Women of Sand and Myrrh (6 page)
Nur was waiting for me in the swimming-pool. As I dived into the clean water I thought no one looking from outside would be able to guess what lay behind those walls. At first I was annoyed, then increasingly indifferent, in the face of Nur’s fear and her failure to listen to what she ought to do in order to stay afloat. But I continued to encourage her, while she apologized and played the part of the embarrassed pupil.
My visits to her became more frequent although I gave up hope of ever teaching her to swim, especially when she confessed to me that this was the fourth time she’d tried to learn. Before me she’d joined a swimming club somewhere in Europe, and her husband Saleh had tried to teach her too. But Nur’s personality and the atmosphere of her house, so different from the other houses I knew, attracted me back there.
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It was difficult for us to become friends, for I had effectively sealed off the channels of communication to every living creature and every inanimate object in this country. I left my house rarely and didn’t give myself the chance to get to know people who would transport me to other worlds. I wasn’t suffering from the depression of the desert which attacked every woman from time to time, even the ones who were content with this restricted way of life: for a woman never knows why she suddenly withdraws from everyday life for a
time any more than she knows why the cloud of depression suddenly lifts from her.
But I wanted peace once I began to grasp the contradictions which existed between my house and the outside world. Every time I walked into my house I felt that I was entering a different world far removed from the other: all the variations and details of life inside appeared reasonable and sensible; the international news on the radio and television appeared important; listening to it, you felt that it was talking about people and events that you understood. While if you heard the same news on the car radio, driving along the sand or the newly-improved roads, it seemed remote from reality, transmitted in an indolent tongue understood by no one, because it didn’t consist of endless talk about money and business. Even the news which concerned everyday economic life gave the impression that it didn’t change from one day to the next as it did in the rest of the world. After all, the gold market here was a few little shops around an unroofed courtyard with the goldsmiths sitting on the ground in front of low tables covered with gold articles and substances for melting them down and polishing them. Black beetles ran over its sandy floor and women stood around, the gold on their arms jingling as they fingered necklaces and gold belts, or bought gilded Qur’ans and ear-rings and bracelets for their children, while their husbands reluctantly counted out vast amounts of money and gave it to the goldsmith who sorted the notes into neat bundles of a hundred and snapped elastic bands round them.
Nur reawakened my curiosity, but only for a short time. Her house was like a peep-show where servants and nannies of different races milled around with children, gazelles and saluki dogs. A delicate perfume floated to meet me whenever I went through the door, and Arab and foreign music reverberated through the spacious rooms. Beautiful clothes, high fashion, the latest of everything – including the furniture and the chocolates she offered me, like Godiva from Belgium and
Chantilly from Lebanon – mangoes and pineapples from the Philippines. It was a large house with white marble everywhere and the trees in the garden visible through the windows, acting as a buffer between the house and the desert. The noise that filled it reminded me of Sitt Wafa’s house, and in both of them I found some semblance of normality.
In Nur’s house I used to sit and wonder where to look next. There were two video machines in the huge sitting-room. The furniture was used to divide the room into three sections. Her daughter and Umar and some other children were shouting and screaming as they fought satellites on the video screen. Female friends and relations of Nur watched stars like Dalida and the Egyptian Nellie on television, and the Filipino men-servants sang and called to each other with loud whistles. Dogs wandered in, wrestled with the children, and wandered out. Budgerigars and canaries and green and white parrots hopped around their aviaries talking to one another. There was a big aquarium alive with different sea creatures. When the friends and relations got bored they would come over to Nur and me and then I wondered which of them to talk to or look at. Some of them were enveloped in abayas and veils and had henna patterns on their hands, while others wore clothes in the latest styles and colours; their jewellery was either embossed bedouin gold or modern international designer style. Which magazine should I flick through? It seemed as if all the world’s magazines, and the magazines produced by all the big international stores, were there on the table. When Said came to take me home I was always surprised how quickly the time had passed.
But Nur’s house was no longer so exciting after I’d seen the show over and over again, and swimming in the pool was no longer a novelty, and I didn’t pay proper attention to what Nur was saying. The times I did listen to her complaints which were always on the same theme – how bored she was and how much she wanted to go abroad – I used to soothe her in exactly the same way that Basem soothed me: ‘Never
mind. Be patient,’ without meaning what I said. Because I was turned in on myself to such an extent, I couldn’t establish a real friendship with any woman here. ‘My friends are in Beirut and I don’t feel in tune with anyone else.’ But I also used to say to Basem that I couldn’t break off relations with Nur as I’d done with the rest because she found an answer to every excuse I gave; whether I said Said wasn’t around, Umar was ill, I wasn’t feeling well or I was busy. When I didn’t answer the telephone Nur came in person and knocked on my door asking if the telephone was out of order. I began to feel annoyed by her and her persistence, and complained about it to Basem. He suggested that I should benefit from her and get to know the desert region here. Despite my lack of enthusiasm, I welcomed the idea and thought it sounded better than sitting on my sofa or Nur’s hour after hour. So one day we went together right into the desert to an oasis community and visited some of Nur’s relations in brand-new tents with sitting-rooms, dining-rooms, showers and toilets and a water pump outside. We sat on Persian and Pakistani rugs. The women seemed more real in these huge tents, although they’d only come to spend a few days in the desert. One of them asked Nur about her husband Saleh; ‘May God guide him,’ she remarked as she started to speak about him, which I presumed was because he was always travelling: whenever I asked Nur about her husband he was away on business. She took me to watch a bride-to-be being bathed and beautified and decorated with henna, and I saw how different the women looked without their veils and black abayas. They were laughing and shouting to one another and exchanging frank comments and gestures as they watched the bride. At night we went to the wedding ceremony and I was happy just to watch, while Nur danced, chewing gum. I didn’t eat anything. Nur ate, while I looked at the women and at the stars that seemed almost within reach.
When the phone rang early one morning I picked up the receiver although I was sure that it would be Nur, and I
agreed to visit her because I wanted to get out of the house that day, particularly as I hadn’t left if for days. When I entered the house I found the opposite of what I had expected. Nur looked as if she’d spent the night in a cold bath, immersed in icy loneliness. At her side was her bottle of tranquillizers. When Nur took one of these she slept peacefully for hours but when she woke up she moved slowly as if the ground wasn’t to be trodden on but just brushed with the soles of her feet. There was a mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray. The pallor of her face made her a part of the sugar-coloured sofa, except for the two points of blackness that flickered there from time to time. Her hands too blended in with the sofa and she held the ashtray listlessly. In front of her on the table was a bowl with pomegranate grains in it, and another of peeled cucumber and carrot. The Filipino maid picked up the two bowls and glanced at Nur before disappearing with them. I was about to ask her what had happened when the maid came back with a bowl of peeled oranges and apples and grapes.
Nur was beside herself. She bent her head and said, ‘I want to die. Every day I can feel myself beginning to explode. I want to travel and I can’t. Saleh’s got my passport. I can’t live another moment in this house, I’m going to run away.’ I sat beside her and said, feigning concern, ‘Calm down, Nur. It’s not so bad. Send a telegram asking him to send you the passport. Saleh’ll be back soon. It’s not such a disaster.’ I thought to myself how spoilt she was. Then I looked around me. For the first time I thought about the cost of everything: the ceiling, the floor tiles, sofas, tables, chandeliers, display cabinets; it was as if every piece had been chosen to give an aura of rock-solidness and life as it should be lived. And yet the house was steeped in loneliness, perhaps because of the absence of visitors and their children at this hour. The doors and windows were hidden by curtains as if they didn’t exist, as if there were no aperture in this house for the plants to breathe through and everything was crouching under a solid
glass cover. Again I pretended to be concerned: ‘What’s wrong, Nur? Calm down. Don’t worry. You’ll be able to go abroad soon.’
Nur wept, and the tears brought the spirit back into her face: ‘I can’t stand any more. I’ve had enough. He’s got to divorce me, or come back to me. I can’t live like a date hanging off a branch, neither firmly attached to the branch nor lying comfortably on the ground.’ Half interested now, I found myself saying, ‘All right. Why haven’t you either got divorced or come back together before now?’ The only reply I could hear was her bitter weeping. Her long black hair was in a mess from the fury of her fit of crying and she lifted her head and twisted up her hair and threw it to the side: ‘I just don’t know what to do. I want to die. I’ve had enough. I want to die.’
I didn’t know what to say to her, but I acknowledged to myself that I was hard and self-centred because I wasn’t moved by her tears now, and because I was thinking about Umar coming home and wondering whether Said had understood that he was supposed to come for me in an hour. Then I justified this by imagining that my reaction would have been different if I’d seen one of my friends in Lebanon crying.
Nur was sobbing hysterically now. I got up and found a box of tissues and brought it over and stood awkwardly before her, not knowing how to make her take one. I tried again in a low voice: ‘Nur. Calm down a bit.’ I hated myself because these were the only words I could think of to say but for the first time I found myself taking Nur’s situation seriously. I had assumed that Saleh, like all the husbands here, was just away a lot or had another wife somewhere. The feeling that the house was without a man was clear although Nur was always threatening her daughter: ‘I’m telling you, your father’s going to beat you. He’ll be back soon and then you’ll see.’
I thought, ‘Nur must trust me and my feelings for her, otherwise she wouldn’t choose to seek help from me in
preference to all her other friends and relations. Perhaps it’s because I’m a stranger? But she’s got lots of friends like me, who aren’t from the desert.’
I rested my hand on Nur’s hair, then patted her shoulder and said to her, ‘There’s a solution to everything, Nur.’ Nur mumbled some words that I didn’t understand. She looked up and reached for some tissues and wiped her eyes, then said, ‘It’s a huge catastrophe.’
I was surprised and pleased that my words had evoked some response in her, and for the first time she appeared ready to look at her situation without crying. I said, ‘Ask him for a divorce. It’d be better than living like this.’
It was as if I’d reminded her of something worse. She bowed her head again and repeated, ‘It’s a huge catastrophe. If I get divorced, who do I marry?’ I was taken aback by Nur’s question but instead of saying jokingly to her, ‘How can you think about marriage when you haven’t thought about divorce yet?’ I asked reasonably, ‘Did you quarrel? What about? Let somebody try and bring you back together.’ Dabbing at the tears and sweat on her face, Nur answered, ‘He won’t budge. He’s got a heart of stone, and his head’s not much different.’ Then leading me back to the main issue she repeated, ‘I want to go away. I can’t bear living here. If only I could go on a trip for a week or two …’
I let Nur cry and I couldn’t help looking at my face in the tissue packet holder as I took a tissue from it, to see how I looked; Nur had even thought of getting a metal cover for the tissue box. I thought I looked beautiful. What was the use? I handed some more tissues to Nur who sat up and said, ‘How lucky you are, how fortunate to be Lebanese.’ I was about to answer, ‘But I’m stuck here, like you’ but no – the perfume that I smelt whenever I came into Nur’s house now coursed suddenly and powerfully through the corridors of my blood, into the blue veins in my head, massaging them. I relaxed as if I was floating on a surface that was like water but without the wetness or the tension. I was suddenly conscious that I
wasn’t from here, that I could travel, and go where I pleased, by myself, for a year, two years, three, or leave for good. But Nur would return however often she went away and however long she stayed away. I felt invigorated by these sensations and I returned to the box of tissues, pretending to take one while I was really stealing glances at my reflection, assuring it again of the reality which I’d grown oblivious to and which had confronted me in the midst of Nur’s passionate outburst. Only now did I appreciate that this outburst was less violent than it might have been, given the situation she was in. So I tried to return to Saleh, to the root of the problem, but Nur was only interested in retrieving her passport and going abroad and a disquisition on the subject of her husband bored her. She was already trying to think of alternative ways of getting out and urged me to help with practical suggestions. I offered: ‘You’re ill and need a specialist?’ ‘No. They wouldn’t believe it.’ ‘Your mother’s very ill and you have to travel to look for a cure?’ ‘Possible. But who’d persuade my mother to go?’ I was running out of patience: ‘Get another passport.’ ‘No. These days you have to have a photograph. Before it was easy. No photos for women. Just the name.’ At this I said with relief, ‘If only I looked like you. I could have given you my passport.’ Nur answered, ‘Thank you, my sweet. And thank you for helping me.’ What help could she mean? I’d only handed her some tissues, and in exchange she’d given me a crystal ball where I’d seen my face and my life.
