Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  Suddenly, a rattle of stones made Mohamed look up. The vacant eyes of a sheep stared down at him. A flock was making its slow way across the upper terrace. Behind it, somewhere, would be a village child, shepherding. Mohamed would not want him to witness this. As his grip slackened I scrambled for my balance, leaping away up the stony hillside toward the road. I never saw him again.

  I don’t know if Mohamed ever found his second wife. But a few miles away, in a Palestinian refugee camp, I got to know a family in which the man had made a similar choice and brought a second wife into his first wife’s home.

  I met them first in the winter of 1987, just weeks after the Palestinian uprising had begun. I was driving through a hard, icy rain when a chunk of concrete slammed into the hood of my car and fanned in fragments against the windshield. The car fishtailed across the rain-slicked bitumen and twirled to a stop just inches from the wide trunk of an ancient cedar. In the rear-vision mirror I caught a flash of red. A group of youths, their faces wrapped in red-checked kaffiyehs, perched on the pile of rubble at the entrance to the camp.

  I jumped from the car and ran toward them. Thinking I was an armed Israeli settler, they scattered like startled birds. “Please,” I called in Arabic. “I don’t have a gun. I’m a journalist and I’d like to talk to you.”

  One of the youths rematerialized atop the rubble heap. “Get out of here!” he cried in perfect English. “There are people in this camp who would kill you!”

  I stood my ground and asked to interview him. “I’m too busy now,” he said, eying the license plate of a passing truck to see if it was colored yellow, for Israeli, or blue for Palestinian. “And if I start on this subject I’ll never stop.” As a Fiat with yellow plates approached, he wound up like a pitcher and hurled his chunk of concrete at its windshield. It fell just short. “It hasn’t been a good day for me,” he said. “I’ve hardly damaged any cars.”

  The wail of an approaching army siren signaled that the day might be about to take a turn for the worse. Barking commands to his three accomplices, the boy turned and ran off into the camp, his kaffiyeh wound tightly around his face to prevent identification by camp informers. I turned and walked slowly down the camp’s main street, hearing the commotion behind me as an Israeli jeep skidded to a stop and emptied its troops at the camp entrance. A few blocks farther, I glimpsed a flash of red in the window of a half-demolished building. It was the boy. His finger on his lips, he signaled to me to follow him.

  Scrambling over rubble, we made our way through back alleys to a large metal door set in a concrete-block wall. The boy rapped gently on the metal and the door flew open. Two pairs of women’s hands dragged him inside by his collar, quickly stripped his T-shirt and jacket and flung him a change of clothes. “In case anybody saw me,” he explained. “This is Rahme, my mother,” he said, introducing the smaller of the two women as she patted down his tousled hair. “And this,” he said, turning to the other woman, “is Fatin, also my mother. Well, not my mother… excuse me, I don’t know the English word… but she is… married to my father after my mother.”

  “Darra?” I said. Co-wife. The Arabic word comes from the root “to harm.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Co-wife.”

  At fifteen, the boy, Raed, was the oldest of fourteen children. Because Israeli authorities had closed the schools, all of them were at home on that wet day, crammed inside the four-room hovel. Cold seeped up through the bare concrete floors and rain dripped through the leaky roof. Most of the toddlers had runny noses. Over the next six years I visited the family often, sometimes spending the night on a thin mattress on the floor, wedged in with Rahme and Fatin and Raed’s sisters. Raed and his brothers slept beside their father, Mah-moud, in another room.

  Clearly, given the number of children in the house, the sleeping arrangements weren’t always like that. Because it was impossible to have a private conversation in that crowded house, I couldn’t raise such a sensitive subject with Rahme or Fatin. I asked a close woman friend from a similar background how people in such situations managed to have sex. What she described was depressing: “If there are three rooms, then the women take one, the boys one, and the husband and whichever wife he wants to have sex with will sleep in the third room,” she said. “But in some homes in the camps there aren’t three rooms, so the act is a quick, silent fumbling in a corner, hoping the children aren’t awake. Of course, neither one of them would ever undress.”

  At first I visited the camp to write about the uprising. But soon I became more involved in the story of Rahme and Fatin. There is a poignant Berber folk song about the arrival of a second wife, and I thought of it every time I visited them:

  The stranger has come; she has her place in the house.

  Her tattoos are not like ours,

  But she’s young, she’s beautiful, just what my husband wanted;

  The nights aren’t long enough for their play….

  Since she’s come, the house is not the same,

  As though the doorsills and the walls were sulking;

  Perhaps I’m the only one who notices it,

  Like a mule before his empty manger.

  But I must accept my new lot,

  For my husband is happy with his new wife.

  Once I, too, was beautiful, but my time is past.

  To an outsider, the relationship between Rahme and Fatin seemed to have little in common with that sad song. The two women seemed more like loving sisters than bitter rivals. If Fatin cooked, Rahme sewed. If Rahme made bread, Fatin kept an eye on the toddlers. When Raed finally got caught after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Israeli soldiers, it was Fatin, not his mother Rahme, who showed up in court to support him. And when Mahmoud, too, was taken to jail in a routine security sweep, the two women relied on each other to get through the long six months until his release. In all the time I spent in their house I never heard a cross word between them.

  It was Raed who taught me to look deeper. Raed spent five years in jail for his part in the uprising. When he was released, in February 1993, the fiery fifteen-year-old who’d stoned my car had been replaced by a solemn twenty-year-old who celebrated his new freedom in long, long walks up and down the West Bank’s stony hillsides. On one of these walks we stopped for a few minutes to chat with a woman he knew slightly. “Her life is complete misery,” he said as we turned away. As we walked, he told me the story of the woman’s unhappy marriage, her husband’s eventual repudiation, and her return to her parents, her children, of course, left behind with their father. “It is my mother’s story,” Raed added unexpectedly, “except for the ending.”

  Rahme’s story began in Jordan. In 1972, Raed’s father’s mother arrived there with her daughter, who had been promised in marriage to a relative in Amman. In Jordan, the mother spotted Rahme, a devout, rosy-cheeked young woman whose tiny stature made her look much younger than her seventeen years. She took the girl home to marry her fifteen-year-old son Mahmoud.

  “What did he know at fifteen? Nothing,” said Raed. “To him, she was a good girl, a nice girl. But how could he love her? He didn’t even know her.”

  Within a year, Raed was born. His brother Murad carne a year and a half later, and two sisters in the three years after that. Rahme was still pregnant with her fourth child when she forced herself to face the fact that had the whole camp gossiping. Mahmoud had fallen for Fatin, a stunning eighteen-year-old who had recently moved in with relatives in the camp.

  The two women couldn’t have been more different. Where Rahme was shy and pious, Fatin was outspoken and political. Where Rahme was quiet and diffident, Fatin laughed and asserted herself. Fatin, tall and shining with confidence, seemed to eclipse the tiny Rahme. Finally, Mahmoud came home with the news that Rahme had dreaded. He had proposed to Fatin, and she had accepted him. Rahme, he said, could have a divorce.

  Rahme knew that a divorce meant leaving the West Bank to return to her family in Jordan. In some ways, that would have been a relief. In six years the youth
Mahmoud had grown into a fierce-tempered man who occasionally lashed out violently at both her and Raed, who even as a toddler was showing a streak of stubborn courage. To live with him as his only wife had been hard enough: she could barely imagine the greater humiliations and hardships that would come from being relegated to second place by a woman he really loved.

  But when she looked up at Mahmoud and gave her answer, it wasn’t what he expected to hear. “I don’t want to divorce you,” she said quietly. Under Islamic law, divorce meant leaving her children to be raised by Mahmoud and his new wife. “I want to keep my family,” she said. “Will you allow me that?”

  Mahmoud was bad-tempered and selfish, but he wasn’t cruel enough to force Rahme to leave her children. If Rahme wished to stay, he said, he would continue to support her. But she would have to be content to be his wife in name only. Although the Koran declares that a man must treat all his wives equally, Mahmoud made it clear that it was Fatin, and Fatin alone, to whom he was sexually attracted. By choosing to stay, Rahme, at twenty-three, would be choosing a life of celibacy in a crowded hovel alongside a woman for whom her husband felt a passionate erotic attraction. Mahmoud made it clear that he would blame Rahme if the relationship between the two women was anything but placid and friendly.

  Rahme choked back her tears and agreed to Mahmoud’s conditions. A few weeks later she put on her best embroidered dress and danced to the drums at her husband’s wedding.

  When we returned to the house, I suddenly saw everything differently. Rahme was in the corner, performing her midday prayers, as Fatin laughed boisterously with Mahmoud. Fatin was pregnant with her eleventh child, and basking in Mahmoud’s obvious pride in her condition.

  Raed was less approving. Since his father’s jobs on construction sites were irregular, Raed was working fourteen hours a day in a shoe factory to support the family. “It’s stupid!” he fumed. “He can’t support the babies he has, and he brings more and more.”

  Fatin had been nursing a newborn when I first met her in 1987. While I talked to Raed about the intifada, she’d sat in a corner of the room with the baby at her breast. She’d interrupted only once, when Raed’s English stumbled over the word “peace.” I’d asked him if the Palestinians in the camp were willing to accept peace with Israel. When he had trouble with the word, I tried the Arabic, salaam. “La salaam!” Fatin yelled suddenly. “No peace! The people of this camp want war!” Fatin, I reflected then, would be a formidable opponent if anyone crossed her.

  Fatin’s many pregnancies had stripped her of her girlish bloom. She showed me the gaps in her mouth from teeth that had fallen out during the latest one. Yet it seemed to be a price she was willing to pay to retain her husband’s approval, and to underline her difference in status from Rahme.

  “My mother is waiting only for us,” Raed said. “As soon as my sisters are finished school and I can support them, she won’t have to put up with this anymore.”

  I wondered, though, if the complex bonds in the family could be so easily broken. Raed himself said he didn’t differentiate between his full siblings and his half brothers and sisters. He loved all of them, and felt responsible for protecting them from his erratic father. His feelings about Fatin also were complex. “I cannot say I hate this woman,” he said. “I hate her only for being the cause of my mother’s suffering, not for who she is herself.”

  In a rare private moment, when I tried to ask Rahme about her feelings, her rosy face broke into an enigmatic smile. She wrapped my hands in her two cracked and work-worn ones and whispered simply, “Insha’allah [As God wills it].” Then she went to wash and began her prayers, as the life of the household swirled unnoticed around her. In a few moments, following the prayer-time ritual, she knelt, touching her head to the floor.

  Her religion, after all, was Islam—the Submission. It seemed to me that its rules had required her to submit to a lot.

  Chapter 4

  THE PROPHET’S WOMEN

  “O wives of the prophet ye are not like any ordinary women.”

  THE KORAN

  THE CHAPTER OF THE CLANS

  She was playing on her swing when her mother called her. Noticing her dirty face, her mother took a little water and wiped the grime away. The swing had left her breathless, so the two of them paused for a few minutes at the door of the house until she recovered.

  Inside, her father and his friends were waiting. Her mother placed her in the lap of one of them, then everyone else rose and left the room.

  Aisha was nine years old, and that day, in her parents’ house, she consummated her marriage to the prophet Muhammad, who was then over fifty. Ten years later, he died in her arms.

  Today, if you ask Sunni Muslims about Aisha, they will tell you she was the great love of Muhammad’s later life, a formidable teacher of Islam, a heroine in battle. But ask Shiites, and they will describe a jealous schemer who destroyed the prophet’s domestic peace, plotted against his daughter Fatima, spied on the household and fomented a tragic factional bloodletting that left the Muslim nation permanently divided.

  Aisha—Arabic for “life”—is one of the most popular girls’ names in the Sunni Muslim world. But among Shiites it is a term ofasperation and abuse. When a Shiite girl misbehaves, her mother is likely to upbraid her with a shout of “You Aisha!”

  Aisha went to live with Muhammad in the year 622 by the Christian calendar—the first year of Hegira by Muslim reckoning. Thirteen hundred and sixty-six years later, an interviewer for “Hello Good Morning” a live, national radio show in Iran, stopped a woman on a Tehran street and asked her who she thought was the best woman’s role model. The woman answered Oshin, the heroine of a Japanese-made TV soap opera who had overcome all kinds of adversity by flouting Japan’s staid traditions. The interviewer asked the woman why she hadn’t named one of the prophet’s wives or daughters as her role model. The woman replied that those women belonged to a far-off era that wasn’t as relevant to her modern life. Ayatollah Khomeini, listening to the radio, was furious, and demanded that the show’s producers be flogged. He relented when an investigation proved that the producers hadn’t acted maliciously.

  For once I found myself more or less agreeing with Khomeini. The lives of the prophet’s wives and daughters were extremely relevant to modern Islamic women. Most of the Koran’s revelations on women came to Muhammad directly following events in his own household. Like modern Muslim women, his wives had to cope with the jealousies of a polygamous household, the traumas of war, the hardships of poverty and the issues of seclusion and hijab.

  To me, the hadith’s intimate vignettes of life in the apartments around Muhammad’s mosque were better than any modern soap opera. I couldn’t get enough of these stories of intrigue, argument and romance. Aisha, undoubtedly, was the star, but the seven or eight wives in the supporting cast made for lively subplots.

  When Muhammad’s first wife Khadija died in 619, the forty-nine-year-old prophet was heartbroken. The Muslim community, especially the women who cooked and cared for him, believed a new wife might soothe his grief. A few months after Khadija’s death, Muhammad’s aunt, Khawla, suggested to her nephew that he marry again.

  “Whom shall I marry, O Khawla?” asked Muhammad. “You women are best knowing in these matters.”

  Khawla answered that, if he wanted a virgin, he should take Aisha, the beautiful child of his best friend, Abu Bakr. If he wanted a nonvirgin, there was the widow Sawda, a matronly older woman who had been an early convert to Islam and a devoted follower.

  “Go,” said Muhammad, “bespeak them both for me.”

  He married Sawda and Aisha in quick succession. But since Aisha was then only six, the marriage wasn’t consummated, and she remained with her family. No one told the little girl of her change in status. But when her mother suddenly began restricting her play, Aisha later recalled, “It fell into my heart that I was married,” By the time she went to live with Muhammad, the Muslims had fled persecution in Mecca and set up an exile
community in the town of Medina. Muhammad lived in the mosque they constructed there—a humble structure of gray mudbricks roofed with the branches of date trees. Aisha and Sawda had a room each. When Aisha moved in, she brought her toys with her. Sometimes Muhammad would find her playing with them. “What are these?” he would ask. “Solomon’s horses,” or “My girl dolls,” she would answer. If her child playmates ran away, intimidated, when he approached, he would gently call them back and sometimes join in their games.

  Muhammad, according to many detailed physical descriptions, was a handsome irtan, of medium height with wavy black hair, a full beard, thick-lashed dark eyes and a radiant smile that revealed a gap between his front teeth. He was meticulous about his grooming, perfuming his beard and brushing his teeth at least five times a day. His only unattractive features were a tendency to bloodshot eyes and a protruding vein in his temple that is said to have become more pronounced when he became angry.

  In the year or two after Aisha moved in, Muhammad married three more women, all war widows: Hafsah, the twenty-year-old daughter of his close friend Omar; an older woman, Zeinab, whose generosity had earned her the name “Mother of the Poor,” and who died just eight months later; and Umm Salamah, a famous beauty whose arrival caused Aisha the first pangs of the jealousy that would blight the rest of her life. When Aisha learned about the marriage to Umm Salamah, “I was exceedingly sad,” she said, “having heard much of her beauty.” She called on the new wife and found her “twice as beautiful and graceful as she was reputed to be.”

  Muhammad tried to keep to the Koran’s instruction that a man must treat all his wives equally. His practice was to see each of them, every afternoon, in a brief private meeting, but to have his dinner and spend the night with one at a time, in strict rotation. Aisha found the arrangement unsatisfying. ‘Tell me,” she asked him one day, “if you were to come upon two camels, the one already pastured and the other not, which would you feed?” Muhammad answered that of course it would be the one not pastured. “I am not like the rest of your wives,” Aisha replied. “Every one of them has been married before, except me.”