Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  My life seemed to change after I moved to the new house. I no longer felt time stagnating as I had in the compound. I began to amuse myself making curtains and cushions, hanging pictures, tidying cupboards. I borrowed books about gardens and dug the garden and planted seeds, waiting from one day to the next for the green shoots to appear. I invited women to visit me, proud of my beautiful house, and offered them cake and tea in cups that matched the curtains. I decided to make my stay here useful, and joined an exercise class at Maryam’s house, three times a week for an hour, another class for baking and decorating cakes, and a literary discussion group. I even became a pupil of Stephanie’s learning embroidery and patchwork, and would have taken classes to learn how to arrange artificial flowers if the time had allowed. However I knew deep inside me that the way I was handling my life was doomed to failure; I was scared of the enormous disgust that I felt because I was leading such a sterile, unnatural existence, and to counter this I began to defend the way of life here, as a means of instilling into my mind what it ought to be thinking. In my discussions with women who hated it here, both Arabs and foreigners, I used to struggle to find objections to their arguments and take the discussions to absurd and trivial limits: I told them that the situation here was ideal in a way, and that they were lucky because they were seeing how cities were built, and witnessing the transformation of man from a bedouin into a city-dweller. This was a great opportunity for them, I added: nothing was laid on for them as it was in other countries, and they would have to fight for what they really wanted. Despite what I said, I myself thought that time was wasted in searching for and constructing what existed and was recognized as normal or obvious anywhere else in the world.

  Things didn’t progress as I’d convinced myself they would when I was forcing myself to attend classes. When the women at the exercise classes with me began to look like birds and animals, and when at the cake-decorating class I became involved in a vengeful struggle with the lid of the confectioner’s cream instead of directing my energies to creating a rose on a cake, or when I began to drink coffee and eat biscuits instead of discussing books, and spent an age trying to make the thread go into the eye of the needle, or even just searching for the needle, I gave it all up and stayed at home. At this point, like most of the women here, I began to think in earnest about how fed up I was, how miserable I was, and how much I’d like to go away somewhere. The only solution was to get out of the house again, this time to work in the store.

  I handled the paperwork, writing letters and demands and putting prices on everything. I used to flick through the shiny illustrated catalogues of goods and foodstuffs choosing whatever took my fancy. When the things arrived I rushed to the crates, excitedly comparing the real thing with the picture I had of it and feeling that I had a link with the outside world as I turned a glass or a packet over in my hands. In spite of my knowledge and my zeal for my work, I made mistakes and these mistakes led to Amer’s goods being censored by the port officials. They set fire to his crates to get rid of the pâté de foie gras which I’d ordered without noticing that pork fat was listed among its ingredients; I ordered games without realizing that they contained playing cards, and bay leaves and dried radishes and rosemary not knowing that they’d arrived saying on their packets that they added a delicious aroma and flavour to beef and chicken and pork. Amer had to make his employees cross out the word ‘pork’ on a thousand packets with their black pens. Although I grew more accurate with my orders there were still some boxes that had to be burnt.

  The psychological tension that began to hang over the place became a bigger problem than hiding in the cardboard box. Amer and his wife were both extremely edgy, and the day he handed me the notification from the customs authorities to read, he was smoking like a doomed man having his last cigarette. He’d lost thousands: the boxes from the United States had been confiscated and their contents destroyed; I asked excitedly if someone had smuggled whisky or obscene videos in them. The soft toys and dolls had all been destroyed, every one that was meant to be a human being or animal or bird, since it was not permissible to produce distortions of God’s creatures. Although I was sorry, I laughed, and imagined those men turning over Barbie dolls and Snoopies and Woodstocks in their big hands and picking up china birds and crystal ashtrays in the shape of cats and thinking hostile thoughts about them, while they stared silently back.

  I remembered how keen I used to be to watch the ‘Muppet Show’, how I’d laughed at Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy: it had never occurred to me that these creatures singing and bobbing about giving amusement and pleasure to their audience were no more than dumb puppets. That was why when Umar asked me one day if they got new ones when the old ones wore out I felt sad, because I’d pictured them being real in spite of the strings attached to their arms and legs. I thought of them piled on top of one another in a box or cupboard in the studio when they weren’t being used, their eyes dead, mouths closed and bodies lifeless.

  I didn’t actually leave my job until one morning I came face to face with the security man in the doorway of the storeroom, whereupon I rushed in past him, up the stairs and made for the offices to hand in my resignation.

  This time I knew that I wasn’t going to visit anyone. My desert experience had to be related to the place, not just the people: I determined to try and communicate with my surroundings.

  Claiming that I wanted to help my husband Basem with a study he had to do for the bank, I asked the driver Said to take me around the town, street by street, starting with the airport. He puffed out his chest proudly, although he had no idea what I meant, and touching his headcloth deferentially he answered, ‘At your service.’ As soon as we’d left the airport I began to take things in, making believe that I’d just arrived from a faraway country, and had never seen the desert before except in pictures. But it wasn’t the desert that I saw, and I found myself in the middle of what amounted to a vast building site.

  Trucks were unloading or loading up. Huge drums stood with electricity cables and telephone cables coiled around them. A crane that looked big enough to move mountains and cities grumbled and creaked as it lifted its load. A cement mixer turned constantly. There was a string of lorries and a petrol tanker, the sort that people stop and stare at in the street because of its size. It was like a giant that had eaten a lot of people; each of its four compartments was bigger than a car, and its driver hovered in the sky as if he was about to make a parachute drop somewhere in the desert.

  I watched the men putting up a hoarding in the sand advertising the opening of a new supermarket that would sell tens of thousands of different brands, and I marvelled at the way that, while old hoardings look as if they’ve been built along with the city surroundings, these new ones here looked as if they had appeared by magic.

  Some of the streets had no names, but there were buildings in them where a few weeks before there had only been steel girders, and they had filled up rapidly with occupants coming to work on other building sites. Interspersed between the real palms were plastic ones and green-painted metal ones planted in tubs down the middle of the streets in an attempt to beautify the place, and ornamental paving stones laid edge to edge around them as if conducting a dialogue with one another. Tools and pieces of machinery lay abandoned where they had been for the past three years, and a black-and-white goat was jumping around on them. After only a few moments she bounded off on to the dusty ground to escape the burning metal.

  Then Said took me to the seashore where there were huge water-purifying plants, some already completed and some still being built. A white bird poised on a wire and fluttered its wings. There was a man wearing a white headcloth, his white robe flying out in the breeze as he supervised work at one of the plants. In the distance on top of that enormous steel building he looked like Superman.

  The markets were a hive of building activity: they were knocking down the old buildings whose walls were riddled with the effects of heat and damp, buildings with little ornamental sto
nework or wooden latticework considered lacking in artistic value. In their place rose buildings full of air-conditioners, neon lighting and garish, over-ornate tiles. Everything was unattractive except the calligraphic design of the expression ‘What God wills’ which was adorning one wall in a contrasting colour.

  A strange smell wafted into the car and small murky black clouds swirled around me at street level. A vehicle drove slowly along spraying the people and the empty air with germicide.

  Asian workmen swarmed everywhere, on foot, in cars, and up the high ladders, the Yemenis in their skirts and loose jackets and platform shoes, stumbling at every step. Periodically the sand was sprayed with oil to immobilize it but it renewed its attack with fresh vigour over the cultivated parts of the desert and the asphalted roads, against windows, and against the few trees trying to bloom and the luxurious cars jostling for place with the lorries and trucks.

  I was a little disconcerted: the feeling I’d started out with of losing my sensitivity to the life going on around me was growing stronger, as was my awareness of the complete absence of women, at least from the world outside. Most of the houses seemed to be devoted to men and their affairs with the signs announcing offices and companies for this and that, and the one house built of red brick with Spanish windows had a sign stuck in the middle of it saying, ‘Adli. Attorney at Law’. None of the houses had balconies, and everything was enclosed by high walls.

  I found myself asking Said to take me to see Ingrid. Although I felt tired and nauseous from driving round and round in the car, I wanted to be with other people and get warmth and energy from hearing them talk and watching them move, so that I could breathe freely again and get back into the rhythm of life here.

  I chose Ingrid because of her garden. The plants in it reminded me of Beirut: the blanket of lilac, the sunflowers, and a third flower, orange with a strong perfume. And apart from that, I had a weakness for her delicious cakes.

  ‘The American?’ asked Said, and he pointed to his head making a circle with his finger.

  I answered, half-laughing, ‘No. Ingrid’s the German, the one with the garden.’

  ‘Ah, the skinny one! Poor thing.’

  Said remembered the women I visited even if he didn’t remember their names, and he assessed their characters through their ways of talking and behaving since he didn’t know any foreign languages. He could say ‘good morning’ to all the women I visited, smiling delightedly at his achievement so that his gold teeth, and the gaps in between them, were plainly visible. The first time he asked how to say ‘good morning’ in English and American and found they were the same, he exclaimed in surprise, ‘Praise the Lord! They’re the same as each other inside and out!’

  Said had been sitting in the Adeni restaurant where he worked, when one of the customers read out in his hearing an advertisement for an accountant in the bank where Basem was manager. Said asked him what an accountant had to do and the man answered him sarcastically, ‘Count money.’ Said went off to the bank and asked to see the manager. Despite his persistence they wouldn’t let him go in. He waited at the door and when Basem came out he reached for the notes in his pocket and counted them in front of him in a flash as if he were a professional gambler, not just an ordinary Yemeni in his skirt and sandals. Then he returned the cash to his belt and adjusted his coloured headcloth. Basem asked him where he worked and he answered in an Adeni restaurant, spiking the meat on skewers and roasting it. Could he read? Could he write? Said contented himself with a smile. He was employed in the bank as a cleaner and teaboy. After a while he asked Basem to teach him how to drive, and Basem explained the principles to him three times. In a few weeks Said begged Basem to let him drive his car and surprised Basem with his proficiency. When Basem questioned him, Said told him that he’d begun to practise every day, making use of every car that stopped at the bank after convincing its driver that he’d take it off and park it in a shady spot. Those who weren’t willing had changed their minds when Said pretended to cry in front of them, muttering something about not being fit to be trusted.

  When I arrived at Ingrid’s I was sorry I’d come. The note of lethargy was still there in Ingrid’s conversation. By the end of every sentence she spoke you were ready to fall asleep. I sat drowsily in front of her, angry at myself for coming and wishing I could sleep with my eyes open.

  She was telling me about the man she’d found creeping into her house while I thought about the pastries or the table whose delicious aroma wafted across to me, and about the sunflowers as big as moons. Then she recounted news of her parents: how her mother had to lean on her father to walk, how her father had slipped and brought the old lady down with him and how they’d both stayed on the floor till the next day.

  I immediately regretted the strong urge I had to laugh as I pictured the scene. I tried to be serious and concentrate on what Ingrid was saying, but failed and rose to my feet, making excuses. When Ingrid said, ‘That was a short visit. You didn’t even taste my pastries,’ I hesitated, but the expression on Ingrid’s face and the vision of renewed boredom made me hurry to the door and not even pause to look at the garden. It was very hot, and when I was in the car I saw the sunflowers peeping over the wall.

  I sat in the car looking about me, uncertain where to go. The fierce glare penetrated the windows and the car body in spite of the air-conditioner, and the humidity in the outside air came through to me. Depressed by the concrete gardens I saw, I looked back inside the car.

  On an impulse I asked Said to take me to Suzanne’s house. To confirm what I’d said he raised his hand once more to his head making a circle with his forefinger: ‘The American, Auntie?’ I forced a laugh and nodded yes. Said appeared not to notice my curt response as he said, ‘It’s been a long time since you visited her, Auntie.’

  As the car approached the Pepsi Cola works and I saw the bottles moving along automatically and stopping to be filled behind the factory windows, I remembered how enthusiastic I’d been about my first visit to Suzanne’s, mainly because of the Pepsi factory.

  When Suzanne’s servant, Ringo, opened the door I knew that I’d made the right choice this time. All at once I was in a world that had not the slightest connection with the desert, except for the brass tray hanging on the wall and the little brass coffee jugs arranged on the table. I loved the gloom created by the thickness of the curtains, and I loved the romantic music, the smell of coffee and the smiling photographs of Suzanne positioned carefully here and there.

  Suzanne rushed from the kitchen shrieking excitedly, clasped me to her and kissed me, reproaching me for not coming to see her sooner and making me turn round in a circle so that she could look at what I was wearing: ‘It’s beautiful. Oh, how beautiful you look!’

  She began to tell me her news, so full of enthusiasm that she didn’t finish one topic before launching into the next, and repeated old news that I already knew. Each time I asked her about something she said, ‘Okay …’ beginning to answer, then switched to another subject. She reminded me of the letter to her lover, and I found myself smiling as I recalled the day I’d met her in the store. She’d been talking in Arabic, murdering the letter tha, sticking out her tongue and swallowing the words like a fish swallowing her young in the face of danger. Now, just as I had been the very first time, I was astonished to go into her house and see the servant Ringo doing her platinum blond hair like a professional hairdresser. When Ringo went to the kitchen to make tea he moved like a girl who knows she’s got a beautiful body. He poured the tea into cups in front of me, raising his little finger delicately like a hostess at a tea party and stirring it till the sugar was melted.

  On my first visit Suzanne had asked me to write a letter in her name to her lover, a local man named Maaz. The words she told me to put were naïve, sentimental, cheap. Reading between the lines I could guess the sort of relationship they had. When she asked me if I liked her style, I nodded hypocritically. Then she asked Ringo to bring the box of tape cassettes, and from among the
cassettes of The Adventures of Dimbo, Sri Lankan singers and even one of Muhammad Abdo, she pulled out one with her name on it and asked me to listen to it. For a moment I thought she was joking, but the expression on her face and Ringo’s told me I was wrong, and I felt more and more embarrassed as Suzanne’s voice sighed and whispered and called out that her Arab lover’s face was as beautiful as the moon.

  I’d stopped caring about the Pepsi bottles in the factory window and found myself looking forward to my visits to her just to hear her passionate stories about Maaz. Whenever I’d felt my interest in her flagging, her outlandish reports of violent scenes and fake suicide attempts had drawn me back. I only broke off my visits when Amer banned her temporarily from the store because she’d been joking with a salesman. The noise she was making had attracted attention, she was wearing bright red lipstick, and although her dress was long it showed the curve of her belly and buttocks as she moved. However, I continued to defend her and told them that her only fault was that she was too good-hearted. I watched her now as she talked for maybe an hour, and felt sorry for her when she started to cry. She’d got fatter, and the roots of her hair showed darker than the rest. As usual she showed me the traces on her forehead left by the bottle that Maaz had thrown at her, and she didn’t stop begging me to go and see Maaz and talk to him and ask him to come back. I was noncommittal, and when pushed refused even to consider it. For a moment I regretted coming back, because I was getting involved once again in her tortuous entanglements. I reminded myself that I was an Arab and should be careful, but I found myself promising to get Maaz back for her another way. Although she begged me to tell her how, I wasn’t going to: I was scared of her runaway tongue and her excitability, and I just said I’d see her the next day.