by Mhani Alaoui
“Zeinab, my name is Zeinab, and I am not a madam.”
“No, of course not, I apologize for my words. You are too young and beautiful to be a madam. Accept my apology, Miss Zeinab.”
“I am not a miss either. I am simply Zeinab.”
“How beautiful and perfect, of course, you are simply Zeinab, desert flower. Your name means desert flower, did you know that? You are the flower that grows in the harshest environments and who gives hope to the desperate traveler who needs hope almost as much as he craves drink and rest.”
Zeinab took in Hamza’s blubbering and felt his words penetrate her heart like a cool spring irrigating an arid landscape. He looked like an oak and smelt like peat. She took in his formidable stature, his green hand, his grey hand, and his open heart. She saw him for who he was—a thundering giant, filled with joy and fury, with the ability to destroy and create. A magical, miraculous creature who had appeared on the threshold of her solitary kitchen and hovered there, incapable perhaps of leaving her. She breathed deeply to find that the air was pure and clean. It rushed through her veins, opening up her arteries like so many minuscule windows to the world. The air popped through her veins like the popcorn she once made for the children of her employers but which she was forbidden to eat. The windows opened and she breathed, truly breathed, for the first time since her childhood in a small village of the Sraghnas. She breathed in the oxygen Hamza had exhaled and realized, at that moment, that she had not taken a deep, unhindered breath since that morning when her mother made her and her sisters their last breakfast. She felt the knives and thorns leave her heart and mind, and understood that she had been slowly dying all these years.
She remembered taking used razor blades she found in her employers’ sink and cutting herself repeatedly just to see herself bleed. She remembered cutting the meat and vegetables in the kitchen and wondering what it would be like if she plunged the knife deep in her stomach, or if she opened the kitchen window on the sixth-floor apartment and jumped. Those had once been her greatest fantasies and, ironically, her immense, secret rebellion against her fate. She felt strong and defiant with this great secret of hers. I know things you don’t. I want things you didn’t tell me were good or right. She yearned for that absolute peace where she could lay down her head and sleep through the insults, the orders, and the violence. She wanted to forget and to be forgotten. She hoped for dissolution and oblivion in a world beyond the grave. She had also been curious, as only teenagers can be, of death. The other world would be a place where she could float about freely, touching the stars and talking to God and his angels. She would explain to them why she had to do what she did. She would tell them she knew that they would understand and welcome her inside.
All she ever wanted was to be inside: the room instead of waiting outside, the bed instead of making it, the living room with the guests instead of waiting on them with a tray too heavy for her small build. Here, she would finally be inside, warm, and at peace. She would, of course, be free. She thought of it as her great escape and of herself as a bird who would one day escape through the prison bars. One day, Zeinab told herself, one day I will wake up and end it all, and they will all witness my great escape. Or perhaps they won’t even notice, or care. What do people like them do with people like me when we are no longer needed? I think they may get rid of us as though we never existed. It’s all pointless. I will rock myself to sleep on my mattress placed on the cold kitchen floor.
Hers was a half-buried consciousness, which did not dare recognize itself as such. It had been stifled by years of hard work and lost play, but now it was reemerging. She was not a small bird who would escape into the blue sky as she had always thought. She was a desert flower who bloomed in the hottest of sands and the roughest of environments. Yes, she finally recognized herself in the mute adoration of this giant who had blundered into her life. She felt something wild and forbidden. A desire for that chocolate she ate once in hiding before it was snatched from her. She wanted to laugh. All she could think of now was that delicious, brown, and stolen chocolate melting in her mouth. She had had chocolate since, on one of her days off or as a treat from Aisha. But none could compare to that first bittersweet chocolate that she had stolen and that had then been snatched from her.
She emerged from her daydream to find Hamza sitting next to her on the floor sifting through the lentils with his left hand. She took his hands in hers and kissed them.
“Do your hands hurt you? Does it cause you pain to have one green hand and one grey?”
Hamza swallowed mightily and with dry eyes replied.
“No one, in all the years I have roamed this and other worlds, no one has ever asked me that question. Yes, they hurt. They hurt like a curse unless they are doing what they must. When the green hand plants, it’s at peace. When the ashen hand destroys, its pain subsides. But it can never be both. I have never felt painlessness in my two hands until…now…until you took my hands in yours.”
They contemplated the meaning of Hamza’s words and the possibilities of escape and happiness they provided. Zeinab was twenty-four years old, and Hamza was timelessness itself. But at that moment she felt like an old soul, and he felt like the young man he never could have been.
“There are ghosts and djinns everywhere. This house belongs to them as much as it belongs to us. Be careful.”
“Houses and gardens are not what they seem. I see them for what they are. I see you. I love you.”
Zeinab was quiet. Nothing in her past experiences had prepared her for kindness and love. She was ashamed, for she felt that all the words that came to her mind would sound coarse and uneducated. And she did not know who this man was or where his tenderness sprang from. She placed the sifted stones on a corner of the sheet and put the lentils in a straw basket. She worked quietly and carefully.
“A child is coming. You must protect that child. The house whispers about this child day and night. You must protect it, for it is a child of miracle.”
“Miracles and myths are never what they claim to be. Stories are told and heroes are born, but sometimes true words and acts of courage are forgotten in the abyss of time.”
“You speak of things I don’t know. Some people are touched by magic.”
Hamza stood up, infinitely sad, took Zeinab’s hands in his, and bowed.
“I must leave you for a while. I’ll fulfill my mission with even greater purpose now that I know I must protect you, too. The guests are arriving soon, and the child is on its way.”
“When will I see you?”
“Every day.”
Hamza strode out of the kitchen, lowering his head to be able to pass through the door. His limbs trembled like leaves in the breeze as he continued his reconnaissance march through the house. He spoke to the ghosts and the djinns about the danger of his ashen hand and the uneasy forty-day truce that had just been established. He then walked toward the front of the house, close to the garage and Zeinab’s room, and set up his post there.
~
It rained and thundered for one day and one night, but Hamza stood his ground. The neighbors claimed they heard a dog howl in front of the Nassiri gate, but no one ever saw that dog. There was only Hamza, with his drenched hair and beard and his roaring laughter at daybreak. After a day and night of sound and fury, the thunderstorm subsided and gave way to a slight wind and a yellow-white sun. The time had come.
Birth
Iam here now, lying on the bed with my eyes wide open. I feel trapped in this body whose functions these past nine months have been beyond my control. My body has been subjected to all kinds of manipulations, proddings, infiltrations. It isn’t the pain that’s most unbearable, but the sense of exposure, of absolute vulnerability. There is nowhere to hide, no darkness to cover the nakedness, no respite. Physical, animal, exposable…terrain of social experiments gone awry—my body is all those things except the one thing I want it to be: mine, individual, and recognizable.
I believe it’s the realiz
ation that my body doesn’t fully belong to me that is slowly killing me today. I suspect that this realization is the lead poison they injected into me. There is but one step between knowing that your body is not fully yours and doubting whether you are truly you. What do I know about myself, in the end? We are the collateral consequences of mechanical workings beyond our understanding.
My vulnerability has deepened since I realized I was pregnant. The kid with the flat stomach and the adult with the flat womb, I am now with child. With detachment I watch the metamorphosis of my body as it fulfills one of its prescribed functions. I feel at once violated, powerless, and amazed at its capacity to run through a checklist of events inscribed in its DNA without my knowledge. My body is a library so vast that an entire lifetime would not be enough to browse through its volumes.
The pre-labor cramps have started, and I’m breaking into a sweat. Lying down, I notice that the ashen film that covered the walls, carpets, and furniture has disappeared. Being withdrawn from myself, I notice that the ghosts and djinns are silent and the house is at peace. My hips are wide open. I feel a hand on my forehead and one on my womb. I chose this homebirth because of my new fear of septic rooms and metal instruments. And Zohra is my midwife come to deliver my child. She puts a piece of paper into my mouth and whispers: “A talisman for you, my love. The four corners of the paper are inscribed with four letters of our alphabet—alif, ba, ta, and nuun. These four letters will shield you from harm and limit your suffering.”
I feel the paper melting under my tongue as I close my eyes under her cooling touch. Adam and my mother are beyond that door, and I am open weakness. The doors between the world of the living and the world of the dead are always ajar during delivery, and I secretly desire to take one of these doors and walk out into the unknowable. Zohra rubs my limbs with rose water and recites phrases of protection and power. She tries to ease my wounded body, but the pain is getting stronger. My body escapes even farther from me. It has become my intimate stranger with its cruel language of pain and passing presence. The wound is open for all to see, and I feel pricks and thousands of needle points in my lower back. Flashes of white, death lingering at my doorstep, cool water on my forehead, olive oil and honey in my mouth…Then, a soft cry and an explosion of orange blossom scent everywhere.
“A thousand congratulations.”
“The child is here.”
“It’s a girl.”
Zohra held the child in her arms. Ibrahim, Aisha, and Adam surrounded the bed, as Zohra cut the umbilical cord and put the placenta in a jar. She would later bury the placenta under the orange tree. She would watch as the night filled with the scent of flower blossoms. She would feel the roots of the tree seep deeper into the earth that holds it and close her eyes as the tree branches brushed her face in acceptance and gratitude for her gift. The tree roots would then reach farther into the earth, and water would rush up into the bark, branches, and white flowers to gorge them with scent and light.
Ibrahim put his mouth against his granddaughter’s right ear and recited the Sourra Al-Fatiha from the Kuran. He then repeated the prayer in her left ear. Aisha and Zohra prepared the water for the child’s first ablution. They mixed henna and mint leaves into the water and bathed her in it. Then they rubbed her down with olive oil and wrapped her tightly in a blanket. Zohra put her in Leila’s arms and told her to feed her.
Leila was tired from the birth but also from the poisonous lead whose grip on her psyche was now acute. She could feel an ache, a sadness, take hold of her body, her skin, muscles, and sinew. The child at her breast was an anomaly, an additional intrusion into her physical space. She was a nfissa now: for forty days, she would be considered a young mother, vulnerable to infections and cruelty, encouraged to remain in her house. She only now understood the full meaning of that word. Nfissa did not mean the new mother, it meant the open grave. For forty days and forty nights, she was an open grave through which all the winds of death and despair could pass.
With the tip of her tongue, she tasted the bitterness from the ink of Zohra’s talisman. A small paper, four square corners on which were inscribed four letters of the Arabic alphabet to delimit a space for protection against evil forces and desires. Four corners, a perfectly rational delimitation of space with one letter for each corner. A Cartesian device placed in the darkness of a rounded mouth to shield her from unnameable monstrosities. It was utterance stripped down to its simplest form and placed in the pained mouth to conjure the power of text. Dissolved letters that circulate through the body-as-text—the body through which laws and their transgressions are endlessly enacted. She felt the four letters trickle down her spine and copy themselves on her skin like a pale reproduction of the Guttenberg press. The letters pressed upon her skin and momentarily absolved the tortured inscriptions the world had subjected her body to.
Leila looked down at the little girl in her arms. She saw in her daughter only frailty and weakness. A girl born in a country of wolves and monstrous sheep would know only pain and disillusionment. A child conceived in violence and scorn could only be pitiful and meek. The little girl had tapered fingers and crooked, uneven legs. Her skin was almost transparent and her frame ever so slight. Leila thought that she could break in an instant, and a deeper part of her answered that perhaps it would be better for her if she did break. Zohra stroked Leila’s hair. “Your daughter is powerful, Leila. Her body’s frailty is a veil shielding a power and courage that will prove beyond compare. Her uneven legs are to allow her to walk the world in her own way with her own imperfect rhythm. Her body touches the air and earth with its own gravitational pattern, and she will know, simultaneously, what it means to be strong and less strong, tall and less tall, transcendent and downtrodden. Her legs are uneven because she is like the world. Do not fear her difference and do not be pained for her.”
Then Zohra lowered her voice. “She is our miracle. She is the one we have been waiting for but were told we must forget, the one who should have been in our ancient texts but was erased, the one who would have shown that the alternative path was the right path but who was never allowed to exist. The child of earth and night, of resistance and integrity, of sacrifice and endlessness, our most wanted and most needed child...”
Leila struggled with the pain caused by the contact of mouth on swollen breast and wondered when her weird, secret, unnatural desire for flight would disappear. Aisha watched as Leila fought to create a connection with her daughter, while Zohra prepared henna in a bowl. When the warm brown mixture settled, she tattooed Leila’s palms, feet, and womb with the odorous henna.
“To protect you from furious despair and incurable disease, to weave a bond between you and your child, and to shield you from the evil eye, you will remain in this room with your daughter for seven days and nights. On the seventh day, the guests will arrive and the naming ceremony will begin.”
She presented her with a date: “Eat this date that was picked from the venerable palm trees of the southern oases to nourish you with courage and sweetness. Do not worry, for I will remain by your side for seven days and nights.”
Leila’s body and mind were alternatively wracked by hot and cold flashes. Hot liquids, cold solids, and ritualistic tattoos had transformed her being-in-her-body into another consciousness of existence and physicality. For one as cerebral as Leila, her body’s weakness and surgical passivity revealed the power of body. In these moments of great vulnerability, Leila no longer recognized herself and doubted her ability to persevere and return to the light. She thought that she could hear the Patriarch rage at her side. “What is this child? Its legs are uneven. What is this monster my daughter has brought into our house? My house is cursed. This is punishment for keeping a child who is probably the spawn of some hoofed demon!”
Leila could sense, more than she could hear, her mother’s anger at her tall, blue-eyed husband. She held her child tighter, breathed in her skin, fingers, and soft hair, and thought of the mysterious link between life and fragi
lity. She slept surrounded with the scent of orange blossoms, fruit, and honey, dreaming of forgetfulness.
~
Night fell on the city, and the household prepared itself. Zohra called out to Hamza, and soon he was at Leila’s door. He came into the room at midnight with his curved, calligraphed sword and an orange-blossom branch. Zohra crouched on the floor and began.
“It is midnight, Hamza: listen to the worlds of day and night whispering alongside each other. In my tribe, when a child was born, the elders used a sword to get rid of Lilith and protect mother and child. The sword would cut the air in half and draw a circle above the resting mother and her child to keep Lilith away. The sword created a closed space for their protection. In that closed space, tales were told, myths and mysteries revealed. From these words would later flow, quite naturally, the newborn’s chosen name.
“I am not asking you to use your sword to ward off demons, ghosts, and witches nor to create a closed space that at once delimits and defines a threatening outside. No, none of that here...I am asking you to bring life back into a broken spirit, to breathe green air out of your lungs to fill hers with life and warmth. I am asking that you remind this weakening mother that there must be light before the darkness descends on us for all eternity. It is not Lilith I am scared of. It is those fierce inner demons that are pushing her toward the brink and drinking the sweet milk intended for the daughter. It is midnight. Listen to the world of night take over the day. Inscribe your magic on its darkness.”