Women of Sand and Myrrh (22 page)

The image of Sita’s bottle gleamed brightly, and I remembered her promise that a few hours or a night after a man took these drops ‘his body would be ablaze as if he had peppercorns up his backside’.

‘Don’t lie, Suzanne,’ he yelled at me. ‘Lying’s a sin. David doesn’t come back at noon.’ I found myself swearing in God’s name, just like him, that when Ringo had saved me from cutting my wrists he’d sent for David too and when he hadn’t been able to find him, he’d left a message.

Only then did I suddenly remember that my attempted suicide was supposed to have been the main topic of the morning, to the exclusion of all else, and I realized that because I knew it wasn’t real I’d forgotten all about it.

‘I want more iced tea, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘Since there are no pomegranates, I’ll drink tea.’

Why didn’t he try again? Or didn’t he love me any longer? I went up to him and embraced him and clung to him and told him how I’d missed him. When he pulled me closer, I knew that he still wanted me, whether Sita’s drops got to his brain or not, and that what had happened between us during our trip abroad didn’t matter. And because he could squeeze me and pull me to him for a few minutes and feel happy, I pulled away like a fish slipping out of the net and said provocatively, ‘I’ll go and get the Scotch.’ I’d dreamt for so long of being in his arms and of the pleasure he gave me, and yet I didn’t feel any longing or desire at this moment; could my
passion have been no more than the result of his abandoning me?

He sat drinking. Then he asked, ‘Why this long separation, Suzie?’ Before I could answer, he stretched out his arm to show me his new wrist-watch.

I wouldn’t have believed that he could be so sly as to turn the question round like that. But he jumped to his feet suddenly, and seized hold of me, pulling me up off the couch. ‘Suzie, I can’t wait. Come on, let’s go upstairs. We can go into the bathroom, or do it standing up behind the door.’ Pushing him off, I said, ‘How did you wait for a whole month?’

He struck one palm against the other, then one palm against his forehead and said, ‘Maaz, you bastard! It’s been a month since you were blessed by Suzanne’s fragrant aroma! Suzie – I went to the bedouin to see my mother. She wasn’t well at all, nor was my father. And I went on a trip hunting gazelles with some of my relations.’ Perhaps he was telling the truth; perhaps he did go to his mother’s for ten days. When I didn’t make any comment, he must have imagined that I’d agree after a while and we’d go to the top floor, into the bathroom, or stand up behind the door, because he added, as if exonerating himself further, ‘When I got back, we had people from the oasis coming to stay with us.’

My eyes bored into his, trying to find out the truth.

‘Where are they? In your house?’

‘What do you think? Would they be sleeping in the street?’

I raised a hand to silence him.

He sipped a third glass of Scotch, then turned to me: ‘What was your answer, Suzie? Are we going upstairs?’ I heard the shrieking of children in the garden and answered, ‘No. Why don’t we go in the garden?’

He began to laugh: ‘God, like the Imam of Yemen’s apes. His house has been turned into a museum and when we went to visit it, I saw apes in the garden one on top of the other, just like human beings, not paying the slightest attention to anybody round them.’

I said nastily, ‘I saw the guests. One day I went to visit Fatima and I saw them.’

With complete lack of affectation he said, ‘I swear Fatima didn’t tell me, Suzanne. She must have forgotten. She’s got the children and their problems, and the little one worries her to death. He’s still eating earth, and it’ll kill him.’

I lost faith in Sita’s drops. If they’d changed anything in him, they’d made him more balanced. Laughing, he asked me, ‘You’ve seen Aisha, you know how beautiful she is? Three men want to marry her and she refused them all because she wants to marry a man from the town, not a bedouin.’

My heart missed a beat but I nodded my head, while he went on, ‘She drives a tractor and a landrover. When the desert guard told her that it was forbidden for women to drive, she said, “Try and stop me. I’d like to see you bringing drums of water in by camel, and winter supplies.” She comes in to town every three months.’

I sensed that the way he talked about Aisha was out of the ordinary; I began to understand Maaz. ‘Does Aisha want to marry you?’ I asked.

He started to laugh, slapping one palm against the other, until his eyes disappeared into his head, and his teeth showed white like pearls. ‘Fatima must have told you?’ he said, questioningly. ‘I swear she’s joking, Sheikha Suzanne. Aisha’s father is a nomad and a real bedouin. He lashes people with the cord of his headcloth and they say one of his strokes is enough to take your fingers off. He decided to marry Suad, relying mainly on God to help him, but also on me. He told me that Suad, who’s a nurse, had fallen passionately in love with him when he was a patient in the government hospital here. Aisha asked him how he knew that Suad loved him and he regaled us with stories of how she’d washed his face for him, changed his sheets, brought him hot food and even helped him to eat, and not been disgusted by him; when she took his temperature she’d always rubbed the thermometer
on an apron tied around her waist so that a trace of him stayed with her. It was while he was still in hospital that he’d told Aisha he wanted to marry the nurse and Aisha, the wicked girl, had said, “There’s nothing to stop you.” Then she went off and told Suad, who was Lebanese, and the two became close friends and laughed together over the old man. When he was better and they took him back to the oasis, he couldn’t get Suad out of his mind, and began saying to his sons and daughters, “It’s not right. The girl Suad’s waiting for me. I must keep my promise. Take me to the town, or bring her here to the desert.” Aisha assured him that Suad was preparing herself for the wedding, and so the father began dictating poems to a bedouin who’d learnt to read and write, then he folded some money inside the poems and gave them to Aisha: “The money’s for winter clothes for Suad,” he said, “because I can see one cloud chasing another, and the cold winds will start to blow at any moment.” ’

I realized what was awaiting me, and cried out, ‘And you love Aisha, and she loves you?’

Maaz was unconcerned by my accusation and went on, ‘Listen! I told Aisha not to play tricks on her father, because one day he might crack up over Suad and it would kill him. Or he might try and go to the town and wander off into the desert and lose his way … Every day he says to her, “Take me. Suad’s waiting for me.” ’

Again I asked him, ‘Are you and Aisha in love?’

He laughed and said, ‘Let’s go upstairs, and I’ll tell you.’

‘I’m tired,’ I replied. He didn’t look disappointed. He’d begun to know me very well and he came over to me and pulled me up. Although I usually submitted at the first touch, sometimes at a glance, I found myself feeling remote from him, thinking that desire too was just an idea in the head. I felt how strong I was now, and how he needed me.

He whispered, ‘Never mind. Let’s go up. You know what I want.’

I went in front of him to the door, rejoicing that I still held
the key to our relationship, and said, ‘Go now. Tomorrow I’ll be waiting for you.’ He made for the Scotch bottle and began sipping from it. I pulled it away from his mouth and asked him maliciously how his cousin Muhammad was. (The doctor had implanted a small instrument in his body to help him give up drinking.) Maaz replied laughing that Muhammad’s body had adapted to the instrument and even to the sensation of nausea which it produced, and continued to swallow a tumbler of Scotch as if it were water.

He asked if he could use the bathroom. I knew he wanted to be by himself, as usual when he was drunk or had been looking at pictures of women in magazines, and I wouldn’t let him, claiming that my son was about to come home. I went with him to the door, moved out of reach and his kisses, said goodbye and closed the door behind him.

In spite of my sense of victory, I thought sadly that there must be some way that I could marry him, and yet it appeared that the chance had passed me by. Maaz was no longer that ripe fruit hanging on a tree in the middle of the path. He’d changed and even seemed able to behave tolerably when he was drunk. In the past would he ever have left so meekly when he was in that state?

Alcohol used to make him crazy, and put me in a state of shock at the effect it had on him. Once he’d crumpled up on the sand and fallen asleep. I’d been terrified of the darkness and silence of the open countryside and when I tried to wake him up he opened his eyes and didn’t know where he was. It was as if he couldn’t see me properly or had forgotten who I was; he threw his empty bottle at me and then ran after me and I crept behind the car to hide. I heard him calling me an Israeli spy and asking me how I’d learnt Arabic so quickly, then he collapsed on to the sand again and I heard him snoring. I looked around me, frightened even of the moon and the stars. I was certain that the moving lights I could make out in the distance were a caravan of camels, but it was only a car because I heard the roar of its engine. I began to
use it and other lights to guide me up on to the main road. Only then did I discover that blood was dripping from my forehead and that I’d left my shoes behind on the way. I stopped a truck by shouting and waving my hands about; the driver must have thought I was a stray camel from a distance because when he saw me and heard me saying ‘Please, home, please,’ his mouth dropped open, and he mumbled, ‘In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and looked around him. When he made no attempt to open the door, I said pleadingly, ‘You open door?’ and when he still didn’t move, I went round and opened it and got in. He went on looking at me as if I wasn’t real. I don’t know if he noticed if I was barefoot or not. I found myself repeating, ‘Thanks, brother,’ and this sentence of mine put him in a state of utter confusion because my blue eyes and blond hair didn’t go with my Arabic and my desert accent. When at last he started up the truck I relaxed, but only for a moment, because one hand was on the steering wheel and the other resting on his thigh and his glances travelled between my face and my body. I’d felt something hurting me on my forehead ever since Maaz had thrown the bottle at me but I’d ignored it. As a precaution against what I feared might happen, I put my hand to my forehead and when I saw a smear of blood on it I gasped, pretending to be frightened, and then became engrossed in wiping off the sand which was sticking to my face and hair. It wasn’t long before my fears that he had only one idea in his mind were confirmed: he stared at me, then, reducing speed, he moved his hand from his thigh to put it beside me; I cried out ‘God is great! God is great!’ looking at the blood on my hand and then striking myself on the face just as I’d seen Arab women doing when they were lamenting because someone had died. I kept saying, ‘God is great! God is great!’ then ‘Thank you, thank you,’ as I directed him to the street where I lived, using my hand and the word ‘left’ or ‘right’, until I called out, ‘Just here, brother,’ and opened the door and climbed down, leaving him stunned. I saw him in our street
again every day for a while, alone or with others, driving slowly around in his truck as if he were looking for me; sometimes he seemed frantic, as if blaming himself for missing his chance.

2

Maaz came back sooner than I expected. I’d spent the whole afternoon in a state of nervous apprehension, thinking that he would surely have hit a tree or a telegraph pole and now be locked up in jail for being drunk. He stood facing me, and every cell, every drop of his blood, all his bones and the pores of his skin, his inhalations and exhalations, had abandoned their proper place and landed here in a mass which hadn’t properly gelled. It was as if he hadn’t known how to find the way to my house. He was bellowing at me, then kissing my feet, trying to eat the varnish off my toenails and when it wouldn’t come off he bit it and said it tasted red, then he pulled my hair and muttered to himself, ‘I don’t understand her scent. It’s not perfume, or incense, or sandalwood.’ He called me Suzie, Susu, Sinsin, Suad. This time I wasn’t aware of his body in spite of my longing for the pleasure of sex. I was waiting for the right moment to whisper to him that I was his wife and that we must get married. As if I’d actually told him what I wanted to say he began shouting at me, swearing to me that he was going to marry me and that I was his woman, the Suzanne of a lifetime, that without me he was camel dung, he was a toothpick; without me he was a eunuch; he told me that he’d seen me naked passing by his office door, and how as he’d pulled up in his car he’d seen my
breasts undulating before him. He wouldn’t be quiet, and I left him shouting out his feelings while I went into the bathroom; I did my hair looking in the mirror, unable to believe what was happening; I put on fresh lipstick, powdered my face and neck, and splashed perfume everywhere, even on my thighs. ‘Long live Sita and herbal medicine, or magic,’ I thought. Then into my head there floated a vision of rows of bottles bearing my name and a picture of me in the main stores in America, and I saw myself talking on television about the time I’d spent going between desert and village and from tribe to tribe to collect prescriptions that could be classified under the heading ‘Love’. Then I saw myself in my own private clinic, wearing a white overall, with medicines and lotions all around me like Sita had, but mine would be in containers looking like bottles of French perfume. I’d be just like the foreign women who collected old silver jewellery and bedouin clothes and produced books with their pictures on the cover.

I heard a knocking on the door and went out but I couldn’t find him anywhere in the room. He was hiding behind the door and he snatched the towel off me and began looking all over the room: how should he start and where? On the bed, on the floor; he opened the curtains and closed them again; in the clothes cupboard, standing up, sitting down. The black pupils of his eyes darted about like a falcon’s eyes, pursuing his thoughts and stopping motionless at the impossibility of what he was thinking. I was flying through space, except I had one eye on my watch to see when it was time for Jimmy to come home from school. I became an instrument in his hands, the willing subject of his fantasy, and he didn’t leave me until sleep overcame him. Then I kept watch, not letting any noise infiltrate the room where he was sleeping, while Jimmy, delighted that Maaz had come back to visit us, sat trying to count his snores. I felt like a bedouin woman sitting with her son in her lap, waving the flies away from him, and giving him her breast day and night so that he’d stay young
and be satisfied within the bounds of her breast and her lap.