Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  I’d grown used to her gentle voice with its soft desert accent and the affectionate words she spoke to her salukis as she patted them on the head; I’d watched her often cuddling the little gazelle, and sticking her finger in the cream and licking it to make sure it was fresh, and lifting her face to be kissed by her veiled visitors. When she put her head in her hands again and I tried to pull them away she pressed my hand with one of her hot hands then cast her head on to my shoulder like a sad child. She hadn’t stopped crying all the time but I couldn’t bring myself to pat her shoulder or hold her to comfort her. I felt embarrassed and wished Nur would control herself, while she stayed where she was like a child safe in her mother’s arms at last. I didn’t move but I said, ‘Nur. Let’s think of a way,’ trying to get her off me. Nur’s face was no longer on my shoulder but against my neck. I ignored the butterfly fluttering and stayed quite still. I felt a moist warmth, then a light-headedness that made me tremble and still I didn’t move. Nur’s face was still pressed against me. Suddenly the warmth of her breathing made my heart pound and a feeling surged through me that scared me. I trembled again but I didn’t want to pull away. I sat forcing myself to remain immobile, staring at the upholstery. Nur realized what was happening to me and as if she was taking me by the hand and advancing step by step, she paused for a little while before nuzzling her face against my neck, then encircling me with her arms and drawing me to her. The warmth spread over my neck, dropping down into my body at the same time. Shutting out everything else, I said to myself, ‘Nur’s kissing me,’ and I didn’t think as I did in real life ‘A kiss is between a man and a woman’, but just wanted more. Every point in my body that Nur reached she aroused and left in a state of agitation.

  My muscles didn’t stay tensed up and as they relaxed I found myself lying back on the bed then a rhythmic movement started up which made me dizzy from the different sensation of pleasure it produced in me. It was a beautiful purely instinctual rhythm, which seemed to take off and fly like the wisps of steam still floating about the room.

  Reality returned to me as soon as I became aware of Nur’s weight smothering me. I pulled my eyes away and fixed them on the ceiling. Then I felt a sudden nausea, then disgust, and wished I could disappear through the cracks in the ceiling. I didn’t want to stay lying there and give Nur the impression that I was happy at what had happened, and at the same time I wanted to be separate from my body and give it orders: tell it to stand up and go away just as I wanted to do, open the door and chase it out. But as it was I got up and stood there, not daring to look at Nur, or around the room, or down at my skirt. I’d pulled my skirt over my legs while I was still lying on the bed, knowing that I would never feel quite the same liking for them as I had done before, or look after them so carefully or bother so much about what tights I wore.

  My skirt looked as if one of Nur’s dogs had chewed it and spat it out. I wanted to turn to her and tell her that I had no connection with the woman who’d been panting with her a little while before. But I just went on standing there, quivering slightly, not daring to move, while Nur sat at her dressing table and reached for her hairbrush, loosened her plaits, brushed her hair, replaited it and pulled down her nightdress. She didn’t look at me but smiled in the mirror as she saw me leaving, and said goodbye. I couldn’t distance myself from what had happened. I went to the car and sat in it, my face almost touching the window, and saw nothing until I reached my own front door. I heard Basem and Umar talking together and longed to be sitting between them feeling bored, or lying in my bed ill, instead of having to go in to them now. I had a terrible desire to throw myself into their arms and cry. I wished I could rush into my room without seeing them. But I stood rooted to the spot when I heard Umar saying, ‘She’s here.’ I got as far as the dining-room when Basem intercepted me: ‘What’s happened?’ Trying to sound casual I replied, ‘Nur’s ill and I got the doctor to her.’ Jokingly he remarked, ‘If she’s ill why’s your face so pale?’ and I said quickly, ‘Her driver hit another car and I had a fright.’

  I swallowed. It was as if I had a big stone in my gullet which hurt me every time I breathed. I didn’t wait for Umar in the bathroom while he cleaned his teeth, as he asked me to. ‘I’ll come and see you in a little while, darling,’ I said apologetically.

  I went into my room and I knew how risky it would be to cry now but I couldn’t help it. I looked at the photo of me with Umar and Basem on my dressing table and turned it face down in case their eyes bored through me and saw the recent scene with Nur. Then I turned it back again and stared at Basem with his spectacles and pale eyes and smooth hair, and his big nose that was out of proportion to the rest of his features. The sight of his striped shirt whose collar I always sprayed with some special cleaner for collars and cuffs made him appear familiar, like a brother or friend or someone who had sat next to me at school.

  I went about the house like someone immunized against hearing and seeing until Umar’s bedtime. Then I went to bed the same as I did every other night, while Basem sat watching a film on the video until late. I closed my eyes and I felt as if I were emerging from a dark cave on to a blue sea glowing with light. I opened a window in my head and looked through it and saw a motor working soundlessly in a room lined with velvety wallpaper just as I’d pictured it before, with red and blue wires around it. I opened a window looking on to my heart and saw a motor boiling and thudding there. I asked my noisy heart, and my mind, which went silently back and forth in its room, what was on the pages which I hadn’t yet read. What was passing along those red and blue wires? What were the subjects of the paintings hanging on the velvet walls? What was the significance of a heart being heart-shaped when I didn’t even know who was beginning and who was reaching an end, who growing, who diminishing?

  I am Suha. I am twenty-five-years old. My mother is Sitt Widad and my father is Dr Adnan. I’m not bent like Sahar, although I’ve laughed and joked and exchanged comments and gestures about men with other girls like me. I’m normal. I saw myself on a bed in the cold of the mountain with Suhail, Aida’s friend, in the middle. All the guests had gone, carrying bags of grapes under their arms. I’d held a party to pick our grapes at the end of the summer. I’d had the idea because my parents were in Europe and I liked having my friends to visit me in my house. The three of us were drunk and I wanted some coffee to sober up. I got it ready but when I took it to the others I found Aida stretched out on my bed facing the wall with Suhail lying beside her, and without thinking I crept on to the bed behind Suhail. It was the smell of him perhaps, or the cold and being drunk, that made me squeeze up against him. He turned and reached his hand out to the back of my neck then moved it down my back and rested it there. I felt confused, comprehending all at once the sort of relationship which Aida and Suhail must have, but I let his hand reach under my skirt. ‘How are you feeling, Aida?’ ‘Fine,’ replied Aida, with her eyes closed. His hands were on my flesh, moving up the slope of my body, pulsating. Then he said, ‘Chopin,’ and Aida asked him, ‘Do you like Chopin?’ ‘I think he’s fantastic,’ answered Suhail, ‘and I like Ravel’s Bolero.’ I knew that Aida wouldn’t believe what I was doing now even if she turned over and saw it. She said, ‘I tried to make Suha like classical music.’ Suhail had begun breathing more heavily. He answered, ‘Suha likes rock,’ and lifted himself over me so he was at the edge and I was in the middle. I wanted to stay where I was but at the same time I wanted to get up. I wondered whether to let myself go and disregard Aida, but I felt sorry for her whichever I did. She said, ‘Suha likes blues as well,’ and Suhail said, ‘Really?’ as he opened his flies. ‘My head’s heavy,’ I said. I began to talk wildly about anything and gathered my hair up off my head while Suhail moved faster and faster then suddenly got up and asked, ‘Where’s the coffee?’

  The heart and the mind opened their two chambers, allowing me to steal a glance into them. I’m indifferent now to Suhail, Maurice, Adnan, Adil, and I understand that time takes a huge eraser and rubs out n
ames and then writes others in and renews feelings and emotions. I’d got to know Basem and fallen in love with him, and my heart had leapt for joy when he asked me to marry him. Now I didn’t want to look into either chamber. I chased away all the images and questions and misgivings and convinced myself that I’d forgotten what had happened in Nur’s room. But the heart and mind were faithful and searched virtuously through their records, unearthing causes and explanations which might supply them with adequate justification for eradicating the event. They made me see myself a month before, when I’d escaped to my bed and listened to a child crying above the sound of the air-conditioner, and music – Western, Arab and Indian – floating out over the rooftops. I’d put my hand under the pillow to pull it nearer to me and smelt Nur’s smell and heard her laughter and seen her thick black hair.

  I imagined her with a man, warm and at the same time powerless, pliant and bending like a doll made of dough, wanting what was forbidden. The severity with which it was forbidden reminded people of it at every moment, and it wormed its way into their minds and bodies. Even when you were buying tampons and sanitary towels and perfumes and spray deodorants, the man behind the cash desk changed colour and you knew what he was thinking about as he smiled or assumed an air of indifference. There was a campaign being conducted in the press against the display of women’s underwear, and its leader was a girl in her twenties who had already raised the subject of bracelets and other jewellery; according to her they were symbols of slavery reminiscent of the age of harems and slave boys and girls, and make-up and jewellery on a woman was a provocation to adultery and fornication even if it was made from behind veils and black drapes.

  Although these thoughts of mine drew things together and had some substance, I couldn’t help feeling miserable. I began reminding myself how I’d thought of Nur as having a kind of illness as I stared at the pillows and the cover that day, and said to myself this is where Nur rolled around and breathed fast and slow with a man, separated from him only by their fine body hairs. However, I couldn’t see it like that now, much as I wanted to.

  A week passed and I drifted in and out of reality, staring out of the window at the dusty desert and the mechanical waste. The telephone rang and I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to hear Nur’s voice. But she came to see me early one morning. She sat down on the sofa, then stood up and seemed to be examining my house for the first time. She grasped hold of the coral and shells, the puppets hanging from the ceiling, the old silver necklaces and bracelets and anklets, and smiled and sat down again in front of me, her limbs loose and relaxed. I was still only half there, trying to make normal conversation and not succeeding. Every question or statement I wanted to utter seemed to have a connection with us, either directly or indirectly, and I only breathed again when Nur left.

  When another day or two had gone by I began to feel a yearning. I missed the particular atmosphere that comes into being only if a person is alone, has spare time on her hands and is waiting for something to happen. For recently we had no longer sat chatting like visitors, each telling the other what she’d been doing. We’d begun to live our lives together, going to the department store, visiting Suzanne, entering the hotel in fear and trembling and ordering tea and cake only to rise up together after hastily swallowing the tea, because the looks of the other guests were almost beginning to be directed towards us, almost becoming a reproach. We went deep into the desert and saw a mirage of many colours. Instead of receding into the distance, it had come closer to us as we approached it in the car, and then it wasn’t a mirage after all.

  I couldn’t help exclaiming in wonder at the carpet of yellow and white daisies, other flowers whose names I didn’t know, and thick-stemmed ones standing straight as pegs: ‘Those are called snake poison,’ I said. It wasn’t the colours that made my heart beat faster, but the smell, fragrant and powerful and new and strange to my nose. I picked a daisy and brought it close to my mouth and chewed its petals, trying to bring together the taste and the smell. As we went further among the flowers the smell grew and changed, from jasmine, to white iris, to narcissus. We sat down on the grass and sand and Nur pulled the petals off the daisy one by one: ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ I stretched out and smiled as a sudden realization dawned on me. My relationship with Basem only existed inside the four walls of the house now; it didn’t even extend to the garden or the car or the street. I rarely sat next to him in the front seat of the car. I didn’t walk along with him in the street or go to the shops with him. We didn’t lie together beside the pool and I didn’t sit with him even on the back seat on the way to the airport; he sat in front next to Said. He’d never met Nur yet, or Tamr, and our conversations were brief, restricted to matters connected with everyday life, holidays, the news from Lebanon and family and friends.

  Through the rooms of my mind and heart passed images of how I’d gone to bed early, trying to read against the noise of the television and the laughter and talking of Basem’s friends. I’d stopped inviting men and women together because I’d become convinced that such gatherings were futile. The women furtively examined each other’s clothes, working out the financial situation of each other’s husbands so that they could feel either proud or jealous, while the men talked about money and business openly. I was glad that I wasn’t obliged to sit with them but it made me realize how lonely I was.

  Sometimes I used to refuse Basem when he came unusually early to the bedroom. It would depend on how fed up I’d felt during the day and how resentful that I was still in the desert. Sometimes I convinced myself that he had no alternative but to stay here, and that he was happy in his work. On these occasions I let him take me in his arms and cover me with kisses and I held him to me in memory of the past and the days of normality. However much I tried to relax I felt conscious of every noise outside and every movement in the bed, and the climax of our lovemaking was lost to me like a piece of paper blown near me by the wind, and blown away again every time I caught up with it. Then I felt angry because I’d shown a desire to participate and not come. Throughout the night I tossed and turned unable to sleep, as if I’d committed a sin, and as if I’d found out for the first time that I wasn’t in control of my body and that only my feelings could make it move, but they wouldn’t forget their dissatisfaction and were rebelling.

  Still breaking the petals off the daisy, Nur had said, ‘When they brought me back here and I saw the desert from the plane I screamed. In the car I threw up three or four times and when I got to the house I banged my head against the walls. I couldn’t sleep or eat and I wouldn’t greet my relatives without letting them see how angry I was. I sat for hours and days as dumb as that table. I locked the door of my room and got a mirror and stared at my face; I counted the hairs of my eyebrows and eyelashes, twisted my hair round my fingers, just like mad people do. All my life I never liked seeing the desert. My mother says that before I was old enough to understand, I used to cry and they didn’t know the reason. When I became conscious of my surroundings, I closed my eyes in the car. I was the opposite of my sisters and brothers. They loved looking out of the windows. I never did. It’s always made me depressed.’

  Our relationship wove itself together from day to day. I was like a fisherman who casts his line into water where he knows there are no fish, or even weeds, but feels a sense of calm and a release from the boredom of his routine every time he does it, and prefers it at least to doing nothing, although every day when he comes back to fish again he feels a little restless and disgruntled.

  In the days that followed, I plucked up enough courage to kiss Nur, when I’d shut my eyes and opened them fifty times. My limbs went numb before I reached that nameless, otherworldly region with her. I couldn’t open my eyes again easily; it was as if I was standing beside a large firework that might go off at any minute, or was dazzled in the presence of Nur the imperious queen bee. This was no longer an experiment; I’d tried a new fruit which I’d thought would be inedible and instead I’d found it intoxicatin
gly sweet; I couldn’t just spit out the stone and go on my way.

  Our secret relationship began to complement our relationship outside the house. I sensed a transformation: whatever plant it was I’d tasted had drugged me and made me lose my memory. I no longer noticed how slowly the time crawled by in the desert, or the pervasive smell of chemicals which used to irritate me so much, or the colours of the new buildings which I had once named Instant Ruins, or the wires hanging down from the outside walls, or the lack of trees. Feelings of agitation and rage no longer crept up on me as they had done before: now when I saw the women’s tailor poking his head out of his tiny window to receive material and a pattern from one of his customers, I shrugged my shoulders indifferently: and I laughed when I heard one of Nur’s mother’s visitors forbidding her daughter to go alone in Nur’s car. ‘If you leave a man alone with a woman, the Devil makes it three,’ she pronounced adamantly, despite Nur’s protestations that the driver’s morals were unimpeachable and he’d been with her for years.

  But I felt irritated when one day Nur came to me in my house; only then did our relationship seem a reality. Instead of the smell of incense and furniture and food which filled my senses when I was in her room, and her bed which was like the cockpit of a plane and was studded with buttons on either side and had a chamois leather bedhead to match her wardrobe and mirror and seat, there were Umar’s drawings blowing about in the draught from the air-conditioner and my yellow case on top of the wardrobe, and this time I couldn’t feel that I was a visitor or an onlooker. Previously I’d gone back home and it seemed as if I’d never left: Basem’s freshly-ironed clothes hung on the door knob; his clean shirts were still spread out on the bed to finish drying. I was aware of myself getting Umar’s things ready and answering the telephone and acting so normally that I began to question if I’d really only returned from Nur’s house a few minutes before, and if me stretching out on her bed and us kissing and clinging to each other and squirming about had really happened.