Cinnamon (13 page)

 

When she first began to work in her mistress's service Aliyah was suspicious of the woman, who would come home late at night and scuttle about at the ends of the house as though she were lost, clattering and clanging until morning came. She would wake up before sunrise and sit sipping her coffee and chattering on the telephone, complaining about her family, cursing her crocodile husband and ruing the day she had first set eyes on him. Yet when she had guests, Hanan was a woman of calm and reserve.

Aliyah would stalk Hanan about the house curiously, snooping on her from behind the curtains or through the keyhole. She would leap like a monkey from one object to another, disappearing behind the furniture whenever Hanan spotted her. She dreaded having to stay with the cook in one place. Instead, Aliyah would take her food, wrap it in a special handkerchief and eat her dinner while sitting on the floor beside the bed. She was too shy to eat in the presence of others.

Day after day, Aliyah waited tirelessly for her father to arrive, or her mother. Head in hands, she sat on the stone steps, her sight fixed on the iron gate. She would stay there as still as a block of dry wood, until Hanan called for her. Aliyah stared at a spot in space, which became a great stage before her eyes. Her mother moved across it like a doll, calling her, chastising her, shouting. Aliyah's face swelled with muted anger. In a distant, shadowy corner, she could make out a small bed. From it there came a sobbing sound and she could just distinguish the shape of somebody's backside in motion above. She turned away but the sobbing continued. Even when she closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears, she could still hear the sound ringing inside her head. With the days that passed, she took to watching the gate from the window. Repeatedly throughout the day, she would come to the window, draw back the curtains and peer out attentively.

‘What are you standing in front of the window for?' Hanan would ask. With a shake of the head, Aliyah quickly retreated.

Aliyah paid little attention to what went on around her. She floated along as though sleep-walking, her toes barely touching the ground. If she ever made a sound, while washing the dishes or polishing the crystal and silverware, she would feel fear seize hold of her and sink into a depression for the rest of the day. Aliyah had taken her own existence and her own self-confidence from where she had found it: within Hanan's body. Before that, she was nothing. After all, wasn't she now capable of making such a rich, beautiful woman happy!

One evening the mistress requested a cup of cinnamon tea. When Aliyah took it to her she found her in the bathtub. The mistress ordered Aliyah to take off her clothes and come closer to help. Then she pulled her into the water, biting her neck until the salty taste touched her tongue. Aliyah was stunned – like a mouse suddenly confronted by a cat – as the mistress continued to kiss her. She was frozen to the spot. The mistress started to kiss the girl's fingers, then she led them wandering to the secret places of her body. When she was completely gratified she whispered a stern order to Aliyah:

‘Now leave.'

Only at that moment were her animal instincts roused and Aliyah pounced at her fiercely. Covering her mouth with her hand to stop her screaming, she was victorious in dragging her mistress to the bed. Yet Aliyah's victory ran much deeper than this; she had usurped Hanan, taken her throne – that seat of power founded in violent love or hatred; a vagabond loathing which heeded to nothing.

Aliyah took great delight in the power of her hatred, not suspecting for a moment that Hanan would turn her out onto the streets to be tortured by the hungry flies that bit away at her legs and face. She remembered the day her father had led her through the alleyways and cast her into that house, the House of Colours as she liked to call it. Aliyah resented her mother for sending her all alone to work for the mistress, for not asking after her once in over ten years and, as the days passed, the memories of her mother became tinged with anger and spite. She tried to picture her in the most repulsive way imaginable, but every time only the most beautiful image returned: her mother's faint smile.

 

Aliyah muttered hoarsely to herself until her voice dissipated in the air. Taking a deep breath, she sensed that her throat was dry. Her gaze turned to the patch of green beneath the tree, settled among the tiny pine needles. She nibbled at her lips, then bit them hard, until she could taste salt.

The silence persisted. Aliyah opened her eyes as wide as they would go. Dazed and obscured, they saw nothing but a roof of green, permeated by beams of violet light. In peaceful surrender, she closed them and leant her head on the bag, her body slipping towards the ground. Sitting beneath the tree, Aliyah surrendered to a sudden sleep. In her dream she vanished behind high walls of green metal. Black bags fell on her head like drops of rain and she shielded her face with her hands. The bags hailed down so hard that she couldn't run away, as the metal walls grew narrower, crushing her between them. Then, rising up from the ground came what seemed at first to be another wall. No, it wasn't a wall; it was a skip. Aliyah screamed at the sight but heard no sound from her voice. She saw two eyes peering out from the shadows, she ran towards them. When she got there the mistress was standing above the two eyes. She fled but Hanan pursued, flying above her head, screeching and howling like the cats of al-Raml. She hid beneath the black sacks, shielding her face from the rotten smells with her hands. Then the bags turned to a sea of rubbish and she began to drown.

Aliyah opened her eyes and woke up from the nightmare. Breathing the air, she exhaled with a deep sigh. Hearing a sobbing sound coming down from the sky above she looked up to see her sister's eyes staring out from the empty space, just as they had that evening.

 

It wasn't Aboud's face that had caught her attention that evening when she had returned from school to discover him on top of her crippled sister; it was her sister's eyes. That vacant look was just like her mother's as she lay groaning beneath her father's weight.
Why do a woman's eyes turn to empty hollows when she lies beneath a man?

Despite the darkness, Aliyah could see that her mother was attempting to escape with her eyes, to get far away from her husband's face, as if she were calling for help. Once he had clambered off her mother and she heard the water begin to splutter in the bathroom where her mother was washing, Aliyah always knew that it was time to sleep.

‘That's how you make babies,' her little brother said. Aliyah slapped his mouth to keep him quiet, afraid that their father might catch them out and punish them; he would flay their hides with his leather belt, followed by confinement to the bathroom, beside the black pit. That was his most lenient way to admonish them. One night, he had caught her brother spying on him. He dragged him from under the woollen covers where he lay shivering, his teeth chattering with cold and fear. Paying no attention even to the wind that howled between the gaps in the tin sheets that protected the roof, he stripped the boy bare, threw him out into the darkness and locked the door.

At the sound of her brother weeping, Aliyah put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes beneath the covers. As the crying grew louder, her mother stayed silent, her siblings too, even though they hadn't closed their eyes for a moment. Aliyah couldn't bear the sound any longer. She jumped out of bed, picked up her brother's clothes, which were scattered over the floor, and went out to find him. In the dim light she could barely make out his dark body, which had turned blue. As she attempted to breathe some warmth into his hands her head gave a sudden, violent shake. Barely conscious of what had happened, Aliyah saw stars in her eyes as her father's giant body swooped down to grab hold of her and her brother. He stripped them both bare, before he swung them in his grasp like a pair of mice, slinging them into the bathroom. There, fluorescent red eyes emanated from the deep, black pit. For a few minutes Aliyah fell unconscious, her head hitting the side of the hollow. That pit was where the devils and hyenas came from to steal children, her mother had told her. The creatures kept children trapped in human waste, turning them into tiny insects. As she searched the darkness for her brother, Aliyah heard her mother sobbing, muttering incomprehensibly and smelt the smoke of her father's cigarettes.

 

The memory was as raw as if it had happened yesterday. Aliyah realised what a paradise she had lost that morning. Lying still beneath the branches of the old pine tree, she hoped this might be her final resting place.

The limbs had begun to grow again – long arms protruding from below her breasts, wrapping themselves around her, as extra breasts sprouted all over her stomach. Hanan ran down a long, dark corridor then stopped before a full-length mirror. At the sight of her extra arms and breasts in the mirror she screamed, waking up from her few minutes of sleep.

She was still in bed, Hanan discovered, groping at her body. No sign of any extra arms. The persistence of the nightmare's attacks surprised her; why couldn't what she'd seen in her dreams be the end of it? Aliyah naked, on top of her crocodile husband. The image would not leave her mind. Hanan cried, choking on an acid taste as she remembered the girl's dark, gleaming body – the body that she had formed and polished herself – in the arms of a decrepit old crocodile.

Hanan tried to concoct excuses for the maid who had given her so much happiness.

‘I told her to follow his orders.'

But what orders? I wanted her to feed him and make him drinks, and to change his sheets before they were soaked with his rancid sweat, not to lie in his arms.

‘Maybe he made her do it,' Hanan tried to convince herself, knowing full well that her husband's only activity was to await death. She herself knew that wait intimately; she had witnessed it with the death of her mother and uncles. A hereditary weakness flowed in the family blood. Hanan knew it, but was no longer worried. Perhaps she never had been worried, really. The way she saw it, death meant release and, in a way, she was waiting too. She had forgotten that though, once Nazek had helped her to discover those secret realms of pleasure, once she had become consumed by passion for the servant girl. The girl who, at night, would hear her own bones crack as she panted above the old man, tirelessly licking his skin.

Hanan's limbs had turned numb with anxiety. She needed to sleep but feared the dream she might find herself in. Descending the stairs once more, she rushed to the full-length mirror, just like before. She turned on the light and looked fixedly at the pallid face before her, stroking her cheeks. The old woman in the mirror had black rings around her eyes. Her small head rested on bony shoulders and her short hair stood on end, like iron needles. Hanan ruffled her hair. It stayed just as it was. Her face was comical, like the moving images of a cartoon.

Hanan figured she must still be dreaming, otherwise how would her hair stay looking so ridiculous, like a hedgehog? She took a few steps away from the mirror and turned full circle, checking there were no protrusions growing from her body. She stopped, coiling from the pain in her stomach. As she imagined the details of her maid's body she felt a deadly jealousy. Every pore, scar, mole and hair, she remembered clearly. Each curve, the roundness of her breasts, the arching of her buttocks, the rise of her backside, her long thighs, she knew every bit of the girl's body by heart, down to the glint in her eyes, which frightened her sometimes when their roles reversed. Hanan had preserved every detail. Yet, for the first time, as she stared into the mirror, she realised that the long years which she had shared with Aliyah had been empty of conversation. In the daytime, Aliyah was silent. She acknowledged her orders with a gentle nod, the only word ever to come from her voice being ‘ma'am'.

This one word was all that remained of Aliyah's voice. Hanan was surprised by her late discovery, racking her brain for any memory of a conversation between them, attempting to recapture the girl's sound. But it was no use.

Hanan's mobile was ringing from inside her room. She wondered who would be calling her at that time. She dragged herself upstairs, afraid to answer, yet equally curious to know who it was calling so early.

When she got to the phone, the ringing had stopped. It was Nazek, who waited no time before ringing again. Hanan peered fearfully at the phone. Nazek would send her insane; she would discover her secret, and she might gloat at her misfortune.

The phone continued to ring. Hanan picked it up and threw it.

She tried to get a grasp of what she should do to bring Aliyah back. All the while, Nazek's voice rang out in her head. She recalled its rasping tone, as she had heard it the evening of Nazek's gathering in honour of Caroline, the artist who was her new lover, even though she was still chasing Hanan.

 

‘One last glass,' Nazek had rasped, pouring Hanan her favourite vodka. She drew so close that her bosom almost grazed Hanan's chin. As she looked directly into her eyes, Nazek poured the vodka down Hanan's front, laughing as Hanan yelped at the chilling ice. Leaning towards her damp body, she kissed Hanan on the lips, savouring the scent. Hanan ignored Nazek's burning glances and fixed her sight on the two women sprawled on the sofa nearby.