by Raja Alem
“Hold on. What about these pills? Do you have any with you? If we dissolve them in the water, it’ll get rid of all Napalm’s revolting farts.”
The women ignored this joke from the Palestinian, and their eyes remained glued to Sarab, waiting for more. She was forced to submit to the inane discussion if she wanted to break that siege of curiosity.
“They have special towels for periods, with padding made of fine cotton. You throw them away after using them once, so you’re not forced to keep washing rags.” She spoke with sarcastic insolence, expecting the Kuwaiti to be furious at her boldness, but sincere interest gleamed in the women’s eyes.
“And the rubbish overflows with blood. Well, they deserve that filth.”
The Kuwaiti woman interrupted, breathing heavily: “And do they have sex with women from behind like animals?”
Unmitigated shock appeared on Sarab’s face. “How should I know?”
“And their men aren’t circumcised? Do they get worms in their foreskins which gnaw at their partners?”
“That’s terrible!” Sarab’s gasp made the women burst out laughing.
A Qahtani woman interrupted them, saying, “Haram! She’s obviously inexperienced. I can tell from a girl’s manner whether or not she’s still a virgin.”
The Kuwaiti snorted, and the rest of the women chorused, “Here we go again! The Qahtanis know all about human nature, don’t they? What gibberish!”
The Kuwaiti cut her off. “A virgin? My dear . . .” She burst into scornful laughter. “The only virginal thing about her is her brain. It’s harder to penetrate than rock. Don’t let her fool you—they dragged her out of the bed of an infidel.”
The Egyptian appeared to have provided her with every detail of Sarab’s history.
Sarab wheeled around, and her body surprised her by releasing a cry and leaping at the Kuwaiti, her chest exploding with nightmares from the Grand Mosque. She pounced like a lightning bolt, throwing the Kuwaiti’s huge body off balance by striking her at shoulder-height and falling on top of her. A glow of madness outlined her features and she was on her way to breaking that thick neck when the women rushed on her and dragged her to the ground. Sarab gaped at them, and the nightmare of the mosque receded. Her senses began to take in her surroundings and her helpless companions. She was horrified at what she had been so close to doing, and her body gave up resisting and subsided, silently accepting being slapped and spat upon. Her surrender robbed the attackers of their zeal, and they withdrew one by one while the Kuwaiti squatted over her like a nightmare, trying desperately to rehabilitate herself.
“You’re damned! The demons are fighting in your body. Infidels have their demons too. You’re possessed by desert jinn and Western demons.”
From the far corner, Latifa gazed at her despondently. She didn’t dare to intercede on Sarab’s behalf. All the while, the Egyptian remained on her bed, watching like an empress and pealing with malicious laughter that would continue to rumble through Sarab’s guts, consuming her with its spiteful fire.
Green Turtle Procession
She didn’t know what woke her up that night, but a weak light led her to the bathroom. She stood in that narrow area of bare concrete. There were rags hanging on the wall that still bore traces of blood despite repeated scrubbing—the shame of their female bodies hoisted like a flag of disgrace over all the women in that dormitory. Between the rags, Abdel-Salam’s uniform was hung up to dry. Without thinking, Sarab began to strip the black robe off her body and pulled on the gray uniform.
My fate seems to lie in men’s clothing. She wouldn’t let this thought put her off however, and immediately hurried to the door that led to the road. The key was always left in the lock, and none of the women dared even look at it. The idea of opening it to go outside was unthinkable, apart from the appointed times when they left for work as a group. Everything was left open; doubtless the Mahdi was confident of the jailers within them.
Sarab’s pulse was racing. She was careful not to make any sound turning the key in the lock. The Egyptian’s snoring rose. She opened the door resolutely. The snoring from bed nine operated like a tonic, sending a familiar mixture of nausea and ecstasy through her veins, and she rushed into the darkness. It was the first time she had been outside without any guard other than the darkness. In the tranquility of the night the smell of dynamite intensified, coming from her hair and perhaps from the nearby factory. She hurriedly gathered up her hair under the white cap. The rough volcanic ground made her suddenly realize she was barefoot; in her haste she had forgotten her plastic sandals. She resolutely pushed away any thought of going back to retrieve them. In front of her, the ascetic houses of the camp stretched away in every direction. They had originally been warehouses serving the British occupation and were abandoned when the army withdrew from Aden. The buildings were arranged in lines, interspersed with meager lamps that illuminated almost nothing at all. The aim of these lamps was not to guide walkers, but to make the camp appear abandoned.
Uncertain of which way to go, Sarab crawled forward quietly. The lamps cast the long, thin shadow of a barefoot soldier in every direction. She left the factory building on her right and turned in the opposite direction. She didn’t know whether the road would take her out of the camp or toward her kidnappers, but an internal sense guided her. Time passed as she moved from one cluster of storehouses to the next until a featureless square building loomed in the distance, all its windows closed apart from one almost at ground level. A weak light streamed from this window, outlining feet in black leather sandals as they moved through the room. It was the only building that appeared inhabited. Intuition, or perhaps a suicidal impulse, prevented her from retreating. She hurried on, swept up in the ecstasy of danger, and she threw her body on the ground close to the window. She was blinded by the blood that rushed to her head. Her heart was thudding, her whole body was numb, and it was some time before she could force her head to crane upward and steal a look through the window. There were perhaps five men in the room, distributed over the metal chairs and looking alert. They were probably guards, but what were they guarding? A strange smell filled her nostrils; it was familiar, but she couldn’t name it, or even remember where she had encountered it before.
Suddenly the floor of the room split open. A trapdoor opened and the head of an African man rose through it. His face was on a level with Sarab’s, and for a second she was certain he had seen her, but a large grin split his face as he welcomed the men.
“Musaffar, hasn’t God made you repent of chewing that rubbish?” He was speaking to a Yemeni man in a yellow turban who was slumped in his chair, his jaw stuffed with qat.
Sarab focused on the trapdoor. She realized it must be the door to the cellar where the Mahdi’s room was: the room from which the two women had taken her after her meeting with him when she first arrived at the camp.
She froze, exposed to the murderous intentions of any passersby, unable even to draw back. She remained prone in the volcanic dust, her face glued to the window bars and her eyes staring at the men coming and going complacently. They were sipping tea while the man called Musaffar continuously chewed handfuls of qat, spitting them out close to where she lay. Her whetted senses allowed her to catch the scent of plants over that red-tinged spittle, something reminiscent of blood or vegetation; it was the same smell she had caught when the two female guards led her out of the ground after she first arrived. Everything in her surroundings seemed to be magnified, especially the voices. She listened to an amplified discussion in various dialects.
“We’ve just heard the news. Salah succeeded in becoming a martyr. He blew up his belt in southern Lebanon and took those damned Shiites with him.”
“Wasn’t he briefed to aim for a convoy of Israeli soldiers at the border?”
“They discovered him. Witnesses said he was stopped and questioned in front of a café in the suq, so he had to detonate ahead of time. To hell with God’s enemies!”
“We will meet him i
n Heaven.”
Sarab choked at the mere idea that it was Heaven that waited for them.
“That’s the third explosion this year by our martyrs. The Japanese kamikaze in World War Two weren’t as brave as us.” Sarab made out an Egyptian accent. “They demanded death as a sacrifice to pride, not to God and Heaven, but when we die, our eyes are fixed on Paradise.”
Sarab heard this phrase as if for the first time. She listened with the ears of someone who had experienced the streets, people, and festivities of Paris. There, life was light, joyful, invulnerable; it made the voice of this cultured Egyptian sound like it came from a different planet, one with no relationship to life on earth. A struggle broke out inside her; she wished she could exchange herself for the bystanders in that suq where Salah had blown himself up in the hope of Paradise.
“My father was a prominent member of the National Liberation Front in Aden when it began its rebellion against the British. He helped attack the high commissioner with hand grenades in 1963: one dead, fifty wounded.” The one called Musaffar, in telling this story, spat his qat farther, as if he were throwing a bomb. “And two of my uncles were leaders of the revolution that forced the British occupiers to leave Aden. I tattooed the date on my arm, here.” He uncovered his arm to show a date tattooed in green: November 30, 1967.
“This is what I have to live up to,” he said with a sigh, basking in the admiration of his companions. “And I’m sorry, my friend . . .” He turned to face the Egyptian. “On the same date, we rubbed Abdel-Nasser’s nose in the mud. We gave him twenty thousand corpses for interfering in our revolution, and this land became the eternal resting place of those arrogant show-offs.”
The Egyptian hurriedly exonerated him: “Thanks be to God, we have overcome our love of leaders and nationalism. Now we are brothers in our fight against a shared enemy: Dajjal.”
But the Yemeni kept boasting of his origins. “It’s no coincidence we’re protecting our Mahdi here. Cain and Abel are buried in Aden. Death is our destiny in Aden, and we are charged with carrying the legacy of this death on earth.” Clearly, Musaffar was desperate to rouse the esteem of his comrades, especially of the huge-bodied Sudanese man who had just come from meeting the Mahdi, as revealed by his elevated status in this group.
“One day I’ll renounce qat and lead a suicide mission. That’s my ultimate dream.” To his comrades who had come from different parts of the world, merely voicing this wish was a guarantee of pardon for using qat. To increase their acceptance of his zeal, he shouted, “Didn’t you once say that the land talks? Our land produces potassium—how could it speak more clearly than that? It’s obvious that bombs are our destiny.”
The men roared with laughter, and this discussion pumped phenomenal energy though Sarab’s body.
The outside of the building wasn’t guarded. She watched the guards sitting inside and racked her brains for a way of reaching that tunnel. She looked for a way of slipping into the building. She didn’t know why. To meet the Mahdi? Why, Sarab, are you lingering around this pit of death when perhaps there is an escape route through this rugged land where humanity’s first victim lies? She thought of the belts she spent her days cramming with death. If she managed to put one of them on, then reaching the Mahdi would be of some use: she would send both of their shredded bodies flying through the air. The violence of this image appalled her, but it didn’t stop her from circling the building, and she couldn’t believe her eyes when she found the door wide open. It sickened her that nothing was locked in this camp; it was a testament of everyone’s servility, and the relinquishment of all will to flee. She slipped unhesitatingly into the dark expanse. There was a narrow corridor in front of her leading to the room where the men were gathered, and on her left there were stairs leading to an upper floor. She didn’t know what waited for her there, but her body was driven upward.
It seemed that the easy life in Paris hadn’t extinguished the embers of war in her. Her heart pounded when she spotted a window in the stairwell. She crept forward catlike on tiptoe, her bare feet pressing into the roughness of the floor; when she looked out of the window there was nothing but the blackness of the mountains. The horizon was obscured by crags reaching up to the sky; at the bottom of their slopes, more huge warehouses reached up to the same height.
The stairs led her to a long corridor. Closed doors lined its left-hand side. Any of them might open at any moment, but her sense of caution had stalled. A will beyond her own was leading her, perhaps to her destruction. She proceeded warily, her entire body in a sort of trance, as if it were operating in response to some unknown external impulse. She reached the end of the corridor and turned; there was another corridor in front of her and a short flight of stairs on her left, leading downward. The corridor seemed endless, so she went down the stairs. There was a small door at the bottom which she opened quietly, and she was astonished to find that it opened onto the mountain, as simply as that, with no guard. Still guided by the mysterious impulse, she jumped the meter and half that separated her from the rock face. As soon as she landing on the rocky ground she began to run, undeterred by the pain in her bare feet, expecting a bullet in her back from some observation post. Her body seemed rarefied, to have lost its density to the extent that a bullet would pass straight through it.
She didn’t know how far she ran but at last she reached a cleft in the ring of crags, and as soon as she went through it, she gasped. An endless, awe-inspiring expanse of water rolled away in front of her. The mountain was like a screen between the camp and the water. She had never seen the sea before, or the huge vessels that plowed its waters. She realized that the howls rocking the ground under their beds at night, which they had thought issued from demons, were nothing more than the horns of these enormous machines passing in the sea. They bore no relation to the women’s guilt.
Facing that great water for the first time, she was greeted by a salty breeze coming from the sea, loaded with the fragrance of coffee and frankincense. For the first time she felt her senses soften; the frankincense recalled memories from her childhood, when women would burn it to break an enchantment. She felt the fetters falling from her body; she felt she could fly.
Without a backward glance she broke into a run and the ground began to yield underfoot. Her eyes were fixed on the water; she didn’t notice the pearl-like bodies under her bare feet where the turtles buried in the sand stirred as she passed, or the two shadows to her left. The two men stopped in their task of tying a huge turtle to a cement truck and watched her in disbelief. Suddenly, Sarab became aware of their gaping stares, and in a second they were in her sights. She realized the danger she was in and, like a cornered animal, she looked back; there was nothing but the black volcanic crags and a half-moon brilliantly illuminating the sand in front of them. The two men came toward her and she threw herself into the water. Her legs plunged into softness, her head covering fell off, and her locks unfurled so that they floated on top of the water. The waves sucked her down, until the water reached her head. Saltiness and cold sent a shiver of pleasure through her; she felt her body shed its skeleton and turn to water. When the sea entered her lungs, she didn’t cough. Her body craved more, but hands plucked her out. She resisted, but couldn’t free herself from their grip. The pleasure of the salt and the water had drugged her, and in the end she surrendered to being dragged back to the sand. All around her, small, narrow eyes emerged from the sand and followed her; all at once, the sand was riven by gleaming globular bodies leaving their hiding places and crawling slowly toward the sea. Her senses had a terrible purity, and as she allowed the two men to drag her, her body remained hyperaware of those slithering bodies creeping toward the water. When the men made her walk ahead of them, she began to cough, the water that had merged with her lungs spraying into the air. Her ear caught their Yemeni dialect when one of them said, “A turtle without a shell.” They both laughed, overjoyed at this unexpected catch.
She paid no attention to the road they took her along
until they brought her inside a shelter that opened up in front of her like a hospital ward. Instantly her senses took in the scene in front of her. On her right were piles of empty shells, doubtless the shells of those creatures in the sand. They glittered with engravings, some in silver, others in pistachio and dark green, and some were covered in dried seaweed. Numb to any possibility of danger, her raw senses were propelled toward the splendor of those empty shells. Sarab had never had any experience of turtles; she had never seen or even heard of them before. To her, it was the earth itself that had split open and turned into these bodies which ran toward the sea. In front of her, piles of meat were carefully packed into thick paper, probably prepared for market. To her left, a man holding a bloodstained knife was standing in front of a blood-covered table, holding a plump turtle. He was tearing the flesh from its shell, and had just finished cutting off the fourth leg. He watched her while her eyes remained on the turtle’s head; it was trying to withdraw into its shell, but was too fat to be able to hide itself completely. Perhaps the turtle was dead, but the poor head was still trying to hide itself in its shell even as all its limbs had been cut off. Sarab felt a kinship with the creature, hiding her head in a great shell and contemplating escape even while her legs were cut off and her breathing subsided.
“A turtle without a shell!” The men were so delighted with their joke they repeated it for the benefit of the third man, who was evidently in charge. Sarab realized these men had no connection to the Mahdi, and felt a mixture of satisfaction and terror at the fact. The leader approached her and threw her a towel.
“Dry yourself, girl. Stay here tonight and things will be clearer in the morning,” the older brother said, pointing at a corner away from the box, and he drew back. Sarab submitted to the instructions and headed straight for the corner where a pile of seaweed covered with a carpet served as a bed. It was covered with a thin cotton blanket.