Delicacies
NIGHT FELL OVER MADRID AND THE ACTIVITY AROUND THE PRADO MUSEUM across the street began to die down. Nora listened closely as she’d grown used to doing in her distant alley:
She heard Nazik the Turkish woman emerging from the cluster of alleys and poverty. She was dressed in her navy blue coat, with embroidered sleeves, and she’d wrapped a white scarf around her head — she didn’t cover her face like the other women in the neighborhood. Her fiery locks fell over her forehead, attracting everyone’s gaze and quivering with every word she spoke to her companion the eunuch. He walked two steps behind her, following her every command like a loyal dog. Every Friday morning when Nazik appeared, the women of the lane would duck into entryways and teenage girls would bury their fingers inside their abayas.
“Nazik can capture a girl with just one finger!” The rumor came about because of how her eyes bulged and hovered above the girls’ hands like a hawk, examining them, picking out the finest, longest fingers. She was always negotiating with parents to get them to allow their daughters to work for her doing embroidery.
That Friday, the girl didn’t run away. She stood there among the pots of herbs, like a dove at rest, and watched the Turkish woman. When Nazik got closer, she walked out to the outer gate to get a whiff of her perfume, Paris Nights; it made the whole neighborhood sigh. Nazik had mummified that perfume bottle, which she’d inherited from her ancient grandfather, allowing herself only a single drop every Friday. Nazik didn’t waste a second. She grabbed the girl’s right hand and started checking out her fingers.
“These are good fingers. Real Turkish delight! If you send her to me, I’ll teach her how to sew, and trim, and fit, and drape, and pin … These fingers will feed you honey and ambergris.” The words wafted on ambergris into her father’s mind and the very next morning he lifted the siege under which she’d lived and sent her to Nazik’s workshop.
At the doorway, she was met by the scents of women. It was mostly sweat but there was a perfume which she couldn’t quite identify. It made the blood rush to her temples. There was nothing of Paris Nights about this place. For the first time in her life, she understood that she was an adult woman.
“Girl!”
Nazik greeted her like someone clinging to a lifesaver. It was a surprise to see the Turkish woman without her wig, her hair as white as a corpse-washer’s sponge. “Welcome to my kingdom, where the girls shake their asses but never break their backs!”
She led her to a row of sewing machines that faced the wall like schoolchildren being punished. A chubby girl sat there, engrossed in her sewing. Her arms were each the size of an infant. She was spinning the machine, a Singer, violently; it looked as if she might tear the wheel off at any moment.
Nazik handed Nora a heart-shaped embroidery hoop holding a piece of white cotton taut. “Should I teach you the fluffy satin stitch?” she asked. “We use it to embroider flowers on women’s dresses. A woman wearing a dress with that flower always turns heads …” When she said “flower,” it sounded like “flavor.”
Nazik began stabbing blindly, lewdly, at the fabric, creating the bright red heart of a flower out of her stitches; it was so suggestive that sweat broke out on Nora’s upper lip. Nazik watched her closely. When the girl tried to take the hoop and have a turn, Nazik tossed it aside. “Don’t waste your time with sweaty slaves’ work!” she cackled.
She walked Nora over to a clothes rack with dresses of every color and shape. She grabbed a red and white head-covering like men wore and wrapped it around Nora’s head until only her eyes showed. She pushed Nora forward in her black dress to a section of the studio that was curtained off. Nora was shocked to see drumming and dancing. “Let yourself dance!” urged Nazik.
Swaying gracelessly ahead, she led the girl forward like water down a sluice. When sweat began to run down Nora’s neck to her chest, the head-covering gave off a scent that gripped her by the throat. Her body heaved with passion and desire. Something inside her took over. She tore herself away from Nazik and fled the dance floor. Nazik didn’t follow after her. The girl understood that they sewed together more than clothes, and that the snips went as deep as each of the chosen bodies dared allow. Some stopped at being stripped, while others were content to be consumed and recycled.
“I’m never going back there, no matter what,” Nora vowed to herself.
“NOTHING PROVIDES SECURITY LIKE LEARNING A TRADE. WITHOUT ME, YOUR daughter will starve!”
Her father fell for Nazik’s threats and pleas and allowed her to go up to his daughter’s bedroom alone, where she menaced her.
“Do as I say,” she said, pulling on the girl’s arm as if to make her understand. “You’re luckier than all my best girls, believe me. During that split-second appearance you made, the scepter fell into your hand. Do you understand me, girl? The scepter!” With every word Nazik spoke, the girl could smell the scent in the head-covering that had stirred an indomitable desire inside of her.
“JUST LIKE MY HAIR SMELLS NOW,” NORA SAID, SHRUGGING HER SHOULDERS AS SHE sat in the large bedroom she occupied in the Ritz Madrid. It was only now that she could get her head around the storm that she’d stirred up during her brief presence in that basement studio. “The scepter,” she repeated to herself. “The scepter you refused to take from Nazik all those years ago.”
In a city without any call to prayer, she woke every morning at dawn to the sound of a dove flapping its wings. She knew when it was time for prayer from the gust that rose up out of the silence, a dawn presence, which pulled her out of her deepest sleep. She knew he was coming. The man who loved her started his motorcycle in a faraway courtyard, startling the pigeons that took to the air to circle the length of her narrow alley, like a wave that pierced her and settled in the back of her neck, causing her entire body to quake in anticipation.
Getting There
AL-GHATAFANI WARNED US THAT we would be passing through hell and then suddenly we were being led into the southern simoom wind. The wind dug the sand out from beneath our feet and erected graves above our heads that reached the sky.
The look in al-Ghatafani’s eyes told me that he’d survived all those nightmares only to fall into my trap. It frightened me.
“Wherever they take us, let’s pretend that we’re brother and sister.” He closed his eyes in assent. The oases of the Hanifa tribe lay before us.
We made camp there, and for the first time since we’d set off, the hush of night combined with the exhaustion of hunger, thirst, and desperation knocked us out. We slept as if we were dead. I lay there until I was pulled back by a brutish growling and gurgling, and found the giants sitting in a circle, chewing on camel meat, tearing the limbs and the sandy insides to pieces. It was like they lived off sand. All around us the sand smelled of the previous night’s light rains, and the camels grazed on Eve plants, which had sprouted overnight like green spikes on the dunes. I realized that we had finally left hunger behind us and were now making our way through the heart of the Najd oases.
I LAY AWAKE, IMAGINING THE abyss we’d left behind. The only thing holding me was al-Ghatafani’s night-sculpted, wind-chiseled body lying beside me. I could hear wolves howling inside me, or out in the desert around us, demanding a drink of his blood. When I got up at dawn, he was standing, facing away from me, stroking his camel’s neck. I felt that persistent movement between my ribs. As I drew nearer to him, passionate dawn and the waking universe rose up inside of me. I interfered with his finely honed senses and ability to read the weather or the scent of a place. He was defenseless. He trembled like a slaughtered sand grouse when my body touched his, but he knew to surrender. Our careful calculations, the cause of our people, our mission were all betrayed because of a wolf’s howl. I heard my father Ka’b’s warning: “Choose the best lineage for us so that we may be resurrected!” and was suddenly terrified at what I’d got myself into. I pulled away. He could tell I meant it, so he kept his distance.