His mother, Aminah, was the only one who didn’t shun me the year of my small breasts. The whole town knew about her. Her husband died in caravan, barely two days away from home. Strangers put him in the ground immediately. She never got to throw herself onto his body. I don’t think she would have. Her female cousins gathered at her gate to wail with her, but Aminah was a silent widow. No one had seen such a thing. A two-month bride robbed of the best husband in the city? She had to be in shock, they said.
But Aminah could still think. She knew she was being stalked like soft prey. Fate had fixed its eyes upon her. None of the other Bedouin women would come to her house. She didn’t have a brass coin to pay for their breasts.
A shadow appeared over me, and it was Aminah. “I have a new baby. Will you come in?” she said in a soft voice. I was squatting at her gate and was almost asleep from fatigue and thirst.
We drank tea without a word. Why speak? We knew we needed each other. I wouldn’t beg, and neither would she.
After a while she said politely, “You’re slender.”
“In our tribe, Banu Sa’d, we work too hard to get fat. Our men are used to it by now,” I replied.
I knew what she meant. I loosened my robe and casually bent over the teapot, pretending to wonder if it had steeped too long. She could see for herself that my breasts didn’t hang as fat as they should have.
“May I have two years?” Aminah asked. She had such a small voice, even in her own home. Perhaps she was naturally timid. Or the eyes of fate had broken her.
Two years was the normal time for nursing a baby in the desert. As a precaution I asked to see the baby. She brought it out in swaddling clothes. She said the cloth was soiled and pulled it away. I saw that the baby, tiny and red as a skinned rabbit, had male parts. You understand?
There is another kind of “mother” who comes to the gates of the rich. It doesn’t matter what her milk is like, because they hand her an infant wrapped in black cloth, its face covered from sight. Women are weak, even in the desert. If you carry a baby away to leave on the mountainside—always a girl baby—seeing its face might soften your heart. But what good would it do to save them? The boys grow up to a hard life, and many will die before they travel on their first caravan. Some will never return. A surplus of virgins and widows is the last thing anyone needs. My husband asked if I would serve as such a “mother.” I told him I’d rather kill myself. We have a daughter ourselves, don’t we?
The contract took only an hour to seal. First I rushed back to camp outside the town walls and got permission from my husband to take the widow’s baby. A very grudging permission.
“After two years you’ll be lucky to get a silver ring out of it,” he said.
“I’m doing this even if I get her cast-off sandals,” I replied.
We argued. I insisted. He frowned, but what can you do? We’d get nothing if I left without a baby.
After Aminah had cried a little, the Banu Sa’d passed the city walls at twilight, heading for the open desert. I don’t know how sailors feel when they smell the sea again, but it must be like how I feel when I can smell the desert. A funny expression, for in truth you can’t smell anything. When the last whiff of rancid smoke, sewage, and dung is out of your nostrils, you are in the desert, where the life is as pure as the air. For the next two years Muhammad never smelled corruption, or saw a house wall for that matter.
MY BREASTS SWELLED when I began to nurse the new baby. The other women became jealous. They spread rumors that I was feeding him camel’s milk. I cornered the worst shrew and showed her my breast.
“See? It got big on its own,” I told her and made clear what I would do if she kept up her accusations. The next thing you know, they’ll say I made a pact with demons. How could I tell them that it was the baby who brought me so much milk? The udders of the goats and camels also swelled, but no one would believe me if I told them. Milk in the middle of a drought. Who can say why?
“I must go,” Muhammad said.
His voice brought me back from my fever dreams. I didn’t know how long I had slept. The blackness in that horrible little room was the same, day or night.
Muhammad put his hand on my brow. “Lie still. I won’t be long. What can I bring you?”
“Bring me the stars,” I mumbled.
Which sounds like I was delirious, but he smiled. Any Bedouin would.
One morning soon after, Muhammad found me sitting up in bed, and when he felt my brow, it was cool and dry. The first thing I wanted wasn’t food, even though I was starving. I wanted to be carried outside. Muhammad fetched two of his cousins, and they carried my bed into a dirty courtyard shaded by palm trees. I was puzzled. Why hadn’t my people come to carry me?
“The contagion is worse. They had to leave,” said Muhammad soberly.
I asked how bad it was. He said people were dying too fast to be buried. The tribes were stacking up corpses outside the city walls. So it was right for my people to flee. They had no reason to lose their lives waiting to see if mine might be saved. Muhammad had girl cousins too, and they brought me millet gruel with lamb in it for strength. They were pretty girls, and gossips. Their chatter was meant to cheer me up, but I sent them away. I didn’t need cheering. Hearing the wind in the palms was better than a chorus of blessed spirits.
We Bedouin are proud, but not so proud that we are immune to money. Sometimes foreign traders will ride into camp on half-dead horses. They empty their purses for a goatskin of water and a guide to the next oasis. Most foreigners foolish enough to cross the desert without a Bedouin don’t make it to an encampment. We find their remains bleaching on the dunes.
The first time Muhammad saw such a sight he was no more than five. It shocked him. A man’s body splayed out on the sand, his skin already turning to parchment, and his horse a hundred feet away, as dead as he was. The wind was mild that day. It had filled their mouths with sand, but not yet covered their bodies.
“There’s a fool,” I said. “Letting his horse loose. Who would do that?”
“He wanted to be nice,” said Muhammad innocently.
I knelt down and looked him in the eye. “No horse can survive on its own out here. What he should have done is kill the horse and climb inside its belly. That way he would have been protected for a day or two.” I knew what I was talking about. The Banu Sa’d were close by. We would have seen the vultures circling over the dead animal and come to see. Even after three days a man might be found alive inside a horse or camel. He wouldn’t be a pretty sight, but death is much uglier.
Muhammad listened, but his eyes kept wandering to the dead man, whose mouth had gasped open in his last moments, leaving a hole for the sand to fill. You could see the boy wanted to ask me something, but he didn’t. I understood. Fate was a tease. Young as he was, he had experienced how cruel a tease. So had his mother. At the end of two years I brought her baby back. Aminah was waiting by the gate and let loose a cry of joy when she saw us coming. Muhammad was walking on sturdy little legs by my side. Bedouin babies don’t start to walk when they want to. They start as soon as they have to, which is very early among nomads.
Hearing her cry, Muhammad drew back. He had been taught that this was a sign of danger. The camp is under attack when women sound the alarm. And he didn’t know her, of course. To him, I was his mother. I bent down and slapped him hard across the face.
“Go to her. Forget me,” I said. “I hate you like a stranger.” We always use the same harsh words when giving a baby back. Muhammad didn’t move or even cry. He had to be hit a second time before he ran toward Aminah, who was crouching in the street now, arms open wide. But their reunion was a tease. Mecca had been infected with a plague, and when the first neighbor died on Aminah’s street, she covered her face with a veil into which bitter herbs were knotted. She veiled her baby’s face too, but this was a futile precaution. She knew fate wasn’t done with her. In tears she returned Muhammad to me. Contagion blows from house to house faster than dust, so ther
e was little time to consider.
“When should I bring him back?” I asked. I was rushing back to the same camp where the Banu Sa’d always stay, only now it was dangerously close to town. Aminah ran beside me, holding Muhammad in her arms. He couldn’t run fast enough to keep up, and she couldn’t bear parting from him so soon, after only a day.
I asked again. “Two months, three?” It was up to her.
“Three years. Keep him as long as you can,” Aminah said.
I won’t lie. I was shocked. “But the plague will be gone once the weak are all dead. It won’t take nearly that long, perhaps by winter.”
She wasn’t listening. She thrust her baby into my arms and ran away, not looking back. Which wasn’t heartless, as you might think. She knew what fate was like. It was like a wasp covered in honey. You cannot taste the sweetness without a sting.
That was why the boy grew up to be five among the nomads and saw his first corpse in the sand dunes. Foreigners had other uses besides dying on us, which could be very useful if their horses were still alive and their purses full of coins. Muhammad learned about respect from the eyes of strangers. Not just the ones from outside Arabia, who were forced to show respect unless they wanted to wake up one morning in the desert to find that their guide had disappeared in the night. City Arabs move freely back and forth between the city and the wild. The young men in particular are never more than half tamed by life in town. Since childhood they have heard about falcon hunting and sneak attacks on the tents of the enemy. Young men want glory, and they sneak away into the desert as soon as they can.
Muhammad met many of them from his tribe, the Quraysh, who were the proudest of all, since they were used to power and money in Mecca. It took only a few days to strip their pride. It wasn’t done through humiliation or mischief (although no one strongly objected to handing them a blanket full of sand fleas to wrap themselves in at night—a few hundred pink bites is a healthy reminder of how things are). What won their respect was something you’d never suspect: words. The young men come with mouths as filthy as the bottoms of their feet. A few can read, but all know the magic of words, and there is no purer magic than the words of the Bedouin.
We are the living chronicle of every Arab hero and god. Our minds are soaked in poetry the way a wineskin is soaked with juice. Their first night sitting around the fire, the young men are shivering with cold—they never come dressed for the chill that descends after the sun sinks—and exchanging filthy anecdotes to keep warm. No one rebukes them. A Banu Sa’d elder will softly begin to sing one of the songs about a great raid in which our ancestors stole a hundred camels. A second man will join in once he recognizes the tune, then a third. In a few moments the whole tribe is singing, and the young men’s jaws drop. It’s not the melody or the exploit being praised that moves them, but the strength of every voice singing as one, and in such beautiful, pure Arabic as these corrupt young dandies have never heard in their whole lives.
You think you know what comes next. I will praise Muhammad for being the best singer or the youngest or the most precocious. I will paint a picture of the day he stood up and astonished the men by singing a song he had only heard once, not getting a syllable wrong. In fact, Muhammad almost never sang, except in a low voice no one could hear. When we were blessed by a wandering bard and laid a feast before him in order to hear his epics of massacred Christians and enemy armies drowned in sand overnight, Muhammad sat on the edge of the assembly or even sneaked away. I had to protect him from suspicion that he had blood that wasn’t Arab in his veins. Without verse and song, what is an Arab?
No use worrying about that. I was anxious that fate would never let him see his mother again. But after three years they were reunited again. She was waiting by the gate, just as before. She crouched in the street with her arms spread wide. Only this time she didn’t cry out, and I didn’t slap Muhammad to make him run to her. He was old enough to be told what his situation was. When he set eyes on Aminah, he was prepared for this strange woman who must be called mother. He didn’t kiss me, but only gave a grave little bow and walked slowly into her arms.
Aminah brought me inside. She was poorer than ever, but she had cakes and tea waiting for me, and two girls in bangles who did a dance in my honor (they had been coached to run off as soon as they were done, not staying for a share of cake and tea). She placed a small sandalwood box on the table between us. When I opened it, I saw all the jewelry she possessed in the world. One was a single pearl as large as my thumb, which I knew she had brought with her in her dowry when she arrived in the house of Abdullah.
Aminah saw that I was about to protest. She drew Muhammad close and wrapped her skirt around him. “You take it. Now I have a richer pearl,” she said. She was a woman, but she had the Arab way with words.
I spent the night in a featherbed covered with a silk spread, once beautiful, now worn almost threadbare. I couldn’t sleep, because my mind kept thrashing a memory over. Aminah was eager to know everything about her son, and we had spent the evening in one-sided talk, as I recounted everything he had learned among the Banu Sa’d. But fear forced me to lie. I withheld the one thing she had to be told.
The thing happened when he was three. One day I was scrubbing out a copper pot with sand when my own child, a boy little older than Muhammad, ran into the tent.
“Two men are killing my brother!” he cried.
He was too breathless and frightened to say more. I raised a cry and ran out into the desert, following the tracks my boy had left. A few men heard my distress and joined me. That morning Muhammad had wandered off. We covered a long distance before I spotted him lying in the sand near a thornbush. My heart pounded. I rushed to his side. He was alive, but very weak.
“Run after them! They tried to kill him!” I cried, but the men didn’t move. They were bewildered. There was no blood on the boy’s body and no wounds. Looking around, you couldn’t see tracks leading anywhere. Nobody called my son a liar. We have a good position, and they wouldn’t dare. I swept Muhammad up in my arms, grateful that he hadn’t gotten lost. Somehow the string that tied him to one of the girls must have broken.
I scolded my boy, and his father threatened to beat him for lying, but he never changed his story. He had followed Muhammad out into the desert when he saw the broken string. The footprints were easy to track. When he came over a rise, he saw two strangers bent over Muhammad, who was lying on his back just as we found him. The two had long knives, and while one kept the boy pinned with his knee, the other plunged his blade into Muhammad’s chest. If they noticed that they were being observed, they didn’t turn their heads. The one reached into Muhammad’s chest and did something. My boy couldn’t tell what; he was barely six himself. The sight so frightened him that he watched for only a minute before running back to camp.
The tale was not incredible to everyone. Jinns roam the desert thirsting for human souls. That was the strongest possibility. I had my doubts, though. Jinns attack at night, and they don’t need knives to pluck out your soul. They have dark enchantment. Not that anyone has survived to say what that enchantment is. I feared Muhammad would be shunned for drawing two demons so close to camp in broad daylight. In fact, the opposite happened. The fact that he had survived their attack was considered to be a sign of stronger magic than that of the jinns. It was decided that Muhammad’s name would be added to the songs about our ancestors who had driven off jinns. After that, his reputation was made. Besides, it was obvious he hadn’t had his soul sucked out.
I couldn’t tell Aminah this, and since Muhammad was so young, there was no fear that he would let it slip. I took the sandalwood box and departed the next morning after first tucking the pearl under Aminah’s pillow. Everything in the box would have vanished anyway, once she fell sick and doctors had to be paid. In the few years she had left, I would have been welcome in her house, but I never went back. Muhammad had spent enough time with a mother who wasn’t real. Now he needed time with a mother who would be real such a
short time. Aminah was like a shadow passing through his life.
WHEN HE WAS sure that I had regained my strength, Muhammad led me from my sickroom to the edge of town. Mecca is too green to see the desert from, even atop the highest watchtower. He fussed over my bags when the small train of donkeys and camels arrived to take me home. I let him. Why not? A hundred cousins aren’t the same as a milk-mother. My few things were packed into saddlebags. The Banu Sa’d men who came for me were old ones who could be spared, and they hated the city. The circling hills shut out too much of the sky. In haste I was laid on a stretcher behind the last camel, since I was too weak to make the journey on foot. The last thing I felt wasn’t love for Muhammad, but a twinge of curiosity.
“Do you remember one day in the desert, when you were very young and got lost?” I asked.
He nodded. “But I wasn’t lost. I had a feeling where I should go. Two men were waiting for me when I got there.”
I was amazed. “They attacked you, and you never told me? After we got you home, you wouldn’t say a word.”
“I couldn’t. I knew you thought the jinns had captured me.”
“It had to be jinns. They left no footprints. They were seen ripping open your chest.”
“I wondered why everyone whispered behind my back. But it wasn’t jinns. Other beings live in the desert. You should know that.”
If it had been anyone else putting me in my place, my nails would have been at his face. But with him I felt a mixture of meekness and wonder. “What kind of beings?” I asked in a small voice.
A strange smile crossed Muhammad’s face. “I’ve never stopped asking that question. You came running in such a panic, you scared them off.” He put a finger lightly on his heart. “Don’t worry. Whatever they wanted to do, it’s done.”
4
WARAQAH, THE BELIEVER
The best hiding place is inside your own heart. I’ve tried all the others. Even when I dug a hole by the open latrines and covered it with thatch, they dragged me out and beat me. I was young then, and they were thugs. A hideous idol with a serpent’s tail had been found smashed to bits outside the Kaaba. It was probably one of them, getting drunk and daring one another. But I was easier to blame.
Muhammad Page 5