Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  So I asked him casually if he could find me a job as Ahmad no longer sent me anything to type. He answered that the pressure against women working was increasing and he didn’t think that I ought to work. It wasn’t this pressure which had forced Ahmad to do without me, but the arrival of his family from Egypt. I was about to ask Maaz when Ahmad’s family was leaving, but I stopped and asked him instead if he’d seen Ahmad. ‘Ahmad’s taken up with his wife and children,’ he answered, and I understood from this that Maaz only saw him in his office since there was no mixed visiting. Then suddenly Maaz asked me if I’d like to go abroad with him. I stared hard at him but he was asking in all innocence, and when I asked why, he replied, ‘I’ve never seen anything but sand and sea.’ He went on, ‘Perhaps the best thing would be when you go to America on holiday, I could visit you and you could show me around. You in the daytime and David in the evening.’ All I could do was wonder fruitlessly how he could make amorous advances to me and at the same time visit us and talk to David, indeed establish a firm friendship with him, and take me to see his wife, and how she could welcome me royally even though she knew how he frequented our house and spent many long evenings with us. Were the two of them more liberated than me and David? And I didn’t answer him, although it struck me that we’d planted in him a germ of curiosity about a world which he’d never previously given a thought to.

  I found myself wishing I could be alone with him at that moment; since I’d stopped seeing Ahmad, the rooms in the house had grown cramped, the shouting of the children in the compound louder, and Jimmy’s requirements more preposterous. I began to feel the need to go out of the house and talk to anyone I happened to meet, my neighbour opposite for example, or to get into the car and ask the driver to take us for a drive around; we would go to the store to buy what Jimmy wanted, and what my greed prompted me to buy, much of it, especially the American products which I didn’t need, without regard to the inflated prices. I felt that money here had no value. I didn’t think of visiting the other women here and I didn’t find things to complain about like they did, because unlike them I didn’t mind the voice of the muezzin in the early hours of the morning or the fact that the shops closed during the daytime prayers.

  Nevertheless my life here was different, and had been since my third night in the desert when I’d opened my eyes in alarm at a sound, neither a song nor a sermon, proceeding from a microphone: I found myself naked in a garden surrounded by a high wall. I looked frantically around me for my clothes and when I found them in a heap near me I began to wonder about my husband; I covered my stomach with one hand and pulled on my clothes with the other. What had happened to me? Where was David? When I stood up with some difficulty I remembered that I’d had a lot to drink. I could only move slowly in spite of my anxiety to find out what had happened to David. I went into the house and saw the owner of the firm fast asleep on the sofa, and traces of the previous night’s dinner, glasses and the remains of food and cigarette ends, and cassettes scattered here and there. I remembered the blue movie and how I’d refused to watch it at first, then laughed and demanded to see it. I’d been happy, hardly able to believe in the interest that was being shown in me, the dishes covering the table, the respectful behaviour of the two servants bringing us drinks, the firm’s owner telling the driver to go and fetch a video of ‘Dallas’ from a friend’s house simply because I’d asked him whether he’d seen the last episode. I couldn’t remember if this had happened before or after David had left the party to check on Jimmy. Had he come back and seen me watching the movie and gone angrily away again? I sat down, pushing ashtrays and plates around in the hope of waking up the sleeping man on the couch. Dawn was beginning to break. I looked out of the window but could see only the high wall. The man was still asleep. I went to the front door and unlocked it and saw his car. Leaving the door open, I went down to the outer door and opened it and looked out. A few houses were all that I could see and the light made my eyes smart; I went back into the room, closing the door noisily behind me. At this the man sat up; he didn’t seem surprised to see me, and smiled at me. Feeling embarrassed, I asked about my husband and he replied simply, ‘David went home.’ I was on the point of asking more questions but felt confused and said nothing. He stood up, searching for the car keys which were hanging on the door latch. Then he bent and took my hand and kissed it, then he kissed my neck and I felt a faint quivering in my thighs. I moved backwards, but in spite of my nervousness I couldn’t help being aware of the warmth of his brown skin. I let him kiss me, put his hands on me, and when I surrendered my body to his I felt a great happiness flooding through me in spite of my disordered thoughts. I tried to recall his name and couldn’t. He wouldn’t agree to write it on a piece of paper for me, but he taught me to remember it: Ahmad. We’d met him for the first time that morning when I’d gone with my husband to stock up with food and buy second-hand furniture from him. When he invited us to dinner we’d wondered whether we were dreaming, and thought how lucky we were to have been posted to a country where people were more concerned about others than they were where we came from.

  Jimmy asked me if he could touch the baby camel. Maaz answered for me and told him that the camel’s mother was tired and might bite him if he went too close. He bit his own hand to make his words more impressive. I didn’t care about the baby camel or its mother, or Maaz’s friend or the women who were watching us through cracks in the door in spite of the veils which covered their heads and hung down the sides of their faces. Even eating dates and drinking tea out of a glass was dull. Maaz’s agitated longing for me had been obvious from the moment I got into the car with him. It reminded me of the incomparably happy times I’d spent with Ahmad and made me long for them again now. On the return journey he drove at a crazy pace as if with the speed he came closer to me and touched me; when we reached home I invited him in for a cup of tea. I noticed that the veins in his hand were standing out and he was pressing one leg down on the other. When I put the tea down in front of him I deliberately brought my face and breast level with him. He asked me if I had an aspirin and I knew he wanted to follow me into the kitchen even though there was a danger that someone might come in and find us there. He held my breasts and rubbed his face against them and held me close for a second and seemed happy. I felt irritated and wondered what I’d been expecting, seeing that we were in the kitchen.

  As I opened my legs for the first time I didn’t think about what he made of my relationship with my husband and why he was always winking at me and laughing as he asked me to marry him. Instead, I watched him closing his eyes, letting his body go loose, murmuring that now he would welcome the Angel of Death. I didn’t understand and he explained that: he wanted nothing more from life after this. At the start I was convinced that he was acting: when he saw me without my clothes on he gasped and struck his head with the palm of his hand, exclaiming bitterly, ‘Why did God create foreign women different?’ When I asked him what his wife’s body was like he didn’t answer me, but passed his hand over my flesh saying, ‘It’s like silk. Pure silk.’ When he let out a noise like a bull roaring I nearly laughed. He said I was like one of the houris whom God had prepared for true believers when they entered Paradise. He even grabbed my foot and smelt it, muttering, ‘More fragrant than sandalwood or incense.’ I started to laugh out loud then. I was relaxed. The curtains were drawn and a gentle gloom enveloped the room. It was eleven in the morning and the house would stay quiet until three o’clock.

  I kept on laughing even though he pleaded with me to stop. I couldn’t help myself in the face of what he was doing with my body. He was like a man worshipping at a pagan shrine, uttering incantations, most of them incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to restrict me: he refused to let me move about or get off the bed or even cover myself up.

  Suddenly he was on his feet, shouting at me. Although the veins were visible on his face I went on smiling. As his anger mounted and I watched the expressions following one a
nother across his face and his hands shaking, I thought to myself that he must have seen a lot of silent films: his black eyes almost made holes in the screen, or in my face. I had no idea of the reasons for his outburst of emotion until, nearly in tears, he asked me why I was laughing. I didn’t tell him that it was his melodramatic admiration of my body and his manner of loving that I found so funny; I made do with saying that there was no need for him to talk and behave as he had been doing because I was quite happy with him. Later I realized that he wasn’t acting and that he really meant it when he called me the Marilyn Monroe of the desert. If I gestured, sat still, walked along, I was exciting; if I spoke, there was someone picking up my words as if they were kisses. He wanted me on the sand, in an empty house, in the open desert, at an oasis, waiting till midnight and keeping a big stick near him in case anyone surprised us. He wanted me in a camel hair tent, even at his mother’s after he’d drunk some camel’s milk and his mother had fallen asleep; in my house, in the bathroom or in bed. I abandoned myself to glorying in my plumpness, not caring about the blue veins in my legs and thighs; I no longer wore a girdle: Maaz took hold of the folds of flesh as if he were snatching up gold in Ali Baba’s cave. Only my stomach worried me still and I devised various schemes to prevent him seeing it in daylight. I always pushed his hand off it or covered it with a sheet until eventually, like an explorer, he began to enjoy what he’d already discovered, whereas before his concern had been to find out where further advances would lead. He began to notice what I was doing and one day he asked me if it was not done in America for him to see my navel. I forced a laugh but kept my hand over my stomach. Then he asked, ‘Do you think there might be a baby in there?’ Laughing, I shook my head and all at once he pushed my hand away over my thigh, using his two feet. When he only saw bare flesh he seemed surprised, and I too was surprised that he didn’t remark on the wrinkled skin or on the broad white lines and the deep brown ones or on the ridge of flesh around the navel. He wasn’t interested in listening to me as I told him how embarrassed I was about my stomach since I’d had my second daughter, and bent over to kiss it. Gathering the flesh to one side so that my stomach looked smooth as if I was a young girl, I told him I was going to have surgery for it. Maaz took a renewed interest in the subject of my stomach and with a look of revulsion on his face he gasped, ‘God forbid. You should be grateful your stomach’s healthy.’ Then he kissed it again greedily, in an exaggerated attempt to convince me of its flawless beauty. My mind wandered and the idea that David’s lack of interest in me was related to my stomach or to my plumpness in general seemed more remote, as it certainly hadn’t the slightest effect on the harmony of my relations with Maaz. Although at the beginning I used to keep control of my body like a Playboy bunny who has to think herself into the part, his way of behaving made me feel that I really was a bunny and I wanted to be intoxicated with passion. I never once envied him when he abandoned himself to his own passion as I used to do sometimes with David or in a fleeting affair I’d had with a distant relation, or with Ahmad; and I never once faked it with him and opened one eye, as I had done with the others, to make sure that they were noticing me shudder. With him I was silent in my ecstasy, confident that he wasn’t going to leave me unsatisfied, because he always wanted me again and for a long time.

  3

  Two days had passed since Maaz had come back to me and Sita’s drops had exploded noisily in his head. When he got up he called me Maryam and said from now on my name was Maryam not Suzanne. ‘Like the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene?’ I asked, pretending to be gentle and at ease. ‘Maryam. The wife of Maaz al-Siddiq. And if anyone calls you Maryam the American woman I’ll break his neck.’ I didn’t ask him when our wedding was going to be or say what about David, and Fatima, afraid that he might withdraw his offer, and he merely repeated, ‘Your name’s Maryam, and if anyone calls you Maryam the blonde he’ll be my enemy for all time.’

  I stood up, full of delight at being the only woman he wanted in the wasteland of the desert. I didn’t feel the same as before when he asked me to marry him. In the early weeks of our relationship it was because he wanted to own me, exactly as he wanted an American kitchen; this time it was the result of a relationship between a man and a woman, and it meant, as well, that he must have grown accustomed to the idea that I and his wife belonged to the same sex, even if there was a vast difference between us.

  I draped the bed cover over my head and let it hang down around me just like an abaya. I smiled, wishing I could get used to an abaya and cover my face with a black handkerchief and become like the others, wrapped up because I was precious and easily damaged and had to move about from place to place. A second wife. It didn’t matter, on condition that I didn’t live with Fatima. Of course I would never live with her for one reason – the children – unless there could be some acceptable arrangement like the one I’d seen between the bedouin woman and her husband’s new young wife.

  I’d gone with Suha to visit her bedouin neighbour because the bleating of one of the woman’s nanny goats had disturbed her son’s sleep for several nights. We stood in the doorway with Umar and my son, and Suha asked her why the goats bleated day and night. The woman laughed, showing her gold teeth, and struck one palm against the other and insisted that we come in. She tried to shoo away the nanny goat, addressing it as if it were a child, while Umar stood face to face with the little creature he was so used to hearing, and it continued to bleat. We followed the woman and left our shoes at the door, as she did, and went in to see a young woman with fair skin and long hair sitting on a rush mat painting her toenails. When she saw us, she rose quickly, excusing herself and welcoming Suha with a pleased smile. We were astonished. What was she doing here, this young woman? Her nail varnish, her short dress, her fair hair and her accent were all alien to the surroundings. She insisted that we should go into the sitting-room to sit on sofas, then disappeared and returned in a flash with dishes of fruit and cake and green almonds. ‘Fresh from Syria,’ she announced. At this, Suha asked her if she came from Syria and the young woman answered, ‘Of course I do. Do I look as if I come from this country?’ Then she added that she was the second wife and we could only stare in amazement. Looking towards the door as if to indicate the other wife, and as if she had understood our surprise, she said, ‘She’s like my mother, and I love her. She does the housework. She cooks. She washes my clothes for me. When I get angry with my husband she brings us back together. As long as no one interferes with the goats, everything’s fine.’ When Suha asked if her husband was old, the Syrian woman smiled, gathering her blond hair to one side, and said, ‘Not at all. He just married young. Imagine how much he must have loved me. He would have done anything to make me marry him, but he didn’t want to divorce her. He said she was the mother of his children – they’re grown up now. He said to me, try it, and I tried it and now I really love her.’ Then she winked at us and whispered, ‘There are times when I can’t believe she’s his wife, poor thing.’

  I wanted to ask her a lot of questions, but Umar came rushing in excitedly to tell his mother about the goat, while my son stood by looking bewildered because he didn’t know what Umar was saying. The first wife was standing in the doorway with the goat close beside her; she stuck her head into the room and said, ‘Excuse me. This goat won’t let me talk to a soul.’ Then she bent down and picked it up and came into the room, looking at her husband’s Syrian wife: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care that she doesn’t make a mess.’ She sat down. The leather of her face veil had faded and looked like an extension of the skin on her face. She nursed the goat like a child in her lap, stroking it gently, never taking her hand away from its face. When Suha asked her if the story of the goat was true, looking at Umar, she answered, ‘It’s quite true. God bless him, he understood perfectly. He asked me one question after another like a bubbling spring. God bless him. I told him about the goat’s mother who died, God rest her, while she was giving birth.’ She pointed to the lower part of her stomach.
‘If I hadn’t pulled hard on the little one’s legs she would have smothered in the mother’s stomach. God decreed that she should live, and I began giving her milk from a bottle. She grew accustomed to me, and because I was always in black she thought I was her mother. She follows me wherever I go. She doesn’t like going out in the street with the other goats. She wants me near her, lying beside her. Whenever I go out and bang the door behind me, she begins to cry out like mad; a couple of days ago I went away to see my sister and the poor little thing missed me.’ She raised the goat’s chin and addressed it: ‘You were missing your mother, weren’t you?’ Then she stood up, still holding the goat, took some nuts and returned to her place, eating one and giving another to the goat who was waiting expectantly.

  I thought of Fatima’s smile and her thinness, and banished the thought from my mind: I was older than Fatima, and the second wife was always the younger one. I dropped the cover on the ground and sat at the typewriter, banging out all my thoughts on the subject of arrangements regarding the children and divorcing David. I had this habit of writing everything down in order to arrange my thoughts, and consequently my feelings. Sometimes I had more than ten lists on the go at a time: lists of what food to buy, of people I had to write to, of people I should visit, of what I ought to say to Maaz, of the gold jewellery I owned, and of the gold I thought I should acquire.