I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  There was no other explanation, for even though the two women had been certain that it was a man they heard coughing, there was nowhere in the village she could have found one. In the graveyard? In the photographs in pride of place on living room walls? In the worn clothes left hanging on a nail because the men had to be dressed in their best when they went away to work? In their voices sent to their families on cassettes because they didn’t know how to write and their women didn’t know how to read? There was no trace of them there except in memories, and can a memory give birth to a man of flesh and bone?

  So the two women slipped away from Qut al-Qulub’s house like hairs from flour and gradually fear began to take hold of them, despite their curiosity and the shock of discovery, and they repeated basmallas and recited the prayer to drive away fear, only to ask God’s forgiveness again for it was a prayer composed by Qut al-Qulub.

  The village rapidly became like a watermelon being tapped to find out if it was red and sweet-tasting inside. Layla’s daughter was the only one to remind them that Qut al-Qulub had tried to explain what was really going on when they asked about the goat. As soon as she began talking about the silver moon and the way it worked miracles for her, they had walked off. The women listened to Layla’s daughter for a moment, then went back to their noisy debate. They wished there were just one man in the village, somebody’s husband or brother, whom they could consult. They had wished this often before, when one of the children or animals became ill, or the traps they set for the birds that ate the seeds failed to work. Then they said they wished their village was close to the other villages, instead of being up in the clouds, so they could seek help from a man of religion. The fact that the mosque had no Quran reciter and no muezzin must mean that there was a way for magic to interfere with religious belief. Then once more they blamed the location of their village—the influence of the moonlight must be twice as strong as in other villages.

  They thought again about hiding from the moon, out of range of its bright beams, but quickly put the thought out of their minds, not wanting to hasten an eclipse and bring bad luck on themselves. All these fantasies were little more than ways of dulling the persistent notion that they must see what was really going on in Qut al-Qulub’s house.

  So moving forward like a column of black ants, their black shawls covering their heads, their black dresses raised so they would not impede their progress and the henna on their dry feet hardly touching the ground, they passed through the main gate in the wall and on through the other entrances so they could go to her on the rocky track beyond the village. Then if the dogs howled and Qut al-Qulub looked out, she would see no trace of them. They went by the pond and the moonlight made the green moss on the water’s surface look like strange insects. Then they encircled Qut al-Qulub’s house, which fitted into the circumference of the mountain like a silkworm wrapping itself around a mulberry leaf. The dark windows surrounded by white plaster looked like watching eyes.

  The sight of the closed door and the high windows discouraged them, but then a light shone suddenly in a window, their eyes fell on the goat’s empty patch and they felt a renewed surge of curiosity about what was taking place in the house.

  Each woman had a different image of what she was going to see inside: a goatskin lying on the floor and the man whom Qut al-Qulub had loved standing there as large as life, imploring her to turn him back into a man for good, kissing her feet contritely; a man’s head on a goat’s body or the other way around; a goat begging her not to turn it back into a human being because it did not like dealing with humankind: “I’ve had enough of their evil ways. Especially yours.”

  Their curiosity rose to delirium, increasing their strength and eagerness, and they formed a pyramid, each on another’s shoulders, until Raifa reached the window and saw the lamp lighting up the room. But it was really the moon that illuminated the room, making it as bright as day, so that Raifa could see Qut al-Qulub lying on her side, smoking a cigarette, her hair spread out around her. Most of her flesh was exposed and beside her was the man who had brought back the body of Batul’s husband.

  The following is an essay I wrote describing a day in my school holidays.

  That day was different from the rest of the spring holidays. The rain came down in torrents, the grass was sodden and my grandmother stood at the window examining the sky, waiting for the clouds to break and a patch of blue to appear. When this didn’t happen she took off her black coat and went back to bed as she nearly always did when it rained. I opened my mouth and started to cry, only stopping when my father said impatiently. “Come with me, then!”

  My mother tried to step in but I was too quick for them. I sat in my father’s car, chanting, “My dad loves me. We’re going for a drive, and he’s going to buy me lots of things.”

  But as he drove along, cursing the traffic and the hole in his exhaust, aiming straight at the puddles, ignoring the people on foot, the picture I had in my mind of him taking me shopping disappeared fast, although I continued my song until he stopped the car suddenly at a row of food shops.

  “Don’t you dare move. Be still as a statue,” he instructed as he left me.

  I wound down the window and stuck my head out, looking at the things on display and wondering why each shopper bought something different. When I was sick of watching the people, I started to observe the drops of rain and decided that they had no idea in advance where they were going to fall. A traffic policeman stood staring at the car but didn’t come up to it until my father reappeared holding a plastic carrier bag that contained a freshly slaughtered chicken with blood still drying stiffly around its head.

  The policeman nodded his head knowingly as he told my father off for displaying his doctor’s permit and parking where he wasn’t meant to. My father fished his card out of his pocket and answered, “Twenty-four-hour service. If you need a checkup, any pills, just call me.”

  He tore off along the side streets, ignoring my song, then crossed a little bridge and plunged down a steep road, making my heart miss a beat, before he stopped finally and said, “Here we are, Layla. Now the nurse’ll give you a sweet.”

  We’d only gone a short distance from the car when my father remembered his white coat and went back, holding me firmly by the hand. He let go of me while he unlocked the car and rummaged around among old newspapers and plastic containers for urine samples and different kinds of medicine until he found his white doctor’s coat at last. We entered a building that didn’t even smell like a hospital. My father went up to a man sitting at a table in the corridor and introduced himself with pride. “I’m the new public health inspector. Here and in the red light district. Every brothel in town.”

  I hadn’t heard the word brothel before, but I felt pleased that my father was a public health inspector, and then ashamed all at once when he put on his white coat and I saw that it was covered in stains. We went into one of the rooms off the corridor and a nun came rushing after us. “Where are you going?” she asked my father, with a disapproving look in my direction.

  He repeated what he’d said to the man sitting at the table, and she seemed satisfied and greeted him, and then turned to me and asked me if I was still on my school holidays. And she took out a brightly colored boiled sweet from the pocket of her white habit.

  The room was cold, and empty except for some iron bedsteads without proper bedding on them, and a little girl with gold teeth who was washing the floor and looking in my direction. My father spoke to her bossily. “Wash it nicely. There’s a clever girl.”

  Then he opened his bag and took out some medicine, which he pressed into the nun’s hand. “Here are some vitamins for her. She’s such a skinny little thing. These’ll make her stronger. Put a bit of flesh on her legs!”

  Then he began talking to the beds: “Come on! Up you get! This isn’t a hotel.”

  The faded blankets stirred and several women’s faces emerged from them, opening their eyes blankly, reminding me at once of the chicken in the plas
tic carrier. I stared at them, fascinated by their sickly color, which matched the blankets. I supposed the women must be very ill, because they looked like Hassan’s mother, who used to be lying in bed whenever I went to play with Hassan. He was proud of having the only mother with a face that color, but in the end she died from being so pale. When the women in the beds closed their eyes again I stood fidgeting, feeling bored, then I heard the nun saying in an Armenian accent, “There were five of them, Doctor. One escaped.”

  For a moment my father didn’t speak, just nodded his head, but then he said, “Where did she think she was going? They’ll pick her up again straightaway.”

  He bent over his bag and selected an instrument like the tongue of a shoe. I had often seen it before and played with it sometimes when I found it lying around. He seemed to be holding a conversation with it as he wiped it on his dirty white coat: “Let’s have a look. Slip your pants off.”

  I stood rooted to the spot in disbelief. “Have you been examined before, or are you new to the job?” he went on, still wiping the instrument. I didn’t know who he was talking to as none of the women moved. Then one turned her face away and looked as if she were trying to burrow into the wall.

  The nun went over to the first bed and ordered its occupant to hurry up because the doctor was very busy. The woman shifted in the bed but her lifeless eyes never changed, as if her head were not connected to her body. My father marched up and pulled the cover aside like he did when I was hiding down in the bed. The woman tried to arrange herself, tugging her nightdress down over her thighs, but my father was shouting at her: “So you’re acting like the Virgin Mary now! You should have done that yesterday when they caught you with your heels in the air!”

  Then he turned to the nun and asked her where they’d been rounded up. “The cemetery at Sinn Al-Fil,” she answered disapprovingly.

  My father swung around to the women again, telling them in that same loud, harsh voice that they must be stupid if they preferred graveyards to the red light district, whose advantages he then listed for them: apart from regular examinations by him, there were clean, tidy rooms with hot running water, and as if that weren’t enough they had the best baker in town just across the street.

  My father hitched the woman’s nightdress up so high that I could see her large stomach. The lower part of it wasn’t like mine, but more like my mother’s, covered with little hairs. He moved in on her with a spyglass; the woman brought her legs together and he forced them roughly apart, then asked the nun to have a look. But the nun turned away in disgust and so did I. My father bent closer as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He told her she was a filthy cow and warned her that she’d die if she didn’t do as he said and take the medicines he prescribed. Then he moved on to the next one and got ready to examine her, when his eyes fell on the last bed. Maybe he was calculating how many more examinations he had to do, and suddenly the tiny red veins in his nose looked as if they were about to explode. He called out a name, “Nafisa,” and swore and spluttered as if he didn’t know what to say.

  He rushed over to the last bed and pulled the blanket away from the woman’s pretty face, accusing her of turning her back on everything good, telling her she had no conscience, nothing, only what she carried between her legs and hawked around the streets. Then he stopped and looked about him and remembered that I was still there. He said soothingly that we were going on the best outing ever, and took my hand, turning to the nun: “I’m going to get her husband.”

  Letting my hand drop he returned to Nafisa’s bedside and shook her furiously by the shoulders, shouting, “How could you? Men are your protection. Why didn’t you stay with him? You’ve had it now. Your brother’ll get to hear about this in no time, and then you’ll be sorry!”

  He took hold of my hand again and hurried to the door, closely pursued by the nun, who was trying desperately to persuade him to finish examining the other women. He assured her that he’d be back but he had to find Nafisa’s husband before he vanished too.

  We were almost gone when Nafisa’s voice stopped us. “Can I have a word, Doctor?”

  “To hell with you! I know exactly what you’re going to say.” He mimicked her voice. “Never again, Doctor. I’ll never do it again.”

  “Doctor! If only he had just given me a roof over my head and forgotten about my past! Everything I do and say is an excuse for him to bring it up. He threatens to send me back where he got me. If I wear lipstick he goes crazy. ‘So you miss whoring?’ he says. When I went to visit his sister in hospital, he thought I’d gone back on the game and went and checked with her and she swore I’d been there. He still didn’t believe it, though, and dragged me all around the other patients in the ward. Some of them could scarcely breathe, but it didn’t stop him from asking them if they’d seen me visiting his sister.”

  My father muttered, “God help us,” and nothing more, but I sensed that he was no longer so angry with her. She burst into a fit of sobbing and said jerkily between the sniffing and gulping, “He was convinced I was lying. So I said to myself, ‘Right, girl! You might as well go back and earn a pound or two.’ ”

  We went off in the car again and I didn’t risk asking my father any questions. He was driving fast and lighting a cigarette, forgetting that he had one lit already. He sighed and muttered to himself, cursing because we were going to be late and the chicken would no longer be fresh.

  “What did Nafisa do that made you so cross?” I demanded at last.

  Instead of answering me, he turned off at a steep slope. That was the end of my last feeble hope that we might be going past the shops for him to buy me something, but I didn’t care.

  Me stopped the car and told me to follow him. We made our way along a muddy path across the grass. I couldn’t help stepping in the puddles even though he kept warning me not to. The cars on the road below looked tiny and far away. I wasn’t used to being so high up and my heart sank in terror at the thought of slipping and rolling all the way down onto the road. I clutched my father’s hand tightly.

  The path took us right to the top of the hill, where there was a broad, open space like a fairground at holiday time, but it was full of sheep instead of children. They were everywhere and I wanted to rush up and stroke their wool and sing, “Little lamb, little lamb, how beautiful you arel”

  But when we got nearer, I changed my mind and stood motionless, as never before had I seen sheep in such numbers and at such close quarters. Their wool was mud stained, with shreds of old newspaper and garbage clinging to it. They called out like small children as if they were in pain or had lost their mothers, not like in the picture in the reading book, where they are happily grazing. Perhaps the thin, straggly grass wasn’t enough for them and they were crying out in hunger. Their owners were strange-looking men, unlike anyone I’d seen before: short, with scowling faces and gold teeth flashing through the smoke that came in puffs out of their mouths when they spoke, even though I couldn’t see any cigarettes. They wore high black boots and black fur hats.

  My father began asking for Amin from Aleppo, Amin the sheep trader, leading me from one noisy group of men to another, sometimes cutting straight through the middle of the flocks of sheep and other times skirting around them. Finally he stopped in front of a thick-set man. When this man noticed my father he muttered, “Hallo, Doctor,” in a very cold voice.

  My father immediately kissed him on both cheeks and whispered something in his ear. The man stepped backward but my father took hold of him by the shoulders and tried to talk to him again. Amin’s lambs bleated at the tops of their voices. He moved back, trying to escape my father’s words. Then he stuck his little finger in his ear, scratched vigorously, examined the piece of yellow wax on his long fingernail for some time and wiped it off on his jacket. At last he spoke, loudly so that he could be heard over his flock. “What I ought to do is take her to the slaughterhouse and cut her throat.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of a building I hadn’t noticed before. “I’d be w
ell within my rights.”

  Cut Nafisa’s throat? I couldn’t take in what he was saying and didn’t dare ask either of them to explain.

  I was quite sure that silence was necessary on this occasion and, rather than fidgeting impatiently as I normally do when grown-ups talk together and leave me with nothing to do, I stood absolutely still, eager to catch each word.

  “Take it easy,” advised my father.

  “What do you think I’ve been doing?” the man burst out viciously. “If I hadn’t made myself calm down, she’d be dead by now. Believe me, when I heard they’d caught her I grabbed a knife and started out to look for her. I was out of my mind.”

  So people could be slaughtered just like chickens and sheep. Was that possible? I looked over to the slaughterhouse, filled with fear and confusion. They couldn’t kill Nafisa. I watched men carrying dozens of fleeces and sheep carcasses slung over their shoulders and loading them tonto a lorry, and convinced myself Nafisa wasn’t going to have her throat cut, because I couldn’t imagine her dangling down a porter’s back like that. I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw my father hand the man a cigarette and reach out to light it for him.

  The man clapped my father on the shoulder and I stared at the outer wall of the slaughterhouse. It was stained with the reddish-purple color that we learned the Phoenicians had discovered in snail shells. The bleating grew louder as a new lot of sheep was driven toward the building. They must have known that this building was the afterlife, the hell which the teacher is always telling us about.