If I close my eyes, I can hear the fat as it bubbles inside the folds of my stomach.
Six of us used to sleep in a space three meters squared.
They say there are microscopic creatures that can’t be seen by the naked eye, and can’t be wiped out by cleaning or sterilization; they hide in our blankets and beds waiting to eat our flesh. They can eat us alive. Can you bear that thought?
Away from you, I lie alone in my bed carrying the torsos of dead bodies back and forth through the operating theater in my head.
Have I told you? In Arabic, Aisha means “alive,” not “living.”
The tea tasted strange to Nasser, and all the sugar he’d added — four teaspoons — coagulated on his tongue at this woman’s talk about the body and flesh-eating mites. All his police instincts, indeed his entire body, reacted to this message: what sort of coldness was this that was being eaten by mites? Mites are attracted to decomposition, heat. Suddenly the air conditioner and the fan were no longer enough to cool the room. He continued reading:
The universe is swarming with messages sent back and forth. In the virtual world, borders have been shattered and people in every corner of the globe are engaged in an exhausting quest for love, desperate to exchange a laugh or share a little company …
My words mingle with throngs of other desperate voices searching for a way out.
I’m on the Internet because I want to learn how to talk to a man. Does that make me sound naive? A divorced girlfriend of mine once said to me, “How was I supposed to know what to do with men’s clothes? How was I supposed to know that you have to starch a man’s headscarf in a specific way to keep it sitting at just the right angle on his forehead like a nest? I grew up an orphan surrounded by a bunch of women. I’d never even looked at a man face-to-face. What was the big deal about this nest thing anyway? How was I supposed to know what temperature to wash a robe at to keep it soft? Men’s robes, like their bodies and minds, are toys I don’t know how to care for or keep looking shiny. I didn’t know that men were obsessed with cars and football and sexy dancers in music videos. I’m on the outside of that world.”
That day, I felt a sense of superiority toward the divorcée, because I knew no headdress was plotting my divorce. Ironing men’s robes was right up my alley — I had six brothers, whose robes were as smooth as paper and whose headdresses hung down as rigid as drainpipes, not even buckling when they knelt to pray.
But the other masculine languages, the language of actually living with a man, had passed me by. When the time comes that I have to interact with a man’s body, I freeze up. There’s a story from somewhere back in the mists of time about the little girl who’s born to a man obsessed with chastity. From the moment she was born, the man imprisoned his daughter in a world he’d built himself in the basement of his house, with not even a skylight to the outside, and he erased from that world every last trace of masculinity. He didn’t even let words that were grammatically masculine enter the space, so instead of sending her food on a masculine “plate” he sent it to her on a feminine “saucer.” He never fed his daughter lamb, but the meat of female cows. The girl didn’t sleep on a bed — which was masculine — but on a feminine chaise longue. He didn’t adorn her with masculine necklaces or earrings, but with feminine bracelets, and so on. He entrusted her to a wicked old lady to bring her up in that feminine environment. The world in which the young girl grew up wasn’t merely devoid of masculine elements; they’d never existed in the first place. It was an indestructible, impenetrable world of unadulterated femininity. Then one day, a pair of scissors somehow found their way into the basement and fell in the hands of the young girl. The masculinity of the object shocked her and she immediately hid them, aware of the danger they posed. Of course, she then used the scissors to dig a tunnel through the wall of the basement so she could look out upon the outside world. One day when she was contemplating the outside, she heard someone talking about the handsome prince Harj ibn Marj, who’d never been defeated in battle and whose hair was so long that it had to be pleated seventy times and piled up on the back of his saddle when he rode his horse. Needless to say, that single masculine instrument was all the girl needed to escape, and then to fight and vanquish Harj ibn Marj. An escape that we, the women of the Lane of Many Heads in the twentieth century, had failed to achieve. We were raised in similar subterranean worlds, and when the time came for us to be allowed out, our faces had to be effaced with black — an invisibility cloak that makes us a non-existence — so the masculine world would not notice us. We’ve been trained so that we’re blinded to masculinity, this castrated masculinity that’s lost its ability to extend any kind of salvation to us as it did in the story of Harj ibn Marj. The weird thing was that this regime of effacement was a sign of modernity in the Lane of Many Heads, for throughout the neighborhood’s history, right up until the early twentieth century, women’s faces had remained uncovered for all the world to see, for the sun to shine on.
On mornings when nothing can get me to open my eyes, I just have to imagine the taste of dates and then I can get out of bed. Throughout the history of the Hijaz, dates were idols; they were worshipped but they were also eaten without any feelings of guilt. With the utmost piety, in fact.
I’m in thrall to the date paste they make in Medina; it’s dark and it looks desiccated, but it melts in your mouth. Medinan dates transmit all the desires of a city that calls upon one to travel in pursuit of one’s faith — follow your faith no matter where it takes you — and that’s why they taste twice as sweet.
The date paste on your tongue is me: you have to chew it for the flavor to come out. The paintings you send me, with their vivid colors, soak my face in splashes of spring morning. My God, how is it that a few simple paragraphs can bring so much intimacy and joy?
Tell me, why do you insist we find our own private language? Does my Arabic not get through to you? Do I not understand your German? That leaves us with broken English. Thank God you can chalk up my incoherence to the language and not a limited intellect.
But let’s turn our backs on this talk and chatter. Let’s talk like people lost in a forest: don’t pretend that you can understand the forest that’s taken hold of you, but carry on walking; your feet plunge into rain-soaked earth, branches laden with last night’s dew graze your forehead, you bask in the scents of untouched blossom and greenery and submit to the forest’s entreaties, its gentle breezes.
This is the language I want us to use to get to know each other. Talk to me like you talk to a trail; walk over me, walk over me and through me, in silence or chaos; run or tiptoe or crawl so that every muscle of your torso brushes over me; allow me to extend my tongue and devour you as you pass over me.
If you were here in front me — like you were the whole time I was being treated at your hospital—your hand could grasp mine, could be my confusion and my guide. You would name the trees growing in my head and the darkness that spreads over me whenever I want to give free rein to my dreams, and this dew that spreads out from my core whenever I see your face reflecting mine, seducing me. Have you become my mirror so I can check to see how I look? To see how your passion shows around my eyes? How your desire has become a scattering of pimples across my forehead?
Tell me, am I still “beautiful and refreshing like a desert moon?” That’s what you said the day it snowed in Bonn. Has my attachment to you made me ugly?
It was you who, with a pat on the shoulder, spoke my today, my yesterday, and my tomorrow. Dream-Words. Words of languor that put me to sleep under your hands, words like tiny thrones I sit on and hop between like a pampered child.