Amira was feeling the champagne and twisting and teasing.
“In what sense?”
“I’m asking what goddess lives in you?”
Firdevs seemed ready to answer her own question. Her mood was brightening and the tension in the air was gone.
“Wait, wait. Let me say it. Amira… Of course! Aphrodite. And you Maryam… Yes, you are Hecate, but you still have time.”
I waited, thinking it was my turn now but Firdevs Hanım started to talk about Hecate and Aphrodite.
“Aphrodite turns the wheels of her life on seduction and inspiration. While Hecate is a woman of wisdom. She has experienced everything, pain and joy. She is always waiting at the door, ready to help her daughters. Now considering everything Esma has told me, Maryam, you’re at the last bend in the road, and once you make it around you will become Hecate. Esma has the same goddess. She was Artemis in her youth but now she is Hecate.”
“Which one was Artemis?” I asked, hoping she might pick a goddess for me. She didn’t let me down.
“And considering what Esma has said to me about you…”
“What did she say?”
Firdevs Hanım laughed.
“No more than what you have already showed her. But mulling over what I was told, you must be an Artemis. A virgin!”
“What?”
Firdevs let out another laugh and then calmed me down. “I’m not speaking about physical virginity. This is a spiritual matter. For you this is a matter of producing, writing and taking inspiration from the world.”
A glass of champagne in her hand, Amira was now steeped in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s mood, poking fun at me.
“Darling, are you sad because I nabbed Aphrodite!”
We laughed at the way she batted her eyelids and wiggled her bottom in her imitation of Aphrodite. Coming into her element, Firdevs Hanım threw herself onto one of the white wicker chairs on the terrace and swinging her glass of champagne in the air she began to explain.
“Esma sent you to me so that I could help. So you should leave this place feeling better than when you arrived. And Esma … girls, you need to keep a close eye on her. Because she … ah … I mean she … she’s always chasing after life. I mean, she couldn’t stay like me … anyway my dears … right now the matter is you. This matter of the goddesses … you’re all smart women so I’m not going to waste too much of your time with them and other mysteries. But this age of ours is very deceiving for women like us.”
Maryam now wore her professorial expression, one hand on her temple and the other holding a glass of champagne. She asked,“When you say women like us…?”
Hardly bothered by the interruption, Firdevs answered, “My dear Maryam, I know your story. Which makes it easier for me to understand why you cut your hair. You must have wanted to forget. You must have felt compelled, like our woman driver, to resign from womanhood. This only shows that you have more than one woman in you. As for Amira … oh! Amira. Esma and I know all too well what you’ve been through. As a woman with a word and a woman who dances … this crowd isn’t easy to confront. That’s why…”
Maryam cut her off again.
“What did Madam Lilla tell you about us?”
Putting her glass on the glass coffee table, Firdevs leaned over and clasped her hands, thinking. Then she smiled and said, “Ladies, have you still not understood? For people like us your stories are already written on your faces. There’s no need for us to speak of them. We only need to help each other. Women like us recognize women who have worn out their angels. We can see it in their eyes.”
She stopped for a moment and looked over our faces and went on.
“I am a woman who has come to certain compromises only later in life. To be Firdevs and to stay that way. To have this house, and these chairs and this champagne. I didn’t race after life like Esma and that’s why I had to come to an agreement. With Walid, with the city, with men and women. To live that way I had to sacrifice a few of my inner women. My Artemis and maybe even my Aphrodite. But you’re not in the same boat. You have refused to make these deals. You did not give up on any of your inner women. Which is why your souls need support.”
Again she paused to give us time to digest what she’d just said or to see if we would challenge her. Looking up she saw that we were listening and she continued.
“Here we have developed a method that fits our needs. It was a method that originally came from a woman like us: Madam Katherine Fowler. Esma made a point of asking me to tell to you about it. In the beginning this might seem a little funny or strange but you’ll see how useful it can be. It’s a speaking method. We do it like this…”
She got up and pulled the two empty chairs towards her. She sat down in one and started:
“You take empty chairs. You can also draw pictures of them. What you do is line up your inner women, sit them down in the chairs. For Amira it’s the dancer, the writer, the woman-child… For Maryam it is the man-woman, the woman-woman, and so on… Then you encourage them to speak to each other and come to an agreement. All the women in you must feel nourished and fulfilled. Otherwise you won’t find happiness. But they must work things out before you decide which one will be most present. You must get them to come to a decision as to how much life they will get out of you. Do you understand?”
I asked, “Well then what good comes of doing that? And what happens if they can’t agree?”
“Of course you’re a writer and so…”
“Well, you can’t really say that.”
Firdevs Hanım took a sip of champagne, raised an eyebrow and smiled as if to say, ‘Now would you check out the little devil.’ Then she added, “What you’re doing right now, mademoiselle, isn’t important. You are already doing enough providing you are still concerned with the wounds of others. You don’t always need a pen in hand, ready to get everything down on paper.”
I looked at my champagne. Firdevs Hanım now turned to Amira and Maryam.
“It isn’t necessary for your inner women to come to an agreement. If you have this conversation frequently enough then over time, perhaps years later, you’ll find that your inner voice has coalesced around one voice. That’s when wisdom begins. By the time you get to be as old as me and Esma you’ll be speaking through one voice. Then your inner goddess comes to life.”
Maryam leaned back in her chair, her stomach shaking to the tune of a sarcastic chuckle.
“Why don’t you just come out with it and say we’ve got a long way to go.”
Firdevs stopped, closed and opened her eyes. Then she said this: “That’s all there is to life! It’s that short.”
She added: “But until then…”
“Until then you should keep the basic principles of a goddess in mind. One: Never apologize for something you didn’t do. Two: Don’t try to over explain yourself. Three: Never underestimate your achievements. Four: Never begin a sentence, ‘Now I might be wrong but….’ Five: Never answer questions you don’t want to answer. Six: Don’t be afraid to say no. As for the seventh rule…”
Maryam butted in with thorns in her voice: “Now are you going to tell us that all we need to do is find ourselves a ruling king, Firdevs Hanım?”
“You decide if you want to find a king or a jester. But you must come up with your own seventh rule. Every goddess has this right. But it might be a good idea to get on with it. Like I said…”
Again she blinked in slow motion, “Life is that short.”
Silence. Though I doubt we would have admitted this I suppose we were all trying to bring up an inventory of inner women and wondering how faithful we could be to those rules. Then a man shouting below broke the silence. He bellowed:
“The Singaporean stock market! Yes! Yes! No! What does the Japanese market have to do with it, brother! The key thing is…”
Firdevs Hanım’s expression suddenly changed. Frozen in that blonde femme fatale look she had when we first met her. Her eyes went glassy. The man continued shouting as he huf
fed up the stairs.
“The kids weren’t following Nasdaq! That’s unbelievable.”
Firdevs Hanım looked at us with compassion in her eyes, asking for us to understand. She was no longer the strong, untouchable woman who had just been lecturing us – now she looked ashamed. Years flittered across her face and in waves it seemed like you could hear the words, ‘well what else can you do?’ And when that fat, old man with a sour expression on his face, Walid Bey, husband to Firdevs Hanım, noisily burst onto the terrace, his bad energy gusted all over the place, the same kind of energy you always feel when a man busts unexpectedly into the middle of a scene without giving a damn. Trying to appear charming, he said, “Champagne? What a pleasant idea?” And with that our interior monologues abruptly came to end and the champagne went flat. Amira took Firdevs Hanım’s hand. For a second. Without even noticing it, Firdevs shook her hand. The curtain had already fallen. Amira dropped her glass and shards exploded over the stone floor. Firdevs Hanım cried out, “Walid! Don’t come out here! Don’t! There’s glass everywhere!”
Walid’s hand hung in the air and his hunger for champagne growled in his gut. But the place really was covered in glass and Firdevs wanted to protect our shards from Walid. As she hurried us out of the house we said nothing about what had happened that day. Except for one thing of course.
25
“So what exactly are you saying, mademoiselle Aphrodite?” asked Maryam, “Are you telling me that God doesn’t love women?”
With her finger Amira was scraping the last bits of coffee out of the bottom of her cup. “Not exactly,” she said, “but let’s say we’re not his favourites. If someone like Muhammedeven says so…”
“He was just being ignorant,” said Maryam leaning back in her white plastic chair. We were sitting in a coffeehouse. “The believers who succeeded in making him out to be genderless know that He or She loves them.”
“When so many believers have made him a man is that still possible?” asked Amira. “In my opinion Firdevs is right. We need to create a God that loves us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” interrupted Maryam. We were silent. I was willing to bet that right then we were all thinking about our inner goddess and more importantly about how we were going to get all the different women in our heads to sit down and talk. I could picture Amira talking politics in her dance outfit and Maryam chanting slogans in Tahrir Square with a baby on her back… Like any woman who looks good in photographs, in my mind I watched them wake up alone. Later they went to bed alone. In the middle of the night when they were startled by a sound and woke they would speak aloud. So what Muhammed and Firdevs said was important. We were so alone that maybe we needed a compassionate goddess to speak with.
*
When we sat down at one of those coffeehouses at the harbour, Amira said, “This is the second time I’ve heard this thing about a god who loves women … my Muhammed said something about it as well.” And she started to tell the story:
One day Amira and Muhammed were travelling from a city on the Tunisian coast to Tabarka. Over lunch in a hotel Muhammed points out something in the garden. A tennis umpire’s chair covered with all different colours of paint. For years they must have used it as a painting ladder. Muhammed then says:
“Leftovers like that from the fifties were abandoned in the southern hemisphere. They say so much, don’t they? What do you think, my love?”
That tennis umpire’s chair that no one actually used for tennis prompted a conversation on the subject. Muhammed went on to explain how Western civilization still spoke of an airy happiness it promised through these leftovers.
“When you look at the state of that umpire’s chair you understand more clearly the revenge they got from that dream of civilization. I can imagine the pent-up anger they must have felt when they had to climb up that thing. This is a far more humiliating form of oppression than suffering at the hand of a Western soldier. Especially when you imagine a typical short, potbellied Arab, don’t you think? Think of all the battles waged in his head so that he could come to grips with that umpire’s chair!”
Muhammed was laughing heartily as he said all of this. Then they talked about the old film projectors that were left behind years ago, abandoned when the open-air cinemas were shut down. As far as Amira could remember Muhammed said something like, “This part of the world rejected its dream of absolute civilization with the anger of a lover scratching out the eyes of her lost love.” And he added, “Of course the holes only remind you that the lover’s gone. Those blank spots overwhelm everything else in the picture.”
Amira looked around her. I suppose she was thinking how empty the world was without seeing things through Muhammed’s eyes. Her face scrunched up with sadness; she was silent. Maryam said, “And? So what are you saying then? The umpire’s chair and everything…”
It was when her finger began to scrape at the coffee that lined her cup. “How should I know?” she said. “Muhammed was strange that day. When we went for a walk along the coast he saw women in chadors and veils over their faces. Beside them were these young tough guys and little kids, naked, running in and out of the sea, laughing. But the women only put their feet in the water, one step forward and one step back. Muhammed was in a bad mood – I’d never seen him like that before – and he said, ‘maybe we made a mistake, sweetie. We were forced to climb that tennis chair back then and to get our revenge we took it out on women. Now it seems to me, that we wanted a God who loved men more. We were so humiliated that we needed a God on our side. A God that would really stick it to the women who laughed at us. But our…’ and he looked at me. For the first time he touched my hair in public and he said, ‘now I need God to love you more. Now I believe that God loves a woman like you as she is.’ That’s what he said…”
“Azizi,” said Maryam, looking at me. “Muhammed loved you so much he lost his faith and love of the world. That’s what happened.”
“But,” interrupted Amira, “just imagine a father-god figure that could really love us the way we are … wouldn’t we walk this earth differently? I mean we’d be that much better off. We could have believed. And not just in God. If he loved us … like Firdevs was saying, you know, we’d love ourselves so much more. And that’s what Muhammed was saying…”
“Say it,” said Maryam, “what else did the heathen let slip?”
“’Do you think God loves women, Amira?’ That’s what he asked me.”
“Most likely just his guilty conscience,” I said. “I mean because he couldn’t really talk about what they did to you, what he did to you. The raid for example.”
“It’s possible,” said Amira, leaning closer to her cup and nibbling dried coffee off her finger.
And that’s when Maryam said it: “And so what are you saying, Mademoiselle Aphrodite? Are you saying that God doesn’t love women?”
“That’s nonsense,” she said and we were quiet.
We said nothing else on the topic. Maryam picked up a paper from the table next to us and started to read, her brow crinkled, her lower lip hanging and a distracted look on her face. She put the paper down and I saw the photograph of the girl in the blue bra. It was the news about the protests that was getting to her. But the devil got the better of me.
“This isn’t about God, if only our homelands could love us for who we are. That would be enough, don’t you think, azizi?”
An eyebrow bent she looked up at me and said nothing. I went on.
“So what are you going to do? Are you going to see your daughter when we get to Lebanon?
She cut me off.
“Azizi, pride brings nothing but trouble.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s just the way it is,” she said, gravely nodding her head a couple times. “Pride is nothing but trouble. Whether it’s talk of God loving me or not. Or whether my homeland is going to love me back. Blah blah blah… All this comes to nothing. You have to love. You have to let go. That’s the deal. The rest is just pr
ide.”
“Oh Lord,” I said, broken. I wasn’t angry. Because I knew that Maryam was speaking to her broken heart. She was kicking her own heart because it was broken for the same reason, because she thought it was full of pride. With astonishing speed Amira changed the topic.
“Now this Walid Bey… Firdevs Hanım really found a guy to fall in love with. I don’t know how women like her do it. Don’t they ever get bored?”
“Of course they do,” I said, “ but some of them don’t feel secure unless they’re with someone who’s going to love them til death. To me it seems like some women set up their lives like it’s this massive company they are going to manage. And they do it mainly out of fear. It’s strange. They get stronger from the fear. But I wonder how Madam Lilla holds out? All the time alone, I mean, the idea that she’s going to die alone.”
I looked to see Maryam with her phone. It was the first time she’d taken it out. She was checking her Twitter. Most likely she was trying to see what her friends were saying about the protests for the girl in the blue bra. Unwittingly she was biting her lips and her fingernails. I had never seen her do that before.
“Hey! Who am I talking to here?” I said, but she didn’t look up. She hadn’t even heard me. “Azizi, do you think that Dido made a new life for herself with her baby in new lands? Was she a loner like Madam Lilla or did she find herself a Walid who made it possible for her to set up a new firm?”
Maryam didn’t look up – she really hadn’t heard anything I’d just said. Before I could open my mouth and shout, ‘Hey,’ Amira grabbed me by the arm and shushed me. So the two of us just sat and watched. Our elbows propped on the table we stared at Maryam. And her Twitter séance went on and on. Once or twice her hand moved to write something and then she stopped. She didn’t even know we were there. And so we just leaned deeper into the table and looked at each other. “What do you think?” I said. “What sort of life did Muhammed make for himself abroad?” Amira shrugged and frowned and stared blankly at the table.
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 34
