When I was a child I used to hunt wild rabbits, and occasionally catch the odd animal. I’d tear it limb from limb like the wolf does, light a fire in the pitch-black night, and grill enough to eat my fill. As I ripped the flesh with my sharp incisors, I’d see a she-wolf in the distance leading her youngsters, passing back and forth, observing me without approaching. When I finished my supper, I’d get up and be on my way. Without looking I’d sense the she-wolf hurrying to the spot where I had sat, then howling, her four little ones behind her.
My mother, Khazna, would miss me for a day or two, but as soon as she saw me she’d scold me for staying on my own in the desert. Then she’d tell me off for not bringing them anything I’d picked up in the wilderness. My father was well advanced in his years, and his eyesight was weak. There was only my brother Sayyaf left, after we lost my elder brother, Sayf. He had been abducted by a genie with long hair and deep dark eyes. They say he went out one night to relieve himself, when the genie fell in love with him and carried him off on her wings. Some said that my brother Sayf had become an inhabitant of the underworld. They even went as far as to say that he had become a great king in one of the genie kingdoms. Ah, my brother, won’t you send me a woman from the genie tribes, or from the daughters of your royal guard? Send me a woman who will fall madly in love with me and whisk me away from this Hell to the regions of the netherworld. You might not be able to hear me, brother, but I swear to you that I sit alone in the desert late at night, relieving myself more than once, looking for a genie to love me and fly me away, but I see only wolves watching over me from afar; they are wary of me.
One night, as I was squatting down to relieve myself, the branches of a nearby acacia tree moved in the wind. It gave me a fright, and, terrified, I jumped to my feet. Can you believe it? I, who dreads neither death nor man, my hair stood on end, and my bowels churned. I immediately felt that it was not an acacia tree, nor a woman with long hair, deep dark eyes, and blushing cheeks. Not at all. The acacia branches were like an old genie hag glaring furiously at me, a human being who had woken her by urinating on her legs.
When I grew older I realized that my brother Sayf hadn’t really been abducted by a genie. She was in fact a very beautiful woman. We called her Dabbaha, the Slaughteress, because whomever she glanced at would lose his mind and become hopelessly smitten with her. She was a daughter of the gypsies who used to pass through the Bedouin encampments. They would patch our tents and clothes, polish our coffeepots, mend our teapots, and sell pillows, rugs, and such wares. After Sayf slept on a pillow of colored wool that one of their women had woven, he fell sick for three days. On the fourth day we couldn’t find him or the pillow. My father waited for months; his eyesight weakened, but Sayf did not return.
One summer night I lay resting under an awshaz tree. I had grown tired of waiting for a caravan of travelers or pilgrims to pass. But then, after three nights of lying in wait, I spied a man in the distance leading a young russet camel, followed by three sheep. I lay down low—my chin scraping the ground—like a wild beast that has sighted its prey. I wanted to crawl to a spot where I could ambush him as he passed. I paused when I saw him turn with the camel toward the awshaz. As soon as he had gone a few steps beyond my hiding place, I rose to my feet, crept silently behind him, then pounced and threw my arms around his neck in an effort to bring him to the ground. He grabbed my wrists with his hands and threw me over his back. I rolled onto the sand in front of him and sprang to my feet in an attacking posture. The man wielded his club of knotted wood that looked like a serpent and was as long as a spear, and brandished it in my face. He demanded I move out of his way or he’d smash my skull. I refused and ordered him to hand over the camel and the sheep. He aimed a swift blow at my head, but I ducked just in time to hear the club whiz through the air, inches above me. Once again he raised the club in the air and brought it down with all his might toward my head. I grabbed it; he struggled to pull it from my hands, and I fought to extricate it from his, but he was strong and hardy. He tried to thrust it into my chest, and I did the same. He turned the club toward the ground; I resisted by lifting it up again. I kicked him suddenly in the hamstring, and he fell, with me on top of him, and his long club went flying. He managed to knock me off of him with his strong legs. I scrambled to my feet and threw my arms around him again in an effort to throw him, but his legs were well positioned, and his feet were planted firmly in the sand. I tried once more to get my arms around his neck, but he released my hands with remarkable strength. He was an excellent fighter. I had never met anyone so strong and powerful, and although our battle lasted nearly two hours, he never tired or waned. I felt my own strength sapped and believed he was stronger. I couldn’t see his face well in the darkness, but his shining eyes seemed like the eyes of a hyena. His hair was long and tied back. His mustache hadn’t been trimmed for so long that his mouth looked like the muzzle of a lynx. After our long contest, and during a moment of disengagement, I asked that we rest awhile. He agreed.
“Will you make peace?” I said.
“I will make peace,” he said. “May Allah protect you.” As I placed my hand in his, I asked him if he would trust a highwayman. He laughed as he panted for breath: “I am a highwayman, too. This camel and these sheep are my takings today.” He embraced me and said, “From today you will be my brother.” He also said that he had never clashed with someone as strong and powerful as I was. Together we would be invincible. We would take lots of plunder. That night he honored me like an old friend. He slaughtered one of his sheep, and we made a fire of ghada wood after he had lit it with a little of the kindling that had been on the russet camel’s back. He told me his name was Nahar, Daytime. I recall how he laughed when I said that Daytime stole and held people up only at night.
Nahar and I spent each day together. He kept me company, and I was good company for him. We said good-bye to the company of the wolves, and they no longer kept watch on us from afar. Indeed, as soon as they saw us they would hurry away; we no longer left them anything to eat. After Nahar and I divided our earnings, I would take my share to my mother, brother, and father.
Once I returned with Nahar from a long trip through the wadis and ravines to find my mother, Khazna, wailing and beating her breast, pulling out her white hair and tearing the front of her garment. As soon as she saw me approaching, driving a young fair-haired she-camel through the darkness, she ran toward me, hugged me, and wept. She told me my brother Sayyaf had carried my father off in the night in a woolen saddlebag and left him in the mountains for the wolves and the wild animals.
It was not an easy thing for him to do, carry off his father and leave him for the beasts to tear apart his body. The poor man was unable to defend himself or ward off the beasts because he was ailing, and his sight was weak. Sayyaf said my mother was a crazy old woman. He changed her name sarcastically from Khazna to Kharifa, which means “senile,” for now she had reached her autumn years. My father, Sayyaf told me, went out one night, when grief and distress got the better of him, to look for my brother Sayf. He said he would find him and bring him back, whether he was with the genies as a king in their kingdom, or had been bewitched by a woman with long hair and deep dark eyes. Sayyaf heard him at the end of the night saying to himself, “I’ll cut off her hair and weave it into shackles to bind that crazy bastard Sayf before I tie him to the back of my old camel.”
At that point Turad was not convinced by his brother Sayyaf’s account, nor was he able to trust the words of his mother, Khazna. Sayyaf may well have done it, for he was well-known for his violent moods and impetuousness. He had felt ignored and neglected after his brother Sayf became his parents’ obsession day and night. Sayf’s name was forever on their lips. If they were struck by famine, or there wasn’t enough food, or if they were attacked, they would weep with anxiety, “Where are you, Sayf?” At the same time, they placed hope in Turad to help them survive, for he was known for his courage, generosity, and strength, even if he was a highwayman.
She wouldn’t stop digging in the sand. For nights on end she scooped and raked with her fingers, howling and snarling in anger, as she scraped away the sand in search of Sayf, who had descended to a kingdom beneath the ground. She dug also in the hope that she might find the bones of the father, her husband, whom the birds of prey and wild beasts of the desert had swooped down upon. From the first light of dawn on the first day she had been digging without respite. Every time her cracked fingers felt the branch of a ghada bush or the root of an arta bush buried in the sand, she would say to herself, “This is your leg bone, Abu Sayf.” But as soon as she pulled up the root or the branch she would be consumed with grief and despair and would not utter a single word.
The worst time she lost her head, she’d been digging for two full nights when finally she unearthed the crumbling leg bone of some animal hunted many years ago by wolves, its broken skeleton buried in the sand. She picked up the bone and ran around looking for Turad. Around and around she ran, wailing as she gripped in her hand the evidence of Sayyaf’s wicked deed. She ran in every direction until she collapsed from exhaustion, and then somehow managed to struggle to her feet and set off once again.
A Body Like Ripe Fruit
ALL HE HAD WAS THE ’76 TOYOTA CRESSIDA, in which he cruised the well-lit tree-lined streets. It had been white before he painted it yellow and fixed the taxi sign on the roof. He frequented all the markets and malls and the terminals at the old airport, ferrying strangers, women and children and young men, all day long, from early morning until midnight. On weekends his wanderings extended to the first threads of dawn.
With its round, pointed headlights, his car looked like a bat as it peered down old alleyways, feeling its way, bumping into walls. He loved his car. He looked after it and decorated it and felt great sympathy for it. On the back ledge he had put two cushions embroidered with tiny round mirrors like little moons that scattered the blazing midday sun in all directions. Over the dashboard he had arranged a piece of olive green cloth from which dangled tassels of the same color. From the rearview mirror hung a ping-pong ball covered in colored sequins, attached to one another by pins, so that they shimmered and glistened every time the Cressida rocked or jolted. On the inside of the driver’s door he had put a picture of the actress Suad Hosni in a seductive pose, with pouting lips and her hair disheveled like a horse’s tail, as she teased her fingers through it and looked provocatively at the camera. Every time he looked at her while waiting for a passenger or someone crossing the road, he felt like she was staring at him, and he would let out a long sigh and silently watch the women walking up and down the street.
Lots of women used him. He would drop them off all over the crowded city, taking short cuts through narrow alleyways and dingy back streets. He never gave any of them a single thought, although the smell of the perfume some of them wore made his head spin. Some of them would flirt with him or make suggestive or provocative gestures, but he always made up his mind that it was money he was after, not self-destruction.
Then one hot and clammy summer afternoon, as he was waiting in his yellow Cressida in a line of taxis opposite the law court in the town center, a woman got in the backseat before he had reached the front of the line; there were still three cabs in front of him. He turned to her: “It’s not my turn yet, Missus.”
And in a thin and very delicate voice she snapped: “I am not a Missus. And anyway, I’m in now, and I am not getting out again.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said with some embarrassment. “It’s just that I can’t pull away until these three in front of me pull away first.” To the right was the sidewalk and to the left a barrier. He pointed to them as he explained to her, but she interrupted him, her voice like drops of soft rain taking him completely by surprise: “Not to worry. I’ll wait with you.” Then she rolled the window halfway down and huffed in displeasure at the relentless onslaught of the heat. As he pulled the car away from the busy commercial center, she told him where she was going. A number of questions crowded into his head, and the sequin-covered ping-pong ball began to sway violently: Why did she bypass the first three cars and choose mine, even though one of those in front was a new Caprice, and much more luxurious than my cheap thing? The AC alone is worth a whole other car in the kind of scorchers we have in this country.
She interrupted his thoughts as she moved along the backseat and sat directly behind him.
“Uffff,” she went, “by God, it’s hot!” Then she asked him to take a less congested route. He turned up a side road in one of the new districts and headed west; the yellow light of the sun poured down onto the front windshield. Suddenly he felt a movement behind him, which was compounded by the pressure of her knee in the back of his seat. He looked in the mirror and noticed her carefully penciled eyes; she had pulled aside the black veil from her face and was using a tissue to wipe off the drops of sweat that had gathered on her forehead. She looked at his eyes in the mirror and did not once avert her gaze. She asked him his name and about his work and other quick things, and he answered as if he were drugged or bewitched. Before she got out of the car she gave him a fifty-riyal note with a white, tender-skinned hand, but he protested and swore he would not take anything from her. She insisted, and when he refused, she tossed the note onto the seat beside him and walked away.
He watched her as she made her way toward the gate of the house—not a traditional or mud house, but a modern house, with the blazing flowers of a bougainvillea hanging luxuriantly over the wall. She was tall and slim, and as she lifted her abbaya to her waist, a yellow skirt with black and honey-colored flowers showed beneath it. As she closed the gate she looked back toward him. She had taken off her head covering, and she shook her jet-black hair from side to side like a frisky mare. He smiled and sighed before shifting into first and slowly pulling away. He contemplated the house and its two front windows and the trees, and the electricity cables that ran along the wall. The instant he turned onto the main street he stretched out his hand to the passenger seat to feel for the fifty-riyal note. He put it to his nose to smell it, and as he did so a piece of paper fell into his lap. It bore the name of a clothing shop, and when he turned it over he was shocked to find a telephone number and, written underneath it, “12 might.” At first he read it as “might,” but then said to himself, Maybe it’s “midnight” but she didn’t bother to write the word out in full. There wasn’t a telephone line in the modest apartment he shared with a colleague from work. Where would he find a telephone after midnight? He decided to visit an old friend who had an apartment in the town center with a telephone. At night her voice was softer, warmer, and more affectionate. She was young and divorced and lived with her elderly parents; her father was an invalid, and she looked after him. She said she had fallen in love with him the moment she had seen him. She spoke of many things:
I didn’t finish my shopping that day. I was rushing to a clothes shop. I wanted to return a baggy red blouse that was the wrong size. I was intending to take it back before the sunset prayer call, before the shops closed, but as I was passing the taxi rank I noticed you playing with your mustache and I felt something inside, something electric, and after I had gone a few steps past your car I turned around and got in. You might say I’m a bit
forward, but honestly it’s the first time that’s ever happened. Something made me turn around. I couldn’t control myself.
She spoke hot, stormy, nocturnal words, and he was drawn along, oblivious to everything around him. He moved into his friend’s flat and started to stay up until dawn. He loved her intensely, and she fell madly in love with him. He didn’t bother with his car anymore, and he didn’t decorate it. He started, instead, to care for his face, look after his clothes, and stay up until dawn listening to her soft voice, which soothed his loneliness and the gloomy melancholy of night. The first time he met her after making arrangements by phone, she got into the taxi in front of al-Farazdaq Bookshop on the main street near her house, and took her place in the backseat as if she were with a driver. After he had gone a little way down the main road, she asked him to turn into a side street, and she hadn’t been in his little car for long before she signaled to him to stop. He stopped. She stepped out, and as she got in next to him she held out her pale, delicate hand to shake his. Her hand was immersed in the vastness of his own. He concealed his bewilderment by asking her how on earth he was supposed to drive around the streets with her next to him. “I am your wife,” she told him. “Should a taxi driver’s wife sit in the backseat like a foreign woman?” He liked her words, her logic, and the supple fullness of her hand as it lay gently in his. Then her slender fingers with the red-painted nails intertwined with his. And, as if to remember forever the empty side street, and the houses that stood down one side and the school wall that stood on the other, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.
Wolves of the Crescent Moon Page 4