Women of Sand and Myrrh (7 page)

Nur began coming to my house and going to my room, closely followed by a man who slipped in after her like a thief while I sat in the sitting-room or in the kitchen waiting for the outer door to open and close and for the sound of Nur’s footsteps, her kiss on my cheek and her words, always the same, ‘I don’t know how I’d live without you, my sweet.’ An hour and she was gone, leaving me to go into my room looking for traces of Nur’s meeting with the man so that I could get rid of them, and thinking why does she get in
between the sheets? Why isn’t she more sensitive to such things? I would open the window and change the sheets, to chase away the smell of Nur, then go over to the table to see if she’d forgotten a ring or a necklace or a bracelet. It was plain that these clandestine meetings were dispelling all the grief and confusion that she’d been suffering from, leaving her calm and in control of the rest of her day. They were like food and drink to her, so that when Basem had the painters in to the house for several days and when even after it was painted she couldn’t resume her meetings for several more days, she pleaded with me to come instead to her house at eleven in the morning and let in a man who would be carrying a black briefcase. I received him pretending to the world that he was the doctor and let him into her room after asking the servant girl nicely to shut the door behind her. I went into the bathroom and turned on the tap as hard as it would go looking at myself in the mirror, asking my reflection how long I would be in Nur’s life. I opened the cupboards and saw rusty razors and razor blades and bottles with remnants of men’s cologne in them in among the face creams and bags of henna. The water was still running and the sound of it drowned out any movement in the bedroom. I opened the curtain at the window and a cloud of dust flew up. I could see a little bit of the swimming-pool and some patches of green grass and trees with pale, sickly leaves. Over the wall came the noise of the water pumps, and I could see the colourless houses with their metallic doors and window frames glinting in the sun. Would anyone passing by this house believe that in one of its rooms there was a woman in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband? This man she’d met in a store, and there had been many others like him; one she’d met at a street crossing, another on a visit to the hospital; she’d slept with the man who’d come selling jewels and material to her in her house and the landscape gardener who advised her on the design of her garden when she was considering planting it with Japanese trees. I thought to myself how human beings
continually manage to overcome their circumstances, thinking up the strangest ways to give substance to their desires. Before I’d always doubted if sex existed in houses like these and here I was listening to Nur laughing behind the locked door. I turned off the tap to hear better and then turned it on again.

These meetings weren’t Nur’s lifesavers for long. She began to dream about going abroad again saying that she didn’t like daytime encounters, although she didn’t stop doing it until I asked her to; one of the men whom she’d seen in my house came to the door one day to ask me if he could bring his foreign girlfriend there. He handed me a bottle of whisky and a big piece of pork. Trembling, I gave them back to him and didn’t answer. I wanted to shut the door in his face or to scream at him to make him understand me and Nur and the risks we had taken. But it seemed complicated to explain, and I couldn’t look him in the eye and say to him straight out that Nur and I were playing with fire.

5

I didn’t hesitate for a moment when Nur asked me to come to her house early one morning, and it wasn’t because her voice sounded weak on the line. She was in bed enveloped in a light cloud of steam rising from a vaporiser. It seemed to have opened up her features so that she looked like a fruit that had ripened prematurely in a greenhouse. I said jollily to her, ‘Well? What’s the fairy princess doing today?’ and she wept silently. I didn’t take any notice. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to her complaining. This was the first time I’d been out after
three days cooped up in the house because of the rain. The dark clouds, the pools of water on the road and in the garden had filled me with happiness.

Rain had come to the desert this year. The sun and the moon had disappeared and the voices praying from the mosque sounded dry and echoless, competing with each other in volume and number. I found myself taking Umar in my arms in the night, calming him because he couldn’t sleep. He said to me, ‘You’re a liar. That’s not a prayer.’ He was used to hearing the prayer regularly at dawn and this was eight in the evening. I answered him gently, ‘They’re praying for rain. It has to rain for the dates and the crops to ripen, and to wash away the germs.’

During the night he woke up screaming and came to my bed several times. Lightning and thunder chased each other around the sky and the rain poured down. I went back to bed hoping that I’d reassured him and listened to the rain hammering on the bathroom roof. I smiled contentedly. When Basem opened the door in the morning he gave a shout of wonder and I rushed to see the flooded garden. The water in the street was several inches deep and had begun to come in under the garden door.

Even the rain here was different: it didn’t stay on the buildings, and they didn’t soak it up. They remained pale, the colour of the dust, like the trees, while the rushing waters swept the building materials out into the street, the wood floating along on the surface. In some places the sand turned to mud. Most of the traffic came to a halt and the drivers got out hitching up their robes to just below their knees and wading through the water showing their skinny legs. Jeeps were the only vehicles that could get through despite the muddy spray that stuck to their windscreens. The shops closed and some women went in cars laughing across the street to visit their neighbours but most of them stayed indoors. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, instead of a rainbow hundreds of mosquitoes hovered in the
air like ballet dancers with their long legs.

I didn’t ask Nur what was wrong but said enthusiastically, ‘I meant to tell you, I saw Saleh on television the other day. You so-and-so. I didn’t know he was so attractive and so young. He spoke well. I liked him. He’s intelligent, and you know, he looks like Ghada.’ Nur shouted back, ‘He’s not worth an onion skin. I didn’t even want to see him face to face this time. I just sent Ghada off without making any trouble.’ Then she asked what I wanted to drink, to change the subject.

Before I answered she suddenly began to beat her head and her face with the palms of her hands so violently that I jumped up from my seat and took hold of her arms. Her paroxysm showed no signs of abating and she screamed, ‘I’m fed up. I’ve tried and I can’t go on any longer. When I’m depressed I say, “Never mind, Nur”, but then I get desperate and I feel ready to explode again. Sometimes I hope he doesn’t come to take Ghada or that I don’t know he’s in the country. Then I pray that when he comes I’ll be away somewhere. If only I could be!’ And she started striking her head and sobbing again, while I grabbed her arms and tried to soothe her. I hadn’t realized that Nur was so strong up till now.

I’d grown used to her gentle voice with its soft desert accent and the affectionate words she spoke to her salukis as she patted them on the head; I’d watched her often cuddling the little gazelle, and sticking her finger in the cream and licking it to make sure it was fresh, and lifting her face to be kissed by her veiled visitors. When she put her head in her hands again and I tried to pull them away she pressed my hand with one of her hot hands then cast her head on to my shoulder like a sad child. She hadn’t stopped crying all the time but I couldn’t bring myself to pat her shoulder or hold her to comfort her. I felt embarrassed and wished Nur would control herself, while she stayed where she was like a child safe in her mother’s arms at last. I didn’t move but I said,
‘Nur. Let’s think of a way,’ trying to get her off me. Nur’s face was no longer on my shoulder but against my neck. I ignored the butterfly fluttering and stayed quite still. I felt a moist warmth, then a light-headedness that made me tremble and still I didn’t move. Nur’s face was still pressed against me. Suddenly the warmth of her breathing made my heart pound and a feeling surged through me that scared me. I trembled again but I didn’t want to pull away. I sat forcing myself to remain immobile, staring at the upholstery. Nur realized what was happening to me and as if she was taking me by the hand and advancing step by step, she paused for a little while before nuzzling her face against my neck, then encircling me with her arms and drawing me to her. The warmth spread over my neck, dropping down into my body at the same time. Shutting out everything else, I said to myself, ‘Nur’s kissing me,’ and I didn’t think as I did in real life ‘A kiss is between a man and a woman’, but just wanted more. Every point in my body that Nur reached she aroused and left in a state of agitation.

My muscles didn’t stay tensed up and as they relaxed I found myself lying back on the bed then a rhythmic movement started up which made me dizzy from the different sensation of pleasure it produced in me. It was a beautiful purely instinctual rhythm, which seemed to take off and fly like the wisps of steam still floating about the room.

Reality returned to me as soon as I became aware of Nur’s weight smothering me. I pulled my eyes away and fixed them on the ceiling. Then I felt a sudden nausea, then disgust, and wished I could disappear through the cracks in the ceiling. I didn’t want to stay lying there and give Nur the impression that I was happy at what had happened, and at the same time I wanted to be separate from my body and give it orders: tell it to stand up and go away just as I wanted to do, open the door and chase it out. But as it was I got up and stood there, not daring to look at Nur, or around the room, or down at my skirt. I’d pulled my skirt over my legs while I was still
lying on the bed, knowing that I would never feel quite the same liking for them as I had done before, or look after them so carefully or bother so much about what tights I wore.

My skirt looked as if one of Nur’s dogs had chewed it and spat it out. I wanted to turn to her and tell her that I had no connection with the woman who’d been panting with her a little while before. But I just went on standing there, quivering slightly, not daring to move, while Nur sat at her dressing table and reached for her hairbrush, loosened her plaits, brushed her hair, replaited it and pulled down her nightdress. She didn’t look at me but smiled in the mirror as she saw me leaving, and said goodbye. I couldn’t distance myself from what had happened. I went to the car and sat in it, my face almost touching the window, and saw nothing until I reached my own front door. I heard Basem and Umar talking together and longed to be sitting between them feeling bored, or lying in my bed ill, instead of having to go in to them now. I had a terrible desire to throw myself into their arms and cry. I wished I could rush into my room without seeing them. But I stood rooted to the spot when I heard Umar saying, ‘She’s here.’ I got as far as the dining-room when Basem intercepted me: ‘What’s happened?’ Trying to sound casual I replied, ‘Nur’s ill and I got the doctor to her.’ Jokingly he remarked, ‘If she’s ill why’s your face so pale?’ and I said quickly, ‘Her driver hit another car and I had a fright.’

I swallowed. It was as if I had a big stone in my gullet which hurt me every time I breathed. I didn’t wait for Umar in the bathroom while he cleaned his teeth, as he asked me to. ‘I’ll come and see you in a little while, darling,’ I said apologetically.

I went into my room and I knew how risky it would be to cry now but I couldn’t help it. I looked at the photo of me with Umar and Basem on my dressing table and turned it face down in case their eyes bored through me and saw the recent scene with Nur. Then I turned it back again and stared at Basem with his spectacles and pale eyes and smooth hair, and
his big nose that was out of proportion to the rest of his features. The sight of his striped shirt whose collar I always sprayed with some special cleaner for collars and cuffs made him appear familiar, like a brother or friend or someone who had sat next to me at school.

I went about the house like someone immunized against hearing and seeing until Umar’s bedtime. Then I went to bed the same as I did every other night, while Basem sat watching a film on the video until late. I closed my eyes and I felt as if I were emerging from a dark cave on to a blue sea glowing with light. I opened a window in my head and looked through it and saw a motor working soundlessly in a room lined with velvety wallpaper just as I’d pictured it before, with red and blue wires around it. I opened a window looking on to my heart and saw a motor boiling and thudding there. I asked my noisy heart, and my mind, which went silently back and forth in its room, what was on the pages which I hadn’t yet read. What was passing along those red and blue wires? What were the subjects of the paintings hanging on the velvet walls? What was the significance of a heart being heart-shaped when I didn’t even know who was beginning and who was reaching an end, who growing, who diminishing?

I am Suha. I am twenty-five-years old. My mother is Sitt Widad and my father is Dr Adnan. I’m not bent like Sahar, although I’ve laughed and joked and exchanged comments and gestures about men with other girls like me. I’m normal. I saw myself on a bed in the cold of the mountain with Suhail, Aida’s friend, in the middle. All the guests had gone, carrying bags of grapes under their arms. I’d held a party to pick our grapes at the end of the summer. I’d had the idea because my parents were in Europe and I liked having my friends to visit me in my house. The three of us were drunk and I wanted some coffee to sober up. I got it ready but when I took it to the others I found Aida stretched out on my bed facing the wall with Suhail lying beside her, and without thinking I
crept on to the bed behind Suhail. It was the smell of him perhaps, or the cold and being drunk, that made me squeeze up against him. He turned and reached his hand out to the back of my neck then moved it down my back and rested it there. I felt confused, comprehending all at once the sort of relationship which Aida and Suhail must have, but I let his hand reach under my skirt. ‘How are you feeling, Aida?’ ‘Fine,’ replied Aida, with her eyes closed. His hands were on my flesh, moving up the slope of my body, pulsating. Then he said, ‘Chopin,’ and Aida asked him, ‘Do you like Chopin?’ ‘I think he’s fantastic,’ answered Suhail, ‘and I like Ravel’s
Bolero.
’ I knew that Aida wouldn’t believe what I was doing now even if she turned over and saw it. She said, ‘I tried to make Suha like classical music.’ Suhail had begun breathing more heavily. He answered, ‘Suha likes rock,’ and lifted himself over me so he was at the edge and I was in the middle. I wanted to stay where I was but at the same time I wanted to get up. I wondered whether to let myself go and disregard Aida, but I felt sorry for her whichever I did. She said, ‘Suha likes blues as well,’ and Suhail said, ‘Really?’ as he opened his flies. ‘My head’s heavy,’ I said. I began to talk wildly about anything and gathered my hair up off my head while Suhail moved faster and faster then suddenly got up and asked, ‘Where’s the coffee?’