by Mai Al-Nakib
But Hayat wasn’t there for the taking. She had made the decision never to marry. Late at night, she would sneak out of her house, walk to an isolated scrap of shore, and plunge into the forgiving warmth of the Gulf. Some nights, when the moon was absent, she even dared to swim without clothes. She knew marriage would mean giving up midnight swims and cheeks to the sun, that it would restrict the space she needed to stretch her toes, and she knew it couldn’t possibly be worth it. So Hayat sold her wares at the souk, tended her flowers, combined her far-flung ingredients, and bided her time.
Hayat never realized she was waiting for Iskandar, Iskandar and her echo twins. On one of his visits to the town center, he passed through Souk al-Hareem, looking over the displayed items, trying to collect everything he might need to survive the next month in the unforgiving desert. At Hayat’s mat, he stalled: in a sea of black, her exposed face stood out like a beacon. He stared down at her in open astonishment. These were the first pair of female Kuwaiti eyes he had seen attached to a nose, a mouth, a chin, and cheeks. He squatted down fast and leaned in closer than he knew was advisable. Hayat remained still. He stabbed two of his fingers into the center of his chest.
“Alexander. Alexander.”
Hayat said not a word. She stared back at him with quizzical, not unfriendly eyes.
“My name is Alexander. Your name? What . . . is . . . your . . . name? Ismek?”
Hayat didn’t answer. He noticed her look up from his aquamarine eyes to the flaxen hair on his head. He was accustomed to fascination over his hair. Men he worked with would often reach forward to touch it, sometimes even pulling out a strand or two to show their children. Hayat seemed to marvel, too, though she remained silent. Alexander gathered a few necessities off her mat, overpaid, and refused the change. Hayat stood up and shook her head at him violently, her black abaya cascading around her shoulders. She pushed the change firmly into his fingers, her hand slipping into his.
She said, “Hayat.”
Alexander knew the women of the souk would begin to make their way home around noon, so he waited for Hayat outside the covered market. He saw her walk out from under the thatched awning, her face lifted, her gait strong. He followed her through the narrow streets, shadowless in the mid-afternoon sun, not hiding, but not making himself obvious either. Her house was on the edge of the sea, its outer walls splashed with bright blooms of bougainvillea. As she pulled open the heavy wooden front door, she turned to look back at this unusual Alexander, daring to follow an Arab woman in the streets, daring to stop in front of her home, daring to look her in the face, as if expecting something. She walked over the raised threshold and left the door ajar, daring Alexander a little further.
And why not? She was a young woman, no different from young women anywhere else. Her propriety had not been respected, growing up in that rotten home for orphans where much unpleasantness had occurred. Now, she wanted this foreign Alexander, hair the color of the lightest sand along the shore, sand she curled between her toes in the middle of the night. She would not respect propriety. Why should she? She was the orphan girl of parents who had loved with abandon, abandoned by them, as ready as they were to abandon this little fortress on the brink of thick, black disaster. Alexander was unearthing disaster in a desert that wasn’t his. He dared to do it, foolishly oblivious. He dared to cross the threshold, stepping through to the other side, into her flowered isolation, Hayat’s discreet life.
That night and for one night a month over the next six months, Hayat and Alexander slept together on the terrace. Had anyone been looking, they would have glimpsed flashes of glacial white together with lean lengths of olive. Had anyone been peering over windowless walls and into private courtyards, they would have seen weaves of gold and black swelling over teak benches. Had anyone been listening, they would have heard echoes:
“Two makes one.”
“Two makes one.”
“Two makes one.”
“Two makes one.”
When she communicated to him, with moving hands and shimmering sounds, that Hayat meant life, he started calling her that. She called him “Iskandar,” the Arabic version of Alexander.
“Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn.”
“Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn.”
“Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn.”
“Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn.”
Two-horned Alexander the Great. Hayat of the hanging gardens. Iskandar and Life, renamed, dazzled for seven nights. Had anyone been sniffing around, they would have smelled salty air, a spiced breeze, and longing in the curve of a white shell he brought in from the beach. At first, no one was there to see, to hear, to smell. No one suspected the rustling behind the fuchsia blooms, behind the cluck of her locking door. In quiet crevices, life is born over and over again, without witness, without recognition. It happens, feverishly or serenely, fast or slow, and the guardians of propriety remain laughably ignorant. But eventually, inevitably, they become aware, their fury rises, and they smash down hard, with an iron fist.
As the sixth month opened, Hayat began to show through her carefully arranged layers. Swift as the wind, the murder of crows gathered in close, circling with wet anticipation. After his seventh visit, as he stepped over the raised threshold and into the lavender light of predawn, Alexander was seized firmly by the arms and escorted to an alley close by, not out of view. He was placed gently onto the dusty ground, like a child into a cradle. He was kicked solidly three times in the ribs and twice in the groin. He was smacked on the side of the head and punched in both of his eyes and in the jaw. A stream of saliva, blood, and teeth seeped through his swollen lips. They rubbed mud into his straw hair and over his hot white skin. They spat on him once, twice, three times, as they turned on their heels and left him writhing. He crawled to the edge of town, back into the drilled desert, passing on his way the haunted building of Hayat’s childhood (she had spoken to him of it in agonizing detail, in a language of tears), whispering gravely:
“One becomes two. One becomes two. One becomes two. One becomes two.”
They had scared him, asserted their irrefutable ownership.
The townsfolk never approached Hayat directly, never threatened or harmed her in any way. She was left alone, her defiance sucked out as thoroughly as marrow from the bones of goats. Or so they chose to believe. Her front door locked, her walls a shield against them all, Hayat became invisible to the town. Apart from a sullen old acquaintance of the mats who willingly snuck supplies to her in the middle of the night, Hayat was not seen for eight years. After that, when the twins began to visit the world outside, only snatches of her would come into view through the door. They had broken the spell of those six months, her affair with Iskandar, fair-haired father of her boys. They had tried to stake their claim on her, just as the world outside, including Alexander, was staking its claim on the poison coursing through the veins of their land. But, to their surprise, Hayat slipped through. She banished them. They were left panting with curiosity about her life behind the walls, about her pregnancy – had it come to term? was it a boy or a girl? what was it called? – and about her plans for the future. They wondered what she thought of them, whether she understood what they had done, or whether she looked down on them with disdain. They were troubled to find they cared about her opinion, more and more as the years passed. From behind those walls, she, unlikely orphan girl, became their touchstone, their measure of cruelty and kindness, and they were ashamed of themselves, irredeemably ashamed of what they had done.
Hayat never learned exactly what had happened to Iskandar, and she never tried to find out. A week after their final encounter, she discovered a small tin box wrapped in white muslin carefully placed on her doorstep. It was heavier than it looked, a weight that sat comfortably in the palm of her right hand. With her fingers around that box came the certainty, the absolute certainty, that she would never see Iskandar again. She never did.
“Mama? What’s in the box?”
“in the box?”
“th
e box?”
“box?”
“ox?”
This question was as close to a direct inquiry about their father as the boys would ever venture. It was a question they asked every night, repeated like a prayer or history. Mama Hayat had shown the twins the box on the morning they asked to go outside. She gathered her eight-year-olds into her arms, breathing in the smell of her womb, recognizing in their request the end of safety, the end of shelter, the end of living their enchanted ostrich lives. She felt already the obliteration of mud brick homes, of unbroken shorelines and crystal waters, of memory and a time before. It would all fall so quickly, and not just for her. So many ghosts to come. She could feel herself melting into an apparition. She could already see money exchanging hands for land. Hayat envisioned a desert partitioned, cordoned, flashing with flames of orange and red in the dead of night. She pictured the place little Kout would become and tried to imagine her boys in the middle of it. It made her fearful. She could no longer imagine herself there. She thought of Iskandar’s box. Abruptly, Hayat released her hold on Mish‘al and Mishari, both a little confused by their mother’s show of desperate affection, and went to retrieve it.
“Habaybi, this box is your father’s legacy. Inside it you will find your birthright. When I die, it belongs to you. For now, it belongs to me.”
“Mama? What’s in the box?”
“in the box?”
“the box?”
“box?”
“ox?”
Hayat kneeled down to face her boys, to look into their eyes as deeply as she possibly could, to let them know that what she was going to say now, she would never say again.
“Mish‘al and Mishari, my yellow-haired angels, inside this box is the answer to everything on earth. Inside is the end of war, the end of greed, the end of judgment, the end of jealousy, the end of selfishness, and, most importantly, the end of cruelty. But you have to wait until I’m dead to look. In the meantime, you must try to figure it out for yourselves. Go outside these walls, past the edge of this town, deep into the desert. Talk to as many people as you can. Ask questions. Take notes. And when you come home, start sorting, start piecing, start weaving. I can’t help you any longer. You’re on your own for now. Courage. Courage.”
Though they asked Mama Hayat the same question every night, hoping to trick her into revealing some tiny clue, she never said another word about it. Her only response to their nightly inquiry was, “Goodnight, my flaxen ropes. I love you forever and a day away from everything we think we know and love.”
“Goodnight Mama. We love you back.”
“ama. We love you back.”
“ove you back.”
“ou back.”
“ack.”
* * *
As her boys plunged into the world beyond her borders, Hayat felt, for the first time in years, alone. She was confident they would swim through their new life, her defiant gait as embedded in their genetic code as their father’s blond hair. In the space they left behind, she came to miss Iskandar, or something Iskandar might have become had he been given the chance. She began to dream of his closed eyes, lashes like flecks of gold on his cheeks. While the boys were out, she started to spend more time with the tin box, carefully unfolding the muslin, unlocking the small clasp, removing the familiar object from inside. It was the feeling of floating in the warm fold of the sea, naked with the crabs and the shrimps and the groupers. Hayat would sit under her sidr tree, the singing of sparrows and bulbuls in her ears, the bluest of skies in her eyes, the lovely weight of Iskandar’s gift in her hands, and she would feel time collapse into something other than it happened to be at that moment. She would drift outside the lines in the sand, toward a glow around something she could almost make out, was on the verge of seeing clearly. It was like galloping through water or shooting up into the sun. Almost past the limit, just about there, pushing against the pull of her boys, their whorl of love echoing in her soul. But Hayat could not surrender, could not ascend toward that orb, that promise left behind. She would wrap up Iskandar’s legacy, hide it where she knew the boys would never look, and spend the rest of the morning, the rest of her days, whistling with the wind, cooking treats for her twins.
The town the boys emerged into, stepping over their mother’s threshold for the first time, was a town on the brink. The Alexanders of Arabia had found what they had come to find. By 1946, oil was vatted and ready to launch across seas and oceans accustomed, for hundreds of years, to carrying spices, jewels, textiles, water. Everyone around was touting change, splendor, and the end of misery. Money, unprecedented, would soon cascade, and the demolition of history would begin. Arched corridors, hidden courtyards, and shared terraces no more. After the initial shock of encountering the twins for the first time, the townsfolk tolerated their presence. Though they would never gather them warmly into fat, welcoming arms, the coincidence of dates caused the people of old Kuwait to interpret the startling appearance of the twins as a sign of miracles to come. Mish‘al and Mishari’s blond heads, viewed bobbing through the narrow alleys or in the waters of the Gulf or around the dhow yards, their three favorite places to be, were considered early on as sigils of good fortune.
But with time, the boys began to generate more unease than comfort. Strange doubled beings and odd echoed speech soon came to symbolize to the increasingly bewildered residents the Janus-faced reality of producing and exporting oil. The mad fantasy of riches would come, but it would come on a wave of seismic destruction. Long after the echo twins were wafers in the memory of only the oldest Kuwaitis, the destruction still rained down, harder and harder. Crystal waters no more. Bluest skies no more. Delicate white truffles bursting in the desert no more. Sidr trees no more. Razed and replaced. Out with the old. To this day nobody knows for certain what has come instead. In with some vicious, damaging thing. In with perplexity. In with loss.
The boys, following their mother’s instructions, spent the years of their youth talking to the townsfolk, asking them questions, writing down the details they didn’t want to forget. Mish‘al and Mishari collected snippets of their mother’s life: an orphan with an inheritance, parents lost at sea, obstinate girl with face uncovered, cheeks raised to the sun. Some mentioned that, like the twins, their mother had once loved to swim; it was, after all, no secret. Most kept their mouths shut about the twins’ father. But a few, only one or two really, mentioned digging in the desert and Britannia. They let slip blond hair and the night. They brought up love. Nobody ever said anything about the end, but Mish‘al and Mishari, made clever by the clues their mother had taught them to read throughout their childhood, put two and two more or less together.
“One becomes two.”
“becomes two.”
“omes two.”
“s two.”
“wo.”
The twins echoed their mother’s story as they wandered around the narrow lanes of old Kuwait, as they swam through the waters of their sea, as they swung from the timber skeletons of dhows under construction. Back and forth to each other, building up stories about Mama Hayat, about their father, about themselves, and then, increasingly, about the people they lived among. They fashioned tales, wild and roaming, unhampered by facts. They imagined away the restrictions of place. They created in leaps that hopped across time. They felt free, taking in long, deep breaths as they built for themselves a home in language, a shelter they carried everywhere with them, turning the heads of those who caught fragments of their oral symphony.
But the twins never once forgot about the box. It contained, they were certain, the answer to every question they ever had. Their mother had said so. Their mother was dead. She never revealed to them where the box was hidden, but they knew. It could only be in one place.
* * *
Mish‘al and Mishari washed their mother’s body and wrapped her in white linens, preparing her for the next morning, her journey into the desert. They could not bear to think of Hayat’s body abandoned in the sands now dr
illed with holes, safety there no more. They placed an unnecessary pillow under her covered head and left her lying on the mattress they had so often pulled out together onto the terrace. Later that evening, the feel of their mother’s weight still in their arms, the twins descended to the courtyard, sat on one of the benches, and stared at the familiar tree, old enemy, old friend. It was there, they knew, hidden somewhere under the tangle of roots. It was time to open the box.
At midnight, in the white light of a moon turning waves into plains of snow, the twins carefully unwrapped their legacy. The muslin, brown from years of wind storms and rain, disintegrated to dust between their fingers. The tin was rusted, the lock no longer locked. The brothers caught their breath as they removed from the box a heavy object not immediately clear in the shadows along the shore. Mish‘al held it up to the moon.
“A compass.”
“compass.”
“pass.”
“ss.”
A heavy brass-cased compass. F. Barker & Son. Trade Mark London. Sharp black points in all directions: north, south, east, west, northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest, and twenty-four others in between. Black on white dial. A heavy little orb with glass catching the twinkling stars and the lunar light as Mish‘al and Mishari passed it back and forth to each other with mounting pleasure. The world resting unexpectedly in their palms. A removable brass lid was engraved with the initials: ASK. The brothers held Alexander between them. Their mother’s Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn, her two-horned lover, their father. Hayat’s version of life pointed them now in a direction they had not foreseen.
