Tonight I went to the orchard unexpectedly, where I encountered the guest, who looked dangerous, what with the bodyguards he had waiting for him at the end of the alley. I darted past, but they spotted me and were about to follow after me before I reached Mushabbab. He was in a state. He hid me off to the side of the orchard as he said goodbye to his visitor.
I waited before I headed back to him. Gathering my courage, I headed for an alleyway that led northeast; at the end of it there was a thicket, dried up, growing wild. At one point, I was stopped by a hand that stretched to cover my entire face. I could feel the hand even if I couldn’t see it. But I didn’t resist. I peeked through the branches to see three white bodies, naked, talking in a huddle. I felt my vitality goad me as I stood there. I was worried that if I moved backward or forward, they would be on to me. I let out a sudden gasp when I felt Mushabbab’s lips rub against my braids.
You think I’m overdoing it? I could feel hot lips against the end of my braids; I smelled fire. Mushabbab led me back. When we got to the sitting room, he sat me down in a Louis XIV armchair he’d chosen for me at an antiques auction, which he always kept in the same exact place in the courtyard facing the sitting area. Only then did he settle my curiosity. “What a wild imagination you’ve got! What you saw was nothing more than three column capitals. The same columns that were left forgotten in the colonnades of the Great Mosque after they were removed from the Hanafi corner and the Well of Zamzam. They disappeared completely, and we had no idea where to look for them even. Then one day a friend of mine who’s got some pull brought them here.” To assuage my doubts even further, he said, “The most complete one is the column that loomed over the Well of Zamzam, its oil lamp lighting the pilgrimage rituals for centuries. Memories of the faces of believers and a faith unlike any humans can conceive of are alive inside that column’s memory.”
The thought of running my hand over those column capitals makes me shiver with a pleasure I dare not explain. Aisha, you’re free to roam through books and the minds of those who wrote them. But my world is here between these four walls, which reflect nothing but my own face. In my room, I miss the feeling of coming across these small things, I miss the whims and the laughter. And they don’t remind me of the windows. For my own is nailed shut and the only way I can get out is through Yusuf’s writing. And that’s not real.
You know what I need? To throw a stone. A stone that will force the bird out of my chest into the open air.
Every time I visit the orchard, my desire to go even farther grows.
You’ll probably laugh, but I’m dying to get my lips on a teat. To drink directly from a nanny goat’s teat. That was what Yusuf did when they couldn’t get him to wean. None of the substances they rubbed on Halima’s breasts — aloe vera, pepper, chili — succeeded in keeping him off, so his mother let him run loose in Mushabbab’s orchard and suckle on the young nanny goats.
What do you think? What must the mixture of dung and wool and hot, pulsing milk taste like?
Mushabbab lays a mat over the sandy ground where we’re standing. He sits down and starts playing a Danat, a Yemeni song. A shawl of silence floats, translucent, above us. It’s nearly touching the ground, but every time it gets close, a night breeze raises it up.
“Ha! You’re going to take her, Mushabbab? Your beloved? To reality TV, to Fashion Academy?” I used to pick fights with him whenever that desire to touch bubbled up inside me.
“Where do you belong if not among beauty queens? When they finally get around to starting Miss Saudi Arabia, you and I are going to have to put our heads together. You’ll show us a flirtatious side that’s been buried like treasure.”
“Everything is buried treasure and keys with you, Mushabbab. Really!”
That’s when he stands up. He pushes away all his wooden instruments and starts playing on the live string in my feet. When he reaches my ankle, bodies spring from my body and Mushabbab crumbles. He has one of those episodes that he calls “a moment of dislocation.” A moment of submission in which he is stripped of his skin, and his nerves are all exposed to the refreshing breeze.
“Your foot is the buried treasure and the key.” I can feel his heart breaking over my foot. I feel awkward and I have to suppress a giggle. How come we don’t laugh when a man’s worshipping us? I can barely make out his whispering. “Men may dream of kissing your lips, but I don’t dream of anything except for this foot. Your foot running over my lips, washing over my face.” I shudder, terrified God might punish me for enjoying the man’s desperation. This same man who doesn’t dare lust after anything above my foot. He stands up suddenly, looking at me as if lost beyond hope. I’m so scared of what I might do to him I begin to tremble.”
IT WASN’T NASSER WHO DECIDED WHICH OF AISHA’S LETTERS TO READ; IT WAS THE puzzle-master. Nasser read them out loud so that he, too, would suffer from their many disappointments. He put this Mushabbab character’s name down as a suspect, as an adversary, and he went looking for him in Aisha’s letters to see if she too had fallen under his spell.
The way the women conspired to break a man’s spirit frightened him. He went digging for more of the erotic suspense that outraged him, that whorish glimmer. The puzzle-master had dropped him into a stifling scene, the only cure for which was to throw Azza and Aisha, crushed and naked, onto the side of the road.
P. S. You found the masculine river, Yang, and the feminine river, Yin, in my body. The river water is like magnetic tape: every scar of our desperation and happiness is written onto it beginning from when we are children, and the moments of our sadness pile up, blocking its course, getting it caught.
My whole body caught fire when your fingers touched my nude back. You knew which keys on my spine would unlock the energy: rubbing the small of my back, then up my spine to the back of my neck and the base of my skull. I chased after the void that rose up from my spine through your touch. Suddenly the river split into two streams and oxygen flowed, pulsing, from the end of my spine to the base of my skull. That’s when you sighed softly and said, “That’s right. Take a deep breath and let it out. Let the dolphin that’s trapped in your spine out.”
You set my senses free so that they could trap the first thing they encountered, which was you.
And then suddenly I could smell. For the first time in years, scents reached me. Your scent.
Now the scent of pine on the inside of your wrist enthralls me.
Oh, how you played the Yin of my body off the Yang. First you raised the level of Yang, and my body burned, then you raised the Yin, and I began to soak. What kind of balance am I supposed to reach through your hands?
I now understand what it means that I was born in the autumn. You said that’s when “femininity is at its peak.”
Aisha
Al-Busiri’s Mantle Ode
NASSER WOKE SUDDENLY TO A POEM INSIDE OF HIM THAT WAS MIXED WITH mastic-scented water from the Well of Zamzam. He’d learned it in secondary school, and it had never held his attention, but still its scent was carried by Yusuf’s diaries, and it made him trail after it through his window for Azza:
I’ll go with you, Azza, to the ceremony Mushabbab has every year on the twelfth of Muharram to conjure the blessed Prophet.
Location: Mushabbab’s orchard. Time: yesterday.