Women of Sand and Myrrh (5 page)
Our hotel was luxurious although whoever designed it had been unsuccessful, obviously seeing things through foreign eyes and wanting to create his own idea of Arab architecture and furnishings, with the result that wealth superseded taste in every room. The picture windows looked out on to distant lights, and in the daytime I saw a big harbour and a sturdy
bridge. Who’d said that we were in the desert here, when all the trappings and institutions of city life were to be found in abundance?
Not much time passed before I realized I’d been mistaken: I was neither in the desert nor in a city. The desert was only a place to be explored; even getting to know its natives was an experience like something out of a tourist brochure and they themselves were ill at ease with anything but hair tents and camels and sand. Those in the city, meanwhile, were in conflict with whatever came to them from beyond the desert. Every aircraft that landed on their sands brought something that frightened them and that they didn’t want to know about because it didn’t spring out of their own arid land. But these aircraft carried people and their different civilizations and they couldn’t afford to reject them because the incomers were the ones who knew the secrets of the desert, almost as if they had been created in its belly and knew where the black liquid was and how to turn it into door handles and bathtaps made of gold.
That first day I went around the house, cleaned the canary’s cage, sat down on the sofa, and thought to myself, ‘Where are all the things that I wanted to do if I didn’t go to teach?’ I opened a drawer. There were coloured shells, silver rings, material. I closed it. The phone rang. I hurried to answer it. The canary flew from his open cage and perched on my shoulder as he always did when I picked up the receiver. My husband was telling me that he’d come and have coffee with me after lunch: ‘I’ve got a few people from Beirut with me.’ I found myself asking him, ‘And when are we going to leave this country?’ There was a silence, then he said laughing, ‘You want to know this minute?’ ‘Yes. I have to know. I can’t go on like this,’ then I started to cry. I heard him hesitating on the other end of the line: ‘We’ll talk about it later. Come on. Bye bye.’ Still crying, I shouted at him, ‘I want to know how much longer we’re staying in this bloody country.’
‘What’s all this about? Calm down, take it easy. What’s happened? I don’t understand. What’s different since I left you this morning?’ I repeated tearfully, ‘Nothing’s happened. I’m going to explode, that’s all. I just want to know.’
And I knew that he didn’t know. We were like all the Lebanese who’d transferred their businesses abroad and had been luckier than they expected. I tried to make myself get up but I couldn’t and stayed where I was, my head in my hands, the canary on my shoulder, thinking about my family and Basem’s family and my friends. None of them were happy in Beirut now, all wavering between staying and leaving. My sister wrote to me from Brazil, the sad letters of an exile. The phone again. Maryam on the line. I found myself gradually growing calmer as if I was getting back into daily life here once more. I took the material from the drawer and began to make a bedouin puppet. I drew in the eyes, the eyebrows, the lips and remained absorbed, unaware of the time until my son Umar came home from school, calling out and shouting at me to take him down to see the baby camel near our house. I was still thinking about the colour of the puppet’s lips as he pulled me along with him, the camera in his other hand. Down in the street I saw to my surprise that there was a dog nosing around the camel and it was responding playfully to the dog’s interest. I clicked the shutter and we approached the two of them with Said shouting to us, ‘Go gently. The camel’s afraid and he’s a cunning beast.’
Basem and his three friends arrived. I gave them coffee while the canary flew about the house and approached the glass-topped table, and landed on the plate of biscuits. He pecked desultorily at a piece of biscuit but perhaps he found it too dry. He flew off again then landed on my shoulder and moved up close to my face, trying to take some biscuit out of my mouth. ‘See that son of a bitch!’ remarked one of the guests in surprise. When I stood up with the canary on my shoulder another of them asked, ‘How’s life? You look as if you’re enjoying it here.’ I thought it’s the canary on my
shoulder that’s given him that idea, and not only the canary, perhaps the furniture and the nice house as well. I returned, ‘I’m all right. But if only I could walk about the place.’ Basem chipped in, ‘By the way, I’ve brought you a walking-machine. Don’t exaggerate, Suha, you can walk about any compound.’ I busied myself putting the canary back into his cage. If this conversation had taken place in our first year here I would have answered him that walking wasn’t just an activity of the feet: eyes needed a change of scenery too and in the compound you went along on a green carpet which resembled grass, or on real grass threatened every instant by sand. I always used to discuss the place with him and ask him if the smell of damp bothered him and if he noticed how time stagnated, and he would answer, ‘I don’t have time to scratch my head.’ Fighting off my despair, I would ask curtly, ‘Don’t you have the feeling that life here isn’t normal?’
When the conversation between Basem and the other men turned as usual to money and business, I thought even people who aren’t living here have been caught up in this obsession with money and can no longer talk about anything unconnected with money, chances for good deals, petrol. Slyly I interrupted them: ‘Do you know, a committee of doctors did ECGs on a large sample of the men around here and thought the machinery had broken down. They all came out blank.’ My smart remark was lost on the three men and when one of them asked what I meant Basem replied, ‘Suha always likes to philosophize about things. She means we don’t feel anything and we’re always chasing after money. An instructive summing-up!’
That night I broached the subject of our staying here again. I tried to be realistic, positive, decisive. I told Basem that I wanted the truth, wanted to know how long we were going to spend here so that I could prepare myself psychologically, and impressed upon him that I wouldn’t by angry whatever the answer might be. When he answered hesitantly, ‘A year. Two years. Maybe three,’ I screamed at him. I thumped my
hand against the door as I went to open it and echoed Umm Kairouz’s words: ‘I’ll go mad. I could accept life in the fighting, but not this.’ I went out but as I reached the door of the overgrown garden I turned back and found Basem standing on the doorstep. I went in with him and said, ‘It’s good that I found out.’
The next day I decided to do what I’d done the day after I arrived when I was acclimatizing myself to the place: go down to the hotel swimming-pool and jump in off the boards, put oil on my legs, smile at the waiter who brought me orange juice and stretch out contentedly. But the spirit of that day was never recaptured. Then I’d looked at the mosaic in the swimming-pool and thought to myself that it was like the green of the sea, admired the sturdy blue sunshades and the clean comfortable chaises-longues and marvelled at the coolness of the juice in the stifling atmosphere. But the veneer of newness had worn off and I’d stopped going to the swimming-pool after a man had come in and banged on the tables, separating the male swimmers from the females. Most of the women took refuge in the changing-rooms trembling, and the few foreigners among them didn’t understand what was going on. In his attempts not to look at the semi-naked bodies in the pool the man had begun to thump his stick looking in the opposite direction, and had slipped and fallen in the water. His head rose to the surface and went under again a number of times, and he swallowed large amounts of water and almost drowned.
Today as I paid the entry fee I made up my mind to speak English. Despite the burning sun I lay back in a chaise-longue by the pool, lifted my hair off my neck and wiped away the sweat: ‘God, do I have to stay? I can’t take another hour in this country.’ Nobody heard me but the flies and the clammy air. I took my face cream and had barely opened the lid before it poured out like a stream of hot water. ‘Even cosmetics melt.’ I threw it down, opened a magazine, laid it aside. I looked around me. Foreign women. Arab women. Children.
Two days a week for women and the rest of the time for men. No music. Only the racket of motors and a bulldozer working nearby. I closed my eyes, opened them and closed them again when I saw a woman approaching. I didn’t want to talk to any woman. I’d stopped visiting and receiving visitors and hadn’t even opened the door to Suzanne in spite of being curious to know what had happened to Maaz since our visit to Sita.
I’d been years in this desert and a quarter of an hour stretched out on the chaise-longue. There was no music playing. Music’s the work of the devil: it infiltrates the mind and whispers seductively to it. I looked at my magazine for a few moments but saw the signs of normal life in it and felt depressed and threw it down. I thought nostalgically of the first year here and closed my eyes again recalling the shapes and colours of the goats that were new to me then; I’d gone into the shops, few in those days, examining all the Indian merchandise, turning over the daggers and bracelets, the real coral and the fake, and passing my hand over the smooth aged wood of the doors which had been ripped out of the mud brick houses. I even got to know about the foodstuffs in the freezers and the prices of everything. I was enthusiastic about the local people: I’d come here to find out what there was in the women’s wooden chests and imagined green and blue and red and white cashmere shawls and rubies and diamonds, one for every finger, but I’d been wrong. The people of the desert had changed and were still changing: they were throwing out their carved sofas, and stainless steel and jewels from Bangkok had become important in their lives.
I no longer felt inspired by the puppets’ costumes that I used to enjoy making. Books began to frustrate me because they took me off into surroundings so remote from where I was. In spite of my boredom I wasn’t interested in witnessing the building of cities stone by stone, or their expansion, and I could no longer stand the sound of the loudspeakers on the
cars that roved around the narrow sandy or asphalted streets enumerating the different kinds of tree they were planting. I did not want to be somewhere that was just starting up. Even the first landings on the moon seemed like ancient history to me now. The newspapers arrived late and the news was already out of date and that was why what went on in the world no longer touched me. Everything seemed as if it was happening on another planet.
The Indian waiter was coming towards me now devouring me with his eyes. I put the towel around me before I asked him if one of the men had come to stop the women swimming. No, they all had to go into the restaurant because the swimming pool had been reserved for a family who were of some importance by the look of them. I just nodded for by now I could see the other women getting into arguments with their children about leaving the pool.
The place emptied although waves still ruffled the blue water where people had been jumping and swimming. I didn’t want to rise from my seat for two reasons: I’d have had to get fully dressed to go into the restaurant, and I was curious to see the important family. I expected a woman in a veil and abaya who’d sit on the edge of the pool, like the ones I’d seen at the seaside sitting with children in over-large bathing costumes while their father enjoyed himself in the water. I saw a young girl followed by a pretty woman in a long dress whose hair reached below her waist. Before she took off her dress at the side of the pool she looked around her and saw me, or perhaps she didn’t, because she didn’t protest, but gathered up her hair, lifted if off her back and went down into the pool. She stood holding on to the steps, then after a while she floated still holding the steps. Her daughter, who was an excellent swimmer, threw water at her and she turned her face away with her free hand on her hair, saying ‘Stop it,’ in a coquettish voice.
I stood up and jumped into the water, thinking that I now knew why people built private swimming pools for themselves.
The water without lots of bodies in it looked much more refreshing. The woman was still holding on to the steps when I got there. We exchanged smiles and before I moved away I heard her asking me in English if I’d teach her to swim. When I answered yes in Arabic she said, ‘I told myself that’s an Arab face. Are you from Lebanon?’
I stood with her in the water and told her to blow into the water as a first step, but she didn’t know how to. I told her to breathe in and hold her breath, then plunge her head into the water and stop holding on and take her feet off the bottom. She did as I said but she couldn’t stop herself clinging on to the steps. She tried once again and still couldn’t. When she asked me if I’d come to her house and give her swimming lessons I laughed awkwardly. Seeing the reluctance on my face she pressed me with good-natured charm: ‘Please. The car will come for you and take you back afterwards. And the pool at our house is big.’ I couldn’t conceal my surprise and wondered how to reply to the woman whose name was Nur, who clearly realized what I was thinking. ‘I was fed up,’ she explained. ‘and I said to my daughter Ghada that we should have a change and go the the hotel pool.’ Then she sat down beside me and began telling me about her time at school in Cairo and how much she liked Lebanon, and every time I stood up to go she insisted that I stayed and I realized that she was bored.
I regretted my capitulation the next day when Nur’s driver appeared at the door. I was sleepy. The car drew to a halt with me outside a house that I’d often seen before. It wasn’t far from where we lived and Umar called it the spaceship while I had privately named it the moon house. Its walls were built of beautiful stone. ‘They must be mad,’ I thought, ‘spending all that cash as if they were in Switzerland.’ Inside the house it was hard to believe in the existence of the dust from the desert and the ugly dilapidated houses, all alike, and the pot-holed narrow streets with piles of rubbish at every corner. I could see trees and green grass in Nur’s garden
although some of the foliage had withered. How quickly the plants died even in the gardens of the rich houses because of sand storms, or goats that got in and ate everything that was green.