Women of Sand and Myrrh (29 page)

He seemed like another person to me, unrelated to the Maaz I’d watched in a storm of emotion as he talked to Ringo about the trip to Sri Lanka, while I sat making plans to marry him; the man whom I’d thought of following to the airport, indifferent to the shame, and then even accompanying against his will, when I’d heard that he was travelling without me. Now he was asking me for help, just as he had done when the washing machine didn’t spin the clothes and when the oven didn’t work, only to have me discover that they hadn’t pushed the right button or the electricity was cut off that day. ‘Has Maaz seen the doctor?’ I asked Fatima, whose stomach had swollen visibly. She held up two fingers: ‘Twice,’ she replied. Then she disappeared and I asked Maaz, ‘What do you feel, and where does it hurt?’ He didn’t bother to answer but sat up in bed and moved his head about restlessly. When I repeated the question, he answered, ‘Ask Ringo. God damn the yellow bastards. Gog and Magog. They don’t fear God. They’re devils. God preserve me!’ At this point Fatima came back in. All the time she’d been away I’d heard her scolding her youngest child, the boy, in the kitchen. He must have been eating from the dishes she’d got ready for me and wanted to place before me untouched: dishes of pistachio nuts and fruit. I tried to find out what the doctor had said to Maaz, but he was talking again about the light which went off and on, about his face, his head and especially his spine, about the dirty house where there was a big rat, and about the funny-tasting Scotch. Then he stretched out his trembling hands so that I could see the veins protruding on them, put them up to his eyes and began crying like a child. I couldn’t bear to see him crying, and it was made worse by his two daughters crying in the hall and Fatima trying to calm the little boy and to finish what she’d started to say: ‘I swear to God, I said to him don’t go abroad on your own. Take the Qur’an and put it under your pillow. He
didn’t listen to me … God forgive him.’ I noticed that the small veins in his temples were standing out and I rose to my feet, saying to Fatima, ‘He must have a doctor.’ Together, Fatima and I helped him up. I noticed a large gold ring on his finger, set with a wine-red stone. To my amazement Maaz couldn’t stand. He leant on my shoulder for a moment, then sank back on to the bed. I asked the name of his doctor and turned to Fatima, saying that I’d contact him. Maaz held out both hands in protest, then bowed his head and kicked out at me with his feet. I couldn’t understand why he was objecting and said to him reassuringly that the doctor would have to come if I spoke to him. But Maaz stopped shouting and said some words which sounded like gibberish to me. Fatima explained, ‘He wants the doctor from your husband’s firm. An American doctor.’ Only then did I realize why he’d asked me to help. I spoke to David, then the doctor, then Ringo, who promised to bring the doctor here. I sat drinking coffee, feeling proud of myself. Nothing was hard for me in this country; it was as if I owned it. To date I’d sold five kitchens; telephone cables led up to our house in three different spots, over other houses and across the desert, because storms had brought them down. The road leading to our house had been surfaced with asphalt where before there had been sand. I got what I wanted either by making telephone calls or by confronting people in person, or through friends. Maaz wiped away his tears with the sleeve of his robe. I noticed his luxurious leather sandals and the suitcase on top of the chest, looking out of place in this room. The doctor came and opened up Maaz’s eyes and peered at the whites. The first thing he asked him was if he was taking any medicaments. I asked Fatima and she hurried away and came back with a little bottle. She gave it to me and stayed outside the room while I went in to give it to the doctor. The bottle contained tranquillizers and the doctor asked Maaz what dose he was on. Fatima replied from outside, ‘Four or five.’ She may have heard me gasping, for she went on, ‘It was him
who said he wanted more, so that he’d get better quicker.’ When I translated for the doctor he laughed and said tht he’d had a patient who’d refused an injection in his thigh, saying that the pain and the swelling were in his eye, not his thigh. I left when the doctor said he wanted to examine him, and when Fatima and I went back in later, she remarked, ‘Thank God he’s repented. No more trips abroad.’

The doctor said he hadn’t found anything wrong with Maaz, except that his nerves were upset; he was to stop taking the tranquillizers and meanwhile the doctor would have some tests carried out on the specimens of blood and urine which he’d taken. Maaz wanted me to stay and I could only leave by slipping out of the room when his attention wandered.

At dawn the next day the telephone rang again and it was Maaz asking me to fetch the doctor. I told him to wait for the results of the tests and he began to shout at me. He came to me in the afternoon because I hadn’t been to see him, accompanied by one of his neighbours. As I went through the motions of contacting the doctor, I could see Ringo urging Maaz to sit down and the neighbour devouring me with his eyes. Then I heard him telling Maaz that he ought to register with the nearby clinic: everybody returning from the Far East had to be examined, and their wives as well. Maaz held out a hand to silence him: ‘What do you know about it? I’ve got this burning light in my eyes.’ He went on talking, saying things which I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t bear his shouting, the movements he made, the sound of his voice: was he crying, laughing or ranting unintelligibly? I found myself phoning Suha. Agitatedly I asked her to come round, not giving her any scope to invent excuses. When she asked me what was going on, I screamed at her, ‘Please. I can’t explain. Please just come.’ I went into the kitchen and asked Ringo to go and sit with the visitors, and I could hear a renewed burst of shouting from Maaz and the same old cry: ‘Yellow bastards. Gog and Magog.’

I stayed in the kitchen until I heard the door bell. I’d refused to go in with Scotch for Maaz or for his friend although both Maaz and Ringo were calling out to me, and Ringo had begun to repeat to Maaz that since he’d stopped visiting us the Scotch supplies had been cut off. He was lying: Scotch, gold chains, Persian rugs were all in greater abundance than ever.

I didn’t understand why Suha was annoyed when she saw Maaz and his friend, even though I explained to her that he was ill. She wouldn’t agree to sit with them and let him tell her what was wrong. She came into the kitchen looking at her watch and saying that she had to contact her husband so that he could send Said for her. But when we heard Maaz calling, we stopped and listened; his calling turned into shouting and I saw Suha laugh. I laughed too and we collapsed together in helpless floods of laughter. His tone was more one of laughter and weeping mixed than of protest. Was he acting? ‘The light shining in my eyes, aah … I put up my hands to my eyes. They pulled them away. The light was like a fire and it shot down my spine, burning me. I cried out, and I heard them laughing. I said, “Forgive me, Lord. Cast the devil out of me as you cast him out of Paradise.” And her black mole. If the whore’s uncle had got rid of the mole, none of this would ever have happened.’ I was waiting for just a sign from Suha and then I thought we’d both begin to laugh again, but this time she ignored me and rose quickly and went into the sitting-room. I heard her asking boldly, ‘Who was she, Maaz? Who was this woman?’ Maaz tried to stand up to greet her but he sank back down again. ‘Madame Suha. There’s a light shining in my eyes. A burning light. It never goes away, even for a second. Aaah. The rat was as big as a chicken. It strutted around and stared me straight in the eyes. I should have guessed from the story of the black mole and escaped with my manhood. But I bought her a diamond like the one in the picture; she talked a lot, pointing to the diamonds and then to her mole. Every time I met her she talked about diamonds
and the mole, and she cried, and I didn’t understand. Bit by bit the group she was with made me understand that she wasn’t married yet because of the big mole on her cheek. They said that the family who’d come to betroth her to their son had seen the mole and changed their minds. It was near her eyes and so the tears would flow over it when she cried; they took this as an omen and said that if she married, her husband might die. Her uncle bored into the mole with the thorn and blood came in its place, then a scab which healed up and fell off, leaving the mole where it had always been. And they told me that she wanted to cover it up with a diamond stud so that she could get married. I said I’d marry her and I wasn’t afraid of the mole. On the contrary, I told them, where I came from it was considered a sign of beauty.’

It was many days before Maaz began to show signs of recovering. I didn’t go back to see him, being content to ask after him on the phone from time to time, until one day Fatima invited me and Suha to lunch: she’d slaughtered a sheep to celebrate Maaz’s return to health. Suha agreed to come and arrived with her son, carrying a box of chocolates. I couldn’t stop myself asking her in a challenging manner how she’d found the time to have lunch with Maaz and Fatima when she’d completely given up visiting her friends because she was getting ready to leave the country. She laughed and said, ‘I was bored with everybody. But hearing Maaz tell the story of his illness is quite amusing.’ We went with Said who came into the building with us at Maaz’s request. He took him off into another room, and Suha looked at me and smiled. For the first time Fatima took off her face veil, after Suha had told her that one of her daughters was like Maaz. Fatima looked young, with an innocent expression in her eyes and a beautiful smile, yellow teeth notwithstanding. Her thick black hair hung loose but was sticky with all the oil she put on it. She wore a gold chain around her neck with King George gold sovereigns hanging from it.

I noticed Suha’s eyes roving over the house. She picked up
a red plastic mug, then put it back on the plastic table, which was the colour of a pomegranate. ‘The same colour,’ she commented. Then she asked Fatima about the bunches of grapes made of interlocking metal rings, which were hanging on the partition. Fatima smiled and brought some bunches of plastic grapes and insisted that Suha should take them. I thought she liked them even though she refused them. But when Umar grabbed them and ran off with them, I heard her telling him in English to put the horrible things down. He didn’t stop pestering Suha until she let him ride the huge stuffed camel which had hair like a hedgehog’s spikes and eyes that were two green pearls, and a brown tongue and brown lips. Umar fell off repeatedly, so Fatima brought the two boys a damp wooden stool from the bathroom. They climbed up on it and hurled themselves on the bunches of grapes on the partition, fighting to pull them down; Fatima hung them up somewhere else, and seemed delighted at the uproar, even though Suha and I were scolding our sons vigorously.

When Maaz came into the room where we were after the meal, it was as if he banished the spectre of drowsy boredom which had begun to steal in on the three of us and especially Suha, who at once asked him where Said was. ‘He’s on an errand. He’ll be back in half an hour,’ answered Maaz. Then he said, ‘Come and see what I brought from Sri Lanka.’ At his bidding, Fatima bent down and pulled out a wooden box from under the bed and opened it. It was lined with red velvety material, and contained prayer beads and rings set with semi-precious stones – mauve, dark blue, pink – and with pink and red coral. I picked out a ring which appeared to have more gold in it than the others. ‘This is beautiful,’ I remarked, hoping fervently that he’d say to me as usual, ‘Please have it,’ and he did, quite happily: ‘Please have it, Suzie.’ He took out a necklace and put it in my hand, then proffered the case to Suha who’d remained standing. ‘Please, Madame Suha. You’re my sister, I swear to God.’ Suha
refused, as I thought she would. Although Maaz pleaded and insisted that she should take anything she wanted, she wouldn’t and eventually she asked Fatima for a glass of water and followed her into the kitchen.

My eyes became riveted to the box again and I said playfully, ‘So you went away without me?’ ‘It was a mistake, I swear, Suzanne,’ he replied, laughing. ‘See how it’s drained my strength and health and left me with hallucinations. After the land of God and Magog, God’s decreed a new life for me.’

I wanted to bring him back to the main issue: I reached for a ring set with a pearl and a red stone and slipped it on my finger. ‘Fatima’s lucky,’ I sighed. ‘Fatima doesn’t like Sri Lankan work,’ he answered, ‘nor Italian. She says the gold’s poor quality. I promised her a chain from Bahrain.’ I pretended that the ring wouldn’t come off my finger and he said, getting to his feet, ‘Leave it there, Suzanne.’ Suha came back in, asking when we were going to leave. I smiled at her. I’d put everything that Maaz had given me in my handbag, afraid of what she would think. She turned to Maaz challengingly. ‘You didn’t finish the story,’ she said. ‘What happened to the woman with the mole?’ I didn’t feel like hearing the story again. I was pleased with the jewellery and I wanted to take it home and look at it properly. I stood up: ‘We must go.’ But Maaz gestured to me to sit down again and turned to Suha, appearing happy at her interest in him. I’d sensed for a while that he was anxious to talk to her. ‘In the hotel they told me to make the trip home and be with my family when I died. They looked for my papers and then contacted the embassy. A man came to show me how to get to the airport and he stayed with me right up till I boarded the plane, God bless him. I told him everything that had happened to me, and he said, ‘You’re very lucky.’ And it’s true, I am. If I’d died in Sri Lanka I would have died unclean, without the prayer or the creed.’

I had no idea what he was talking about, but Suha asked him, ‘What caused it? You haven’t told us what caused it.’
Maaz paid no attention to Fatima who came in carrying a stainless steel coffee pot, and answered, ‘The woman with the mole cried and said nobody would marry her, and she wanted to hide the mole with a diamond. I told her that I’d help her escape from them and take her to my country and marry her. The following day I went to the casino. She didn’t turn up. Some of her group were there, and they took me away and tortured me with fire and with lights that hurt my eyes and made me confused. Maybe they put sleeping pills and pills to make me crazy in the drinks they gave me. I didn’t know why they were doing it, and every time I asked about her they tortured me some more. When I understood what was wrong, I told them that I was married already, and I’d said the things I’d said for a joke.’