He asked if he could use the bathroom. I knew he wanted to be by himself, as usual when he was drunk or had been looking at pictures of women in magazines, and I wouldn’t let him, claiming that my son was about to come home. I went with him to the door, moved out of reach and his kisses, said goodbye and closed the door behind him.
In spite of my sense of victory, I thought sadly that there must be some way that I could marry him, and yet it appeared that the chance had passed me by. Maaz was no longer that ripe fruit hanging on a tree in the middle of the path. He’d changed and even seemed able to behave tolerably when he was drunk. In the past would he ever have left so meekly when he was in that state?
Alcohol used to make him crazy, and put me in a state of shock at the effect it had on him. Once he’d crumpled up on the sand and fallen asleep. I’d been terrified of the darkness and silence of the open countryside and when I tried to wake him up he opened his eyes and didn’t know where he was. It was as if he couldn’t see me properly or had forgotten who I was; he threw his empty bottle at me and then ran after me and I crept behind the car to hide. I heard him calling me an Israeli spy and asking me how I’d learnt Arabic so quickly, then he collapsed on to the sand again and I heard him snoring. I looked around me, frightened even of the moon and the stars. I was certain that the moving lights I could make out in the distance were a caravan of camels, but it was only a car because I heard the roar of its engine. I began to use it and other lights to guide me up on to the main road. Only then did I discover that blood was dripping from my forehead and that I’d left my shoes behind on the way. I stopped a truck by shouting and waving my hands about; the driver must have thought I was a stray camel from a distance because when he saw me and heard me saying ‘Please, home, please,’ his mouth dropped open, and he mumbled, ‘In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful,’ and looked around him. When he made no attempt to open the door, I said pleadingly, ‘You open door?’ and when he still didn’t move, I went round and opened it and got in. He went on looking at me as if I wasn’t real. I don’t know if he noticed if I was barefoot or not. I found myself repeating, ‘Thanks, brother,’ and this sentence of mine put him in a state of utter confusion because my blue eyes and blond hair didn’t go with my Arabic and my desert accent. When at last he started up the truck I relaxed, but only for a moment, because one hand was on the steering wheel and the other resting on his thigh and his glances travelled between my face and my body. I’d felt something hurting me on my forehead ever since Maaz had thrown the bottle at me but I’d ignored it. As a precaution against what I feared might happen, I put my hand to my forehead and when I saw a smear of blood on it I gasped, pretending to be frightened, and then became engrossed in wiping off the sand which was sticking to my face and hair. It wasn’t long before my fears that he had only one idea in his mind were confirmed: he stared at me, then, reducing speed, he moved his hand from his thigh to put it beside me; I cried out ‘God is great! God is great!’ looking at the blood on my hand and then striking myself on the face just as I’d seen Arab women doing when they were lamenting because someone had died. I kept saying, ‘God is great! God is great!’ then ‘Thank you, thank you,’ as I directed him to the street where I lived, using my hand and the word ‘left’ or ‘right’, until I called out, ‘Just here, brother,’ and opened the door and climbed down, leaving him stunned. I saw him in our street again every day for a while, alone or with others, driving slowly around in his truck as if he were looking for me; sometimes he seemed frantic, as if blaming himself for missing his chance.
2
Maaz came back sooner than I expected. I’d spent the whole afternoon in a state of nervous apprehension, thinking that he would surely have hit a tree or a telegraph pole and now be locked up in jail for being drunk. He stood facing me, and every cell, every drop of his blood, all his bones and the pores of his skin, his inhalations and exhalations, had abandoned their proper place and landed here in a mass which hadn’t properly gelled. It was as if he hadn’t known how to find the way to my house. He was bellowing at me, then kissing my feet, trying to eat the varnish off my toenails and when it wouldn’t come off he bit it and said it tasted red, then he pulled my hair and muttered to himself, ‘I don’t understand her scent. It’s not perfume, or incense, or sandalwood.’ He called me Suzie, Susu, Sinsin, Suad. This time I wasn’t aware of his body in spite of my longing for the pleasure of sex. I was waiting for the right moment to whisper to him that I was his wife and that we must get married. As if I’d actually told him what I wanted to say he began shouting at me, swearing to me that he was going to marry me and that I was his woman, the Suzanne of a lifetime, that without me he was camel dung, he was a toothpick; without me he was a eunuch; he told me that he’d seen me naked passing by his office door, and how as he’d pulled up in his car he’d seen my breasts undulating before him. He wouldn’t be quiet, and I left him shouting out his feelings while I went into the bathroom; I did my hair looking in the mirror, unable to believe what was happening; I put on fresh lipstick, powdered my face and neck, and splashed perfume everywhere, even on my thighs. ‘Long live Sita and herbal medicine, or magic,’ I thought. Then into my head there floated a vision of rows of bottles bearing my name and a picture of me in the main stores in America, and I saw myself talking on television about the time I’d spent going between desert and village and from tribe to tribe to collect prescriptions that could be classified under the heading ‘Love’. Then I saw myself in my own private clinic, wearing a white overall, with medicines and lotions all around me like Sita had, but mine would be in containers looking like bottles of French perfume. I’d be just like the foreign women who collected old silver jewellery and bedouin clothes and produced books with their pictures on the cover.
I heard a knocking on the door and went out but I couldn’t find him anywhere in the room. He was hiding behind the door and he snatched the towel off me and began looking all over the room: how should he start and where? On the bed, on the floor; he opened the curtains and closed them again; in the clothes cupboard, standing up, sitting down. The black pupils of his eyes darted about like a falcon’s eyes, pursuing his thoughts and stopping motionless at the impossibility of what he was thinking. I was flying through space, except I had one eye on my watch to see when it was time for Jimmy to come home from school. I became an instrument in his hands, the willing subject of his fantasy, and he didn’t leave me until sleep overcame him. Then I kept watch, not letting any noise infiltrate the room where he was sleeping, while Jimmy, delighted that Maaz had come back to visit us, sat trying to count his snores. I felt like a bedouin woman sitting with her son in her lap, waving the flies away from him, and giving him her breast day and night so that he’d stay young and be satisfied within the bounds of her breast and her lap.
My self-confidence returned and I no longer needed constantly to turn for comfort to the memories of the first few times with Maaz to feel confident and to make myself believe that he’d have to come back to me; this had been a shortlived confidence in any case, rapidly turning to dejection. I’d always begun by remembering the falcon which he left in the office on its wooden perch. Its wary, frightened eyes moved whenever I moved or hit a key on the typewriter. From time to time it spread its great wings, then fixed its eyes on my face again. The office was empty; even my boss Ahmad had gone off with the falcon’s owner. I couldn’t bear the bird looking at me any longer and I began to swear at it and tried to think of some way I could get out to go home. I gathered my courage and stood up and took one step; the bird moved, fluttering its wings, as if it wanted to fly. The noise of them was shockingly loud, and I clung to the wall again, even though the falcon remained chained to its perch, and stayed where I was until its owner returned. He laughed when I begged him to rescue me. I found his name hard to remember but I couldn’t forget his black eyes which were like the eyes of his falcon and watched me all through his visit to our office and began to amuse me after a while: I hadn’t
known before that a man like that could exist in real life and not just on the cinema screen.
He smiled constantly and sat in front of me like a faithful dog; as soon as my hand reached for the cigarette packet, he lit a match and fetched the ashtray, having first rubbed it with his fingers to make sure it was clean. He brought in a thermos flask of coffee which had cardamom in it. He took my cup in his hands and whenever I put it down on the table he held it against his heart and raised his eyes to the ceiling. When I laughed he presented the cup to me, mumbling something, and when I asked what he was doing he answered in broken English that he was bewitching the cup so that I would exchange feelings with him. Each time I reached the end of a piece of typing and heaved a sigh he came across and bent over me and asked if he should fetch a doctor. It was the way he kept on insisting that he would drive me home which really annoyed me: I was afraid that he’d make it difficult for Ahmad and me to be alone together, and answered him irritably. He pretended to be angry and disappeared, but when I went home I found he’d preceded me to the house.
Three days after I first saw him in the office he began to visit us regularly, never coming without presents. He brought a bottle of monstrously expensive cologne for Jimmy, who was no more than eight, a lamb and a gazelle, then a tortoise, a snakeskin, a basket of dates and leather slippers. We clustered around him and his presents, not believing what we saw. He brought a lizard and as he tried to extricate his hand from between its teeth, he struggled with it and spoke to it as if it was human; he asked us if we’d like to eat it if he slaughtered it and cooked it. He left his sandals at the door and wandered round our house barefoot and happy, touching everything and asking what you did with things, anything from my son’s toys to the automatic egg whisk. I would find him standing entranced by the rumble of the dishwasher, asking how it cleaned the plates, scoured the dirt off them and dried them; and how the oven cooked the chicken while I was away and stopped of its own accord.
After a while we began to be aware of the fact that we weren’t friendly with him just because of the presents he brought or the magazines, banned for their politics or the amount of bare female flesh in them, which he could get because of the work he did. It was more as if he was the unfamiliar desert land come into our midst. Jimmy grew accustomed to him and considered him a necessity in our life because we were here, just as Ringo was a necessity in the house. Meanwhile he admired our way of life and our possessions, and my knowledge and worldly wisdom: I read out to him the instructions accompanying medications; I sprinkled something from a bottle on a stain on his clothes and it disappeared; I could type a line in a flash without looking at the keys; I knew how to find my way around and what the street names were in Arabic; I loved Arab food and dipped my morsels of bread and rice into the meat juices the way that they did. I knew how to adjust the television, change a light bulb, paint a wall, read books, drive a truck.
For our part, we grew accustomed to eating the rice and meat which he prepared, to the way he ate with his hand, gathering the rice into a little ball and throwing it into his mouth, and the way he drank water straight from the water bottle but never touching it with his lips; the way he drank Scotch at our house, then got drunk and sang songs, the way he circled around me and the numerous questions which his curiosity provoked; his incomprehensible English, the way he kept saying my name; on one occasion this led me to answer exasperatedly, ‘Suzanne yourself’, and perhaps he hadn’t seen my expression because he immediately bent and kissed my hand repeating, ‘Suzanne yourself: that means you and I are one person.’ Then he said that he loved me very much, with a love that was as vast as the sand and the sky. He was bouncing around me and I extricated myself, laughing despite my embarrassment. He followed me into the kitchen, insisting that I visit his wife, Fatima, and when I refused he said that he wanted my opinion on installing an American kitchen just like mine in his house. I knew he was thinking up excuses, and I said to him, ‘I’ll give you the name of my kitchen and you can order it from the States.’ The sentence was hardly out when an idea flashed into my head: why didn’t I order a kitchen for him from the States and benefit financially, be a trading link between the desert and America?
I began to calculate in my imagination how much I’d make, and agreed to go; in any case I was anxious to see his wife: one day he’d telephoned her from my house, and tried to hand me the receiver so that I could talk to her, saying in English, in a tone of voice that was almost an order, ‘Speak to Fatima.’ At first I’d refused, uncertain what I should say, then I gave in when I saw the disappointment in Maaz’s eyes; Jimmy, disillusioned with me, had already decided to have a go and had snatched the receiver out of Maaz’s hand and shrieked down it in Arabic, ‘Hallo. Hallo, darling.’ When I spoke I said in Arabic, ‘Hallo, Fatima, how are you?’ and her voice came down the line to me like the speaking clock or the recorded information services, ‘Hallo. Hallo. Hallo,’ then silence, then laughter, then again, ‘Hallo. Hallo. Hallo.’
I think I understood the reasons why Maaz was attached to us from the moment I first entered his house, but I couldn’t fathom his wife’s attitude to me. She was young with a shy smile. When I held out my hand to shake hers, she embraced me and kissed me three times on alternate cheeks, and kissed my son, then ran into the kitchen. The house had a particular smell, and after a while I came to know that it was the smell of incense and basmati rice and heat all mixed together and that it was in all the Arab houses I visited, except Suha’s. I cast my eyes around the house. There was only basic furniture: a rug in deep colours, sombre sofas, dust over everything, and heat, because not every room had an air-conditioner in it. Maaz wandered between the kitchen and the room where we were sitting, just as he did in my house, carrying plates and cups of tea and fruit. I turned to Fatima and said, ‘Maaz’s doing the housework.’ She smiled and covered her teeth with her hand and turned to look at him: ‘Just today. For you.’ I thought, this house hasn’t seen a blond hair before today, and Maaz doesn’t trust his wife to do her duty towards the guests. Gradually I began to comprehend that they saw me as an important guest from Nixon’s land, the land of the oven that cleaned itself without spilling any water. My sense of my own importance began to increase, as if my yellow hair which hung lifelessly round my face had turned into shining gold, and my speech into pearls, for his children’s eyes were fixed on me and my son, and the neighbours’ children poured in to greet us and sat asking Maaz for an explanation of every word I said, then giving me smiles of admiration and encouragement. I thought to myself that at home in my own country I had never been spoken to or even looked at admiringly like this.
Fatima sat facing me, bending forward as if she was sitting on a sofa for the first time, her long dress covering the floor at her feet; she wore a headshawl, a veil over her eyes, and her hands and feet were stained with henna. We conversed with fleeting smiles, and I found that I was laughing and smiling without reason; I felt as if I were years younger than her, and like a spoilt child. Maaz interrupted, urging her to bring me more biscuits, since my son had swooped down on the plates like a flock of pigeons. Maaz’s two daughters had withdrawn into a corner and stood looking at me in astonishment. Only his little boy was unaware of my presence and cried continuously because his father had shut the door, and he still had the habit of eating earth in the garden. Maaz dominated the gathering with his movements and way of talking, as he did when he came to visit me; he didn’t care who was there when he told me in English that his love for me was vast as the sands and the sky, while Fatima smiled, then held out her hand as if apologizing to me for her husband’s behaviour; she didn’t understand what he said but perhaps she guessed because I did no more in reply to him than look arch and say, ‘Stop it!’
She seemed happy and told Maaz that having me to visit was more fun than watching television or going for a drive in the car. I smiled at her, trying to appear especially grateful because I’d noticed that she was hiding something in the folds of her dress. Perhaps l
ike Maaz she liked to give presents, either as a social obligation or because it made her feel happy. My curiosity grew and I followed the movement of her hand intently to try and see what she was hiding but only succeeded because her little son wanted her to pick him up. I saw a packet which in disbelief I made out to be jelly. Maaz began to sing in Arabic, pointing to his heart, his eyes dancing, till I ordered him to stop, smiling at Fatima who was happy and at ease with the company; the jelly packet must just be a wrapping for something else: in the women’s market I’d seen them putting gold in milk tins and silver in empty soap-powder boxes. Maaz’s little son threw the jelly packet and Maaz caught it and said to me, ‘Fatima wants you to teach her how to make jelly but she’s shy of you.’ I stood up inpatiently, trying to hide my disappointment, and Maaz took me to the kitchen with Fatima following slowly behind. I strutted proudly along in a new way, indifferent to my surroundings, pulling in the muscles in my bottom to make it look slimmer and more shapely. I tried to explain to her, but she only smiled and didn’t look at what I was doing, didn’t even seem to be listening to me, but just nodded and covered her mouth with her hand.
In the car Maaz tried to persuade me and Jimmy to go with him to a small village to see a newborn camel on a farm belonging to a friend of his. I didn’t raise any objections; his interest in me and his amorous behaviour amused me, and the monotony of these days needed some such novelty, especially since I no longer saw Ahmad.
When Maaz took off his headcloth and cord to try them on me, I saw his head, his hair, his forehead – and I saw a man, and as he reached out his hand to take the headcloth back I felt a fierce heat touching me. He returned his hand to the steering wheel and I longed to feel the heat again, and turned to Jimmy in the back of the car, smiling at him as if to excuse this urge in me, then turned back to look at Maaz’s brown hands which were covered in little black hairs. I caught sight of his white underpants through his loose robe and looked away, staring out of the window; his attempts to reach me had eventually succeeded: I’d previously been convinced that the whole idea was absurd, because I’d been sure that he knew all about my relationship with Ahmad from the first day he’d come into the office with the falcon.
Women of Sand and Myrrh Page 18