Women of Sand and Myrrh (34 page)

When he told me one morning that he was going away I didn’t answer; I turned on the video and he snatched the cigarette out of my mouth and repeated, ‘I’m going away.’ I lit another cigarette. ‘Goodbye,’ I replied. His going really did make me feel more at ease, for confrontations and displays of stubbornness were no longer daily occurrences and I found myself welcoming phone calls, and if no one come to visit me I went out visiting myself. When I was asked if I had seen Saleh on the television news, I shrugged my shoulders unconcernedly. I didn’t go to see his mother as I’d promised to do and when she came to my house, I left her with my child and the nanny. As soon as Saleh came home from his trip I asked him for a letter giving me permission to go abroad with my mother. But I actually travelled with Mother Kaukab.

As usual I erased the traces of the desert as soon as the plane was in the air. I went into the toilet, and from my hand luggage took out a short sleeveless dress. I bundled up my abaya, and untied my hair and let it fall loose. Feeling some embarrassment, I returned to my seat and when Mother Kaukab gasped and reproved me, I told her that my husband didn’t mind. More and more I felt that marriage meant freedom, and especially material freedom. For despite the monthly allowance which I’d continued to receive from my father I’d been in debt to a lot of people; to Nahed the Egyptian woman who sold off-the-peg clothes by all the most famous designers and had threatened to complain to my father when my account was approaching a hundred thousand; to the Syrian jewel merchant, although I’d sent Mother Kaukab to him with some jewellery I no longer liked. And I knew that I was being exploited a lot: the Lebanese woman, Madame Sandra, had demanded an exorbitant amount for designing a tree with silk leaves that had a place for a bottle of perfume at the base of each leaf; and so had Jameel who
designed my room for me, and Fernando with his paintings; even Ibtisam, who was from the desert herself, had sold me a fake antique claiming that it was truly old and covered with gold leaf.

I lay stretched out, wondering whether my pleasure had reached the floor under me, for the heat of it was almost burning me. In the large hotel room the rock singer was drinking water from a bottle. His face and its features appeared small, and there was nothing handsome in him; his white body was narrow and thin as he tipped his head back, and he was uncircumcised. I pictured Mother Kaukab spitting as she described the ugliness of his thin white body and said he was like an obelisk. All the same, I’d been in a state of eager excitement ever since I’d met him in a disco and he’d danced with me for hours, ignoring the woman he’d come with.

When he reached out his hand under the table to touch me I knew that he’d stay with me that night. It had been ages since I felt this happiness mixed with anticipation, even tension, and it reached a pitch when he followed me up to my room, giving me a few minutes’ start so that I could lock the door leading to Mother Kaukab’s room. Once I looked like staying abroad for a long time, or rather once I’d gathered up my courage and admitted to myself that my body was the main outlet for my feelings, I’d moved to an hotel, claiming to Saleh, in the course of one of our telephone conversations, that I felt car-sick every time I travelled from our house in the country into central London.

The rock singer picked up my dress from the floor and asked who the designer was. Then he put it on and looked at himself in the mirror and admired the shoulders, which were shaped like aircraft wings; I replied in a whisper, thinking that I must see him again that night. The touch of his lips, thin and unappealing as they were, made me tremble, and his chest felt broad and strong to me, even though I could see his
rib cage.

I couldn’t help asking him, ‘Will I see you at the disco tonight?’ He was fiddling with things of mine that lay about in the room, picking up a diamond ear-ring and laying it down again on the table, and he shrugged his shoulders carelessly and said, ‘I don’t know.’

I brought my hair close around me. He was the first man to take hold of my hair and ask if it was real. Not believing my answer, he tugged on it and said, ‘Ding dong,’ as if he was ringing a church bell. ‘Shall I have it cut?’ I asked him.

‘Is this what they have instead of crisps where you come from?’ he returned, holding up an old manuscript which Saleh had given me for Christies to examine, so that they could tell him if it was authentic. I asked him about my hair again, feeling a sense of loss and trying to devise a way of seeing him that night.

‘Yours is the most beautiful hair I’ve seen in my life,’ he said, turning to me. ‘When I saw you dancing, I said I want that hair.’

Feeling somehow reassured, I ventured, ‘Let’s go to another disco tonight.’

He didn’t answer and was still holding on to the manuscript which was made of torn, shrivelled vellum. ‘What does it say?’ he asked. He’d sat down beside me on the bed again but seemed indifferent to my body; I hadn’t covered myself up and was deliberately vaunting my naked beauty because my thoughts were all channelled towards seeing him that night, and I wanted to please him at any price. I began trying to remember some of the obscure writing which Saleh had read out to me. Before I began to tell him what I knew he stretched out his hand to me, making me sit down beside him, and rested his hand on my shoulder as if we’d been friends and lovers for a long time. I noticed his amazement growing with every word that I spoke and felt happy; I was sure that it was making me figure more vividly in his thoughts, although I was astonished at his total ignorance of my country, even of
its geographical location. He got up to look for a pen and could only find my black eye pencil which he stared at in disappointment and self-mockery: ‘And here I was thinking you’d use kohl like Cleopatra!’ He began writing letters which looked more complicated than the ones on the manuscript. He crossed them out, rewrote them, asked me to read again, then asked me more questions; I explained, and he wrote and pondered and hummed to himself.

He was so delighted to find this rare and original material for a song that he took my face in his hands and kissed my eyes and nose and lips and chin, the beauty spot on my cheek, the downy hairs on my upper lips, then my hair and my forehead. He was carried away by his enthusiasm and bent over me whispering ‘I’ll reward you for this,’ but I just wanted to make certain of that night. When he got up he said he’d stick a red star on the country I came from, because he had a map of the world at home and he remembered countries by the women he’d met.

He left only when a smell of cardamom began to pervade the air, and Mother Kaukab tried the door. When I didn’t respond she must have assumed that I was still asleep and he jumped up, hurriedly pulling on his clothes, and gathering up his papers and blowing me a kiss on the way out. I rushed to the door to ask him about the evening and he answered, ‘Come to my house and I’ll let you hear the song,’ and told me his address. I smiled with joy at him, for my heart had sank hopelessly. When I opened the door separating me from Mother Kaukab, she asked me excitedly, ‘What did you have to eat at the princess’s?’ I couldn’t think what she meant then I remembered that I’d told her that I’d been invited to dinner with the English princess, the Queen’s daughter. She sat there, asking me eager questions: ‘What did you talk about? Did you have fun? What did you have to eat? What did they wear? Your dress must have been nicer than theirs! What did they say about your ear-rings?’

She wanted to know all the details so that when she went
back to the desert she could repeat it to the servants and the other women. Then she poured me a cup of coffee, remarking innocently, ‘I said to myself, Nur must have switched on the radio while I was still asleep.’

When I went to his house I prepared myself for kisses, but instead, to my disappointment, he sat me down in his studio and sat at the piano, strumming and singing:

My love is from a tribe in the heart of the desert.

Her forefathers suffered the heat and the thirst.

They buried alive their baby girls

Yet took the women prisoner in battle

Preserving them to bear men-children.

Her blood must not be mixed with strange blood.

And yet my love, she loves me.

5

I returned home and set off on my travels once more. This time, like a cook who can only handle a giant ladle, I spooned out for myself enormous quantities of emotion, parties often lasting most of the night, conversation and laughter. Perhaps the fact that Saleh was always travelling and showed no interest in me also pushed me further in this direction. What I was doing could quite possibly have remained a secret, but it seems that I began to frequent places where many of my fellow countrymen also spent their evenings. I was swept up into a circle of dancers, actors, musicians and men of society from the Arab world, whose fame spread because of their beauty and wit. One of them used his charm and humour to
entertain professionally: sometimes he would dress up as a dancing girl and cry, ‘Your donations, gentlemen, for the Prophet’s sake,’ and ten-pound notes would rain down on him; or he would put on a dress, tie his hair back in a scarf and imitate a housewife doing her housework, talking irritably to the saucepans and plates. When he’d done his turn one night and the applause had died down, he announced, ‘I want to thank Nur, who realized that I was an artist, not just a clown, and encouraged me to turn professional.’

It was true that I’d become addicted to his wit and thought him worthy to be ranked with the great characters of comedy, and I’d offered money to the cabaret owner to let him up on the stage. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, as we’d already made a third-rate dancer famous by applauding wildly and opening bottles of champagne for her until she was promoted and eventually became a top dancer in the oriental clubs of London. I sank down in my seat at the sound of my name, feeling afraid, but forgot the incident by the following day as I became involved in the details of daily life once again. I never thought about the desert except when I smelt cardamom, and then when Mother Kaukab asked me one day about going back. This made me realize that it must be time, and that I’d have to do my best to keep things going here for a bit longer. I claimed appointments with doctors and urgent shopping; and Mother Kaukab commented that she was enjoying herself, although her excursions here were limited to going to the shops with the driver, and she was even happy to go in the car if it was to visit families from our country who were in London. ‘They all ask if Saleh is with you,’ she told me. ‘I don’t say no and I don’t say yes. I just nod my head.’

6

The doorbell of the flat rang early one morning (I’d moved into my father’s flat by this time). Before I could close my eyes again, Mother Kaukab came in to wake me, saying that a man from our country was asking to see me and insisting on waking me up although she’d told him that I was still asleep and that I’d gone to bed late. Many thoughts came to me but I didn’t guess the reason until he showed me a piece of headed paper from Saleh’s office, signed by Saleh. The letter, written in a dry official tone, said that I must leave for home that morning.

I thought immediately of contacting Saleh, but changed my mind, and wondered about my family. All of them must have heard what was going on by now. I looked at the man and said, ‘But I haven’t finished doing all I’ve got to do – I’ve still got an appointment at the doctor’s.’ ‘I really don’t know …’ The man’s voice tailed away and he shrugged politely.

I said nothing more, and went back into my room to pack, but I was overwhelmed by a powerful sensation that I’d only just arrived from the desert and was really unpacking. The long nights of laughter had suddenly vanished, and my heart began to pound, but I shrugged my shoulders, pretending not to mind, and told myself that I was luckier than many. My cousin had opened his eyes one morning to find himself in his house in the desert, when the last thing he remembered was going to bed in a Hong Kong hotel. The papers wrote of the fantastic amounts which he’d lost in a casino in Hong Kong, and the dud cheques he’d signed. And there was a friend of my brother’s who’d been put on the first plane to the desert in handcuffs after his family had discovered that he was a drug addict.

Although the man stayed in the hall I felt as if he’d bound my hands and feet and blindfolded me. A car stood waiting at
the entrance to the building and he opened the door for me and stood waiting by it while the driver and another man went up to fetch my cases and bags. I didn’t feel free of the oppressive weight of his presence until I’d gone aboard Saleh’s private plane. Mother Kaukab turned to me and said, ‘Saleh must have missed you. Yesterday he phoned three times and I told him you were having dinner with the Queen’s daughter. He said hasn’t she had dinner with the Queen yet, but I told him Nur’s young and she wouldn’t have anything to say to old women …’ Then she went on, ‘Saleh’s fame and prestige have reached London.’

In circumstances roughly similar to these I’d returned from the private school in Cairo: everyone in the plane could hear my whispering and crying the whole journey and see my blood-red eyes and my abaya flying through the air, followed by shrieks of protest. The man accompanying me on that occasion had been an employee of my father’s, and although I was so young I’d promised myself that I would marry with all speed. I remember that the moment my companion went to the toilet I signalled to the foreigner beside me to order me a whisky and pour it into the glass of Pepsi Cola which I already had in front of me.

All through the flight I repeated to myself that Saleh was behind all this, that he must want to divorce me, but why hadn’t he said so openly? When we landed, everything seemed normal. Saleh was waiting for me and he didn’t confront me then or later. The idea of his doing so was absurd anyway, not just because men had had all the rights since the time of our fathers and grandfathers, but because there was much to be feared from a confrontation: if the sounds of our voices reached beyond the house walls, I would be removed from the family’s sphere of influence and denied its protection. Saleh didn’t divorce me, although he hinted to me that I could ask for a divorce if I wanted to. He was fearful for his honour and self-respect in the face of my family and society. Then shortly afterwards I found out that I’d lost
my passport. It was the one thing that I guarded carefully, holding on to it as if I needed it to live, like oxygen. I’d learnt its shape and colour and number by heart. It was also the one thing which I kept hidden, wrapped in a plastic bag in a metal strong-box, while I forgot about my jewels and left them lying among the lip pencils and nail varnish and creams. It wasn’t in Saleh’s drawer, nor in his parents’ house, not even in his office drawer. I secretly enlisted one of the people who worked for my father to help me in my search, thinking that it must be in Saleh’s briefcase which he carried with him from place to place, but my emissary opened the case and didn’t find it.