I broke free and ran. He came after me. Outside in the cemetery’s main Square I caught my breath and leaned against a tombstone while I fastened my sandal. Children were playing with a ball there, disregarding the comments of their mothers and the older women who sat resting from the labors of their cooking. “The dead must be trembling with anxiety down there,” remarked one.
I composed myself at last, perhaps at this spectacle of everyday life, or the glimpse of a bird abandoning itself to space, beautiful and oblivious to what was happening below. We stopped beside the car. I knew we would have to wait for his family. I felt I wanted to be free of his hand holding tightly onto mine. I turned my face away, contemplating the washing spread out to dry, the empty bowl resting against one grave, the cooking pot sitting on another, as if it were a table, and the owners of these objects going about their business—victims of the housing crisis, who had squatted in abandoned tombs, rented at the going rate, or simply occupied family tombs prematurely, and adapted them to suit their lives. I saw television and radio aerials in place; and yet Farid’s mother wanted a bigger space to house her graves.
When I saw Farid’s mother, father and sister appearing in the distance, I felt the breath being knocked out of me. So we were one family, living together, dying together?
Farid’s father must have told his wife to keep quiet, as she hadn’t uttered a word from the moment she entered the car. His sister tried to make peace with me, and told me about a friend of hers who was a social scientist and was doing a study of the people who lived alongside the dead. She said how the women would be trilling for joy at the birth of a baby, and would fall silent suddenly if they noticed a funeral procession approaching. Their noises of rejoicing would turn to keening, while the men rushed to find which tomb the music was coming from, or the news broadcast, so they could silence it. As soon as the funeral was over, life would return to normal.
But I remained silent. Surrounded by their loud voices, I felt like the ant I’d noticed on the floor of the tomb. It had moved aimlessly along, not knowing that at any moment it could be trodden on and crushed to death. I realized I’d changed my mind about marriage, and I wanted to get out of the car straightaway before I was swallowed up by Farid’s mother. I had a vision of the aunts like three witches preparing to serve us all up to the Devil.
I thought I would tell Farid that the reason I’d changed my mind about marrying him wasn’t to do with the tomb or where I would be buried. On the contrary, I’d loved all the commotion, and the cemetery itself was like a funfair. Anyway, I didn’t like being alone even when I was alive.
Then I decided against this last sentence. I was haunted by the scene of the family in the tomb, and their voices were still ringing in my ears. I resolved to try and like being alone, alive or dead.
Yasmin stood looking in astonishment at the white peacock. She had not known that nature produced such creatures. Every feather in its long tail had a decorated eye surrounded by a heart, then a bigger heart and finally long eyelashes. The feathers were patterned exactly like blue and green peacock feathers, but they were white. Why had no one thought of white peacock feathers when they wanted to describe the morning mist? She walked up to it, thinking of a way to make it flash its tail. She shouted at it, threw a atone at it—a small one—and barked like a dog. The peacock, its head crowned with white like a fall of fresh snow, continued to move proudly and slowly, drawing its tail behind it, a cloud of fine white lace. She wanted it to come close to her and stand still where she could see it, but it moved on with its haughty, calm gait. Yasmin hurriedly took out a piece of bread that she had brought for her son to feed to the ducks and crumbled it in the peacock’s path. It approached, pecked up the crumbs and, failing to find anything else of interest, walked away. God had not forgotten a single ornamentation. She thought, as she followed it, that she would write to her friend in Beirut about it. Then she dismissed the idea guiltily: it would be unthinkable to describe the white peacock to her when she and the others left behind in Beirut were spending their days seeking refuge from the bombardments, trailing between the corridors of their apartment buildings and the underground shelters.
Her son, Ziyad, ran ahead of her, licking an ice cream. She was glad she had gotten him out of Beirut, because for the first time for months he was running about like a child. For two months he had been shut indoors, confined to his room and the kitchen and the passage in between. She looked down at her feet as if she were rediscovering them and began to run delightedly, watching them move. She did not notice that she and Ziyad were alone in the park and the sun had disappeared until the darkness came down suddenly. She caught up with Ziyad and took his hand and hurried to the place where they had come in, but there was a gate barring the way and it was locked. She was both astonished and afraid: it had never occurred to her that parks and gardens had gates which could be locked. Her fear transmitted itself to Ziyad, and he asked anxiously, “Are we going to sleep here?”
“We won’t be long. We’ll soon be out,” she reassured him.
There had to be another gate. All parks had several exits. She walked around and failed to find one: Holland Park seemed to have been transformed into a dense, high forest. The autumn leaves had piled up on the ground and their feet began to sink into them. Although she was afraid, she could not help noticing the beauty of the silent park, visible through the darkness. She stopped, trying to decide which way to go. A few steps, and she was plunging into utter blackness. Sweat trickled from her armpits and her palms felt damp. Her tongue was dry. “Oh God,” she said dispiritedly.
She heard Ziyad imitating her: “Oh God.”
His voice set up a new current of alarm in her. There must be a telephone. She should make her way back to the first gate. She tried to remember where it was.
It was as if nature knew of her predicament: a man and woman embracing materialized under a tree a few steps away from her. When they became aware of her they walked on. She ran after them, asking them to help her. She and Ziyad and the couple were soon walking together along a path she had not seen before, past a pond where a white goose floated. The man stopped at a wall and jumped over into the street and stood waiting to receive Ziyad. The woman went next and Yasmin found herself scrambling after her, not caring about the height of the wall.
She lay in bed with her eyes closed, remembering being lost in Holland Park, the man and woman embracing under the tree, the dry autumn leaves and the white peacock. She remembered her fear, and to her surprise she liked it. She wanted to be lost again, and to be accompanied by a man. She began to picture it: her heart thumping, her palms sweating, him taking her hand as they wandered around the exits and found them all locked; the two of them in the park, and all the peacocks, in spite of her admiration for them, had flown up into a tree; their long tails, hanging down in a cloud of shimmering whiteness, looked like mist rising from the tree’s branches. She longed for this tension, for the decisive moments in a relationship with a man. With her husband, they wouldn’t forget the time; her husband would make sure they were out of the park before darkness fell; in fact, she and her husband would never walk in the park together at all.
She switched out the light, closing her eyes and wondering with a smile why the tension in Beirut had not been enough For her. Yet even in the war their tension had been domestic: they thought about food, about water. They did not give vent to their fear by holding each other close or kissing, which was apparently a forbidden activity amid the noise of the explosions, even though it was more real than in peacetime. They needed it to calm them down, to reassure them that love existed despite the violence of war, but instead they began rolling up the rugs with mothballs, having new thick wooden doors made with keys fit for a fortress, and wrapping up the silver in towels rather than themselves in the bedclothes, where they could have gone into their shell and heard nothing but the sound of the waves.
I must find a man to be lost in Holland Park with, so that when darkness falls, an
d we walk around, our feet sinking into the yellowing leaves, and find all the exits are closed, we are calm and embrace under a tree while we think what to do, then go into the forest and along the narrow path where it is nearly pitch dark.
Yasmin continued to wander around Holland Park, lost in one dense thicket after another, sighing, saying, “Oh God,” and never arriving at the perimeter wall. She was always in the middle, caught in the unending maze of paths. In spite of the darkness, she made out the face of a poet whose readings she had attended faithfully before the outbreak of war. He approached her, surprised at this chance meeting, and said that he too was lost. Yasmin led him around the locked exits, along the dark path, and into the forest. He took hold of her hand; she could hear her own breathing and he must have been able to hear it too. Then she stood under a tree, closed her eyes and felt two fiery coals descend on her lips. She trembled. Nobody had kissed her like that before. They walked on and saw the white peacock asleep. To her astonishment the poet squatted down and put out his hand to stroke it; the peacock did not stir. Then he took hold of her hand and passed it over the bird’s feathers. The two of them stood up and he held her face and told her that he had noticed her at the poetry evenings: she had been wearing a dress the color of the sea and her face had been sunburned. They did not walk any further, but climbed over the wall and stood on the pavement embracing.
In the morning she could not believe that her meeting with the poet had been a dream. She had dreams regularly, and of men too, but not like this, not with the truthfulness, the reality of this dream. During the day, as she went around London with her son looking for a school for him, admiring the city and feeling pleased to be away from the fear of the war, she was constantly aware of the warmth of the poet’s hand, and the feel of his chest as he caught her in his arms when she jumped down off the park wall. She remained uneasy into the afternoon, when she headed for the park and took the same paths she had taken with him. She looked around her: all the little details in the tree trunks and branches, she had seen with him; it even felt the same walking over the piles of dry leaves. The barbed-wire fencing was there, the little pond, the birdsong, the cold sting in the wind. That was the bench where they had sat before the darkness fell. She walked along, wrapping her arms around her chest to protect herself from the cold, while Ziyad crumbled up a piece of bread for the white peacock. It watched the cock, the guinea fowls and all the other smaller birds gathering around, stretching out their beaks, keeping wary eyes on it, and finally it turned its back on them and ate all the bread itself.
She was thinking hard. Should she write to the poet and ask him to come to London? Before she had time to wonder whether he would be surprised to be asked, or understand that he had to be lost in Holland Park with her, she was distracted. The white peacock had spread its tail high, forming a huge fan. She approached it gently, recalling the delicacy of black sea coral, each piece a little fan, and gazed in awe at the whiteness of the peacock’s own coral. It had begun to strut slowly back and forth as if it knew that its beauty made people catch their breath in wonder. Yasmin remembered what the poet had said the night before: that the peacock only displayed its feathers to attract the female.
Their conversations could not have been illusory; it was impossible that they had never really jumped over the park wall, that he had not held her close when she told him she loved her husband and would never be unfaithful to him. He had taken her to a club afterward: she remembered the kind of chairs it had, their table, the pineapple-shaped mirrors, and exactly what the Bloody Mary tasted like when she took a sip of it to heighten her sense of elation and heard him muttering something. She had asked him what was wrong and he had replied, laughing, that he was bewitching her drink to make her love him. She had told him that she regretted not inviting him to her house in Beirut to see her beloved white plaster donkey.
It was not a dream: a dream haunts a person for a day, a week, but not a month. She wandered around big stores, looking in mirrors, trying to see herself through his eyes. He was not like other men: he noticed colors, clothes, the smallest details. She sat in Ziyad’s class, trying to occupy herself by writing letters until he felt at home in the class and forgot about her. She found herself writing the poet’s name. She wrote him a letter, then tore it up. She bought Lebanese magazines in the hope of finding a photo of him or one of his poems to read, in case there was an allusion to her. He was mentioning jasmine flowers for the first time: perhaps he meant her, or perhaps not. At the theater bar she wished he was with her, discussing the play like the man and woman in the corner. On the bus home she thought, If only he was sitting beside me instead of that drunk. He was real. That was why. when her husband joined her in London after a conference in the United States, she did not kiss him with any enthusiasm, or long for him as she had done in the past. She felt detached from him. She plucked up her courage and told him she loved the poet. He laughed and said with a look of tenderness on his face, “You’re a dreamer. You’ll never change.”
She answered him silently. It can’t only be a dream. Intuition sparks off love. Imaginary relationships flourish under its influence and it makes them real. It prepares the way for a meeting.
But when she was engrossed in making meals, or walking through the supermarket buying vegetables and packets and tins, or scrubbing the bath, she found it easy to separate reality from the dream. She believed the logic which told her that the romantic atmosphere of Holland Park, the white peacock, London and everything about it provided a poetic background for love: the winter, the clear skies, the cold, the green grass, the buses, the big department stores, the cinemas and theaters, the roar of noise, the untroubled atmosphere, the pigeons, the absence of war. And she was alone without a man for most of the time.
In the evenings she was once more convinced in her mind of the reality of the dream. She tried to think of ways of meeting the poet during her stay in London. But when there was a month’s ceasefire in Lebanon. Yasmin returned to Beirut. She did not think about the poet until one day she saw him approaching in the distance holding a newspaper. She smiled and continued walking.
Samr had wanted to be alone ever since they came out of their hotel into the swarming streets. If she was honest with herself, she had wanted to be alone since the plane landed.
From the moment they started walking it was like an exercise in self-defense: as the streets became narrower, the crowds grew thicker and the pack mules made walking difficult. At first they assumed that if they swerved slightly they would easily avoid them, since other people were pushing past them, dodging through the crowds, floating along like feathers. But they found themselves jumping out of the animals’ way, stepping up into the doorways of the shops, which were crammed close together on either side of the street, sometimes even taking refuge inside them. The mules were loaded up with mountains of furniture, garbage, goods for sale, vegetables, even building materials. Samr’s husband, who carried a tourist guide in his pocket, commented that mules took the place of cars in this ancient city, and that, like the rest of the municipal employees, they had names and numbers and received a wage for the services they provided, transporting water and refuse.
Samr received this remark with veiled scorn, but later the idea pleased her.
The narrow, twisting streets took them into a jumbled maze where the light was obscured by the crowded buildings, which met overhead, or were joined together underfoot by a tangled harvest of dried grass and weeds.
Apart from the crowds and the noise, the only things of note in these markets were the slippers, most of which were for women, lavishly decorated and in a variety of colors, reminiscent of A Thousand and One Nights. Whether they were on display, still in their baskets and boxes, or being examined by prospective purchasers, they appeared to be the single most important item of dress for sale.
The plan was to visit the famous old mosque, but the crowds, and the interventions of passersby, made it difficult for her husband to study the map properly
. Samr had been against the idea of the map in the first place. The moment they had gone through the archway into the old city, they had found themselves in a human beehive in a perpetual state of movement and constantly multiplying numbers, and Samr had suggested that they employ the services of one of the many boys and young men who had surrounded them and were offering—in Italian, French and English—to act as tourist guides. But her husband refused outright, as if by proposing such a thing she had insulted his intelligence and questioned his ability to manage their affairs.
They set off again through the heart of the beehive, which rose and fell with the crowd as if it lived off the movement of human beings and animals and things. The annoyance was beginning to be visible on Samr’s husband’s face, and he seemed to have lost the spirit of adventure that he had set out with. He looked scared too, and claustrophobic, unlike Samr, who had pressed a button in her mind that had taken her back in time. She found herself enjoying the narrow streets and the noise and the chaos as if she were a little girl again, going shopping with her grandmother. Her husband was sticking close to her now, trying to talk to her in Arabic in a vain effort to conceal his light eyes and straight, fair hair, which struck a discordant note among the curly heads. He repeated that he felt smothered by these little streets and the youths and children still streaming after them. Her response was to turn and talk to the three young men nearest them in Arabic, teasing them when they demanded to know which Arab country she came from, and whether this foreigner was her husband. They didn’t move away, in spite of the crush of people and animals, and the fact that her husband was trying to stop her from walking with them, objecting to the intrusion, and pointing out the mosque on the map, insisting it was just a few meters away. Samr tried to make him see their charm and innocence, and reproved him for suspecting that their motives were purely financial.
I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops Page 11
