I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Their cries grew louder and I pitied them and found myself reaching out to touch a woolly tail. “Little lamb, little lamb, how beautiful you are!” I chanted under my breath. It turned to look at me. Had it heard me? I smiled but its eyes were unseeing like glass.

  My mother always threatened me when we had a visitor. She wagged her finger at me if I refused to follow her into the kitchen to receive her threats face-to-face, and gave me a look that I understood meant I wasn’t to talk too much. If I ignored her and sat down comfortably with one leg crossed over the other, giving my opinion on everything that was discussed, talking rashly about subjects I didn’t understand, my father would come quietly across to me and put a big towel over my knees. I heard him saying, “Azrael,” under his breath: I knew this was the name of the Angel of Death, but I didn’t know if he was scolding me or praying for me to be spared.

  My father was a devout man and the sight of my bare knees pained him. He had tried without success to make me cover my head and arms, then channeled his piety toward my legs.

  When he covered me up with a towel, he didn’t know that he was also gagging me and reducing me to silence. I would freeze, wishing the ground would swallow me up, and soon slink away to my room.

  He was only pious about physical things. Otherwise he was broad-minded and allowed me to talk and joke with my brother’s friends. He was pleased to see me borrowing books from young male neighbors, and when he heard me arguing a point he would announce to the assembled company that he was going to put me through law school. My brother used to ask him what was wrong with dressmaking, and he would smile kindly, not realizing my brother was joking, and say, “Shame on you! She’s the most intelligent girl in the world!”

  Although my brother moved north to teach in a government school, his friends continued to visit and stay overnight, as some of them lived down south. For some reason, in the presence of these youths I felt like a toy with a new battery. I paraded my knowledge on any subject, talked at length about Jurji Zaydan’s stories and the Rock Hudson film Never Say Goodbye, introducing a few English words into my conversation, which I mispronounced. I made them laugh with my impersonations of movie actors. My talk was peppered with lies and exaggerations. Whenever I sensed that my openness was making them awkward. I plunged on without a pause, even using my new surge of power to hide my embarrassment sometimes.

  I was twelve when the piano became my obsession. Nobody escaped my question: “Do you know anyone who plays the piano?”

  I didn’t ask them if they could play themselves, as I knew the answer in advance. I kept repeating untruthfully that the music teacher had told me that a brilliant future awaited me if I learned the piano.

  Among those to whom I put my by now habitual question was a boy from the south called Khalil, who stayed with us when he came to Beirut to collect his monthly salary. He was so shy and taciturn that I used to wonder how he explained the lessons to his pupils, and if he ever cracked a joke in class or shouted at them. When we talked to him, he lowered his head and didn’t reply and when my parents asked him a direct question, he would answer with his eyes fastened on the toes of his shoes. I don’t remember him ever talking to me before that day, still less answering one of my questions.

  My mother used to make up a bed for him on the sitting room floor after supper. As soon as everybody was in bed, and the rooms were dark and silent, he switched on the radio and listened to it until late into the night. This annoyed my mother so much that she considered asking him to pay half the electricity bill. Although I knew how shy and awkward he was, I asked him the question that preoccupied me more than any other. I was sure he didn’t know anyone who played the piano, but when he ignored me I asked him again, and he merely raised his eyes from the floor in response. For the first time I noticed his long black eyelashes and wondered how he could be so timid when he had such beautiful eyes. The third time, to my surprise, he answered me, or asked me a question in return: “Why do you think I’d know someone who plays the piano?”

  His answer-question disconcerted me. “I just thought you would,” I said lamely.

  My inhibitions didn’t last, and the next time he came, as I was setting out the dishes of zaatar—thyme and olive oil — and cream cheese and olives for his breakfast, Í asked again. He looked away from me. He began staring hard at the piece of bread he’d taken and crumbling it in his fingers. Before I could press him further, my mother called me in a voice that broke the sound barrier. Although I was standing before her in no time, she didn’t lower the volume. “To hell with you and your piano,” she shouted. “You’re driving us all crazy. Stop pestering that poor boy. I hope they put a piano on your grave so that you can strum it in eternity till you’re sick of it.”

  It didn’t often bother me when my mother shouted at me, but this time was different. Khalil must have heard. With her shouting, my brightly colored hula-hoop socks, my jingling bangles, the English words I knew, all evaporated into nothing. I stood paralyzed outside the door of the living room, with an empty tray in my hand. My mother gave me a push and told me to hurry up and get the plates off the table, or else. I found myself in the middle of the room, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t have heard. But he had, because he cleared his throat self-consciously. I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t even breathe. Í went discreetly up to the table, and to my amazement I heard him say consolingly, “I’ve got a friend who studies music at the Conservatoire. I’ll try and bring him with me next time I come.”

  I turned to look at him and found him with his head bowed as usual: it was as if someone else had spoken the words, or they had descended as a revelation from heaven. On this occasion I hid my embarrassment and confusion by putting on a smile and saying with a squeal of delight, “How nice of you! Make sure you don’t forget!”

  A month passed, and Khalil didn’t come to stay with us as usual. My mother thought she must have offended him when she asked him for ten pounds because he bumped into the radio one night and knocked it onto the floor. Meanwhile I was convinced that he was avoiding me because he didn’t really know anyone who could teach me the piano.

  I no longer counted the days to the end of the month. I started asking everyone who visited us my usual question again, until I heard that Khalil had been found one morning hanging from the rafters in the school where he taught in the south.

  One of the woman wondered aloud if he was a dwarf in every way. The other women sitting at the intersection burst out laughing. Even though they prayed to God to forgive them, their laughter grew louder before the dwarf was out of sight.

  They had grown used to seeing him every morning shortly after they set to work, bending over the hibiscus bushes to gather the wine-colored blossoms. He would go by with a confident step, heading for the convent, where the pure ones lived, books and magazines tucked under his arm, a cloth bundle containing his food for the day held firmly in his hand. He was content to greet the hibiscus pickers as he passed, although they welcomed him enthusiastically and offered him a glass of tea or some warm bread. He knew it was because he was a dwarf and they felt sorry for him, but he had a great sense of his own importance. Besides keeping up with the politics of his own country and the Arab world in general, he had broadened his interests to take in the whole planet. He studied thoroughly and remembered everything he learned, delved into dictionaries, read novels, both translated and local, and underlined passages in pencil when the subject matter appealed to him or he liked the sound of the words. He wrote poetry and prose, and sent it to newspapers and magazines, even though not a single line of it had ever been published; and he had been going to the convent and waiting by the main gates in its outer wall for a year or more.

  He would sit in the generous shade of a sycamore tree or lie on a blanket he had brought with him beneath its spreading branches, staring at the convent walls. He had learned the shape of their dusty red stones by heart; their uneven surfaces and the way they were arranged reminded him of a tray of the vermic
elli pastries called kunafa. He spent these long stretches of time either reading, sometimes to himself and sometimes out loud, or building a fire with a few sticks to make tea, or waiting for the hoopoe, which appeared out of nowhere from the direction of the trees and the water or from the bare, stony desert. Every now and then he would stare hard at the iron gates of the convent, hearing some kind of a commotion on the other side. But he was convinced that it was a figment of his imagination because the place was always calm and still again at once, as if there had been no interruption.

  But as the days went by he discovered from one of the men building the nearby tombs, who sat and chatted with him for a while each evening, that the noise he heard was real enough, as the nuns used to sweep the convent yard every now and then. This ruined his concentration for some considerable length of time: he could not read with such enthusiasm, or savor a choice sentence or the hot sweetness of a glass of tea or the food he brought with him. He became entirely focused on the iron gates, as if by staring at them he could melt them and make them collapse before his eyes.

  During his first few weeks of frequenting the monastery, he had tried to have a conversation with the nuns to persuade them to open the gate, but each time his request had been refused in dumb silence. He had asked if he could sweep the yard for nothing, worship in the church, confess, but still he met with no response from behind the closed gates. Gradually he became convinced that everybody had joined forces to concoct a lie about the existence of this convent, because he was a dwarf, and he knew very well what people thought about dwarves. They were all lying to him: the tomb builders, the hibiscus women, his family, the wind, which must have cooperated with them by making some noise behind the abandoned gates; Georgette’s mother, who had lamented long and loud because her daughter had joined the pure ones and their door had closed behind her, never to open again.

  Georgette’s family must be hiding the truth. Georgette must have gone mad and been locked away, for just before the rumor went around that she had entered the convent, she would only leave the house to walk over thorns until her feet bled.

  The dwarf became convinced that many people profited from his visits to the convent. His mother regularly rose at dawn to get his food ready, as if he had a job to go to. His younger brother must have heaved a sigh of relief at this new routine of his, for however much he might love the dwarf, he had to be forced to let him participate in his nights out with his friends. They all used to sit in the dwarf’s presence as if they were on eggs, wary of any joke or chance phrase that might offend him or hurt his feelings. Still, he couldn’t remember his brother ever praising him for his determination when he saw him preparing to go to the convent, nor even the hibiscus women, who must have relished the chance to invent hilarious, irreverent stories about him. And what did the tomb builders think of him? He couldn’t bear to let these thoughts torment him anymore, and hurried resolutely to bang on the gates with his giant hands. As usual, he asked for Georgette. He wanted to see her, to thank her for the affection she had heaped on him. Time stood still and he felt as if all the power in his body was in his huge, solid fist with its wide-apart fingers. As he was about to start hammering on the gates again, he heard a soft voice whispering to him that Georgette said hello but seeing her was out of the question.

  From that moment on he began to have a fixation about the convent. The iron gates, bolted and barred, had an obsessive hold over him. Georgette’s mother had wailed that she would never see her daughter again even when she died. How did they exist in there for all those years without being tempted to step over the threshold for a moment?

  The gates, unmoved by his devotion to them, had opened a few times when he was not there; he had discovered their treachery by looking for evidence each morning, and had found tire tracks made by cars, trucks and mule-drawn carts. He brought his face close to the ground to find out whether the gates had been opened wide or only on one side, biting his lip in remorse because he had missed a chance to see the pure ones as they opened the gates and took the things and paid for them. Where did they get the money from?

  As time passed, the dwarf grew ever more obsessed with the convent and its inhabitants. He no longer tried to explain it, and those who saw him waiting regularly at the gates ceased to worry about him. No doubt they told themselves that it was something to do with the way dwarves looked at things, and their different mentality.

  Then one night the dwarf failed to return home. His mother wept loudly, blaming herself for not stopping his visits to the convent before. She was sure that a wild animal had blocked his path and eaten him in one mouthful. His brother suspected that a group of acrobats had kidnapped him and taken him to the city to train him to work in the circus.

  He set off for the convent at high speed. He passed the hibiscus gatherers and they directed him to it. One of them winked at him, so he thought better of asking if they had seen the dwarf. The moment he stood before the gates he was seized by a violent sense of apprehension. One last grain of hope had remained, but there was no sign of the dwarf, only the tree and the blanket that he had hung over a branch and the stone where he used to sit; a few empty soap-powder cartons, which had been blown up against the walls; and crushed and broken coffins, some lined with black material and emblazoned with white crosses. The wind whistled and in the distance he could see the builders at work on new tombs. He shouted his brother’s name and was answered by silence. He began to blame himself. He had known that his brother was running away from reality by taking refuge at the convent, making everyone think that he was strong enough to do the daily round-trip on foot, about four hours in all, so that he could come home proud of having had some adventures.

  Adventures? The roads were always the same: deserted, except for stretches of date palms, canals and the sounds of frogs croaking and an occasional donkey braying.

  The brother stumbled hurriedly over the remains of human bones and crumbling skulls and entered a burial chamber with no roof or doors. He read on its whitewashed walls, “Remember, O Lord, your obedient servant”; “Remember. O Lord, your erring servant”; “Remember, O Lord, your righteous servant, your repentant servant.” Suddenly he burst into tears, mortified that deep down inside he had blessed his brother’s daily visits to the convent. He had not wanted it to be known that he was the dwarf’s brother, that he lived under the same roof as the dwarf. He rushed outside and over to the tomb builders. One of them was painting a tomb a reddish-brown color and he asked him if he had seen the dwarf. The man pointed toward the convent. He turned and ran back and pounded on the iron gates, calling out the dwarf’s name. To his astonishment he heard his voice: “Yes?”

  “Thank God you’re safe,” he said, crying tears of joy. “Come on, let’s go home, or your mother will do herself mischief.”

  “Don’t worry,” replied the dwarf. “Tell her that I’ve become the nuns’ watchman. I’m happy. Don’t worry.”

  The dwarf had only gained access to the convent by jumping in. Not by bouncing in off a springy bedstead, an idea he had quickly banished from his mind, nor by piling the wrecked coffins one on top of another. Instead he had jumped onto the shoulders of the Lord Bishop, who had come from the city to pay his annual visit to the convent with several crates of luggage. The dwarf had planned for this moment for a long time during his vigils by the gate. He didn’t know where he had found the courage, agility and speed of thought that had enabled him to leap out as soon as he heard the car engine and alight on the hood before it stopped, like a winged insect, then jump on the Lord Bishop and relieve him of one of the crates and rush off with it, his heart beating with almost unbearable ferocity. He hurried disbelievingly through the open gates into the courtyard. To force himself to take in what was happening, he stood stock-still at the gates once they had been closed again, seeing them from the inside for the first time. He was certain that they would be opened again shortly and he would be hurled back outside. But things no longer hinged on him. It was as if he had disa
ppeared from sight. The nuns began to gather around in their white habits and crowns of artificial flowers, bowing their heads before the Lord Bishop, who looked like a big black bird, and bending over to kiss his hand.

  They were like brides, some of them extremely young and pretty. As they stood in line, their heads drooping bashfully, they resembled a row of beautiful narcissus. For a few moments the dwarf felt embarrassed and scared. He tried to suppress his breathing, which had suddenly become audible. Then he found the Lord Bishop was looking at him. “Is this the one?” he was asking.

  One of them, the senior nun, answered him humbly, but with affection, “Yes, My Lord.”

  Turning back to him the bishop said, “The nuns have told me about you. You have been blessed. You will watch over them.”

  The dwarf felt awkward in the bishop’s presence. He didn’t know how to answer him. He had been immensely curious to see what was behind the gates; it was like the time he split a battery in two to see what was inside it. And now the bishop was offering him a job as a handyman to the pure ones, and he found himself agreeing to stay in the convent and oversee the cultivation of the fruit and vegetables, without giving the matter more than a moment’s thought.

  He hadn’t imagined the convent would be like this. It bore no relation to its outer walls and to the countryside around it, which was all sand, and the color of sand. The dwarf developed an attachment to the colors in the convent in his early days there. Some of them he was seeing for the first time, sculpted on the walls, or in paintings of animals, bats, angels, flowers, and women holding drums and wearing ornate brocade dresses, flying through the skies or in boats on the sea, with lances and daggers and swords in the background. Then gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and he began to see clearly and especially to notice how the nuns lit up the place in their white clothes.