With only a sigh she started to read one more of Muhammed’s letters.
Muhammed’s Third Letter
Fine then, so people are dumber than we think but they can still make a real mess of the world. We can hardly work out what’s going on. And despite the sheer idiocy they still manage to devise incredibly complex traps for each other, concocted out of their own chaos, it’s beyond my comprehension. But you have nothing to worry about. You are humming along. You and others like you have come to this world to enrich us. And we are powerless no matter how hard we fight back!
Not everyone is blessed with a character and not everyone is blessed with a heart. But you have one and praise God it’s magnificent. I often think about the day I first discovered your heart like I am replaying the video of Maradonna’s famous goal. It had to be the hand of God! A beautiful song was playing, had to be something from Asmahan, and there were tears in your eyes. Then I remember how moved you were to watch a seagull fly differently from the others, alone, perhaps in the distance, not among a flock, all alone. Fine then… So you like to shed a tear or two but in this you can’t prove me wrong. Here’s a point someone like you needs to keep in mind: Hopelessness is the greatest sin. Sweetie, you need to accept the fact that every now and then you commit this sin. Yes I know I must sound a bit ridiculous so try to forgive me. What I want to say is this: it really wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you were to organize day trips for your heart now and then. I have no doubt that birdwatchers from all around the world would rush to Tunisia for such a trip. Kiss those hoopoe birds in your heart for me and please pass on my greetings to Süleyman. And please don’t be angry with me for all my idle chitchat, I’m shutting up now.
People who, like me, believe that if you slip into those baggy pants and wear socks and sandals – go for that style and fashion –you find the road to the Prophet. I suppose if we just look strange enough we’ll find some kind of heartfelt belief. But for those who fail to grieve with children, with their lovers, with street cats, even with the squawking wild geese, how will they ever hear the word of God? If the Prophet himself came upon them… A fool like me cannot know how the Prophet will temper them. But I suppose through patience and compassion he would call them to silence. Without breaking their hearts he would show them the drought inside. He would tell them their hearts had to be watered with the dew of poetry and love, and maybe he would urge them to go to pastures in the morning to carefully gather dew in their pockets to later drop them in their hearts. But still, as these hearts have lain fallow for hundreds of years I have no doubt the first harvest will be outstanding.
You, my love, are travelling on the same road as the Prophet. If I could redirect the energy you spend punishing yourself out of desperation and fear, I imagine the world would quickly come alive.
Fine then, please do not think I have crossed a line here. I know you don’t like this but you must do it: Please say a prayer to God, a besmele. Begin with the name of God. The besmele will call the universe to your aid. God is the universe. When we say, Inshallah or God willing, we understand we are a part of this universe. I’m not talking about all that silly ‘send a positive message to the universe’ stuff, don’t be daft. When we invoke the names of God we announce our belonging to the universe. Now and then you need to win the hearts of angels so you can work together. What do you think?
Fine then, take another look around you now for my sake. Remember the leper’s wager. The sweetest part of believing in God is believing in a flawless heart. Till now you have believed in people. You shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve always found yourself in trouble. If you believe people are made in His eyes you could more easily share your compassion. What do you say, sweetie? Can you do it?
Now consider this… This colonialism business really is terrible. It has a little to do with what I’ve been talking about. Colonialism can even lead people to stop naming children and flowers in their mother tongues. But only our language and its words ring in our hearts. The heart is made up of words. Every word creates a space on the surface of the heart. So then, in this sense the people you see around you are crippled in the same way too. Ask them if they can name flowers in their own language. Ask the Judas Tree. You will see that they don’t know it. Ask old compassionate women about the Judas Tree, sweetie. They keep the names of flowers, old prayers and lullabies in their minds. So they frighten everyone, and who knows maybe everyone just wants to forget it all. Only an old woman can stop the erosion.
As a woman, granted, as the princess of them all, I believe that you will challenge all this stuff. No film does well at the box office if it doesn’t challenge the status quo. What’s more we have no doubt that you can’t knock out all the evil in the world with a single punch. Well then why should you do it?
There’s no end to all these questions!
OK then, I’ll give you this. The West will watch you dance with the respect and envy you deserve. But you won’t resonate in their hearts. To me it doesn’t seem like a risk worth taking. What do you think? So I feel pretty sure that you’ll come back. I feel like you’d rather take care of yourself as a human being in Tunisia than show yourself to millions like you’re a carpet or an antique ceramic tile. If all this sounds ridiculous you can blame it on my fuzzy head.
I suppose you need to describe your dancing to them in their own words. Sadly this is something you really should do. Because idiots like me end up believing lust is a sin. But every emotion is its own planet. Of course God’s planets. And instead of observing them like crafty astronomers it wouldn’t hurt to visit them once and a while and walk in the countryside, indeed it would broaden our minds. Belief comes with experiencing all these planets and meeting each other there in solidarity. OK then, but you can’t expect everyone to be as brave as you and do this with every inch of their bodies.
Dissatisfaction is a miserable emotion. I want to see you again but if I spent the rest of my life with you I know it still wouldn’t be enough. Such caprice. You’re right, I need to pull my act together.
Your lowly chevalier,
Muhammed.
Maryam wasn’t surprised but I was.
And we stood there humming and hawing like people stranded on a treasure island without a clue as to what to do. Because here’s how things unravelled that morning after the gunshots had echoed through the air…
*
Angrily gathering up her skirt, Madam Lilla stormed out of the garden and into the house. In her room she sat down at her mahogany desk. She placed the gun on the dressing table. She was furious. Narrowing her eyes, she looked at us. Would we be able to understand her? She stared at Maryam. Who would still be standing at the end of the story?
“Give me another cigarette,” she said and snatched one out of Maryam’s hand. She lit up like women of another time and without inhaling she explained, “Ladies, first of all… I wasn’t a victim. And I wasn’t heartless. I say that because the majority of women assume that women who don’t let themselves fall victim have no heart.”
“The real story … the real story is simple.” She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth like she was reciting a poetic prayer. “One day I saw a mirage in the desert of a man’s heart. In time the mirage turned into a prayer for rain and the prayer became a sea. And with that I stuffed the sand full of fish. When I tired of the mirage and the prayer the sea once again changed into a cemetery. Without so much as trembling the fish died in an instant. And I saw that again I could reinvent the water and the mirage and the sea and fill a man’s desert with fish. All passionate love is this. Love finishes when a woman grows weary. Women don’t leave men – they leave a graveyard. But I’m not like other women. Ever since I was little I have stood on my own two feet.
Maybe I was seven or so when I started going to weddings with my father’s tambour. First it was neighborhoods in Cairo then surrounding villages and other cities. My voice was so full of sorrow that when people heard me they stared at me like I was some kind of animal
they were seeing for the first time. Even my mother was afraid and she couldn’t love me. Mother was always the woman crying behind my dad and I was the little girl at his side. I grew up with men. So before I could become a woman I had learned how not to be one. My dad used to wrap sacks around me so that I wouldn’t look like a girl. The men there loved to cry for the grief of the poor, frail, troubled children. None of them ever thought to ask why those children were so sad – it just seemed easier to cry for them. When I was still a child I learned how men played this dirty game. Before I learned to laugh on my own I first learned how to make others cry. I saw their heartlessness when they threw three pennies at my dad’s face and then the way they pitied themselves while they cried at the sound of my voice. I was disgusted. I neither cried nor was heart-broken, most of all I was disgusted by them as I grew older. I was disgusted by my mother, by her weakness. I loathed how she would jump to her feet when I brought home money, a light flickering in her eyes as she slipped into the role of a suffering woman. I loathed how father would wrap me in sacks. How he used to read the expressions on the faces of men listening to me sing, and greedily calculate the money he was going to make. I saw hundreds of brides; they all looked like captured foxes. All done up and finely dressed for a man and when they sat down they looked like water buffaloes. When I was eleven I could recite the Koran by heart. I did it so they could use me at funerals and births. When I was thirteen and my breasts were just developing I had already been to every ceremony there is between cradle and grave. All those faces … I saw a thousand faces. In my mind they have all merged into one. It is a face that suddenly cries, suddenly laughs, shifting to suit whatever mood. I was disgusted. Absolutely disgusted. Ladies, I grew up in the backstage of humankind.
Then when the money really starting rolling in they decided for one last big win… As you probably have already guessed they decided to marry me off. At one of those ceremonies I had watched from the backstage with disgust… So I was supposed to hop out of the gunny cloth and into the lace. When we’re children we make decisions based on what’s going on right here (and she put her hand on her stomach). The best decisions are made here I guess. So one night I rounded up all the money there was in the house and I hit the road. In my gunnysack I made my way to Alexandria. That was where I met Mother Wasma. Women of an older time are something else. She was once the head concubine of the Ottoman Palace and she knew that it was a woman’s mind and not her flesh that made the money. And so I was taken to her home. She raised me. She must have seen the anger and the power in me because she took me seriously. She took me as her daughter… We sat down and discussed how much we could get for my virginity. That was how I would repay Wasma for the education I would get from her. It was a fair agreement. I was selling something men wanted, I was trading, buying my own life. I would be Wasma’s most powerful weapon. Everyone in the Cairo elite – sometimes even women – (she smiled) secretly came to her house. And not only them, there were rich Brits, Americans, Frenchmen and Arabs. We were ladies. Courtesans, escorts as the French say. By the time I was twenty I could speak every Arabic dialect, French and English. Mother Wasma taught me how to work with my anger. May she rest in peace. When she died she left me a gold-plated coffee pot inscribed with the Felak verse, and three-hundred pounds and precious stones. On her deathbed her face was pale as ash. Taking my hand, she said, “Esma Hanım, I beg you to go to the West and start over.” So I hopped on a train to Alexandria and from there to the pier and then I sailed to Paris. I took a room at the Ritz, presenting myself as the daughter of an Arab prince. Europeans love that sort of thing. From that day on I danced and sang in the most luxurious venues of Paris and London. I was invited to private parties and met extraordinary people. Princes, kings, ship owners… I hired private tutors to study politics, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, religion, history and poetry… You name it. The world was my oyster, ladies. And I was gobbling it up. Money flowed. Which was always the easiest part. Because I didn’t have a heart. Then I went back to Egypt. From there I travelled to all the Arab countries and lived in many. I took lovers and left them, flowers, diamonds, flowers, more diamonds… But I wanted more. More power. I knew that I deserved more than being a desired woman in a man’s world. So I started relaying information, from the English to the Arabs, from the Arabs to the French, from the French to the Americans. I worked for them all. It was a giant puzzle and I was running the show. Just like I wanted. I only did it for the men and their eager eyes – those crazy eyes always watching to see what I’d say next. It was that moment when they would hold their breath and wait on every word. But it wasn’t enough to have them as my adoring slaves – I wanted to rule the game. I had grown up in the backstage of life, disgusted by humanity, and now and again I was in the wings, having my fun. I didn’t take money but there was one thing I did want from them. I wanted them to be indebted to me. And through those debts of the heart I wove a network over the world. Now if we manage to make this journey it’s because of this. I had a few close brushes with death. But danger only raises the stakes in the game. When you live on your wits, life can be the most entertaining game. You take the crème de la crème – men, money, cities and time – and run with it. Ah! I lived the most wonderful life a woman could live. Years went by. And I wasn’t getting any older. Because, like I said, I didn’t have a heart. I was standing on my own two feet.
Then one spring day I find myself in Beirut and I’m forty-nine years old. I’m sitting at the bar in the Saint George hotel, the setting sun falling on my face, the waves lapping against the hotel jetty. First I saw his shoes. Black patent leather. Then his chic, dark-green, silk gabardine suit. He came in and sat down at the table opposite. With no shame or discomfort, he spent a long time casually looking me over with a teasing smile. I was expecting him to come and over and say hello or send me a drink, expecting and expecting… For some time he made me wait, looking straight into my eyes. Maybe for an hour, he looked at me like he was gazing out over the sea. Then he got up, walked past me and left. That was it. The next day at the same time the same thing happened again. But for even longer. Without blinking and with a sweet air of indifference. The next day the same thing all over again… I should have known he was a deer hunter and that he could have waited as long as it took to kill me with that one shot to the heart. He was waiting for me to turn and bare my heart.
Ladies, love comes to you in a moment of hesitation. Just a slight stumble and you’re done. Years of experience, a lifetime of victory, never getting double-crossed or two-timed… Love waits for a slight hesitation and our fortress comes crashing down. Who knows, maybe that’s what I was secretly hoping for. My own game wasn’t hard enough to really try me. I wanted to put my heart to the test in a wild, unknown forest. That’s what we make of life, there are no coincidences. We breathe into life all these signs, magic and serendipity. Who knows, maybe the strongest among us welcome defeat only to feel more alive. What can I say to that? In the same way a soldier might feel phantom tremors in his amputated limb perhaps I wanted to feel something in the empty chambers of my heart. People pray for sadness only if they have never really tasted it. Though we rarely would admit so much we all crave self-destruction at least once in our lives. Forget about getting to heaven, we all burn to whine in our own hell. I was forty-nine years old and maybe just for a moment, I hesitated, wondering if I was living the wrong life. The greatest hunters have the ability to detect that moment of hesitation in their prey. He walked past me and deep down in my stomach and down my spine, I felt his soul. I only heard him breathing when he came over and smelled the back of my neck. I was caught by surprise when he deftly placed his golden lighter on the table. His name inscribed on it. Jezim Anwar. And without saying a word he walked away. A game I had played hundreds of times on others was finally played on me. I gave him permission to play. Love, ladies, is a game played with absence. And the more trust that your absence will be felt deeply the better you play. But the moment you hesitate you
’re out of the game. I hesitated. Like I said, love comes down to that.
Months passed and I caught myself on countless occasions: when I went to back to the bar in the Saint George and sat down in the same place, holding the lighter and sitting just a half an hour more, and, now here is the worst of it ladies … the worst my dears is when I caught myself staring at the door. Like a miserable woman waiting for life to happen. Like my mother. What I mean is that love is the agony of catching yourself falling to pieces. Finally one day, and it was the wrong day, he showed up. It was the wrong day because I was ready, I’d made all the preparations, or so I thought. He was wearing black shoes and a dark blue suit. And holding a whip. I knew he wasn’t looking for me, and that made me angry. He didn’t see me and I went mad. I got up and I walked to the bathroom and when he still didn’t acknowledge me I nearly lost it. There was no need for him to do anything – I was already thrashing in my own web. I was just about to leave, cursing myself and ready to close the matter altogether, with only the anger I felt towards myself left in my heart when he came out with his cigarillo. He grasped my little bag like he was holding my inner thigh. Oh so slowly. He opened the bag like he was opening my legs. His eyes fixed on mine. Then he plunged his fingers into my bag like he was running them through my hair. Oh so gently. And when he found the lighter he smiled. That’s when I knew there was no turning back. All bets were made.
My devastated heart suddenly came to life. But how I loathed that rush of joy. I loathed myself because I could not loathe him. From then on I was at war with myself. He enjoyed watching a panther willingly come to his feet as a kitten.
‘My job is catching wild animals, mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘only the most dangerous ones. And you?’
If it had been another time, another place, another man, I would have laughed coyly and gracefully and asked questions – men love that sort of thing. But like I said, there was that moment of hesitation. Maybe I wanted to do what I had never done and break from a routine. I wanted to tell him my story. Men don’t like that at all. They want to carry on about themselves and never listen. And I told him so many things, starting with how I danced. Smiling, he touched my hair and looking at me with a deep admiration that made me wonder if it was real, he said, ‘Who knows how terrifying you really are. Men must be quite terrified by you. Who knows how many times you had to withhold stories so as not to frighten men away… You, mademoiselle, look like a Judas Tree that has bloomed in the desert.’
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 24
