Women of Sand and Myrrh (20 page)

Taj seized Mauza’s hand beseechingly. ‘What if I don’t get pregnant?’ she asked, pointing to her stomach. Mauza smiled. ‘You’ll get pregnant, God willing,’ she said. ‘You follow my advice and your stomach will swell up under your chin, and when the Sultan hears the cry of his newborn son he’ll give you his weight in gold, and if it’s a girl half her weight in gold. And you remember Mauza and give her
whatever you feel you should.’ Quickly, Taj al-Arus asked again, ‘What if I don’t get pregnant?’

‘You’ll get pregnant if you trust Mauza,’ she replied.

Taj al-Arus learnt that she would have to lean against the door after the rest were asleep, and when she heard a rattling, she should lift her nightdress and drop her pants down around her feet and press up against the door just where there was a big wide hole, and there would be a man outside ready.

Taj al-Arus hid her face in her hands, not wanting to hear more, while Mauza, seeing the girl’s reaction, hurried to make light of it and said she’d been teasing her. Taj al-Arus discovered that even if she gave birth to a son or a daughter, the Sultan would eventually divorce her and she’d never become a Sultana; she’d been wrong to think that he had over a hundred wives; the fact was that he would even divorce her, his youngest wife, to give himself the chance to marry others.

Three of the women besides her were still the Sultan’s wives and the rest were divorced from him but preferred to stay in the big house helping to bring up the little sultans; some of them married again to drivers and servants.

Taj al-Arus didn’t get pregnant, but she didn’t consider going back to her village because she was still enjoying the light blazing from the lamps, and admiring the water flowing from the tap.

Another month passed and Mauza came asking Taj to gather up her possessions and prepare to leave. She asked her for a keepsake. For the first time for ages Taj al-Arus thought about her family and her heartbeat quickened, but Mauza told her that the Sultan had divorced her and was going to marry her to a friend of his, and somewhere in the building the first chapter of the Qur’an had been recited and the agreement concluded in her absence. She left the big house wrapped in her abaya. She touched her jewellery; when she wore it she felt like a Sultana, because hers hadn’t changed colour like the others’. She remembered how she’d heard some of them shriek when they saw their emeralds and
sapphires changing colour as they washed their hands or rubbed their clothes in washing powder; after that they’d avoided washing powder like the plague. Through the black cover she saw the yard – sand and small stones without a single plant. She was told to sit in the back seat of the car. The roads were like the yard, only long, and the car didn’t stop until nightfall. When the driver and the man who’d been sitting next to him got out of the car, she did the same.

When the Sultan’s friend saw her he said, ‘So you’re Taj al-Arus?’ He took hold of her long red hair and pulled it, not believing that such hair could belong to a human woman and thinking she must be a jinnee. When she gave a cry of pain he was satisfied that she was human. He didn’t leave her room for three nights. He’d put her in a high room the night they’d brought her to him. The two of them had climbed a long flight of stairs and he’d taken her into a room which smelt of dates. He told her not to leave this room except to go to the bathroom on the second floor, and not to talk to any woman she might see. She was brought food on a tray by a young girl, and on the third day the door was pushed open: two women stood there without speaking. They took her down the long staircase to the entrance.

One of them pointed to a bucket of water and indicated to Taj that she should pick it up and take it upstairs and empty it into a large barrel there. She followed her and directed her to go back downstairs again where she lifted up a plank of wood, hauled up another bucket on the end of a rope and poured water from it into the first bucket. She gestured to Taj to do as she’d done then looked up, pointing to the long flights of stairs. Taj al-Arus was frightened of the well and said nothing. When her husband came to her she cried. He asked her what was wrong and she told him, but he didn’t understand. He left the high room and later when he tried talking to her again she didn’t understand a word he said.

In time she found out that the two women were Jauhar and Najeeya, his wives, and that they had taken it upon themselves
to order her about; they blamed her for everything that went wrong and even invented mistakes she was supposed to have made: burnt food, water spilt on the stairs; when the children screamed they accused her of hitting them. They even stole from her and her husband. Taj became pregnant twice, and gave birth to two stillborn children, a boy and then a girl. As soon as she’d learnt some Arabic she told Jauhar and Najeeya that she’d been a Sultan’s wife, and that if she’d had his child she wouldn’t have been there with them then. When she got pregnant again she stayed in bed in the high room and refused to get up because she’d realized that they’d made her carry the bucket as an act of hostility towards her: she’d seen the black servant letting the bucket down to his wife who was standing by the well, and then pulling it back up. She noticed that her husband had changed. He no longer called her ‘Crown of Kings’; he shouted at her and inquired of her sarcastically why there had been all that trouble and waiting if she was going to give birth to two dead children. Sometimes he panted with excitement on top of her, but no sooner had his head touched the pillow than he fell asleep and started to snore. He no longer came to her each night. One morning she held the pillow in her arms wondering why her husband slept as soon as he rested his head on it. She felt it and her hand came up against something hard; she began pulling apart the fibres of the pillow and saw embedded in the cotton some charred pieces of paper with writing on them. That night she showed them to her husband. He seized them with eager rage and descended the stairs: she could hear him shouting and threatening as he went. Later on he came back into the room and shouted at her and beat her and told her that he’d found out about her being unfaithful to him with the servant. Then he pulled her by the hair down to the second floor and pointed to a rifle hanging on the wall. He screamed at her that he would wait for the black boy or the stillborn black girl before he fired it. She smiled and went back to bed and slept as she’d never slept before. She gave
birth to me after she’d been pregnant for four years.

My father came back to the high room with silver and dates and a box containing English and Turkish gold sovereigns and necklaces of coral, sapphires, gold and emeralds and placed them all around me. I was beautiful and my skin was the same colour as his. From the terrace adjoining the room he made two big rooms, so that I could run about and go down without falling on the stairs. But Najeeya and Jauhar wouldn’t keep their mouths shut. Misery and spite made them ever more inclined to accuse Taj al-Arus of everything that went wrong in the house, and she never knew why he came to her after a long trip to India and said he was divorcing her. She didn’t leave the house, saying that she would wait until I was married, and she no longer saw him, although she heard him talking to me and playing with me, as he married a young girl he brought back from India with him. She didn’t ask him why he divorced her and not Jauhar and Najeeya; she was told that they were related to him and what’s more she wasn’t from the desert. She asked, ‘Why didn’t he bring his wife to live in this house as he brought me?’ Jauhar answered, ‘The man’s afraid of you. Glory be to Him who made you different. In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful! Your head’s like a piece of cloth unrolled and blown here and there by the wind. Your eyes dance and move around and never focus on a fixed point. And your voice – in the Name of God the compassionate, the Merciful! – one moment it’s sensible, the next it’s wild, and one moment you’re a pious Muslim, the next you’re the Devil’s creature. Tell me, tell me, are you right in the head or crazy?’

7

The noise lessened with the departure of most of the women. When my cousin and my son Muhammad came I went down with my mother and we sat in the car and waited for my aunt. The two Filipino girls stood in the middle of the street, happiness written all over their faces; this was one of the few times they’d been able to go out into the street, see the night and breathe air which was hot and sticky but at least wasn’t manufactured by the air-conditioner. They helped lift my aunt into the car and when they’d gone inside I got out of the car and locked the shop door behind them. I called out good night but didn’t hear them reply.

I closed my eyes as the car sped along with us, wondering why they were so annoyed at not going out. How could I let them go out when the men here were like traps set ready for them? I felt happier as I began to think about renting a second flat now that there was no longer room for my clients, in spite of the objections raised daily by my son. My aunt remarked suddenly. ‘Congratulations, Tamr, and God willing we’ll be able to congratulate you on finding a new husband before long.’

Once in the past she’d given me the names of three highly eligible men and urged me to speak to all three of them on the telephone and choose one of them. I insisted that I should meet them: I would only marry a man whom I’d seen and talked to. The past was no longer clear, or painful. I felt tired and turned to my mother. Her eyes were closed and there was a half-smile on her face: she must have been dreaming of her homeland.

Later that same night everyone in the house was asleep except Taj al-Arus. She was afraid that if she closed her eyes an angel or a devil would whisk her away to Turkey, and the smell of the gaseous springs for which her village was famous
would penetrate her mind, used by now to the smell of humidity and sand and the noise of air-conditioners, and make her lose it.

Taj al-Arus opened her eyes in terror and recited, ‘In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful.’ She stared in front of her for a long time and could see nothing. The darkness had swallowed everything up. ‘Tamr. Tamr. Rashid. Batul,’ she screamed. She screamed until she saw the three of us bending over her; she didn’t know why these faces looked scared and asked them what was wrong. Our hands shook her and our fingers brought water up to her lips and one face was crying: my face. When we were all gathered around her she could see everything she was used to seeing each day in the distorted mirror: heaps of bags and clothes in one corner, the cracks in the walls, a cord hanging from the ceiling with a bulb on the end of it; the room had no window.

‘Rashid. Tamr. Batul.’ She knew these names, but not the faces. She told us that she’d been with her mother and father and other relations and heard herself calling out to them and laughing with the village girls; she knew each one, remembered the dress each one wore, the colour of her kerchief. She remembered every house in the village, the colour of the earth and the mud, the distance between every corner, every street. She saw herself pushing her kerchief back off her forehead so that the pearls and gold rings didn’t go in her eyes while she was plucking a duck and making kebabs, and she saw again the freckles on her firm white hands and on her face. She peered into the faces in front of her and muttered, ‘God protect me from the accursed Devil,’ and realized that she was dreaming, and that we were the faces that went with the names which she knew. Rashid and Batul went back to their room while I climbed into bed next to my mother; she closed her eyes and turned on her right side as usual. She didn’t sleep, and she didn’t cry out although her heart was pounding and there was a rattling in her throat which obstructed her breathing. ‘What’s wrong, mother?’ I whispered. ‘What’s
upsetting you?’ And she was saying, ‘Forgive me, Lord. Forgive me, mother, father.’ She sat up in bed and told me that she’d remembered carrying her little brother and sister one on each hip, and running with them for fun, the chains around her neck chinking and rattling, and how they’d wailed and clung to her in fright. She could picture the dress her little sister had been wearing and her brother’s bare feet knocking against her as she ran, and even the shape and size of the blisters on them.

Taj al-Arus felt a heat in her chest, and pushing the cover back she got up and paced about the room like a cat searching for her little ones, even though she’s seen them all dangling from the mouth of a wild animal. The heat rose up into her head and she cried out to herself, ‘Why so long? What’s become of them?’

When the floor began to reverberate to the sound of her feet, even though they were so small and slender, I rose to take her back to bed. My aunt had heard her cry and called from her room, ‘What’s got into you, Taj? The Sultan’s a heap of bones. Tamr isn’t going to marry any sultans. For God’s sake go to sleep.’

Nevertheless, Taj al-Arus sat describing the roads and pathways to me, telling me the names of the trees, recounting how the whole village thought that the hot springs were the Devil’s bath. She described her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters, the earthenware jar of figs the size of stones, the snow, the ducks, the pomegranate juice; how they’d distilled rose water, fattened the sheep, made rag dolls, and cats of clay and water. When I showed interest and prompted her to tell me more, she settled into her stride and plunged ahead impetuously as if she were coming closer and closer to her village. All of a sudden she stopped and asked in Turkish, ‘Do you think they remember me?’

In the morning I got up, my aunt grumbled restlessly, and it seemed as if the daily routine of the house had begun: Rashid’s children made a noise; Batul shouted at them; the
water boiled on the stove and the smell of coffee filled the place. Taj al-Arus gathered her nightdress around her as if she didn’t want any person or thing to reach her or come near her feelings, in case they took away what she was bent on preserving. She withdrew, her rosary in her hands, telling its beads. She couldn’t see any freckles on her hands and for a long time there hadn’t been any on her face either. Jauhar or Najeeya had once said to her mockingly, ‘God protect us. You’ve got eyes all over your face!’ When my father stopped coming to see her, Taj never missed an opportunity to ask every woman she met, old or young, how to remove the freckles.