Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  You speak, whispered Qamar. You hardly ever say anything.

  Azzan sighed. But a moment later he did begin speaking. He told her about a long-ago wound that was still alive. His son Hamad.

  From birth, Hamad had been a weak and wan-looking baby. His mother expected him to die at any moment, as had her first baby, Muhammad, who had died before he was even two months old. She had Hamad wearing every kind of amulet that she could get a shaykh to prescribe. Azzan lost the hopes he had had for the boy.

  But Hamad lived. His tiny body fought hard, resisting the fate of his brother, and he made his way in life – and what life there was in him! So constantly in motion was the boy that he could barely eat or sleep. It was almost impossible to see him still or quiet. He was always scampering around or chattering away.

  Azzan began to let himself hope. This boy would be his successor. This boy would carry his father’s legacy – his name and property. This was the boy on whom he would depend in his old age. Hamad’s mother left his hair alone to grow long like a girl’s, hoping to fool the jinn, to evade the destructive envy that might target her son. The leather and silver amulets were still there, concealed under his clothing, until he reached the age of eight and died.

  He couldn’t dodge fate, as his parents had always worried and silently suspected. But death took its time. Death gave their hearts time to swell, years enough to grow heavy with love for him, and only then it took him.

  Qamar swallowed. What happened to him?

  Azzan smiled slowly and closed his eyes. What happened to him was what happened to the Range Rover.

  Range Rover? You mean, a car?

  Azzan’s thin smile turned to a bitter smirk. Yes, the green Range Rover.

  When the fever struck Hamad down and it was no longer any use to rub herbal preparations onto his burning body, Salima walked to her uncle’s house. Shaykh Said had grown old by then but he had not grown soft enough that his heart would melt at her entreaties. She pleaded with him to remember his brother Shaykh Masoud, her father. She begged him to be merciful, to think of his faith. She spoke in the name of the generosity, high mindedness and honour befitting a shaykh. Everything she could possibly think of, she said, as a mother whose child was lacerated by fever.

  His response didn’t change. The Range Rover doesn’t leave al-Awafi unless I’m in it.

  The next day Hamad’s fever shot even higher. The boy was delirious. This time Azzan went with Salima to her uncle’s house. Azzan talked to the shaykh for a long time, explaining that his son’s condition was very bad and growing worse, and the only car in al-Awafi was Shaykh Said’s Range Rover, and they needed to rush Hamad to Saada Hospital in Maskad. If they went by donkey it would take four or five days, too long to save the boy. Azzan would pay whatever Shaykh Said asked for and would cover the driver’s pay as well.

  Shaykh Said said, I don’t have anything more to say. The Range Rover doesn’t leave al-Awafi, and your son can get well without those doctors. All children get fevers and then they’re fine.

  Azzan and Salima left his house avoiding looking at the green vehicle hunched at the door. Shaykh Said had bought it two years before. When his driver brought it grandly into al-Awafi, absolutely everyone came out of their homes to witness it. Even Shaykh Said’s ancient mother, leaning on her slave women, came out to see it. But when she heard the motor and saw its black wheels whirling, she threw a rock at it, calling out to the people of al-Awafi that it was the work of the Devil. Her rock broke one of the windows. Shaykh Said ordered her women to take his mother inside, threatening that if they ever brought her out again when the car was there, he would whip them then and there, in full daylight for all to see. From that day on, the car never budged except when Shaykh Said occupied the front passenger seat. If one of his wives was in the car he covered all the windows with curtains.

  Salima cried all the way home. Now Azzan’s dreams held only one image: the car he must have. He swore he would take permission to buy one from the Sultan himself, as Shaykh Said had done. He would own a car even if he had to sell his farm – his whole inheritance – to do it.

  But Hamad didn’t wait until his father filled his vow. The fever killed him first.

  They removed his clothes and his amulets, and they erected the ritual bench made of dried date-palm fibre in the courtyard. Neighbours brought buckets of water from the canal to wash him. They sprinkled him with incense and perfumed him with aloes-wood oil, and wrapped his body in a white shroud. The funeral procession marched to the graveyard west of al-Awafi.

  Judge Yusuf said to Azzan, Your son is in heaven, and he will be there to bring you cold water when you are thirsty. You know, Azzan, that your child will serve you in heaven, on the day of Judgement, as long as you are patient with God’s will. Be consoled for it was God who took your son.

  Azzan said nothing. He did not say to the judge that he had wanted his son to bring him cold water in his old age, still on earth. He bore himself with resignation as was expected, and shook hands with those who came to offer their condolences. He shook every hand that was outstretched to his, even Shaykh Said’s.

  Tears fell from the Moon’s eyes. Aah, it’s true what the proverb says: Every father knows misery and pain.

  From Hamad’s burial to this day, Azzan told her, he had never spoken about his son. Only now. She turned to him. Even with his mother? He shook his head. Especially not with his mother.

  As they spoke, Salima was slipping cautiously out of a house in al-Awafi. She had just come from a very important appointment. She walked quickly, so that she would be certain to be back at home before Azzan could return from his evening with the Bedouin men.

  She tried to avoid thinking about how dark it had been in there, or about the conditions set for this peculiar agreement. But the last sentence the man had said, when she was already at the door, pounded insistently in her head. Don’t worry, Bride of the Falaj! Ugh, she thought. These people who never forget! Her daughter had married and given birth, and another daughter was engaged, but people still called her by this hateful nickname. Angry, she quickened her pace, wanting to be at home.

  Abdallah

  When Mayya had got through her forty days, I brought her home, back to our living quarters, a small wing attached to my father’s house. She stayed there, secluded, closing her ears to the words that had spread through al-Awafi like fire across dry wood. People were whispering about a relationship between her father and an enticing Bedouin woman.

  At that time I was driving my father’s white Mercedes between Muscat and al-Awafi several times every week. I spent my long commutes musing that the peaceful happiness I enjoyed was almost too much for me. Was it too much, this feeling that I had it all? It made me nervous.

  Did I deserve such happiness, or didn’t I? A happy man driving his father’s car to his own home, where the wife he loves holds their child, and where his father presides, still alive and even healthy.

  That’s what I was, a happy man. Simply that. A young man, barely past his first twenty years, whose dreams reached no further than what he had in his hands. But he was a little afraid of what he held in his hands. The dark interior of the Mercedes, the glancing light reflected in the shiny buttons on tiny London’s clothes, the drops of water falling from Mayya’s hair at dawn, the flash of the needle in her hand as she sewed fabric flowers onto Baby London’s gowns, my father’s rare smiles. In all of it I saw – me, the so-very-lucky man – that this happiness was a lot for me to bear. It was too much for me. Somehow I knew that – whatever the reason, and I had no idea what it might be – I was not worthy of all this joy.

  Zarifa

  Ah, Zarifa! You were wrong to believe that Habib had gone forever. No, Zarifa, it doesn’t work like that. Habib was careful to plant his seeds in his son. The young shoots would grow to prick and wound you, just as Habib gave you pain.

  Habib, whether you are lying cold in some faraway grave, or whether you drowned in the Shatt al-Arab, or whether you’re
even still alive and making money in Dubai or Baluchistan, wherever and however you may be now, if only you could have left us before you sowed the Devil’s own seeds!

  We are free, Mother. Free according to the law. And we will name our children whatever we like.

  Your son went mad, Zarifa. No, it wasn’t on account of the viper he married, that woman who was so rebellious and so disrespectful to her mother, it wasn’t she who insinuated these ideas in his head. It was the seed, the one his father carefully planted before he could disappear.

  Ayy, Habib! The more I wanted to forget you and the wretched trouble you made, the larger your seed grew in my eyes, grew and grew until the pressure was too great and my eyes exploded.

  Merchant Sulayman – who raised him and supported him, and put him through school – he called the raving mad old man.

  Can’t he see that we grew up by the grace of that old man? If it weren’t for him, we’d be begging in the streets now or calling out to passers-by for a mouthful of rice, like pitiful Maneen does.

  Free . . . we are free.

  This boy Sanjar wants to disrespect you and leave, just like his wife the viper scorned her mother and left her to the charity of the neighbourhood women.

  Poor, poor Masouda. Yes, she was jealous of you, Zarifa, all those days when you didn’t have to go out into the desert at sunrise to gather wood as she did. All of your work was inside the house, and when you went out to draw water from the falaj, you used the outing as an opportunity to visit the women you liked in the neighbourhood. But she, poor thing, had to bend double from the burden of the wood on her back, day after day, year after year.

  She was patient about all the toil and misery, and about her husband. No sooner would Zayd finish with one woman than he would go after another. What do you have to say, Zarifa? Seek God’s forgiveness! The dead deserve only mercy. God have mercy on him, he was also my relative. And the proverb-maker says: Your nose is still your own even if it’s putrid to the bone. God give him mercy.

  Now, here’s her girl Shanna, with eyes like a tiger’s – but who do you blame, Zarifa? You insisted that Sanjar marry her because you worried over him. Are you at peace now? He wants to go far away, and he says to you, Come with us.

  Go with you where? So, we should leave the land that’s ours, the place where we live, the country of our family and our ancestors for some strange world where we don’t know the people or what’s what? And Merchant Sulayman – who will watch after him? Who will bake his bread? His sister whose nose is permanently in the air? What she did to poor Fatima, to that poor woman, mother of Abdallah! God give her mercy. People have no mercy in this world.

  How can you leave al-Awafi, Zarifa, when you barely know any other spot in God’s wide world? It’s all your fault, Habib, all of it. The words you kept repeating in front of Sanjar when the boy was still in nappies.

  Your wild savage laugh in the depths of the night still tears my heart apart. Your country and your ancestors’ country? What ancestors, Zarifa? Your ancestors aren’t from here. They were as black as you are, they were from Africa, from the lands from where they stole you, all of you, and sold you.

  It’s useless, Zarifa, to try telling this man that no one stole you. That you were born a slave because your mother was a slave and that’s the way life is. That slavery passes to you from your mother. That no one stole you, and al-Awafi is your place, its people are yours.

  Habib spat in your face whenever you said such things to him. He did not want to banish that memory, to forget the terrifying journey that ended his calm, pleasant life in Makran. The second child of his mother who had five boys in all, he remembers everything: the local gangs that attacked their village wanting money, or perhaps to pay old scores; the merchants, a jumble of Baluchs and Arabs, who bought them, there on the plains; the filthy crammed ships those merchants packed them into; the eye disease that spread fast from one child to the next on shipboard; his mother’s screaming for her other children, who’d been shoved onto other boats; the nursing baby who died of smallpox while on her breast, so the slave traders snatched him away and threw him into the sea.

  We are free. They stole us, and then they sold us! he would scream in the middle of the night, at dawn, in the zar exorcisms: Free! They did us wrong, they destroyed us. Free!

  He and his mother were sold when they reached the east coast of Oman. The slave traders sold them to other slave traders, until finally Merchant Sulayman bought them. Habib’s mother wept for years. People in al-Awafi were sympathetic when they heard her story, but no one could find out where her other children had been sent, and as for her being returned to her own land, that was out of the question. Anyway, highwaymen and pirates would simply steal her and sell her again. There was no doubt about that in anyone’s mind.

  Azzan and Qamar

  Azzan held Najiya’s face between his hands as he repeated the lines that Majnun had said to his Layla.

  Light the dimness with your glow once the full moon dips

  and shine in the sun’s stead whilst lazy dawn tarries

  Your radiance outdoes the brightest sun there be:

  it can never thieve your smile, steal your pearly mouth

  The resplendent night, your countenance! tho’ the full moon rise

  a moon bereft of your breast, of this graceful throat I see

  Whence would the morning sun ever find a ready kohl-stick

  to etch for its pale face these languid eyes of yours?

  What starry siren can mime coy Layla when her form spirals away

  or her eyes, the winsome startled pools of the sands’ wild mare?

  Najiya laughed quizzically. The sands’ wild mares?

  Azzan stroked her face. This is the most beautiful sort of animal, Qamar, and Layla’s Crazed Lover tells you for certain, Qamar, my Moon, that your beauty is a gift from the Creator. That from you streams more light than the sun and moon together can ever give, and that your eyes are more beautiful than the eyes of the wild desert mare.

  Her beauty was so strong it hurt him; her sharp glow splintered his chest with a murky roiling pain. All he could do then was to recite poetry to her. Before she knew him, names like al-Mutanabbi, Ibn al-Rumi, al-Buhturi, and Majnun Layla – Layla’s Crazed Lover – were just pale ghosts from books, lifeless figures that belonged to the hated world of school and the boring books full of words they’d had to memorise. Azzan made these dead images breathe. Najiya began to feel al-Mutanabbi’s insomnia, his ambitions and his frustrations, as if they were her own. She imagined al-Buhturi sitting on the right hand of the Caliph Mutawakkil, the two of them gazing out across the lake that al-Buhturi immortalised in his poetry. The image of Imru’l-Qays pursued by the night that lowered its curtains over him like the waves of the sea dazzled her. Now, she would end her long evening chats with Azzan by chanting Imru’l-Qays’s words – al-yawmu khamrun wa-ghadan amrun – Wine we’ll drink today, tomorrow’s command they’ll bray – to remind him of the heavy tasks that were waiting for her the next day. Though she felt some sympathy for al-Maarri in his blindness, she didn’t understand his poems nor did she like his insistence that the surface of the earth is made of nothing but the remnants of bodies. Najiya was all for life. She was passionate about it, and poetic lines that celebrated love and the tribal zeal of old delighted her. She could not warm up to poems of quiet contemplation, a puritan withdrawal from life, or the Sufi mystical way.

  It didn’t help that Azzan would sink into a state of gloom at the very thought of the late Judge Yusuf with whom he had learned this poetry and the Sufi way of spiritual passion that sat so uneasily now, for him, with his cravings for Najiya. One day she witnessed Azzan slide into an unfathomable grief after he began repeating the lines by Shaykh Said, son of Khalfan al-Khalili, who had been, he told her, an important scholar and political leader of their region in the nineteenth century, the right-hand man of the Imam Azzan, son of Qays, and at the same time a man of steely will who could renounce worldly things.r />
  Neither exertion nor acceptance can I claim to possess

  only a mere affinity in which I find my pride

  Nor have I strength to wish myself into their clutches

  how can my wished-for goal be theirs and not be wrong?

  My purpose is to see no willed-for purpose there

  the essence of will this is, the wish-eye of the blind.

  As time went on, Najiya began reacting to Azzan’s nervous poetic intensity by recoiling from any mention of poetry, Or at least she tried to place limits on it in her own mind, by reducing anything smacking of poetry to her own fancies about these poets who had loved life, or who had gone over the edge as a result of meeting beautiful women, among whom she saw herself, of course, and especially Layla, beloved of al-Majnun, the Crazed.

  Abdallah

  My aunt is enormously tall. When I was little I used to think of her as a skeletal minaret soaring over a mosque and casting a threadlike shadow. Something about the fact that she was taller than Zarifa aggravated me, though she couldn’t compete with Zarifa in overall bulk. That, at least, made me feel a bit better. Zarifa’s bosom was splendidly ample for a little boy to snuggle into and sleep. When she hugged me her hands and arms practically buried me alive. My aunt, on the other hand, had no chest to speak of. Gold rings brightened her thin white hand. Both wrists were swaddled in a dozen heavy, intricately-worked bracelets that made their own distinct clanging whenever she lifted an arm to point her thin fingers aggressively at someone. I couldn’t imagine her hands engaged in any activity, except for poking their skinny fingers imperiously into the faces of others.

  I did not understand the secret behind her never-ending presence in my father’s house even though she had been married to a maternal cousin of hers who lived in another town. She was scornful of everyone and treated them with an eccentric, exaggerated etiquette that belittled them mercilessly. She didn’t have much to say. When the neighbourhood women came by, out of politeness, when she was in our house, she would barely touch their hands in greeting, quickly and ostentatiously pulling back her own heavily hennaed fingertips, inviting them to sit down as she made a clear sign to Zarifa to bring the coffee in quickly. They would sit down and exchange hasty, abrupt words, almost cutting each other off, as if the fact of her severe presence prevented them from holding more drawn-out or relaxed conversations. As soon as they finished their dates and coffee my aunt would shift in her seat and they would get up to leave immediately as if shrugging the duty of the visit off their shoulders. There was an unspoken understanding that they were absolutely not to bring their children. My aunt despised children more than she did anything or anyone else.