Sarmada Read online

  Farida, who'd gotten used to his silence over the past four years and whose every attempt to get him to speak to her had failed, gave in to fate, as usual, and waited patiently to see what it had in store for her. She was nearing fifty, but her face was still vibrant and there were no wrinkles around her eyes. She wasn't carrying any excess weight. She still had her lovely, long figure and she still gave off that old scent of tantalizing femininity. She started working even more in order to improve her finances. She’d slip Bulkhayr’s allowance between the pages of his books and she’d leave his meals out in the kitchen for him. On many nights, she’d sneak into his bedroom to study his round, handsome face and the fair beard that had begun to appear against his tawny skin, and she wished more than anything that she could look into his emerald eyes.

  Who could be his father? she once asked herself. The question exhausted her soul because her memory didn’t just bring up all those old teenage faces, but also a powerful taste of the dangerous desire she thought she’d long since forgotten, and she could feel herself slipping into its grip once again. She couldn’t resist: she masturbated, though her orgasm was mixed with the bitter taste of sin, and it made her swear—not to God—but to the photo of Bulkhayr that hung in her bedroom that she’d never go near the threshold of pleasure again. Then she stuffed a rag in her mouth and heated the cast-iron ladle she used to roast coffee until it glowed red. She placed it between her labia and calloused her clitoris and then she passed out from the pain.

  That was in the first year of his spurning and with time, she grew used to his silence, learned to deal with it, and it was enough for her just to know that he was in good health.

  When Bulkhayr returned from his trip to Hebariyeh two days later, Farida was sitting by the door of the shed, drying out wreaths of damask roses. She looked up at him and saw that the old unrest had left his face. She couldn’t believe her ears when she heard him say, “Hello,” in a faint voice, clear and full of warmth, and she smiled for the first time in years.

  Buthayna returned, divorced, during the spring vacation in 1989. She arrived at Farida’s with two big Versace bags, wearing Dior sunglasses, her hair dyed fair. She raised her sunglasses on her head, revealing eyes like crystals, free of wonder, free of sadness. Her round face, her white teeth, her lips a little less red than before, her wide brow, her chest a little more full. In an instant, Bulkhayr recalled every single detail of her body and he waited for any sign from her to signal that indeed they had some shared history, but nothing came. He broke out in a cold sweat when she came up and kissed his cheeks. He took in her scent, faint agarwood from her incensed clothes mixing with some newfangled perfume that smelled of cloves. She seemed to be disguised somehow, or artificial; she’d lost that old fragrance she’d had stored up in her pores. She commented on his height, “Good lord, you’re all grown up now!” and she wasn’t exaggerating. She took out a white shirt she’d brought as a gift and said, entirely neutrally, “I hope it fits.” He took the present indifferently and wondered: could she actually have forgotten? Had what happened between them been real or just some ambiguous escapade he’d embellished in her absence? These Borgesian questions and a creeping doubt engulfed his mind: was his affair with Buthayna just the product of a playful imagination?

  His only consolation was that he’d soon find out for sure, as she’d come to stay with them—for a month or more—seeing as her own house needed renovating after having been chewed up by waiting and stripped bare by emptiness. In a matter of days, he’d know whether he still had a foothold in her affections. He couldn’t go out into the wasteland to clear his head as he usually did, so he went up to the roof, eaten up by his worry and consternation. Could his first love, the one he’d waited and pined for, really be so thick?

  He let out a scream for no reason at all up on the roof of the house, confusing the farm animals around him, while beneath the roof, Buthayna thanked Farida for her hospitality and told her all about what had happened to her in the Emirates.

  As soon as she'd gotten to Dubai, she was struck by the stifling humidity and boredom, the smell of spices and the reek of frying curried fish. “From the moment I got off the plane it was like that smell was stuck to me. I felt like it was coming from my own body,” she explained to Farida. Saloum was gentlemanly and affectionate, but he was never there. He was a faceless husband. A week after she'd arrived in the Emirates from Sarmada, she realized that the emptiness, the loneliness, the confinement, nothing had changed.

  Her only task in life was to wait for her husband to return from his job at the school and there was nothing to pass the time except for a few meager friendships with other teachers' wives. They barely got past small talk, which made the loneliness seem a perfect heaven compared to the constant assault on her privacy and the foolish questions and gossip about every last thing. It was inevitable that she'd keep them all at arm's length. Her days there were written in sentences of words dotted—just to pass the time—with sickly dreams and Saloum was the typical migrant laborer, living by the creed: “Sun's down, count the cash!”

  As the years went by and Saloum al-Rayyash's financial situation began to improve, he was able to open a small restaurant, and he would go there to supervise after he was finished teaching for the day. Slowly but surely, they ended up seeing each other only in passing. Buthayna wasn't demanding, she didn't throw fits. She wasn't the type to moan about her own deterioration, or to complain about anything at all, for that matter. She found ways to mask the void: stringing bead necklaces, honing her old embroidery talents, and watching television, but her womb, it stayed empty.

  She didn't get pregnant and she didn't ask for anything; she was serene and happy to go along in whatever direction life took her. She docilely accepted her fate every time but one. “We have to see a doctor,” she told Saloum and so he took her to a women's clinic, where they ran some tests. He went back that evening and returned home with the results.

  He delivered the news calmly: “You're not able to bear children... but that’s my fate and I’m not going to gripe about it.” She spent several weeks trying to convince him that he had the right to have a son who’d inherit his bird-cursed family name. They went for a second test, and a third, and every time he came home more loving, but with the same result. She was barren and there was nothing they could do about it. She was even coming around to Saloum’s suggestion of adoption when she suddenly had a bout of acute stomach pain and went to see her Iraqi physician, who insisted on running a whole series of tests.

  She called Buthayna at home and told her a different truth: “You could give birth ten times over. Have your husband come and see me.” Despite several long and contentious arguments, Saloum refused to go and submit to any of the doctor’s tests and Buthayna realized from his constant foot-dragging that he was the one who was infertile. She gathered up her things and decided she wanted a divorce.

  “You know if he’d only told me the truth, hadn’t run away from it, I’d have stayed with him. But he lied to me. He lied to me and manipulated me, made me feel more grateful and guilty than I could stand. Everything after that was a lie. Anyway, he didn’t put up a fight, he just had one request: that I keep it all a secret because he’s afraid of the way people in Sarmada talk.” Buthayna then asked Farida to swear on Bulkhayr’s life that she wouldn’t tell a soul.

  “So what are your plans then?”

  “I’m going to go back home! He gave me enough to put my life back together and last a few years without needing anything from anybody. And he promised he’d send what he could.”

  The sight of her smooth, ample body hit him like a full-scale military attack and his erection was killing him. Nothing, absolutely nothing else mattered. He didn’t miss a single chance to touch her. He used to surprise her when she was stood at the sink; he’d rub the back of his hand over her butt and disappear before she’d even turned around.

  Three-quarters of his day was spent prisoner to an erection that just wouldn’t abat
e. He watched her, when she moved and when she was still, but his eyes wouldn’t meet hers. He tried his hardest to stop, but it seemed there was nothing he could do. It happened again and again: he barged in on her, pressed himself up against her; he didn’t miss a chance to get close to her flesh.

  She found this distressing at first, but she never tried to tell Farida. She pushed him away with all her insistence and might, but there was some satiny contentment muffling her fears, something tickling about the dangerous game played by a divorcee in her thirties and an adolescent on the verge of sixteen. He rubbed at the bristly edges of her empty days, tempted sin, kindled her memory and lack, and somehow this put her at ease, kept her from confronting him. She blamed herself. She blamed her soul. She was even more anxious to see how renovation on the house was coming along and she paid the workers more to finish the job quickly. She was worried she might grow weak. She didn’t want to venture down that path with an unruly teenager as it would only further confuse her already traumatized spirit.

  She snapped at him the next time he squeezed her ass as she was sweeping the floor. He'd squeezed her harder than usual and it made her nervous. This was something she hadn't seen coming. He'd let her get used to the light touches that left no trace, giving her a shiver and disappearing in the blink of an eye, but it was different this time.

  “Bulkhayr, stop it! I need to talk to you.” He stopped and turned to look at her. “Next time you touch me, I'm going to cut off your hand. The only reason I put up with you is because I know you're going through a hard time right now. Do you understand me?”

  He stood there, trembling, and as she stared into his eyes, she couldn't help but pity this being who was being tortured by his own body. His eyes welled up: “Forgive me, Auntie,” he said, heart-breakingly.

  “You're forgiven,” she said and turned around, abandoning him to new bouts of devastating anxiety.

  Those fantasies had been with him for many years and they would still come to him every once in a while. He was chronically frustrated, storm-battered by his body, which swept away all wisdom before it and knocked him down over and over again. He lost the brittle peace he'd got from Hebariyeh. Unabashed desire fled its confines and became his overriding concern, his focus, his constant preoccupation. He couldn't concentrate on anything and his thoughts were filled with all the women he knew, kin and non-kin. He made a hole in the bathroom door, forgetting his plea for forgiveness, and invaded her private nudity, panicked lest Farida should sneak up and catch him as he watched. But the longing he felt for the sight of her naked body fixed his eye to the hole as he watched her undress. He watched as she muttered a few prayers and the name of God, before pouring the water over her body and rubbing herself with laurel soap. She, too, was thirsty with want and loneliness and tormented by the pleas of a body that wouldn't let up.

  When she spotted the peephole, her face flushed and she fought back an explosion of anger. She slapped her clothes on and bolted from the bathroom: “What do you say I tell Farida what a little bastard you are?”

  “Whatever. I don't give a shit,” he answered with wounded pride. “I need you and it's killing me.”

  She didn't know what to say to that. She could feel her last line of defenses beginning to crumble under the pressure of his caddish insistence. “You're nuts. I'm like your mother, kid,” she said, looking into his emerald eyes, knitting her arched eyebrows, squinting as her own dark eyes filled with disappointment and pique.

  “But my mother didn't feed me molasses when I was little,” he said defiantly. “All my mother ever did was feed me shit and bring me into this whore of a world.” And then he stormed out and slammed the front door behind him.

  He went into the wasteland for three days, spending the night in the basalt caves, walking among the rocks, imitating the howls and shrieks of the wolves and wild dogs. With the arrival of spring, the rugged wasteland had become some kind of miracle for the eyes. The sky was suddenly gloomy with spring clouds and in the west, a storm began raining down while the sun still shone on the eastern part of the rocky tract. He felt bliss pricking his face—a velvety drizzle washing his loneliness. He stripped off his clothes and stood there naked, spreading his arms to the rain, as the sunlight that fell across his body was washed with drops of purest water. Two jackals hid behind a rock in the distance and watched skeptically as this naked human and his two sizable penises were bathed by the sky.

  Farida told Buthayna about the torture he'd put her through, how he used to greet her with a heart-wrenching silence. She told her how she was willing to give her life for him, but that she didn't know what to do. “He won't talk to anybody anymore. He doesn't relate to anyone. It breaks my heart. Every time he goes out into the wasteland, I count the days he’s gone by the minute. I can’t stop him, I can’t talk to him. When he comes home, he locks himself in his bedroom and he just reads and reads for days. Sometimes he’ll go two days without even eating.” She confessed to Buthayna that the Epistles of Wisdom had helped her and that she’d put her fate in God’s hands—she’d even swapped her old diaphanous, fine lace headscarf for a thicker one to signal her increased piety—and that the only thing that settled her soul was reading the Blessed Epistles, and she told her how she’d cauterized her desire with the searing iron ladle. The only good news was that business was booming and she’d been able to an add an extra room to the shed, which was where Buthayna slept.

  When Bulkhayr returned home, he disappeared into his silence, leaving the women to whisper to each other the secrets of their hearts. There was a knock at the door: it was a warning about his school absences and that he was in danger of being expelled if his truancy continued. He tore up the warning, not minding the messenger who’d delivered it, and slamming the door in his face. He went into his room, picked up a dingy book and began cutting the leaves with a ruler. The book was a biography of “Rimbaud, the vagabond poet” told grippingly by Sidqi Ismaeel. To Bulkhayr, just the name Arthur Rimbaud gave him a thrill every time he read anything by or about him. He devoured the book in one evening and then he read it again the next day. There was some sort of life force coming from the poet’s death so to get it out of his head he picked up the novel Madeleine, or Beneath the Linden Trees by Alphonse Karr as adapted by Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, and for the first time in his life, something he read brought tears to his eyes. He was sobbing when Buthayna came into the room. She saw him reading, the tears staining his face, but he hadn’t noticed her come in. She hesitated at first, and then she stepped forward. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  He looked up and quickly wiped the tears from his face. “Nothing. It's nothing, I've just got something in my eye.” She ran her hand through his carob-colored hair. She wanted to embrace him, to squeeze him against her chest, to drown him in the abundance of her soul, the springs of her compassion. But she did nothing of the sort.

  She merely ran her hands through his hair and whispered hoarsely, “I want you to know you're my everything.”

  She didn't lock her bedroom door as she did every other night to forestall his rash offences, she just slipped into bed after she'd perfumed herself and dressed in a thin slip. Her heart beat a drum of anticipation. He opened the door slowly and she shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep, as the faint glow of the nightlight fell across her face. He moved toward her on tiptoe and slid under the blanket into bed, settling behind her without touching her. She could hear his shallow breathing. He reached his hand out and placed it on her shoulder, and then he moved it up to her hair, rubbing it, inhaling the long-awaited scent. She let him, she didn't want to startle him. He brought his hand to her lolling breast as she tried to breathe regularly, pretending to sleep, while his hands woke every dormant cell of her smooth and sculpted body. When he tweaked her nipple, she pushed his hand away with faux annoyance and turned to face him. “What do you think you're doing, kid?” she whispered.

  “I've missed you.” His lips moved as if in prayer and his hands fell si
lent as if in preparation for another set of bodily devotions, as if gathering all their strength before invading seduction's lairs. She rolled over onto her back and he covered her lips with his own, and in their untamable kiss, saliva poured daintily from mouth to mouth, mixed, and their bodies lit up. Hands were loosened from dewy memories and set free to roam among the resplendent, gushing gardens of her body. His fingers began to climb her ivory thighs like a flock of hungry goats, jumping excitedly over her grassy plain, rubbing with the calm deliberation of a seasoned reaper, slipping past her labia down into the hot liquid valley, and then gliding over her excited clitoris.

  She grabbed his hand. She was determined to stop him; he'd gone way past the limits of what she'd wanted, and quickly. She thought it would be a romantic night: that he would encounter some of her body and a lot of love's whisper. She could never have imagined how bold and rash he'd be. She was about to push him away and jump out of bed, when he whispered with all the longing in the world, “I'm begging you: let me put my hand there.”

  All her defenses collapsed in a single moment under the hail of that reckless torrent of emotion, that passion. This was a moment that would never be repeated, she thought, as she held his hand back—a moment that would mark the rest of her days forever. The fire would consume her unless she put a stop to this foolishness.