I kissed her on both cheeks, tasting the salty tears, then kissed her hands and embraced her, saying ‘You’re Taj, Crown of the Bride and Crown of Kings.* You’re no more mad than I am!’ This last sentence made my mother’s weeping rise almost to a lament, and she made a noise like a cat in distress.
She rocked her whole body and covered her face with her hands again.
Gradually her sobs abated and she indicated in the direction of her nose, then reached out a hand to me. I gave her a handkerchief from my pocket, and when she’d cleaned her nose and wiped her eyes she tried to speak without crying. Out came one sentence that I knew by heart: ‘I felt you between my shoulders.’ I wanted to say to her, ‘I know, I know,’ but I was afraid of annoying her and I let her go on. ‘I felt you between my shoulders, and I never once slept on my back, always on my stomach or my side. Every day I drank camels’ milk and sheeps’ milk and ate three dates, and the doctors injected me with a needle a span long. When you were born I saw the needle marks in your hands and thighs. God is great! You had no hair, no eyebrows or eyelashes, not even any hair in your nostrils. I began to put henna on you every Friday night. The other wives and their children laughed at me and said, “You’re wasting your time putting henna on the Safwan stone.” And I made myself deaf and dumb and blind. I hennaed your scalp and bought you combs and hairbands and even medicine for headlice. In the woman’s market they all made signs behind my back when they saw that damned Mawda trying to sell me a big bottle and saying to me, giggling and winking, “Perhaps Tamr needs this medicine from India. Everybody swears it’s like Solomon’s devils. One drop applied to the head does away with lice as if they’d never existed.” Just to show them all I said, “It can’t do any harm to have some,” put my hand in my bosom and paid for it.’
I looked at my mother’s breast, which was scarcely visible in the folds of her voluminous dress and answered, bored but sad at the same time, ‘I know, Mother. I’ve caused you anguish in the past and I’m still doing it. I know. I mustn’t talk to Aunt Nasab so much. In any case she’s just a guest, and in a couple of days she’ll be going back home.’ Then I added hypocritically, ‘From the way she was so hard on me and spoiled Awatef when we were in London, I know where I really stand with her.’
My mother gulped in agreement. ‘You don’t have to tell me about Nasab and Awatef. When the sheikh divorced you your aunt didn’t tear her hair or claw her chest in sorrow. Maybe she was glad. How could Tamr be married to a sheikh and not Awatef?’
‘God forgive her,’ I replied appeasingly.
Then I took my mother by the hand and pulled her up off the bed. ‘Come on, Crown of the Bride and Crown of Kings. Wash your face, put on your dress and do your hair. We’ve got lots of work to do.’
As I picked over the rice, minced the meat and chopped up the vegetables with enthusiasm, Rashid came in with the permit in his hand, still not able to believe that the ministry had given it to me. I smiled triumphantly and said nothing. I had to cook quickly. Batul had offered to help me with the cooking that day but I’d refused to let her. I wanted to prove that my opening the workshop wouldn’t mean I did any less housework.
I had many things to occupy my thoughts – such as purchasing machines, curtains, pins, scissors, a small fridge and two beds for the Filipinos – but still I was concerned about my mother. I thanked the Lord she was continuing to recover. Her anger and her sadness were normal this time and she didn’t refuse to leave her bed.
When I was little I lived with my mother in one room of a three-storey house. I used to wait for her to come to bed, watching her as she plaited her red hair and dipped her fingertips in warm oil. She would say to me with a smile, ‘You must be sleepy, Tamr. Don’t you want to hear about the Little Fish?’ I would be smiling too, knowing that she was teasing me. She never changed her way of speaking even when she was ill. She adjusted her veil as she said the story’s name, and always began by biting her lips. ‘Tamr, O Tamr, the Story of the Little Fish is the story of a poor girl whose mother had died, and whose stepmother was harsh and wicked. She made her stay in the kitchen, polishing the brass, fetching water, sweeping, dusting, stoking the fires and cooking, doing the washing, preparing the incense burner and putting henna on her stepmother’s hair.
‘O Tamr, O Tamr, one day her father caught one hundred fish, and the poor girl had to stay up all night gutting them. Her stepmother said to her, “You must clean all the fish tonight. If they weren’t full of evil, they wouldn’t make such a horrible smell.” When the girl took hold of the last fish it slipped from her grasp. She thought to herself that her swollen red hands must have grown tired, but the Little Fish cried and said in a loud voice to the girl, “Spare me and I’ll make you rich.” The girl was astonished that the fish had spoken, and she took fright. “God preserve me from the Devil’s curse,” she said. She looked hard at the Little Fish and saw that it was beautiful: its eyes were black, its nose small as far as she could see, its mouth a tiny opening; it had little even teeth and a shining silver skin. The Little Fish cried louder and begged the girl again, “Spare me, and I’ll make you rich.” The poor girl took pity on the fish. She put it under her arm and slowly opened the door. The snores of her stepmother and her father rose to the sky. She ran until she reached the sea. There she took the fish in her hands and said to it, “Little Fish, Little Fish, don’t cry and don’t wail. Go back to your mother and father and sister and brother, and to your neighbours and your Qur’an teacher. Goodbye.” The girl went back to the house, and when she heard the snores of her stepmother and her father still rising to the sky, she heaved a sigh of relief. The next day the Sultan’s son was giving a party to end all parties, with meat and rice and sweets in abundance. And every boy and girl and every man and his wife went to the party, all except this poor little girl. Her stepmother left her in the kitchen with a big bag of rice and ordered her to pick the weevils out of it grain by grain. Then she sprinkled salt on the floor and ordered her to gather it up grain by grain, and scared her with stories about the Judgement Day and how God would make her spend eternity sweeping salt off the floor with her eyelashes if she didn’t do as she was told now. The poor girl sat on the floor crying, and began trying to pick the weevils out of the rice, but the creatures slipped through her fingers. Suddenly she heard a sweet voice saying, “This is the Little Fish. I’ve made you a dress of coral from the sea, and jewellery of shells and pearls so that you can go to the Sultan’s palace.” The poor girl turned in surprise and called out, “Where are you?” Then she looked back at the floor and said, “What about the weevils and the rice and the salt?” The Little Fish replied, “Don’t bother about them. I’ll make the rice clean and white for you and drown the weevils and put the salt in a jar. Off you go. Goodbye!”
‘The girl looked down at herself and found she was wearing a lovely dress, and from the window she saw a coach with a huge shell for a seat, driven by a young giant. So off she went to the palace and the Sultan’s son fell in love with her beauty and her sweet disposition, and she married him, Tamr, and lived till the Judgement Day and had both sons and daughters.’
Only when I was stretched out in bed listening to the tale of the Little Fish did I feel happy, for my mother looked peaceful and beautiful, and the smell of food and coffee and laundry soap had faded from the room which was our home.
My mother cooked our food and washed our clothes in this room, and we didn’t leave it except to rush down the long staircase and back again, my mother clutching meat and vegetables in her arms as if she were a thief. I grew used to hearing her voice cursing and threatening up the stairs from the first floor. Sometimes the sound of another voice mingled with hers. I was glad whenever I saw that she had the bucket, because then I would run out of the room and lean over to watch her hauling up the rope with a frown on her face.
Because she was in such a hurry, most of the water in the bucket slopped out on its way between the two floors, and sometimes one of the boys, in spite of t
he speed at which it was moving, dropped a pebble or a date stone or a bit of paper into it, to see my mother Taj go crazy with anger and curse Jauhar and Najeeya at the top of her voice. I rarely left the room day or night except to go to the lavatory, and then I went with my mother. As we descended the two flights I would try to loiter and she would scold me in annoyance: ‘No time ago you were clutching yourself, and now you’re prancing about as if you’ve got all the time in the world.’ I wanted to see the other children, and Jauhar and Najeeya, and stare into their faces, for I could see more likeness between me and them than between me and my mother. But without realizing it I lowered my gaze each time I met one of them in the hallway of the house or at the bathroom door.
I felt as if I lived with them because I could hear the sounds of their voices and the noise they made as well as if they were in the room, and when I couldn’t hear them I waited expectantly until I could. My mother told me their life histories from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning until she went to bed at night; she recited stories that I didn’t understand, but I recognized that at the core of them lay a deep hatred. All the same I was curious about them, and longed to go down to the rooms where they lived and talk to them and play with their children. More than once I’d seen Jauhar and Najeeya pulling my mother’s hair and jumping on top of her and hitting her; they would shriek when my mother bit their hands and their thighs, while the children cheered them on delightedly, chanting, ‘The Turkish woman’s mad! The Turkish woman’s mad!’
I even began to long for us just to open our door because they used to leave their rubbish beside it, a dead rat, potato peelings, a gold paper crown, all of which, as far as I was concerned, formed part of a dialogue between me and them.
How I wished I could explain to them how much I longed to know them – even though our mothers fought and I’d once seen goat dung thrown outside our door – and how much I’d loved the gold paper crown which they’d discarded there; I’d tried it on and I wanted to keep it, but my mother pulled it off and tore it with her teeth.
It was when my mother lost my gold bangles, a pendant formed of the words, ‘What God has willed’, and a Qur’an studded with diamonds and sapphires which had been a present from the Sultan, that my aunt came to take us to live with her, for my mother was frantic. When she discovered the things were missing she’d rushed down the stairs to Jauhar’s like a tornado, as if she were certain that Jauhar was the culprit, and overturned the furniture and even ripped the bedding and began feeling around in it. Jauhar and her children couldn’t do anything to stop her, and my mother turned her fury on Najeeya and twisted her arm and spat in her children’s faces. When she found the door locked in her face, she began to retreat, then returned to the fray, charging the door like a bull. It withstood her assault and she raised her eyes to heaven, beseeching God to destroy them one by one. Nejeeya and Jauhar were afraid of her coloured eyes and the red freckles on her face and her red hair, the like of which they’d never seen before. Each of them hurried to protect her own children, covering their little faces with the hems of their dresses.
Life was different in my aunt’s home, and I couldn’t help wondering why we hadn’t moved there before instead of staying in that room, why indeed we’d never visited her, nor she us. For my aunt had an abundance of love, a broad smile, and a laugh which everyone in the house could hear.
Even my mother sat calm and beautiful at my aunt’s side, except sometimes when she remembered episodes with Najeeya and Jauhar. She was the focal point of any gathering. Her appearance was so different from all of theirs that she dazzled and shocked them, but what she said must have fascinated them, for all the women, even my aunt, listened as if they were bewitched. I began to enjoy playing with my cousins, especially Awatef who was the same age as me. The boys went to school and came back with books full of pictures, which opened my mind to things I hadn’t known existed: once I asked about the pictures of fishes that caught my eye, and one of my cousins told me all about them. I waited for him at the door in the heat of the sun and afterwards I shook my head sorrowfully and said, ‘If only the woman who teaches us about religion gave us books like the ones you’re allowed to read.’ I took the books in my hands, staring at the pictures. Once I read the word ‘God’ and was amazed to find that I could read and understand a book that wasn’t the Qur’an. When I began to be able to read what he read, and study what he studied and write what he wrote, the tears that I had shed regularly every morning when it was time to go to the Qur’an teacher were replaced by a sense of gratitude. I no longer minded her hard eyes, and I gave up counting the buttons on her veil and lavished all my attention on her mouth, deciphering the symbols for the words and then asking her if I was writing my name correctly.
With my aunt I visited the market, rode in the car, went into the desert and slept in a tent, and with my aunt looking on, I stood while our Indian neighbour fitted material on me for a dress. Running my hands over the gold and silver threads, I asked my mother curiously if a feast day was approaching. It was my aunt who answered: ‘No, Tamr, this is for the daughter of one of my relations in Iran.’ I didn’t ask which one as she had many relatives over there. Not a month went by without her inviting a family from Iran or Bahrain to stay; I used to think that every woman wearing an abaya and a veil was a relation, and I would stop in the street and refuse to go on until my mother had said hallo to the moving abayas.
But the nice clothes were for me: they hennaed my hands and feet one morning and dressed me in one of the dresses that same afternoon. They took me to my father’s house where Jauhar and Najeeya and my father’s fourth wife were waiting, and for a moment I thought of the bucket and the rope and the servant. My mother and my aunt were there to accompany me, and I suddenly wondered if this could be my own wedding. The neighbour’s daughter once told me that she’d known about her father’s second marriage because there had been so many baskets and metal containers around, full of cooked rice and meat, and here I was confronted with bags and boxes of provisions, and my mother tasting a bit of rice and saying, ‘They’re obviously mean. God help us! You can count the cardamon pods and cumin seeds with the naked eye. God help my precious Tamr!’ Then I heard drumming and women trilling. ‘Mother, mother!’ I cried. ‘Are you marrying me off? I’m not even a woman yet!’ I knew about puberty from the Qur’an, although it was the teacher who had described monthly periods as ‘dirty’. ‘Are you marrying me off when you know it’s wrong?’ I asked again. ‘It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s to a boy or a grown man.’ ‘Hush, Tamr,’ replied my aunt. ‘Don’t be ungrateful. A man is an adornment, a crown for your head, a staff to strengthen your heart.’ I wept, without knowing why. ‘Mother, mother, will you be staying with me?’ I asked her, and when she nodded I felt reassured.
The women beat the drums and trilled and sang. Women I didn’t know entered the gathering. The chanting and songs rose higher, and I saw the professional entertainer whom I’d seen singing at other weddings. I’d always wondered why money was showered upon her and watched her hiding it in her breast, as she was doing now. When I saw the neighbours and their daughters kissing my mother and looking at me, I thought, ‘Perhaps I’m already married,’ but I pushed the thought away. I’d heard that the bride was wrapped up in a carpet or rug. Before my father came in my aunt shouted, ‘Anyone who’s unveiled should cover herself!’ The women gasped and if they saw my father picking me up it was only by sneaking a glance, but when I screamed ‘Mother! Mother!’ they couldn’t resist throwing back the covers from their faces.
He carried me to his room at the centre of the house and I saw a young man sitting on a mountain of mattresses with a white cover draped over them. I screamed. When my father had gone, the young man stood up. I screamed again and took a few steps backwards. He didn’t move or speak, and I retreated to the door. I stood there for about an hour and whatever he did, whether he took a step in my direction, climbed up on the bed, or said something, I screamed. I
wanted to open the door but I could hear the tambourines and drums and the women’s trilling. I kept my face to the door and when the noise died down and the drums fell silent, I opened it and closed it again. I stood for perhaps another hour before I opened it and this time went out and ran from room to room searching for my mother. I found her in her bed and squeezed up next to her, and put my arms around her, sobbing. She put out an arm to hold me and I wished she’d recite the story of the Little Fish to me until I was calmer. I couldn’t sleep because of the long gold ear-rings and chain and belt that I was wearing. I took them off and put them down on the floor. When I heard the dawn call to prayer, I started up in fright and found that my mother was no longer beside me in bed. She was doing her ritual ablutions. Kissing me, she said, ‘Good morning on this blessed morning, Tamr.’ I didn’t answer: I wanted to cry, but I didn’t.
My father’s fourth wife made the breakfast, and my mother arranged the dishes on the mat. I sat by my aunt who hugged me and quoted some expression about the musk from deer. I didn’t know what she meant but the phrase stayed with me until I was grown up, and one day I asked her what it meant. She didn’t remember saying anything about musk on my wedding morning but told me that it was the most precious of all scents, and they gathered it from sacs under the bellies of certain male deer. She had some which she’d acquired from a woman whom she met on the pilgrimage, in exchange for a sheep. Then I remembered that distinctive smell which had dominated every detail of the wedding and stayed in my sensory memory, so that whenever I smelt it the wedding came back to me.
That morning they put me in another dress and replaced all my gold jewellery and sat me on mats piled high in the heart of the gathering. The tambourines began to play and the dancing and singing started up again and went on till nightfall. Everyone enjoyed themselves enormously. I saw the boys and girls I used to play with, and even the younger ones were peeping round the door, sticking out their tongues and rolling their eyes, making me laugh. Amidst all this excitement I forgot the coming night, although I hadn’t thought about what was going to happen and why I was afraid. This time my mother took me to the room, and before my eyes had adjusted she left abruptly, and the confused young man took her place. I screamed and shrank against the wall. He took no notice and said nothing. Now it was his turn to stand for ages with his face to the wall. When I stopped shouting, I stood where I was and only moved my eyes when a sound came from the bed and I looked to see him stretched out there facing the wall.
Women of Sand and Myrrh Page 12