How many people have been killed by the oversight of a spoiled princess? Killed by a favour… How many slaughtered souls because she never cared to look? How many hearts have burned because she withheld love? How many women have been sent to the dark underworld with a laugh? How many men belittled by disregarding the value of their treasures? How many children were killed because she pretended not to know? I was but a girl who betrayed her gifts from the gods, drunk with power and abundance. I held my mirror so close to my face there remained no room for another. The life of that princess laid to waste by her indulgences will now remain the suppurating sin of a queen who founded her own country tooth and nail.
Hey, stranger! I am not going to account for this hungry and savage rabble. A moment off guard and they will raze this county to the ground. Not for my sins – they would kill me out of a thirst for blood. Their decrees would be so ignorant they will amount to nothing in the face of my miserable sins. I wanted you to come, noble sailor! I wanted to surrender to you my sins not my heart. So that an equal is tried in the traps of power and nobility would judge me. I shall shed tears and tear myself apart before you and you shall see how I punish myself and thus I, Elissa, not Queen Dido, shall be forgiven. Oh glorious warrior, I do believe that I am entitled to a fair trial and to you. You! The last right given to me by the gods. As my blood has not been shed and dried it still pollutes my body. Clearly my penance will remain so long as I live. Even if all the gods were to forgive me and all the locals worship me and if every night I were to poke out these eyes, my misery would not abate. Those who do not receive a merciless but fair trial are always punished more than they deserve. I needed you.
And now you will not come. I know that with the birth of a new day tomorrow, I know, that you will leave this shore. The birds are no longer singing. And the flowers no longer come back to life in the rain. There is no longer a trace of reproach on my lips. The wind no longer blows through my soul. My heart has withered. This morning I even forgot to look out to sea. Tomorrow with the rising sun, I know, you will leave as if you never came. I will wait until I forget the nightmare you dragged me through. Carthage will wait. And the days will roll away as if they had never been. To remind herself of her strength, Dido will declare new wars. Because she has not forgotten the young and sinful princess Elissa, Queen Dido will run to the swords that will kill her.
*
“What are you guilty of, Maryam?” asked Amira, her voice hoarse. Now she no longer trusted Madam Lilla, who just told us how she had betrayed her daughter, or Maryam, whose secret seemed to be greater than we had thought. She must have felt so alone in the middle of the desert. Maryam looked at the fire. Without taking her eyes off the flame she said, “Alright then, Amira, why didn’t you forgive the man you love most? How could you have been so fragile and merciless at the same time?”
Silence again. Then Amira read another one of Muhammed’s letters…
*
Muhammed’s Fifth Letter
“I don’t know my own worth, so will you know it for me?” Or so you said one day, and now look how I am counting that same worth like I’m counting prayer beads. Day and night. But I know, don’t say it, I’m counting them after I’ve pulled them all off and they have scattered on the ground. Now I am counting your worth as if I am holding all the elusive little drops of mercury that have spilled out of a broken thermostat. Sweetie, maybe I’m losing my mind.
You are the only living thing that moves faster than my own imagination. So my wretched sin only grows. If this heart I have broken wasn’t yours I might have wished to spend the rest of my life on my knees praying for forgiveness. But now having ruined the heart of an angel there is nothing left to do but stay quiet and wait for this life to end. Who am I to undertake such a task as fixing the broken heart of an angel? Now I am nothing but a ‘who’, my angel.
I know that you didn’t tell me about your anger. Your grace and your compassion jammed a shotgun of words. But all you need to do is aim, sweetie: My heart is already sealed.
Maybe men are just like that, sweetie, we are out to conquer a country we cannot even understand. All this ambition over land they cannot even decide what to do with. A woman’s skin is not enough, nor her heart – we aren’t satisfied until they have surrendered their soul. Even after we have raced over the lands of your neck, towards the valley of your ribs and arrived at the source of the Nile, your heart, we are not convinced that we have truly conquered. When it comes to women, we are all angry and restless, like Alexander the Great. In essence we know we don’t deserve this and we cannot rest clear with the idea of a conquered heart. We want to see what adorns the most intimate cabins of a woman’s heart. But we don’t know that once you walk in you’ll have to stay. You once said, “If I don’t know my worth, will you know it for me?” I promised you. Sweetie, when we take those vows we don’t know how much you will take them to heart.
So it isn’t fair, eh? Well not at all. A heart can be broken, betrayed, but I know we don’t have the right to shake each other’s faith in life. Such a crime only works on promises, you taught me so much. And I understand that even my not knowing the value of your conquered flesh wouldn’t hurt you that deeply. But once you surrendered your faith in life to me I understood that I was the sum of a tremendous lie… Committing such a sin and asking God’s forgiveness, I could only live with that if you weren’t in my life. From now on every sin you commit is mine. Every heart you have broken and every will you have thwarted will be the cross I have to bear. If you were to take a person’s life the blood would be on my hands. If only I could be justly punished in this world or the world beyond.
You remember when I said, “Leave everything and hold onto me,” right? I wish you didn’t. Then you would have forgotten how you humoured me. If only I had made you angry, without touching your heart, then there might have been grounds for due justice. But twisting the wings of an angel like you and just leaving you there… Such punishment doesn’t happen even in fairytales, what do you say to that, sweetie? But you see no one is cleverer than a fairytale. I’m not even a robber, only a mountain man trickster. Not even Hira mountain can keep me covered.
For I’m as guilty as if I slaughtered all those pure souls. It is written in the Maide verse, “If you kill one, you have killed all of humanity.” I am trying to pay for stabbing your soul by wrapping my arms around rabid dogs scratching away at their bleeding sores. It’s so miserable Satan himself might die laughing, don’t you think?
Yesterday I separated that rifle into seven pieces, sweetie. Then I took it and buried everything at my mother’s grave. I don’t even know what in the world I was thinking. But my stupidity went further than that. I sat down and I swallowed the last two bullets in the casing. One for me and one for you. After you left my idiocy expanded geometrically, sweetie, if you haven’t gathered this much already. And all this was no end result, you might have guessed that, too, seeing that I’m still writing this letter.
Sometimes I say to myself that I should go kill those fools, mow them down one by one, the same men who levelled their guns on you. But even if you beat back all the demons, can you bring back an angel?
I have come to understand that birds fly to desolate islands to die. I learned so much after you left: so as not to stain the hopes of this world with their blood the shirtless fairies go to close their eyes in different worlds.
But justice should be possible, sweetie. For a miserable wretch like me it’s far too comfortable to keep wrestling with my conscience. Who am I to decide on my own punishment! With every moment I suffer a crisis of conscience, I am ashamed of my pride. And because I still see myself as a Muslim I cannot put a bullet in my head. I will have to burn in ice because I have fallen for an angel that did not have the heart to bow to me. Sweetie, my lips burn even with the names of God.
Vav
Mim
Muhammed
*
“Madam Lilla…” I said, “she betrayed everyone. Maybe she ha
s betrayed us…”
It was like they couldn’t hear me. They had both switched onto a channel I couldn’t access. Maryam asked again.
“What is this crime of his that you cannot forgive, Amira? Supposedly you’re so strong but then why are you so weak around me? If you loved Muhammed that much why did you let that guy kiss your foot?”
Without pausing Amira pivoted back to her question.
“I let that man kiss my foot because my heart is like a stone. Now answer me. What did you do? If you’re supposedly so ruthless then why are you so gentle with me?”
Maryam replied: “Because you are just a young girl.”
And then they only looked at the flames. A little later we all went back into the tent. Madam Lilla was waiting for us there. She was holding one of the cards with a number on it.
22
“I’m fed up with your lies, your stories, your treason, fed up with it all, Madam. You have betrayed us all. The whole world knows just who you are, Madam! The whole world! You betrayed us too. With your lies, false promises and your stories you’ve dragged us out into the desert.”
Amira left the tent. In the middle of all the other tents she stopped in the darkness. Maryam and I were still in our tent. We could hear Amira crying outside and the swish of footsteps in the sand, moving quickly towards her. But we couldn’t go out. We only waited, keeping still. Considering everything that had happened that day we had no other choice.
*
With long faces we came out of our tent. None of us were speaking to Madam Lilla. Furkan and Tariq were already getting the camels ready and we still hadn’t said a word to each other. Maryam only made a weary attempt to joke with Furkan. They laughed at something I couldn’t understand. Soon Furkan was riding next to her. I was behind them. Then Taraq and Madam Lilla, side by side. They weren’t speaking at all. At the back, Amira and Tin Abutut were keeping a good distance from the group.
“Then the man sewed himself into his own quilt. Ha ha ha!”
Now Furkan was telling Maryam a story and so loudly I could hear everything. It seemed interesting. A noble Tuareg goes to Istanbul in Ottoman times. Wandering the city streets he comes across a quilter and he is dazzled by the shimmering satin, the dancing sunlight on the cotton fluffer, the embroidered shapes on the cotton and satin, and the quilter’s dusty but clean little shop. Now this man is weary of all his wives. And because his heart is empty – or as Furqan put it, he no longer has desires – he becomes enamoured with quilting. When he returns to Timbuktu he decides that he can no longer live in a country where there are no quilting materials let alone a climate that requires quilts. But he’s in no position to leave behind his wife and children. Night and day he keeps dreaming of quilts, crying and drinking himself to sleep. And in the end he comes up with an idea: he makes a deal with a tradesman, who brings him the satin and cotton and everything else he needs from Istanbul. Now the next part is tragic. The man is a butterfingers with the needle and he can hardly even separate the satins. His wives go crazy but he doesn’t let them touch a thing. In the end they take a stand and say, ‘It’s the quilt or us.’ That night he drinks and he drinks…
“Then he sews himself into the quilt. Ha ha ha!”
The moment Furkan finishes Madam Lilla is suddenly shouting.
“Furkan, desire and love never kills just one person. Leila will also die … she will also die…”
She stopped and started telling her story at the top of her lungs. She wanted Tin Abutut to hear.
“Once upon a time there was an old man who lived in a city. He chained himself to a tree and the key to the lock was nowhere to be found. And he lived like that. But he never stopped writing, filling one notebook after another. When people asked him about his plight he would say, ‘Ah, for the sake of love’. Years passed and no one could understand the connection between love and his chain. And the man died of old age still chained to the tree. He was quickly buried and everyone began to wonder about the notebooks. ‘But what if,’ they asked, ‘what if the old man wrote down the reason in those notebooks?’ And with that they raced over to them and began rifling through. But they were empty. The pages had got wet and then dried and were all wrinkled. Then an old woman they had never seen before appeared and announced to the crowd, ‘He would write with his saliva. You can’t read any of it.’
The astonished crowd was brimming with curiosity.
‘Did you know the deceased?’ they asked.
‘He knew me,’ said the old woman.
“And she told her tale. Many years ago the old man and the woman fell in love when they were young. The girl started a cruel game. She said to the man, ‘If you come for me I won’t be yours. All I can do is tie you to a tree. And every day you will write me a letter. I will come to read them and if I like them I will be yours.’
“But the man was illiterate. So some evenings the girl would look at the blank pages wet with saliva and give herself to the man if she felt like it, or if she didn’t she wouldn’t even pass by the tree. After the old woman finished her story she said, ‘it was the beginning of the end when he decided to use my own cruelty against me. The games of youth are the torture devices of maturity. I didn’t know that then. But when I finally wanted to untie him and let him go he was already a madman in his own world. Even when I opened my legs and wiggled before him he didn’t look: he was still writing things in his notebook he never showed me. Like that he killed me. Now don’t get the wrong idea and think he’s the only one lying in the ground. Bring me those chains so I can chain myself to his gravestone.’”
Furkan laughed at the story. Tariq glanced at Madam Lilla for just a moment: he had understood what she was trying to say. Then Tin Abutut’s voice rang out from behind us:
“I have a story, too … Tin Abutut!”
It wasn’t clear if she was addressing Madam Lilla (for the old, blue-faced man called her that) or if the name of her story was Tin Abutut. In a voice loud enough for Madam Lilla to hear Tin Abutut began her story:
“In a time before time and in a fairytale before the real and in a place so very far from here there once was a charming young man who lived in the desert. He was the most noble of all the noblemen, the keenest of all the warriors. All the women were so deeply in love with him, but it was an unrequited love; they knew they couldn’t have him and so they only wished for him to be happy. And then one day an enormous wooden bird landed in the middle of the desert. From under its wing appeared a young woman. She was dressed in many layers of silk, and fluttered in the wind like a good omen. The young man assumed that woman was sent to him from the clouds. They raced through the desert on horseback, bonded in a cloud of hashish. But one day when the man felt they were the only two people left in the world and after he had overcome the initial pangs of love and became accustomed to her scent the giant wooden bird came down to the desert again. And the woman hopped on its wing and they were gone. Desperately the young man rode his horses about the desert, kicking up sand in their wake. But it was all in vain for the woman would never return. And as he was wondering if he would be able to live through the pain an iron bird lands on the desert floor. From inside the bird bandits leap out and throw nets over the man and take him prisoner. They wanted something from him, something the woman left behind. As if the pain of heartbreak were not enough the young man now sees that he’d been deceived. They were not going to let him die of sorrow, and right there they slashed his stomach. His heart ached so terribly that his flesh felt no pain. Later he married and had children but he never loved anyone again. In his sleep he would mutter the name of the woman who came to him on the wooden bird. He was disgusted by his wife and his children. His heart had withered and he raised his children as if they were a curse. They vowed that they would one day take that woman’s life. They would lift the spell that had taken hold of their father’s heart. It would be the only way for them to avenge their mother who had gone crazy with the love she had for their father.”
And w
ith that Tin Abutut had issued her verdict on Madam Lilla. The sun had nearly set. This was another love story from Madam Lilla, one we had never heard, one filled with secrets; we were listening to a story that could lead to our being killed in the middle of the desert.
So when night fell and Amira cried out, “We are fed up with your lies!” she had every right. Maryam and I stared at Madam Lilla for some time and then we went outside. We couldn’t stay with her any longer. We sat down at the fire. There was no sign of Amira. We waited for her till morning. Still no sign of her anywhere. And not once did Madam Lilla even so much as stick her head out of her tent.
Once the sun was up over the horizon Furkan and Tariq came out of their tents. Arm in arm Amira and Tin Abutut came out of another tent. Amira’s eyes were swollen from crying. She was leaning on Tin Abutut. She looked devastated. She looked as helpless and lifeless as a gutted fish: another mother had betrayed her. Maryam and I walked over to them. Madam Lilla was still in her tent. Furkan and Tariq didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They weren’t preparing for us to set out. Tin Abutut left Amira with us and then she went over to Madam Lilla’s tent and cried out:
“Get up! You old witch! Wake up. Get out here. Get ready for your final journey!”
“Don’t kill her here,” shouted Amira, “I don’t want to see it.”
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 29