Celestial Bodies

by Johka Alharthi

  Did I doze off? Why am I so thirsty? Zarifa used to warn me about going to sleep thirsty. The sleeper who’s parched, she would always say, finds his soul has left him to search, looking for something to quench his thirst. I always drank two or three glasses of water before going to bed, afraid that my soul would leave me and never return, like the man who fell asleep thirsty and his soul left him to drink from a big water jar. While it was in there drinking the lid was clamped over this soul of his. It couldn’t go back to him. As they were getting ready to bury him the next morning, someone lifted the lid to get a drink himself, and the man’s soul came rushing back to him.

  After I stole my father’s rifle for the magpies that I never tasted, my father hung me upside down and tied up in the well, to punish me, and I did go to sleep even though I was very thirsty. Many nightmares later, Masouda finally relented and told me about my mother.

  Abdallah, my boy, the proverb-maker says: Daytime’s for people but night-time’s for the jinn. Your mama, God rest her soul in paradise, was out walking at night. She just flung away a pebble that got in her sandal perhaps. She didn’t know it, but she’d hit the jinni-woman’s son in the head. That jinni-woman was the servant of the Shaykhs of the Jinn. She came to your mama and she said, Pull up the basil bush in the courtyard, its smell draws vipers, and soon your son will get old enough to play there and he’ll be bitten. Your mama, God take her soul to paradise, thought the jinni-woman was a poor and ordinary woman and she believed her. So at dawn she cut down the basil bush, which angered the Shaykh of the Jinn who lived beneath it. He made the poor woman sick. Two or three days, no more, and she was dead, may God keep her soul in Paradise.

  When I got older, and when Shanna tried to tempt me out on the farm and I said no, she pulled her clothes together around herself and screamed, Your mama isn’t dead, she’s alive! They bewitched her and then they took her away. They put a plank of wood where she’d been lying down, and your papa buried it, and so your mother lost her mind. The wizard took her mind away and made her his servant. My father saw her once at night, outside town. She was all in white.

  Salima

  When Salima had finished arranging her daughter Asma’s wedding things she closed the door to the world outside and broke down in sobs. She felt a sudden longing for her father and mother.

  Salima had given birth to Khawla, the youngest of her girls, just as her own mother was giving up her soul. Really, though, her mother had died a long time before, ten years at least, when a messenger appeared to inform her that her only son, Muaadh, had died as a martyr in the war of Jabal Akhdar. She hadn’t been given a chance to say her goodbyes.

  When Muaadh fled the home of his uncle Shaykh Said, before the end of his sixteenth year, his uncle was furious. So, then, his hunches about the boy had proven true! He’d known that boy would split the rod of obedience to join the tribes allied with the Imam, thumbing his nose at his uncle’s alliance with the opposing tribes.

  Whenever people were gathered, Shaykh Said made certain to proclaim loudly that he bore no responsibility for his brother’s son. He had no guilt. Does that idiot believe taking shelter in al-Jabal al-Akhdar with the Imam and his group will save him, or any of them, from the warplanes of the English? he repeated in front of anyone with ears to hear him. Those English have planes and weapons. What do they have, in the Green Mountain?

  The Sib Treaty, signed in 1920, divided Oman into an interior ruled as an Imamate and a Government of Muscat that retained its traditional jurisdiction over much of the coastal plains. Muscat’s Sultan was financed by the English. The Treaty was respected for quite a long time. But then the Sultan signed an agreement with a British firm for exploratory oil drilling in the Fahud desert, which was well within the Imamate’s territories. The company formed its own defence unit, which came to be known as the Muscat-Oman Infantry. And so imperialist greed lit the wick of war, when the company army marched into Ibri and soon began strafing territories loyal to the Imami state, in the regions of Nazwa and Nakhal. In 1955 the Imam Ghalib al-Hana’i and his followers – warriors drawn from allied tribes – were forced to take refuge in the Green Mountain.

  That’s when Muaadh slipped out of al-Awafi and joined the fighters in the Jabal. He stayed there through 1959, one of a band of guerrilla fighters harassing the Royal British Air Force defences. The resistance had only their traditional weapons, but at least they could keep others out of the Jabal. Muaadh was tasked with lighting fires in deserted areas to convince the English that there were fighters there; the idea was that they would use up their ammunition mounting attacks against phantom platoons. One night Muaadh stepped on a small mine as he was returning from a mission. He exploded into fragments, one of more than two thousand martyrs who died in the war to control the Jabal. There wasn’t even a body to return for his mother to mourn over.

  She received the news of his death in silent submission. She arranged the funeral rites as well as she could in her modest circumstances, for his uncle refused to offer the slightest help or to mourn. She died, though no one knew she was dead. Every day and every night, for ten years, she died a little more. She breathed and ate and drank but she was dead. She spoke to people and walked among them, dead. Only much later did her body give up its already-deceased spirit, its dead spirit, no longer forced to pretend, to play at being alive.

  Abdallah

  My head is under water. This headache lays into me every time I have to fly. I feel confused and unable to focus, and everything in front of me appears to be submerged in water. Then I sense myself being flipped upside down. I’m in a well, head down, and that heavy palm-fibre rope is wound around my body. My skull crashes against the murky black interior wall. I’m terrified that the rope will unravel, will weaken, will break and drop me to the very bottom. Why did I steal the gun? Why did I want the magpies so badly?

  From my underwater head pour the many-coloured plastic blocks that Muhammad plays with. He has to have them lined up, no gaps. If there is any alteration to the way they are arranged, even one block, he screams and screams, no pauses. Screaming, Muhammad screaming.

  When Uncle Ishaq’s wife went into the bathroom of their home in Wadi Aday to wash before the dawn prayers she found her son in there. Pure Marwan’s veins were cut open with his father’s dagger. She screamed and screamed.

  When my father gave up his soul in the Nahda Hospital, Zarifa screamed and the sound went on and on. I didn’t scream then, I didn’t cry. Only when he hung me head down in the well.

  I can see myself as a little child. A boy but like a little man in disguise, wearing a man’s dagger and a perfectly fitted turban, and brand-new shoes. My father’s hand leads me somewhere far away. To Ibri. We are responding to the invitation of a shaykh there. Habib was with us – it was before he fled, of course – and so was Suwayd and the Bedouin who owned the two camels we rode. Suwayd’s oud was not with us, though; perhaps it hadn’t yet come to him. It must have been before the jinni woman fell for him, offering to answer one single wish. The oud. The bewitching oud whose sad tunes rubbed across my childhood and scored the raw loneliness of my adolescence. The oud was the gift of the jinni woman, and so Suwayd couldn’t play any other instrument, only that one, solitary lute. No, there was no oud with us on that trip. There was a cloth bundle holding dried shark flesh that people ate on journeys, and some onions, and a box of dates. There was a waterskin, a lot of sand, and singing. Habib was singing, in an unfamiliar language, Baluchi maybe? It was cheerless singing and his voice would choke, coming out in a wail, when he reached some refrains. It sounded more like crying than singing. Before he fled, Habib told Zarifa that songs were the only thing left in his memory to keep his language alive for him. That’s why he sang. If he didn’t have songs in there, all the hollow spaces would be filled with rage.

  There I was, a young fellow disguised in the uniform of his elders, the sole representative of my father’s seed, paraded for the benefit of the Shaykhs of Ibri. In the souq, though, I c
ould hardly resist reverting to my childhood state, faced with the heaps of sweet coconut spread across the stone benches to dry, and well within my reach. But I had to return to the awful dignity of my early manhood the next day, at the big midday meal with these men. I tried to sit exactly the way old men sit in the majlis meeting place, my weight on one leg while I folded the other leg beneath me, watchful, knowing I mustn’t change my position no matter how numb my legs would go, because I had to show the hardness of men. I did extend my hands to the enormous platter of rice around which we sat, but I felt so shy that my fingers could hardly grasp anything, bringing only a few grains of rice all the way back to my mouth. Some tiny bites later I finally summoned enough boldness to reach the meat piled up over the rice, securing a tiny morsel. I tried to make certain my father saw it. When the platter was lifted away I was hungry but happy, certain that my father would be satisfied with me. He had cautioned me earlier: the Shaykh’s family, neighbours and slaves would be waiting expectantly for their share, whatever remained of the same platter of food that had been offered to us.

  My head wasn’t hanging upside down, then, and it wasn’t submerged in water. My brain and heart weren’t searching desperately for a sliver of land somewhere, anywhere from Muscat to Sib, where I could build the house of my wife’s dreams. We couldn’t manage to get the lot she really liked. The municipal authorities refused, claiming that exactly this bit of land was slated for future use: it fell within the area designated for a new rapid-transit light rail system. The planning document had already been signed off at the highest level, by the Sultan’s Cabinet itself.

  My head is splitting now, and the cabin pressure will certainly detonate it, until it explodes wide open. Why do I never carry headache remedies with me, like all the rest of God’s travelling creatures do?

  In the Shaykh’s house, my hand touched the meat only after having a dozen or so little bites that were only rice, to soar in the stratosphere of my father’s approval. We were nearly home when a desert viper lunged at me. If my father hadn’t immediately borne down on it with his cane, killing it then and there, it would have bitten me to death. When my papa hugged me so intensely it hurt, my eyes were open to their widest and, my nose crushed against him, I breathed in the particular smell of his dishdasha. I could see stars dropping from God’s sky to cling to his turban so hard that they blended into its ornaments.

  I had never in my life seen a souq. The one shop in al-Awafi, and the festival sweet biscuits laid out on wooden planks at the edge of the space where religious ceremonies were always held – that was all I knew. The Ibri souq was simply a corridor of facing shops, or perhaps these were more like warehouses since I couldn’t see any merchants inside, waiting for customers. They sat on mats on the ground or on the stone benches outside their shops, with various baskets of different sizes lined up before them, carrying a variety of goods: dried dates, spices, dried lemons, red peppers, barley. Sometimes there would also be a tray or two of dried coconut. I’m certain it was those enormous tin platters of dried coconut that preserved my memory of that day so vividly that I can still see it and smell it even now: the souq exactly as it looked then. Closing my eyes, I can see the tree trunks and the arcing date-palm fronds, creating a vault overhead that knitted the two separate rows of shops into one entity. I can see the iron hooks from which wool carpets were hung, and the baskets, leather pelts, reed mats, and even the dried fish whose sharp odour still comes to me instantly. Boys scampered here and there, most often wearing the leather belts that already awaited the daggers they’d receive in days to come. The merchants exchanged news, stared at people indifferently and waved their canes in the air. What drew my gaze was the red colours of their turbans, the jumble of smells, the heaps of coconut. I liked it all.

  Directly on the ground sat the barber, ramrod straight, a turban on his head and a dagger in his belt, sleeves rolled up to show his bare forearms. His customer sat down facing him but leaving enough space that he could bend forward slightly, signalling that he was ready to entrust his head to the broadly grinning barber. Unlike the barber, his customer wasn’t sitting on bare ground but on a ragged square of rough canvas onto which his shaven hair would fall. The barber had his tools laid out next to him on an ancient wood chest along with a small bucket of water which he sprinkled on the customer’s head. When the customer arose it was invariably with a shaven head since this barber had no experience actually cutting hair. All he could do was shave it to the roots.

  I don’t know what roused all of those smells in me as Mayya and I stood on the verge watching. A very fine large villa was going up on the plot of land that she had chosen and the municipality had refused to sell to us – the land which was included in the future planning for the governorate’s multi-lane highway. Hah! exploded Mayya. So the land was sold after all! What happened to the city planning, to the document signed by the Cabinet? How much will the municipality pay now to change the fast line’s route, now that they’ve given in so very respectfully to the demands of whoever it was who wanted this land for his villa?

  I didn’t say anything. The smells of the old souq in Ibri filled my lungs.

  This headache is affecting my hearing. When I was little, my father’s hand on my head could absorb my headache. Laying his hand there, he would repeat the words from the Qur’an: To Him belongs everything that rests quietly, in the night as by day. My head would grow quiet, at rest, and the pain would go away.

  But my father’s veined hand swelled under the intravenous needles in the Nahda Hospital and could no longer reach for my head, splitting in pain, unable to give way to sleep.

  The hand of Bill, the English teacher, was not heavily veined. It was covered with minute freckles. It was Bill who convinced me I must learn English. We met at a dinner party organised by one of the Muscat merchants. In serviceable Arabic, Bill queried me. You are a businessman and you don’t know English? No restaurant in Muscat will serve you if you don’t have any language! He was right. And I was tired of the acute embarrassment I felt whenever I tried to reserve a hotel room, or was invited to dinner at a restaurant. In my own country! My Arab country, where restaurants, hospitals and hotels all announced that ‘only English is spoken here’.

  I started private lessons with Bill. His blue eyes gave nothing away but his smile seemed promising. Before getting to know him I would never have imagined that a person’s smile could reveal his intelligence, but Bill’s smile gave form to a shrewd mind.

  My father did not smile. Or perhaps he did smile, a little, once in a very great while. If his mouth did begin to curve I would feel instant contentment, but the sparky brilliance his eyes gave off awakened only my terror. I would never be that smart, no matter how much I studied or learned. I would always be the gullible little boy, or the deluded lad who would never know how to manage the family business and would never have his papa’s brains. That astute gaze, that smile hinting such cleverness – I search in my children’s faces, but I never see my father’s expressions there. London? Perhaps, if only she hadn’t gotten mired in Ahmad’s lies.

  Whenever I think of that whole affair I feel so angry that I almost can’t breathe. When Mayya discovered they were talking, she smashed London’s mobile, locked her in her room, and slapped her as she had never slapped anyone before. After, she remained on high alert, ready to detect the slightest vibration in the air. But stubborn London insisted on her love. Why does it still pain me so much? After all, it is over, isn’t it? Does it hurt because I gave in to her, allowing the two of them to sign a marriage contract? Or because I didn’t support her, didn’t stand up for her love, from the very beginning? Or because I scolded her for choosing him, but only after it went bad? Am I hurting because he harmed her? Or is it because Mayya never knew love and so she did not know, when London fell in love, how to deal with her daughter?

  Didn’t you at least have some notion of what love is, Mayya? Didn’t you feel something of what I went through as I paced around your family
home like a pilgrim circles the Kaaba, once, twice, seven times?

  How could the house ever be spacious enough to hold all of my passion? How did its single balcony bear up under me, as I stood there alone, weighted down by so much love, without collapsing onto the dirt street or fragmenting, to be carried off by the breezes into God’s heavens? How did the small room bear the tons of clouds I kept stored away in there, simply so that I could walk across them? How did the walls stay still and unshakeable, never once quaking with the torment of my unbearable joy?

  But everything remained in its place even if I had no place. The doors did not fly off their hinges even if my cast down body was riddled with the live bullets of desperate love. The windows did not shatter, though my wings beat hard against the glass, strong enough to soar from the front window to the furthest speck on the horizon. The house was roomy enough to hold me, to contain the scream of desire that echoed inside me.

  Then how could it be, Mayya, that your eyes, fixed on your sewing machine, never could see the vast and tortuous expanse of my love, and my imprisoned self?

  Asma

  Still drowsy, Asma opened her eyes slowly. Seconds later, she remembered that today was her wedding day. She stretched, pressed her hands against her stomach, and smiled at the thought that a few months from now it might well be rounded and full. Getting up, she folded up her bedding, hung it on the peg and hurried to the kitchen. Her father liked to have his coffee as soon as he’d come from dawn prayers.