The Sand Fish

by Maha Gargash

  “Anyway, let’s get you ready.” Yaqoota turned and began walking back to the entrance, waving an arm over her shoulder toward the two rooms on the other side of the wall between the wind towers. “Arbab’s room, Ommi Lateefa’s room.” Then, the facing wall. “Shamsa’s room.”

  They stepped into the room next to Shamsa’s by the entrance of the house: Noora’s room. On the far wall was another door that led to a smaller room. Pressed in the corner was a high, four-poster bed. Next to it sat a hurricane lamp on a wooden chest, but still everything remained dark.

  “How can you see through everything that’s covering you?” said Yaqoota. “You don’t need to keep all those clothes on you when you’re in the house. Take it all off.”

  Noora had quite forgotten that she was still covered. She peeled off her abaya and burka, let the shayla slide onto her shoulders.

  Yaqoota gasped and tipped Noora’s chin up. “So pretty, masha’ Allah. Your face is like a princess. Now, tell me, princess, what is your name?”

  “Noora Al-Salmi.”

  Yaqoota squealed. “What kind of accent is that?”

  Noora flinched. What boldness!

  “Tell me, Noora Al-Salmi,” Yaqoota said, now laughing. “Does everyone talk like that where you come from?”

  “Like what?” Noora was not comfortable with such quick familiarity. She was not sure how to react to this girl-woman, so full of childish abandon.

  “Come on, say something else,” begged Yaqoota. “Please, please, please.”

  “What do you mean? You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  Yaqoota dropped to her knees and bent over into a shudder of mirth.

  They heard the pounding on the wall and Shamsa’s voice barking her anger, an anger that caused it to crack with strain. “Enough! Can’t you see we need to rest?”

  “Shh,” said Yaqoota, raising her hand to her mouth to stifle her laugh. “Don’t make any noise.”

  “I’m not the noisy one.”

  Yaqoota continued to giggle. “I want to laugh loudly, but I can’t. There’s too much anger in this house right now.”

  What a strange reception! Noora waited for Yaqoota’s next eruption. Instead, Yaqoota swallowed her glee and said, “It is just that your accent is so funny.” Then she stood up and listed all the other sections of the house, raising her arms in broad sweeps: “A privy in the house at the far corner of the courtyard, way back behind the men’s majlis!”

  “In the house?”

  “Yes, the only house with one. Everyone else in Wadeema does their thing by the sea or in the dunes.”

  Before Noora had a chance to ask more, Yaqoota described it: a raised platform with a cemented hole that opened to the ground. “The hole is covered with a piece of wood so that you don’t accidentally fall in. Believe me, you would not want to fall in that!” Again she hugged her arms and snorted, and Noora wondered how much gaiety bubbled in this girl.

  Yaqoota wiped the mist from her eyes and continued. “Of course, for washing and bathing, you just go in there.” She pointed to the attached smaller room. Noora peeked through the doorway. It was a low-ceilinged washroom. A large earthen container of water sat on a cemented floor that was slanted, so that the water could slip easily into a corner hole.

  “Where does that hole go?” Noora asked.

  “Into the street. This house is very special. It makes living easy. Water for bathing comes from the well.”

  “Should I go out and bring the water to the house every day?”

  “Bring the water? Masha’ Allah, this house has its own well.” Yaqoota swept the air with her arm in a bold stroke of importance. “Outside by the kitchen.”

  A well in the house, too! These people don’t need to work, thought Noora.

  “But the house well’s water tastes bitter and old. So we drink the water from the village well.”

  “Should I bring that?”

  “No.” A squiggle of puzzlement broke the taut skin on Yaqoota’s forehead. “Yusef the water seller takes care of that.”

  “Well, what are my duties?”

  This time Yaqoota did not laugh. Instead, she looked deep into Noora’s eyes. “Don’t you know? Your duty is to make a baby.”

  Noora sank to her knees in front of the only window in her room and peeled open the shutters. Thick bars covered the opening, which overlooked the courtyard, and she wondered at the logic of it. If the bars were to keep robbers out, shouldn’t they be fixed on an outside wall? If they were meant to keep her from escaping, where would she run off to anyway?

  From somewhere outside came the howling rivalry of tomcats. She groaned and let her gaze drift up along the sidr tree till it reached a sky depleted of its vitality: a piece of charcoal trapped in the square of the courtyard, the jittery dots of the stars struggling to give it light. She hugged the softness of her chest, felt the crush of her arms, and remembered Rashid, how he had held her that one time in the cave. He had given up on her, chosen to follow his mother’s command. And instead of fighting for him, Noora had let her pride get in the way. What could she have said? Would it have made a difference? She sighed. What was the point of thinking about it now? It was too late: she belonged to another man.

  The household was still. She wished she were moving, on a boat or a donkey, even just walking. In this house the only sound came from the kitchen, where Yaqoota was preparing dinner. The smell floated through the bars on the window—fish, maybe something else, too, but the pungent odor of fish was always victorious, as it masked all other scents.

  She rose, suddenly wilted with fatigue, and sat on the bed. Her head drooped to her chest and she felt the sway of the sea. She had no appetite now that the weight of her new life was sitting heavily on her shoulders.

  She smelled onions. In her mountains, their scent would have floated into the open air and watered her mouth. The onions would have signaled the coming of some tasty meal. Here, they bonded with the fish and clung to the air in an oppressive smell that would not dissolve.

  Lateefa glided, silent as a ghost, on the other side of the bars, followed by a dense trail of smoke. She entered, and Noora was about to hop off the bed in respect to the older woman when Lateefa raised an arm. “No, don’t get up. Sit, sit.” Lateefa placed an incense holder and a bowl filled with what looked like yellow mud on the trunk. “Are you settled, dear?” she asked.

  Noora nodded and caved back into her position, occupying her mind with the upsurge of howls coming from outside.

  “Pah! Those cats,” said Lateefa. “All night, all winter, they fight and scream at one another. It is hard enough to sleep without that noise.” She grunted. “Never mind, Allah be thanked, we are home safe. Now, let’s get you smelling good.”

  Noora’s back stiffened as Lateefa lifted her plaits and inserted the incense holder. The smoke wrapped them with its amber scent, dancing snakelike toward the roof, and for a moment it swallowed that stale stench of fish and onions being fried in the kitchen.

  “There, that’s better,” Lateefa said, placing the incense holder back onto the trunk. She dipped three fingers into the yellow mud and ran it along Noora’s middle part. “Saffron, to make you smell nice, to make you pleasing.” Then, another dunk of the fingers before she streaked a line on each cheek “I know those matchmakers prepared you well,” she said, “but you don’t need to follow every little thing they said when he comes to you tonight.” Her voice sounded concerned, almost motherly.

  So it was to be tonight. Noora’s dangling feet quivered like fish slapped onto the shore. No more waiting. She counted in her mind the list of instructions that Sakina and Gulsom had made her memorize. She knew Lateefa was not talking about the date-pit trick. “Which part should I ignore?”

  “It’s all fine what they told you,” said Lateefa, frowning with gravity. “But the part where you struggle, well, you don’t really need to do that.”

  It was a point Gulsom had insisted on. By holding back as much as possible on
her first night, a bride highlighted her dignity, her self-esteem. She was proving she was not to be had so easily, that she was not to be taken for granted.

  “What should I do?”

  “Ah, that’s easy,” said Lateefa. “Just lie back and do nothing.”

  There was a victorious cat outside, for the screeches suddenly stopped. Noora’s fingers writhed into a tangle of complicated twists. She wished she could shrivel into a dry leaf that would crumble with the first touch of this man, this stranger, this husband, who was to come to her once the charcoal sky turned black.

  22

  Noora stood outside the doorway of Jassem’s room. In the shadow of the arcade, she picked up the beginnings of a tune she knew too well. She had heard it almost every night for the past two months. It started softly as a series of broken hums that promised to lead to a structured song. But then the melody twisted wily in another direction, its notes falling one after another into a long line of purrs—cat purrs of pleasure. These simple spur-of-the-moment creations were his tunes of lust, the ones that stained the air every time he desired her.

  He will come to me tonight, she thought. He will carry his lamp and full belly, and come into my room for some intimacy. Her stomach churned and the sourness itched the back of her throat. She swallowed hard. The sickly feeling trickled down. Again and again, she swallowed to push it down farther. For the moment, it was subdued, just as she had learned to subdue much of what she felt in her life by the sea.

  She leaned on the wall, closed her eyes, and whispered, “I must be thankful. I must be thankful I’m married to him.” Thankful: it was a peculiar word and, more and more, she repeated it to herself, desperate for it to fog her thoughts and trap some numbness in her limbs so that she couldn’t feel him anymore once he came to her.

  It never worked. The word hovered for the shortest moment and passed through her mind like an invisible breeze. Should one be thankful for basic physical necessities or emotional needs? It was a riddle her young mind could not answer.

  She coughed and called to Jassem, “Supper is ready.” The tune stopped abruptly and he grunted, and she understood that he would join them shortly.

  Noora walked out of the protective darkness of the arcade and crossed the courtyard to join the other wives. They were sitting on the ground by the kitchen, their legs stretched out, as they supported their weight on elbows rooted to a couple of firm cushions. A palm-frond dining mat lay in front of them with a small bowl of dates on one side and a platter of radishes and onions on the other. The hot food was still in the kitchen, being kept warm in a pot till the arbab of the house could join them.

  “Well, where is he? Did you call him?” asked Lateefa. Her burka shifted from side to side as she crunched a piece of radish. Unlike Noora and Shamsa, Lateefa wore her burka in the house.

  Noora sat and stretched her legs straight in front of her. “He’s coming,” she said, and let her gaze drift to Shamsa’s face, creamy as milk, with no blemishes, no scars. Noora’s skin had none of the refined softness of Shamsa’s, the smoothness that came with a life of indulgence. She could not help but admire its whiteness, so full of the shine of the moon even in the soft glow of the lantern. Over a fine nose, Shamsa’s brows dipped and connected. Now she lifted one up and the other followed.

  “What are you looking at?” she said to Noora.” You know, if you do what needs to be done, he won’t ignore us like this.”

  Noora waited for more. It was the daily dose of Shamsa’s contempt. One day, she hoped she would be able to let Shamsa’s anger breeze through without affecting her, without reminding her that she was in this house to conceive.

  “It’s up to you to give him that baby,” Shamsa said. “But you can’t even do that. What do you think he brought you here for?”

  Noora wanted to speak out, throw an accusation back at her. Why hadn’t Shamsa fulfilled her obligation? After all, she had been his bed companion for three years.

  “Just you wait, mountain girl! No baby means you”—she flicked her thumb toward the door—“into the street!”

  Lateefa leaned forward and began pressing her knees. “Keep it quiet. He will be here soon, and you know how he hates the bickering.”

  Shamsa threw a sidelong glance at Noora and sat up straight. She peeled her cuff to her elbow and raised her hand to her forehead to rake her fringe in place, not that she needed to. Like Noora’s, it was a short fringe, after all, sitting high on her forehead, a broad line from the edge of one temple to the other. It never got messy, that style designed to show the beauty of her face and complexion. No! She was showing off again, and not just the ivory sheen of her arm.

  The chunky gold bracelet with thick spikes slid down her dainty wrist. There was the luxury she was born into displayed once more. And, every time, it worked to make Noora feel small. Every time it ate at what confidence she had left. Noora twirled the three thin rings on her middle finger and burrowed both hands into the hollow between her thighs.

  Shamsa snorted. “I don’t know what he sees in her. I mean look at her feet, thicker than leather. All her life jumping on the mountains barefoot, I guess at the end of it they would have to turn hard as hooves, which is all right, I suppose.” She sighed. “After all, she’s just another goat from the mountains.”

  “When I say enough, I mean enough.” Lateefa pressed her knee harder. “How many times do I have to exhaust my voice with you? How ungrateful you are. When I was your age, I had to endure the arrival of two other young wives.” Lateefa paused to breathe in that special wisdom she had collected in her long matrimonial life. “I didn’t bicker like this. When those poor girls passed away, God rest their souls, I kept my husband as happy as he could ever hope to be. I didn’t nag him; nor did I trouble him with such pettiness.” She closed her eyes and waited for a response.

  “Yes, Ommi Lateefa, a difficult life you have had,” Noora mumbled, and tried to ignore the smirk Shamsa was beaming at her as she crossed her legs to hide her toughened soles.

  Lateefa’s eyelids quivered and she opened her eyes, misty with emotion. “You don’t know how lucky you are. All you have to worry about is trivialities. When I was the only one, I did all the housework, ignoring all those aches in my back, knees, and everywhere else.” Her voice strengthened. “No complaints. I cooked, cleaned, washed. I had only Yaqoota’s mother to help, God rest her soul, but she was withered and I did most of the work. At least now, you two have Yaqoota to help you out, young and strong that she is. Not that you have so much hard work to do.”

  Noora heard the clatter of pots in the kitchen. Why wasn’t Yaqoota with them so that she could have said something (the truth!), revealed how Lateefa did no more than boss her mother, how it was Yaqoota’s mother who had cleaned, washed, and cooked for years and years. Maybe Yaqoota would have taken Noora’s thoughts and hurled them back at Shamsa, too. Somehow, Yaqoota could say whatever she wanted, and although Lateefa and Shamsa might shout at her, they never thought her important enough to argue with. She was the family slave after all, like her parents and grandparents before her, to be owned and worked but not argued with. “You see, her mind is not like that of the free!” Lateefa always said. “So one has to make space for her silliness.”

  As they heard the creak of Jassem’s door, Noora watched the color rush to Shamsa’s lucid cheeks. Ever since their arrival at Wadeema, Shamsa continued to receive stern looks from their husband. Jassem ignored her and refused to visit her bedroom. It seemed he hadn’t forgiven her for having taken refuge in her father’s home while he was away. Shamsa slapped her palms to the floor and rose with an indignant huff. She kicked her dress in front of her and marched to her room.

  Lateefa shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Again? Why does she do that to herself?” Once more, as every night, Lateefa would give her a chance to spill some tears before sending her dinner to her room. Then, with an abrupt clap, Lateefa said, “Still, that’s how it is now, and she will just have to learn to accept it.”
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  As they watched Jassem cross the sandy courtyard, Lateefa leaned close to Noora and whispered in a solemn voice, “Now, listen to me, young Noora. Tonight, when he comes to you, lie very still.” She paused and held Noora’s gaze, as if she were dictating a secret recipe, before continuing. “If you do that, the seed will get rooted in your belly, and only then can it develop to become the baby we all want.”

  That night Noora waited for the familiar footsteps, those sliding toes with a duty that would carry Jassem to her room. She wished the baby would come soon. Only then would he give her less attention.

  Her back caved and her legs wilted over the side of the bed as she waited for his arrival. She heard a sniffle from the next room: Shamsa’s sobs, coming not so much out of love but out of failure. Failure to produce a child or, perhaps, out of losing her place as the new wife, the favored wife, of the house.

  How quickly she colored, thought Noora. Her delicate complexion was not made to handle sadness. In the mornings, she would emerge with puffy eyes and a crimson nose, and Noora always wondered how many tears were stored within those eyes. Sometimes Noora wished she could cry like that. But her eyes had dried a long time ago, when Sager had sent her away, when she began her new life in this house of chalky walls. Now only the sharp sting of indignity prickled them.

  There they were: the soft plods of passion, pausing at her door. She heard the door creak, and Jassem coughed and entered the room. She could not understand why he still insisted on clearing his throat every time he came to her. Did he think she hadn’t heard him? She kept her head down, waiting for him to raise it. Wasn’t that the way a wife should be? Patient, subservient, just as Gulsom and Sakina had explained. Her eyes followed his shadow as it floated along the wall. She held her breath.

  She felt his pudgy hand on her chin, raising her face till their eyes met. A gleam ran along the rim of his spectacles (he always kept them on), and from behind the lenses his expression was serious, as if this were the most important event of the day. His hands slid to her shoulders in a firm press, the signal to lie down.