Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  In Nur’s house I used to sit and wonder where to look next. There were two video machines in the huge sitting-room. The furniture was used to divide the room into three sections. Her daughter and Umar and some other children were shouting and screaming as they fought satellites on the video screen. Female friends and relations of Nur watched stars like Dalida and the Egyptian Nellie on television, and the Filipino men-servants sang and called to each other with loud whistles. Dogs wandered in, wrestled with the children, and wandered out. Budgerigars and canaries and green and white parrots hopped around their aviaries talking to one another. There was a big aquarium alive with different sea creatures. When the friends and relations got bored they would come over to Nur and me and then I wondered which of them to talk to or look at. Some of them were enveloped in abayas and veils and had henna patterns on their hands, while others wore clothes in the latest styles and colours; their jewellery was either embossed bedouin gold or modern international designer style. Which magazine should I flick through? It seemed as if all the world’s magazines, and the magazines produced by all the big international stores, were there on the table. When Said came to take me home I was always surprised how quickly the time had passed.

  But Nur’s house was no longer so exciting after I’d seen the show over and over again, and swimming in the pool was no longer a novelty, and I didn’t pay proper attention to what Nur was saying. The times I did listen to her complaints which were always on the same theme – how bored she was and how much she wanted to go abroad – I used to soothe her in exactly the same way that Basem soothed me: ‘Never mind. Be patient,’ without meaning what I said. Because I was turned in on myself to such an extent, I couldn’t establish a real friendship with any woman here. ‘My friends are in Beirut and I don’t feel in tune with anyone else.’ But I also used to say to Basem that I couldn’t break off relations with Nur as I’d done with the rest because she found an answer to every excuse I gave; whether I said Said wasn’t around, Umar was ill, I wasn’t feeling well or I was busy. When I didn’t answer the telephone Nur came in person and knocked on my door asking if the telephone was out of order. I began to feel annoyed by her and her persistence, and complained about it to Basem. He suggested that I should benefit from her and get to know the desert region here. Despite my lack of enthusiasm, I welcomed the idea and thought it sounded better than sitting on my sofa or Nur’s hour after hour. So one day we went together right into the desert to an oasis community and visited some of Nur’s relations in brand-new tents with sitting-rooms, dining-rooms, showers and toilets and a water pump outside. We sat on Persian and Pakistani rugs. The women seemed more real in these huge tents, although they’d only come to spend a few days in the desert. One of them asked Nur about her husband Saleh; ‘May God guide him,’ she remarked as she started to speak about him, which I presumed was because he was always travelling: whenever I asked Nur about her husband he was away on business. She took me to watch a bride-to-be being bathed and beautified and decorated with henna, and I saw how different the women looked without their veils and black abayas. They were laughing and shouting to one another and exchanging frank comments and gestures as they watched the bride. At night we went to the wedding ceremony and I was happy just to watch, while Nur danced, chewing gum. I didn’t eat anything. Nur ate, while I looked at the women and at the stars that seemed almost within reach.

  When the phone rang early one morning I picked up the receiver although I was sure that it would be Nur, and I agreed to visit her because I wanted to get out of the house that day, particularly as I hadn’t left if for days. When I entered the house I found the opposite of what I had expected. Nur looked as if she’d spent the night in a cold bath, immersed in icy loneliness. At her side was her bottle of tranquillizers. When Nur took one of these she slept peacefully for hours but when she woke up she moved slowly as if the ground wasn’t to be trodden on but just brushed with the soles of her feet. There was a mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray. The pallor of her face made her a part of the sugar-coloured sofa, except for the two points of blackness that flickered there from time to time. Her hands too blended in with the sofa and she held the ashtray listlessly. In front of her on the table was a bowl with pomegranate grains in it, and another of peeled cucumber and carrot. The Filipino maid picked up the two bowls and glanced at Nur before disappearing with them. I was about to ask her what had happened when the maid came back with a bowl of peeled oranges and apples and grapes.

  Nur was beside herself. She bent her head and said, ‘I want to die. Every day I can feel myself beginning to explode. I want to travel and I can’t. Saleh’s got my passport. I can’t live another moment in this house, I’m going to run away.’ I sat beside her and said, feigning concern, ‘Calm down, Nur. It’s not so bad. Send a telegram asking him to send you the passport. Saleh’ll be back soon. It’s not such a disaster.’ I thought to myself how spoilt she was. Then I looked around me. For the first time I thought about the cost of everything: the ceiling, the floor tiles, sofas, tables, chandeliers, display cabinets; it was as if every piece had been chosen to give an aura of rock-solidness and life as it should be lived. And yet the house was steeped in loneliness, perhaps because of the absence of visitors and their children at this hour. The doors and windows were hidden by curtains as if they didn’t exist, as if there were no aperture in this house for the plants to breathe through and everything was crouching under a solid glass cover. Again I pretended to be concerned: ‘What’s wrong, Nur? Calm down. Don’t worry. You’ll be able to go abroad soon.’

  Nur wept, and the tears brought the spirit back into her face: ‘I can’t stand any more. I’ve had enough. He’s got to divorce me, or come back to me. I can’t live like a date hanging off a branch, neither firmly attached to the branch nor lying comfortably on the ground.’ Half interested now, I found myself saying, ‘All right. Why haven’t you either got divorced or come back together before now?’ The only reply I could hear was her bitter weeping. Her long black hair was in a mess from the fury of her fit of crying and she lifted her head and twisted up her hair and threw it to the side: ‘I just don’t know what to do. I want to die. I’ve had enough. I want to die.’

  I didn’t know what to say to her, but I acknowledged to myself that I was hard and self-centred because I wasn’t moved by her tears now, and because I was thinking about Umar coming home and wondering whether Said had understood that he was supposed to come for me in an hour. Then I justified this by imagining that my reaction would have been different if I’d seen one of my friends in Lebanon crying.

  Nur was sobbing hysterically now. I got up and found a box of tissues and brought it over and stood awkwardly before her, not knowing how to make her take one. I tried again in a low voice: ‘Nur. Calm down a bit.’ I hated myself because these were the only words I could think of to say but for the first time I found myself taking Nur’s situation seriously. I had assumed that Saleh, like all the husbands here, was just away a lot or had another wife somewhere. The feeling that the house was without a man was clear although Nur was always threatening her daughter: ‘I’m telling you, your father’s going to beat you. He’ll be back soon and then you’ll see.’

  I thought, ‘Nur must trust me and my feelings for her, otherwise she wouldn’t choose to seek help from me in preference to all her other friends and relations. Perhaps it’s because I’m a stranger? But she’s got lots of friends like me, who aren’t from the desert.’

  I rested my hand on Nur’s hair, then patted her shoulder and said to her, ‘There’s a solution to everything, Nur.’ Nur mumbled some words that I didn’t understand. She looked up and reached for some tissues and wiped her eyes, then said, ‘It’s a huge catastrophe.’

  I was surprised and pleased that my words had evoked some response in her, and for the first time she appeared ready to look at her situation without crying. I said, ‘Ask him for a divorce. It’d be better than living like this.’

  It was as if I’d rem
inded her of something worse. She bowed her head again and repeated, ‘It’s a huge catastrophe. If I get divorced, who do I marry?’ I was taken aback by Nur’s question but instead of saying jokingly to her, ‘How can you think about marriage when you haven’t thought about divorce yet?’ I asked reasonably, ‘Did you quarrel? What about? Let somebody try and bring you back together.’ Dabbing at the tears and sweat on her face, Nur answered, ‘He won’t budge. He’s got a heart of stone, and his head’s not much different.’ Then leading me back to the main issue she repeated, ‘I want to go away. I can’t bear living here. If only I could go on a trip for a week or two …’

  I let Nur cry and I couldn’t help looking at my face in the tissue packet holder as I took a tissue from it, to see how I looked; Nur had even thought of getting a metal cover for the tissue box. I thought I looked beautiful. What was the use? I handed some more tissues to Nur who sat up and said, ‘How lucky you are, how fortunate to be Lebanese.’ I was about to answer, ‘But I’m stuck here, like you’ but no – the perfume that I smelt whenever I came into Nur’s house now coursed suddenly and powerfully through the corridors of my blood, into the blue veins in my head, massaging them. I relaxed as if I was floating on a surface that was like water but without the wetness or the tension. I was suddenly conscious that I wasn’t from here, that I could travel, and go where I pleased, by myself, for a year, two years, three, or leave for good. But Nur would return however often she went away and however long she stayed away. I felt invigorated by these sensations and I returned to the box of tissues, pretending to take one while I was really stealing glances at my reflection, assuring it again of the reality which I’d grown oblivious to and which had confronted me in the midst of Nur’s passionate outburst. Only now did I appreciate that this outburst was less violent than it might have been, given the situation she was in. So I tried to return to Saleh, to the root of the problem, but Nur was only interested in retrieving her passport and going abroad and a disquisition on the subject of her husband bored her. She was already trying to think of alternative ways of getting out and urged me to help with practical suggestions. I offered: ‘You’re ill and need a specialist?’ ‘No. They wouldn’t believe it.’ ‘Your mother’s very ill and you have to travel to look for a cure?’ ‘Possible. But who’d persuade my mother to go?’ I was running out of patience: ‘Get another passport.’ ‘No. These days you have to have a photograph. Before it was easy. No photos for women. Just the name.’ At this I said with relief, ‘If only I looked like you. I could have given you my passport.’ Nur answered, ‘Thank you, my sweet. And thank you for helping me.’ What help could she mean? I’d only handed her some tissues, and in exchange she’d given me a crystal ball where I’d seen my face and my life.

  Nur began coming to my house and going to my room, closely followed by a man who slipped in after her like a thief while I sat in the sitting-room or in the kitchen waiting for the outer door to open and close and for the sound of Nur’s footsteps, her kiss on my cheek and her words, always the same, ‘I don’t know how I’d live without you, my sweet.’ An hour and she was gone, leaving me to go into my room looking for traces of Nur’s meeting with the man so that I could get rid of them, and thinking why does she get in between the sheets? Why isn’t she more sensitive to such things? I would open the window and change the sheets, to chase away the smell of Nur, then go over to the table to see if she’d forgotten a ring or a necklace or a bracelet. It was plain that these clandestine meetings were dispelling all the grief and confusion that she’d been suffering from, leaving her calm and in control of the rest of her day. They were like food and drink to her, so that when Basem had the painters in to the house for several days and when even after it was painted she couldn’t resume her meetings for several more days, she pleaded with me to come instead to her house at eleven in the morning and let in a man who would be carrying a black briefcase. I received him pretending to the world that he was the doctor and let him into her room after asking the servant girl nicely to shut the door behind her. I went into the bathroom and turned on the tap as hard as it would go looking at myself in the mirror, asking my reflection how long I would be in Nur’s life. I opened the cupboards and saw rusty razors and razor blades and bottles with remnants of men’s cologne in them in among the face creams and bags of henna. The water was still running and the sound of it drowned out any movement in the bedroom. I opened the curtain at the window and a cloud of dust flew up. I could see a little bit of the swimming-pool and some patches of green grass and trees with pale, sickly leaves. Over the wall came the noise of the water pumps, and I could see the colourless houses with their metallic doors and window frames glinting in the sun. Would anyone passing by this house believe that in one of its rooms there was a woman in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband? This man she’d met in a store, and there had been many others like him; one she’d met at a street crossing, another on a visit to the hospital; she’d slept with the man who’d come selling jewels and material to her in her house and the landscape gardener who advised her on the design of her garden when she was considering planting it with Japanese trees. I thought to myself how human beings continually manage to overcome their circumstances, thinking up the strangest ways to give substance to their desires. Before I’d always doubted if sex existed in houses like these and here I was listening to Nur laughing behind the locked door. I turned off the tap to hear better and then turned it on again.

  These meetings weren’t Nur’s lifesavers for long. She began to dream about going abroad again saying that she didn’t like daytime encounters, although she didn’t stop doing it until I asked her to; one of the men whom she’d seen in my house came to the door one day to ask me if he could bring his foreign girlfriend there. He handed me a bottle of whisky and a big piece of pork. Trembling, I gave them back to him and didn’t answer. I wanted to shut the door in his face or to scream at him to make him understand me and Nur and the risks we had taken. But it seemed complicated to explain, and I couldn’t look him in the eye and say to him straight out that Nur and I were playing with fire.

  5

  I didn’t hesitate for a moment when Nur asked me to come to her house early one morning, and it wasn’t because her voice sounded weak on the line. She was in bed enveloped in a light cloud of steam rising from a vaporiser. It seemed to have opened up her features so that she looked like a fruit that had ripened prematurely in a greenhouse. I said jollily to her, ‘Well? What’s the fairy princess doing today?’ and she wept silently. I didn’t take any notice. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to her complaining. This was the first time I’d been out after three days cooped up in the house because of the rain. The dark clouds, the pools of water on the road and in the garden had filled me with happiness.

  Rain had come to the desert this year. The sun and the moon had disappeared and the voices praying from the mosque sounded dry and echoless, competing with each other in volume and number. I found myself taking Umar in my arms in the night, calming him because he couldn’t sleep. He said to me, ‘You’re a liar. That’s not a prayer.’ He was used to hearing the prayer regularly at dawn and this was eight in the evening. I answered him gently, ‘They’re praying for rain. It has to rain for the dates and the crops to ripen, and to wash away the germs.’

  During the night he woke up screaming and came to my bed several times. Lightning and thunder chased each other around the sky and the rain poured down. I went back to bed hoping that I’d reassured him and listened to the rain hammering on the bathroom roof. I smiled contentedly. When Basem opened the door in the morning he gave a shout of wonder and I rushed to see the flooded garden. The water in the street was several inches deep and had begun to come in under the garden door.

  Even the rain here was different: it didn’t stay on the buildings, and they didn’t soak it up. They remained pale, the colour of the dust, like the trees, while the rushing waters swept the building materials out into the street, the wood floating along on the su
rface. In some places the sand turned to mud. Most of the traffic came to a halt and the drivers got out hitching up their robes to just below their knees and wading through the water showing their skinny legs. Jeeps were the only vehicles that could get through despite the muddy spray that stuck to their windscreens. The shops closed and some women went in cars laughing across the street to visit their neighbours but most of them stayed indoors. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, instead of a rainbow hundreds of mosquitoes hovered in the air like ballet dancers with their long legs.

  I didn’t ask Nur what was wrong but said enthusiastically, ‘I meant to tell you, I saw Saleh on television the other day. You so-and-so. I didn’t know he was so attractive and so young. He spoke well. I liked him. He’s intelligent, and you know, he looks like Ghada.’ Nur shouted back, ‘He’s not worth an onion skin. I didn’t even want to see him face to face this time. I just sent Ghada off without making any trouble.’ Then she asked what I wanted to drink, to change the subject.

  Before I answered she suddenly began to beat her head and her face with the palms of her hands so violently that I jumped up from my seat and took hold of her arms. Her paroxysm showed no signs of abating and she screamed, ‘I’m fed up. I’ve tried and I can’t go on any longer. When I’m depressed I say, “Never mind, Nur”, but then I get desperate and I feel ready to explode again. Sometimes I hope he doesn’t come to take Ghada or that I don’t know he’s in the country. Then I pray that when he comes I’ll be away somewhere. If only I could be!’ And she started striking her head and sobbing again, while I grabbed her arms and tried to soothe her. I hadn’t realized that Nur was so strong up till now.