Women of Sand and Myrrh

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Sally remarked laughing that she couldn’t envisage a girl like Candice here for a moment. Saleh listened to her and he pressed my hand when I tried to draw it out from under his hand; it seemed to me that his talk of Candice was to make Sally understand that his being married to me didn’t mean that he was like me, or was even meant to justify his mistake. Then he began talking again in that enthusiastic voice which perhaps meant nothing when he used it to me or to people he found in our house; contradicting her, he said, ‘Sally, Candice is intelligent. She could even manage to live here. She might have a hard time because she’d be forced to lead a double life. Take me and Nur for example: when I came back here I found that the ideas which I’d been convinced were right when I was in the States seemed ridiculous here, like the contents of my suitcase. But I made a firm decision that Saleh who wore a white robe and sandals and tore meat apart with his fingers should also be a man of the twentieth century discussing Margaret Thatcher’s politics and standing to applaud dancers in a club.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Nur wears an abaya when she’s here in her country but abroad she walks around in a cocktail dress. Of course she feels hard done by, but this is where she was born.’

  When we took her back to my parents’ house, it was the first time I’d given someone a lift to where they wanted to go; I’d always been on the receiving end of such treatment, and only contacted people when I needed them. Saleh got out of the car to shake her hand, then the two of them stood for a moment looking towards me. When I made do with a desultory wave, Saleh came back to the car and got in heaving a protracted sigh. He didn’t speak until I asked him what was wrong with him and then he shouted at me, ‘Even the Queen dismounts to say goodbye to people.’ Then he muttered, ‘Sorry. You’re more important than the Queen.’ I found myself saying that I hadn’t wanted anyone from the house to see me. He stopped the car and turned to face me: ‘And what would have happened if someone had seen you? Wouldn’t it have been more normal to go in and visit your family? Or are they at the round table solving the world’s problems?’ To himself he added, ‘I don’t understand your family. I don’t understand the stuff they’re made out of. None of them are normal.’ At this point I screamed at him, ‘Is all this fuss because I didn’t get out and shake hands with the American woman?’

  Thumping his hand down on the steering wheel, he shouted back, ‘How can I make you understand that it’s not a question of an isolated incident? It’s to do with your view of the world, your understanding of life. Is it reasonable that Sally should be with your family for a week and you don’t get in touch with her? Instead you spend you time fooling about with empty-headed women and the nannies. From what I’ve heard, you only had to mention somewhere in the States and Sally would take you to see it. What about the telegram she sent us when we got married, and the present that would still be in its paper if I hadn’t opened it? You don’t only have this careless attitude towards people – you have it towards things as well. There was that orchid that was thrown to one side in the kitchen, and died still in its cellophane paper. And the plants left to wilt in their pots. Do you know the cost of orchids even before they reach the desert! Your problem is that you weren’t born into one of the ruling families.’

  4

  When I found out that I was pregnant, and the doctor said my feelings of nausea and tiredness were normal I told him that I couldn’t stand it, as if he were the one responsible for my condition. As well as feeling sluggish and sick, I began to swell up like a sponge and became convinced that I’d never go back to my old shape. Perhaps the state I was in began to bore my visitors because I no longer had people around me every minute of the day, and I grew lonely. I found that this isolation was something I didn’t have the strength to endure, and one day when I was barely awake I began to scream and shout; I tore my clothes; I bit the hands reaching out to restrain me, and then I rushed out of the house; Mother Kaukab caught up with me and contacted my mother and I called Saleh at the office and told him I wanted an abortion. The main reason I could think of was that the clothes I’d had made to wear this season were such beautiful and unusual styles that they would never be fashionable again. Although he was kind and showed some understanding of what I was suffering, he tried to convince me that I would become fulfilled as a woman if I had a child and that there were maternity clothes which were as unusual as ordinary clothes. When I gave in he began pestering me to stop smoking. My reply was that the doctor had said to me that if I stopped it would make me tense, so it was better if I didn’t.

  When I gave birth to my daughter, jewels were showered upon me, too bright to believe in and almost too unbearably beautiful to touch; and flowers the like of which, I was told, the desert had never seen before. The day I had the baby I said I wanted to rest and wouldn’t pick her up, and the same that night, but on the following day the English nurse insisted that I should hold her so that she and I could get to know each other. After a few minutes she began to cry and I pressed the bell and gave her back to the nurse. I tried the trick of feigning sleep every time I sensed the two of them in the room until the nurse gave up in despair and took her away. When one time she came in to find me talking on the phone, she told me that she was ready to collapse because she didn’t sleep day or night, and our lack of concern for the child made her angry. I told her that what made me angry was her coming in without permission, and shouted at her to go away and leave me in peace. I was especially cross because I was listening, consumed with jealousy, while a friend told me about a handsome Egyptian singer who was here, and the parties they had in the evenings, and who was chasing him and who was spending a lot of time with him. As she was talking, I pictured her still in her nightdress with no pain, her breasts not swollen as mine were, in spite of my attempts to empty them of milk. Or probably her maid was putting on her make-up for her or taking it off. I could no longer stand the sight of them, when they visited me just to show off their dresses and talk to one another, not to me, indifferent to my gasps of pain.

  Saleh was no help to me during this period; he began giving me words of advice, saying that I must pick my daughter up, nurse her myself instead of giving her a bottle, and not smoke when she was in the room. I was at my most annoyed with him when he woke me up every morning as soon as he heard her voice, and brought her to our bed; I don’t know why but I began blaming him for everything, even for going to his office. I began to avoid talking to him and acted as if I didn’t care whether he was there or not. But instead of being prompted by my coldness to make it up with me, he no longer concerned himself with me either. He began to live his life as he chose, inviting his own friends, and even though some of them came with their wives, I refused to leave my room and sat in front of the video hour after hour. Feelings of depression and resentment towards him seethed inside me and I felt like I did when my cat escaped and hid in some inaccessible place; I’d be angry to the point of tears and stamp my feet, almost choking each time I thought of the pleasure I felt when I had her in my grasp.

  When he told me one morning that he was going away I didn’t answer; I turned on the video and he snatched the cigarette out of my mouth and repeated, ‘I’m going away.’ I lit another cigarette. ‘Goodbye,’ I replied. His going really did make me feel more at ease, for confrontations and displays of stubbornness were no longer daily occurrences and I found myself welcoming phone calls, and if no one come to visit me I went out visiting myself. When I was asked if I had seen Saleh on the television news, I shrugged my shoulders unconcernedly. I didn’t go to see his mother as I’d promised to do and when she came to my house, I left her with my child and the nanny. As soon as Saleh came home from his trip I asked him for a letter giving me permission to go abroad with my mother. But I actually travelled with Mother Kaukab.

  As usual I erased the traces of the desert as soon as the plane was in the air. I went into the toilet, and from my hand luggage took out a short sleeveless dress. I bundled up my abaya, and untied my hair and let it fall loose. F
eeling some embarrassment, I returned to my seat and when Mother Kaukab gasped and reproved me, I told her that my husband didn’t mind. More and more I felt that marriage meant freedom, and especially material freedom. For despite the monthly allowance which I’d continued to receive from my father I’d been in debt to a lot of people; to Nahed the Egyptian woman who sold off-the-peg clothes by all the most famous designers and had threatened to complain to my father when my account was approaching a hundred thousand; to the Syrian jewel merchant, although I’d sent Mother Kaukab to him with some jewellery I no longer liked. And I knew that I was being exploited a lot: the Lebanese woman, Madame Sandra, had demanded an exorbitant amount for designing a tree with silk leaves that had a place for a bottle of perfume at the base of each leaf; and so had Jameel who designed my room for me, and Fernando with his paintings; even Ibtisam, who was from the desert herself, had sold me a fake antique claiming that it was truly old and covered with gold leaf.

  I lay stretched out, wondering whether my pleasure had reached the floor under me, for the heat of it was almost burning me. In the large hotel room the rock singer was drinking water from a bottle. His face and its features appeared small, and there was nothing handsome in him; his white body was narrow and thin as he tipped his head back, and he was uncircumcised. I pictured Mother Kaukab spitting as she described the ugliness of his thin white body and said he was like an obelisk. All the same, I’d been in a state of eager excitement ever since I’d met him in a disco and he’d danced with me for hours, ignoring the woman he’d come with.

  When he reached out his hand under the table to touch me I knew that he’d stay with me that night. It had been ages since I felt this happiness mixed with anticipation, even tension, and it reached a pitch when he followed me up to my room, giving me a few minutes’ start so that I could lock the door leading to Mother Kaukab’s room. Once I looked like staying abroad for a long time, or rather once I’d gathered up my courage and admitted to myself that my body was the main outlet for my feelings, I’d moved to an hotel, claiming to Saleh, in the course of one of our telephone conversations, that I felt car-sick every time I travelled from our house in the country into central London.

  The rock singer picked up my dress from the floor and asked who the designer was. Then he put it on and looked at himself in the mirror and admired the shoulders, which were shaped like aircraft wings; I replied in a whisper, thinking that I must see him again that night. The touch of his lips, thin and unappealing as they were, made me tremble, and his chest felt broad and strong to me, even though I could see his rib cage.

  I couldn’t help asking him, ‘Will I see you at the disco tonight?’ He was fiddling with things of mine that lay about in the room, picking up a diamond ear-ring and laying it down again on the table, and he shrugged his shoulders carelessly and said, ‘I don’t know.’

  I brought my hair close around me. He was the first man to take hold of my hair and ask if it was real. Not believing my answer, he tugged on it and said, ‘Ding dong,’ as if he was ringing a church bell. ‘Shall I have it cut?’ I asked him.

  ‘Is this what they have instead of crisps where you come from?’ he returned, holding up an old manuscript which Saleh had given me for Christies to examine, so that they could tell him if it was authentic. I asked him about my hair again, feeling a sense of loss and trying to devise a way of seeing him that night.

  ‘Yours is the most beautiful hair I’ve seen in my life,’ he said, turning to me. ‘When I saw you dancing, I said I want that hair.’

  Feeling somehow reassured, I ventured, ‘Let’s go to another disco tonight.’

  He didn’t answer and was still holding on to the manuscript which was made of torn, shrivelled vellum. ‘What does it say?’ he asked. He’d sat down beside me on the bed again but seemed indifferent to my body; I hadn’t covered myself up and was deliberately vaunting my naked beauty because my thoughts were all channelled towards seeing him that night, and I wanted to please him at any price. I began trying to remember some of the obscure writing which Saleh had read out to me. Before I began to tell him what I knew he stretched out his hand to me, making me sit down beside him, and rested his hand on my shoulder as if we’d been friends and lovers for a long time. I noticed his amazement growing with every word that I spoke and felt happy; I was sure that it was making me figure more vividly in his thoughts, although I was astonished at his total ignorance of my country, even of its geographical location. He got up to look for a pen and could only find my black eye pencil which he stared at in disappointment and self-mockery: ‘And here I was thinking you’d use kohl like Cleopatra!’ He began writing letters which looked more complicated than the ones on the manuscript. He crossed them out, rewrote them, asked me to read again, then asked me more questions; I explained, and he wrote and pondered and hummed to himself.

  He was so delighted to find this rare and original material for a song that he took my face in his hands and kissed my eyes and nose and lips and chin, the beauty spot on my cheek, the downy hairs on my upper lips, then my hair and my forehead. He was carried away by his enthusiasm and bent over me whispering ‘I’ll reward you for this,’ but I just wanted to make certain of that night. When he got up he said he’d stick a red star on the country I came from, because he had a map of the world at home and he remembered countries by the women he’d met.

  He left only when a smell of cardamom began to pervade the air, and Mother Kaukab tried the door. When I didn’t respond she must have assumed that I was still asleep and he jumped up, hurriedly pulling on his clothes, and gathering up his papers and blowing me a kiss on the way out. I rushed to the door to ask him about the evening and he answered, ‘Come to my house and I’ll let you hear the song,’ and told me his address. I smiled with joy at him, for my heart had sank hopelessly. When I opened the door separating me from Mother Kaukab, she asked me excitedly, ‘What did you have to eat at the princess’s?’ I couldn’t think what she meant then I remembered that I’d told her that I’d been invited to dinner with the English princess, the Queen’s daughter. She sat there, asking me eager questions: ‘What did you talk about? Did you have fun? What did you have to eat? What did they wear? Your dress must have been nicer than theirs! What did they say about your ear-rings?’

  She wanted to know all the details so that when she went back to the desert she could repeat it to the servants and the other women. Then she poured me a cup of coffee, remarking innocently, ‘I said to myself, Nur must have switched on the radio while I was still asleep.’

  When I went to his house I prepared myself for kisses, but instead, to my disappointment, he sat me down in his studio and sat at the piano, strumming and singing:

  My love is from a tribe in the heart of the desert.

  Her forefathers suffered the heat and the thirst.

  They buried alive their baby girls

  Yet took the women prisoner in battle

  Preserving them to bear men-children.

  Her blood must not be mixed with strange blood.

  And yet my love, she loves me.

  5

  I returned home and set off on my travels once more. This time, like a cook who can only handle a giant ladle, I spooned out for myself enormous quantities of emotion, parties often lasting most of the night, conversation and laughter. Perhaps the fact that Saleh was always travelling and showed no interest in me also pushed me further in this direction. What I was doing could quite possibly have remained a secret, but it seems that I began to frequent places where many of my fellow countrymen also spent their evenings. I was swept up into a circle of dancers, actors, musicians and men of society from the Arab world, whose fame spread because of their beauty and wit. One of them used his charm and humour to entertain professionally: sometimes he would dress up as a dancing girl and cry, ‘Your donations, gentlemen, for the Prophet’s sake,’ and ten-pound notes would rain down on him; or he would put on a dress, tie his hair back in a scarf and imitate a housewife doing her hous
ework, talking irritably to the saucepans and plates. When he’d done his turn one night and the applause had died down, he announced, ‘I want to thank Nur, who realized that I was an artist, not just a clown, and encouraged me to turn professional.’

  It was true that I’d become addicted to his wit and thought him worthy to be ranked with the great characters of comedy, and I’d offered money to the cabaret owner to let him up on the stage. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, as we’d already made a third-rate dancer famous by applauding wildly and opening bottles of champagne for her until she was promoted and eventually became a top dancer in the oriental clubs of London. I sank down in my seat at the sound of my name, feeling afraid, but forgot the incident by the following day as I became involved in the details of daily life once again. I never thought about the desert except when I smelt cardamom, and then when Mother Kaukab asked me one day about going back. This made me realize that it must be time, and that I’d have to do my best to keep things going here for a bit longer. I claimed appointments with doctors and urgent shopping; and Mother Kaukab commented that she was enjoying herself, although her excursions here were limited to going to the shops with the driver, and she was even happy to go in the car if it was to visit families from our country who were in London. ‘They all ask if Saleh is with you,’ she told me. ‘I don’t say no and I don’t say yes. I just nod my head.’