Muhammad (9 page)

W
e had no idea. There should have been omens. There were none. God is as unexpected as lightning in the desert. Before he strikes, the sky is as blue as on any other day.

Muhammad and I had been married in peace for fifteen years under that sky. It was a household of women, four daughters and a wife. There were apricots soaked in rose water on the shelf. When a caravan came home from Syria, each of our girls got a precious little bell to hang around her ankle. When my girls walked, a silvery tinkling brightened the path before them.

Muhammad could have acted like a king behind these walls, or a beast. It was common enough. But I had watched him closely before I unfolded my heart's desire. I wasn't born a fool. He wasn't the only young man who listened to the poets in the bazaar and sat in the shade on sweltering days talking with his cousins. People ridiculed me for offering myself to such a young man. “It's like buying a camel and
refusing to tie it up,” they said. “It's in an animal's nature to stray.” My money ensured that none of them laughed to my face, though. I didn't care that Muhammad had asked his uncle, Abu Talib, for his daughter's hand. The girl was sleek as a cat with eyes as soft as a deer's. Old Talib refused him, because he had set his sights on a better marriage with one from the Makhzum clan.

When Muhammad was new and shy with me, he nervously confessed this failed proposal. I burst out laughing. “Not at you,” I said, seeing his crestfallen look. “My first two husbands came from the Makhzum clan. They left me twice rich. Is that revenge enough for you?”

He paused, weighing his words. “You will lift me far above any life I've ever known. My grandfather Muttalib was the last elder in my clan to hold sway. I'm a wanderer among men. I listen to songs, but cannot sing. I hear the poets, but cannot read what they say or write better words if I could think of them, which I can't.”

He was surprised when I shrugged this off. “Two kinds of people can't read, the illiterate and royalty. We'll just pretend you're a king. My foreman will read for you.”

If Muhammad had turned into a tyrant after we married, I would have had only myself to blame. No one in Mecca saw what we did the day before the wedding. They would not have believed it. We bartered over our future. Well, I did.

“How do you intend to treat me?” I asked.

“How would you like to be treated?” he said. Caution. I like that in a man. He smiled. “They call you a princess, but I was born too low to be any good as a courtier.”

“Treat me like a beautiful young girl,” I said. “But never let me guess what you really think.”

“That is what I really think,” he said, as soberly as if he were assessing the weight of a Byzantine gold piece.

We were lying on a couch—not touching—with the shutters closed and all the servants ordered from the house. It does no good to hide behind doors. They always eavesdrop, just as they always steal from the olive jar and pretend that yesterday's lamb has gone bad.

I remembered how I looked in the mirror that morning. I said, “Never be tempted by other women. Betrayal would shame me, and shame would kill me.” Without thinking, my fingers traced a wrinkle around my eyes, still a shallow wrinkle. Before long it would be a crease.

“There's no reason to be afraid. I am betrayed every day. I know shame,” Muhammad said.

I couldn't hide my surprise. “Who betrays you?”

“My tongue, which is why I rarely speak.” Muhammad meant his accent, which, to tell the truth, everyone notices. He spent too much time with the Bedouin because of his timid mother, who postponed the day he would have to breathe filthy city air. Twenty years later, he sounds faintly as if he just stepped out of a sheep enclosure in the hills. We were comfortable together, lying there, each lost in a dream of what this marriage would be like. His accent was charming to me.

Finally, and with a blush I didn't know I possessed, I said, “Don't reveal any other women you've been with. But I have to know that you aren't sick.” If I had picked the right suitor, he had to be pure.

“But I am sick. Some days I think it's fatal.”

Muhammad rose and walked to the window, peering through the cracks in the shutter. His face was streaked with
light and shade, like the image of a zebra my father brought back from Abyssinia when I was a girl.

“Mecca is my sickness,” he murmured. “I get infected again every day. Sometimes with fear, sometimes with rage. On the streets I see the walking dead, and my clan, the Hashim, are almost beggars. I may never recover.” He turned around and saw my mystified look. “As for my body, it has no weaknesses. You could store wine in my belly and load my back with saddle bags like a camel.”

An Arab cannot consider himself respectable unless he has skill in lying. Our life is haggling. We barter to stay one step ahead of drought, famine, and the malicious gods. This back-and-forth with my fine young Muhammad could have been the prelude to disaster. I knew that it wasn't. Not from woman's intuition. I knew because Muhammad passed my tests. He asked nothing for himself. He didn't insinuate that I should pity him for being an orphan. He didn't sit in profile so I could admire his curved nose or carelessly dangle a curl over his forehead. Not that a woman doesn't notice.

Even so, I hesitated. My father taught me a saying: “A chameleon doesn't leave one tree until he is sure of the next.” I had the cook put rare dishes on the table—roast duck bathed in pomegranate syrup, deep-sea fish so delicate that the skin glistened like a rainbow. I did this to see if he salivated. A poor man cannot help but drool, and if he drools over a duck, how secretly he must be drooling over my money. Muhammad's eyes didn't even wander to the food. He kept his gaze on me. A woman can resist anything but attention.

It wouldn't surprise me to know that Allah watched our every move, heard our every word. They were probably his
words in some way, fated and sealed. All my life, I assumed that my will was mine. I had more strength than ten other women. I was called “princess,” not “surrender.” It's a shock to realize that all this time my will was God's.

It was his will that our two baby boys died in the cradle. I awoke one morning before dawn. It wasn't the hour when a baby usually cries. On that morning, when the first boy died, the silence in the house was different, as if the angel of death had whispered overhead. I couldn't bring myself to run into the baby's room, but sent a servant. And the second time? I had a dream of a boy running after a flock of sheep in the mountains. He looked down at his feet as he ran, and he saw the shadow of a wolf. Before he could cry out, I awoke.

Muhammad didn't want any women to wail over our babies after they died; he forbade mourners in the house. When I asked him why, he said, “If an orphan can't handle grief alone, he won't survive.” Rarely did he speak of his past that way. No matter how deep into his eyes I gazed, I never saw scars on his heart. Strange, given that this life is made of scars.

But it wasn't in me to wail, either. I had married off three grown children before I ever met Muhammad. My new babies were precious, but if one died, a part of me wasn't ripped away. I kept this a secret, but Muhammad sensed it. He was unhappy when I ordered two animals to be sacrificed in the Kaaba. It was considered only prudent to appease the gods after any kind of misfortune. I was dressing in a black veil when he appeared at the bedroom door, tight-lipped. His face was pale.

“Are you going? You don't have to,” he said. I told him that I couldn't leave something like this to servants.

“And which gods do you think will help us?” he asked. He ticked off the names of Hubal, Al-Lat, Manat, and Al-Uzza. In Mecca everyone sacrifices to them, even those who have doubts. We're practical. It costs little enough to please the idols.

“I don't know which one. All of them,” I said. I tried to sound casual as I smeared an extra layer of kohl around my eyes as a sign of grief. But I felt guilty pretending to be a believer. Who knows? Maybe one of the gods cursed our babies, or us. These things are impossible to fathom. I watched Muhammad standing behind me in the little polished mirror.

“You can forbid me to go,” I said.

In a sarcastic voice that he rarely used, he said, “Can a husband pretend to be more powerful than all the gods? Go if you must.”

I went. It wasn't piety that drove me, but fear and grief. I didn't want the gods' disfavor. But I didn't want their protection either, the way common, superstitious people do. If I had dragged ten terrified animals to the altar and watched their throats being slit, would that have saved my two babies? What I wanted was to have the knife in my heart come out. Although I kept my desperation quiet, I had to find relief. If the gods existed—if only one existed—maybe it had the power to grant mercy to one in pain. The sacrifice was made, with many citizens standing around and nodding their approval.

When I came home, Muhammad asked me if I felt better. I shook my head. I felt ashamed to put on such a dumb show before gawkers and idlers, people whose only interest was in seeing a rich woman suffer despite her money.

I've never pretended to have humility, but my pride didn't stop me from running to Muhammad and begging his forgiveness. He lifted up my face and asked me to look at him. Then he said, “I understand your despair. Bring it to me. Half your pain comes from keeping it a secret.”

I can't say that the knife immediately withdrew from my heart just because I had a kind husband. That took many months. But my husband and I sat up the rest of the night talking between us about things that wives rarely speak about, such as our sense of frailty. When we stand so low in creation, as every girl is taught, our hope is that at least the gods will give us strength. I was such a girl, wondering where protection would come from in a violent world.

Giving birth is a death sentence for one mother in six, maybe more. I'm willing to believe, but in what? The finger of fate passes over the scrolls and chooses this one for pain, that one for delight, this one for life, that one for death. Has this invisible hand ever been seen by anyone, even the most devout? Once seen, would it change just because a pitiful suffering woman cries out? Fate wipes out creatures by the thousands with a single flash flood in the hills or a summer of drought. We humans are creatures too, subject to the same whimsical catastrophes.

This episode of the sacrifice could have caused Muhammad to condemn me; instead, it brought us closer. We found that we shared no brilliant answers. We shared the same questions instead, and that was enough.

It was my custom to go to the bazaar every morning to inspect the goods and keep an eye on prices. Once I got married there was no practical need for me to do this. I had turned all my business affairs over to Muhammad. He resisted at first.
“There is no need. You've run your own affairs for years,” he argued. “And if it's my pride you're worried about, don't.”

“It's the pride of every other man I'm worried about,” I said. They could barely endure taking orders from a woman. I didn't want them whispering behind Muhammad's back that I married him just so I could emasculate him.

I won't say the matter was settled in one conversation. It's always delicate when a poor man is yoked to a rich woman. Muhammad understood. When a big ox and a small ox try to pull a cart together, it will likely tip over. I told my old steward, Maysarah, to present all the accounts to my husband from now on. He raised an eyebrow, but obeyed. So you see, I could have spent the rest of my life behind doors driving the servants crazy, the way respectable women do. I tried. After two weeks Muhammad begged me, for my own sanity and everyone else's, to keep up my customary ways. The caravan camps were my natural habitat. As he put it, I would still be a lady even if my sandals smelled of camel dung. Unlike the chameleon, I jumped to a new tree, but kept one foot on the old one.

I went on my inspections even when I was with child. The first delivery was two months away when an old man called out to me, “So it's true. You really did change your sex.”

It was Waraqah, who had only grown stranger as he grew older. He was sitting on a low wall in the warm winter sun. My legs were sore from waddling down the cobbled street, and I decided to have a rest beside him.

“Ah,” he said. “You've given up a man's life, but you're still as brave as a man.”

“Let people talk. I don't have to be brave to sit beside you,” I said. “Unless I've made a mistake and you still have a tooth left in your head.”

He tilted his head back and gave a croaking laugh. “I'm not the one who will bite you if you're seen with me. There are others who will be happy to do it.”

He was only half joking. The rich old man was regarded with suspicion among the elders. Waraqah no longer sat with them in the inns, and he hadn't made things any easier for himself by hanging around the Kaaba, muttering oaths at the pilgrims who passed nearby.

I said, “You don't fool me, you know.” The veins in my legs had stopped throbbing. I balanced myself on the wall so that my swollen belly didn't make my back ache so much. “You're not as cracked as they say.”

Waraqah shot me a sidelong glance. “If I'm not cracked, then what am I?”

I searched my mind, but he didn't wait for a reply. “The word you're looking for is subversive. I'm a snake in a basket of dates. Like your husband.”

The expression on my face made him give out another croaking laugh. “You've made him rich, and you did it overnight. But a dangerous mind doesn't get less dangerous swathed in finery.”

I was struck silent, which seemed to please Waraqah. The penalty for free thinking had gotten severe during the past few years. Mecca was no longer the city I grew up in. We breathed suspicion. Muhammad wanted to keep his good name, but he would no longer be Al-Amin, the trusted one, if people couldn't trust his opinions. For most men, words are the same as thoughts. As soon as a thought is in their head, it's on their tongue. My husband had thoughts he didn't speak.