‘Aren’t you going to listen to my chest, Hypa?’ she said.
I understood what she meant. She wanted me to put my ear on her back, as I had done with her aunt. I hesitated a moment, then I sat next to her and she stood in front of me. She turned and took two steps back until my knees almost touched the back of her knees. At the time I did not worry that any of the monks or any patient might come in on us through the open door or that the abbot might come to visit me, as was his habit. I thought of nothing but her and I was emboldened by the fact that I had heard no footsteps on the gravel in the courtyard.
The silence was complete, and my desire for her was overpowering. I pressed my ear against her back to hear her pulse and find out the cause of the rasping in her chest. But there was nothing wrong with her chest and all I heard was the steady beats of her heart, loud. I felt that the beats were calling me. I lingered, listening, enjoying the feel of the velvet dress pressed between her body and the side of my face. Without thinking I put my hands on her hips and pulled her gently towards me. She leant back until her bottom touched my chest. Then she put her hands on my hands and brought them round to meet in front. She squeezed my hands and I squeezed her stomach. I raised my hands, with her hands on top, until I touched her breasts with my palms. She pressed my hands with hers and I pressed her breasts beneath. At that moment I ejaculated in great spurts, like a flood pent up since time long past, watering land that had cracked from twenty years of drought. Martha trembled, the same tremble I had witnessed twenty years earlier in the wine cellar, but Martha’s trembling was more gratifying and more receptive.
She turned her face towards me, with my arms still wrapped around her. She gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and hurriedly slipped away towards the door. I stayed sitting for a long while, bewildered, then stretched out on the big bench and fell into a deep sleep, sweeter than normal sleep.
SCROLL TWENTY-FIVE
Longing
I woke up at dawn the next day and found myself hugging one of the coarse pillows which were on the bench. I got up like a man brought back to life after aeons. I shut my eyes and imagined myself embracing Martha and recalled the ecstasy of the previous day. As the light of the lazy sun spread, the farmer who planted seeds arrived with three workmen who knew about farming. I accompanied them to the hanging gardens around Martha’s cottage and caught sight of her twice as we planted and prepared the soil. In the afternoon when we had finished, I sent Deacon to fetch the boys and I dropped in on Martha to invite her to the last practice, because we had two days before we would start to sing at mass, just two days.
Martha joined me without delay and sat in her usual place in the library, with me facing her and her facing the door. I felt she was close to me. If she stretched out her arm, and I stretched out mine, then our fingertips could touch, even interlock, and a single force would flow through us, enclosing us until we left every other world behind us. Then my heart would surge and my mind would go blank, and were it not for a remnant of fear I would steal a march on my own death and my soul would escape my body, to soar through worlds of eternity and never return to this ephemeral body and its agonizing desires.
Martha turned to me, showing the full sun of her face. She took off her black diaphanous cap, and her hair fell down around her face, making her look yet more beautiful. I was looking at her in silence when she surprised me with a question. ‘Hypa, don’t you feel homesick for your country, the place you were born?’
‘Why do you ask?’
She turned towards me with just a twist of her right shoulder, but that was enough for my mournful eyes to see how her neck rose to her queenly cheeks. She must have descended from some bygone royal line which had lost its kingdom in the vicissitudes of time but whose features showed up in their distant progeny. Smiling angelically, she said, ‘Will you answer my question with a question?’
‘It’s not one question, Martha. I have many questions for you.’
‘Ask me anything and I will answer you, my lord.’
I could not help but smile, and she smiled too and there was a twinkle in her eye. She turned full towards me and my eyes fixed on her breast. I was unable to avert my gaze from the spot where I would have liked to lay my head. She was not bothered that I was gazing so intently at this forbidden spot. Perhaps she wanted to offer her breast to me to soothe away the sorrows which had afflicted my soul for so many years, and put an end to the age of abstinence. Ah, if I had rested my head on her breast that day, I would have knelt in front of her, put my head between her breasts, held her to me, melted into her and died.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me?’ she said.
Her question brought me to my senses. I looked up to her neck, her cheeks, her nose, delicate as a flower bud, to the sea of liquid mountain honey in her eyes. Adrift, I held fast to words. ‘Martha, tell me about your family.’
‘That’s a long story.’ Her smile was almost a laugh now. She leant her shoulders back a little, then began to tell me stories. She recounted many unconnected happenings, about her grandmother who never tired of talking about the city of Palmyra, which was destroyed when her grandmother was still a child; about her father who was a blacksmith in Damascus, well known there for his skill at making fine swords out of Damascus steel, famous for its quality. For some reason which she did not reveal, or which perhaps she did not know, her father moved to Aleppo but the people of Aleppo would not accept him and he spent years there trying to join the Christian community and serve the parish, but they refused because his wife, Martha’s mother, was a pious pagan and had once been seen lighting candles secretly on the remains of the abandoned temple which used to stand on the road to Aleppo. Her father had to spend five years under the scrutiny of the deacons and priests until the bishop agreed to let him enter the fold of the Lord. Her father did not stay long before moving his family to that small village which nestles beside the road between Aleppo and Antioch, Sarmada, and there she was born nineteen or twenty years ago.
‘So your father lived as a pagan?’
‘We didn’t know what religion he was until his death. He died early, in his early forties, but in any case he wanted to be Christian.’
‘Did he die a Christian?’
‘He was killed.’
She shed two tears, and my heart went out to her. I was about to stand up and hug her to my chest, as I had imagined, or hold her face in my hands as I used to do with my uncle’s white doves. Was Martha just a white dove which had alighted in this world from beyond the clouds? Why did I not hug her that day? She was mourning for her father, mourning for herself, mourning for the desolation of this world.
The next day I asked her about her husband, and she wept many tears as she told me that she was nine when her father met his end after a dispute with a group of highwaymen for whom he made swords. Two months after his death her mother told her she was going to marry her off. By the word ‘marry’, all she understood was that a man would come to live with them. The husband was more than fifty years old, a wanderer who dealt in swords and other weapons. He collected them from the makers in the big cities and travelled to countries far to the east, selling them to a group of warriors called the Shankara, or so she said.
‘Do you mean Shabankareh?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know exactly, I was very young.’
‘They’re a group of Kurds who live on the borders of the land of Persia, and their name is derived from the word for shepherds in the Kurdish language,’ I told her.
‘How do you know all these things?’
‘Because I once treated one of them and because I’m an old man, twenty years older than you.’
‘No, my love, you are my little child, my beloved.’
She stood up, kissed me and moved away. I would have wrapped my arms around her but she went straight back to her place, looking warily towards the door. I sat up straight and asked her to tell me what happened to her husband who was forty years older than her. She said that he wasn’t a husb
and in the usual sense and she stayed two years with him without knowing what married life meant, until one scorching summer’s day. It was midday and she was playing with the neighbourhood children behind the house when an old woman who lived nearby called her and took her by the hand to her husband. Her mother wasn’t at home. The husband was alone, sitting on the ground with his back to the wall. All he had on his colossal body was a short jellaba rolled up to show his legs, which were covered, as she said in disgust, with thick hair.
She spoke with a trace of lingering pain as she continued. ‘The old woman stood with me at the door to the room, happy for some reason I could not see. Then she dipped an old copper cup into the water jar near the door, poured some of it into her cupped hand and wiped my face. Then she undid my plaits and wet my hair with water. He was smiling at the old woman, who began to drag me towards him, then threw me in his lap. I was like a little bird who had fallen on a giant’s thigh. When the old woman left, he pulled me towards him so hard that I felt my ribs breaking between his arms. Then he began to explore my body with his rough hands. I wasn’t very curvy at the time, but he started to squeeze under my arms, then moved on to my breasts, which had hardly developed. I was submissive and frightened, anxious because my mother was not at home. He stripped me completely naked, laid me on his bare thighs without taking off his jellaba and began to run the palm of his right hand over my stomach and legs. I had a strange unfamiliar feeling, shut my eyes and submitted to him. Suddenly he slipped his finger inside me and I started to bleed. I screamed, jumped out and ran towards the door. He stood up behind me and grabbed me by my hair with his hand, which was stained with my blood. I kept screaming as he held me, then he threw me violently into the corner of the room, where I curled up with my head between my knees. I fell asleep like that, or completely lost consciousness, until my mother came and took me in her arms.’
‘That’s enough, Martha, that’s enough,’ I said.
‘No, I’m going to tell you everything, so that you know how life has abused me.’
Martha’s story shook me to the core, especially when I learnt that her husband, in spite of his large body, did not sleep with other women, and that when he came back from his travels he would amuse himself with her whenever the opportunity arose. When she reached fifteen, her mother died and her husband forbade her to leave the house. He would go away on business for weeks and came back to find his plaything awaiting him.
Her floods of tears soaked the bodice of her dress but she insisted on telling me more, perhaps to unburden herself of the memories or because she wanted to make me aware of what she had suffered, or perhaps because she wanted to share with someone else what she had been hiding behind her angelic face.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks and continued. ‘His rough lips would open in a stupid smile when I hurried to fetch a bowl of water to wash his chapped feet. That was on my mother’s advice and I made it a habit whenever he came home and threw himself down, pretending to be exhausted, on the mud platform at the entrance to our two-room house. After some weeks, when he had grown used to having me massage his feet in the water, he started ordering me to keep massaging them until he fell asleep. He used to sleep seated and snore loudly. After weeks of going to sleep that way, he started ordering me to shut the outer door and sit down again, then he would play with my breasts with the toes of his right foot, until he fell asleep. After weeks playing constantly with my breasts, the day came when he ordered me to take off all my clothes and come and sit at his feet. With one foot he would ravage my naked body while I massaged the other foot. One scorching hot day I was drying his feet when he stuck his right foot in my mouth and ordered me to suck his toes. I refused and he pushed me in anger with his left foot. The powerful shove threw me on my back and I was sprawled on the ground. He guffawed, delirious at my subdued scream and my arrant nakedness spread beneath him. He stood up, like a rock about to fall on me from a mountain top. That day I wished he had thrown his clothes off, pounced on me and taken me by force so that I could die beneath him and be rid of him. But he did not do what I wanted. He just put the bottom of his left foot on my lower belly, rubbed it and laughed. I can feel his heel crushing me now.’
‘Take it easy, Martha, and thank the Lord for saving you from this unrighteous man.’
She stopped a while and looked down at her knees, recalling distant memories. I gazed with sympathy at her cheeks and her long eyelashes. When two new streams of tears began to flow and her cheeks took on a slight flush, her face had a serene virginal quality which was both disconcerting and heart-wrenching. I wanted to hug her but I hesitated, then I yielded to my hesitation. If only I had stood up, I would have wiped her cheeks with my hands, clasped her to my chest, stroked her hair, shut my eyes and inhaled her inner fragrance. She would have rested her head on my chest and I would have wrapped my arms around her until we merged into one, as still and immutable as a white marble statue full of symbolic power.
Why didn’t I embrace her? I stayed still, did nothing, until she continued, her voice a whisper now, or as good as a whisper.
She said, ‘I was lying on the floor beneath him, screaming, and when he raised his foot I escaped from under him towards the door. I opened it and ran through the village streets, terrified and naked. My screams filled the lanes and people were looking. A woman took me inside her house and covered my nakedness with an old jellaba. In the evening, people gathered and he came home drunk, his vast frame reeling. He then divorced me because I had not produced any children! And he threw me out of our house. I had nowhere left to live, so I went to this aunt of mine in her old house in Aleppo and spent the last three years there. I learnt to sing there, and because we found it hard to make a living, and I was constantly harassed, we left my aunt’s ramshackle house, and I came with her to live here, next to you.’
‘Dry your tears, Martha, and go off home before the boys come, because they are about to arrive.’
‘Will you come to me when you’re finished with them?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I’ll come before sunset to see you in the cottage, and I’ll come again tomorrow after daybreak. After today no day will pass without me seeing you.’
I don’t know how I summoned up the courage to say those last words, but she was pleased with what I said, and I was pleased with her smile and her dreamy look. She stood up to adjust her headscarf quickly, and hurried away.
At the door she turned towards me, and I sat there paralysed. ‘I’ll be waiting for you. Don’t be long, Hypa,’ she said.
She spoke my name as though she were the angel who would bring me back from the dead on the Day of Judgement, for me to wake up and dissolve in divine light. At the door she tightened her scarf, dropped the thin silk veil over her face, then threw one end of it over her shoulder. She took two steps towards me, and whispered her reproach. ‘I asked you questions and you gave me no answers. You asked me, and I told you everything.’
‘I’ll tell you today, everything you want to know,’ I said.
When she was out of sight, I stood up and watched her from the jagged crack in the wall, then from the hole between the wooden cupboards, then from my only window. I saw her reach the monastery gate and veer to the right to go down the hill. She disappeared from view little by little – her feet, her waist, her head. When she was completely gone, I was quite beside myself. I wished impossible wishes and when I came to my senses, my head leaning back against the wall, I spoke to myself at length to distract myself from what I longed for, to dig out the roots of desire from my heart. I wanted to die instantly, to save myself from my uncertainty.
The sun was sinking and I heard the sound of the boys coming, so I prepared to receive them. I did not take long over practice and when I had finished with them I told them it was the last day of practice and we would meet in the church on Sunday mornings, starting in two days’ time. I went out with them to the foot of the hill and asked Deacon to come back to meet me in the field near the cottage after he ha
d dropped them off.
Martha was waiting at the door in attractive house clothes. All her clothes are jellabas of the kind women wear in these parts – but she was enchanting. She met me at the cottage entrance and invited me in. Her aunt repeated the invitation, and I went in, and the aunt brought us something cold to drink. I don’t remember now what it was but I do recall that it tasted good and that as I drank my eyes were feasting on the sea of honey in Martha’s eyes as she sat in front of me on the floor. The opening in the bodice of her jellaba revealed the firmness of her breasts. I could not help but look at them, until Martha noticed and closed the opening with both hands. She smiled, looked at me with affection and bit her lower lip.
I looked around the cottage – a single room with wooden sides of flimsy construction, with a smaller room attached without a door, I think a toilet. In front of the door there was a small piece of level ground and on one side the oven which they had recently restored and which was still giving off a little smoke. Next to the oven there was a small room with walls of old brick, also without a door. Martha was looking at me, smiling and content, and her aunt was taking a small pot out of the oven, in which the fire had almost died. It smelt of delicious cooking.
‘I’m going to take some food to the soldiers,’ the old aunt said.
Martha stood up at once, took a palm-frond basket from the corner of the cottage and put the pot of cooked food in it with the help of an old rag. It smelt delicious. Her aunt took her leave and went on her way with the pot. Without me asking, Martha answered the question that was puzzling me. The men of the Roman guard contingent, whom the aunt called the soldiers, had agreed with her the day before that she would cook them a hot meal every other day. Either they would come and take it or she would take it to them shortly before sunset. They would send the meat, vegetables and the cooking money in the morning, and enjoy their meal in the evening. That was because, according to Martha, they did not like the food which came to them every day from the monastery kitchen.
Azazeel Page 29