Sarmada Read online

  Buthayna broke in on her whispered prayers: “You'll help me, won't you?” she asked, undressing, getting ready to depilate her pubic area. Farida needed every last atom in her brain to turn down the temptation-soaked invitation and tear her gaze from Buthayna's vulva.

  “No, I've got to cook something for Bulkhayr. I'll help you next time.” She didn't want to risk going any nearer the danger she'd sworn she'd keep away from, so she left Buthayna to get ready and to remove her unwanted hair and to spend the better part of the evening in the bathroom, where—kept company by her invigorating pain—she began to sing.

  Farida snuggled her son and tried with every fiber of her being to expel the voice in her head that evening. She was awash in erotic dreams of Buthayna, which caused her to wake up panicked and damp. Her mood showed no sign of improving, so she finally made up her mind. She told Buthayna: “You've got to go back to your place. It isn't good to leave the house empty.”

  Having won her temporary reprieve from loss, Buthayna seethed with life. She tried not to make a big deal out of being kicked out—Farida's surprising, and slightly cruel, request from out of nowhere—and as she was making her way back to the al-Khattar family home, she said to herself, “Farida's got a point. It isn't right to neglect the family home like this.”

  Rambunctious Bulkhayr planted smiles wherever he went, but over time Sarmada's adulation evolved into cloying boredom. No one ever scolded him and every single thing he did earned him praise and affection. It was constant: anyone who saw him would either kiss him, or joke with him, or give him a treat, or buy him one, and anyone who'd been away would have to return with a gift for Bulkhayr. News about him was greedily sought after with the excuse that his father had been a war hero and a martyr, and a good teacher, to boot, and that he had done the right thing by all.

  In all truth, though, he never felt the slightest bit exceptional, except that he had two penises and didn't know which one he ought to pee out of. Bulkhayr cheerfully entered the first grade shortly before his sixth birthday, dressed in the khaki uniform with the Baath-scout neckerchief and his leather satchel, which had once belonged to Hamoud the geography teacher, in hand. Farida, who was letting him go out for the first time unsupervised, found the house suddenly desolate, and she felt that the new life she'd embraced and gotten used to, and which had blunted her claws with the file of monotony, had begun once more to sharpen her feelings, to hone their ability to scar, but she kept on with her new life all the same.

  Her extraordinary talent for optimism, for taking part in celebrations, and for conscientiously and generously giving her time and energy amazed everyone. She watched as the fruit of her womb grew up before her eyes and she was filled with cheeky pride as well as great misgiving, for when she peered into time's gaze, she could see how far it stretched and how unpredictable it was—its every moment both a beginning and an end. She could see that time was divided into two paths: one brought things and the other carried them away. Her own life was short and it was headed down a single path, now that she'd closed off all the portals to the past and blocked them with the tree of her passion, which she'd cut down and chopped up to fuel the fire of time. Yet as soon as she'd embraced an asceticism of the body, ridiculing it for its triviality, new inanities cropped up: how could she give him—this child embodiment of the past—the features of the present? Down which paths should she lead him? Up toward God and unity and the void or down into the secret underground where he'd learn how to confront what was found on the surface? She decided she'd wait until the time came and would deal with whatever was going to happen as it happened. She locked up the flocks of suspicion and all it spawned in her ribcage and, lo, the flapping ceased.

  She was the first single mother in the area and a lot of people knew it. They cheered her for not having killed her fetus and managing to secure a cover story to allow him to forge a life in a place ill with fanaticism and shame. He once asked her out of the blue, “How come everyone else has a dad and I don't?”

  “Oh, your father was a hero, my love, and he was martyred in the war.” She pointed to Hamoud's photograph on the wall, which had a shiny black ribbon round one corner of the frame. That answer didn't really satisfy him and he slowly began to realize that there was something different about him in addition to the thing between his legs.

  Buthayna tried to calmly dismiss anyone who tried to get close to her; she couldn't stand the sight of any of Sarmada's men now that Hussein had forsaken her. Just the thought of her foolish Penelope-vigil was humiliating. She knew full well that he was never coming back and that she'd be condemned to wait her entire life, no matter how hard she struggled to escape, and she came to realize that the trenches desire ploughed through her body would no longer be fulfilled by self-pleasuring alone. But at the same time, she felt that her body would be wasted on the boorish men around her, so she embraced the idea of spinsterhood with an open mind.

  One day when she saw Bulkhayr playing near the valley, she called to him and he ran over. She sent him to the shop to buy a few things, and he was an expert at running errands by now: getting a few coins in return, showing off how wonderfully fast he could run, wowing the adults with his record times. When he returned, flushed and panting, she asked him about school and caught sight of something angelic rising to the surface of his face, rustling awake her own sleeping demons. She didn't want the conversation to end. “What did you learn today?”

  “We got to the letter ghayn,” he answered earnestly.

  “So you know how to write the letter ghayn now?” she asked. “I know half the letters,” he answered with boyish pride. “I can write your name if you want.”

  She smiled gaily and kissed him on the cheek, near to his mouth, and as she grazed his soft lips, she shuddered inexplicably, her body colluding stealthily. She grabbed a notepad and pencil and sat him down on the ground. “Show me how you write my name. If you write it right, I'll give you a sweet.” He began showing off his school skills and wrote her name out phonetically: Buthayn. After a moment's thought, he made it: Buthaynat. She laughed and changed the final letter to a silent T.

  “I wrote the letter N even though we didn't learn it yet.”

  Was it his innocence that drew her to him or was it simply the emptiness that had stretched cobwebs across the corners of her life? She watched his angelic face as he concentrated intently on the notepad, his fingers smudged with lead, and grieved for her brother who'd been struck down in the prime of life. What if this boy had been his son, would she have loved him even more? Or perhaps less? Where did an awareness of bloodlines or bonds, whether sacred or profane, even come from?

  She arrested her troubled thoughts, faked a weak smile, and mumbled, “The N is very good. Let me teach you how to write the rest of the alphabet.” She took his little hand and drew a semi-circle, adding a dot up at the top. Then she wrote out a few words on his notepad: N, fire, women, light, and told him to copy them.

  After an hour of tireless housework, she was finally done. As she was drying her hands, she was struck by a vague demonic anxiety, so she poured some grape molasses into a white bowl and licked her finger after wiping the rim of the jar. The sweet stung, or rather stirred, something inside her. She went back in and saw him, focused—as happy as could be—on copying the words one after the other.

  “Finished!” he shouted. “I wrote all the words.”

  He was a little diversion, both amusing and saddening her with his overflowing innocence and beauty. “You deserve something sweet,” she said, dipping her finger into the bowl. “Here, open your mouth.”

  She placed her finger in his mouth and his lips closed around it. He began sucking on her finger, his eyes shut, the words being branded in his memory with the taste on his tongue, and it tickled her right index finger and caused blood to rush into her breast. She removed her finger, gave him a quarter-lira, and sent him on his way, driving out the ludicrous imaginings that had filled her head.

  Two days later, he took his
schoolbooks and homework and went to see her. She was taken aback by the sight of this rosy-faced boy, carrying a schoolbag bigger than he was and a worksheet blazoned with a jotted note in red: Well done and keep it up. He spoke to her confidently, but with earnest pleading: “I want you to teach me the rest of the alphabet, Auntie.” She found the combination of his angel face and intent affecting, so she sat him down on the ground and made him take out his pens and paper.

  “At school, you get a ‘Good Work’, but here I'm going to give you a lick for every letter you write correctly.” And then she laughed but it trailed off into abrupt doubts:

  What are you doing? Were you actually waiting for him? And if he hadn't come, would you have felt some great void that only this little rabbit could fill? Be honest, Buthayna, is it really true that the only thing that can change the uninterrupted desert of your life is a visit from him? Could you really bring yourself to taint his innocence? What's this gaping emptiness you're feeling, Buthayna? What is it?

  Her own laughter took her unawares, and in its prolonged abundance, all questions and desires were curtailed.

  He was busy carefully making his handwriting as nice as he could as he copied out the list of words she wrote on his sheet of paper, bringing his face closer to hers to smell her redolent, fragrant scent, and innocently watch her protruding, quivering breasts.

  After he'd finished his assignment, she brought out the dish of grape molasses and dipped her finger in it. She brought her finger up to his mouth, but when he tried to nibble at it, she gently pulled away. He followed her finger as if hypnotized, while with her left hand she unbound her breasts and brought them out into the open. She brought her finger to her breast and splashed it with grape molasses as he, like a little puppy, followed the sugary trail and the bosom taste he'd been weaned from more than three-and-a-half years earlier. He stuck out his tongue, licking roundly a flawless letter M unlike any other. Once the wine-colored blouse had been removed, she could paint her hard nipple and say, “Have some molasses” in her best Arabic, mocking the tone of the teacher she was pretending to be.

  He came nearer to the rosy nipple, which was doused in a liquid that obscured the glowing white, and he ran his lips over it and took it into his mouth, and then out. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice, the way it quavered. She dipped her finger into the dish and rubbed it over the other nipple. He grabbed onto them and begun to suck, moving back and forth between them. With an uncanny and unending patience, he crawled above her as she lay back against two pillows.

  She began dipping two fingers and drawing circles from her breasts down to her stomach. He followed the sour scent of grape molasses, like a giddy wolf pup, licking unremittingly. She drew the alphabet across her stomach, first the letter A, and he repeated, “The letter A” as he licked.

  With his tongue, he licked up the alphabet of her body. “The letter B: one dot under. The letter T: two dots above.”

  She repeated the letters he'd learned that day by heart and tongue; the letters tasted of grape molasses in his mouth. The sticky liquid settled in her navel and, overflowing, ventured downward. She slipped off her khaki skirt and broke all the bonds of equivocation as she removed her panties—white with tiny blue hearts. The molasses spilt down over her loins and he went searching for the sweetness in the sprouting hair. It smelt like the wheat harvest and cooked molasses. He slithered down between her thighs and instinct alone led him to the syrupy volcano that awaited him. He started by tasting her labia, dyed dark by the grape molasses. She grabbed the back of his head and then he stuck his tongue out and plunged it inside her to take his virgin taste as his nose rested against her pubic arch. She tugged his hair and pressed him down between her thighs, pulling him in deeply. He devoured the moisture between her thighs, submerged down to the very dregs.

  He wanted to penetrate her with his face, and with his teeth, and his tongue, and his nose that was buried in the trembling damp. She pulled him up and down and up again until his entire face ran with the sticky liquid flowing plentifully from between her thighs. He stopped suddenly and it was as if he were about to burst with laughter. He heard her fiery moans and asked, “Is everything all right, Auntie?” She seized the back of his neck and pulled his head back down between her thighs, grinding against his face, not giving a damn about the laughter that had turned to fear and unmistakable tears as his angel face was transformed into that of a pale, molasses-smeared lizard.

  His first year of school went by and the grape molasses lessons continued, even though her irresistible instinct to possess the child gnawed at her and her dream of becoming a mother constantly lashed at her soul. She wanted a child more than she wanted a husband. It was a perverse desire that jarred the walls of her empty womb, demanding she fill it, and yet, at the same time, some enigmatic emotion led her to continue with the molasses lessons. She thought it over for a long while until in a single instant, her true feelings and motives became fleetingly clear. Was she really just trying to get revenge on Farida by corrupting her child?

  She couldn't come up with a clear answer, but she resolved to stop regardless because her feelings of deadbeat guilt drowned the pleasure in sin. She screamed at him, escorted him out, and slammed the door shut behind her with a resolve she wanted her desire to take note of. He stood there on the doorstep, carrying his schoolbag, and pounded and pounded, bawling and panting and shouting: “Open up, Auntie! Open up! Please, Auntie, open up!” She put her fingers in her ears and refused to give in to the insistent wish to open the door and hold him and wipe away his tears and shower him with all the affection she had to give. It was pure torture until, eventually, he left. She watched his short, slouching form walk past. He would turn to look behind him and then carry on. The big schoolbag weighed him down so that he could barely manage it. She gasped when he stumbled on some rocks, but he got back up, dusted off his clothes, wiped his teary eyes, and continued on. That last sight of him etched itself on her mind and she clung to it for the next decade.

  That evening she went to see Joumana al-Rayyash and told her that she'd agree to marry her brother, Saloum. She returned home and took a shower so hot it nearly scalded her skin. She didn't cry.

  Before the wedding, Buthayna sat with Saloum al-Rayyash and looked with her scorn-tinged heart into his eyes, which flashed fretfulness every time he blinked. She examined his long, soft and unsettling fingers and embraced him silently, which flustered him more than it should have. His questions and conversation-openers all failed to drive away the mocking smile that made him so uneasy and so vulnerable to jest. But when he started telling her his stories, he was able to defuse her ridicule and make it into something more like listening. He wanted to put her fears to rest, or more likely his own, by telling her the stories of his noteworthy family. He wanted to be as candid as possible, in a way befitting a former communist, a high-caliber mathematics graduate, and an intellectual who supported the materialist theory of the world and historical determinism. Though when he spoke there was no hiding the petty bourgeois inside him, or to put it more plainly: he had all the traits of a liberal feudal lord and it made him the constant target of his comrades' criticisms, but he still managed to lure the broken-hearted Buthayna into listening. He didn't care what anyone else thought. All he wanted was to break down the barriers separating him from this sexy, strong and fierce woman who plagued his heart with the panic of hope.

  After he got the chance to go to the Gulf, he couldn't give a damn about the accusations they tried to smirch him with: small-minded opportunist, free-rider, callow lefty. He walked out on the circles of communists and the enlightened after he made a point of order at a meeting, interrupting a raving comrade who was saying that “The Muslim Brotherhood and the government are both evil and we have to put an end to the most dangerous of the two. As it stands right now, the most dangerous evil is the Brotherhood because they want to turn Syria into an Islamic state, and they're going to wipe out all the esoteric sects because that's what their
draconian authorities, such as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Jawzi, have always told them to do. They have a long history of suppressing esoteric sects, which made great progress compared to the underdevelopment of classical Islam.”

  It was sectarian scare-mongering dressed up in a Marxist critique and Saloum couldn't take the bullshit any longer. He placed his right fist against his left palm and rose to make a point of order. He demanded he be allowed to speak: “Comrade Lenin used to say that his fight wasn't with capitalism, it was with the lice infesting the heads of Russian children. I don't think our fight ought to be with the ruling class, or with the government, or even with America and the Arab reactionaries, and not even with Israel above all else, because everything we're fighting is connected and it'll all collapse once we liberate ourselves from within. Our fight ought to be with ourselves. Before we set up our coat rack and start hanging up defeats and excuses and theories about the future and evaluations about who's more dangerous than who, we've got to start with ourselves as individuals, as a party, or as cells in a progressive movement, and ask ourselves, ‘Where are we right now?’

  “We turn a blind eye to illiteracy and poverty. We ignore individuals, and the rights of people and their dignity, and even life itself as a legal principle. Instead we agitate and call for resistance and sacrifice. Our fallen are ‘martyrs,’ just like in the religious code we're trying to uproot or tear down. Comrade, the retreat to religion is flourishing because there's no such thing as justice, and because individuals' sense of self and selfworth is equal to zero. When the earth is undifferentiated misery, heaven will thrive. When ideas are impotent and strange and naive and they have nothing to do with reality, well, then all people have left is magic, and heaven and houris. Or else they can only volunteer to become fuel for leaders' fires.