Jameela
BETWEEN YUSUF AND AISHA’S PAPERS, NASSER FELT LIKE HE WAS MOVING AROUND in a fantasy Mecca. It wasn’t the Mecca he knew from his usual beat. That night, he stopped over some pages of Yusuf’s entitled “Sheikh Muzahim’s Biggest Secret: A Farce”:
January 1, 2005
Jameela was like butter stuffed into her black abaya. It was open all the way down the front, concealing nothing. The beautiful Yemeni girl’s headscarf lay nonchalantly on her shoulders, leaving her black braids uncovered. Sheikh Muzahim’s heart leapt into his throat at the sight of her. She was a luscious round pumpkin dripping with butter. Sheikh Muzahim’s right eye, less afflicted by glaucoma than the other, dived into her lap and buried itself there.
“Welcome, priceless ornament, exquisite face, may the Hijazi earth welcome the beauty of al-Mukalla!”
“I’d like a Galaxy.” Her voice echoed in the empty depths inside Sheikh Muzahim. He nodded.
“Your Sheikh Muzahim, his store, and all his sweets are at your feet. I have every kind of candy: lollipops, lemon bonbons, Mars with caramel, Kit-Kat, coconut Bounty … But your choice is the sultan of chocolate, Galaxy!”
Sheikh Muzahim believed that Yemeni workers were the best at all trades and it was good luck, too, that their lust for life made them reproduce more.
Jameela had spotted the Galaxy bars in a dark blue tin and was instantly hypnotized by the rancid cacao. He held out a bar for her, making sure to brush the edges of her fingers; his eyes practically popped out and the blue clouds of glaucoma roiled at the touch. No snuff, qat, or mahaleb cherry could compare with the electricity that crackled between him and the soft-skinned beauty.
At the first simmering of femininity, the scent would shoot through him to the very tip of the big toe on his right foot. In that smell glimmered the Bedouin charcoal-seller who had hidden him under her dress when his tribe came under attack, as happened constantly in the desert. He was seven at the time. The girls in his tribe started embroidering their dresses when they were still children, then got married in the dress, and never took it off for the rest of their lives. It secreted away every memory of every moment of passion and sadness until it passed on with them. All that wrapped itself around him inside the dress of the Bedouin charcoal-seller; he got an instant erection the size of Mount Tuwayq and ejaculated a flood bountiful enough to irrigate an orchard.
The same mountain reared up now whenever he saw fifteen-year-old Jameela. She brought back the moan that echoed in the the well inside him that he’d turned his back on long ago, along with the dream of a male heir. Jameela’s gaze had the placidity of a cow’s; what was it that was absent from her face? Disgust and defiance. There was none of that in Jameela’s sweet, animal gaze; she gave him back what Azza’s mother had taken from him.
A Hair
“NASSER, SON!” HIS MOTHER’S VOICE ON HIS CELLPHONE CUT SHORT THE NAGGING of that phrase from Women in Love in his head, “best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.” It was the middle of the night. “I’ve found you a bride! She’s rich, pretty, and respectable.” The Lane of Many Heads roared with derision inside Nasser’s skull.
“Oh God, Mom, not this again …”
“You bury yourself in work! You’ll be the end of the family line and you’ll never have the chance to have a kid who has your name.”
Nasser fidgeted with some paper. His bed was covered with Yusuf’s diaries, and Azza’s sweat was leaking out of the pages onto the bedclothes. He couldn’t even close his eyes against it; the smell seeped out anyhow. Going back to his mother’s ways was inconceivable. He struggled to focus on what she was saying. “She’s an orphan. Her uncles are very modern and would be happy for you to meet her, with a chaperone and so on, of course. Please, Nasser, make me happy before I die!”
“God keep you here for us, Mom … Can we chat about this tomorrow? It’s pretty late.”
“Son, don’t go to your grave a dried-out stick!” Her words darkened the already-dim room. He hung up. He closed his eyes and tried to slow himself down, fleeing to that remote spot in the corner of his heart, where no murder or misery could sneak in. There, he’d hidden the image of a girclass="underline" a girl whose veil he’d never dared to even tug on, so that throughout his adolescence and maturity she’d remained wrapped head to toe in her abaya, though she was still as light and joyful as a shadow.
Tonight, though, he reached out a feverish hand to that cloud of black he’d concealed throughout his adolescence, and began pulling off layer after layer of the endless blackness. But when he at last got to the center of the cloud he didn’t find the women he’d been collecting — glimpsed through the windows of cars speeding past him in the traffic, or the windows of his neighbors in Ta’if. Back then, whenever he looked up at a girl’s bedroom window, he’d find a sandal dangled out the window, sole facing him, in a rude rejection of his presumptuous advance. In the mirrors of those dirty soles, Nasser saw his own lonely face waiting for a female face to inhabit it.
He took his memory tin out of the bottom of his wardrobe. All there was inside was a single long hair and a hairclip decorated with a tiny red diamanté apple. He remembered how he’d found it on a side table in his friend’s house, how the blood had rushed to his temples when he’d picked it up and stuffed it quickly into his breast pocket. His hand hadn’t stopped trembling for days; the apple next to his heart was a fully formed girl and she had captivated him for years. He never said she was imaginary, the Apple Girl. He’d spent his prime obsessed by that apple and the single long hair that he’d wrapped in velvet and laid in a long thin box like a precious, jewel-studded sword in its sheath, as if waiting for great men with jet-black beards and glittering eyes to uncover it and forge its blackness into the path of their destiny.
Vague scenes haunted him; he thought they were from that film starring the famous Bedouin singer Samira Tawfiq. What was it called …? Amira, Daughter of the Arabs? Maybe … The one where the handsome prince falls madly in love with a black hair that he finds in the middle of the vast desert, and abandons his tribe and kingdom to travel the land searching for the woman it belongs to.
Nasser felt like all the men of his generation could have been that Arab prince, capable of falling in love with a nameless hair. A name is a woman — it’s a woman’s self, her honor — and could be enough to kill a man out of passion. He remembered his mom’s trips to find a bride for his older brother. The whole family used to join in the offensives she led on houses where she’d heard there were available daughters. There was an African woman, Hajja Hawwa, who used to go round the houses helping families out with their laundry and ironing and would bring back descriptions of the girls wherever she’d been: “Al-Mukharrij’s daughter, her braids are as thick as a palm trunk and reach down to her ankles … The al-Asiri girl is as curvy as a moringa branch and has breasts like home-grown pomegranates … Al-Zahraniya’s eyes are fatally seductive … Al-Ghamidi’s girl is quicksilver, whoever gets her’ll be a lucky man …”
Her usual trade was smuggling forbidden features, but one time, she came with just a name. She breathed the name like she was breathing a spirit into his brother’s body: Salma. It was love.