“To the marina!”
Lilla always looked younger when she was leaving a place behind. I could understand it now. But Maryam never seemed to understand. She looked lost like a child with no love for school. And this time she was really annoyed we were leaving. She’d been reluctant to leave Tunisia and Yafran but leaving Alexandria was the hardest. She was running from an unfinished story. I knew this because I knew the story behind the slingshot in her back pocket. And I knew about Kamal. In the taxi I started making notes so that I wouldn’t forget.
*
It was the second day that people began to gather spontaneously in Tahrir. Maryam had convinced herself that she needed to get married. She had decided that the best candidate would be a fellow academic from her university. The unpleasant feeling she’d had while reaching the decision only grew as days passed and she secretly began to wish for a problem that might help her escape this feeling. The man’s name was Necib. It had to be Necib… once they both had their bios written up on the same page. He and Maryam loved the same books, watched the same movies, seemed to want the same things out of life and they both spoke with the same conviction. They had never kissed but they were both sure they wanted children. Always stressing how perfect they were for each other they struggled not feel bored. They both pretended to be the kind of people they were supposed to be. The pretence was so perfect that neither dared to interrupt the game. They were just about to get married to please friends and family when the second morning in Tahrir broke. Maryam didn’t have to go. Tahrir still hadn’t taken its vital place in the history of Eygpt.
On that second day so many men and women like Maryam, who needed a deluge to show them the truth of their own feelings, had gone to Tahrir to unleash storms that were already brewing in their heads. Of course the goal was to bring down Mubarek, but who wouldn’t want history to turn your life upside down if you were already life’s plaything. People like Maraym went to Tahrir to write a part of history that was greater than their own lives. There was no turning back. And like so many others Maryam didn’t want to go back to her other life, she didn’t want to leave the square. She didn’t leave for the struggle that was Tahrir, a struggle against the military after the fall of Mubarek and all the related politics.
But like so many others caught in that tumultuous time she was possessed. Like every Mecnun she had a Leila. And like every Leila, that man, (for Maryam it was Kamal) was not the sum of himself. He symbolized Tahrir and escape, never returning, leaping boundaries, vanquishing fear, freedom, justice, the other side of the turnstile and, lastly, revolution.
But more than this, like every Leila this man was so beguiling because he showed Maryam that she could be a Mecnun. She had fallen in love with her capacity to fall in love. Kamal was charming because he didn’t really fit the part of an academic or a revolutionary or a leader. He was young, a high-school drop out, the leader of a football fan club that stormed Tahrir as if they were out of their minds. But there was something about him. He could laugh until he was beyond himself. The way his jawbone dropped and his cheeks caved when he shouted, and his beard shimmered in the lights of Tahrir and his brotherly compassion when he helped the other women who had faltered and finally when he took Maryam by the arm as she fled the police and he put his arm around her waist and helped her up over the iron gate that surrounded the square and did it all without causing her the slightest pain and without looking at her face and the genuine concern he showed when he asked, worried and out of breath, “Are you OK?”
“Come with me,” he said. She thought at last someone was finally speaking clearly, as she raced with him through streets she didn’t know. If she ran any faster she would leave behind her life altogether. It seemed a new door was opening and if she hurried she could step inside. They ran and they ran. Now and then Kamal looked over his shoulder, smiling, slowing down for her, picking up speed, then losing themselves along the dark streets. Only God could see them and He was in Maryam that night. Finally they stopped at the entrance of an apartment building. Out of breath, Kamal pulled out his key, opened the door, stepped inside and looked at Maryam. There is no need to draw this out. There was half a loaf of bread and a radio on the table covered in newspaper. On the wall an Ultra emblem and a messy portrait of Che Guevara in oil paint. The last two letters of the word ‘Basta’ were scrunched and falling, like it always is with unplanned writing on the wall. In the sink were three dirty plates and a beer glass covered in grease. On a single bed were pamphlets and the crumpled sheets that hung over the edge. This was a place Maryam should not have been to and where she could do things she shouldn’t do. Egypt would be a totally different place the day after so Maryam would be an entirely different person.
Kamal approached her slowly and gracefully. When their breathing had died down they could only hear the drip from the tap. After making love it was still the same sound but the world had changed. They sat down together naked and smoked, “That was some getaway, don’t you think?” said Kamal. Maryam was silent, feeling the very sound of her voice would give her away, and she nodded and smiled. She could feel her cheeks flushing. She felt beautiful. It was the first time she felt that way. In the days to come they went to Tahrir together and they came home together; they ran and they ate and they made love; they cried and threw stones, taking cover and taking punches; they stumbled and got up and ran and in the end they always made love. She was already pregnant. From the moment she knew she ran even faster, she fell more, she threw more stones and they made love more. That strange thing that happens to women who are pregnant but who shouldn’t be and who want the baby but shouldn’t, happened to Maryam, too. She wasn’t thinking. Her body was governed by something more powerful than thought. The clamour around her was so great it had silenced her inner conversations and in her heart swelled an unqualified but unquestionable feeling of goodness.
She didn’t know what she believed as now something even more reasonable than belief itself surrounded her heart like sweet butter. She felt like she would be protected, she felt that things that cannot happen could.
She could have had an abortion but she couldn’t even bring herself to think of rooting out this intoxicating and completely new feeling of peace, joy, contentedness and wild happiness. So she went to work, gave lectures, collected a few of her things from home and went back to Kamal, and they made love and went to Tahrir and screamed and later they laughed and fell asleep right away and when she woke up she had no time to think about what had happened.
When she was almost too big she found herself at the airport. She bought a ticket and flew to Beirut and from there she went to Tripoli where she gave birth and left the baby.
Maryam still has a secret that I can’t write… but I must continue.
She wandered aimlessly as if out of her mind. She went to London where she met with academic friends. She pretended to laugh and carry on. Her soul curled up in the pit of her stomach and she was as still as someone sleeping after torture, somewhere between life and death. Somehow she tried to get back to her old life but she knew that wasn’t possible. As if she didn’t know that she was chasing a dream she found herself in Tunisia. She didn’t know that she was going to Dido’s Carthage until she ran into us and told me about Dido. She was startled by the fact that she didn’t know that she was following a fairytale in the back of her mind. And it was only later that she came to realize she was writing this tale herself, concocting a new ending to Dido’s myth to make a good ending for her own story. In Yafran. That night we were all together. That night Lilla fell apart. That night Maryam redid the buttons on Madam Lilla’s shirt. That night she understood we could make it together and that it wasn’t the baby or life she feared but loneliness. In the desert she realized deep down that her baby was a part of her destiny and that she was already going back to her. Even without admitting the journey to herself, she was already doing it. Something in her snapped.
She had set herself up for a sad, accursed life locked shut and s
he would wither alone, lonely and pale. Returning to hope frightened her more than a life of grief. That was why she had bellowed and cried in the helicopter. She reached down into her guts and pulled out the bullet. From that deep sleep her soul came back to life and she felt the pain.
That’s how it had to be. That is how it happened. I had put it down on paper…
Did Kamal look for her? He must have. Did she miss him? Maybe. But the revolution was over. She was thrown out of the maelstrom that she had hoped would send her to another life but when it finally stopped, Egypt, Tahrir and people were the same. She was the only one who had changed. She cut off all her hair.
Maryam was now looking in on her life from the outside. She no longer looked at her own face the same way and she no longer believed God loved her. When she met Amira and I and then later Madam Lilla she’d already lost all hope of another life. We were the only story she could fit in. That was why she had agreed to come on our trip. The solution to her solitude was our strange quartet. We were forced to take her to the place she most feared which was also the place she most wanted to go. That was why she was angry with Madam Lilla. Like a child angrily embracing her mother because she is both afraid of the sea and desperately wants to go in. It was only Madam Lilla who knew from the beginning that once Maryam got used to the sea she would love swimming.
*
I scribbled this down on Union Hotel stationery when we were in the taxi. I held my breath as I wrote and when I placed the last full stop I let out a heavy sigh and I was back inside the car. I added a note in the cramped space at the bottom of the page. Characters in novels most likely enjoy being watched, but as for me…
“No way!” said Amira, shocked. The car stopped. There before us in the marina was a shiny black yacht the size of a ship that looked like it belonged to a Russian oligarch. The captain was smoking a cigarette beside it, waiting for us. Lilla said to us, “You can trust the Captain. The owners don’t know we’re using it. You can always trust criminals.” And she laughed.
We got out of the taxi and the captain signalled to a thin, dark-skinned cabin boy beside him who rushed over to our bags and whisked them up onto the ship. “Let’s get a move on,” the captain said. “We need to set out before the sun sets.”
Like an actor in a film, Madam Lilla stepped onto the boat, her hand in the captain’s hand. As I followed them … well that’s when I said, “I found my own rule…”
With the tolerance you show a lunatic, Amira pushed me towards the boat and Maryam with her slingshot in hand was waving her arms with that let’s-get-going routine. I wanted to tell them that I would write the end to both their stories. But I didn’t. I was going to write Muhammed’s seventh letter and Dido’s seventh tablet. In the end I had found the seventh rule. I would write it down and it was definitely going to turn out just the way I wrote it. And that’s how we set out on the Mediterranean.
29
“It’s so much busier on land. But the horizon is never moving. It’s beautiful here because you can’t see what’s ahead,” said Amira as she looked down at the rich foam the boat churned up in its wake. Those white caps in the dark blue water seemed as strange as what Amira had just said. Night was falling. Our first day on the boat had come to a close with those words, but here’s how we got there.
*
“We don’t do this boat any favours,” said Maryam as she took aim at the cabin boy. He was making it clear that serving a rough group like us was beneath him. She stretched out the rubber band of her slingshot and let go. We certainly weren’t doing the boat any favours but we were enjoying ourselves more than any picture-perfect Russian model ever could.
With our feet curled under our big bums, parked on the stern of the boat we were talking loudly over the sound of the churning waters. The cabin boy reluctantly served a set of ridiculous fruit cocktails. He had the long face and upturned nose of a salesman at a luxury boutique. We sank deeper into the dark-green cushions. We made ourselves comfortable. Amira stretched out, Maryam took aim with her slingshot. She was going shoot the world right in the eyes.
Madam Lilla was settling into her cabin as if we were permanently moving onto the boat. In the movie she had running in her head we were on the Titanic and her closet was packed with all her things from Alexandria – silks and satin, flared skirts and brocades – all that she would need before we arrived in New York. She must have missed the feel of fabric. The trip would only last a couple of days but of course Madam Lilla had a different measure for time.
“Seems Lilla is going on a journey around the world in eighty days on this boat,” said Maryam.
“No doubt we’ll be invited to the captain’s quarters for dinner tonight!” commented Amira.
“Lilla and the captain will dance the first dance together.”
Still on her back, Amira flung open her arms and twirled her wrists as she made the announcement for the evening, “Captain Stubing and the Love Boat’s amazing guests. The episode, The Return of Madam Lilla!”
We all laughed. The three of us had grown up in the 1980s and we’d all seen The Love Boat on the television. I added, “Of course at the end of the episode we shouldn’t end up like the Three Black Fish on the grill.”
I was laughing on my own now. Neither Amira nor Maryam had understood. “Don’t you get it?” I asked. They looked at me blankly. “No way! So you don’t know the Little Black Fish? From Behrengi.” They didn’t. “How’s that? Aren’t you guys supposed to be Arabic? He’s actually an Iranian writer. You know the one who was killed under the Shah…” They had no idea who I was talking about.
Maryam tired of the joke. She wanted an explanation. “Alright already. If you have something to say then spill it.”
“There’s this little black fish who leaves his home with a knife around his waist. He’s looking for adventure. He ends up in a pelican’s gullet. But teaming up with the other fish he manages to cut a way out and they escape. And it’s then that…”
I stopped, feeling a little foolish but Amira was curious to know how the story ended. “And?”
“The end is a little … I mean it’s like … my mother’s version of the story ended with the fish going back home to tell his story but … in the real story he doesn’t go back home. They never hear from him again.”
I was silent. In that moment the fate of the Little Black Fish seemed overloaded with meaning for someone who was on a boat crossing the Mediterranean and who was confused about writing a book and being an actual character in that book.
“In the end does he come home or not?” asked Maryam, indifferently.
“How should I know,” I said.
We were silent for a few moments. And it seemed the subject was closed.
Maryam kept sniffing the strange smell the rubber band left in the palm of her hand. Rubber, plastic, latex, a hero … she was thinking and began to tell us her thoughts.
“Something’s happened to superheroes, azizi. They all seem depressed recently. Have you noticed?”
I was still musing about the Little Black Fish while Amira had her arms on the back of the boat, her chin on her hands, lost in all the foam bubbling up from the propeller. Maryam continued her theory.
“Even Superman was depressed. Batman started the trend. Then Spiderman got the blues. The world’s only going from bad to worse, azizi. Even superheroes are on the therapy couch. Their heads all turned around.”
“Maybe it’s because women superheroes have come along,” said Amira. I thought of all the films I’d recently seen with heavily armed women in tights. Perfect beauty, incredible strength, extraordinarily smart, exceptionally wise, and always flying off somewhere… A crew of super-ladies that didn’t look anything like our ragtag trio of Little Black Fish.
I noticed an orange butterfly with black and white spots, the last thing I expected to see in such a place. Freeing itself from the wind, it had managed to land on the deck of the boat.
“Maybe telling a story, or writing it do
wn, is just the hopeless search for a home.”
“The library in Alexandria!” said Maryam, and she thoughtfully covered her mouth but suddenly catching a whiff of rubber from the sling again she scrunched up her face. She hesitated then continued, “Alexander the Great wanted to establish a place where he could gather every story ever told because he could never go home. So it was a home where all the stories were collected. But the place he chose was opposite his old homeland of Macedonia. Only the sea was in between … the reason for the lighthouse in Alexandria…”
“Brava, my love!” I said to Mayram, and excitedly I went on, “the story is hopelessly trying to find a home. Or like miserable Alexander, you put up a lighthouse and wait for the house to find you.”
“And?” said Amira, “In this story does anyone end up going home?”
I saw a different question in her eyes. A question about Muhammed. When he came back – if he did – would she be there, too? If we made it out of this trip alive would Amira return to Tunisia and lead a normal life? Or like a butterfly would she pass away before the story ended…
“Is that a butterfly?” asked Amira, distracted.
Maryam looked at our new voyager on the boat, “It happens sometimes. In Alexandria there can be these sudden gusts of them. The wind must have blown this one all the way out here.”
For some time we gazed at the butterfly. We watched it opening and closing its wings, as if on the brink of coming to a decision. It mustn’t die before three pairs of eyes could marvel at its wings. Then we saw them and its story was told. Maybe Madam Lilla was right, “No life ended unachieved.” Even lives that lasted just one day.
“I can write it,” I said.
“Yes, you can, just steady yourself, Rocky,” teased Maryam.
“I mean the end of your story … I can write the end of our story,” I added.
Joyful as a butterfly, Amira asked, “What will it be like?” And almost at the same time Maryam said “So you don’t need us then?”
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 38