Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  I didn’t know that Samer liked his own sex as well until in the course of one of our trips abroad he chose to stay in the hotel rather than come sightseeing with me, and when I met him for lunch Waleed wasn’t with him and I sensed the tension in him. I asked him if someone from home had been in touch with him; even abroad we sought the company of show business people and night club society and we were always scared that word of our wild nights would get back to the desert. He didn’t answer. I asked him where Waleed was and saw his jawbone moving as he clenched his teeth. When Waleed appeared and sat down apologizing, my husband gave him a look which was meant to be between the two of them, but I understood what it meant, as I understood the inquiries, the riddles, the jealousy which followed. He tried to hide his feelings but his face and his nerves gave him away, and gradually I realized how artificial his desire was when he slept with me as it was always connected with his fantasies and most times it subsided half-way through.

  Waleed was quite attractive. I sometimes wished he would press himself against me when we were dancing together. As well as being handsome he was nice, quick-witted, with a never-ending flow of stories and information and jokes about his home country, Morocco. When I found out what was going on between him and Samer, I laughed as I thought of all the women who’d flirted with him or made approaches to him directly, or through me; I wondered if he was like my husband and liked both sexes, and planned to find out.

  I wouldn’t have thought of divorce if Samer hadn’t sent someone to inform me that he’d already divorced me. He was on a naval training course in Belgium and Waleed was with him. Apart from the driver who gave me the certificate of divorce, nobody knew about it, and I was able to take advantage of others’ ignorance by behaving for a time as if I was a married woman and my own mistress.

  I was still thinking about who would come asking to marry me, when I met Saleh’s sister at a wedding. The moment I saw her I reproached myself for letting my thoughts stray so far from Saleh. Apart from the fact that there was an aura of magic surrounding him because of his lifestyle and his constant travel abroad for his work, he was good-looking and an important person in society. I’d begun to realize that I wouldn’t meet anyone else like him. Civilized young men no longer wanted to marry young, nor on the other hand did they abstain. They travelled abroad and went out with girls who were very beautiful and very young, often little more than minors, while the ones who preferred their own sex married and had children for the sake of society, like Samer. I found myself talking to Saleh’s sister most of the time. The happiness on her face was plain to see because I was paying her so much attention. Like the other girls she was curious to get to know me face to face because my flaunting of conventions was much talked about. I wore a green and red abaya, and sometimes covered my face with a heavy black veil and stuck a diamond pin at nose level. When the wedding was over I stopped off at my parents’ house, went straight into my mother’s room and told her that if I didn’t marry Saleh I would never marry at all. I knew how much they wanted me to marry because they couldn’t bear my impetuous behaviour any longer, my artful adaptations of abayas, the night-time gatherings I held, which were attended, it was rumoured, by my brothers’ friends. My mother asked me if his mother or sister had broached the subject with me. I didn’t answer. I began phoning his sister at every opportunity just as I had done with other girls whose brothers I wanted to get to know, in case the brother happened to answer. Saleh never answered and I discovered that he had a place of his own separate from his family so, claiming to be his sister, I called him at work in the Ministry. When I told him my name, he gave me his private number so that I was able to talk to him every day. Eventually we agreed to meet at the home of his married sister; she’d been at the wedding and had looked on discouragingly as I talked to her younger sister.

  I knew that Saleh wanted to marry me. As he said to me one day, I was the bride he’d been searching for: beautiful and educated at the same time. I knew there was more that he didn’t tell me: I was the daughter of a man whose millions grew every time he drew breath. Although there were many like my father, my breeding and ancestry were better established than those of many girls. As I sat opposite him his white robe and headcloth and the rosary between his fingers seemed to give off a cool breeze of freedom, not at all like the stale draught from the air-conditioners, and as it brushed my face I felt invigorated and no longer thought beyond the four walls that contained us. I felt as I watched the brown fingers that life flowed through them and that I ought to cling on to them. They were like the fingers of a giant who held the land about him in thrall. I even felt the power bursting from his car keys when he jingled them in his fingers, as if they were capable of knocking down whole walls and opening buildings up to the outside world. At the same time I began to feel a great longing to move closer to him and take his hand and bury my head against his chest, and I wondered at myself because only moments before I had thought of marriage as a way of being free and gaining access to others.

  There was no question of him taking my hand. He began to talk, telling me that I had to help him. I didn’t understand what he meant; he wasn’t rich like my father but he was a wealthy man all the same. Rather than naming a figure, as I’d expected, he said that like me and other girls here he too lived in a state of frustration, and that the pressure exercised by the society and its traditions was great, but this was our country and we had to put up with it, despite the immense riches which allowed us to wander about the world, to go to countries where there were trees and lakes and where I could wear a low cut dress and walk freely in the street. But was it right to take wealth from one country when your eyes and heart were set on another?

  I shook my head, but as if I was telling him to be quiet. I wanted him to hold me close, or to move closer to him myself. I passed a finger over my lips which had parted in anticipation of his lips touching them, but he went on talking while my urgent desire for him to hold me and kiss me distracted me and I didn’t listen to what he was saying. Eventually he asked me if I was listening and I nodded my head and tried to force myself to, despite my irritation. He reached out a hand towards my neck and I rejoiced, but then he said, ‘That necklace – if your father and generations of your family before him hadn’t struggled against the heat and hunger of the desert you wouldn’t be wearing it now.’ Trying to reassure myself, I answered, ‘But you travel a lot.’ ‘I know,’ he laughed. ‘I’m just trying to explain what I’m like to you, so that you can understand me and help me – when you learn to understand this country of yours and appreciate what it means to live here.’

  3

  The difference between Saleh and me which had drawn me to him began to annoy me and make me on edge, and I became as unyielding as stone. Since our meetings in his sister’s house, before we were married, I had been aware of it, as it became clear that we were there for different reasons: I was waiting for him to take my face in his hands and kiss me and whisper words of love and admiration in my ear; while for him the purpose of our encounters was that we should understand each other’s natures so that we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of our fathers and grandfathers.

  His sister only agreed grudgingly to our meetings, fearful that they would cause a scandal, whether we eventually married or not. I used to phone him constantly as well, something he was unused to, and was never going to grow used to. When I asked him why he was so short on the phone he made a joke of it and said he wasn’t alone in the room; and when he asked me in turn why I so much enjoyed telephone conversations I didn’t know what to reply because it was true that I loved talking on the phone, and every time our conversations seemed to be tailing off I tried to inject new life into them, even inventing bits of news to reawaken his curiosity, or provoking jealousy in him by the way I talked. I remember especially when a famous Italian designer came to make my wedding dress; this man lost patience with me because I couldn’t keep appointments however hard I tried, and once, pretending to make a joke of it,
he remarked that perhaps the weight of the diamonds in my watch had made it stop. The version I told Saleh later was that the designer had suggested that I shouldn’t wear my diamond choker in case its sparkle distracted attention from the beauty of my breasts. Instead of being jealous, Saleh upbraided me for letting the designer speak so uninhibitedly to me. When I suggested that he was reacting this way out of jealousy he denied it and said nothing more, as if he wanted the subject to be closed.

  Less than a month after our wedding I began to feel restless. The happiness and the hustle and bustle seemed to vanish upon our return to the desert, and Saleh began to get up at nine in the morning and wanted me to get up with him so that we could have breakfast together. I did it once but the following day I protested that I was tired and stayed in bed. That night Saleh didn’t want us to stay up after midnight but I wouldn’t sleep. He reminded me of how tired I’d been that morning, and I joked that he would make me forget that I was from a family of Draculas. Despite my efforts I never managed to get up till noon or a little afterwards, when he came back from work to have lunch. He continued to insist that I must get up in the morning and when I asked him what the urgency was, he replied, ‘What about the house?’ and I laughed and said sarcastically, ‘What about the servants?’ ‘What’s the use of a crew if the ship has no captain?’ he returned.

  On one particular evening our visitors departed early because Saleh had said a pointed farewell to them even while I was begging them to stay. Boiling with rage I went back into the room: ‘How can you drive them out like that?’ I shouted at him. Without looking up from his book, he answered that they were spongers, a flock of sheep moving from house to house to be fed, held in submission by the videos and funny stories. ‘I thought you enjoyed yourself with them,’ I said challengingly. He marked his place with a bookmark and shut the book. I found myself thinking that the division between us really was vast, not because I didn’t read books but because it would never occur to me to use a bookmark. Then he said in an affectionate tone, ‘Nur. Come here. I want to talk to you.’ Putting an arm round me he told me he loved staying up with them once or twice a week, but said that we shouldn’t use them to fill up our spare time. ‘How should we spend our evenings then?’ I demanded. ‘With one another, or are you bored with me?’ Then he added, ‘With one another, or with normal people.’ ‘With one another?’ I thought to myself. ‘That means him reading or watching films that I don’t like, or practising tennis or training on his exercise machines. And normal people means businessmen and embassy staff and their wives.’ However hard I tried, I could never think of anything to say to their wives.

  Then Saleh began asking me like a school teacher if I’d read the newspapers and whether I’d liked the books he’d brought me to read. He began urging me to continue my education and enrol in a university, or even do a correspondence course. Anything rather than wasting my time sleeping or talking to friends whom he described as unfortunate because of their lack of intelligence.

  I didn’t show the faintest desire to listen to what he was saying, and at midnight he went to bed, while I began pleading with a servant or a guest or a relation to stay up with me into the small hours.

  These differences vanished during the holidays. He no longer said my English was awful because I’d picked it up haphazardly from foreign nannies and acquaintances, or criticized me because my only interest, according to him, was a single-minded study of the goods produced by modern industry for the consumption of the rich, such as yachts and sun beds. Instead he seemed proud of me as we moved around together in our yacht or our private plane between the chalet in Switzerland, the Paris flat and the house in a London suburb. We spent the time sailing the yacht and lying on beaches which we had almost to ourselves, and in winter wore skiing clothes, although I didn’t keep up with my lessons because it was always nearly sunset by the time I was ready. Still the weather and the people and their talk and laughter aroused a mood of happiness and enjoyment in me wherever we were. I quickly forgot that I’d been annoyed with him for trying to make me learn to read the compass while the white yacht ploughed through the Mediterranean; or for urging me to learn to ski and get out in the open and move at speed over the great expanses of whiteness. As soon as the holidays ended and we returned to the desert the old resentment returned too. When I asked him why we only came close to one another on holiday he answered that he liked life without work or responsibility for a while but my problem was that I wanted it to be like that all the time; of course he traced the causes back to my upbringing, as he did with all my behaviour. His continual criticism of me, even over stupid things, surprised me more and more. I remember how upset he seemed that I didn’t call back as soon as I heard that someone had called me. When I blamed the servants he said it was my fault because I didn’t encourage them to tell me.

  One day Sally the American, the daughter of a friend of my father’s, came to the desert to attend my brother’s wedding. She tried to phone me more than twenty times, and as usual I knew about some of the calls and didn’t pay much attention. Then Saleh happened to answer and she was on the other end apologizing because she was leaving the next day and hadn’t seen me. Looking at me angrily he told her that he’d come and pick her up straightaway, and with one more furious glance at me he was off. His behaviour didn’t surprise me and although I was jealous I felt relieved that he was the same as all the rest, and wanted to get to know foreign women. Sally came back with him apologizing, as if she was quite sure that I couldn’t have known about her calls. I replied coldly that Mother Kaukab didn’t understand English, and Sally said in some confusion that she’d asked the servants at my parents’ house – where she was staying – to make the calls.

  Then she turned to talk to Saleh about the time she and I had spent together in the United States when my father had left me with her and her family and they’d taken me over most of California, from Disneyland to Universal Studios. She talked enthusiastically and seemed to have captivated Saleh, as if my dress and the way my hair was done no longer mattered. Then their conversation took off beyond the table where the three of us were sitting and away from anything that I knew about or was interested in. She began to talk about her work: she was one of the people who wrote speeches for the American president; then she switched to talking about her father’s club and I pricked up my ears and thought that here was my chance to make them listen to me and look in my direction since I knew most of the internationally famous clubs. But a cloud of dullness descended on the conversation once more when I heard that the club was only for men and that their activities didn’t go beyond delivering speeches. Then he asked what university she’d graduated from and when she told him the name of some university he laughed and asked if she knew Candice F. She didn’t, but she’d heard of her because she was president of one of the graduate societies. He hesitated a little, put his hand on mine and said, ‘With Nur’s permission,’ then proceeded to tell us that he’d promised to marry Candice when he’d said goodbye to her after his graduation. But as soon as he’d arrived back in the desert he’d found that he couldn’t begin to imagine her wandering about the house, or sitting at his side in the car or talking in sign language to the other women; the thought of her light-coloured hair, her unrestrained way of talking without regard to time or place, seemed absurd in this setting.