I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops (11 page)

Seeing Saad laid out on the floor, dumb and silent;
Saad, whose mighty voice had welled up from his entrails. Now his wife seemed to have snatched his voice to lament for him, joined by her daughters, by his aunts and sisters, all beating their faces and rubbing ash and black soot onto their cheeks.

The English pigeon devouring the remains of the couscous without a pause, immersing its whole beak and head in the grains while I smiled at it, saying, “You seem to like couscous from a packet. I suppose it’s because you’re an English pigeon. You’re used to things out of packets.”

Aisha’s insistent words in the grain store, as she shook her gold earrings and the bangles on her wrist, urging me to stay at home, but I could only gaze at her shoes and marvel at how exactly they matched her handbag.

Then I am standing in Aisha’s house with its Moroccan furniture and Moroccan smell, hardly able to believe that I’m in London.

The letter with my name in English on the envelope, a Moroccan stamp, and a list of requests from my family for a white bridal veil for my sister, surgical stockings for my brother and a china dish for my mother.

Offering the blond English boy—the one I was throwing water at now—half my lunch, and sitting there full of gratitude because he smiled, because he liked the taste of the piece of chicken dipped in cumin and saffron and he was smiling at me for the first time. I wanted his approval
because he was English. I wanted the approval of everyone from the bus conductor to the Pakistani shopkeeper, because he owned a shop and spoke English. Being lost in the Underground, tears running down my cheeks. Learning to decipher the names of the stations. Learning the letters by heart as if they were magic signs.

I was throwing water at the English boy and his friend and they were yelling, “She’s crazy. Jesus Christ, she’s completely crazy.”

He started up at my scream and I saw the purple blood on him and on me. Then he jumped to his feet as if he’d been bitten by a snake, shouting, “You’re a virgin! You’re still a virgin! I don’t understand you.”

I didn’t chew my fingers with regret at giving him my virginity, furious at my weakness in lying down for him, and taking this boy in my arms just because he was English, a citizen of that great nation which had once ruled half the globe; nor did I blame myself for having clung to the notion that I had severed all links with my country just because I had traveled to London alone without any member of my family. Instead of striking my face and grieving aloud because my hymen was no longer intact, I wondered, Is it because he’s an Englishman that he doesn’t feel proud he’s taken my virginity, or is he frightened that now I’ll try to force him to marry me?

I tried to tell him that I didn’t blame him for deflowering
me but he wasn’t listening. He just went on saying in a shocked way, as if he had lost his mind, “You’re twenty-five, thirty years old? And you’re still a virgin? Jesus Christ, I don’t understand you. I just don’t understand at all.”

He didn’t go to the bathroom to wash, he stayed in the room. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him wipe himself with Kleenex tissues and drop them on the floor, indifferent to the smears of blood on them. He pulled on his trousers and went quickly over to turn up the music, moving his head from side to side with the beat, then lay facedown on the floor.

I saw myself on the roof of our house as I spread the couscous out to dry on a sheet in the sun for the last time before my journey to London; I could see the whole town in my mind: the tops of the trees, the minaret, the ancient wall that ran round the town. I could think of nothing except going to London and finding my way among its tall buildings sparkling with lights.

I saw the friend of Aisha’s helping me escape from her house in London, carrying one of Aisha’s children, while I took my suitcase and dragged the other child along with me. I could see Aisha’s English neighbor shutting her front door in our faces, and yet all the same we left the two children on the doorstep and ran after I’d pinched their cheeks to make them cry so that she’d have to come out to them.

I walked in the cold London without stockings, without an overcoat, without a sweater. In Marks & Spencer there were hundreds of dresses and sweaters and beautiful nightdresses. I paid the woman at the cash register and smiled at her. She smiled back and said the coat I’d chosen was really pretty. I was overjoyed. She approved of my taste and I’d given her the right amount of money for the red coat, which I still haven’t worn.

I bent eagerly over the vacuum cleaner, as if it were a magic broom to transport me to another world, from poverty to riches. The implements available for cleaning here were as many and varied in color and smell as the places I had to clean. Aisha’s gold chain, which I had hidden among my clothes, was in my hands one moment and the next on
the
counter in the Oxford Street goldsmith’s.

The red of my anger bubbled up like the rosy orange juice squeezed by the machines in the tourist street in our town. It ran down between my eyes and made me see everything blood-red, even though seconds before my mind had conjured up a pleasing vision: the English boy’s sister. She was polite, she gave me a small box of chocolates with a thank-you card and kissed me and shook my hand when she came for Sunday dinner. She had been different from her brother and from his friends, who used to visit us and make themselves at home in my clean room and on the clean bed, delighted to find a video and a cassette recorder, who ate
my nice food and listened to loud music and swallowed the drink they brought with them. They all said they wanted to visit my country and I nodded my head, promising it wouldn’t cost them a penny, thinking how the people in the town would crowd around them, look at their colored hair, some of it short and some long. I smiled at them, heaped more food onto their plates, poured more mint tea or coffee into their cups. I wanted their approval, even if they did smell so terrible, the reek of their hair in its stiff, bright tufts mixing with the fumes of alcohol.

I began to alter my standards of hospitality, offering them my pale, cold face when their music grew louder, when they began laughing among themselves and didn’t take the trouble to explain their jokes to me as they had before, or repeat their words until I understood what they were saying. The English boy showed the others all the implements and products I had collected for cleaning and disinfecting, telling them I had a mania for cleanliness, and I’d once decided to wash all his clothes and he’d had to stay indoors the whole day.

I felt revolted by them and began to sleep in the hall, dragging a pillow and a wool blanket off the bed and leaving the room to them, in the hope that they would understand my anger, that they would no longer stay till the early hours of the morning, stepping over me as I lay asleep, leaving overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses and cans and
bottles strewn about the floor. Sometimes they were so drunk they fell asleep where they were and lay without pillows or covers until I returned from work, and then I would rage at them in Arabic, telling them that thanks to them my room was no better than the Italian’s pig farm on the outskirts of our town; we used to spit on the ground whenever we went near it, shouting exclamations of disgust, even though all we could see of it was the outer fence.

Why was I doing this? Pouring water over them while they yelled at each other? Perhaps similar things happened in the neighboring rooms, which were occupied by all different people. Their noise had stopped me from sleeping: shouting, shattering glass, the word
police
echoing here and there.

How glad I’d been in those first nights with him. I’d believed he would protect me from these sounds. Now they were happening right inside my own room. I tried to shout like the two of them, but my cry came out strangled and distorted; I still didn’t know how to express my anger in English. So I reverted to the role of crazy horse, raging bull: wheeling, rearing, plunging, now attacking, now drawing back. Were they shouting? No, they were laughing. Actually laughing.

It was the music that brought me in from the hall where I had been lying. A single note repeated over and over again, throbbing in my head, making my chest tighten. I
had to be rid of them. I decided. I had to be rid of the English boy. I’d give him a choice: he could either stay on his own or leave. I knew he had no home, but that wasn’t my problem. I was going to pull the tape out of the machine, interrupt the music right in the middle of the song. It had been on loud all evening, and now it was the early hours of the morning. They had no sensitivity, no conscience.

I charged like a bull. When I saw no one in the middle of the room, which had been full of music and smoke and pungent with the smell of hashish, I thought he must have forgotten to turn off the music before he went to sleep. I found myself thinking affectionately that I ought to be straightforward with him; the English liked that. Perhaps he didn’t understand why I’d become so angry and distant. Suddenly I stopped and stood still, staring in amazement. A man was lying by his side. They were both naked. They were lying in each other’s arms. I saw their uncircumcised members as clear as day and shuddered. That was the first time I’d seen a man’s penis up close and my mouth and throat went dry. I went dry between my legs for several seconds, then I charged again. Shocked, they started up, but they made no attempt to cover their nakedness.

Then, as if they’d recovered from the surprise, they began to laugh, snorting and giggling in delight at the water being thrown at them, like two children playing a game.

I must be dreaming, seeing the opposite of what I thought I was seeing. In reality they should have been dumbfounded, wishing the floor would open up and swallow them in their embarrassment. Or hiding themselves from me, thinking up a whole range of lies and excuses. How would the English boy go on living now that he’d been found out?

They continued to call on Jesus Christ, trying to dry themselves off, then laughing again. The English boy pointed to my face, unable to control his mirth. I must have looked like the mad ape that wandered the streets of our town with its gypsy owner.

Their laughter so infuriated me that I began to have thoughts of revenge. But how, when he had nothing that I could take by force, steal, hide, break in front of him, tear up or trample underfoot, to vent my rage and spite? All he owned were the clothes on his back and a few cassettes, which I’d partly paid for anyway. I looked wildly about me a hundred times, unable to think what to do; then I threw my coat on over my nightdress, pulled woolen socks over the wool trousers I wore to protect me from the cold, and ran to the door, without listening to what his friend was trying to say to me. I went out and slammed the door behind me, turning the key in the lock as if I wanted to safeguard the proof of the crime and its only witnesses, repeating the same English phrase over and over again: “Just you
wait and see.” Then I went on in Arabic: “You’ll be sorry. Everybody’s going to know. I should have noticed. You were with me for a whole week and you might just as well have been a girl, or a boy without balls. What was I doing admiring you for being so well behaved, sitting there for hours content to have your arm around me? I even said to myself, ‘He’s English and he understands.’ Still, I wanted you to go all the way with me, and London’s far away. I’ll never go back home. I’ll always live here now. I should have guessed. How was I to know? If you’d had a big fat bottom I might have guessed. But you’re all scrawny. Your bum’s hardly bigger than a fist. I’m crazy. I let your white flesh and your skinny body and your blond hair blot out things that would have made me shudder at home.”

I rang his sister from a pay phone. When she heard my voice, she asked dryly, “What do you want?”

“Your brother—” I began.

She cut in. “Are you getting me out of bed at this hour to talk to me about my brother?” she demanded.

“It’s urgent,” I replied.

At this she changed her tone, and asked quickly, “Is he all right?”

I told her what I had found out. She shouted at me, accusing me of being crazy to wake her up for that and telling me to keep my nose out of her brother’s business,
especially since it was nothing to do with me. As her parting shot she told me never to phone her at this time of the night again, but then her anger seemed to have woken her and she continued, “I know you went to a lot of trouble over the meal, but my brother’s sexual proclivities aren’t any of your business, or mine either.”

“Bitch,” I screamed down the phone at her, then, remembering how much they liked dogs here, I shouted in English, “Whore! Whore!”

I walked along, trembling with anger and misery, not through the London of beautiful houses and clean streets that I’d dreamed of, where people wore only elegant, expensive clothes, nor between buildings glittering with lights that soared into the clouds, but in the darkness among the shadows of trees planted at infrequent intervals and council houses with their unlit windows, all alike; I passed people asleep, protected from the cold in cardboard boxes, and rubbish in untidy heaps or neatly tied up in black plastic bags, and empty milk bottles with traces of sour milk lingering in them.

A voice rose from a heap of clothes on the pavement, accompanied by the stench of alcohol-laden breath, a voice begging for a drink or money to buy a drink. I used to smile at people who stopped me in the street, not knowing what they wanted at first, until I discovered that there were actually
beggars in London. I gave them money, full of pride that I was richer than at least one English person, even if he was a beggar.

I walked along with something boring a hole between my legs. Now I was conscious of Aisha’s words when we stood together in the storeroom and she tried to dissuade me from going to London: “Go alone to London without an aunt or a husband or your mother and they’ll say you’ve sold your soul. You’ll be known as a bad girl even if you’re as pure as the Prophet’s daughter.”

Aisha’s annual visits home had sown the seed of travel in my spirit and this seed had grown and opened out and reached my eyes and tongue. On her last visit I’d been unable to take my eyes off her gold earrings and her bangles. I’d dragged her into the storeroom and begged her to take me to London, saying my family wouldn’t allow me to go without her. It was not only her matching handbag and high-heeled shoes that fired my enthusiasm. The smell of couscous and other grains that filled the air constantly reminded me of my own situation. All I wanted to smell from now on was the fragrance of England, which Aisha exuded. I urged her to listen to me and to feel what I was feeling. Then I took off my little gold earrings and felt in the folds of my dress for all the money I’d saved or stolen over the years, and placed both the money and the earrings in the palm of her hand, forcing her fingers shut around them. As
I gave her an exaggerated account of my clashes with different members of my family, she continued to discourage me, saying that the work in London was hard and that exile was no easy way of life. I thought she must not like the idea of my going on the plane with her, then coming home every year laden with presents. How could she compare the task of dusting and polishing the magnificent English furniture with the drudgery of cleaning our house, where there were only torn rags, a broom and a pail of water, and you had to go down on your knees to scrub the floor and do the endless piles of washing by hand?