Did you know that you were the first person to ever pat me on the back? At our house, love used to pause at the front door to stick out its spines like a hedgehog before crossing the threshold. Love could only be found in my father’s pockets and my mother’s pots and pans: if you wanted to know how much you were loved, you had to count how much money Dad spent and how many meals Mom cooked.
My father couldn’t afford to be extravagant on a schoolteacher’s salary, but he did indulge us with little treats from time to time. On Friday evenings he used to take us out and buy us each a shawarma sandwich and a plain baguette, and we’d divide the meat between the two to fill us up. My grandmother used to like to say that we had snakes in our bellies eating our food, which is why we were always hungry. My father never stopped trying to trick those snakes into feeling full.
That was one of our sacred rituals; fruit was another. My father did everything he could to make sure we each had an orange a day and one peach a week, and a bunch of grapes in summertime. My youngest brother, who was the apple of my father’s eye, used to get a peach every day during the summer, and we’d all watch him eat it, hovering about like crows for him to throw away the stone because he never figured out how to strip it right down to the pit and we were more than happy to see to the task.
You said you grew up feeling like you’d been pushed away, isolated, after your parents sent you to that boarding school when you were six years old. That you graduated at eighteen without ever having felt the touch of another heart. You told me you’d been born tough, but not tough enough to swallow your mother’s cold heart at breakfast. I think you’re alienated and untamed, that you’ve come to me now looking for the jungle. You’re chasing after crumbled bridges that lead into the void with no route back, not even a glimpse of what you’ve left behind, should you look over your shoulder …
In your hands I began again, starting from nothingness, nothing but pain, like someone weighed down by a twin around their neck.
While your hands massage and dig into the hidden pain, I suddenly wake to find my heart halfway round the racetrack, doing eighty miles a minute. It slipped away from me somehow while I was distracted, leaving my mouth dry and my lips cracked and salty.
Your hands must have felt its first kick, its acceleration and the willfulness of its first shot, before my head even noticed you or it.
My heart took me by surprise that day and slipped away to alert my body, as your hand massaged this shattered pelvis of mine. I no longer know which bits of me are metal and which are living bone. I imagine that now, in the heat, it’s becoming acutely sensitive, that it burns at the touch of your large hand, those fingers. “My hands are beyond all standards of human beauty,” you said sheepishly.
I imagine that they’re long and slender and stretch from Bonn to Mecca, that they were created in a single, smooth movement out of clay that’s still fresh and dripping. After all these months, I can feel your fingers, clay-like and soft, against my spine, kneading into it a suppleness I hardly recognize in my own body.
That hand of yours kneaded my back. You cared. Your palm was gentle, as though you were touching a child. When I received your email I understood that you believed — though I most certainly do not — that our paths may cross again somewhere down the line.
I need to stop writing. As you know, before the light forces my eyes open and my body surges with an uncanny energy, just at that moment, I feel I could fall in love every dawn, or drop dead.
For years, before I met you, I used to stand at the door waiting for Khalil to arrive in his taxi to take me to school, and when the light burst through, the inexplicable eruption always made me nervous. The accident had put me on the shelf, useless and neglected, but I couldn’t shake off the wakefulness and the early-morning bursts of energy. To be honest with you, I was relieved to be done with the gloom of being a teacher. Did I say “teacher”? What a joke! I was just one of the neighborhood’s many tentacles; one of a countless many who wage war against fate, stifling young girls.
I was essentially a timekeeper. My only duty was to ring the bell to signal the end of one class and the beginning of the next. The poor spinster headmistress and I fought a minor war over that bell.
But I also mastered the art of catharsis. I used to stand as still as an idol in the schoolyard in the mornings in front of the lines of students — two-hundred lungs burning with life, arrayed before me like mummies — for a whole hour as the morning radio program was broadcast. They feigned interest in the antiquated parables and didactic poems in classical Arabic, and the stories that had failed to make anyone laugh since the beginning of the last century. Two hundred granite faces. Any hint of a smile, any meaningful glance, any simple string of beads, any colored hair ribbon or trace of nail polish, any attempt at self-expression at all was enough to get a girl dragged up to the stage where I stood. There I would slowly, carefully — and in front of two hundred pairs of horrified eyes — rip out and crush this self-expression before it could blossom.
I was the executioner in the doll factory. Their bodies were our private property and my job was to color them, head to toe, in a drab gray moderated only by black shoes and white hair ribbons.
It was for this instinctive sternness that I earned the headmistress’s confidence and the right to ring the bell now and then without having to wait for a nod from her or a jerk of her finger.
Does the Lane of Many Heads have a problem with girls? Maybe it’s this: life is a scorpion’s egg that emerges from its mother’s back and then, as soon as it hatches, fatally stings its mother.
Every move we make taunts the Lane, its many heads and its octopoid tentacles. Do you know how many heads have sprung up in the spot where we dared to sever just one? With one of its heads, the Lane of Many Heads imagines us as untouched virgins, and with another, as lascivious sex dolls.
The challenge we face is how to be superwomen, a cross between our Bedouin grandmothers who never raised their face-veils, not even when eating with their husbands, and the pop stars and dancers who writhe and moan in music videos.
I feel like there’s a woman made of stone inside of me.
My salvation lies in writing to her.
Your bird,
Aisha.
P.S. This reminds me of my father’s cane. My father died, but the cane remained, beyond the reach of death.
We, the children of the Lane of Many Heads, grew up, every last one of us, in the shadow of a cane, stored inside a water tank to keep it supple, ready to spill and drink our blood.
When I first got back from Bonn, alone with the weight of the empty house and the death of my family pressing down on me, I was stopped short by the sight of the cane resting in the water tank in the hallway that was connected by a pipe to the drinking fountain, which stood in the alley for the benefit of passersby. My father hoped that the chilled water of that public drinking fountain in which his cane lay would clear his path to heaven; my mother used to clean the tap diligently so as to make sure she would slip in along with him.
Maybe the cane gave me a frightful look (or maybe it recited the Fatiha for my father’s soul) as I walked over, picked it up out of the water, and set it on the shelf to the right of the entrance, leaving it panting with thirst.
P.P.S. The first time I felt you, and I closed my hand around your stem, you surprised me by saying “This is what I wanted to give my mother!” Something about what you said made me ache deep inside, but I was absent. Do you know how old I am now? I’m in my thirties, and I was even married once, but still I’d never uprooted a man before. Taking a man’s very being in your grasp. Now I know that our hands were made for this, to hold this root of life, to feel this erection from head to toe. You had no idea how new it all was to me, the shock of discovery. You were absent, lost in your past and your mother: