“I still haven’t made that decision, Madam,” said Maryam sharply. Looking at Amira she continued, “I have neither the patience nor the strategic thinking to find myself a Walid goon like Firdevs.”
Looking out the window Madam Lilla flashed a wry smile.
“What is it then, Madam?” I said. “What do you think about Firdevs? After all she did say, ‘Like Madam I didn’t go running after life.’”
The limo slammed on the brakes. Suddenly through the darkness we saw the eyes of many children peering into the limo. They could only see the shadows of their own reflections, blank gazes. They held limes which they were trying to sell to the people in the passing cars. The little green fruit stood out brightly against their dark palms and the darkness of the night.
Maryam sat upright. Like a grounded child watching her friends play outside, she looked out the window. She was trying to show herself through the tinted glass. Closely she followed the gazes as they came closer to the glass. From both sides they were searching for each other, like lost travellers in the night, blind in a crowded port. The traffic started moving again. As the car lurched forward Maryam reluctantly leaned back and looked one more time at the kids. She looked at those lime sellers and they stood still in the middle of the road as if one of their own was in the car and they had just lost her without ever catching a glimpse of her. Turning into thin shadows in the headlights they scrambled off and were gone.
When Madam Lilla saw Maryam so moved she ignored my question and caressed her short hair.
“Your homeland is everywhere. It’s wherever you are. Your homeland isn’t Tahrir. As long as you keep looking at those children like that … it’s right here.”
Lilla placed her hand on her heart. Then she touched Maryam’s head, “Egypt is here, always in you. The time for you to return will come. And not broken and guilty like this, but full of joy.”
“That’s if we make it alive to other side,” said Maryam with a bitter smile.
“Or if the natives don’t eat us alive when we get there!” said Amira, chewing on a fingernail. Turning to Madam Lilla, she said “Madam Lilla, were you able to reach Eyüp Bey? Any news? I mean about the bride?”
Madam Lilla skipped over the questions with a haste I’d only understand later. She used my earlier question to change the subject. “Firdevs is trying to teach the women in this country who have always felt worthless to feel precious. From the birthday of Hypatia to this whole thing with the goddesses. She is trying to create a spell that women without adventure in their lives can believe in. She is doing everything she can. She has embraced her fate. And of course you…”
Lilla left her sentence hanging. We were in the front of the bar. Men were smoking cigarettes cupped in the palms of their hands, heads bowed, throwing us sideway glances. As the girls blew out smoke they looked at us condescendingly. It wasn’t such a great thing to pull up in a limo and we felt duly ashamed. On behalf of the group, Maryam slightly hid her face, as if she were apologizing.
With a single finger Amira touched Maryam’s spine at the curve to make her sit upright, and, imitating Firdevs, she said, “Goddesses never offer needless apologies!”
“You’ve really taken a shine to these rules,” said Maryam.
Madam Lilla was greeting people at the door with her regal style, which always annoyed people who were meeting her for the first time. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen! I hope that you are enjoying yourselves!”
“You call this enjoyment?” hissed one of the girls through her teeth. She took a hard drag on her fag then flung its butt to the ground and made a move for the door. Madam Lilla was in fine form. “Ah! There’s no point if there’s no fun, sweet bird! If you can’t kick back then you don’t get the taste of life. Ha ha ha!”
Maryam sidled up to Lilla and flung open the door to get inside before the revolutionary could smack her. Amira seemed about to laugh.
In a long, narrow corridor packed with round tables men and women, young and old, sat together waving their hands to the rhythm of discussions on the plight of their country. Two big TVs were showing live coverage of Tahrir Square where people were beginning to gather. Occasionally conversations around the tables stopped for a breath when someone pointed to a screen and then they plunged back into a heated discussion. It all surged forward with bursts of laughter, moustaches thoughtfully twisted, beards absentmindedly stroked and sentences chopped short with, ‘Just a minute. Wait up, but actually…’ Every table seemed to be trying urgently to reach a conclusion, as if a moment later they’d be questioned on the fate of the country, asked for a personal decision, and when they failed to come up with a consensus all eyes turned back to the screen.
At least one person per table was busy predicting how many people were in the square comparing it with the night before; the fate of Egypt seemed to rest on a rough head count. The bar was shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke that made it all look like a dream. Occasionally people with burning eyes went outside to watch the crowds of Alexandria that weren’t watching the crowds in Tahrir. The people outside were caught between the difference of life on TV and the life flowing by on the street. They were never out with the real life for very long. Once back inside they slumped down in front of the TV. They returned seamlessly to the world of Tahrir.
On the one hand it seemed they were welcoming the images on the screen but they also looked like hungry opium addicts who were taking a hit from a pipe they had left only a couple minutes ago. There was a nervous energy in the air. When their voices faded you could almost hear their heartbeats.
So when Maryam and Amira stepped inside they merged with this communal heartbeat, locked to the image of the surging crowd. Madam Lilla and I were the only people alone with each other. We alone had noticed the old man at the bar who was eyeing Lilla from his seat under the light reflecting off the bottles. She pulled me with her away from the mass. We sat down at a table opposite the bar with our backs to the TV.
Seeing that Maryam and Amira were more interested in Tahrir, Madam Lilla turned to me, “We are all in this life together, sweetie. Me and Firdevs, too. Even Tahrir…”
As she spoke her eyes drifted to the man at the bar. Clearly he was the boss of the place. Now and then he gave her an under-the-brow look. Lilla still didn’t realize that I was close to her secret.
“It’s just that Firdevs chose a safer path. I could have chosen the same and lived a life with someone in a home. Instead of wandering the deserts and rushing to war zones. If I found such a life comfortable I could have found myself a Walid … but if you ask me, those Walids are fare more frightening than the idea of being abducted in the desert. Ha ha ha!”
All of a sudden Lilla was in full flirt mode. Not with me of course, she was working the man at the bar. She still hadn’t realized that I knew what she was doing. She continued, “Indeed we are all living the life we can live best. The one we fear less. The life that gives us what we need.”
“What do you fear most, Madam Lilla?” I asked.
“Surrendering, mademoiselle. Surrendering! Because then…”
“You’ll be defeated?”
“I’ll become mortal. If I set out along one road, if you choose one path you’re already choosing an end…”
The waiter came over to our table with a plate full of fruit.
“Mademoiselle, this is for you. From Necib Bey, with his regards.”
Madam Lilla flirtatiously pouted her lips and with a slight nod she conveyed her thanks. Ogling, she looked over at the bar. Only for a second. No more. Then turning back to me, “As for me … I still can’t risk losing this life I lead. The surprises and the excitement.”
She must have taken the look in my eye to be an allusion to her age because she tilted her head to one side and smiled, “Yes, and I’m still going.”
I smiled back at her. I looked up at the screen, at Tahrir. Maryam and Amira were lost in the unfolding drama. With the hope of bringing them over to our table, I said, “To
day Firdevs Hanım was saying that life only lasted so long.” And I blinked. “That short.”
Then Lilla raised her voice, addressing Maryam and Amira.
“On the contrary, life is very long…”
That’s how Madam Lilla started her story. She had asked me for a cigarette … she began to tell the true story that Maryam and Amira would learn much later. Tahrir was full of noise. It was clear I was the only one who was going to hear the story of her life which was longer than the revolution and bigger than the country. By the time she finished Necib Bey was gone. She hadn’t even noticed. It was clear from the story that men were never important – the important thing was the story she had made. The secrets of all secrets she had just revealed was hardly mysterious – like all the other stories – and it had always been around us.
After she had finished we were silent.
Maryam could see how far we’d drifted from the tense atmosphere in the Spit Fire. She snapped, “Aren’t you a journalist, azizi! What’s with the indifference? Madam Lilla … you … aren’t you Egyptian? Don’t you have any interest in what’s going on in Tahrir?”
Lilla looked at me and then speaking to Maryam but really addressing me, “We are already talking about a revolution.”
There was no way for Maryam to know what she meant by that.
Suddenly a group from the right side made a clear cut through the roaring crowd in Tahrir. Placing four beers down on our table, the middle-aged waiter said full of excitement, “The Ultras are finally on the scene. Things are going to change now.”
It was like he was watching a football match and commenting on the arrival of a strong centre forward.
Maryam opened her mouth wide and gasped for air. Still on her feet and glued to the screen, Amira cried out joyously, “The Ultras have arrived! Maryam, come and look!”
Maryam took another gulp of air and sat down. I didn’t know what was happening. But I guess Lilla did. Calmly rising from her chair she undid the top button of Maryam’s blouse. Then she did something strange, she mumbled a prayer and then blew three times over Maryam’s face.
It is impossible to heal your own wounds but when you move to help another you end up healing yourself. But for me to explain that I need to weave the story behind Maryam’s strange moment in the bar and the mystery that lay behind the secrets Lilla had just told me. A crude and funny moment in the most unexpected of circumstances would take me there.
27
“Poverty puts people on the same playing field. Crushed under the same rock people are all the same. You wouldn’t know it. You’re not poor,” said Madam Lilla. This was the lecture she gave me before we set out on the Mediterranean. Here’s what happened the morning after we left the bar and came back to the hotel without saying a word.
*
I drew the curtains. The sky and the sea were the same grey. That night Alexandria had been washed with rain but she still didn’t want to get out of bed. Maryam was twisted in white sheets and Amira was wandering around the room as if she had lost something, scratching her head.
“I’m going to find a coffee,” she repeats three times before she starts to dress. I looked out the window.
“Mornings make my head spin,” I announce. With one eye closed and her face crinkled, Amira replies, “Huh?”
My hot breath clouds the windowpane as I write my name, “I was saying that mornings… I think every novelist starts a book with the desire to be the hero. But we actually write because we can’t be the hero.”
Amira made a sound to show she wasn’t listening. On the street below a bus was moving through the city. Kids were hanging off the back of the bus like a bunch of dark grapes. As it slowed they jumped off together, then huddled arm in arm until the next bus arrived. Watching them laugh as they dangled from each other’s shoulders you might have thought it was a sunny morning. “Like dark grapes…” I thought to myself and I wanted to write those words on the glass. Not for any real reason, I suppose I just had the urge to put pen to paper. It was that longing you get when you wake up with the remnants of a dream and you try to get back to sleep to recover it. Feeling the weight of the lager from the night before, Maryam looked up at Amira and,with her eyes still shut demanded, “Amiraaaa! Coffeeee!” like a spoiled child. Then she buried her head back in her pillow.
Amira pulled on her jeans, wriggled into her shirt and left. I sat down on the broad window ledge and thought about the story Madam Lilla had told me last night. It hurt me to think that if no one wrote it down it would be like water flowing through mountains that no person has ever seen. Just like those words, “dark grapes”. I shivered as I remembered a sentence in Madam Lilla’s story that stood out.
“I loved you, Esma. I loved you like my blind eye.”
*
Why hadn’t I ever thought of it? I suppose it was because we’d never considered that in Madam Lilla’s magnificent life such a key issue could be so small, simple, and right there before our eyes. We had never thought that Madam Lilla’s half-blind butler could have been the real reason she had set out on this fantastical journey and all the other journeys in her magnificent life. Only his patent leather shoes and his blind eye alluded to a deeper past. I suppose we were all too young to know that a man enslaved to a woman through love could actually take her prisoner. Looking out of the window I considered why we had come on this trip. We were learning how to be each other. And when we did the journey would end.
Amira would learn to become as manly as Maryam, and Maryam would learn to become as womanly as Amira; Madam Lilla would learn to become as young as us; and I, instead of writing their story, would become a character in their novel … and maybe a little bit about surrendering, too.
That’s just what Lilla said the other day when she was telling me her story, “Is that what you’re curious to know, mademoiselle? What will happen to you when you surrender. And what it means for a woman like me to surrender.”
“Yes,” I had said. Just when the military launched its largest assault on the crowd in Tahrir. Among all the noise Lilla was telling me the greatest secret of her heart.
“When you love someone … when you let someone love you … fine then, when you surrender … when you surrender, right at your core … yes, right near the belly button … you notice a scar you didn’t know you already had. And the ache never really goes away until you are with the one you have surrendered to. Now there is something else that you think about more than just staying alive. And so you get smaller, softer, weaker. Do you see what I mean?”
The clamour in Tahrir had consumed the Spit Fire. Embracing their fate and each other, people in the square threw stones at guns. They shouted in the face of the muzzles and the clubs. They charged at their own fears as if they had nothing left to lose. They had surrendered to the moment, willing to accept whatever might happen. They were no longer flesh but steel.
“It is safer to lead a meaningless life racing from one place to the next. It was always like that…” She looked me in the eye to judge if I would to be able to understand what she was about to say. And then she went on, “Do you remember Eyüp Bey? He loved me very much. How many times did I tell him, that it wasn’t him…”
She stopped. The sound from the TV was cutting out, a bad connection, but the footage ran on for a few seconds in silence. Men at the neighbouring table leaned right over to get a closer look at the screen as they shouted. “Did you see it? Did you? You see that’s how they get hit in the eyes.”
“God damn it! Those kids pop up out of the crowd to see what’s going on and the soldiers aim right for their eyes!”
“Mother… they’ve taken out so many eyes like that! Mother f—kers!”
They cursed a couple times more before glumly sinking back into silence, staring at the screen.
“What do you mean, ‘that it wasn’t him’, Madam?” I asked. She took a sip from her beer, trembling.
“That my daughter wasn’t his. Leila … but … he doesn’t believe it. H
e didn’t for years. He’s had this conviction that he is the father. And he said so much in the end, when we parted, ‘I loved you. Esma. I loved you like my blind eye.’ That’s what he always said to me, for years. Watching other men come and go, he never gave up. And he’s still waiting, always will be. It kills me to see him wait like that. That’s how he surrendered to me. But I… ”
The men next to us started shouting again. If they screamed any louder their voices would carry all the way to the streets of Cairo and into the ears of the soldiers in Tahrir.
“Look, look. Did you see it? Those two kids there. Right there! Look! They both have patches over their eyes! Lions! They’re already out of the hospital and back in Tahrir!”
The other man said under his breath (I think tears were welling up in his eyes), “lions.” The expressions on their faces tugged between laughing and crying, their cheeks trembling.
“But me,” continued Madam Lilla, “The moment I surrender is the moment I begin to get old and die. One embrace and I am swept off my feet. Because … then my heart would be under siege. It would be easier to surrender to the enemy. At the most your honour takes a blow but if I were to surrender to someone I loved … I would be a slave.”
“But I don’t understand at all, Madam,” I said, directly and with unusual honesty, “I don’t understand how people can let themselves fall back into a bank of snow. They must be crazy.”
She touched my cheek. Touched me as if I was a picture of her forty years ago. For a moment it felt as if there was nothing we could learn from each other. And that’s when Maryam was affronted by our indifference and Lilla said, “We were already talking about a revolution.”
The men at the neighbouring table were taut like bows, stretched out toward the screen. A space was opening in the middle of Tahrir. The Ultras had showed up. And in less than five minutes everything in the Spit Fire changed. And then we drank. Even after Maryam had her outburst we kept on drinking.
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 36
