The scarf fell from her face, exposing her dark lips. Yousriya coughed and fanned the air around her mouth with an elegant, practiced wave followed by three light raps on her ample chest. She continued with her face uncovered, chewing every word with pleasure:
“Khalil considers himself part of the generation who were taken to the sea and came home thirsty — the generation who fled to American movies to escape the image of the belly dancer — it was either Taheya Carioca or Samia Gamal, I can’t remember — pouring champagne into her shiny stiletto for some Pasha who’s crawling around her on all fours like a dog. Khalil felt like he’d been transformed, as they say — into a monster. A cross between a Pasha, a dog, and the Incredible Hulk. Just to make it absolutely clear to us that he was made of different stuff than ordinary people, that he was a modern-day combination of movie hero and space explorer who belonged to a world of science fiction, they took away his pilot’s license — what a shame — and let him loose in the streets of Mecca, to make the rounds with his taxi … He would say that inside an airplane he always became a silent drop of night, gliding transparently, searching inside himself for the young woman who made him fall in love after thirty years of liberty.
“I used to tell him, ‘Khalil, you’ve only ever seen the shadow of her abaya!’ But he’d say, ‘Yes, but still my mind is licked!’ He’d captivated and conquered nightclubs in Florida and Los Angeles, he had adventures to his name like those of Abu Nuwas and dervishes and hashish smokers. He was excessive in everything he did, even in his daydreams, apparently, which all revolved around that cunning temptress, Azza the idiot, who was half his age. Khalil’s philosophy was absolute: he was looking for an odorless woman, and he thought he’d found her in Azza. He thought she was a different species from the kind he’d tried on his airplanes. The thing that terrified him most about those women was how promiscuous they were. His stomach would be whisked away and turned upside down in disgust; he’d lose control and become violent, and say he was the dinosaur and that he’d awoken to go on a pitiless rampage. I remember the night after the first screening of the dinosaur film: Khalil’s body was taken over by the dinosaur, which was something he’d inherited from our father when he was only nine years old. He stepped out of the house at noon to find a Thai man had spread his watermelon stall out on our doorstep. Suddenly Khalil was throwing watermelons left and right, hurling them down Qarara hill where they exploded like bombs. The Thai man’s shrieks brought our mother to the window. Her loud, forceful clap was enough to rein us in, and she tied us up with the firm rope of a threat: ‘Wait till your father wakes up and sees what you’ve done!’”
Yousriya laughed, quickly covering her mouth to stifle it. “The dinosaur was suddenly a mouse cowering, paralyzed in a corner, waiting for the stick. When our father got up from his seat to descend upon us he really warmed us up with those lashes. Fresh welts across our shoulders, feet, and behinds, ready to have salt rubbed in. The marks that that stick left on our bodies were the only words we exchanged with our father. ‘Miserable bastard’ was how Khalil eloquently put it when the subject of our father Nuri’s severity arose. The language had been handed down from the time of Ottoman rule in Mecca, to our grandfather Ateeq, then Sulayman, and from him to our father Nuri, and now it had reached Khalil. Prophets of torment, all of them. People would say they ‘stood on the doorstep weathering necks,’ which meant the mere sight of one of them was enough to crack a person’s neck with fright.
“After weeks of not talking, and tormenting each other, their moods would relax and our father would take Khalil out on trips to look for Uncle Ismail — whom we didn’t know and never had known and never would know.
“Khalil’s a good boy. He never once fell out with me. Even now he comes every Thursday to pour his heart out into my hands. The two of us got on like a house on fire, but sometimes during the punishments the fire would go out. The cracks of the cane brought our bodies closer together.
“Khalil was ground down hard. He’s severe in his affection, too, though. Even at that age, he wanted to imprison me hot cold, but after the fire I forswore this new world — I just couldn’t endure it. I decided I’d kneel and pray and serve my sisters instead. I look after the aged and sick, and when their time comes, I shut their eyes and pray over them … I know my path: it’s here with my isolated sisters, here with these twenty-seven women who are trapped between two darknesses, the darkness of glaucoma and the darkness of these rooms they haven’t left for thirty or maybe even fifty years.”
Yousriya’s eyes settled on Nasser’s form as if awaiting sentence, but quickly relaxed into a knowing smile. “And you, what’s your story?”
“I haven’t got a story!” he answered quickly, embarrassed, but he found himself adding, “I’m also being pursued by nightmarish dreams about a woman.” He had to repeat his words for Yousriya like an echo, but she was completely deaf and still couldn’t hear him. She must have been able to read his features, though. “The same one?!” she asked.
“No, a friend of hers.” She gave him a look of surprise, which soon turned into pity.
“Same thing,” she said, before retreating to her memories. “Khalil and I found refuge from our father’s harshness with our grandfather, our mother’s father. His house looked over al-Malah Cemetery so we got to watch all the funeral processions in Mecca. We played a game where we’d try to tell the different kinds of dead people apart: the elderly were covered in gray, which was very different from the green draped over those who’d died when they were still young; the biers of children could be distinguished by the bright, embellished drapes, and then there were the cages laid over women’s bodies which our grandfather explained to us.
“These cages were first widely used in the time of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, peace be upon him. She was the first Muslim woman whose bier was covered in this way, having been told about the tradition by Asma bint Amees, who had said to her, ‘Shall I tell you about something I saw in Ethiopia?’ She asked for some pliant palm-frond stalks, bent them and covered them with cloth, making a canopy like a bridal howdah. We used to imagine how Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, had ordered that nobody be allowed to see her dead body and how it emerged in that bridal litter. Khalil used to terrorize me by saying, ‘I can picture you as a silent bride in one of those cages for dead women!’ And here I am, a spinster. I never married and never even went out into the world, and I’m waiting here in my cage for my funeral procession to set off. Death and I know each other pretty well after all this time.