Women of Sand and Myrrh (8 page)

The heart and the mind opened their two chambers, allowing me to steal a glance into them. I’m indifferent now to Suhail, Maurice, Adnan, Adil, and I understand that time takes a huge eraser and rubs out names and then writes others in and renews feelings and emotions. I’d got to know Basem and fallen in love with him, and my heart had leapt for joy when he asked me to marry him. Now I didn’t want to look into either chamber. I chased away all the images and questions and misgivings and convinced myself that I’d forgotten what had happened in Nur’s room. But the heart and mind were faithful and searched virtuously through their records, unearthing causes and explanations which might
supply them with adequate justification for eradicating the event. They made me see myself a month before, when I’d escaped to my bed and listened to a child crying above the sound of the air-conditioner, and music – Western, Arab and Indian – floating out over the rooftops. I’d put my hand under the pillow to pull it nearer to me and smelt Nur’s smell and heard her laughter and seen her thick black hair.

I imagined her with a man, warm and at the same time powerless, pliant and bending like a doll made of dough, wanting what was forbidden. The severity with which it was forbidden reminded people of it at every moment, and it wormed its way into their minds and bodies. Even when you were buying tampons and sanitary towels and perfumes and spray deodorants, the man behind the cash desk changed colour and you knew what he was thinking about as he smiled or assumed an air of indifference. There was a campaign being conducted in the press against the display of women’s underwear, and its leader was a girl in her twenties who had already raised the subject of bracelets and other jewellery; according to her they were symbols of slavery reminiscent of the age of harems and slave boys and girls, and make-up and jewellery on a woman was a provocation to adultery and fornication even if it was made from behind veils and black drapes.

Although these thoughts of mine drew things together and had some substance, I couldn’t help feeling miserable. I began reminding myself how I’d thought of Nur as having a kind of illness as I stared at the pillows and the cover that day, and said to myself this is where Nur rolled around and breathed fast and slow with a man, separated from him only by their fine body hairs. However, I couldn’t see it like that now, much as I wanted to.

A week passed and I drifted in and out of reality, staring out of the window at the dusty desert and the mechanical waste. The telephone rang and I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to hear Nur’s voice. But she came to see me early one
morning. She sat down on the sofa, then stood up and seemed to be examining my house for the first time. She grasped hold of the coral and shells, the puppets hanging from the ceiling, the old silver necklaces and bracelets and anklets, and smiled and sat down again in front of me, her limbs loose and relaxed. I was still only half there, trying to make normal conversation and not succeeding. Every question or statement I wanted to utter seemed to have a connection with us, either directly or indirectly, and I only breathed again when Nur left.

When another day or two had gone by I began to feel a yearning. I missed the particular atmosphere that comes into being only if a person is alone, has spare time on her hands and is waiting for something to happen. For recently we had no longer sat chatting like visitors, each telling the other what she’d been doing. We’d begun to live our lives together, going to the department store, visiting Suzanne, entering the hotel in fear and trembling and ordering tea and cake only to rise up together after hastily swallowing the tea, because the looks of the other guests were almost beginning to be directed towards us, almost becoming a reproach. We went deep into the desert and saw a mirage of many colours. Instead of receding into the distance, it had come closer to us as we approached it in the car, and then it wasn’t a mirage after all.

I couldn’t help exclaiming in wonder at the carpet of yellow and white daisies, other flowers whose names I didn’t know, and thick-stemmed ones standing straight as pegs: ‘Those are called snake poison,’ I said. It wasn’t the colours that made my heart beat faster, but the smell, fragrant and powerful and new and strange to my nose. I picked a daisy and brought it close to my mouth and chewed its petals, trying to bring together the taste and the smell. As we went further among the flowers the smell grew and changed, from jasmine, to white iris, to narcissus. We sat down on the grass and sand and Nur pulled the petals off the daisy one by one: ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ I stretched out and smiled as a
sudden realization dawned on me. My relationship with Basem only existed inside the four walls of the house now; it didn’t even extend to the garden or the car or the street. I rarely sat next to him in the front seat of the car. I didn’t walk along with him in the street or go to the shops with him. We didn’t lie together beside the pool and I didn’t sit with him even on the back seat on the way to the airport; he sat in front next to Said. He’d never met Nur yet, or Tamr, and our conversations were brief, restricted to matters connected with everyday life, holidays, the news from Lebanon and family and friends.

Through the rooms of my mind and heart passed images of how I’d gone to bed early, trying to read against the noise of the television and the laughter and talking of Basem’s friends. I’d stopped inviting men and women together because I’d become convinced that such gatherings were futile. The women furtively examined each other’s clothes, working out the financial situation of each other’s husbands so that they could feel either proud or jealous, while the men talked about money and business openly. I was glad that I wasn’t obliged to sit with them but it made me realize how lonely I was.

Sometimes I used to refuse Basem when he came unusually early to the bedroom. It would depend on how fed up I’d felt during the day and how resentful that I was still in the desert. Sometimes I convinced myself that he had no alternative but to stay here, and that he was happy in his work. On these occasions I let him take me in his arms and cover me with kisses and I held him to me in memory of the past and the days of normality. However much I tried to relax I felt conscious of every noise outside and every movement in the bed, and the climax of our lovemaking was lost to me like a piece of paper blown near me by the wind, and blown away again every time I caught up with it. Then I felt angry because I’d shown a desire to participate and not come. Throughout the night I tossed and turned unable to sleep, as if I’d committed a sin, and as if I’d found out for the first time that I wasn’t
in control of my body and that only my feelings could make it move, but they wouldn’t forget their dissatisfaction and were rebelling.

Still breaking the petals off the daisy, Nur had said, ‘When they brought me back here and I saw the desert from the plane I screamed. In the car I threw up three or four times and when I got to the house I banged my head against the walls. I couldn’t sleep or eat and I wouldn’t greet my relatives without letting them see how angry I was. I sat for hours and days as dumb as that table. I locked the door of my room and got a mirror and stared at my face; I counted the hairs of my eyebrows and eyelashes, twisted my hair round my fingers, just like mad people do. All my life I never liked seeing the desert. My mother says that before I was old enough to understand, I used to cry and they didn’t know the reason. When I became conscious of my surroundings, I closed my eyes in the car. I was the opposite of my sisters and brothers. They loved looking out of the windows. I never did. It’s always made me depressed.’

Our relationship wove itself together from day to day. I was like a fisherman who casts his line into water where he knows there are no fish, or even weeds, but feels a sense of calm and a release from the boredom of his routine every time he does it, and prefers it at least to doing nothing, although every day when he comes back to fish again he feels a little restless and disgruntled.

In the days that followed, I plucked up enough courage to kiss Nur, when I’d shut my eyes and opened them fifty times. My limbs went numb before I reached that nameless, otherworldly region with her. I couldn’t open my eyes again easily; it was as if I was standing beside a large firework that might go off at any minute, or was dazzled in the presence of Nur the imperious queen bee. This was no longer an experiment; I’d tried a new fruit which I’d thought would be inedible and instead I’d found it intoxicatingly sweet; I couldn’t just spit out the stone and go on my way.

Our secret relationship began to complement our relationship outside the house. I sensed a transformation: whatever plant it was I’d tasted had drugged me and made me lose my memory. I no longer noticed how slowly the time crawled by in the desert, or the pervasive smell of chemicals which used to irritate me so much, or the colours of the new buildings which I had once named Instant Ruins, or the wires hanging down from the outside walls, or the lack of trees. Feelings of agitation and rage no longer crept up on me as they had done before: now when I saw the women’s tailor poking his head out of his tiny window to receive material and a pattern from one of his customers, I shrugged my shoulders indifferently: and I laughed when I heard one of Nur’s mother’s visitors forbidding her daughter to go alone in Nur’s car. ‘If you leave a man alone with a woman, the Devil makes it three,’ she pronounced adamantly, despite Nur’s protestations that the driver’s morals were unimpeachable and he’d been with her for years.

But I felt irritated when one day Nur came to me in my house; only then did our relationship seem a reality. Instead of the smell of incense and furniture and food which filled my senses when I was in her room, and her bed which was like the cockpit of a plane and was studded with buttons on either side and had a chamois leather bedhead to match her wardrobe and mirror and seat, there were Umar’s drawings blowing about in the draught from the air-conditioner and my yellow case on top of the wardrobe, and this time I couldn’t feel that I was a visitor or an onlooker. Previously I’d gone back home and it seemed as if I’d never left: Basem’s freshly-ironed clothes hung on the door knob; his clean shirts were still spread out on the bed to finish drying. I was aware of myself getting Umar’s things ready and answering the telephone and acting so normally that I began to question if I’d really only returned from Nur’s house a few minutes before, and if me stretching out on her bed and us kissing and clinging to each other and squirming about had really
happened.

My room was still as it had always been except for the traces of Nur and her perfume. Bedrooms all over the world are always private and special. I used to love going into my parents’ room to see the cut-glass moon mounted into the wood of their bed, although I never once saw it lit up. And I could still remember my European teacher’s bedroom when I went to visit her with the rest of the class after she’d had her appendix out. To my surprise I saw toys of every shape and size scattered about the room. My teacher was about fifty years old and she didn’t smile easily.

Before I was married I used to love my friends to see my room; I’d leave my tennis racquet lying on the table on purpose and the classical records and thick books on art and literature in obvious places, and foreign dictionaries, and the photograph of me receiving my school certificate. When I was married I chose the colours in the bedroom and took care that my night-dresses and even the tissues all matched each other. Now in the desert I’d come to think of the bedroom simply as somewhere to sleep.

6

I was surprised when I saw the hall packed with women from the desert: I couldn’t think where they’d been hiding all the time because the town always seemed forlorn and half-empty. They were like a strange and wondrous kind of bird with their beaks and gay plumage, or female magicians gathered to see the colour of the air that night. They dressed in magnificent colours and styles: Marie Antoinette was there,
Cleopatra, Madame de Pompadour, Scarlett O’Hara and Raqiya Ibrahim.

Their hairstyles too were out of keeping with this hall, which had been built especially for wedding parties after a private house had collapsed because of the great number of guests crammed into it. Even the ceiling of this place had fallen in on some women one night, and with that in mind I sat at the back near the door, although Nur protested angrily. The women looked heartless tonight. Was it because of their clothes, or because their veils hung down to their noses or their hair reached their waists? Nur had gathered up her hair under a white cap fringed with seed pearls on the ends of fine threads, and she wore a long dress by Valentino, who’d designed the same dress in a shorter length for European women.

The concert this evening was being given by a singer named Ghusun. Her fame had spread after she’d met Abd Al-Halim Hafez and he’d heard her bedouin voice and asked her to sing in Cairo. She took along her sisters and female relations to back her on drums and tambourines, but they were terrified by the lights and the audience and refused to sit up on the stage, even with their veils on. So Ghusun was left singing to the microphone alone with her lute.

When Ghusun appeared she looked like a heroic female warrior from an African tribe. Her hair was like a wig she’d found among the bric-à-brac left behind by some Western mission, but her features were African. She wore a dress that was half black, half red, with big gathers at the shoulders that extended down the sleeves. Gold chains and coloured necklaces hung round her neck and rings sparkled on her fingers. She aimed to dazzle the crowd, knowing that her place in society was precarious and her reputation unsavoury, because since she was little she’d sung and played the lute at weddings to earn her living.

Applause rang out but it was harsh and quickly over. The noise level rose. A boy of about four stayed close to the rustle
of his mother’s dress as she passed between the rows of women. I stared at their dresses and their faces, as they chewed gum with their mouths open, most of them still veiled. Their abayas were bundled up on their laps and it looked as if their dresses had big black stains in the middle. A fat girl, her head still covered, climbed up on the boards where Ghusun was singing and began to dance. She was followed by another, perhaps her sister; a thick gold chain bounced and jingled against her gold belt.