“A Yemeni got up, his compass pointing north, he needs a nest to stick it in but he hasn’t got a dime!”
I wait for the children’s rhyme. They sing it as loud as they can and smiles break through the frowns of windows quivering to open.
I could never bring myself to say those raw, naked words. Words like that stick in my throat and send blood rushing to my face, because they don’t come out level and neatly cut, but take me by surprise, their bodies appearing out of nowhere on my tongue.
The Lane of Many Heads doesn’t sing those songs in the middle of the day any more. Perhaps their giant has left.
If the Yemeni man were still alive, I’d have sent you his picture. The rumor was that he’d been magicked into a bunch of leeks and devoured by the female crows in the impenetrable hideaways of the Lane of Many Heads.
We the girls of the Lane of Many Heads grew up with all these dreams and all these things we’d read. We were raised to think the world revolved around love and that love would save a girl from suffocation. I know now that the world revolves around sex and food.
I finished last in that race — it took me thirty years to have my first orgasm. The whole world is built around two bodily orifices.
Everything else is just padding that disappears at first contact.
Aisha
P. S. Dear ^,
‘Do you love me?’ she asked.
‘Too much,’ he answered quietly.
She clung a little closer.
‘Not too much,’ she pleaded.
‘Far too much,’ he said, almost sadly.
‘And does it make you sad, that I am everything to you?’ she asked, wistful. He held her close to him, kissing her, and saying, scarcely audible:
‘No, but I feel like a beggar — I feel poor.’
She was silent, looking at the stars now. Then she kissed him.
‘Don’t be a beggar,’ she pleaded, wistfully. ‘It isn’t ignominious that you love me.’
‘It is ignominious to feel poor, isn’t it?’ he replied.
‘Why? Why should it be?’ she asked. He only stood still, in the terribly cold air that moved invisibly over the mountain tops, folding her round with his arms.
‘I couldn’t bear this cold, eternal place without you,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it, it would kill the quick of my life.’
(Women in Love)
Every time I read this conversation, I find something new.
Is this what I’ve been missing all along? Begging?
And what comes before begging: poverty. A hunger you would steal to sate?
It takes another person to make a beggar out of you. Because if your indigence becomes paranoia it will chase him away and you’ll be left hungry.
P. P. S. My computer crashed all of a sudden.
Don’t ask what made me download this cutting-edge program. This program excels at testing our curiosities and whims. Sometimes it opens us up onto a world in which a single click makes magic happen and other times it wipes your entire hard drive. Just like a human relationship.
I was in a coma for hours. Without our computers, we cease to live, I thought. And why? Because we are removed from the digital truth.
I’m out of order now, but still this list of commands is penetrating deep into my memory. It took me a couple of tries to get this service to work. These are the steps:
All Programs —> Supplementary —> System Controls —> Reset or Restore
Renew System Time or Revert to an Earlier Point in Time
All of a sudden you find yourself in front of this calendar and you can choose to go back one day, or a whole month, and with a single click you can delete the whole intervening epoch from your system. You can go back in time to when things were still working perfectly.
Should I look into my head to find the virus that disabled this service?
Should I think about which time it makes sense to restore to? Which periods to delete so I can go back in time?
Maybe I should start by erasing my name
Aisha
Maybe I should change it to
Hayah.
Aisha
P. P. S. 1. You said you like the digital photos I send you. It amazes me that though they come from this muddy darkness, they’re light when they reach you (and museum-worthy!).
2. A photo of Umm al-Sa’d? None exists.
Attachment 2: Hamid al-Ashi: this is his yard and his shelves of paper.
Attachment 3: This is a sheep tied up in a fire-pit. The Madbi cooking yard is never without a feast being prepared for the fortunate people who can afford it — people from outside the Lane of Many Heads, of course. The aroma makes its way to us.
You can’t smell.
Nasser turned up at my, the Lane of Many Heads’, entrance tonight. And he uttered these words, as if they were an oath: “I wasn’t made for this poverty and I won’t let the Lane of Many Heads ruin my career. Not now, and not even when I’m old and feeble.” And yet I still draw him in deeper and deeper. The dark circles under his eyes and his hollow cheeks tell me he hasn’t slept in ages. I notice everything. I watched him sneak over to Aisha’s house for the second time. I knew he was looking for Women in Love this time. It was vital for him to find that red sock, anything that represented Aisha, any snippet of her dreams. The smell hit him as soon as he walked into the hall. The whole building smelled like the inside of his undershirt. Nasser felt like he was walking through his own personal paranoia. He felt his way up the stairs, which were enveloped in darkness. Every door in the building was wide open. None of them had been shut except for the door to the cubbyhole. He knew it was the room squeezed in between two floors. He did try the lock, but in the end he had to break it. As soon as he took his first step into the room, his eyes ceased to see the world around him. In front of him, he saw only her bed, looking like a battleship. He fought the desperate urge to throw himself onto that space that had been inhabited by her body, her suffering, by the German demon who accumulated in her loneliness.
“Aisha is the very devil. But what, Nasser — you think you’re a holy sheikh? And you’ve come to exorcize the demon from inside her? You want to extract it from her eye and blind her? Or from her toe and doom her to a wheelchair? Which body part are you going to have to sever to get him out and punish her?”
He didn’t dare go forward. There was a satin sheet covering the bed — it was the color of lavender, light purple — and it was ruffled and twisted like a body in love. He scanned the entire room, looking for Women in Love. Wherever he looked, the scent of lavender lured him on. He moved forward. He dug through the drawers in the dressing table. He looked in all four corners, but he didn’t dare touch the bed or the balled up sheet. There was no trace of the book. Everything in that house was stretched out; it was as though the people who lived there had left the place very, very slowly, with plans to return. Everything except for the cubbyhole, which looked tapped out. As if it had had enough of waiting for the women who loved to return. They’d been gone a long while.
He shut the door quietly behind him and left.
He would definitely have chosen to go from her lips downward. The opposite direction to the German. The thought turned his stomach.