Sarmada Page 10

  “But of course.” Her magic voice tugged at his blood cells, mesmerizing him. She turned and walked into the house, swaying, and the rooftop Romeo beat his ingenious retreat. Still there was no escaping the bonds of her seduction. He stayed up that whole autumn night looking through her open window as she let her hair down to spill over her body in the greenish light. She massaged her breasts with wood-sorrel flowers and the shoots of other strange plants. She rubbed chamomiles under her arms and wild tulips and shy mint against her ivory breasts, smeared lushly green. He came down from the roof like a sleepwalker and followed solace’s path toward his destiny.

  The door was half-open and two arms were waiting to grab him. Fingers as soft as bread-dough tickled the threshing-floor of his abdomen and wandered—herd-like—over the wilderness of his body. The fingers became stallions as they gripped his erection, his entire life changing in an instant. She squeezed him tightly as he fell to pieces. His shirtbutton caught the light and without thinking she tore it off with her gleaming white teeth, then she stripped off all his clothes and laid him down on his back. Her mouth moistened the straw of his innocence as the bee of his body began to dance. He was already about to burst as she lowered herself onto his erection and it had scarcely taken shelter inside of her when it frothed and foamed, ejaculating in irregular spurts and then dying out. He swarmed as if a whole colony of bees were stinging his very blood, and then shrank inside of her as if turning to nothing. His slackness slipping out from her tenderness.

  Her hands reached out to touch him, disturbing his pleasure coma, and he'd been made a man in a matter of minutes. A half hour later, she shuffled him out of the shed and he was alone once again. He cried for his loneliness, wiped out from exhaustion and wild delight, wondering what had just happened. He wanted to crawl back into her arms, to get back the innocence she'd shattered with her seduction. He wanted to get back the button she'd ripped off his shirt, but she'd locked the door and her body. Her rule was unshakable and went into effect the moment he'd stepped out of the house: all the Sarmadan teenagers who attained their manhood in her shed over the surface of her intoxicating body had one chance and that was all.

  One after the other, they came to see Farida and she marked them with her scent and tore a button from each of their shirts. She took their gifts coolly and gave them a never-ending list of chores: they built a wall around the house, tiled the roof, installed running water, built a chicken coop, painted the fence and the bars on the window. They performed tireless services—in secret, at first—and then openly with a good deal of pride and rivalry. Eventually it became something natural in the landscape. Her house was just like the majlis, or the church or the mosque: a place where people worshipped a lord who knew—better than anyone else—that everything was predetermined.

  She was accepted for what she was. Sarmada could deal with her captivating presence as she transformed the teenagers from permanent pains-in-the-ass to a troupe of gallant, lightfooted poets. She acquired a strange kind of power over all the hormonal youths: she knew how to talk to them, how to advise them, how to listen to their souls and lift their spirits. They all obeyed the strict rule: no one could have her body more than once. She took a button from each one and showed him the door, sitting down right after he'd left to sew the button onto a large white veil, and she'd embroider his name—or a nickname she'd come up with for him—right there under his button, before going off to bathe her body—which was devoted to giving, not getting—in rose-perfumed water.

  Yet she still waited for Shafee Mansour, the only one she herself longed for. She saw him hanging around outside the house, monitoring her every move, counting her lovers, never capable of walking in himself. One evening after midnight, she caught him lurking in the garden, but when she whispered to him, “Shafee, come in, don't be scared,” he turned and ran.

  She started arranging her days according to his schedule. He'd come in the morning and wait for her to open the door, then she would just look at him until she'd got her fill. She felt as if her day only started when she got to see him, and then he would go off to join in the endless work dreamed up by Nawwaf to keep him and all the other brothers busy, struggling to forget spilled blood through hard labor. When they'd finished their stone-hoeing, they began tilling and seeding, digging irrigation canals and planting trees, building walls, chopping firewood, working constantly to exhaust their guilt and shame. For her part, Farida received patients and prepared the requested cures: for stomach ills and indigestion, for high blood pressure, for increased fertility, tighter vaginas and whiter teeth. In the daytime, the eager teenagers came over to help out and by the afternoon, she'd decided which lucky boy would be next. This routine sometimes lasted for a month or more, depending on her mood and the state of her garden.

  “Shafee Mansour isn't like the rest,” she whispered over and over to herself. Shafee had those strangely sparkling sad eyes. He bore a too-heavy burden: he'd stabbed his own sister in front of the entire village and he’d never be able to shed the guilt and remorse. He was totally in thrall to his eldest brother Nawwaf’s authority and to his own contradictory emotions—he didn’t know whether to take refuge in God and wipe clean his guilt after shame had stained his family or to go to that abundantly feminine woman in the embroidered dress and dive into her curves until he drowned, to wipe away the stink of blood that still lingered in his nose.

  He hadn’t slept since he first saw her, when she came to invite them round to her house for rice pudding. He tried with all his strength to drive her from his mind, but it was no use. He started going to her house every morning to wait for her to wake up so he could catch a glance to calm his anxious soul. It was true that they’d been spared the crying plague—except for upset stomachs—even though they’d eaten the sweets the children had brought over, but ever since that day Shafee had been unable to sleep. Not because of the sweets, but more likely because of the pain that stabbed his heart whenever he recalled her eyes and gentle voice. He returned in the evenings to pace back and forth, to catch a glance or a wave, and when she smiled his body ached, but the longing of his soul was eased. Nawwaf could see the signs on his youngest brother’s face and was struck by an old terror: he saw the same pallid confusion, the same moony insomnia he’d seen in Hela. If only he’d understood those signs when he’d first seen them, he’d have locked her up in the house or chased her lover out of town and saved his family the exile of spilled blood. He was worried about his youngest brother and every time he looked into his sweet, almost girlish face, he could see Hela.

  On a bitter cold night in early 1970, an icy wind whipping through Sarmada, Nawwaf walked in from the parlor, wrapped in a thick fur, and heard his brother crying in his bedroom. It was love and he knew it. He burst into the room, cursing and grabbing Shafee by the neck, lifting him off his feet as if he were a pillow. He stared into his eyes and barked, “Who is she? I'm not kidding around: tell me who she is!”

  Shafee was gasping for air, trying desperately to reach the ground with his feet. “It's Farida, Nawwaf. Farida.” Nawwaf choked on the shock and dropped his brother onto the bed. He was livid; he stormed out into the cold, his breath melting the snow, and rolled a cigarette. He inhaled the hot smoke voraciously until the cigarette burned all the way down and singed his fingers. He went back inside the house like a raging, bellowing bull, threw on his heavy coat and grabbed his shotgun. He threw open the door and saw Shafee looking wasted, like a misshapen pillow.

  “Get up, you son of a bitch. Get up and get dressed.”

  Shafee obeyed as if hypnotized and his brother grabbed him by the hand and dragged him over to her house. He rapped at the door with the stock of his shotgun, then knocked incessantly with his massive hand. He could hear a voice on the inside, trembling, cold and scared: “Who is it?”

  “Open up, Farida.”

  “Who's there?”

  “Open up before I break down the door.”

  “Give me a second.” She put on a heavy rob
e and grabbed the kerosene lamp before she opened the door.

  Shafee was still a bit shell-shocked, chattering in the cold, and Nawwaf with his steaming breath looked rather like a snorting bull in the pale light of the lamp. He didn't want to drag things out, so he simply threw his brother at her. “Here, you whore! You can have him.” And then vanished into the icy darkness.

  Back at the Mansour family home, Nayef, Talal, and Shahir were sitting there worrying, wondering where their brothers had disappeared to in the cold. Nawwaf came back alone and threw a couple of cow chips into the stove and lit a fire. He sat there staring into space and none of his brothers dared to speak to him, or even go near his silence, boobytrapped as it was with mines that the slightest whisper would set off.

  They all sat there together silently, and when the wood began to glow red, Nawwaf stood up and took the hot coals out with a pair of tongs and set the blackened teapot down on top of them, before adding three more cow chips and some oak logs to the stove. “When winter dies down, we've got to move back to the old house. I think it's been long enough.” He sounded as if he'd walked in from another world, calm and resigned. Nayef and Talal nodded, but Shahir still couldn't shake his agonizing foreboding and, just as a log was popping in the fire, he blurted out:

  “Where's Shafee?”

  Nawwaf rolled a cigarette and took a deep drag. “At Farida's.”

  Nayef was shocked into silence, but Talal jumped out of his seat:

  “For God's sake! Why didn't you bring him home? Why didn't you just shoot him on the spot? Oh, that dirty little son of a bitch!”

  “Hela's blood wasn't enough, Shaykhs? You want us to kill him, too?” he asked his enraged brothers. “I took him over there myself,” he said defiantly.

  At dawn, Talal and Nayef walked out of the parlor, packed their bags, hugged Shahir wordlessly, and then left for Khalwat al-Bayada on Mount Lebanon. They were never heard from again.

  After Hela's death, the brothers had found themselves condemned to remain unseen, so they became Nawwaf's shadow, and when they walked anywhere together, they stepped silently, matching his footsteps. Talal and Nayef had decided to become pious shaykhs, with white cowls, thick moustaches, and shaved heads, dedicating their lives to copying out manuscripts of the Epistles of Wisdom. But they still remained dedicated to their older brother; he was the one who decided which direction all their lives would take. It was a kind of strange submission that could’ve lasted forever if Nawwaf hadn’t done what he’d done. They couldn’t understand why. How could a family who’d paid such a high price for dignity, with their own blood, sit idly by as their eldest brother lost all reason and himself delivered their youngest brother into the embrace of licentiousness? It was too much for Talal and Nayef to understand and their consent would have meant that their five-and-a-half years of ostracism had been nothing more than a joke. Their bold objection wasn’t meant to insult their brother, whom they revered, and this was why they felt that all they could do was to go to the only place left where the saveable could be saved.

  Shafee stayed at Farida’s for two straight days. He was nearly dead from desperation, torment, and the cold when his brother abandoned him to this love-charged woman. She took him into the warmth of her bed and held him until morning. He slept deeply in her arms and she chose not to wake him. She left him in bed and heated the place up. Then she brought him breakfast, not letting him get out of bed, and fed him—over his objections—a boiled egg dipped in ghee, and made him drink a glass of milk. She didn’t add any drops of griefmilk to it because she wanted him exactly as he was, under no influences at all; she wanted his tender heart, his unadulterated soul, and she understood why she was so drawn to him.

  He ate and smiled, and then fell back asleep. He slept all day as she took care of her business and received customers wanting her herbs. She took care of all their orders and then she returned to him. She watched his face in the light of the paraffin lamp and saw that the drowsy clouds had all cleared away. She stood there, not knowing what to do, and for the first time, she was truly frightened: this boy's going to stay here! She'd never let any of her lovers stay the night before.

  She wanted nothing more than for the overwhelming affection she felt for him to be transformed into mere desire, and yet she felt as if every fiber of her body craved him. She kept her nightgown on and slipped into bed beside him. He moved closer to kiss her, but she jerked her lips away; she didn't want anything resembling love to intrude on this night. She feared the torment of an infatuated heart, and kisses were the shocking, painful gateway to a land of simultaneous joy and hurt called love. She didn't want to fall for him, to love him, for it could never be undone.

  He kissed her slender neck, whispering breathily, and she could only surrender. She usually had to guide her body-tortured teenage lovers, who'd yet to learn the secrets of unspoken desires or the difference between maternal and sexual passion and love. But he, she felt, was complete. He smelled unlike any other man she knew. His body was supple and strong: subtly sculpted, she felt as she ran her hands over his tight muscles. That's why she let him kiss her neck, and nibble her earlobes, and take off her nightgown, leaving her naked. That's why she let him celebrate every inch of her skin with his hot tongue, and suck her breasts—not ferociously, but gently, exciting her desire. He squeezed her breasts together and slipped both nipples into his mouth at once, sucking hard and biting, but stopping just before it hurt, and pulling away and blowing coolly as his saliva seeped into her skin. He continued down, licking at her belly, and then his tongue came into contact with her invisible, almost microscopic, pubic hair, causing it to stand on end. Her brain received mysterious signals, telling it to transmit quivering waves all over her body. He travelled down between her thighs, kissing her, smelling her, rubbing his face against her, and then he rested his chin against her pubis.

  He was led by instinct and hunger. Her amulet's riddle deciphered, he brought his face back up to her pelvis, lapping at her, dipping his tongue inside of her, teasing her clitoris, rubbing his nose against the secret spot none of her young men had discovered. She was wet, she was fragrant, and she writhed. And then she came, for the first time in her entire life. He slid down to her feet, sucking each of her toes and licking her heels and calves. He was completely absorbed in discovering every spot on her body, its hidden secrets, and he was in no hurry for it to end. He wanted to go over—and down into—her every pore.

  She was light in his arms as he maneuvered her into any position he felt like, but his erection was like stone when she reached out to grasp it. It wasn't overly large or unsuitably small.

  She swooned as she knelt down in front of him, feeling his veins, holding his penis back as she ran her tongue down over his testicles and took them in her mouth. She dipped them in and out, and then she pushed him down onto his back and knelt over him like a cupola, staring at him with brassy eyes, and then, resuming her tonguing, she slid down his chest to his stomach and came to his erection. She licked the engorged head, and took it into her mouth. Shivers rippled through his entire body as she removed it slowly and held it, like a fluttering, placing light kisses on his jumpy veins, and then taking it back into her mouth. She swallowed it until she could feel his pubic hair against her lips. She wanted to give him what she'd been unable to give anyone else.

  He entered her, lowering himself down on top of her as he looked into her eyes, which were glazed over with pleasure and fear. Then before she could say anything, he put her on all fours and entered her from behind. She didn't know how many times she'd come, but when he pulled out of her, she felt as if her soul were slipping away. He suddenly forced it into her ass, ignoring her pleas. “Stop! You're hurting me! Please stop!”

  He could hear nothing over his own exhilaration as he rode her—in and out; it burned her insides. He moved back and forth between her vagina and ass as he repeated, “Farida, you slut. Farida, you bitch. You whore.” She caught a lusty fever from those words and she seemed to
glow with pleasure. Her body, she felt, was finally being liberated from the worship of those teenagers who sanctified its motherly affection. The repugnant words set her free and added to her ecstasy. She longed to hear more and more; she wanted his force to blow straight through her body. Remembering the naive, empty words of love on teenagers' whispering lips, she felt her femininity was being washed clean of all that had clung to it. She felt the membrane of her innocence sloughing off the dust of desperate love. He was giving her everything he had stored up in his dictionary of filth, without embellishment or emotion, taking the body to this lit-up point as every atom burst open and was soaked with sweat and exhaled pleasure. The trembling never ceased. She reached peaks she'd never known. Images ruptured in her mind as it clung to extreme heights. She felt her soul dissolving, her body disintegrating, mixing with spheres of light, spurting, sea-foaming, overflowing with heat. Until it came time for him to come and he let loose a round of semen on her back and then grabbed himself tightly, squeezing it, biting down on his lip till it bled, and frantically lay her back down in her crib and yanked at her head to slip his flushed member between her lips before it exploded in her mouth.

  Shafee erupted in hysterical giggling and filthy slurs as she swallowed his milk and nursed until gradually it withered. Only the erring, heart-twisting words her lover repeated could bring her back to reality: “Oh, Hela... Hela... You’re such a slut, Hela.”

  He returned to his brothers the next day, exhausted but full. His face was white and bright, but clearly hiding something. There was a striking glimmer in his eyes that burned out as soon as he found out that two of his brothers had left and that Nawwaf was refusing to speak to him. His other brother Shahir simply slapped him and spit in his face. He wiped his face calmly and went to wash.