After downing five murky mint teas, I dragged my suitcase back to the hotel. “I knew that you were going to miss this place,” says Kamal. This has to be the classic joke reserved for all the customers who fail to leave. All I could say was, ‘and where else am I supposed to go Kamal…’ Fear is a miserable prison house. Like a ghost I slink back into my room. Locking the door I pop a sleeping pill and plop down on the bed. I sleep until night and then right through till the morning. Finally I get up and head down to the courtyard without a thought in my head. I take my luggage with me. I suppose I’m planning to go somewhere. Or so it seems when I have a look at myself in the mirror. I hear Maryam’s voice above me – is she shouting or throwing up? Strange noises echo through the courtyard. Maryam can really drink; her stomach must be a wreck. Kamal sits me down in the courtyard and makes me a coffee. I sip my coffee through tears. “I’m going to give Maryam Hanım the news,” says Kamal. He disappears. Vacantly I look around, unable to recognize anything, the names not coming to mind. My thoughts slip underwater and there is a deep hum in the base of my ear. I vaguely sense time is passing. So alone in the courtyard I could hardly sense the sinking feeling when the front door loudly swings open. Amira comes running in. Startled like a baby zebra who has woken up to find she’s in a zoo. Breathlessly she says, “We need to go!”
She takes me by the arms. Without thinking about asking me why I’m sitting there. Trying to catch her breath, she’s whispering and shouting at the same time:
“I … I think I killed someone!”
With a swollen face, Maryam appears at the door:
“What? Who?”
Openly taking refuge in Maryam for the first time, Amira pleads, “Let’s go. Please, let’s get out of here right away! Now!”
I’m holding a cup of coffee and my suitcase is at my feet. Our faces turn red like beets; the three of us are transfixed. The entire city could probably hear Amira’s breath echoing through the courtyard. Planting her hands on her hips, she looks at me, desperately waiting for an answer. I… And it just happens. There are times when such strange things happen that it feels like I’m watching a film and not really living. Watching with a numb fascination, waiting to see what I’m going to say. Waiting to see if I’ll get up and go. Minutes pass, or so I think, I can’t say. With a voice as deep as a dungeon, Maryam says to Kamal, “Kamal, go and tell Madam Lilla we’re ready. But tell her we need to leave straightaway! Get our bills ready as well! Now!”
Kamal’s even more prepared than I am. It is like I am the only one who has come to the scene without reading through my lines. Still holding my coffee, I’m watching. Now Maryam takes me by the arm.
“Look at me! Are you in some kind of shock? If so then snap out of it! Hey, is anyone there?”
Her face buried in Maryam’s shoulder, Amira says, “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” then she mumbles something else I can’t understand. She starts rattling something off in Arabic. For some reason it reminds me of an old couple that started speaking Kurdish with each other after a break of forty years when the big earthquake hit Istanbul in 1999. I drift off into that world. I imagine their children shocked to hear them and their own shock. I wonder if they forgot how to speak Kurdish simply because they hadn’t spoken it for so long. What was the first thing they said to each other? I wonder if I’d forget my Turkish if I was always on the run. All I want to do is get out of this moment, be anywhere else; I’d even welcome an earthquake for the chance to run away. I am about to open my mouth, about to say something like, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to go back home. I was scared.’ Why I can’t put down this cup of coffee, I have no idea. Maryam pulls out a cigarette and stuffs it between my lips.
“Look at me! We’re leaving. I … I mean Amira needs to go. So we’re going too. Do you hear me? Look at me! Hey! Seeing as you’re still here you’re coming with us.”
If I could only open my mouth I’d ask, “But why are you going?”
In bits and spurts Amira is giving Maryam the story and occasionally I can make out the word ‘hamam’ and ‘bride’ then ‘but me’ and then a string of curses, and then something – and did she really say this – ‘Michael Jackson’. I can’t piece together all the fragments. I feel ashamed and frustrated with myself but there is nothing that I can do. Slowly Maryam takes the coffee out of my hand and puts it down on the table. “You wait here,” she says. She’s just about to let go of my hand when – and this isn’t really me because I am watching myself moving in a film – I reach out and take her arm. “Maryam,” I say in a cracked voice, “I think I’m homeless.” As tears roll down my cheeks, she caresses my face and says, “So am I. Don’t worry.” In my mind’s eye Maryam’s stomach – which was hardly a stomach at all – seemed so big we could have all hidden inside.
When had we become so close? Who are these two women? And what was Madam Lilla to us? Shouldn’t a camera now pan out to show a speaker who steps in from stage right and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, this has all been nothing but a pack of lies?”
Kamal comes racing back while everyone struggles to keep the show moving along. From the entrance, he cries out, “Madam Lilla is ready. She told me you should meet her outside the hotel in half an hour.”
Amira scrambles up to her room on the first floor with Maryam at her heels. I pick up my coffee. It feels like nothing is really happening to me. The characters in the film have left and I’m alone in the courtyard. None of this has happened. I look at the jasmine then up at the sky. A heavy silence. Light should have sound. Otherwise we wouldn’t hear mosquitoes so clearly in the dark. Light must have mass. Otherwise making love in the dark wouldn’t seem so vast. If we put a stop to the excessive compassion we feel for swallows and ants. Though both are truly aggravating predatory creatures… All these thoughts are banging about in my head when suddenly ‘Boom!’ A seagull falls into the middle of the courtyard. Blood splashes all over my face. I scream, “Maryaaaaam! Amiraaaaaa!”
When seagull blood splashes over your face you’d better trust the people who first spring to mind.
Strange. I am not the one screaming, it is the I in the film. I am actually thinking of something else. I have always wondered where all the dead gulls go. I am split in two. And it seems one part of me has no qualms about heading out on some strange trip. For I am nothing more than a watching eye.
Amira comes downstairs wearing a yellow wig. How ridiculous, I think to myself. If only I can move my face I might even laugh. As Eyüp Bey keeps the car moving at a hundred and forty kilometres per hour, I keep loudly telling myself this isn’t a movie. I am not moving at all.
9
“But I actually didn’t do anything. That girl, I mean the bride, was asking for it. I didn’t do anything.”
Madness swirling in her eyes and her yellow wig now tilted from the bumpy ride, Amira is about to tell us what happened. Maryam is trying to calm her down. Madam Lilla is wearing a lilac-coloured headscarf and Eyüp Bey sits at the wheel dressed in his finest duds. Madam Lilla looks as cool as a wealthy leading lady in a love film set in 1950s Morocco. When elderly women hit the road in these parts they don’t wear tracksuits like they do back home; they have the right respect for a journey and whatever might crop up along the way. Apparently I am also in the car. Maryam finally manages to calm Amira, who gets herself together enough to start telling the story.
“You remember the girls we saw in the hamam… I don’t know why but they asked me to come back. One of them was getting married. Maybe they wanted to flaunt it in my face, maybe they wanted to get revenge… Anyway, they were going to have a party for the bride in the hamam. They were all there and I was cool with it. Just a lot of giggling and laughing. Everything was normal. It was just a job for me and that means money. So I couldn’t care less what they were really thinking. They were talking about all sorts of things. The bride was supposedly going into politics – you’d think she was Joan of Arc – it was that over the top. ‘For our country, for Tunisia’, and all
that kind of crap. They say they are proud to be Tunisian, that it was already high time for a revolution. That they saw it coming. But then they go on about the Islamists and all that… Honestly I was trying not to listen. In the end it was time for me to dance. My head was somewhere else. I mean that’s just how I was feeling. But then when they started acting like they were the other day, as if they’d grown up somewhere else and suddenly found themselves in Tunisia … but even then I didn’t let it get to me, I kept calm. They were in their bikinis and all that and for a while we danced along to music. The bride was this little pipsqueak. Wouldn’t you know she says, ‘in honour of Michael Jackson’. And then they were all up on their feet, singing something from Michael Jackson. And then the girl says to me, ‘seems like you don’t really know these tunes.’ And they all laughed. So I said, ‘come on then, let me teach you sweeties the moonwalk.’ No, wait up, no, just a minute, I didn’t say ‘sweeties’. I couldn’t have said that.”
“Just tell us the story. What happened next?”
“Then I go out into the middle. To the centre stone. And I start moonwalking. Giggling, they all give it a go. But they can’t do it and then they start really laughing. Then I suppose the bride has got to show me how it’s done and she says, ‘You might have slept with everyone, Miss Dance, but you can’t do a real moonwalk,’ and she throws herself in the middle. And when she steps up on the stone…”
Amira stops and Maryam goes berserk. “And! Say something Amira!”
“Boom, she falls down and dies.”
“Huh?”
“She just died. Broke her neck and bang she was dead.”
“What?”
At the top of her lungs, Amira stamped out each syllable. “I am saying that the bride is dead!”
Silence in the car. Lowering her voice, she adds, “I didn’t do anything. Really.”
Maryam covers her face and tugs on her cheeks like she can’t breathe. She closes her lips like she might throw up. Eyüp Bey seems deaf; there isn’t the slightest twitch on his face to show he’s registered anything. Madam Lilla looks unfazed. And me, well I’m not even there.
Maryam says, “Let’s think about this.” And she’s lost in thought. “Alright,” she says, “did you touch the girl at all?”
“I didn’t push her.”
“I’m not asking you if you pushed her,” snaps Maryam. “But did you touch her?” Amira is silent. Maryam claps her hands: “Okay. We’re up shit creek!”
“But they can’t prove anything,” says Amira, panicking.
“If they can’t prove anything then why are we running away, Amira Hanım?”
Her voice a notch louder, Amira says: “I’m the one running away. Why are you coming with me, Maryam Hanım?”
Silence. I don’t know when they had officially formed their coalition but the two of them turned and looked at me as if I was a penguin who had just taken flight. I kept quiet, thinking about when I might be able to get out of the car. If I could only open my mouth and speak. Whatever the expression on my face is, it isn’t encouraging either of them to ask me why I gave up on leaving the country. A pregnant silence. We’re about to leave Tunis when Maryam crosses her arms and takes it upon herself to ask, “Just where are we going, Madam Lilla?”
As if woken from her beauty sleep at just the right time, she cheerfully replies:
“We’re heading south!”
“How far south?”
“Way down south.”
Maryam looks at both of us. Amira is gazing out the window like she has every intention of going way down south. Maryam looks at me and I can hear her whispering to herself, “Once there were two crazies and now there are three. Oh God, give us patience. Oh Lord.”
As if Amira had not killed a bride and Maryam was not a bald bundle of nerves and I was not mute and we had never actually met each other, Madam Lilla said in a tone of voice that defied reality, “Don’t worry about it. We won’t cross the border at night. We’ll stop somewhere and sleep for a few hours and cross in the morning.”
With her forefinger between her lips, her elbow against the window, Amira seemed to have surrendered to fate as if her sole saviour was a woman living in a fantasy world and she asked, “What border?”
“You mean Libya, Madam Lilla?” asked Maryam, in a brittle and sarcastic tone.
“Oh yes! Libya. Once we get there everything else is easy.”
“Madam Lilla, are you out of your mind?” said Maryam. She had leaned close to her, put her hand on her shoulder and posed the question in a cool and collected tone of voice with the intention of getting a real answer. Mirroring the same cool tone, Madam Lilla pinned Maryam to the spot.
“Not crazy enough to kill a bride in a hamam, young mademoiselle!” Bound to Amira’s fate, Maryam kept quiet even though she had no doubt that all the signs indicated this adventure was going to leave us somewhere near the end of the world.
“War?” said Amira to Madam Lilla.
As if she wasn’t driving south along bumpy Tunisian roads but racing straight back to her youth, Madam Lilla came out with a line right out of a film. “Well that’s why there’s absolutely nothing to worry about!”
Wildly cursing Maryam spoke of all the atrocities of a sexual nature that would befall three women travelling through a desert. But Madam Lilla wasn’t hearing any of it. Maryam stopped to apologize to Eyüp Bey for the bad language. He looked cracked and broken. I thought it was a good thing that we were driving on the right side of the road, made perfect sense as our driver was blind in his left eye. We were blasting along but the blank expression on Eyüp’s face made you think the car was moving on its own. I don’t know how far we had gone when I saw the sign for Sfax, which meant we were halfway to the border. I was struggling to rally my voice to say, “There’s an airport in this town, right? You can drop me off there.” Mustering the will to push a pebble up a mountain, I finally got a sentence out. “I’m getting out. At the airport.”
Screech! Eyüp Bey had stopped at five minutes to death o’clock. As I struggled to figure out how my scant announcement had created such a stir, Eyüp Bey was already out on the street, flinging open the boot and slamming it shut before he came back and started driving as if nothing had happened. Gently he said, “I was checking to see if we had the covers.” And with that we were back on our way. As I was trying to figure out if he’d heard me a minute ago or if I hadn’t said anything at all, Maryam said: “I’m coming with you.” Bouncing in her seat, Amira said, “If you were just going to leave then why did you even come? And why didn’t you leave before?”
“I was going to go,” I said, “but they were throwing journalists in prison…” And suddenly Madam Lilla says, “Let’s stop here.” And we did. We got out of the car. It was all desert beyond Sfax. I saw an eagle circling in the sky. It wasn’t the wind we heard but the whoosh of its wings. Her chiffon scarf draped over her shoulders, Lilla took a deep breath.
“Oh, how I have missed the desert. There’s an old saying: ‘Drink from the desert waters and you’ll find yourself back in the desert.’ You don’t know it now, but you’ll be back, too.”
We stood there in the middle of the desert under the burning sun, the shimmering sand rising to meet the sky. The eagle was directly above us now, swirling in smaller circles. Except for Eyüp Bey, we all looked up and watched it for a while. Madam Lilla turned and looked at us as if we were her daughters, as if we were about to go our separate ways… Then in a worldly voice that clashed with the beauty of the desert, she said, “From here on we might not have a mobile signal. So call anyone you need to call.”
We paused. Amira flashed an evil smile. Maryam fixed her piercing eyes on Madam Lilla as if to say, ‘you shouldn’t have done it, Mum.’ Neither was even moving anymore. Only standing in the middle of the desert. Madam Lilla kept quiet, playing with the expected silence to ratchet up the tension. I was the only one who moved through the dream space as I pulled out my phone. Once I had it in my hand it beeped t
o announce a new message like an accursed sign. I read it and sat down. The eagle flapped its wings. Taking my phone, Maryam read the message.
“What does it say,” she asked.
“Don’t come.”
“Why?” asked Amira.
“I told you, they’re throwing journalists in jail.” I am still barely getting words out but I am slowly coming to my senses.
“And what does that have to do with you?” asks Maryam.
“Nothing,” I say, “but they could pick me up if they wanted to, they are taking anyone in the opposition.”
“If there’s nothing directly to do with you then why are you scared,” asks Maryam. Amira adds, “yeah, why?” For a moment I just look at them. The two of them are pushing this too far. It seems that if we all jump back in the car it will be for my sake, like we are all running away for me, and that way everything would seem more justified, more reasonable, more meaningful. I feel like I am deep under water. And from the bottom I can hear them, and a little higher I can understand them, and even higher I can imagine us setting off together but then higher we are not going at all and just near the surface I am speaking.
“Should I be scared or not? That’s just why I am scared,” I say. Maryam scuffs a couple times at the sand. Sitting down beside me, Amira puts her arm around my shoulder and with her other hand over her mouth she gazes into the distance. Maryam is standing silently over us. She bumps me with her knee and then Amira. We are the last three sea bass on the counter of a fishmonger whose throat is dry. No one wants us. In the sky the eagle is circling south.
I really wanted to know how Madam Lilla knew precisely when a risky move was least likely to be rejected. She knew just when to strike. Tapping each of us lightly on the shoulder, she said, “Come on. We’ve got a long journey ahead.” Turning to Eyüp Bey she said, “Let’s go. We’ll stop at Shusha.”
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 10
