I dismissed all these ideas as I pictured how Suha would look at me, and slipped quietly out of the door leaving it open behind me. I went back along the empty street, cursing her at first then feeling annoyed with myself for not waking the driver up to bring me; he must have noticed my relationship with Suha, and with the Italian woman who’d come to the desert at my mother’s request to design a garden of artificial trees and flowers. I quickened my pace along a street that I’d never been in before on foot even in the daytime, and pulled the headcloth tight around my face, ready to talk in a deep rough voice if I met anyone. With every hurried step I took my dislike of Suha grew. What if I was discovered now? I’d be in disgrace and people would think I was meeting a man.
For the first time I was glad to see the wall of my house in the distance, to take refuge in my room, but as soon as I’d forgotten about the fear which had taken hold of me out in the street, Suha started to dominate my thoughts again. Plenty of people had occupied that place before her, men and women, but only for a short time, and before I got to know them well. Suha was the exception: I’d been crazy about her all the time, perhaps because she’d lost interest in me moments after we met in the swimming-pool. Her thoughts were always somewhere else, and when they weren’t, she complained and grew irritable. Even when she began to come round to my house it was because I insisted and phoned her continually and persistently. Only once did I feel that she envied me, and that wasn’t for my clothes or jewellery but just for the swimming-pool, when she said that she wished it was in her garden, then took it back and said she’d prefer the merest drop of water away from the desert to this swimming-pool of mine.
At first I thought she was putting on her indifferent attitude, because I’d never met anyone who wasn’t attracted by my personality and my way of life, or just my hair, or my house and all the entertaining things in it. She even began to criticize the number of servants that I had and the noise of the video and the general anarchy; she said the gazelles had no life in their eyes, no beauty, none of the magic that gazelles were famous for. Looking at my clothes one day she asked where I was going, and laughed scathingly at me when I said, ‘I’m staying at home.’ I only realized the full extent of her pride when she refused a present I’d tried to give her, even when I sent it back to her with the driver. When I spoke for too long on the telephone in her presence she left and at that I decided to have no more to do with her, reminding myself of all the people who were only too anxious for my company; but I discovered that I preferred to spend my whole time desperately trying to reach her and dominate her. Being turned down by her had a magic similar to the feeling I had when I was chasing my cat to pick her up and cuddle her: when I finally succeeded in catching hold of her I was always overwhelmed by a desire to give her a lesson she wouldn’t forget.
I wished Suha would come to me at that moment, or to be honest, I longed for any human being who would hold me until the first ray of sunlight stretched down through the darkness, but the silence deepened.
I dialled her number and let it ring and didn’t put the receiver down even when I heard her husband repeating, ‘Hallo. Hallo.’ I wanted to hear a human voice; dawn was still a long way off, I was scared of being alone, and the voice repeating, ‘Hallo. Hallo,’ restored life to me in spite of its dry tone. I got out of bed and took a tablet from a packet in the drawer among my lipsticks and eye make-up. I noticed it was grubby and began looking for a clean one but they were all the same. Without giving it time to work I swung back the mirror near my bed and pulled out a white phone; the existence of this phone was known only to me and a telephone engineer who’d demanded a large sum of money to install it secretly. I dialled a number and heard the voice that I remembered so clearly. He sounded drowsy this time but as soon as he heard my voice, he answered excitedly, ‘It can’t be …’ I hadn’t contacted him for days because the line had been out of order and I hadn’t dared risk using either of the other two. His excitement was obvious, because subconsciously he’d promised himself that he was going to get something out of this call. Every time I spoke to him I wanted more, and as I’d expected I heard the heat in his voice down the receiver and I began to talk to him. I’d learnt his habits, which video films he liked best, and from my knowledge of the details of his life I’d built up a picture of him in my imagination.
‘Where have you been all this time? I’ve melted down my fingertips trying to hit on the right number for you. You must give me your number for emergencies.’
‘I was away,’ I answered, and thought to myself that the poor man really had no idea who I was. All he knew was that I liked Warda al-Jazairiyya because he’d heard her singing in the background when I was talking to him; since I didn’t like being alone I used to beg him not to say goodnight to me even after an hour, but just to carry on talking, even though my eyes were closing and he’d stopped answering. As usual our conversation got on to passion and love and I began to pretend that his voice was penetrating my senses and spoke more caressingly, letting him hear my moans of pleasure. I didn’t stop until I heard his voice shaking, as if it was being squeezed out of him. At this point I wished him good night and returned the phone to its place like someone under a spell. Even though I enjoyed myself and wanted this relationship, I never failed to be amazed when I thought about where my voice was going to, and how his voice held my interest and left me waiting for the next day.
My daughter came into my room in the afternoon, dropped her books and black abaya on the floor, and rushed over to me. I was still stretched out in bed where I’d been since the night before. She burst into tears: ‘The teacher was cross with me …’ ‘Never mind,’ I answered. She seemed to notice my indifferent tone because she began to shake me and carried on speaking while I nodded my head pretending to show interest, until in the end I shouted irritably at her, ‘I heard you! I heard you!’
Ghada ran out. I thought of going after her but stayed where I was. I thought about sending for someone to bring me a drink but then found myself phoning Suha. When she answered and I whispered ‘Suha?’ she slammed the phone down on me. Then I phoned Suzanne, her American friend, and asked her if she had any water melons or cakes. When she finally understood what I was saying, she made her excuses. The general hubbub throughout the house rose above the sound of the video, which mingled with the strains of Filipino music. The servants had just woken from their afternoon siesta, and I didn’t take my hand off the bell until my coffee arrived. Drinking it, I thought ‘What can I do for the rest of today and tonight?’ I went over to Ghada whose staring eyes and audible breathing seemed to make her one with Michael Jackson’s hissing dead. She was addicted to the ‘Thriller’ video and had watched it at least ten times, each time more avidly than the last. She reminded me of myself when I was little and used to sit alone with my Somali nanny watching Arabic and foreign films one after the other. In those days there was no video, just a screen on the wall and a projector. It was operated for us by a tailor whom my mother had had brought over from the Philippines too. These films must have aroused something in the tailor and the nanny because when I got up and wandered about the house one night, unable to sleep, I saw them on the kitchen floor. I remembered that I stood and watched them without feeling embarrassment or any other emotion. I was used to seeing kissing and men and women together on the films and in our house. A day rarely went by when I didn’t hear whispering, and see two bodies clinging together in the darkness, or in daylight, behind the door, in corners of our large house: the servants with one another; my brothers with the servant girls and my girl cousins: a man and a friend of my mother’s whom I could recognize from her red shoes poking out from under her abaya, as her face was veiled too. I used to be able to work out who was pregnant in our house because I’d seen if so often and knew the symptoms by heart. A woman who was pregnant would sleep most of the time, and rush to the bathroom and throw up, claiming to have a stomach upset. Then she would boil up cumin and other plants from Sudan and India, herbs a
nd spices which had a wonderful smell, and drink these concoctions constantly. The ceiling fans would be switched off and she would cover herself with rugs and sheepskins to make herself sweat and stay in her room for two days. At this point she seemed to become more weary and sick and she would take aspirins and other medicaments. After a few days I would hear a shrieking louder than I’d ever heard on the films and would race to see the new baby. But the door was always closed. Only when Mother Kaukab came out did I go in to the room, and I would see the servant girl writhing on the bed, and no baby.
Mother Kaukab was a relation of my mother or my father, I don’t know which. I became aware of her visiting us on special occasions, when a servant girl was pregnant or someone was ill, or at weddings: she was there when the bride-to-be was decorated with henna, trilling for joy at the ceremony when the girl’s body hair was all removed, shouting at her to silence her if she gasped and cried out in pain, telling her, ‘You have to be strong to be beautiful.’ And she was there for the preparation of the special food which was buried in the sand and for the slaughter of the lambs. Even my mother used to call her Mother Kaukab, and she was the only one who dared to go into my mother’s room. Then when I got my own house at the age of thirteen, Mother Kaukab moved in with me. My mother and father had promised me a house of my own when I was seventeen, but I couldn’t wait and they were tired of my insistent demands. Whenever my father hugged me he would say, ‘I’m building you a really special house,’ and I would glow with pride and ask him, ‘Like my brother Jalal’s house and my brother Hamid’s?’
‘Of course,’ he would answer. ‘I don’t have daughters and sons. All my children are as good as each other.’ There was a vast amount of land around our house and on it my father had built a house for the male servants, a house for his mother, one for each of my brothers, and one for my sister who was married and lived in another part of the country, for her to stay in when she visited us.
Then he would add, ‘You know the big date palm? Right next to it.’ I don’t know why, I would have liked to tell him that it was too close to their house, and that if only it were further away I could be properly alone. My mother would say, ‘I’ll furnish the house for you, Nur, with everything in it, just as it should be.’ She was always spoiling me and her affection was at its most lavish when she was making me try on the clothes which she bought me locally or on her trips abroad; whenever she noticed the length of my hair, which reached right down to my thighs, she whispered in my ear, pointing to her stomach, ‘Look what came out of there. The most beautiful girl in the world.’ My mother was one of the first women to go abroad and discover life beyond the desert, and she would return bringing back with her everything which these other countries produced. I got used to her not being at home, or rather to not seeing her there, for if she wasn’t abroad or visiting one of her friends, she would be asleep or talking on the telephone. From when I was small, I’d been aware of her criticizing my father for staying out late with his friends, and sometimes talking about him in a depressed sort of way and crying in front of Mother Kaukab. But when I saw them together I knew she would smile and be loving and call him ‘my soul’ and ‘my darling’.
I remember that the glimmer of joy I felt at having a house of my own disappeared rapidly after a few days or weeks. I wearied of the red hearts which matched the bedcover, and the pillow that was shaped like a single big red heart; even the chairs were patterned with red hearts, not to mention the curtains. My father had sent for a European designer to do these red hearts everywhere. My pleasure at having her there outlasted any pleasure the hearts gave me, and I believed that she was going to live with me for ever. I remembered once when she’d been with my brother into the desert, she came back to the house as if she’d gone crazy. Distraught, she began packing her bags, crying all the time. Mother Kaukab guessed what had happened and I heard her saying to my brother, who wasn’t even thirteen at the time, ‘You had an old woman? But you’re a young man strong as a brass pestle, God bless you!’ and he answered, and he was laughing too, ‘She was the one who wanted to go and see the desert at night.’
When I heard them I rushed to her, pleading with her as she picked up the receiver and asked for my parents’ number. Only when she saw my tears did she give in and put it down. I wasn’t thinking of the hearts on the wall which she hadn’t finished yet, but of the fun I had just from her being in the house. I no longer found the Somali woman or Kaukab amusing company, and I’d stopped listening to their stories. Recently I’d begun to keep up with life outside the desert, in Cairo or Paris, and through my travels with my family or the presents my mother brought back from her own travels I learnt about the latest clothes and films and singers and songs, and the men and women who were famous in international circles. Not satisfied with just knowing about them I began to look for ways of bringing them to where I was. We would wait for occasions like family weddings and then nag the grown-ups to hire famous performers from Cairo. When they agreed to come we all rushed to arrange parties for them and give them presents. We followed them around all the time hoping for a word or a touch or a kiss, and then we discovered that the aura surrounding them grew gradually less powerful and finally disappeared altogether as they began to chase after us, or at any rate the presents we gave them. I remember the actress who borrowed some diamond ear-rings and didn’t give them back. When Mother Kaukab asked her for them she pretended to look for them in fear and trembling and offered Mother Kaukab all her own jewels. But those little details didn’t stand in the way of us inviting famous people we hadn’t met before. Even writers and poets aroused our curiosity and I remember one writer who always hailed us with the same phrase: ‘How are you? I’ve missed you,’ and he promised all of us girls that he would write stories about us. I’d never read any of his celebrated novels although I’d seen films of them. I wasn’t much good at reading. I went to school but I didn’t seem capable of attending regularly. I and my Somali nanny both slept heavily perhaps because we stayed up until the early hours of the morning. The alarm clock didn’t waken us and even if I managed to get up at the right time I was slow choosing what to wear and what to eat and looking for my books. It was as if I thought time ought to be subject to my will. On some occasions when I was ready in time I couldn’t find the driver, and when the nanny called him he came after a while, barefooted, hurrying, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and drove the car at breakneck speed. Then one of my mother’s friends arranged for a Lebanese teacher at the school to help me after school hours so that I could catch up with my class. I was delighted with her and began to have great fun with her, because sometimes instead of teaching me she was happy to come for a bicycle ride with me – on our land of course – and she started plaiting my hair for me like in the magazines. She only stopped coming when she’d tried without success to see my mother for months on end, and on several occasions she had to wait for ages before the outside doors were opened for her.
I was pleased. In the end she’d started interfering in my affairs and giving me lectures about the shortcomings of my upbringing, and she’d let me know the meaning of the word ‘frivolous’. She began to criticize the anarchy of our household and shake her head regretfully at everything, even the kitchen equipment – which she admired and said was like what you’d find in a luxury hotel: she told us we were spoiling it and ended up trying to explain to the cook and the other servants how to use it properly. She advised me to go back and live with my family and told me I didn’t need a personal driver or a cook or Mother Kaukab, but my mother and father and brothers and sisters. When we didn’t pay her on time she wouldn’t leave the house until she had the money, saying it was a matter of principle not money. She used to make me wait with her until Mother Kaukab woke up, or until the driver had gone to my father’s office to pick up some money. Once she even insisted on contacting my mother, although I’d often told her that my mother didn’t like being woken from her afternoon nap. The teacher’s exasperation grew when she f
ound that my mother had unplugged the telephone and locked the door on the inside, and angrily she expostulated that my mother wouldn’t know if something dreadful happened to me or my brothers and sisters. It didn’t seem to occur to the teacher that we could have knocked on the door, although none of us had ever dared to do it, and she began calling my mother selfish and ignorant.
In response to my request I was sent by my father to a private girls’ college in Cairo like a lot of other girls from the desert. There I discovered that the freedom which I’d thought I would gain by moving out by myself into the desert was nothing compared to my freedom in Cairo. Just walking down the street on my own two feet was freedom, so walking without an abaya was out of this world. Freedom no longer consisted of dialling a telephone number and giggling and whispering love down the line, or making the driver follow the other cars, or eyeing the shopkeepers; even kissing and sometimes other things in cars – which seldom happened anyway – weren’t freedom compared to Cairo with her wide-open arms reaching out beyond the horizon.
2
I began to think about marriage after I came back from Cairo, even though I’d always said before that I wouldn’t think of it until I was in my twenties. Mother Kaukab had married when she was twelve, and my own mother when she was fourteen. I wanted to have a husband and a wedding and then I would become my own mistress. Not that I wasn’t that already, but I was still having to ask permission to go abroad. Then my mother would forget that she had promised to take me with her and leave when I was fast asleep in my house, or take me with a group of her friends and I would tire of being abroad for such a long time because our trip would be taken up with eating in restaurants, buying clothes and giggling. I wanted to get to know lots of the sort of people who went to parties at night, although I didn’t dare to go to them without my mother and father. When I was there I became all eyes and ears and stared at the men, wondering who would suit me. When I saw Samer I knew that I had to marry him. He was three years older than me. I was seventeen. He’d heard about the motorcycle which I’d ordered and which I used to ride between my house and my parents’ and my brothers’. These houses and their gardens were all surrounded by high walls over which only the tops of palm trees were visible. Samer came with my brother to see the motorbike when I decided to sell it. I was wearing a leather jacket and trousers and dark glasses. I knew by the way he rode bikes and by his wristwatch and the type of bracelet it had that he would suit me. I took it as given that he would like me, because I was beautiful: the blackness and great length of my hair and the permanent pallor of my complexion were oriental, and my clothes and everything around me were western. I found myself looking at him in a way that embarrassed him and I wanted to ask him to marry me, but I made myself wait and spoke to him and pursued him on the telephone until we’d decided to get married. He was a male Nur. He loved the latest fashions and everything conjured up by modern civilization: the newest models of cars, skiing equipment, a stainless steel model of Ali Ibn Abi Talib’s sword made in Japan, an Aubusson chair, a type of honey found high in the mountains of Tibet, a handbag made of ostrich skin. He was inventive in his dress even when he was wearing a plain white robe, but he also wore blue, grey, and pistachio green, and when we travelled abroad he wore the most beautiful suits and the weirdest ties. There was always a lot going on in our house as we had friends round every night. We knew nurses, nannies, even married women, from various countries, and we danced and sang and ate and watched films until dawn and slept till the afternoon. We didn’t begin our night’s entertainment before eleven in the evening, then we swam or went out into the desert, and he would ride the motorcycle and try and jump obstacles on it, little natural hillocks or ones that his friend Waleed constructed for him. I was so used to Waleed being around that we seemed incomplete without him. The fame of these nights of ours spread until everybody who felt they shared our way of thinking and could entertain us or enjoy themselves with us found a friend who was coming and came along too. We soon found that the desert was crowded with people wanting to entertain and be entertained. There was a man who liked imitating famous actors, another with a guitar who pretended to be Elvis Presley, a third who acted out a pantomime of a woman giving birth, behaving conquettishly if it was a boy, and telling the other women what an awful time she’d had and how she’d passed out with the pain if it was a girl. When we were tired of these mimes, friends would bring along people they knew with mild deformities, like the man who stammered, or the simple-minded one who was funny when he was provoked. Someone brought a monkey who liked drink and we stood around it pouring whisky down its throat and watching it caper and scream in its cage.
Women of Sand and Myrrh Page 25