Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  It could have been the engineer whom I hadn’t wanted to meet again after I’d visited his scheme in the desert. Although he phoned frequently and circled the house in his car, he was the one man I couldn’t even bear to remember. The journey had been long, two hours’ drive into the heart of the desert with nothing to see except black crows against the changing hues of the great expanses of sand. The Filipino driver had met me at the door of the store as I’d agreed with the engineer, and all the time he looked at me in the driving mirror which he’d trained on me for the purpose. He played one tape after another until we reached an outpost of human existence dotted about with tools and machinery and workers with their heads and faces swathed in cloth as an armour against the stinging sand.

  It wasn’t easy to recognize the engineer when he was dressed in trousers and a shirt. To my surprise he began to take me on a tour of the place, explaining to me seriously how the machines worked and what the men were doing. The sun grew hotter by the moment as we walked to the furthest point of the scheme and he took me into a trench, talking and explaining non-stop, redoubling his efforts when he saw that the men were watching us. I asked him where he’d got his American accent from, to shift things on to a more personal level. ‘New York State University,’ he replied, walking a few steps ahead of me. I despaired and caught up with him and we arrived back at his office, a concrete room smelling of cigarettes and wet cement. He sat down at the table and asked me about my Arab friend, but before I opened my mouth he stood up and opened the door for me saying, ‘The air-conditioner isn’t working in the office,’ and took me back into the sun. Disappointed, I felt that I’d been wrong to come, and was angry at myself and sick with exhaustion and the heat. He went up to one of the workers and the man handed him a bundle of photographs. He began giving me one after the other, pictures of steel foundations and trench-digging equipment. I told him irritably that I was thirsty. His features didn’t change. Retaining his solemn expression he led me over to the car and opened the door for me. As soon as I got in I wished I was still in the sun. It was boiling inside the car. I swallowed down a scream. My thighs were almost on fire from the plastic of the seat. I wiped sweat off myself with my hand, thinking that I was no longer of an age to be able to handle these tiresome escapades. He stopped the car in front of a small building and I followed him out; I’d begun to understand his behaviour: he was afraid and on edge. The coolness spreading through my body in the little cafeteria, which was fragrant with the smell of curry and rice, made me forget the outside. He spoke constantly to the workers who were seated at tables round about us, then he showed me the photographs again and stood up. I was scared of the burning car and wished I could stay in the restaurant or go back home straightaway. So I said that I had to be getting back. He nodded, as if this request of mine had made him feel easier. He said that he wanted to go in the car to fetch some papers and although I didn’t understand my connection with these papers, I nodded and followed him out again. Without waiting for the air-conditioner to take effect, I opened the car window and stuck my head out. We only went a short distance. When he got out, I stayed in the car, but he signalled to me to get out too. I did so hesitantly, telling myself that I’d soon be free of him. There was a secretary typing there. He introduced me to him, then led me into another room. The moment he’d closed the door he took hold of me and we stood there right by the door. He felt my breasts, then opened his flies at speed, as if he was receiving orders from somewhere. He brought me close to him, and I was forced to cling to the wall to keep my balance. Then he turned away, closing his flies and straightening his shirt. He picked up an envelope off the table and began talking to me again about engineering terms. There were signs of annoyance and impatience on his face now. He was hurrying me and didn’t wait even while I reached for my bag. Still talking in technical jargon that only another engineer would have understood, he went out ahead of me. Then he gave me the envelope which he’d been holding. ‘Say that this is for the firm,’ he instructed me, and I was left completely at a loss.

  It was inconceivable that any of these men would have reported me, I told myself confidently. I stood up and, on Ringo’s advice, I called the man who’d come to the house the next day but he wasn’t there. After I’d tried for several days in a row, I was told that he’d gone away. When I’d had numerous conversations and the voice at the other end had started to get flirtatious, although I wasn’t sure whether it was the man himself or another man in his office, I felt reassured. My fear evaporated altogether when I saw him by chance in the street with a veiled woman, and he hid his face in fright.

  6

  I returned home one day and Ringo rushed to meet me saying that Maaz had called dozens of times. Instead of going to the phone I went to the fridge to look for something to drink, Ringo started to tell me that Maaz had been shouting in a way that wasn’t like him, and he’d scarcely finished speaking when the telephone rang. I rushed to pick up the receiver not expecting it to be Maaz again so soon. His voice came weakly and thinly down the line. He asked me to visit him; he was ill, he said. He must have thought I’d refuse because I was angry with him since the day he’d come to ask about Sri Lanka and gone off there without me. He went on urging me to come and I made the excuse that there wasn’t a driver around. ‘What about Ringo?’ he asked. Then I heard him cursing in a loud voice: ‘God damn the yellow bastard. He can bring you.’ It usually made me laugh when he cursed Ringo, but not this time. ‘Tomorrow,’ I replied. ‘I’m tired.’ And I put the receiver down. I’d scarcely flung my head back on the couch when the phone rang again. It was Maaz and he was pleading with me. I got up in spite of myself. I thought I knew exactly why he was so insistent, and it was as if just for a moment I missed our times together. I asked him why he didn’t come here; I was tired. Lunch with the owner of the drugstore and his family had been a heavy meal and the drink had flowed in abundance, but he persisted to a degree that was uncharacteristic of him.

  When Fatima opened the door to me, I knew that something was wrong in spite of the broad smile and her kisses on my cheek. ‘Maaz’s ill,’ she said, clasping her hands together then pointing to her head and inclining it to one side. I followed her, still beset by feelings of tiredness. The smell of incense seemed extra powerful that day. We passed through the sitting-room and I couldn’t help noticing the new things: there was a picture on the wall looking like a television screen, depicting slowly changing images. I remembered the present which he’d been promising me since he returned from Sri Lanka. Maaz was in bed in the room which I’d thought would one day become part of my daily life. There was nothing in it but the bed against the wall, a pile of mattresses against the facing wall and a chest. Smoke from the incense rose into the air.

  Maaz was thin, his face was pale, there were mauve circles under his eyes, and his hair was on end. Inclining his head to one side, he accosted me with words that I couldn’t understand. He talked about electricity, lights flashing on and off in his face, a dirty house. Then he spread out his hands in front of me, and made them shake. I was struck by how bad his English was and wondered how I’d understood him before. I must have helped him to express himself and here he was now unable to do it, even with the help of Arabic words and sign language.

  I found myself turning to address Fatima who stood there looking at him and talking about him as if he were a stranger, not her husband. ‘He doesn’t eat. Doesn’t drink coffee, tea. The poor thing has a few crumbs at each meal, and a drop of water to get them down.’

  He seemed like another person to me, unrelated to the Maaz I’d watched in a storm of emotion as he talked to Ringo about the trip to Sri Lanka, while I sat making plans to marry him; the man whom I’d thought of following to the airport, indifferent to the shame, and then even accompanying against his will, when I’d heard that he was travelling without me. Now he was asking me for help, just as he had done when the washing machine didn’t spin the clothes and when the oven didn’t work, only to have me di
scover that they hadn’t pushed the right button or the electricity was cut off that day. ‘Has Maaz seen the doctor?’ I asked Fatima, whose stomach had swollen visibly. She held up two fingers: ‘Twice,’ she replied. Then she disappeared and I asked Maaz, ‘What do you feel, and where does it hurt?’ He didn’t bother to answer but sat up in bed and moved his head about restlessly. When I repeated the question, he answered, ‘Ask Ringo. God damn the yellow bastards. Gog and Magog. They don’t fear God. They’re devils. God preserve me!’ At this point Fatima came back in. All the time she’d been away I’d heard her scolding her youngest child, the boy, in the kitchen. He must have been eating from the dishes she’d got ready for me and wanted to place before me untouched: dishes of pistachio nuts and fruit. I tried to find out what the doctor had said to Maaz, but he was talking again about the light which went off and on, about his face, his head and especially his spine, about the dirty house where there was a big rat, and about the funny-tasting Scotch. Then he stretched out his trembling hands so that I could see the veins protruding on them, put them up to his eyes and began crying like a child. I couldn’t bear to see him crying, and it was made worse by his two daughters crying in the hall and Fatima trying to calm the little boy and to finish what she’d started to say: ‘I swear to God, I said to him don’t go abroad on your own. Take the Qur’an and put it under your pillow. He didn’t listen to me … God forgive him.’ I noticed that the small veins in his temples were standing out and I rose to my feet, saying to Fatima, ‘He must have a doctor.’ Together, Fatima and I helped him up. I noticed a large gold ring on his finger, set with a wine-red stone. To my amazement Maaz couldn’t stand. He leant on my shoulder for a moment, then sank back on to the bed. I asked the name of his doctor and turned to Fatima, saying that I’d contact him. Maaz held out both hands in protest, then bowed his head and kicked out at me with his feet. I couldn’t understand why he was objecting and said to him reassuringly that the doctor would have to come if I spoke to him. But Maaz stopped shouting and said some words which sounded like gibberish to me. Fatima explained, ‘He wants the doctor from your husband’s firm. An American doctor.’ Only then did I realize why he’d asked me to help. I spoke to David, then the doctor, then Ringo, who promised to bring the doctor here. I sat drinking coffee, feeling proud of myself. Nothing was hard for me in this country; it was as if I owned it. To date I’d sold five kitchens; telephone cables led up to our house in three different spots, over other houses and across the desert, because storms had brought them down. The road leading to our house had been surfaced with asphalt where before there had been sand. I got what I wanted either by making telephone calls or by confronting people in person, or through friends. Maaz wiped away his tears with the sleeve of his robe. I noticed his luxurious leather sandals and the suitcase on top of the chest, looking out of place in this room. The doctor came and opened up Maaz’s eyes and peered at the whites. The first thing he asked him was if he was taking any medicaments. I asked Fatima and she hurried away and came back with a little bottle. She gave it to me and stayed outside the room while I went in to give it to the doctor. The bottle contained tranquillizers and the doctor asked Maaz what dose he was on. Fatima replied from outside, ‘Four or five.’ She may have heard me gasping, for she went on, ‘It was him who said he wanted more, so that he’d get better quicker.’ When I translated for the doctor he laughed and said tht he’d had a patient who’d refused an injection in his thigh, saying that the pain and the swelling were in his eye, not his thigh. I left when the doctor said he wanted to examine him, and when Fatima and I went back in later, she remarked, ‘Thank God he’s repented. No more trips abroad.’

  The doctor said he hadn’t found anything wrong with Maaz, except that his nerves were upset; he was to stop taking the tranquillizers and meanwhile the doctor would have some tests carried out on the specimens of blood and urine which he’d taken. Maaz wanted me to stay and I could only leave by slipping out of the room when his attention wandered.

  At dawn the next day the telephone rang again and it was Maaz asking me to fetch the doctor. I told him to wait for the results of the tests and he began to shout at me. He came to me in the afternoon because I hadn’t been to see him, accompanied by one of his neighbours. As I went through the motions of contacting the doctor, I could see Ringo urging Maaz to sit down and the neighbour devouring me with his eyes. Then I heard him telling Maaz that he ought to register with the nearby clinic: everybody returning from the Far East had to be examined, and their wives as well. Maaz held out a hand to silence him: ‘What do you know about it? I’ve got this burning light in my eyes.’ He went on talking, saying things which I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t bear his shouting, the movements he made, the sound of his voice: was he crying, laughing or ranting unintelligibly? I found myself phoning Suha. Agitatedly I asked her to come round, not giving her any scope to invent excuses. When she asked me what was going on, I screamed at her, ‘Please. I can’t explain. Please just come.’ I went into the kitchen and asked Ringo to go and sit with the visitors, and I could hear a renewed burst of shouting from Maaz and the same old cry: ‘Yellow bastards. Gog and Magog.’

  I stayed in the kitchen until I heard the door bell. I’d refused to go in with Scotch for Maaz or for his friend although both Maaz and Ringo were calling out to me, and Ringo had begun to repeat to Maaz that since he’d stopped visiting us the Scotch supplies had been cut off. He was lying: Scotch, gold chains, Persian rugs were all in greater abundance than ever.

  I didn’t understand why Suha was annoyed when she saw Maaz and his friend, even though I explained to her that he was ill. She wouldn’t agree to sit with them and let him tell her what was wrong. She came into the kitchen looking at her watch and saying that she had to contact her husband so that he could send Said for her. But when we heard Maaz calling, we stopped and listened; his calling turned into shouting and I saw Suha laugh. I laughed too and we collapsed together in helpless floods of laughter. His tone was more one of laughter and weeping mixed than of protest. Was he acting? ‘The light shining in my eyes, aah … I put up my hands to my eyes. They pulled them away. The light was like a fire and it shot down my spine, burning me. I cried out, and I heard them laughing. I said, “Forgive me, Lord. Cast the devil out of me as you cast him out of Paradise.” And her black mole. If the whore’s uncle had got rid of the mole, none of this would ever have happened.’ I was waiting for just a sign from Suha and then I thought we’d both begin to laugh again, but this time she ignored me and rose quickly and went into the sitting-room. I heard her asking boldly, ‘Who was she, Maaz? Who was this woman?’ Maaz tried to stand up to greet her but he sank back down again. ‘Madame Suha. There’s a light shining in my eyes. A burning light. It never goes away, even for a second. Aaah. The rat was as big as a chicken. It strutted around and stared me straight in the eyes. I should have guessed from the story of the black mole and escaped with my manhood. But I bought her a diamond like the one in the picture; she talked a lot, pointing to the diamonds and then to her mole. Every time I met her she talked about diamonds and the mole, and she cried, and I didn’t understand. Bit by bit the group she was with made me understand that she wasn’t married yet because of the big mole on her cheek. They said that the family who’d come to betroth her to their son had seen the mole and changed their minds. It was near her eyes and so the tears would flow over it when she cried; they took this as an omen and said that if she married, her husband might die. Her uncle bored into the mole with the thorn and blood came in its place, then a scab which healed up and fell off, leaving the mole where it had always been. And they told me that she wanted to cover it up with a diamond stud so that she could get married. I said I’d marry her and I wasn’t afraid of the mole. On the contrary, I told them, where I came from it was considered a sign of beauty.’

  It was many days before Maaz began to show signs of recovering. I didn’t go back to see him, being content to ask after him on the phone from time to time, un
til one day Fatima invited me and Suha to lunch: she’d slaughtered a sheep to celebrate Maaz’s return to health. Suha agreed to come and arrived with her son, carrying a box of chocolates. I couldn’t stop myself asking her in a challenging manner how she’d found the time to have lunch with Maaz and Fatima when she’d completely given up visiting her friends because she was getting ready to leave the country. She laughed and said, ‘I was bored with everybody. But hearing Maaz tell the story of his illness is quite amusing.’ We went with Said who came into the building with us at Maaz’s request. He took him off into another room, and Suha looked at me and smiled. For the first time Fatima took off her face veil, after Suha had told her that one of her daughters was like Maaz. Fatima looked young, with an innocent expression in her eyes and a beautiful smile, yellow teeth notwithstanding. Her thick black hair hung loose but was sticky with all the oil she put on it. She wore a gold chain around her neck with King George gold sovereigns hanging from it.

  I noticed Suha’s eyes roving over the house. She picked up a red plastic mug, then put it back on the plastic table, which was the colour of a pomegranate. ‘The same colour,’ she commented. Then she asked Fatima about the bunches of grapes made of interlocking metal rings, which were hanging on the partition. Fatima smiled and brought some bunches of plastic grapes and insisted that Suha should take them. I thought she liked them even though she refused them. But when Umar grabbed them and ran off with them, I heard her telling him in English to put the horrible things down. He didn’t stop pestering Suha until she let him ride the huge stuffed camel which had hair like a hedgehog’s spikes and eyes that were two green pearls, and a brown tongue and brown lips. Umar fell off repeatedly, so Fatima brought the two boys a damp wooden stool from the bathroom. They climbed up on it and hurled themselves on the bunches of grapes on the partition, fighting to pull them down; Fatima hung them up somewhere else, and seemed delighted at the uproar, even though Suha and I were scolding our sons vigorously.