I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops (18 page)

Her little daughter was clinging to her now, but this was no consolation to her. She was being smothered under a thick blanket of whispered remarks, and it was impossible to escape, for the talk was now about more than the jug and the moon and unperfumed soap: “Come on! Given a bit of time, she’ll go back to her first husband and start bringing up this daughter of hers again. See, the Almighty’s taken His revenge.”

When Shadia heard this she hid her face in her hands. To stop them intruding on her privacy, she bowed her head and retreated within herself so that she was alone, as she had wanted to be all along. She abandoned herself to her passionate thoughts, conjuring up his smell, especially the
smell of his neck and under his arms, his smell before he went to sleep and when he woke up, and before and after shaving. Eventually she worked around to the smell of the first kiss. She found herself delaying, hesitating, uncertain where she wanted to freeze her thoughts so as to enjoy them for the maximum possible time. But then she let them run on, again reliving the moment he first entered her, which in its intensity surpassed all that followed, even the ecstasy, because it was the focal point, dissolving the agony that had been eating away at her: her sorrow at leaving her daughter, her horror at the idea that her lover would marry somebody else before she could get away from her husband, her fear of facing her family and the neighbors.

As soon as she felt him right inside her, she was sure she had been created for this moment. She closed her eyes, savoring the peace of mind that she thought had been taken away from her for good.

But they didn’t leave her alone with him now, any more than they had done before, when she ran away with him and they had pursued her with violent talk and messages and threats. Their voices reached her, and she felt they were working her in their hands like a piece of dough, especially the women on her family’s side. The others were mulling over their loss with enormous anguish, which made them accuse her of being the reason for God’s vengeance on him.

Her aunt was trying to make her change her name back to Rashida, “the wise,” for Shadia—which means “the singer”—symbolized his era, as he was the one who had given her the name, and now she had to go back to being wise … and don’t do your ablutions with the tin jug because the long spout will remind you of men, and you shouldn’t look at the moon because it’s male, and …

Shadia kept her eyes determinedly shut, lost in her memories of how he had smelled, the way he had touched every part of her, even her toes, sensing him all around her. Then her feelings took off in another direction as she heard the women discussing, more audibly now, how she would be forced to go back to her previous husband this time, straight after the seclusion period, and how she would be moved to her brother’s house in the meantime. She found herself blessing death, deciding that she too would die. She closed her eyes and held her breath. She wanted to suffocate. She squeezed her chest, as if she could wrench her heart out of place. However, she remained fully conscious, and happened to glance down at her healthy hands. Her longing for him must be interfering with her grief and giving her strength and vitality. She willed herself to die again, picturing him cold and lifeless, as if he had never known her. She was startled when her aunt forced her head upward,
pried her clenched hands away from her body and pushed her daughter toward her, hoping to oblige Shadia to take the child in her arms.

“Bear up!” her aunt ordered her briskly. “It’s God’s law. Dust to dust.” Then she went on, “You must repent. Return to the fold. Defeat the keeper of hell’s furnaces by showing him you’ve slipped through his fiery fingers. What more could the believer desire? Naturally, the angels’ pens will cross your bad deed off the slate if you return to your first husband. They’ll be even surer of you if you look up into the sky at night when you’re dozing off to sleep—after your period of seclusion, of course—wait until you see a shooting star, then close your eyes, say, ‘There is no god but God,’ and repent. This star will hear and hurry to curse Satan, who tempted you to commit adultery. Repent so that you can go to heaven and see ‘the ground gleaming white like silver and pearls, the earth made of musk, the saffron plants, the trees with alternating leaves of silver and gold.’”
¹

Shadia’s eyelids did not even flicker while her aunt was speaking: she was still trying to die. But one sentence penetrated the gloom, and gave her a glimmer of hope.
“Heaven is the place where all couples are reunited,” said her aunt.

But as quickly as Shadia had rushed to greet the words, she backed away from them. “Will I meet my first husband or my second?” she demanded.

Her question, asked in a heartfelt rush of despair and terror, rolled over ears that had never heard an amorous whisper, a kind word or a beautiful melody, and was buried in hearts that knew only frustration and anxiety.

Her aunt lashed out at her with loathing, disregarding the rest of the company, as if her chance for revenge had come at last. “You’ve lived exactly as you pleased and dragged us through the mud, and we’re still paying for it. If you repent, at least we’ll get some benefit. But you want to guarantee your afterlife as well. You scheming whore!” She paused and then burst out again with venomous delight, “Your first husband, of course.”

As Shadia’s world fell apart, she heard one of the women asserting that God forgives all a woman’s sins except adultery. Shadia closed her eyes, recollecting what she had read in her teens about the terrors of the afterlife, about “women hanging by their hair in the infernal zaqoum tree and having boiling water poured over them till their flesh came off in strips, because they’d taken medicine to get rid of their unwanted children,” and “women whose faces had been burnt and whose tongues lolled out onto their chests,
because they had asked their husbands to divorce them for no reason.”
²

Too bad. Shadia nodded her head calmly, accepting her fate. “I don’t care,” she said, and rid herself of two images: herself in bed with her first husband, and lying with him on the pearly white ground of Paradise.

¹

I woke up
this morning thinking I was a tin can stuck away on a shelf, wanting to be picked up by a pair of hands and opened so that some of the air trapped inside could escape. It wasn’t the spring urging me to open up even though it has always stirred animals and birds to cover thousands of miles for the sake of sex. No. It was my nightdress.

Why do I keep wearing it when I know I’ll be disappointed as usual in the morning after sex? Now I only have to picture it to get that feeling.

I pull it off and fling it away and put on a dress suitable for cleaning the house and scrubbing bathrooms. Perhaps this will bring me back to reality. But I still feel like a fruit stone discarded on the sidewalk: a mango, my luscious flesh sucked from its fibers by a voracious tongue. I pick the nightdress up off the floor and stand holding it. I should be grateful it’s this ivory color, not rose pink. Rose pink would be too much.

I know that color of pink which promises uninterrupted passion, but it’s a color you don’t see anymore: maybe the people who mix fabric dyes have never seen pomegranate seeds, and you can be sure that nobody examines the color of a woman’s nipple anymore except the doctor.

But there must be women like me looking for it, and if they find it unfortunately it’s in nightdresses that have seen better days in secondhand-clothes shops, and bras and corsets that depend on more than plastic bones to give them shape: they were made for women like my mother’s friend whose breasts used to be the object of regular attacks by me and my brother. I mean we would sit on her knees as close as possible to the two big mountains and she would fend us off, laughing until her whole body shook, including the two mountains, and we were happy when they touched us. She
told my mother of the salesgirl who stuck her head in the cup of a bra she’d been looking at and said, “This one’s the right size for you.”

I forgot to say that this color has a smell like a powder puff, the smell of roses. And I also forgot to describe its silky feel as it slips through your fingers like quicksilver.

I look at myself in the mirror, so disappointed and sour, and vow that this will be the last time I wake up in this state.

I didn’t think about liberating my body until I was on a summer holiday with my friend Muna. Sex began cropping up in our conversations all the time and dominated our thoughts as we sat in our white summer cottons under the gentle sun, arranging our long hair, or appeared in the restaurant in all our finery after a long day’s preparation of our bodies: stretching them out under a layer of hot wax that picked up even the downy little face hairs so the surface of the skin was smooth as pearls, surrendering them to the masseuse’s hands, soaking them in frangipani milk, giving them a siesta, dressing them in underwear so soft it almost slipped off the skin, then sitting them down to wait and enjoy more conversations about sex, and fidget with lust. Even so, they showed no interest in flirting with the other guests in the hotel, quite the opposite: they couldn’t wait to be alone with the men they pictured waiting in bed for them, naked and scarcely able to contain their impatience.
Meanwhile, we dawdled, fueling our desires and tantalizing these creatures of our bodies’ fantasies. But this intimate atmosphere changed at once when Muna began describing how she felt when she was with someone who understood what her body wanted: how she became like an unweaned baby content to lie back and suck on its pacifier, daydreaming about the flood of warmth and nourishment to come.

“But that kind of desire isn’t always there,” she added. If she hadn’t said that, my throat would have exploded with the pulse that was beating there and preventing me from speaking. “It’s not always like that. I’ve had some disappointments too. There was one man who brought his big heavy hand down on my breast like a flyswatter and tweaked my nipples as if he was picking dust off a curtain. And I remember another who couldn’t work out where the well was in spite of the wetness all around. He whispered to me, demanding to know if I was normal, did I have a hole? And he hung on to my hair the whole time, as if he was scared he’d lose his balance and fall off! And of course there was the one who began to groan and sigh and gasp for breath and had his eyes shut. I thought he was having a heart attack, I didn’t realize it was just passion, so I sent for the doctor!”

We laughed together, her laughter submerging mine because she saw them as she talked, and then her laughter
silenced me. Suddenly there was this pulse beating in my throat again and it squirted out creatures that tried to throttle me as I listened to her saying how she used to rage like a fire, keeping the men off her with her hands, her tongue; scolding, mocking, angry as she laid down her terms for sex. And I was still behaving like a donkey, going down a road against my will, and on top of that, reassuring whoever was riding me that this was the ideal way, the way I’d always dreamed of, sometimes going to the lengths of hiding the hooves that had been bloodied by the sharp stones on the bumpy road.

When I owned up to this, Muna was shocked to the core. She had always known me as a mistress of manipulation and deceit, a woman who took a thirsty man to water and led him back thirstier still, plucked words from a mute’s mouth, pulled out an eyelash even if there were no lashes there. Had I still managed to fall into the trap of my own cunning? Here I was complaining to her, like little Cupid to tall, sublime Venus, that I’d been stung by a nest of bees on my face and hands and chest, because my face was turned to the wall and I was lying on my front with one arm underneath me and the other hanging down desolately in space. All this just so that the joiner could try and make a hole for the screw to go into.

Muna stroked my hair and twisted my curls around her fingers, just as Venus must have done to Cupid, and tried to
soothe away my sadness and irritation with wise words that were addressed to the depths of my soul rather than being designed to instruct me on what my tongue could do.

“But why do I have to teach him how to kiss me? How to make love to me? Why doesn’t he—?”

“Shhh. Listen.” She wouldn’t let me talk at all, being rational just like Venus, and I was following her advice as if I had no choice. Her eyes were fixed on me, following me wherever I went. She controlled me as if invisible strings were attached to every part of my body and I only moved when she jerked them.

My lover and I watched the video Muna had picked out for me. I wasn’t relaxing and enjoying it as I was meant to. Instead I was searching for clues like a detective, wanting to grab hold of the tongue as it moved up and down, in complete control. I watched intently, wishing that one shot would last longer, or another could have been in close-up. When my lover turned his attention to the dish of sliced carrots, I felt the strings working my feet, my head, my whole body and I wanted to make him turn back to the television for fear the golden opportunity would be missed. I saw that he was shaking his head in disgust. “Did you see how wide they were opening their mouths? Thank God I’m not that guy eating the woman’s tongue. It’s revolting! It distorts the shape of her lips, makes her look grotesque.”