Women of Sand and Myrrh (2 page)

I knew that life here was odd when I found that I had no garlic for my cooking and I couldn’t go out to the shops and buy some. So I opened the door and stood on the step, looking about me at the other wooden houses painted white, the sparse trees, the water storage tanks, the sun burning down on the asphalt, and it made me imagine that I was somewhere in space. The houses stood at a distance from each other, the doors were closed, the air-conditioners hummed. Only when I could go in the car with my husband did I feel happy to leave the house. However hard I tried to buy everything I needed, I always forgot many things and the display on the shelves didn’t help me. All the goods were mixed together: egg whisks, rolls of material, vegetables side by side with bars of soap, Arabic grammar books, bread, pocket knives and silver Maria Theresa dollars.

I found out that the inhabitants of the compound were Arabs and foreigners mixed. But I hadn’t the courage to knock at their doors, perhaps because I had heard the adults swearing and the children shouting. I knew their quarrels by heart, even though their television sets were turned up so loud, and I knew the children’s names, the mothers’ feeble protests and the fathers’ furious oaths.

It was only a matter of a few days before the women thronged to my house, reproaching me for not knocking on their doors. The one called Umm Kairouz said, ‘Are you an angel or something? Is that why we didn’t even know you
were here?’ And another, downcast at her own lack of intelligence, commented, ‘It’s funny. I heard the toilet flushing and thought it was working by itself, and I heard wood creaking and said to my husband, “Stop eating. Every time you move there’s a creaking noise.” ’

I felt disillusioned: this wasn’t the desert that I’d seen from the aircraft, nor the one I’d read about or imagined to myself; there was sand and wind but no old houses. I didn’t want to pass judgement on it from the few short weeks that I’d spent in my wooden house and my neighbours’ wooden houses. But the first impression is the most important, because your eye grows accustomed to its surroundings and no longer connects with the mind and the heart in its responses. Everyday-life existed in the desert, but it was the daily routine of housewives and didn’t go beyond the smell of coriander, the neighbour who only half-opened her door because she had wax on her thighs, fortune-telling in coffee grounds, food on the stove, and gossip and knitting and babies’ nappies. I always felt that I was different from my neighbours, but still I took comfort from their presence around me.

My husband, meanwhile, had gone further afield and begun to discover what lay beyond our street and on the other side of the shops and buildings we could see from our house: he’d seen houses with good big rooms, and even gardens, although these were made of gravel and sand. He asked to be transferred to another house, and to my astonishment his request was granted. I rushed to tell my neighbours, wanting to bring some joy to their hearts with the news that there was to be a house they could visit outside the compound, for they talked at length about the difficulty of travelling outside the neighbourhood, and discussed the possibility of all the families sharing in the cost of a car and hiring a driver so that they could visit the devils, as Umm Ghassan put it. But instead of being glad at the news of my move they showed signs of resentment. They all began to complain about the companies that their husbands worked for and the
directors’ wives with their houses and servants and drivers and strings of pearls. Their voices rose and they reminded me of women in a bathhouse when the water supply is cut off, and they sit around still covered in lather, noisily gossiping and arguing. One of them said antagonistically to me, ‘You’ve been here two months and we’ve all been here for three years,’ and added that there must be scorpions and snakes and big rats living in their hundreds underneath all these wooden houses raised up off the ground, and that every day she heard tapping and hissing. They began to vie with one another in telling stories about rats: one said a rat had dragged a chicken right out of the oven, and as they were all gasping in horror, Umm Ghassan interrupted, ‘A kilo of meat disappeared from off my table when I went to open to door. They must have been watching me.’

At this Muna seized hold of her son and turned him upside down, inspecting his plump white foot. Then she said, as if reporting back to us, ‘There
are
scorpions here. Perhaps it was a scorpion sting he had. I don’t know which day it was he screamed and I lifted him out of his bed and he began to swell up. He was blue in the face, then his whole body turned as red as a pomegranate seed.’

They got up to go, and I looked at their empty coffee cups on the table. For a moment I felt a faint sadness, then I started to put all that had accumulated around me during these two months into boxes. When I finally sat down the house looked just as it had done when I entered it for the first time – the thick curtains, the line of dust shimmering in the bright air, the couches coarse to the touch. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for my neighbours because they were staying on in these houses. I supposed that I would invite them to visit me in the new house, but as it turned out I never saw them again from that morning onwards, or even caught sight of them at a distance. I used to turn and look the other way every time I passed the compound. The sight of the yellow wooden roofs and walls and the dusty oleander plants reminded me of
myself when I lived in there among those god-forsaken helpless women.

On the other hand, the thought that living in this country was only a temporary phase prevented me from feeling the same firmness of purpose as Sitt Wafa did towards her home: she planted basil and radishes and kept hens and a rooster in a coop that she built for them; the rooster had developed a nasty nature and when Sitt Wafa ran after him with a broom he turned round and chased her in turn. An odour of permanence emanated from her home and I saw jars of jam, dried yoghurt, thyme and cracked wheat stacked in the kitchen. I used to love going into her house and drinking mulberry juice, and made the excuse that I was coming with Umar to ask her about him so that I could see the children gathered around her while she instructed them one by one, or gave them dictation while shelling peas and shredding beans. The children loved her, although she shouted and pulled the ears of those who made mistakes, and called them ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and continually threatened to take them off to the sheikh’s school under the trees. They laughed at this because they’d seen the open-air school and the old man with his stick.

My life seemed to change after I moved to the new house. I no longer felt time stagnating as I had in the compound. I began to amuse myself making curtains and cushions, hanging pictures, tidying cupboards. I borrowed books about gardens and dug the garden and planted seeds, waiting from one day to the next for the green shoots to appear. I invited women to visit me, proud of my beautiful house, and offered them cake and tea in cups that matched the curtains. I decided to make my stay here useful, and joined an exercise class at Maryam’s house, three times a week for an hour, another class for baking and decorating cakes, and a literary discussion group. I even became a pupil of Stephanie’s learning embroidery and patchwork, and would have taken classes to learn how to arrange artificial flowers if the time had
allowed. However I knew deep inside me that the way I was handling my life was doomed to failure; I was scared of the enormous disgust that I felt because I was leading such a sterile, unnatural existence, and to counter this I began to defend the way of life here, as a means of instilling into my mind what it ought to be thinking. In my discussions with women who hated it here, both Arabs and foreigners, I used to struggle to find objections to their arguments and take the discussions to absurd and trivial limits: I told them that the situation here was ideal in a way, and that they were lucky because they were seeing how cities were built, and witnessing the transformation of man from a bedouin into a city-dweller. This was a great opportunity for them, I added: nothing was laid on for them as it was in other countries, and they would have to fight for what they really wanted. Despite what I said, I myself thought that time was wasted in searching for and constructing what existed and was recognized as normal or obvious anywhere else in the world.

Things didn’t progress as I’d convinced myself they would when I was forcing myself to attend classes. When the women at the exercise classes with me began to look like birds and animals, and when at the cake-decorating class I became involved in a vengeful struggle with the lid of the confectioner’s cream instead of directing my energies to creating a rose on a cake, or when I began to drink coffee and eat biscuits instead of discussing books, and spent an age trying to make the thread go into the eye of the needle, or even just searching for the needle, I gave it all up and stayed at home. At this point, like most of the women here, I began to think in earnest about how fed up I was, how miserable I was, and how much I’d like to go away somewhere. The only solution was to get out of the house again, this time to work in the store.

I handled the paperwork, writing letters and demands and putting prices on everything. I used to flick through the shiny
illustrated catalogues of goods and foodstuffs choosing whatever took my fancy. When the things arrived I rushed to the crates, excitedly comparing the real thing with the picture I had of it and feeling that I had a link with the outside world as I turned a glass or a packet over in my hands. In spite of my knowledge and my zeal for my work, I made mistakes and these mistakes led to Amer’s goods being censored by the port officials. They set fire to his crates to get rid of the pâté de foie gras which I’d ordered without noticing that pork fat was listed among its ingredients; I ordered games without realizing that they contained playing cards, and bay leaves and dried radishes and rosemary not knowing that they’d arrived saying on their packets that they added a delicious aroma and flavour to beef and chicken and pork. Amer had to make his employees cross out the word ‘pork’ on a thousand packets with their black pens. Although I grew more accurate with my orders there were still some boxes that had to be burnt.

The psychological tension that began to hang over the place became a bigger problem than hiding in the cardboard box. Amer and his wife were both extremely edgy, and the day he handed me the notification from the customs authorities to read, he was smoking like a doomed man having his last cigarette. He’d lost thousands: the boxes from the United States had been confiscated and their contents destroyed; I asked excitedly if someone had smuggled whisky or obscene videos in them. The soft toys and dolls had all been destroyed, every one that was meant to be a human being or animal or bird, since it was not permissible to produce distortions of God’s creatures. Although I was sorry, I laughed, and imagined those men turning over Barbie dolls and Snoopies and Woodstocks in their big hands and picking up china birds and crystal ashtrays in the shape of cats and thinking hostile thoughts about them, while they stared silently back.

I remembered how keen I used to be to watch the ‘Muppet Show’, how I’d laughed at Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy: it
had never occurred to me that these creatures singing and bobbing about giving amusement and pleasure to their audience were no more than dumb puppets. That was why when Umar asked me one day if they got new ones when the old ones wore out I felt sad, because I’d pictured them being real in spite of the strings attached to their arms and legs. I thought of them piled on top of one another in a box or cupboard in the studio when they weren’t being used, their eyes dead, mouths closed and bodies lifeless.

I didn’t actually leave my job until one morning I came face to face with the security man in the doorway of the storeroom, whereupon I rushed in past him, up the stairs and made for the offices to hand in my resignation.

This time I knew that I wasn’t going to visit anyone. My desert experience had to be related to the place, not just the people: I determined to try and communicate with my surroundings.

Claiming that I wanted to help my husband Basem with a study he had to do for the bank, I asked the driver Said to take me around the town, street by street, starting with the airport. He puffed out his chest proudly, although he had no idea what I meant, and touching his headcloth deferentially he answered, ‘At your service.’ As soon as we’d left the airport I began to take things in, making believe that I’d just arrived from a faraway country, and had never seen the desert before except in pictures. But it wasn’t the desert that I saw, and I found myself in the middle of what amounted to a vast building site.

Trucks were unloading or loading up. Huge drums stood with electricity cables and telephone cables coiled around them. A crane that looked big enough to move mountains and cities grumbled and creaked as it lifted its load. A cement mixer turned constantly. There was a string of lorries and a petrol tanker, the sort that people stop and stare at in the street because of its size. It was like a giant that had eaten a lot of people; each of its four compartments was bigger than
a car, and its driver hovered in the sky as if he was about to make a parachute drop somewhere in the desert.

I watched the men putting up a hoarding in the sand advertising the opening of a new supermarket that would sell tens of thousands of different brands, and I marvelled at the way that, while old hoardings look as if they’ve been built along with the city surroundings, these new ones here looked as if they had appeared by magic.

Some of the streets had no names, but there were buildings in them where a few weeks before there had only been steel girders, and they had filled up rapidly with occupants coming to work on other building sites. Interspersed between the real palms were plastic ones and green-painted metal ones planted in tubs down the middle of the streets in an attempt to beautify the place, and ornamental paving stones laid edge to edge around them as if conducting a dialogue with one another. Tools and pieces of machinery lay abandoned where they had been for the past three years, and a black-and-white goat was jumping around on them. After only a few moments she bounded off on to the dusty ground to escape the burning metal.