Women of Sand and Myrrh (9 page)

I supposed they were from the singer’s band of dancers and musicians but I was wrong, for many more girls and women climbed up on the stage. The rhythms of their dancing, not Arab, and not a rapid European beat, but African, was mostly in the feet, with one hand held up in the air like someone calling out for help. It was as if they forgot themselves on the stage, even the thin girl who’d caught my eye because she was so thin and had such a pretty face. She’d greeted Nur warmly, talking in a low voice which trembled slightly with embarrassment, but there she was now dancing boldly to the beat. Nur chewed her gum and moved in time to the music, almost jumping up and down on the chair. For fun I said, ‘You look as if you think you’re dancing with them!’ She leapt out of her chair and up on to the stage, the seed pearls flying around her head, her dress clinging to her. She stood out from the other dancers like a Hollywood star performing a jazz number.

I felt embarrassed suddenly, and amazed that this music and the naïve words – ‘I’m in love, and I’ve got Indian hair’ – could prompt Nur to dance with such spontaneous exuberance.

Ghusun stopped singing to announce jokingly, ‘No one who’s pregnant should be dancing.’ One of them must have asked her, ‘What if you’re married?’ because she went on laughingly, ‘Then it’s the opposite; it you’re married you have to dance so you get pregnant quickly.’ She moved her hands and waggled her chest in a gesture of confirmation.
Nur came back to her place and grabbed my hands and pulled me up saying, ‘I’ll introduce you to Ghusun. She’s good fun. And you can see more from up there.’ I felt ashamed of my clothes which seemed odd because they were so simple, and my flat sandles. Suddenly I was made uncomfortable by Nur’s hand in mine, even though the women here rarely went about without holding hands. As Nur climbed back on the stage I hesitated for a moment despite the dozens of women already there. Nur went up and kissed Ghusun, who didn’t get up but proffered a cheek and a hand to me and said with a wink, ‘Are you the one from Beirut? I’ll sing a song especially for you.’ Then she turned to Nur as if she were finishing a story: ‘Later on her poor mother shook her to wake her up for school and she was dead.’ I interrupted, studying Ghusun’s face: ‘Who was?’ ‘Someone Nur knew. She choked to death in her sleep.’

I sat down next to Nur in the middle of all the others sitting there looking at me. Some of them were unveiled and stared at me, chewing gum and sipping tea. I noticed some of their expressions in particular and it seemed as if they were pleading with me. I brushed aside the thought that perhaps they knew about my relationship with Nur. They were passing a narghile round. One of them held it and took a long drag as if it was the elixir of life, and didn’t let go of it until she was bending almost double where she sat. Another, older than the rest, drew on it with her eyes closed, not speaking or moving, as if it would give her back her youth. They looked pleadingly still, but as if constrained, into the faces and at the bodies of the dancers dancing to arouse.

‘ “Do you want to come out?”

“Just try me,” I said.

“But don’t be jealous,” she said,

“You won’t be alone.”

So I said, “Forget it.

You can leave me at home.” ’

Ghusun sang this smiling and the women sang along with her through their teeth, resting their gum on their tongues. How could the throat and tongue sing and the ear enjoy hearing words so much at odds with reality? They were like old women trying to darn enormous holes in socks. If they really thought about what the words said they might wish the tea and chewing gum would turn to deadly poison. ‘I must be wrong,’ I told myself, for they looked happy, clapped enthusiastically, and one of them lifted her veil a little so she could let out a wild trill of joy and appreciation. The henna was black around the fingers of the hands that were clapping. Ghusun stood up; her body was beautiful with her taffeta dress tight across her chest, showing off the slenderness of her waist. Was she leaving? About to dance? With the air of one who has no intention of exerting herself she gave her body a little shake making her breasts quiver, smiled and approached the edge of the stage like a feather fluttering in a current of air. All at once the shouting and laughter rose to a crescendo.

Nur drew my attention to a woman in the first row of the audience. Her hair was tied up in a black kerchief and she was twisting her neck around with enormous strength, as if detaching her head from the rest of her body. The women pushed her towards the stage. I had no idea what was going on. She stood facing Ghusun and both women were trembling slightly. Ghusun couldn’t detach her neck from her body in the way that the other woman could. The woman began rocking her stomach and thighs as if she were receiving something with them, then thrusting it away. Ghusun tried to twist and bend in the same way, but she couldn’t. The woman facing her bent backwards until she touched the floor and her stomach and thighs began to shudder. The singer didn’t try to imitate her this time, but stood there laughing. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked Nur in embarrassment. ‘Dancing,’ answered Nur. The woman had got up and stood facing the singer again. She put her right shoulder against the
singer’s left, and they moved their thighs and stomachs rhythmically, then paused. One of the women in the audience rushed up and whispered in Ghusun’s ear then went back to her place. Ghusun’s expression changed but she didn’t stop dancing. The woman bowed close to the singer’s shoulder then to her neck and then touched her face. The singer backed away and the audience laughed and clapped. The tambourines and drums played louder. The woman moved in again, a quiet fire burning in her eyes in spite of the lack of air and oxygen. She was tall and slim and brown-skinned with gentle features, and her ear-rings were two broad circles of gold which gave an added sharpness to her large ears. Her neck was long and slender and carried on it a network of hundreds of blue, mauve, red and flesh-coloured veins.

I turned to ask Nur who this woman was and she answered, applauding delightedly, ‘She’s Jaleela, the nanny of the Sidassi girls. She raised their mother before them and when the mother died and the father married again she stayed in the house with the daughters. They take her with them wherever they go and whoever invites the daughters has to invite Jaleela first.’

Jaleela was still challenging the singer with brazen movements of her hands, her tongue and every part of her body, leaving it to transmit its own signals. But the rhythmic nature of her movement made it into a dance: she didn’t sway or rock her body; she ordered it or shook in response to it, disregarding the shouting around her; her ear was centred on the music and her other senses on the full-lipped singer. Jaleela’s eyes were in an agony of passion, her mouth a stubborn line. She tried to touch the singer’s face, to kiss her on the lips in the midst of the clapping and laughter, the crashing of tambourines and shouts of encouragement. But the singer drew back, laughed, put her hand up to her mouth and seemed to take something from between her teeth which she held in her fingers, gesticulating to the audience. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Nur, my nerves all on edge. Nur answered
simply, ‘They’re doing a local dance. One of the dancers grips a ring or a gold sovereign between her teeth and the other has to pull it out with her teeth.’

As if I were Umar I asked, ‘Why don’t they finish off the dance then?’ ‘Ghusun doesn’t want to. This woman Jaleela’s awful. She must be gay.’

Ghusun’s voice rang out singing about beauty, beauty’s eye, beauty’s form. The women and girls were all dancing although Ghusun cautioned them: ‘Just two at a time. Two at a time, please.’ But their enthusiasm, the music and the feeling of freedom away from the house and children, and the evening which still promised surprises made them fall over one another to get to the stage and jump around in a primitive dance, more than satisfied with the occasion although it was brief compared to many local weddings and evening parties. I took no pleasure in the songs or the happy dancing atmosphere; indeed I felt angry at the joy which filled the hall, although I tried to imagine how these women felt. A quite different feeling began to creep over me until I could no longer bring my face close to Nur’s or turn when she spoke to me. When the singer and the woman danced with the ring between them, one trying to pull it from between the other’s teeth, I couldn’t bear to meet her eyes, or brush against her sleeve inadvertently, or hear the sound of her voice.

I was weary of the smell of chewing gum and incense, and their shouted conversations to one another from different parts of the hall. Their applause, even their dancing, seemed unacceptable; the music and the songs about love and imaginary love affairs had no connection with these dresses, these perfumes; their emotions that night were out of keeping with their veils. They were six hundred women, their ages ranging from the twenties to the forties, who knew that they were prisoners even in this hall because they couldn’t leave it until their drivers or their husbands came to pick them up.

What did the night have to offer beyond the recalling of familiar tunes and the two women’s dance? And I knew this
was why Nur asked me if I’d go back home with her even just for an hour. My anger, which had died down of its own accord, flared up again at this and I didn’t answer her. I was suddenly gripped again by the feeling I’d had when Nur had come into my bedroom and sprawled on my bed, as if the objects around the place which belonged to Umar and Basem had begun to grow sad reproachful eyes. With each day that passed the relationship appeared more furtive and unwholesome because it was inconceivable that it should either go away or be exposed. I began to fight against myself, as if there were two distinct parts of me. Every time Basem made love to me I clung to him trying to drive out Nur’s image, angry at my sense of shame in the face of Basem’s tenderness. Afterwards I would stand under the shower, and clutch my head in my hands and say out loud that what was happening to me wasn’t real, that I wasn’t real, my breathing, my head, my voice, my son himself were all illusions.

I found myself getting increasingly impatient as Nur spoke to me like a lover, then moved on to the details of her day, telling me what she was wearing then, what she was doing, who was at her house, what she was going to eat, using pet names and endearments that I wasn’t accustomed to hearing even between a man and a woman. Only Nur’s desert accent which I loved to hear stopped me making fun of her. I knew that my need to meet her, no longer to exchange conversation or to complain to each other or have fun, was aroused by the thought of one specific aspect, and our muscular spasms increased in intensity whenever circumstances threatened to intervene to impede our activity: a visitor, Nur’s mother, Nur’s daughter. Every time I stood up, straightening my skirt, I felt a surge of anger and vowed not to see Nur again, and forced my brain to recall the image of a gay bar in Berlin which I’d gone to out of curiosity with Basem and a group of friends.

I sat where I was like a cat watching a mouse, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I thought of the atmosphere in
my house; there was a feeling of the past, a sense of order and stability emanating from the furniture, from Basem’s talk and from Umar’s shouting and laughter; he’d be asleep now between his Superman sheets. Anxiously, Nur asked again, ‘Are you coming to my place for an hour?’

I drew back, took a hold on myself, and dared no more than a shake of the head. I decided to get up from my seat, go home and never see Nur again. I understood that it was the dance of the two women and the excitement accompanying each of their movements which lay behind Nur’s invitation to me on this occasion. But still I marched off past rows of women to the door of the hall. I turned to look back and saw them dancing under the fluorescent lights as if they were drugged. Outside there was a dust storm, and dozens of men stood at the entrance waiting, appearing to be guarding the women inside.

I saw Basem waiting with Said in the car. He spoke first: ‘You’re late. I was worried about you. Said told me they might not allow women to go home alone with their chauffeurs at night. Tell me, how did you enjoy yourself?’ I smiled and replied, ‘It was great.’

In my mind’s eye drifted images of Ghusun, and the lust-crazed old woman urging the girls to dance, pulling them up on to the floor, embracing them and clasping them to her. She sat with desire in her eyes, which descended to her tongue as she complimented the women on their beauty and said other more obscure things in short, jabbing phrases.

7

The canary hadn’t sung since a female companion entered his life. She’d bewitched him while he was showing her the secrets of the house. Whenever he smelt the rice and came to the table as usual to peck a grain or two, or flew and landed on my shoulder, she called him to her. She had taken possession of his throat and he no longer sang or made a sound except when she was lost somewhere in the house and called out for help. Then, turning his little head from side to side, he would tell her that he was coming and fly through the rooms searching for her. When they were both in the cage at night he twittered lovingly to her with a sincerity which was plain to see, and touched her beak with his own. I’d realized that he needed a female when he stained his mirror perching and looking in it constantly, bending his head to peck at his reflection and singing loudly. When this female came into his life in flesh and blood he no longer sang of his loneliness and longing.

I stretched my hand inside the cage, trying to get him to hop on to my finger, then on to my shoulder as he usually did. This made the female more scared then ever and her anxious twitterings rose to a shrill cry. When he wouldn’t come to me I banged the cage door shut, then smiled bitterly and sang to him:

‘I had a little bird

So charming and fine