6
The doorbell of the flat rang early one morning (I’d moved into my father’s flat by this time). Before I could close my eyes again, Mother Kaukab came in to wake me, saying that a man from our country was asking to see me and insisting on waking me up although she’d told him that I was still asleep and that I’d gone to bed late. Many thoughts came to me but I didn’t guess the reason until he showed me a piece of headed paper from Saleh’s office, signed by Saleh. The letter, written in a dry official tone, said that I must leave for home that morning.
I thought immediately of contacting Saleh, but changed my mind, and wondered about my family. All of them must have heard what was going on by now. I looked at the man and said, ‘But I haven’t finished doing all I’ve got to do – I’ve still got an appointment at the doctor’s.’ ‘I really don’t know …’ The man’s voice tailed away and he shrugged politely.
I said nothing more, and went back into my room to pack, but I was overwhelmed by a powerful sensation that I’d only just arrived from the desert and was really unpacking. The long nights of laughter had suddenly vanished, and my heart began to pound, but I shrugged my shoulders, pretending not to mind, and told myself that I was luckier than many. My cousin had opened his eyes one morning to find himself in his house in the desert, when the last thing he remembered was going to bed in a Hong Kong hotel. The papers wrote of the fantastic amounts which he’d lost in a casino in Hong Kong, and the dud cheques he’d signed. And there was a friend of my brother’s who’d been put on the first plane to the desert in handcuffs after his family had discovered that he was a drug addict.
Although the man stayed in the hall I felt as if he’d bound my hands and feet and blindfolded me. A car stood waiting at the entrance to the building and he opened the door for me and stood waiting by it while the driver and another man went up to fetch my cases and bags. I didn’t feel free of the oppressive weight of his presence until I’d gone aboard Saleh’s private plane. Mother Kaukab turned to me and said, ‘Saleh must have missed you. Yesterday he phoned three times and I told him you were having dinner with the Queen’s daughter. He said hasn’t she had dinner with the Queen yet, but I told him Nur’s young and she wouldn’t have anything to say to old women …’ Then she went on, ‘Saleh’s fame and prestige have reached London.’
In circumstances roughly similar to these I’d returned from the private school in Cairo: everyone in the plane could hear my whispering and crying the whole journey and see my blood-red eyes and my abaya flying through the air, followed by shrieks of protest. The man accompanying me on that occasion had been an employee of my father’s, and although I was so young I’d promised myself that I would marry with all speed. I remember that the moment my companion went to the toilet I signalled to the foreigner beside me to order me a whisky and pour it into the glass of Pepsi Cola which I already had in front of me.
All through the flight I repeated to myself that Saleh was behind all this, that he must want to divorce me, but why hadn’t he said so openly? When we landed, everything seemed normal. Saleh was waiting for me and he didn’t confront me then or later. The idea of his doing so was absurd anyway, not just because men had had all the rights since the time of our fathers and grandfathers, but because there was much to be feared from a confrontation: if the sounds of our voices reached beyond the house walls, I would be removed from the family’s sphere of influence and denied its protection. Saleh didn’t divorce me, although he hinted to me that I could ask for a divorce if I wanted to. He was fearful for his honour and self-respect in the face of my family and society. Then shortly afterwards I found out that I’d lost my passport. It was the one thing that I guarded carefully, holding on to it as if I needed it to live, like oxygen. I’d learnt its shape and colour and number by heart. It was also the one thing which I kept hidden, wrapped in a plastic bag in a metal strong-box, while I forgot about my jewels and left them lying among the lip pencils and nail varnish and creams. It wasn’t in Saleh’s drawer, nor in his parents’ house, not even in his office drawer. I secretly enlisted one of the people who worked for my father to help me in my search, thinking that it must be in Saleh’s briefcase which he carried with him from place to place, but my emissary opened the case and didn’t find it.
The only way was to make it up with Saleh and get him back. But it appeared that he’d cut me out of his life, and he no longer even visited the house since I’d tried to provoke him to argue with me. Instead he began sending for Ghada to spend a few days with him whenever he returned from abroad. Each time I asked him for my passport, he stalled and said I was still his wife and he wouldn’t let me travel, but I didn’t give in to him and ask for a divorce. He couldn’t marry a second wife because I’d made that a condition of our marriage and the sheikh had repeated it during the formal signing of the contract which Saleh had attended with my father and the rest of the men, while I and my mother and the women had waited in another reception room: ‘Nur … stipulates that Saleh … will not take another wife while he is married to her, as she fears this would result in her being wrongfully treated, and she has no defect or fault which would make living with her difficult; just as the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, stipulated that Ali should take no other wife besides Fatima, fearing that she would be wrongfully treated.’
I didn’t want a divorce until I’d found another husband, since I was still enjoying the big house, the servants, the money to spend, and my freedom, even though I was barred from the skies and bound to the expanses of the desert. The rich needed money more than the poor, not only to preserve their standard of living but to improve it, for there were a lot of rich people and great rivalry existed between them, the men, the women and even the children. I asked Mother Kaukab and her friends to look around for a suitable husband for a friend of mine. Mother Kaukab guessed what I was up to and didn’t comment. In no time she produced names and descriptions of possible suitors; among them was al-Sayrafi, an old man with two front teeth made of diamonds who swore that if I accepted him my dowry would be my weight in sheets of gold, but he was fanatical in his passions and would be jealous even of the breeze; another man wanted a second wife because his first wife had grown old, and he was blessed with plenty of money and wanted to enjoy someone younger and more beautiful. ‘He follows where his heart leads,’ remarked Mother Kaukab, ‘and God created the heart.’
‘We all act in accordance with our hearts’ desires,’ added another woman.
But I knew that this man lived by himself with his family all in separate houses round about him!
Mother Kaukab didn’t know what had happened between me and Saleh; not even my family knew, and Mother Kaukab was convinced that he was like the rest of the men here and all that was wrong was that he neglected me and enjoyed himself when he was abroad; she assumed that I wanted someone richer or more generous and made unfavourable comparisons between our house and some of the palaces, or the houses with marble walls, and her lip curled with displeasure. Once I asked her, ‘What about the private plane and the yacht?’ And she answered, ‘I know, but real wealth is on land, not in the skies or on the seas.’ In any case she thought Saleh was mean because she’d often heard him telling the servants off for not closing the packet of tea properly, or complaining when he went into the garden to inspect the newly-planted trees and found that the water had overflowed on to the gravel and washed it away. I asked her about Fadl’s son who’d been divorced for some time but she said, ‘He’s not good enough for you. They say there’s singing coming from his house and his car night and day, and you know how the sound of drums does queer things to the brain, and you’ll find the Devil behind those drums and tambourines.’
With every new day that came I realized that Suha was further from my mind; and one day I found myself thinking that this day was going to go by just like the one before, and I didn’t want to spend the evening by myself. I phoned my sister-in-law and she told me that the party that evening wasn’t to be missed
because my brother had discovered some young man in the Turkish restaurant.
That night I set off after I’d put on a dress that sparkled, and pinned up my hair with shiny pins so that I looked as if I’d come straight from Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps the smell of my perfume was very powerful because Mother Kaukab called to me from her room, ‘Wearing perfume, my precious Nur, is a kind of adultery. A man smells it and his spirit is aroused.’ ‘If only you were right,’ I thought of saying to her. I wanted to be the most attractive woman there, as I always used to be. The other women, and their clothes and jewellery and hairstyles, had walked through my imagination, and I was especially conscious of the fact that they would still be going abroad while I was dependent on my mother’s taste, and magazines, and whatever the Italian designer chose to send me.
The young Turk was at the party, answering the questions that cascaded down on him from all sides. Everybody, including me, choked with laughter at the plain straightforward way he did it, especially when he told us the story of how his father was put in prison because he loved his cow. ‘The moon was rising, the breeze was fresh and cool,’ said the father to the judge. ‘It wasn’t my fault. My heart fluttered, and my cow is beautiful …’ After a little while I grew restless and began looking at the faces around me. Old familiar faces with nothing in them that aroused my curiosity; even when it was said that the Lebanese comic had finally been granted a visa to come to the desert, I couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm. I had to have a different atmosphere, different people. I asked the driver to take me to my parents’ house. My mother and father were out for the evening. I sat down on the sofa and leant my head back, and the next thing I knew was my mother shaking me by the shoulders, asking me why I hadn’t come that afternoon. Then she called to her maid to fetch her the big suitcase. It was full of clothes, all punk style just like I’d asked her to get me, with the right shoes and accessories and coloured hair spray. I began to try them on and stared at my face in the mirror. Not a single spot or line marred its purity, even though my nights merged into my days and I was assailed by heat and cold and lack of sleep; though pills to put me to sleep and pills to wake me up fought each other down my throat, and my body was on display to both sexes like a shirt on the washing line, in frantic motion or quiet and still, depending on which way the wind blew.
Epilogue – Suha
I marked the sixteenth of June, the date of my departure, with lipstick on the wall calendar. I was so worked up about it I couldn’t concentrate on packing my cases. Would I not regret this step when faced with the security situation in Lebanon, living temporarily with my mother, the separation from Basem and the effect of this on Umar? But my tension slipped away from me when I got into the car, and Said took me along the bumpy unmade roads and the broad asphalted streets bound by high walls. I asked myself and the monotonous desert, ‘Have I ever been into those houses? Do I know that woman?’ Of course. Her house passed through my mind: the brass coffee jugs and those reddish brass ashtrays which had become a trademark of all the houses here. How had I been able to put up with listening to their conversation, thought of inviting them to my house, or remembered engagements with them with some interest and enthusiasm?
One afternoon after I’d decided to leave I’d been obliged to visit Ingrid, since she’d come in person to invite me. When I came out of the house hundreds of migrating birds with blue bellies and orange wings were passing overhead through the desert air then disappearing as if consumed by fire. The grass was dying in Ingrid’s garden; the new crop of sunflowers was thrusting its way upwards while the seeds of the old ones were dropping and their yellow petals fading.
Ingrid was crying; she hadn’t been able to buy her mother a present for Mother’s Day; the prayer times had changed with the sunset and the shops were closed. Myra was sitting sadly waiting for someone to ask her what was wrong so that she could tell them about the man who’d tried to attack her while she was hanging out the washing: ‘… he had a cap embroidered with gold and silver and coloured stones, and a patterned shawl over his shoulders; he was wearing trousers and a loose mauve cotton jacket, and on his feet he wore gold sandals that turned up at the front like the ones the genie wears in Aladdin.‘ She’d struggled with him and got him off her, then rushed in locking the door behind her. He’d tried to force it and she’d dragged sofas across and piled them up against the door. She’d sat on her own refusing to open the door for hours even though she’d been able to hear the voices of her husband and daughter outside. Ingrid interrupted her saying that she’d been hoeing her garden once when she’d caught sight of a man’s feet. She’d known from his sandals that he’d come to rape her. She’d reached for the garden shears before standing up to confront him, only to find that the man was Said bringing a dish of tabbouleh from me. Maryam asked if the man who threw acid at the pretty blonde Syrian girl’s dress was trying to burn it so that he could see her legs or was making a religious protest.
I was far away from them, and my heart beat with fear at the prospect of staying, when I thought of how mine and Umar’s passport had been returned every time Basem had sent it to get an exit visa, because the new stamps weren’t ready yet; planes bringing passengers in were making the return journey empty.
The boxes and cases were ready at the door. I went up on to the roof to make sure that Umar hadn’t left anything. The pigeons’ houses were empty, seed scattering the ground; the dishes of water had changed colour in the air and a thick layer of dust lay on the surface of them. I stood at the roof parapet exactly as I’d always done while Umar was riding his bike. I stretched up to look at the road and Umar said, ‘You always do that,’ and asked me what I could see.
At that moment as I looked down I seemed to see nothing, and I felt regret building up inside me because I’d lived here for so long. So long, and yet the passing time hadn’t left many traces: a few little grey and white hairs buried in the thick mass of my dark hair, a few wrinkles round my eyes and on my forehead. I compared myself to the empty cover of a once full book of cinema tickets: the leaves torn off and handed out through the ticket-office window were the times I had wasted at tea parties and coffee mornings, or bouncing around on the back seat of the car feeling chilled by the air-conditioner, then stifled when Said turned it off and the car grew fetid like a packed and airless railway carriage on a long journey; or the years I had spent revolving in a circle of people who didn’t change from one day to the next as if they’d been put in a pot with a tightly-fitting lid and drew life from the steam which rose within the confines of the pot, breathing in only their own heat, while a low fire burnt underneath them.
Umar said to me, ‘Your skirt’s rustling. You must have some chewing gum or chocolate.’
‘If only I had, darling,’ and I pulled out a lot of bits of paper with addresses written on them. I tore them up into tiny pieces and dropped them on the floor. ‘Why did you tear them up, Mama?’
‘We’re not going to see anyone from here ever again.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re addresses.’
He asked insistently, and with some heat, ‘Do you mean we won’t see Sitt Wafa again, or her rooster?’ ‘Definitely not,’ I thought, but I said, smoothing his hair, ‘Her family lives in Lebanon so when we go and visit them we might see her.’
Recently Sitt Wafa had begun to take the broom with her whenever she went into the garden and beat the rooster with it so that he was knocked senseless for a few minutes while she put down the seed and water and collected the eggs. At the end of the month I’d gone to settle up with her and heard her talking about the rooster: ‘It’s got very mean,’ she was saying to a friend of hers.
‘Slaughter it,’ said her friend, ‘and stuff it with rice and pine nuts. Bless its heart, it’s huge, it might not fit in the oven!’
‘No, Sitt Wafa, you mustn’t!’ shouted Umar.
Sitt Wafa said calmly, ‘But you like to raise rabbits and birds, Umar. Why are you so angry?’ Her frie
nd responded with a slurping noise: ‘Ah, rabbits! How good they are and so tender, especially the little ones. You roast them and smother them in lemon and garlic. It’s a meal you won’t forget.’
I got up in the morning still tired; I hadn’t slept well and hadn’t been in the mood for Basem’s kisses because I was in a flurry of happiness mixed with tension and apprehension about the journey. I looked down at the bed; in my imagintion I saw Nur climbing over the wall of my house. As we went along in the car later I stared long and hard out at the town that I would never see after today; I knew this although I’d actually agreed with Basem that Umar and I would visit him once between his visits to us in Lebanon. As if I had just arrived I noticed the walls: every house had a different wall, made of marble, cement, natural stone like the stone you see in the mountains; tiles, factory-made stones, patterned and plain; there was a wall that took the form of a series of arches, so high that only the water storage tank was visible. New young branches were tied to one wall to give them support; electricity cables and telephone cables dangled down from another: no building, nothing in this place, was ever completely finished. The walls were high; the newer they were, the higher they seemed to be. Some were beautiful colours, as if they belonged to calm and tranquil houses. I remarked to Basem, ‘Do you know what annoyed me most here?’ ‘Nur? Suzanne? Tamr?’ ‘No. The walls, constricting everybody.’
Women of Sand and Myrrh Page 28
