Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  I sat there just as I had done before we left Texas to come here, when I was getting ready to let the house, and finding boarding-schools for our three daughters. The difference between me then and me now was a difference in the way I felt. The world beyond the desert seemed far away. I seemed to be a different Suzanne now, and I found myself speaking my name: ‘Suzanne. Susan.’ Then in a louder voice: ‘Suzanne. Suzanne,’ until I heard Ringo asking if I was calling him. I was calling myself, asking if I was the same Suzanne or Susan who’d sat in Texas, a woman in a house like any other house, or an ant in a garden like any other garden.

  Here, because I sat at a typewriter, people looked at: me with surprise and admiration on their faces. I passed through the minds of everybody in the houses round about, just as they passed through mine, and those people who went by my door, if they didn’t long to come in, at least they thought about me. This knowledge stole all through me and made me feel calm and secure.

  I’d been an ordinary American housewife in the past, washing my children’s nappies and enjoying folding them up neatly, switching off the lights in their rooms every evening with a feeling of real happiness because they’d eaten and washed and gone to sleep. I would pick their clothes up off the floor and be delighted when I saw dirt on them because it saved me the trouble of deciding whether to wash them or not; seeing the family eating sandwiches without asking where the cooked food was pleased me too as I calculated to myself that they could eat the roast which I’d prepared for that evening the next night. I sat in front of the television from the early morning following the soaps. I read romances and detective novels and drank Pepsi continually. I couldn’t find any real reason why my relationship with David was lukewarm; we never quarrelled and I was sure that it was what happened to married couples, even after a passionate love at the start. Even though I was relatively young, I can’t have been in touch with any lively circles of people. I never gave a thought to other countries or even to neighbouring states, until I talked to Barbara. Barbara was the owner of a gallery, which I’d never entered in my life although it was near my home. She caught my attention because she dressed like the magazines and television commercials in cotton and silk, clothes by designers whose names I’d heard of and thought were for a special sort of woman, like Jackie Kennedy and foreign princesses. I don’t remember ever seeing her in polyester trousers or with her hair tied up out of the way; her hair was always clean and newly done, the gold bangles jangled on her wrist and the chains and necklaces round her neck. Barbara stopped me, just as she stopped everyone else she saw and asked them to visit her. I knew that her interest in me was instrumental, since it was inconceivable that my mundane personality could have attracted her; I was a potential customer and she wanted me to see her gallery. But I was wrong, for after a short time things which I’d never seen in my life before like engraved wood, copper and brass, paintings on silk, appeared less interesting to me than her conversation. She talked a lot about her life in India where she’d been a teacher, and her two train journeys round the subcontinent, on one of which she’d surprised a gang trying to smuggle stolen jewels in her luggage and got to know her husband who was one of the passengers who’d jumped up to help her. At this, I stared at her necklace, so she took it off and dropped it into my hands, telling me that it was made of precious stones. I felt embarrassed by my red hands and my nails next to her long painted ones. She went on to explain how she’d won over the Indian jewel merchant and begun buying a single stone from him every now and then. At: last she asked, ‘What about you?’ and fell silent. I smiled at her and reached for an ashtray, cheaper than most of the other things, and refrained from telling her that my life had been uneventful except for a burglary at our house some years before.

  I remembered the strange feeling that came over me when I took that brass ashtray out of its bag and put it on the table at home. For the first time I was unable to sit indolently, my mind undisturbed by anything but the most obvious domestic duties; I began to think about Barbara and her way of life and her liveliness, and was curious to see her again. This feeling led me to another feeling which I can’t describe but it was as if I’d lost something, or as if I was watching an isolated episode from a television series.

  I visited Barbara again the moment David told me that he’d been offered a job in an Arab country in the desert. It seemed that at last my chance had come to tell her with pride that our life too was interesting. She gave me great encouragement to go there and said that we’d live like characters in A Thousand and One Nights. I smiled in polite acquiescence, although I’d never heard of the book, then she began to tell me about the riches, the palaces, the jewel-studded fabrics, while I looked at the gold she had and thought happily how I would surely be able to buy similar things in the Arab country since David’s salary would be double what he earned here. She said that Omar Sharif came from the same country, also the Empress Soraya. I was at a loss to know whom to believe: my father told us to watch out for fleas and lice, and my aunt warned us against scorpion stings and said they loved blondes’ blood.

  The feeling that had come over me when I was looking at the brass ashtray, an article that had no connection at all with the rest of the furniture in the house, came over me again the night we landed at the desert airport, and I was sure that something which would be quite unfamiliar to me was about to happen. The black eyes stared at me often, and I stared at the white cloths on the men’s heads. My son pointed at them and asked if they were the shepherds who’d come to see Jesus in the manger. I laughed. When I laughed, the black eyes smiled. The man who stamped my passport looked at my photo then at my face then back to the photo. He passed a finger over his lips and sighed, and I realized that the bold eyes were admiring and pleading at the same time.

  When David came home, I’d organized on paper and in my mind what was to be done. I told him that Maaz and I were going to get married. With great deliberation, and continuing to spread butter on his toast, he asked, ‘When?’ This reaction should have put me at ease but I burned with anger. He went on crunching his toast and I didn’t answer that we’d have to be divorced first. Perhaps he’d forgotten that we were still married. I felt a strong desire to tear the toast out of his hands and rub it into his face. ‘You seem pleased,’ I said, and then I began to scream at him, accusing him of being without feeling, self-centred, weak. In a loud voice I remarked that I wondered how he’d been able to land this job of his. Then I answered my own question with sarcasm, still talking loudly: ‘You must have deceived the evil spirits themselves.’ ‘I’m pleased,’ he answered, ‘because it’s what you want, a divorce from me, because you’re unhappy with me, and naturally I want your happiness.’

  ‘The children stay with me,’ I shouted, ‘and Maaz will be their father, and you won’t see them at all.’ ‘As you wish,’ he replied amid the crackling of toast in his mouth. ‘You’re mad!’ I cried. ‘Do you think I’m going to pay for them? You’re their father, and you can be responsible for them.’

  This time his only response was a sigh, a shake of the head, as if to say, ‘Give me strength.’ I stood up, pushing the plate and the bread and butter and honey away from him to the other end of the table but trying to make my voice sound normal, as if it were unconnected with my actions: ‘Jimmy will stay with me, and the three girls will stay where they are and we can share them in the holdiays.’ ‘Fine,’ he replied, and I went on provocatively, ‘Of course I’ll convert to Islam and bring up Jimmy as a Muslim.’

  ‘As you wish,’ came the answer.

  I pictured Jimmy trying to read the Qur’an in a Muslim school, and the teacher scolding him for his ignorance, and I shouted, ‘You’re the same as you always were and you’ll never change: cold and selfish, interested in nobody but yourself; you don’t care what happens to your children.’

  It was obvious that I’d tried his patience as far as he was prepared to allow me, for he began as he usually did on such occasions to tell me that I was mad, talking
in his normal voice as if debating a point with me.

  I responded by saying he was the one who’d reduced me to this state, and I meant what I said. I accused him of being cold, of feeling pleasure only when he was flying his model areoplanes, and suggested that he preferred sex with other men, and was having a relationship with Ringo. When he remained with his head bowed over the table, I screamed at him that he must have taken money from Ahmad, otherwise why would he have left me alone that first night with all the men, and here he was now giving his blessing to my relationship with Maaz.

  At this point he could no longer control his agitation, perhaps because Ringo was in the kitchen. He got up, but instead of coming towards me he made for the door and went out.

  I opened it and shouted after him, ‘I’ll be in touch with our lawyer.’ ‘I was in touch with him several weeks back,’ he replied. ‘He’s doing the paper work for the divorce.’

  Only then was I forced to confront my fears: two days went by without Maaz contacting me. On the third day I thought I could feel the beads of sweat seeping through the faint hairs on my upper lip. I wiped them away with my hand, and leapt up to dial his number. Fatima answered with a laugh, and said, ‘Maaz’s at work.’ I dialled his office number, and a colleague of his drawled, ‘Darling. Honey,’ when he heard my voice. I shouted back, ‘Can you get Maaz, please,’ but he knew that I was Suzanne. The whole town must have known about my affair with Maaz. Then I heard Maaz saying in his usual way, ‘Darling. Honey. Ooh darling, I miss you.’ I wasn’t reassured. These were the words he always used, even in the days when he’d stopped coming to see me. ‘When will you come today?’ I asked him, talking fast. He asked me if Ringo was at home, which surprised me, because he didn’t usually bother. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I replied tersely. I heard him talking to his colleague and interrupted irritably, ‘Hallo, Maaz.’ ‘Darling,’ came the reply, ‘I’ve got some brochures for Sri Lanka.’ As if I hadn’t heard properly, I repeated, ‘Brochures for who?’ ‘Sri Lanka,’ he said quickly. ‘Tell that son of a gun Ringo to wait there till I come.’ I held my tongue, not wanting to argue with him or question him. I was anxious that no animosity should develop since he’d come back to me.

  I hovered about, thinking that I couldn’t wait for Maaz without doing something to take my mind off my feelings of hatred for David, which were growing with every breath I took. I thought about taking down the Afghan rug from the wall, and gathering together everything which I’d bought or Maaz had given me. I picked up the stuffed lizard with a snake in its mouth, and put it beside the brass coffee pots, and the skin of some animal I didn’t know. I couldn’t think where to begin, and what to do with all this stuff, or where we would get married, and where we would live. I threw myself down on the sofa in a state of collapse and instead of thinking about myself and Maaz I began thinking about David, and clenched my teeth as if I were about to enter the ring with him.

  Fifteen years I’d been with him. Fifteen years and I didn’t know him, even though I knew the number of hairs on his shoulders. After a few years of marriage his interest in me had begun to grow less bit by bit. If I’d read about this in the problem pages of women’s magazines I wouldn’t have believed it. It was a feeling that led to madness, and after a while to recklessness and then to frustration. Gradually he cut down on the time he spent talking to me, then on how often he slept with me. I assumed he must have another woman. I tried to catch him out, and I kept an eye on his mail, stood waiting at a discreet distance opposite the building of the company he worked for, and eavesdropped on his telephone conversations. I discovered nothing, except that he was no longer interested in me. If ever I tried to put my arms round him when we were watching television, he pushed me away saying that he’d rather wait till the sports programme had ended; it seemed that he was genuinely fanatical about sport on TV, and that it absorbed all his attention. In bed I would approach him and he would move me off, saying that he didn’t like me to be the one to start. When I waited for him to make the first move, he turned on his side away from me, wishing me good night. But I didn’t know the full extent of his indifference to me until that morning when I’d found myself naked in Ahmad’s garden.

  I remember that when Ahmad brought me home in his car and dropped me in front of the house and disappeared, I stood for a few minutes at the door, not daring to knock. When I knew that I couldn’t bring myself to knock, I gave the door a push to prove to myself that I was capable of some action, and to my amazement it wasn’t locked. I took off my shoes and picked them up, and went into Jimmy’s room, then into our room. David was fast asleep. I crept quietly into bed and held my breath, waiting. In spite of my fear I couldn’t help thinking about how much I’d seemed to mean to the men I’d spent the evening with, especially Ahmad, and how I didn’t mean anything to David. In his looks, his ways of behaving and the amount of respect he showed me, he didn’t compare with Ahmad. For the first time I criticized David’s heavy body and large stomach to myself.

  The next morning David got up and said good morning to me in a normal tone. Then he asked me if I’d got on all right with the Sri Lankan servant. I nodded my head and remained silent for a while, not knowing what to say. In the end I asked him if he’d enjoyed himself last night. ‘Nice people,’ he replied, tying up his shoelaces. ‘Shall I send the car round for you?’ I didn’t answer. I was astonished at his behaviour, and didn’t get out of bed for some hours.

  4

  Maaz arrived carrying tourist brochures and a number of fashion magazines. I wasn’t interested in the magazines or the fashions, although I pretended to take them with some enthusiasm so that he’d feel useful. I begged my ears to let me hear what I wanted to hear from him, but I despaired and my ears grew numb with waiting.

  I began to blame myself for not marrying him the day he’d come back to me, when he’d lost his equanimity and shouted that I was his wife. Here I was now listening to details about travel, hotels, cash, the sights to be seen. I found myself gripping the edge of the sofa, afraid to let slip a single word in case I said that the most distant place I wished to go to was well within the confines of the desert; but then instead of just listening as I’d promised myself that I would, I interrupted: ‘We don’t need to take planes and travel abroad. We can marry at your mother’s.’ ‘Aren’t you getting divorced first?’ he asked. ‘It’ll only be a short time before my divorce comes through,’ I replied.

  He put up his hand as if to wave a fly away from his face. ‘It’ll work out fine, God willing, Suzanne.’ Then he turned back to Ringo, all eager to hear about Sri Lanka.

  Every time I began to think that there would be no harm in going abroad with him now, a light flashed in my head, warning me that he was planning to make the trip alone. I sat there, trying to put this notion out of my mind, and actually covered my mouth with my hand to stop myself saying anything: I didn’t want to give him even the slightest impression that I had any doubts about whether I was meant to accompany him.

  I began to compare the preparation for our previous trip abroad with what was happening now. He hadn’t believed that I was really going to go with him. He’d paced around me with his ticket in his hand, wanting to make sure that the date of the flight was written on it, and his name, comparing his ticket with mine to see that we were travelling on the same day. This was because he’d bought his own ticket, but given me the money to buy mine myself since he’d begun to be scared about our relationship. It was Suha who’d made me understand that Maaz was genuinely afraid, when I recounted to her how he sneaked into our house, how he wore a different headcloth every day – white, striped, blue, red, brown – how sometimes he’d hide his eyes behind dark glasses, and sometimes he’d wear spectacles borrowed from a colleague at work even though they made him trip up; how he began to come empty-handed, without his confiscated goods; and how when he started to jump up and hide under the bed, imagining that he’d seen something move or heard a noise, I could no longer restrain myself from laugh
ing uncontrollably. It had always seemed to me that he was putting it on, for I’d never before seen him at all concerned at: the prospect of being caught. Around the same period, I grew weary of him accusing me of not loving him each time he asked me to marry him and I refused, ostensibly because of Fatima and David and my children and his children. So all in all I had welcomed the idea of a trip abroad with him, the more so because the hotel where he’d made reservations was like the luxury hotels I’d seen in advertisements, and this was a unique opportunity to visit Europe. I avoided looking at him when we were at the airport although he wasn’t looking in my direction; he was comforting his son who’d been hit in the face by the bag hanging from his shoulder in the crush of people saying goodbye to him, kissing him on the nose and forehead as if he were about to embark on a journey from which there was no return. He looked like a stranger to me, dressed in a suit and shoes which seemed to make it difficult for him to walk.

  Although we sat side by side we didn’t move close to one another or speak until the aircraft had taken off and the noise of the engines was drowned by the passengers who broke into applause to express their joy at the freedom and the drink. Maaz began to order one glass after another, and to joke with the stewardess, and with the other passengers round about him. Then he stood up and began distributing dollars to them, insisting that they accept them, while some laughed at him and others joined in the game. I was embarrassed and sank down in my seat, pretending to be asleep. He talked and drank and guffawed all the way, and to my surprise when the plane landed, he took the names and addresses of several of his fellow passengers and promised to be in touch with them. I decided to myself that we wouldn’t go out much in order to avoid the embarrassing situations which arose all the time with him. But he wasn’t content, as I’d thought he would be, to draw the curtains and stay in our hotel room: I didn’t know that he and I had other means of communication besides our bodies.