Taking Zaytuna in his arms, he laughed. He held her too tightly, awkwardly, one of her arms trapped between them and her jaw pressing against his collarbone. She pushed against him, trying to release herself, and whispered, “Sit down!” He held her for a moment longer and then let go.
She whispered, “What made you come? Is it about the slave?”
“What? How do you know?”
They both said at the same time, “Saliha.”
He unbuckled his knife belt and let it fall to the floor, saying, “It’s not that. I’m just tired. Can I sleep here?”
“But you need to tell me.”
“I know I share case stories with you, Zay, but not tonight.”
“It’s God’s…”
“Stop. No God’s will tonight. Not tonight, I’m tired.”
She snapped at him, “You stink. Not just wine, I smell women on you.”
He replied, exhausted, “Like old times.”
“You can have your old spot outside the door.” She pointed beyond the door in the dark.
“It’s cold, Zaytuna. Have some pity.”
“Fine. You can stay in here, but you can’t use my blanket.” She heard him slump onto the floor, and she got down as well. She propped her hand on his leg, reaching over him to the box where she kept her dear things. She felt the edge of the small clay lamp. “I have oil for the lamp.”
“You’ve given in to luxury, Zaytuna. God will be angry.”
She ignored the comment and lifted the lamp, careful not to spill the oil, then realized. “Uff, ridiculous, what use is this? I’ve got no way to light it.”
“No fire outside?”
“Did you see one?”
“How did you afford the oil?”
“Not with any money you’ve given me.”
He blew out his nose, “Humph.”
She gave a hard look into the darkness and said, “Saliha gave it to me. I only took it to make her stop trying to give me things.” Then she added for good measure, “And I don’t want your money, either.”
“I know.”
She heard the acceptance of her ways in his voice and it pulled her back. Could she not control her tongue? She turned inwardly toward God and said, “Forgive me,” aloud, without realizing it.
He knocked one of his legs against her. “I accept.”
She nearly blurted out that she was speaking to God, not him, but pulled herself back in time, saying instead, “I am sorry, Tein.”
“I’m not sure what you are apologizing for now,” he laughed, “but later, there will be something. I’ll remember it for then.”
She laughed with him and put her hand on his bent knee. “I’m glad you are here.” She teased, “Was the tavern you ended up at closer to me than Barley Road?”
“It was the same distance, either way. I wanted to see you.”
She pulled his bent leg against her and held it. “Tell me why you are so tired.”
He felt her arm around his leg, the warmth of her body against him, even the bones of her ribs against his calf, and it felt like home. He said, “Let’s sleep. I miss you.”
“Not yet, tell me.”
His tongue was loose from the wine. He said what he would not during the day, when he was sober and remembered how easily they fought, but rather what he was thinking right there and then, “I never should have moved away from you, Zay. I should have found us a place together.”
“Habibi, come here.”
His body was so heavy, he could barely move his limbs. He pushed against the reed mats, dragging against them, exposing the pounded earth floor below, raising dirt. She’d be angry with him. “I’m ruining your mats.”
“Shhh, come here.”
She pulled on him, trying to help and making it worse, but he got himself up against the wall next to her. She leaned into him and took his hand. Her long fingers, like their mother, laid flat against his own. Tein wanted to settle in, crawl under her arm, pull himself in and rest despite his size, but the wine hadn’t done its work. His Mother. His wife, Ayzit. His infant son, Husayn. The men he’d failed in battle. The people whose cases he couldn’t solve. The people he’d sent to lose their heads. Their bodies followed him everywhere, and all of them, huddled together, wouldn’t fit. He sat up, his limbs stiff and heavy with fear and recrimination, and let go of Zaytuna.
“What, habibi?”
What could he say? So he asked instead, “Tell me, did you have a lot of houses to work today?”
“One house, but I went to go see Uncle Abu al-Qasim this morning.”
“And?”
“I asked him to be my shaykh.”
Tein squeezed her hand for a moment and she leaned against him. He asked, “So what comes next?”
She laughed uncomfortably. “I have to be good.”
He pushed her shoulder with his own. “You’d better give up now, sister!”
“Maybe I should,” she said resignedly.
“Zaytuna, I was just having fun with you.”
“In the short time that he asked me to correct myself, before I even left him, I did everything wrong and ignored every correction.”
Tein started laughing again, his body shaking off some of the sorrow that gripped him. He began to feel the wine with the release of it and wanted more. He said, “Oh Zaytuna, I’m sorry, but that is so you!”
She pushed him away. “What good are you!”
He lifted his hand like a poet poised to declaim and said with a flourish, “I am the one who has loved you, loved you since the womb.”
Her voice sank, “That sounds like something that could have sprung from Mother, if God were the Lover speaking those words and not your drunk body.”
The comment stung. “What’s wrong?”
“YingYue was there.”
The second it came out of his mouth, he regretted it, “Mustafa’s girl.”
She pushed herself up against him to standing. She spoke down at him, “I’m tired, Tein. Let’s just sleep.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, sit down.”
“What did you mean it like? What have you seen?”
Tein had seen the beautiful young Chinese girl stealing glances at him when he visited the aunts and uncles and blushing as she spoke to Mustafa. He answered, “Nothing, you told me that Mustafa was interested in her. What is this anyway? You don’t want him.”
She sat down against the wall across from him. “I can’t have him, yet I don’t want to give him up.”
He turned hard on her, “Zaytuna, you kept him like a donkey on a rope all those years. Let him go.”
“Maybe I can’t let him go to her.”
He shook his head. He told her that she’d turned their dearest childhood friend into no more than a pack animal for her whims, and she’d registered none of it. He wanted to drive the point home even deeper. She should know that who Mustafa married was not her choice. At least it better not be, who knows with Mustafa. But he held himself back. He wanted to sleep there tonight, not stumble into the nearby cemetery to sleep cold, huddled with the poorest of the poor who lived within its gates, so he asked instead, “Why not her?”
“She reminds me of Mother.”
He repeated the name, “Mother,” and the frustration he felt towards Zaytuna dissolved into the exhaustion that had driven him to a tavern, and then to her, for comfort. Comfort he could see now he was not going to get.
“She’s a natural, like Mother.” She added bitterly, “Not like me. You should have heard her talk about how she loved God. She wrote God love letters.” Her voice became high and tight, “She took the letters to the riv…”.
Tein let it out, “The girl we arrested, Mu’mina...”
“…er to dissolve…” She stopped cold with a sharp intake of breath.
“I’ll tell you.” He waited for some response, but Zaytuna held still.
She finally spoke, “Saliha said you had to arrest her. Did you charge her?”
“Ammar did.”
“I fought it.”
“Tein, I’m sorry you had to arrest her. Of course, you had no choice.”
He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. What good would it be to try to explain to her that he had a choice? A man always has a choice.
She interrupted his silent recriminations, “What about Tansholpan?”
“Who?”
“The cursewriter.”
Tein could hear she was pleased with herself for knowing more than he did. He asked, because she expected it, “How do you know who she is?”
“Yulduz says Tansholpan is the only one who could write such a powerful curse.”
He tried not to sound smug himself, “A curse didn’t kill him.”
“Well, that is good because Yulduz vowed she’d get a curse written against you and Ammar if Tansholpan is arrested.”
“She may yet, if Ammar has his way.”
“Why?”
“Because Mu’mina confessed to giving the Imam the talisman made by Tansholpan and believes it killed him.”
Zaytuna nearly jumped up. “But that’s not the same thing at all! She only confessed to giving him a talisman. What she believes isn’t evidence!”
He slapped his knee. “Thank you! I tried to explain that to Ammar! He took what she said as a plain confession of fact. I got him to let me question her and tried to make him see it wasn’t a confession.”
“So why wasn’t she released?”
“He still thinks she did it. I reminded him there are other ways he could have died, but he’s not interested in pursuing them.”
“But I don’t understand, Ammar’s usually so thorough.”
“All I succeeded in doing was getting her confession thrown into doubt. She’ll be brought before the Police Chief as soon as possible. Once we find Tansholpan, that’ll be that.”
“May God open Ammar’s eyes!”
“I’m doing my best.”
That got her back up. “Oh, you are God, now?”
“Curse your moods!” He reached out to her quickly, hoping she’d not dig in at the insult, saying, “You know that’s not what I meant.”
She pushed his hand away. “Uff.”
There was a movement outside, coming from within the courtyard. They’d woken one of the neighbours.
Zaytuna lowered her voice, turning her ire on Ammar, hissing, “What is wrong with that man?”
Tein met her emotion with his own, “He’d be relieved if she were executed. He’s afraid of her.”
“Why?”
Tein responded as if the answer were obvious, “She’s African.”
“But you’re African.”
“Am I?”
“You think because an Arab man raped our mother, we are Arab?”
Tein retorted, “But what do we have other than Mother’s drum and a few of her beads? She never told us about our family, where she came from, or why she left. We’ve grown up in Arab lands. We speak Arabic, we dress like Arabs, we eat like Arabs. How are we not Arabs?”
“Fine, you be Arab. I am African. What we have is enough.”
Tein snorted. “And you the one who looks like an Arab, and me the one who is called ‘crow’ and ‘Zanji’ everywhere he goes.”
Her breathing changed and he knew what it meant. He pulled himself up to sit closer to her, one knee resting on her leg. He reached out to touch her face and wipe away her tears, saying, “My beautiful African sister.”
She sniffed and brushed his hand away. But he raised his hand again, and lightly traced lines down her nose and across her cheekbones saying, “Mu’mina, has these small scars across her face. Ammar said she counts spells on them.”
“Is she Muslim?”
“Yes. She had a vision of Fatima and is devoted to her.”
“Doesn’t that mean anything to him?”
“No,” Tein said, “he says she worships Fatima as if she were an African god.”
“Does she?”
“Oh, the piety! Why would it matter? She deserves justice either way. The Imam raped her.”
Zaytuna was certain. “I would have killed him, too.”
“He deserved whatever he got.”
“Tein, it sounds like she killed him, you just don’t know how yet.”
“Why wouldn’t she just confess to what she actually did then? Why insist it was the talisman?”
“You don’t know what’s going on in her mind.”
He huffed in reluctant agreement, “You should have seen her, Zaytuna.”
“What should I have seen?”
He didn’t realize it until that moment. “She reminded me of Mother.”
“You said that.”
He became impatient. “Listen to me. Maybe this is why Mother left to wander on her own. Was it just for God? Or was she trying to escape something?” Tein sighed and leaned forward heavily, putting his elbows on his knees, placing his forehead against his open palms. “I’ve been nothing but a useless burden. To you, to Ayzit, Husayn, my own mother, myself, and even Ammar, curse him. Curse it all! Curse this living!” He tried to hold back, but broke into uncontrollable sobs, his tears running down through his fingers.
Zaytuna reached forward to comfort him. She heard movements outside her room again. Someone must have come out to sleep in the courtyard, although why they would in this cold? She wondered if they could hear him weeping, too. He’d be mortified. “Tein,” she said, brushing his cheek, then, using both hands, took the turban off his head, setting it down next to her box and their mother’s drum in the corner. She pulled him to her. “Come here.”
Folding over onto his side, he stretched out his legs as far as they would go and tugged his great body towards her. She pushed him to lay his head in her lap, and he wrapped his arms around her waist. Zaytuna covered him with her body, while he shuddered with sobs. She breathed quiet into him until it passed.
He reached out for the blanket underneath her and pulled an edge toward his face. She thought, God he’s going to blow his nose with that! She said aloud, “Uff, Tein, how could you be so disgusting?” She found a clean square of folded cloth in her box, and tucked it into his hand saying, “Here, use this.”
Sitting up and crossing his legs, Tein blew his nose. “I’m fine. It’s just the drink.”
She wanted to tell him to leave the past behind him, but who was she to talk? She couldn’t put her own pain down for longer than a moment. He was stuck from the earliest moments in his life having to protect her and their mother. Tein had pulled a man off of their mother in the dead of night. He circled the graveyards where she preached to make sure no one attacked their mother in her ecstatic states. He had slept at their feet, always ready for anyone who might harm them. All of that, and he still couldn’t keep their mother from dying. He fought back the Byzantines but couldn’t protect his wife and child when their camp was raided. She realized in that moment, he was going to have to save this girl whether she was guilty or not. I’ll do my part for his sake. Alhamdulillah.
She whispered, “So what can we do?”
He didn’t answer. He laid down, pushing against her as he did, forcing her to make room.
“Tein, what are you doing?”
“Come here.”
She realized then what he wanted. She lay down next to him and pulled the blanket over them both, curling up behind him tucking her arms in between them, as if he were carrying her like a baby tucked into a wrap on his back. It had been a long time since they had slept next to each other like this. Not since they were very young. Not since Mother died, when he stopped holding her at all.
He finally answered her question, “I don’t know what we can do. Maybe first, can you keep Yulduz from cursing me?”
Zaytuna heard a stifled laugh outside, and then she realized who it was. Saliha. My God, how long had she been listening? Zaytuna laughed a little louder than she would have to cover what sounded like Saliha retreating to her room.
“Can you stand th
e stink?”
She laughed. “You smell fine. Just don’t kick me.”
“Don’t let me oversleep, it’s a long walk to the office in the morning.”
“Yes, I remember it well.”
The Second Day
Chapter Eight
“It’s late.” Zaytuna kicked Tein awake with her foot.
Every one of his muscles was sore and tight in the morning cold. His mouth was sticky. His head was throbbing. He prayed for her, “May your morning be like the light of a full moon dawning on a donkey’s ass.”
She laughed, “Amin!” Then she went into the still-dark courtyard leaving him thick-headed and slumped against the wall. He stuck his legs out and found the jug and cup that Mustafa had made for her many years ago and poured himself some water. He never made one of these for me, Tein thought, as he drank it down in one gulp and poured another, leaving the jug empty. But then Mustafa was never trying to convince me to marry him. And now that was done. There was a man for her somewhere, although whether she’d accept him was another matter. But he sorely wished someone would take her off his hands already so he wouldn’t have to worry about her.
Tein reached up and felt around for the bag of dates hanging from the peg on the wall. Lifting it off, he opened it and shoved three into his mouth. He rolled them around until he had the seeds in his cheek, swallowed the meat, then spat them out to the other side of her room. Thwat, thwat, thwat. He felt around in the dark for his turban and shoved it on his head, then picked up his knife belt from where he’d let it drop, stood, straightened his woolen robe, and strapped the belt around it.
Stepping out into the courtyard, he realized it was later than he thought. A faint dawn light illuminated the courtyard. Ammar wouldn’t like it. He corrected himself, What does it matter what Ammar likes?
Old Qambar sat in the far corner of the small courtyard near the water basin, whispering his morning supplications. Yulduz was shaking out one of the reed mats from their room and raising dust.
“It’s a bit early for that,” Tein grumbled. “Can’t you do it in the alleyway like everyone else?”
Squinting one eye and grimacing as if the combination was some sort of magical mechanism, Yulduz said in the most formal Arabic she could manage, “May this dust keep you from seeing the innocent ones you persecute!”
The Jealous Page 10