Women of Sand and Myrrh (23 page)

My self-confidence returned and I no longer needed constantly to turn for comfort to the memories of the first few times with Maaz to feel confident and to make myself believe that he’d have to come back to me; this had been a shortlived confidence in any case, rapidly turning to dejection. I’d always begun by remembering the falcon which he left in the office on its wooden perch. Its wary, frightened eyes moved whenever I moved or hit a key on the typewriter. From time to time it spread its great wings, then fixed its eyes on my face again. The office was empty; even my boss Ahmad had gone off with the falcon’s owner. I couldn’t bear the bird looking at me any longer and I began to swear at it and tried to think of some way I could get out to go home. I gathered my courage and stood up and took one step; the bird moved, fluttering its wings, as if it wanted to fly. The noise of them was shockingly loud, and I clung to the wall again, even though the falcon remained chained to its perch, and stayed where I was until its owner returned. He laughed when I begged him to rescue me. I found his name hard to remember but I couldn’t forget his black eyes which were like the eyes of his falcon and watched me all through his visit to our office and began to amuse me after a while: I hadn’t known before that a man like that could exist in real life and not just on the cinema screen.

He smiled constantly and sat in front of me like a faithful dog; as soon as my hand reached for the cigarette packet, he lit a match and fetched the ashtray, having first rubbed it with his fingers to make sure it was clean. He brought in a thermos flask of coffee which had cardamom in it. He took my cup in his hands and whenever I put it down on the table he held it against his heart and raised his eyes to the ceiling. When I laughed he presented the cup to me, mumbling something, and when I asked what he was doing he answered in broken English that he was bewitching the cup so that I would exchange feelings with him. Each time I reached the
end of a piece of typing and heaved a sigh he came across and bent over me and asked if he should fetch a doctor. It was the way he kept on insisting that he would drive me home which really annoyed me: I was afraid that he’d make it difficult for Ahmad and me to be alone together, and answered him irritably. He pretended to be angry and disappeared, but when I went home I found he’d preceded me to the house.

Three days after I first saw him in the office he began to visit us regularly, never coming without presents. He brought a bottle of monstrously expensive cologne for Jimmy, who was no more than eight, a lamb and a gazelle, then a tortoise, a snakeskin, a basket of dates and leather slippers. We clustered around him and his presents, not believing what we saw. He brought a lizard and as he tried to extricate his hand from between its teeth, he struggled with it and spoke to it as if it was human; he asked us if we’d like to eat it if he slaughtered it and cooked it. He left his sandals at the door and wandered round our house barefoot and happy, touching everything and asking what you did with things, anything from my son’s toys to the automatic egg whisk. I would find him standing entranced by the rumble of the dishwasher, asking how it cleaned the plates, scoured the dirt off them and dried them; and how the oven cooked the chicken while I was away and stopped of its own accord.

After a while we began to be aware of the fact that we weren’t friendly with him just because of the presents he brought or the magazines, banned for their politics or the amount of bare female flesh in them, which he could get because of the work he did. It was more as if he was the unfamiliar desert land come into our midst. Jimmy grew accustomed to him and considered him a necessity in our life because we were here, just as Ringo was a necessity in the house. Meanwhile he admired our way of life and our possessions, and my knowledge and worldly wisdom: I read out to him the instructions accompanying medications; I sprinkled something from a bottle on a stain on his clothes and it
disappeared; I could type a line in a flash without looking at the keys; I knew how to find my way around and what the street names were in Arabic; I loved Arab food and dipped my morsels of bread and rice into the meat juices the way that they did. I knew how to adjust the television, change a light bulb, paint a wall, read books, drive a truck.

For our part, we grew accustomed to eating the rice and meat which he prepared, to the way he ate with his hand, gathering the rice into a little ball and throwing it into his mouth, and the way he drank water straight from the water bottle but never touching it with his lips; the way he drank Scotch at our house, then got drunk and sang songs, the way he circled around me and the numerous questions which his curiosity provoked; his incomprehensible English, the way he kept saying my name; on one occasion this led me to answer exasperatedly, ‘Suzanne yourself’, and perhaps he hadn’t seen my expression because he immediately bent and kissed my hand repeating, ‘Suzanne yourself: that means you and I are one person.’ Then he said that he loved me very much, with a love that was as vast as the sand and the sky. He was bouncing around me and I extricated myself, laughing despite my embarrassment. He followed me into the kitchen, insisting that I visit his wife, Fatima, and when I refused he said that he wanted my opinion on installing an American kitchen just like mine in his house. I knew he was thinking up excuses, and I said to him, ‘I’ll give you the name of my kitchen and you can order it from the States.’ The sentence was hardly out when an idea flashed into my head: why didn’t I order a kitchen for him from the States and benefit financially, be a trading link between the desert and America?

I began to calculate in my imagination how much I’d make, and agreed to go; in any case I was anxious to see his wife: one day he’d telephoned her from my house, and tried to hand me the receiver so that I could talk to her, saying in English, in a tone of voice that was almost an order, ‘Speak to
Fatima.’ At first I’d refused, uncertain what I should say, then I gave in when I saw the disappointment in Maaz’s eyes; Jimmy, disillusioned with me, had already decided to have a go and had snatched the receiver out of Maaz’s hand and shrieked down it in Arabic, ‘Hallo. Hallo, darling.’ When I spoke I said in Arabic, ‘Hallo, Fatima, how are you?’ and her voice came down the line to me like the speaking clock or the recorded information services, ‘Hallo. Hallo. Hallo,’ then silence, then laughter, then again, ‘Hallo. Hallo. Hallo.’

I think I understood the reasons why Maaz was attached to us from the moment I first entered his house, but I couldn’t fathom his wife’s attitude to me. She was young with a shy smile. When I held out my hand to shake hers, she embraced me and kissed me three times on alternate cheeks, and kissed my son, then ran into the kitchen. The house had a particular smell, and after a while I came to know that it was the smell of incense and basmati rice and heat all mixed together and that it was in all the Arab houses I visited, except Suha’s. I cast my eyes around the house. There was only basic furniture: a rug in deep colours, sombre sofas, dust over everything, and heat, because not every room had an air-conditioner in it. Maaz wandered between the kitchen and the room where we were sitting, just as he did in my house, carrying plates and cups of tea and fruit. I turned to Fatima and said, ‘Maaz’s doing the housework.’ She smiled and covered her teeth with her hand and turned to look at him: ‘Just today. For you.’ I thought, this house hasn’t seen a blond hair before today, and Maaz doesn’t trust his wife to do her duty towards the guests. Gradually I began to comprehend that they saw me as an important guest from Nixon’s land, the land of the oven that cleaned itself without spilling any water. My sense of my own importance began to increase, as if my yellow hair which hung lifelessly round my face had turned into shining gold, and my speech into pearls, for his children’s eyes were fixed on me and my son, and the neighbours’ children poured in to greet us and sat asking
Maaz for an explanation of every word I said, then giving me smiles of admiration and encouragement. I thought to myself that at home in my own country I had never been spoken to or even looked at admiringly like this.

Fatima sat facing me, bending forward as if she was sitting on a sofa for the first time, her long dress covering the floor at her feet; she wore a headshawl, a veil over her eyes, and her hands and feet were stained with henna. We conversed with fleeting smiles, and I found that I was laughing and smiling without reason; I felt as if I were years younger than her, and like a spoilt child. Maaz interrupted, urging her to bring me more biscuits, since my son had swooped down on the plates like a flock of pigeons. Maaz’s two daughters had withdrawn into a corner and stood looking at me in astonishment. Only his little boy was unaware of my presence and cried continuously because his father had shut the door, and he still had the habit of eating earth in the garden. Maaz dominated the gathering with his movements and way of talking, as he did when he came to visit me; he didn’t care who was there when he told me in English that his love for me was vast as the sands and the sky, while Fatima smiled, then held out her hand as if apologizing to me for her husband’s behaviour; she didn’t understand what he said but perhaps she guessed because I did no more in reply to him than look arch and say, ‘Stop it!’

She seemed happy and told Maaz that having me to visit was more fun than watching television or going for a drive in the car. I smiled at her, trying to appear especially grateful because I’d noticed that she was hiding something in the folds of her dress. Perhaps like Maaz she liked to give presents, either as a social obligation or because it made her feel happy. My curiosity grew and I followed the movement of her hand intently to try and see what she was hiding but only succeeded because her little son wanted her to pick him up. I saw a packet which in disbelief I made out to be jelly. Maaz began to sing in Arabic, pointing to his heart, his eyes dancing, till I
ordered him to stop, smiling at Fatima who was happy and at ease with the company; the jelly packet must just be a wrapping for something else: in the women’s market I’d seen them putting gold in milk tins and silver in empty soap-powder boxes. Maaz’s little son threw the jelly packet and Maaz caught it and said to me, ‘Fatima wants you to teach her how to make jelly but she’s shy of you.’ I stood up inpatiently, trying to hide my disappointment, and Maaz took me to the kitchen with Fatima following slowly behind. I strutted proudly along in a new way, indifferent to my surroundings, pulling in the muscles in my bottom to make it look slimmer and more shapely. I tried to explain to her, but she only smiled and didn’t look at what I was doing, didn’t even seem to be listening to me, but just nodded and covered her mouth with her hand.

In the car Maaz tried to persuade me and Jimmy to go with him to a small village to see a newborn camel on a farm belonging to a friend of his. I didn’t raise any objections; his interest in me and his amorous behaviour amused me, and the monotony of these days needed some such novelty, especially since I no longer saw Ahmad.

When Maaz took off his headcloth and cord to try them on me, I saw his head, his hair, his forehead – and I saw a man, and as he reached out his hand to take the headcloth back I felt a fierce heat touching me. He returned his hand to the steering wheel and I longed to feel the heat again, and turned to Jimmy in the back of the car, smiling at him as if to excuse this urge in me, then turned back to look at Maaz’s brown hands which were covered in little black hairs. I caught sight of his white underpants through his loose robe and looked away, staring out of the window; his attempts to reach me had eventually succeeded: I’d previously been convinced that the whole idea was absurd, because I’d been sure that he knew all about my relationship with Ahmad from the first day he’d come into the office with the falcon.

So I asked him casually if he could find me a job as Ahmad
no longer sent me anything to type. He answered that the pressure against women working was increasing and he didn’t think that I ought to work. It wasn’t this pressure which had forced Ahmad to do without me, but the arrival of his family from Egypt. I was about to ask Maaz when Ahmad’s family was leaving, but I stopped and asked him instead if he’d seen Ahmad. ‘Ahmad’s taken up with his wife and children,’ he answered, and I understood from this that Maaz only saw him in his office since there was no mixed visiting. Then suddenly Maaz asked me if I’d like to go abroad with him. I stared hard at him but he was asking in all innocence, and when I asked why, he replied, ‘I’ve never seen anything but sand and sea.’ He went on, ‘Perhaps the best thing would be when you go to America on holiday, I could visit you and you could show me around. You in the daytime and David in the evening.’ All I could do was wonder fruitlessly how he could make amorous advances to me and at the same time visit us and talk to David, indeed establish a firm friendship with him, and take me to see his wife, and how she could welcome me royally even though she knew how he frequented our house and spent many long evenings with us. Were the two of them more liberated than me and David? And I didn’t answer him, although it struck me that we’d planted in him a germ of curiosity about a world which he’d never previously given a thought to.

I found myself wishing I could be alone with him at that moment; since I’d stopped seeing Ahmad, the rooms in the house had grown cramped, the shouting of the children in the compound louder, and Jimmy’s requirements more preposterous. I began to feel the need to go out of the house and talk to anyone I happened to meet, my neighbour opposite for example, or to get into the car and ask the driver to take us for a drive around; we would go to the store to buy what Jimmy wanted, and what my greed prompted me to buy, much of it, especially the American products which I didn’t need, without regard to the inflated prices. I felt that money
here had no value. I didn’t think of visiting the other women here and I didn’t find things to complain about like they did, because unlike them I didn’t mind the voice of the muezzin in the early hours of the morning or the fact that the shops closed during the daytime prayers.