Nasser buried his head fast under his pillow, rubbing it against the sleeve of the robe he’d found and promptly hidden as if it were the limb of some woman he’d murdered. He didn’t want to return to her, but her scent filled the air. The robe with the missing sleeve appeared before him, called out to him to come. Detective Nasser al-Qahtani was trembling as he followed the scent, which pushed him toward the sleeve between the lines of Aisha’s writings. Lately his sleep had become fitful and troubled. He’d wake up and immediately begin recording every suspicious item in Aisha’s letters, marking a red X at every explosive spot and copying out some of the phrases that particularly took his fancy so he could carry them around with him and reread her secrets wherever he was. He felt like every word concealed some transgression or temptation, the silhouette of a man. By her own account, “getting caught with a book was like getting caught hiding a man inside your school notebook.” Nasser searched for that man’s face, wondering if it resembled his own and wondering: how many men had she hidden so they could enjoy that scent in solitude?
As soon as he’d woken from a night of troubled sleep, he picked up another of Aisha’s letters, and once he’d drunk its scent he added it to the pile of letters he’d read through next to his bed. He leapt out of bed — the damp morning air free to view his naked body, the air conditioner free to attack it. He was aware, for the first time, of his own body as he strutted about before the world in lazy arrogance. He liked the way it felt when his legs rubbed against the stove as he made himself a cup of instant coffee. Then he got back into bed, his mind preoccupied, and reread the same letter for the tenth time. He picked up a red pen, and after a moment’s hesitation, scribbled a title across the top of Aisha’s letter:
Women in Love
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 6
There are things that guide me to discover them.
That book I’d forgotten about … When? Since my first year at the Teachers’ College. Stuffed in a nook under the stairs for years.
My friend Leila had curves like creamy condensed milk. She stuck out her lips like a bird’s beak when she spoke; her voice was hoarse, but tinged with laughter, and she loved stealing glances. She’d smuggled the book out. She said she’d found it waiting for her in the corridor where it had fallen out of one of her uncle’s moving boxes. He was the director of Mecca’s famous Falah schools, and ordinarily his office was out of bounds to all. He was planning to bequeath it to his male offspring once his long life was over.
“Do you want it or should we bury it?” she said. That was how the book’s destiny became tied to my own.
Leila and I both risked expulsion: getting caught with a book was like getting caught hiding a man inside your school notebook. I tucked it beneath my buxom chest, where the gray expanse of my school pinafore concealed it easily, and I yanked my abaya down slightly. That was a signal agreed on between the girls that meant your clothes were stained with period blood.
Leila and I were like two bats. We spent the day in the bathroom reading the first lines. I came across the words “Lawrence ran away to Germany with his female tutor.” The words pricked me somewhere deep in my insides, and we both averted our eyes. A single word more would’ve stopped our hearts and given us away.
Of all the books she’d smuggled out, this one seemed most like a sinful time bomb.
Returning home with the book would have been suicide. I crept in, and without even looking at it I stuffed it into that hole under the stairs to the right of the door. It’s been there all these years. It was only tonight that the rain brought it out, wet around the edges, pages yellowed, binding falling apart. It still had the same sting of fear and awe, though …
Leila and I didn’t even read the title. I just imprinted the cover image onto my memory: those long red stockings and the woman wearing them, a bundle of sketchbooks tucked under her arm.
That’s how you saw me, ^: leaving the hospital wearing your long red socks and thereby fulfilling my legs’ oldest dream …
Women in Love … Can you believe they were lying stuffed under the stairs — right under the nose of my mother, father, and Ahmad — and in love, too? Of all the books I managed to get my hands on and dared to read, this book (which I’d have preferred to call Women in Love in the Arabic translation rather than Lady Lovers) terrified me: from the moment I set eyes on those red stockings I knew that I was risking a lot — perhaps even my life. Do you understand why? One woman becomes two becomes three. Like rain. Drops of women in a downpour of love, like the battery acid that jealous men hurl at the women they love in the short items in the newspaper.
Today, I’m grateful for the innate prudence that made me understand, even at that young age, that I needed to bury Women in Love in that nook under the stairs.
Now it’s popping back up.
Good Lord, did you notice? That English writer’s name reveals your name, ^. Can these little voices, which lead us suddenly and unexpectedly to detours and forgotten secrets, really give us away like that?
My body has suddenly started to tremble. Does it seem logical that the mere sight of a book should be able to slough off our scales? This book is scrubbing the prints off of the tips of my fingers so that they’re ready to be replaced with others. The book is chopping time up into cycles that spin me round like a cement mixer.
I’m lost to the mystery — do you see what little sense any of this makes?
Are you bored yet?
One time I caught the Eunuchs’ Goat sneaking a mannequin into the backyard of his father’s kitchen. I was shocked. Not because of whatever he might be about to do with the mannequin, but because the plastic doll reminded me of me in my wedding dress. It reminded me of how Ahmad had carried me as if he were shouldering a bundle of firewood. If you ask me, these mannequins are invading the neighborhood, possessing our bodies, sowing tumors in men’s imaginations.
I know that you can’t decipher Arabic letters yet, ^. It all looks like a painting to you. You still write to me in a mixture of pictures and English words. I sit on my over-the-top bed and allow the Aisha beneath my skin to pop her head out and flirt with you in a way that surprises even me — but she doesn’t pay any attention to me. She just flows on automatically, ready for you to receive her on your screen. And when I make you lose your cool, and the German words sigh out of you, I receive them with my body. I let them crush my ribs in their embrace, bite my chin and the edge of my cheeks, bore into my skull to reach the pressing need inside …
I don’t know where all these violent temptations are coming from. I don’t want D. H. Lawrence’s loving women to steal your heart. I could become even blacker and more violent, because wherever I look in Lawrence’s analysis of love, I find the words blackness and black truth.
What’s with all this blackness? Is this me? On top of all these red lines which surround the black smear of my abaya?
I don’t know when they started coming to me in the alley with all these life-maps, demanding to bury them in my head as if I were a memory dumping-ground. Even I forget that they’ve come … And who were they anyway? Was it the anesthesia from the series of operations I had that left these sunspots in my memory? Who was just here? All I can hear is Mu’az singing in the corridor, and even that sounds like the echo of a memory someone left behind.