was still laughing. I imagined the beggar from the London streets sitting with the old woman Khadija in my town; the conductor on the red London bus talking to Hammouda the postman; the English boy’s friends playing with Khadija’s grandson, especially Margaret, whose hair reminded me of the colored duster Khadija’s grandson had pleaded for every time he saw it in the market, thinking it was a toy or a bird. I saw Margaret talking to Saniyya in the bathhouse. I saw people springing up from the ground or coming down out of the sky, boarding red buses, jabbering in English. Englishmen climbing the ancient wall with their bowler hats and black umbrellas and Englishwomen pushing their strollers along the winding muddy roads.
The television blared, and my attention was caught by the electricity advertisements: an electric stove, an electric heater, an electric boiler. I’d have to buy an electric boiler to replace the gas one, which had been leaking for a week now. The gas man had told us not to use it or else it would blow up, and had stuck on a red warning sign to remind us.
I turned, intending to ask the English boy why he lived with me, why he liked my company. Once he had said I showed him a concern that he had never met with before, even from his parents, and that he would love to visit my country one day. At the time I didn’t believe him because I wasn’t used to hearing the truth from people’s lips, preferring to believe what I thought rather than what I heard.
Instead I found myself thinking, AIDS. I looked at the two of them: “You ought to go and have a blood test.”
I was thinking I would boil the sheets that evening and ask the chemist for a powerful disinfectant and give myself a vinegar douche to get rid of all the germs inside me.
They went into the kitchen and I started to tidy the room, gathering the plates from here and there and scattering the remains of the food on the window ledge. The pigeons flocked around it immediately, though dawn was only just breaking. I knew the neighbors complained that this habit of mine encouraged the pigeons to come up to the windows, but I didn’t care. “Eat up,” I told the nearest bird. “You’re lucky I’m feeding you, not eating you. Where I come from, if we see a pigeon we throw a stone at it. If it falls we accept our good fortune, kill it and eat it. If it carries on flying we shrug our shoulders and say, It’s the angels’ turn today. You’re not beautiful, you’re not white, or even a nice light brown. You’re gray and black like a big rat, but I lo
ve you because you’re English and you wait for me every day.”
My fiancé Farid, insisted that I should go with him and his family to visit his grandmother’s grave on the eve of the feast. I had always thought this custom was for old or lonely people, who took comfort from sitting with their dead relatives. They say there’s nothing like visiting a cemetery for curing depression. I had not been aware of my own parents visiting family graves on special days, although once when I was little I prayed fervently that somebody I didn’t know in the family would die so that I could go inside one of the buildings people put up around their graves. I had gone with our cook to her house overlooking the cemetery—an occasion that must have remained imprinted on my mind—and from then on I’d pictured the dead people living in those burial chambers, like us in our houses, only different: perhaps they moved about without making any sound, or stayed in bed all the time.
I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops Page 9
