Women of Sand and Myrrh (15 page)

Between her sobs my mother said, ‘I swear, I carried you in my womb and gave birth to you but you cling to Nasab. It’s as if she’s a hyena who’s pissed on you and got power over you. Four years I was pregnant with you …’

She cradled her head in her arms and I didn’t know how to answer her. I knew she wouldn’t stop crying for days and nights as usual, and I was scared that she’d revert to her raving and chattering, losing her mind as she always did when she became very angry. I approached her and spoke soothingly as I would have done to a child. ‘No, mother. I swear by my son, you’re wrong. I listen to you and I do what you want. You know Rashid and his stubbornness, but my aunt has an influence over him and she makes him embarrassed. You know he owes her a lot. She’s like his mother.’ Tentatively I touched her red plait. I saw the little white hairs at the roots. Her head appeared small. Even the henna didn’t colour the original red of her hair or the striking whiteness of the palms of her hands. I stared at the fine blue veins in her neck and caught sight of one of her bare feet, small and slender, looking as if it were made of glass.

I pulled her hand away from her red face. When she lifted her green eyes to me they were swollen. As usual when I noticed her colouring, I thought that she couldn’t possibly be my mother. ‘God forbid,’ I uttered involuntarily, warding off this notion of mine, and my mother cried out, ‘Even you, Tamr, say “God forbid”. By God, I’m not mad!’

I kissed her on both cheeks, tasting the salty tears, then kissed her hands and embraced her, saying ‘You’re Taj, Crown of the Bride and Crown of Kings.
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You’re no more mad than I am!’ This last sentence made my mother’s weeping rise almost to a lament, and she made a noise like a cat in distress.

She rocked her whole body and covered her face with her hands again.

Gradually her sobs abated and she indicated in the direction of her nose, then reached out a hand to me. I gave her a handkerchief from my pocket, and when she’d cleaned her nose and wiped her eyes she tried to speak without crying. Out came one sentence that I knew by heart: ‘I felt you between my shoulders.’ I wanted to say to her, ‘I know, I know,’ but I was afraid of annoying her and I let her go on. ‘I felt you between my shoulders, and I never once slept on my back, always on my stomach or my side. Every day I drank camels’ milk and sheeps’ milk and ate three dates, and the doctors injected me with a needle a span long. When you were born I saw the needle marks in your hands and thighs. God is great! You had no hair, no eyebrows or eyelashes, not even any hair in your nostrils. I began to put henna on you every Friday night. The other wives and their children laughed at me and said, “You’re wasting your time putting henna on the Safwan stone.” And I made myself deaf and dumb and blind. I hennaed your scalp and bought you combs and hairbands and even medicine for headlice. In the woman’s market they all made signs behind my back when they saw that damned Mawda trying to sell me a big bottle and saying to me, giggling and winking, “Perhaps Tamr needs this medicine from India. Everybody swears it’s like Solomon’s devils. One drop applied to the head does away with lice as if they’d never existed.” Just to show them all I said, “It can’t do any harm to have some,” put my hand in my bosom and paid for it.’

I looked at my mother’s breast, which was scarcely visible in the folds of her voluminous dress and answered, bored but sad at the same time, ‘I know, Mother. I’ve caused you anguish in the past and I’m still doing it. I know. I mustn’t talk to Aunt Nasab so much. In any case she’s just a guest, and in a couple of days she’ll be going back home.’ Then I added hypocritically, ‘From the way she was so hard on me
and spoiled Awatef when we were in London, I know where I really stand with her.’

My mother gulped in agreement. ‘You don’t have to tell me about Nasab and Awatef. When the sheikh divorced you your aunt didn’t tear her hair or claw her chest in sorrow. Maybe she was glad. How could Tamr be married to a sheikh and not Awatef?’

‘God forgive her,’ I replied appeasingly.

Then I took my mother by the hand and pulled her up off the bed. ‘Come on, Crown of the Bride and Crown of Kings. Wash your face, put on your dress and do your hair. We’ve got lots of work to do.’

As I picked over the rice, minced the meat and chopped up the vegetables with enthusiasm, Rashid came in with the permit in his hand, still not able to believe that the ministry had given it to me. I smiled triumphantly and said nothing. I had to cook quickly. Batul had offered to help me with the cooking that day but I’d refused to let her. I wanted to prove that my opening the workshop wouldn’t mean I did any less housework.

I had many things to occupy my thoughts – such as purchasing machines, curtains, pins, scissors, a small fridge and two beds for the Filipinos – but still I was concerned about my mother. I thanked the Lord she was continuing to recover. Her anger and her sadness were normal this time and she didn’t refuse to leave her bed.

When I was little I lived with my mother in one room of a three-storey house. I used to wait for her to come to bed, watching her as she plaited her red hair and dipped her fingertips in warm oil. She would say to me with a smile, ‘You must be sleepy, Tamr. Don’t you want to hear about the Little Fish?’ I would be smiling too, knowing that she was teasing me. She never changed her way of speaking even when she was ill. She adjusted her veil as she said the story’s name, and always began by biting her lips. ‘Tamr, O Tamr, the Story of the Little Fish is the story of a poor girl whose
mother had died, and whose stepmother was harsh and wicked. She made her stay in the kitchen, polishing the brass, fetching water, sweeping, dusting, stoking the fires and cooking, doing the washing, preparing the incense burner and putting henna on her stepmother’s hair.

‘O Tamr, O Tamr, one day her father caught one hundred fish, and the poor girl had to stay up all night gutting them. Her stepmother said to her, “You must clean all the fish tonight. If they weren’t full of evil, they wouldn’t make such a horrible smell.” When the girl took hold of the last fish it slipped from her grasp. She thought to herself that her swollen red hands must have grown tired, but the Little Fish cried and said in a loud voice to the girl, “Spare me and I’ll make you rich.” The girl was astonished that the fish had spoken, and she took fright. “God preserve me from the Devil’s curse,” she said. She looked hard at the Little Fish and saw that it was beautiful: its eyes were black, its nose small as far as she could see, its mouth a tiny opening; it had little even teeth and a shining silver skin. The Little Fish cried louder and begged the girl again, “Spare me, and I’ll make you rich.” The poor girl took pity on the fish. She put it under her arm and slowly opened the door. The snores of her stepmother and her father rose to the sky. She ran until she reached the sea. There she took the fish in her hands and said to it, “Little Fish, Little Fish, don’t cry and don’t wail. Go back to your mother and father and sister and brother, and to your neighbours and your Qur’an teacher. Goodbye.” The girl went back to the house, and when she heard the snores of her stepmother and her father still rising to the sky, she heaved a sigh of relief. The next day the Sultan’s son was giving a party to end all parties, with meat and rice and sweets in abundance. And every boy and girl and every man and his wife went to the party, all except this poor little girl. Her stepmother left her in the kitchen with a big bag of rice and ordered her to pick the weevils out of it grain by grain. Then she sprinkled salt on the floor and ordered her to gather it up
grain by grain, and scared her with stories about the Judgement Day and how God would make her spend eternity sweeping salt off the floor with her eyelashes if she didn’t do as she was told now. The poor girl sat on the floor crying, and began trying to pick the weevils out of the rice, but the creatures slipped through her fingers. Suddenly she heard a sweet voice saying, “This is the Little Fish. I’ve made you a dress of coral from the sea, and jewellery of shells and pearls so that you can go to the Sultan’s palace.” The poor girl turned in surprise and called out, “Where are you?” Then she looked back at the floor and said, “What about the weevils and the rice and the salt?” The Little Fish replied, “Don’t bother about them. I’ll make the rice clean and white for you and drown the weevils and put the salt in a jar. Off you go. Goodbye!”

‘The girl looked down at herself and found she was wearing a lovely dress, and from the window she saw a coach with a huge shell for a seat, driven by a young giant. So off she went to the palace and the Sultan’s son fell in love with her beauty and her sweet disposition, and she married him, Tamr, and lived till the Judgement Day and had both sons and daughters.’

Only when I was stretched out in bed listening to the tale of the Little Fish did I feel happy, for my mother looked peaceful and beautiful, and the smell of food and coffee and laundry soap had faded from the room which was our home.

My mother cooked our food and washed our clothes in this room, and we didn’t leave it except to rush down the long staircase and back again, my mother clutching meat and vegetables in her arms as if she were a thief. I grew used to hearing her voice cursing and threatening up the stairs from the first floor. Sometimes the sound of another voice mingled with hers. I was glad whenever I saw that she had the bucket, because then I would run out of the room and lean over to watch her hauling up the rope with a frown on her face.

Because she was in such a hurry, most of the water in the
bucket slopped out on its way between the two floors, and sometimes one of the boys, in spite of the speed at which it was moving, dropped a pebble or a date stone or a bit of paper into it, to see my mother Taj go crazy with anger and curse Jauhar and Najeeya at the top of her voice. I rarely left the room day or night except to go to the lavatory, and then I went with my mother. As we descended the two flights I would try to loiter and she would scold me in annoyance: ‘No time ago you were clutching yourself, and now you’re prancing about as if you’ve got all the time in the world.’ I wanted to see the other children, and Jauhar and Najeeya, and stare into their faces, for I could see more likeness between me and them than between me and my mother. But without realizing it I lowered my gaze each time I met one of them in the hallway of the house or at the bathroom door.

I felt as if I lived with them because I could hear the sounds of their voices and the noise they made as well as if they were in the room, and when I couldn’t hear them I waited expectantly until I could. My mother told me their life histories from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning until she went to bed at night; she recited stories that I didn’t understand, but I recognized that at the core of them lay a deep hatred. All the same I was curious about them, and longed to go down to the rooms where they lived and talk to them and play with their children. More than once I’d seen Jauhar and Najeeya pulling my mother’s hair and jumping on top of her and hitting her; they would shriek when my mother bit their hands and their thighs, while the children cheered them on delightedly, chanting, ‘The Turkish woman’s mad! The Turkish woman’s mad!’

I even began to long for us just to open our door because they used to leave their rubbish beside it, a dead rat, potato peelings, a gold paper crown, all of which, as far as I was concerned, formed part of a dialogue between me and them.

How I wished I could explain to them how much I longed to know them – even though our mothers fought and I’d once
seen goat dung thrown outside our door – and how much I’d loved the gold paper crown which they’d discarded there; I’d tried it on and I wanted to keep it, but my mother pulled it off and tore it with her teeth.

It was when my mother lost my gold bangles, a pendant formed of the words, ‘What God has willed’, and a Qur’an studded with diamonds and sapphires which had been a present from the Sultan, that my aunt came to take us to live with her, for my mother was frantic. When she discovered the things were missing she’d rushed down the stairs to Jauhar’s like a tornado, as if she were certain that Jauhar was the culprit, and overturned the furniture and even ripped the bedding and began feeling around in it. Jauhar and her children couldn’t do anything to stop her, and my mother turned her fury on Najeeya and twisted her arm and spat in her children’s faces. When she found the door locked in her face, she began to retreat, then returned to the fray, charging the door like a bull. It withstood her assault and she raised her eyes to heaven, beseeching God to destroy them one by one. Nejeeya and Jauhar were afraid of her coloured eyes and the red freckles on her face and her red hair, the like of which they’d never seen before. Each of them hurried to protect her own children, covering their little faces with the hems of their dresses.

Life was different in my aunt’s home, and I couldn’t help wondering why we hadn’t moved there before instead of staying in that room, why indeed we’d never visited her, nor she us. For my aunt had an abundance of love, a broad smile, and a laugh which everyone in the house could hear.

Even my mother sat calm and beautiful at my aunt’s side, except sometimes when she remembered episodes with Najeeya and Jauhar. She was the focal point of any gathering. Her appearance was so different from all of theirs that she dazzled and shocked them, but what she said must have fascinated them, for all the women, even my aunt, listened as if they were bewitched. I began to enjoy playing with my
cousins, especially Awatef who was the same age as me. The boys went to school and came back with books full of pictures, which opened my mind to things I hadn’t known existed: once I asked about the pictures of fishes that caught my eye, and one of my cousins told me all about them. I waited for him at the door in the heat of the sun and afterwards I shook my head sorrowfully and said, ‘If only the woman who teaches us about religion gave us books like the ones you’re allowed to read.’ I took the books in my hands, staring at the pictures. Once I read the word ‘God’ and was amazed to find that I could read and understand a book that wasn’t the Qur’an. When I began to be able to read what he read, and study what he studied and write what he wrote, the tears that I had shed regularly every morning when it was time to go to the Qur’an teacher were replaced by a sense of gratitude. I no longer minded her hard eyes, and I gave up counting the buttons on her veil and lavished all my attention on her mouth, deciphering the symbols for the words and then asking her if I was writing my name correctly.