Bitter Orange Tree, page 13
When he died, Kaaffa left the compound. No one knew where she went.
The Holy Night of Revelation
We finished the apple tart and ice cream. Feeling relaxed, I stretched my legs out a little. Imran noticed my red shoes, and said their color intrigued him. They were made of leather, I told him. Natural skin. Then there was silence. Kuhl went back to her notebook and I exchanged a few words with the Polish waitress. She told me she was studying biology and had worked as a window cleaner and child minder to pay her university fees. Her dream was to stay on in Western Europe, she said.
Imran spoke up suddenly. “Those shoes! As if they are made from the skins of oppressed peoples.”
I stared at his glossy brown shoes. I didn’t say anything. I was remembering his plastic wardrobe opposite the bead curtain. I imagined the shirts slapping against each other inside, like flags caught in a strong gust of wind, but one whose effects were nevertheless invisible, as though it were a whirlwind welling up only inside me. Hearing the sound of the shirts flapping in the wind sent me to the sea, to the slap of sails on never-ending voyages, to a lost ship raising the flag in Love in the Time of Cholera to the swirling and eddying of the ocean, sea shanties, the whale in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, the glint of strange and far-off stars. I tugged at my spirit, which was stumbling over the buttons of Imran’s shirts in his wardrobe, getting tangled up in Kuhl’s spirit on the way and stumbling over it as well.
Kuhl was bursting with tenderness, but it looked to me like Imran was trying to fend off her affection in self-defense. He always tries to keep a distance between himself and others, I thought. Not because he believed he was better than they were, but because he was wary of them. Wherever he landed, he seemed to create around himself an aura of opacity and silence, keeping everyone a fierce arm’s length away. Kuhl broke open the aura, and forced this unyielding arm—which still showed the traces of the glowing iron spike, the father’s hateful anger—to encircle her. But her route to this arm scarred by the seal of cruelty was a tough and rocky one. Even now, with the first anniversary of their secret marriage approaching, waves of doubt about whether this devotion was real and lasting, since he had never known the like—or alternatively, known fears about its very strength—would crest and break over him, sweeping him somewhere far away.
Imran was not inattentive to others. In fact, he paid more attention, and cared more, than people thought. They believed that his apparent indifference to others meant he cared only about his studies. In fact, his was a profound curiosity about people. But it was a curiosity he kept concealed, or at least camouflaged. It was a curiosity that extended to me.
He was clever—he could even be sly—but he was not out to deceive anyone. Kuhl recognized his pure intentions, as I did, too. It was just that he was so tightly swathed in the winding cloths of a terrible, frightening childhood. The cringing affection of an abased mother had not been able to protect him from all of that humiliation. Her powerlessness had only intensified it.
In his village, everything was made from dried mud. Houses, livestock enclosures, the walls around every field, the primary school. Even the emaciated animals were covered with splatters of dried mud. The one structure built of stone was the imam’s shrine. From its hidden inner chamber the expected Mahdi was to emerge. This savior would flood the world with justice, for it had become a world of tyranny. No one knew exactly where in the shrine the vault sat. Imran started going there every night. He lifted the worn-out carpets and inspected the stone floor. He put his ear to every inch of the place, knocking and tapping the walls, but the shrine never revealed the secret of its vault.
On Laylat al-Qadr, he saw a light coming through the cracks in the floor, and he heard the sound of weeping. He put out his hands in the darkness—the hands of a young man, burned and scarred by the father’s iron spikes. He tried to jiggle the stones, and then to push them. They slid open, and there was the vault. Imran squeezed himself into it easily and dropped lightly, like a bird landing gently on the ground. The vault was paved in silver. He saw the seated imam, poised on one pan of an enormous scale, balanced by an equivalent weight in gold. He was wearing a white robe embroidered with gold threads and a tall cap studded with carnelian. Imran stood before him, and the imam put out his hand, diamond and ruby rings on his fingers. The hand touched the burn marks left by the hot iron skewer, and the wounds left by the leather whip scourging Imran’s body. The imam ordered his followers to catch the young man’s tears in a worked silver bowl. When the imam dipped his hand in the bowl, the tears turned into pearls, which his acolytes then dropped into Imran’s pockets. They lit his way out with torches. The door to the vault closed. It did not open again.
The Fiancé
After my grandmother buried her friend—our elderly neighbor Shaykha—she took to spending the late afternoons on the stone bench in front of our house, staring at her neighbor’s front entrance, the metal door shut and locked. The key was with Gran. After all, Shaykha’s son, who had emigrated so long ago, might be set free by the jinni women of the West, and come back one day to open up his mother’s house—the mother who went raving mad and died waiting for him.
One overcast day, as the afternoon was darkening, an old man appeared. He was a stooped, fragile figure, and his beard had gone white. When he saw her sitting there, he rapped on the door with his cane and called out, “Gharib wa-atshaan! I’m a stranger here, and I’m thirsty!” My grandmother waved at him to sit down. She brought him a glass of water, a plate of dates, and a little pot of coffee. He settled himself comfortably on the bench in front of old Shaykha’s house. He ate and drank. He began telling my grandmother how he had lost his way returning from the hospital. The driver he had hired set him down in this village instead of his own. He didn’t notice at first, and wondered why he could not find his way home. And then he realized that he was in a different village.
My grandmother told him about her neighbor who had died; about Shaykha’s longing that her son would come back; about the trees she had planted that had given fruit, about the wonders of the bitter orange tree that didn’t bear fruit until my grandmother patted and rubbed it with her own hands; about her son, Mansour, and his wife from Sur, the big city, and his children; about their first home when they were married, on the coast at Sur, and then how they had moved back to the village when the woman couldn’t bear the smell of the sea during her second pregnancy, which didn’t end in miscarriage. About little Sufyan’s aversion to formula and his wild love for chocolate even before his teeth were fully grown in; about her son Mansour’s trips to the Emirates with his children, and the little gifts he brought back—from bottles of perfume and hair creams to the combs that the girls always gave her. About the lengths of fabric and the wraps his wife brought her, and how she knew perfectly well that Mansour bought all these things and then handed them out to his wife and children to give to her. About the one time she traveled with them to the Emirates. She didn’t like it there at all, and decided to stay home after that, even when they headed off in the summers. Then she told him the latest news in the village.
When the man got to his feet, it was evening. She had persuaded one of the neighbors to drive him to his own village. As he was stooping to climb into the car, he asked her what was her name, and who were her family? When she told him, the man began to laugh. His mouth was open so wide that she could see his toothless gums. Before she could get too annoyed at the sight, or at the sound of his cackle, he said, “You? You’re Bint Aamir? The horseman’s girl? I tried to marry you fifty years ago, but your papa refused me.”
He kept on laughing, even as the car started up and took off. My grandmother stood there, staring after it.
That was the night my grandmother turned elderly. Through her few remaining years, the body that had been so strong and erect would slowly deteriorate, collapsing into lameness and violating the norms of suitable conduct that she had preserved, in all dignity, throughout her life.
Triangle
Imran traveled to his village—a village without a name, somewhere in the Pakistani hinterland. Kuhl lost her equilibrium.
She wanted to write to him—the little love notes that you hear about in songs. She wanted him to know that in his isolation and distress over a life of deprivation and want, that her spirit was hovering, enfolding him. That if she could not change a single line in what was written for him, her fingers were long enough that even from here she could touch his hair and stroke it.
She wanted to talk to him about desire. How it burns, truly burns, how the stinging pain of it surprises you, reaching the deepest recess of your heart, and you don’t understand how to transcend it.
Kuhl talks to me about this desire that burns, and I imagine you. I imagine you through her eyes, Imran. I imagine your hair, at the line where it meets your neck, and I imagine myself stroking it. And I dream that you are feeling—in this precise moment—my finger twisting a short lock of your hair around itself. That your fingers are spreading my hair out across a white mattress, to look at it. I imagine my hair twirling like the spinning swings in amusement parks. I am mad for you; I am mad with you. I am Kuhl, and I want to give you the milk from my breasts, so that you will be my son. To give you the honey of my womanhood, so that you will be my man. To feel you patting me on the shoulder, and then you will become my father.
Imran traveled, his body all gentle feeling and all hardness, displaying the utmost unconcern toward humanity and concealing the most vivid interest in people. He traveled when death had just closed his father’s eyes—those eyes that had always and ever radiated a fiery accusation at his son. Imran was always in the wrong. Accused of error if he acted; at fault if he intended to act; sinning if he did not act at all. His very presence was subject to danger. When his father died and the danger vanished, Imran finished his degree and traveled immediately to his village, where he would become the man of the household.
Kuhl was waiting.
The two of them led lives in which imagination occupied a very narrow margin. They loved each other, they were partners in desire, and so they married. But I, standing at the head of the triangle, had let imagination fill the whole space of my life. I made the imaginary my life. I loved them both, and I desired their union, and our union. I was happy enough living with imagination. It was imagination that developed and tended my strength of will, while reality was smashing it to bits.
Kuhl and I are alone in the Three Monkeys Café. I want to speak. But silence is what we have. I want to ask about the corner of his mouth. About his fear of people. About how he left without making any promises. I want Kuhl, this sad woman across from me, to shout out his name. And I want to shout with her. Imran! I want to say something about different cloth, about how the weave of his trousers was not spun along with the weave of her skirt, and so it all unraveled. If only it hadn’t come apart. If only grace had come down from a merciful heaven allowing me to cleanse their two hearts every dawn. Every dawn.
But what we had was silence. It is not merciful, silence, nor is talk.
In the beginning, my spirit roved across her face. In the end, my spirit wandered restlessly amid the walls of the Three Monkeys Café.
And then my spirit landed on your balcony. It dived into your pillow, drank from your cup, buried itself amid your books. It embraced your wife. The abandoned body, Imran. Kuhl’s body. A body whose steps are no longer steady. Its gaze is not steady. And the roaming spirit cannot come back, nor can it rest.
The source of my companionship—what I mean to say is, my solitude. Don’t touch my spirit as it moves restlessly through your café, for it is nothing but a sad shadow now. My friend—what I want to say is, my beloved. My beloved—what I need to say is, my partner, my other half. My husband.
Sheets
When my grandmother told me the tale of the lion who gently offered his back to carry the load of firewood for the man with the mean wife, she said, “If the Lord brings a catastrophe down on His servant, the Lord compensates His servant for it with something else.” When I got older and she was no longer braiding my hair, no longer strong enough to walk, and no longer able to make out anything but vague shapes with her one good eye, she told me and Sumayya another story. This one was about her father, in the year that Sa‘id bin Taymur became ruler of Muscat. Clan Hammuda of Jaalaan sent word secretly to her father. They hoped to tempt him to join them in seceding and proclaiming independence. They craved his heroic persona and his singular courage. He craved the money funneled to them by the House of Saud. His brothers were furious, because Clan Hammuda followed a different religious line. He didn’t pay them any attention. Sharifa, his mother—who was known as Sharifa al-Aziza, Sharifa the Noble, because her family had famously accrued such sharaf and ‘izz, honor and glory—cut off all communication with him. He shrugged that off, and entered a losing battle against the sultan and the British. He came back suffering from a shrapnel wound in the shoulder and the death of white Dahim, his favorite mare. He lost everything he had, because he had pawned it all off to buy weapons. The shame of it kept him away from the men’s gatherings. He sat at home, kicking at the walls in frustration and punching anyone who came near. On the day he realized that he must sell the last of his horses to feed his children, his wife observed sharply that his son was now old enough to support himself and his one-eyed sister.
I didn’t really listen to the story. At the time, my exams were looming and I had my eyes on a scholarship to study in Europe. Sumayya wasn’t interested either. The handsome young man who had just gotten his degree in Australia had presented himself, and she was longing for the promised bliss. We left my grandmother’s room quietly. She didn’t say, “Don’t go.” My mother asked us, “Does Maah need a bath?” We nodded. She called the servant.
That was the last story I heard my grandmother tell.
I was dreaming, and flocks of swooping birds woke me up. What I felt against my cheek was the rough weave of my grandmother’s garments. Not for the first time, I recollected that I had not really said goodbye to her before I traveled. I got out of bed to go over to the telephone. How could I have forgotten to say goodbye? Halfway between my bed and the telephone I remembered, suddenly, that she had died. And I remembered the sheets.
The sheets were collected quickly. Green, brown, cream, striped, worked, plain, new, old; some with tassels on their edges and others with hastily done lines of stitching along the hems. They were all lifted, held together or singly, by this crowd of women who formed a square of fluttering sheets around the bier. The women knotted the corners, and their hands, keeping the sheet-curtains high, came together at the knots to form a tent with no gaps. But something was not quite as tightly joined as it should have been. What was taking place under the protective veil of this square, improvised tent formed by sheets was not curtained at all. The heavy, musty-smelling cloth with the tassels along the edge was meant to open only enough so that one of the women assigned to wash the corpse could fetch another bucket of water, or the perfumer could stick her head just far enough out to ask where the aloe was, or to request a bit more camphor. But instead, it opened to every little puff of wind—and to curious glances, now and then, from the women who were holding up the improvised square tent. Some of them were relaxing their grip, lowering their arms, stealing little glances at the unclothed body of the dead woman. Since the deceased was not a young person whose face had been smashed up in a car accident, nor an invalid whose body carried the raw scars of a recent operation, there was not much to look at that could furnish later conversations, in whispered moments when the women were sitting together, or during louder moments at family gatherings not yet muted by the presence of a body in a shroud.
The corpse washers and the perfumers announced that their work was done. The women who had been holding the sheets aloft now rested their arms. As tired as they might be, none of them seemed too fatigued to display the strain to their backs or rub their hands together vigorously, ridding themselves of the numbness. Someone gathered up the pile of sheets and took them all away.
And so Bint Aamir came into that time in which there is no air, no light, no end. The time against which every life appears unbelievably short, and swiftly gone, even the life of my grandmother.
The Valiant Horseman
She was a child who wore twenty braids oiled lovingly with myrtle. Her cheeks were daubed with saffron and her eyes were little stars. She had a house, and that house sat amid small fields. Behind it was a stable for the horses. She had a father who was a renowned man of the horse, and a mother who was all gentleness, and a loving brother, and a name.
The mother had not yet died, the father had not yet married another woman, and there were not yet so many hungry mouths clustered around him. The father had not yet lost all of his stallions, and the cost of a sack of rice had not shot up to a hundred qirsh. She had not yet lost her eye, and would not have heard her father mutter, “I will never marry off this girl and hear her husband’s family calling her the One-Eyed.”
