Women of Sand and Myrrh (32 page)

I was pleased. In the end she’d started interfering in my affairs and giving me lectures about the shortcomings of my upbringing, and she’d let me know the meaning of the word ‘frivolous’. She began to criticize the anarchy of our household and shake her head regretfully at everything, even the kitchen equipment – which she admired and said was like
what you’d find in a luxury hotel: she told us we were spoiling it and ended up trying to explain to the cook and the other servants how to use it properly. She advised me to go back and live with my family and told me I didn’t need a personal driver or a cook or Mother Kaukab, but my mother and father and brothers and sisters. When we didn’t pay her on time she wouldn’t leave the house until she had the money, saying it was a matter of principle not money. She used to make me wait with her until Mother Kaukab woke up, or until the driver had gone to my father’s office to pick up some money. Once she even insisted on contacting my mother, although I’d often told her that my mother didn’t like being woken from her afternoon nap. The teacher’s exasperation grew when she found that my mother had unplugged the telephone and locked the door on the inside, and angrily she expostulated that my mother wouldn’t know if something dreadful happened to me or my brothers and sisters. It didn’t seem to occur to the teacher that we could have knocked on the door, although none of us had ever dared to do it, and she began calling my mother selfish and ignorant.

In response to my request I was sent by my father to a private girls’ college in Cairo like a lot of other girls from the desert. There I discovered that the freedom which I’d thought I would gain by moving out by myself into the desert was nothing compared to my freedom in Cairo. Just walking down the street on my own two feet was freedom, so walking without an abaya was out of this world. Freedom no longer consisted of dialling a telephone number and giggling and whispering love down the line, or making the driver follow the other cars, or eyeing the shopkeepers; even kissing and sometimes other things in cars – which seldom happened anyway – weren’t freedom compared to Cairo with her wide-open arms reaching out beyond the horizon.

2

I began to think about marriage after I came back from Cairo, even though I’d always said before that I wouldn’t think of it until I was in my twenties. Mother Kaukab had married when she was twelve, and my own mother when she was fourteen. I wanted to have a husband and a wedding and then I would become my own mistress. Not that I wasn’t that already, but I was still having to ask permission to go abroad. Then my mother would forget that she had promised to take me with her and leave when I was fast asleep in my house, or take me with a group of her friends and I would tire of being abroad for such a long time because our trip would be taken up with eating in restaurants, buying clothes and giggling. I wanted to get to know lots of the sort of people who went to parties at night, although I didn’t dare to go to them without my mother and father. When I was there I became all eyes and ears and stared at the men, wondering who would suit me. When I saw Samer I knew that I had to marry him. He was three years older than me. I was seventeen. He’d heard about the motorcycle which I’d ordered and which I used to ride between my house and my parents’ and my brothers’. These houses and their gardens were all surrounded by high walls over which only the tops of palm trees were visible. Samer came with my brother to see the motorbike when I decided to sell it. I was wearing a leather jacket and trousers and dark glasses. I knew by the way he rode bikes and by his wristwatch and the type of bracelet it had that he would suit me. I took it as given that he would like me, because I was beautiful: the blackness and great length of my hair and the permanent pallor of my complexion were oriental, and my clothes and everything around me were western. I found myself looking at him in a way that embarrassed him and I wanted to ask him to marry me, but I made myself wait and
spoke to him and pursued him on the telephone until we’d decided to get married. He was a male Nur. He loved the latest fashions and everything conjured up by modern civilization: the newest models of cars, skiing equipment, a stainless steel model of Ali Ibn Abi Talib’s sword made in Japan, an Aubusson chair, a type of honey found high in the mountains of Tibet, a handbag made of ostrich skin. He was inventive in his dress even when he was wearing a plain white robe, but he also wore blue, grey, and pistachio green, and when we travelled abroad he wore the most beautiful suits and the weirdest ties. There was always a lot going on in our house as we had friends round every night. We knew nurses, nannies, even married women, from various countries, and we danced and sang and ate and watched films until dawn and slept till the afternoon. We didn’t begin our night’s entertainment before eleven in the evening, then we swam or went out into the desert, and he would ride the motorcycle and try and jump obstacles on it, little natural hillocks or ones that his friend Waleed constructed for him. I was so used to Waleed being around that we seemed incomplete without him. The fame of these nights of ours spread until everybody who felt they shared our way of thinking and could entertain us or enjoy themselves with us found a friend who was coming and came along too. We soon found that the desert was crowded with people wanting to entertain and be entertained. There was a man who liked imitating famous actors, another with a guitar who pretended to be Elvis Presley, a third who acted out a pantomime of a woman giving birth, behaving conquettishly if it was a boy, and telling the other women what an awful time she’d had and how she’d passed out with the pain if it was a girl. When we were tired of these mimes, friends would bring along people they knew with mild deformities, like the man who stammered, or the simple-minded one who was funny when he was provoked. Someone brought a monkey who liked drink and we stood around it pouring whisky down its throat and
watching it caper and scream in its cage.

I didn’t know that Samer liked his own sex as well until in the course of one of our trips abroad he chose to stay in the hotel rather than come sightseeing with me, and when I met him for lunch Waleed wasn’t with him and I sensed the tension in him. I asked him if someone from home had been in touch with him; even abroad we sought the company of show business people and night club society and we were always scared that word of our wild nights would get back to the desert. He didn’t answer. I asked him where Waleed was and saw his jawbone moving as he clenched his teeth. When Waleed appeared and sat down apologizing, my husband gave him a look which was meant to be between the two of them, but I understood what it meant, as I understood the inquiries, the riddles, the jealousy which followed. He tried to hide his feelings but his face and his nerves gave him away, and gradually I realized how artificial his desire was when he slept with me as it was always connected with his fantasies and most times it subsided half-way through.

Waleed was quite attractive. I sometimes wished he would press himself against me when we were dancing together. As well as being handsome he was nice, quick-witted, with a never-ending flow of stories and information and jokes about his home country, Morocco. When I found out what was going on between him and Samer, I laughed as I thought of all the women who’d flirted with him or made approaches to him directly, or through me; I wondered if he was like my husband and liked both sexes, and planned to find out.

I wouldn’t have thought of divorce if Samer hadn’t sent someone to inform me that he’d already divorced me. He was on a naval training course in Belgium and Waleed was with him. Apart from the driver who gave me the certificate of divorce, nobody knew about it, and I was able to take advantage of others’ ignorance by behaving for a time as if I was a married woman and my own mistress.

I was still thinking about who would come asking to marry
me, when I met Saleh’s sister at a wedding. The moment I saw her I reproached myself for letting my thoughts stray so far from Saleh. Apart from the fact that there was an aura of magic surrounding him because of his lifestyle and his constant travel abroad for his work, he was good-looking and an important person in society. I’d begun to realize that I wouldn’t meet anyone else like him. Civilized young men no longer wanted to marry young, nor on the other hand did they abstain. They travelled abroad and went out with girls who were very beautiful and very young, often little more than minors, while the ones who preferred their own sex married and had children for the sake of society, like Samer. I found myself talking to Saleh’s sister most of the time. The happiness on her face was plain to see because I was paying her so much attention. Like the other girls she was curious to get to know me face to face because my flaunting of conventions was much talked about. I wore a green and red abaya, and sometimes covered my face with a heavy black veil and stuck a diamond pin at nose level. When the wedding was over I stopped off at my parents’ house, went straight into my mother’s room and told her that if I didn’t marry Saleh I would never marry at all. I knew how much they wanted me to marry because they couldn’t bear my impetuous behaviour any longer, my artful adaptations of abayas, the night-time gatherings I held, which were attended, it was rumoured, by my brothers’ friends. My mother asked me if his mother or sister had broached the subject with me. I didn’t answer. I began phoning his sister at every opportunity just as I had done with other girls whose brothers I wanted to get to know, in case the brother happened to answer. Saleh never answered and I discovered that he had a place of his own separate from his family so, claiming to be his sister, I called him at work in the Ministry. When I told him my name, he gave me his private number so that I was able to talk to him every day. Eventually we agreed to meet at the home of his married sister; she’d been at the wedding and had looked on
discouragingly as I talked to her younger sister.

I knew that Saleh wanted to marry me. As he said to me one day, I was the bride he’d been searching for: beautiful and educated at the same time. I knew there was more that he didn’t tell me: I was the daughter of a man whose millions grew every time he drew breath. Although there were many like my father, my breeding and ancestry were better established than those of many girls. As I sat opposite him his white robe and headcloth and the rosary between his fingers seemed to give off a cool breeze of freedom, not at all like the stale draught from the air-conditioners, and as it brushed my face I felt invigorated and no longer thought beyond the four walls that contained us. I felt as I watched the brown fingers that life flowed through them and that I ought to cling on to them. They were like the fingers of a giant who held the land about him in thrall. I even felt the power bursting from his car keys when he jingled them in his fingers, as if they were capable of knocking down whole walls and opening buildings up to the outside world. At the same time I began to feel a great longing to move closer to him and take his hand and bury my head against his chest, and I wondered at myself because only moments before I had thought of marriage as a way of being free and gaining access to others.

There was no question of him taking my hand. He began to talk, telling me that I had to help him. I didn’t understand what he meant; he wasn’t rich like my father but he was a wealthy man all the same. Rather than naming a figure, as I’d expected, he said that like me and other girls here he too lived in a state of frustration, and that the pressure exercised by the society and its traditions was great, but this was our country and we had to put up with it, despite the immense riches which allowed us to wander about the world, to go to countries where there were trees and lakes and where I could wear a low cut dress and walk freely in the street. But was it right to take wealth from one country when your eyes and heart were set on another?

I shook my head, but as if I was telling him to be quiet. I wanted him to hold me close, or to move closer to him myself. I passed a finger over my lips which had parted in anticipation of his lips touching them, but he went on talking while my urgent desire for him to hold me and kiss me distracted me and I didn’t listen to what he was saying. Eventually he asked me if I was listening and I nodded my head and tried to force myself to, despite my irritation. He reached out a hand towards my neck and I rejoiced, but then he said, ‘That necklace – if your father and generations of your family before him hadn’t struggled against the heat and hunger of the desert you wouldn’t be wearing it now.’ Trying to reassure myself, I answered, ‘But you travel a lot.’ ‘I know,’ he laughed. ‘I’m just trying to explain what I’m like to you, so that you can understand me and help me – when you learn to understand this country of yours and appreciate what it means to live here.’

3

The difference between Saleh and me which had drawn me to him began to annoy me and make me on edge, and I became as unyielding as stone. Since our meetings in his sister’s house, before we were married, I had been aware of it, as it became clear that we were there for different reasons: I was waiting for him to take my face in his hands and kiss me and whisper words of love and admiration in my ear; while for him the purpose of our encounters was that we should understand each other’s natures so that we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of our fathers and grandfathers.

His sister only agreed grudgingly to our meetings, fearful that they would cause a scandal, whether we eventually married or not. I used to phone him constantly as well, something he was unused to, and was never going to grow used to. When I asked him why he was so short on the phone he made a joke of it and said he wasn’t alone in the room; and when he asked me in turn why I so much enjoyed telephone conversations I didn’t know what to reply because it was true that I loved talking on the phone, and every time our conversations seemed to be tailing off I tried to inject new life into them, even inventing bits of news to reawaken his curiosity, or provoking jealousy in him by the way I talked. I remember especially when a famous Italian designer came to make my wedding dress; this man lost patience with me because I couldn’t keep appointments however hard I tried, and once, pretending to make a joke of it, he remarked that perhaps the weight of the diamonds in my watch had made it stop. The version I told Saleh later was that the designer had suggested that I shouldn’t wear my diamond choker in case its sparkle distracted attention from the beauty of my breasts. Instead of being jealous, Saleh upbraided me for letting the designer speak so uninhibitedly to me. When I suggested that he was reacting this way out of jealousy he denied it and said nothing more, as if he wanted the subject to be closed.