It looks like I’m going to be laid up here for a while. At least until your anger runs out.
I promise you I won’t be a burden and that I’ll resume my plan for making inroads as soon as I get out of the hospital. As you can see I’m slowly turning into metal, starting with my knees.
Here I am, jettisoning all my limbs like the bodies you draw, so that I can escape this picture-frame.
Sitting cross-legged Gandhi-style on the floor so much means that the knee joints of most women in Mecca wear out eventually. And they all have to replace them with metal ones; the female sex is racing to be transformed into steel. Do I look like I’m changing sex, too? Let me talk nonsense … Don’t be mad.
Nasser made a note: Yusuf limps.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 25
‘Death is all right — nothing better.’
‘Yet you don’t want to die,’ she challenged him.
He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to her in its change:
‘I should like to be through with it—I should like to be through with the death process.’
‘And aren’t you?’ asked Ursula nervously. They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said, slowly, as if afraid:
‘There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death — our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world.’
‘Why should love be like sleep?’ she asked sadly.
‘I don’t know. So that it is like death — I DO want to die from this life — and yet it is more than life itself.’
(Women in Love)
Dear ^,
In the mood for dying, I read Women in Love—a scandal — in the open air of the rooftop. The Lane of Many Heads took in the scent of a woman in love. And the down on the back of Ursula’s neck. It stood there, yearning, waiting for the musician who’d just then opened his mouth and begun to sing.
By reading it out in the open like that I knew I wasn’t just goading my father, I was challenging every one of the Lane of Many Heads’ many heads. Including my own.
We were raised to fear the outside world. You probably can’t believe that the woman you treated, and then invited out, had never been alone in a room with a strange man ever before. Had never walked in the street by herself before. Had never been alone before. Had never exited the bubble of fear to see what she was capable of.
The thing I feared most was waking up without an address. That I wouldn’t get off at the Lane of Many Heads one day. You’re the first address on the outside I’ve ever longed for.
That’s why I simply couldn’t die in Bonn. It was impossible. Not even when I was brought to the very precipice, more than once, as my lungs failed.
In my mind, moving will always be associated with a black-stuffed yellow cube. Can you guess what the cube is? The setting: Women’s Teacher Training Academy. Time: 1985.
I set the cube before you, and I warn: what is it?
The security guard shuts the door of the academy, locking it with a chain and padlock. On the other side of the door:
We girls, she-goats, sweating in the heat, stinking of adolescence.
We get ready in a hurry. Our heavy black: abayas.
Our translucent black: headscarves. We put on our abayas and lay our headscarves over our faces. One layer, a second, a third, a fourth … It makes us proud to break the record for how many layers of fabric can be worn without tripping up.
We crowd together and are crushed. There wasn’t space for a single hair to pass between one abaya and the other. There was even less room in our lungs for breath.
The door parts and spills us out. We take no notice of anything.
You didn’t know where your abaya ended and your friend’s headscarf began. You were carried between the two doors: the academy and the bus. Whatever part of you popped out in the bus would be your claim to infamy in the line-up the next morning.
When we reach the bus, you need to be a gymnast and up at the front of the crowd, if you want to score a seat.
Breathing was forbidden. Speaking was forbidden. There was no laughing. Girls’ Schools Transport. Most of us stood.
When you sat down, there was the chance that bodies would be pressed up in front of you where your feet should go. The chassis groaned and the bus was transformed into an utter blackness but for a single whiteness: the driver’s robes.
And a redness: the chaperone’s pen, writing down a list of any girl whose body parts were exposed or were made to be exposed.
I don’t remember ever being exposed. In the morning line-up my name was only ever mentioned under the section: “jostling” and “talking”.
I have no idea how the chaperone was able to tell whether we’d sneaked a peek at the opposite sex or not. And apparently with no difficulty at all.
The free transportation wiped Mecca’s streets, and the female students, clean.
Then when we reached the Lane of Many Heads the black mass dissipated.
You don’t know what the neighborhood boys are like. They never got bored. Every afternoon they waited at the top of the lane for our bus to arrive.
Look: this scar on my nose is from a stone hurled indiscriminately at a group of us by a young boy.
He wasn’t hoping to land himself a beautiful angel or anything, but perhaps only to touch one of those faces out of the mass of all those girls’ faces. Even if only with a rock.
Aisha
P. S. Just imagine how far I’ve come: from four layers and a headscarf to a Bonn hospital gown.
P. P. S. Have you noted that I’m most like Ursula? Well in that case what the hell are Gudrun’s socks doing on my legs?
Confidential Attachment: A photo of the black triangles, i.e. Imam Dawoud’s daughters, crowding behind the door, trying to steal a glance at the television in the cafe.
Attachment 2: The song of a turtledove (singing alone because the other birds were suddenly alarmed by the sudden light).
The joy of that turtledove spread all the way through to my pillow and I cried.
After dawn prayers, I leave the birds to make supplications on my body.
It is the sound of healing and penetrates deeply into one’s mind.
The idea of death as a rebirth, which came up in that section of Women in Love, caught Nasser’s attention. Nasser was paying special attention to the death extracts that Aisha selected for her letters, and to the severed stumps that piled up in Yusuf’s diary, wondering to himself just what kind of deviancy he was dealing with. Nasser thought back to a particular expression from Yusuf’s diary entries that occurred over and over again like a cry for help:
December 12, 2005
I know women from books. And women know me in dreams. There they bring me to climaxes my waking body has never known. Because I’m a coward. And because I’m desperate to stay white, never to stray, never to mix with the darkness.
Every morning I wake up terrified by those female visions. I’m a deviant. I can’t enjoy a woman unless I write her. I can’t enjoy myself unless I write myself. Not even Mecca pleases me unless it comes in a window written for a newspaper that is destroyed day after day.