You say, “He covers me.
Not with words, but with my abaya.”
I don’t hear you.
Starting from the bottom of your feet,
the silk of your abaya flutters, brushes against your belly
shivers against the tips of your breasts, the gap between your lips,
finally the silk relaxes over the hair that’s come loose
from your braids.
A naked demon, that’s who Mushabbab is when he lays the silk of the abaya over your nakedness to cover you. The moment your face is covered up, every last drop of my strength and the voice that tortures me with that scene, both dry up.
You’re cursed, Azza. I’m not writing you any more. Go die, and good riddance, from your face to your feet. God has no mercy for you.
Yusuf
Yusuf’s words tumbled over one another in rage:
June 9, 2006
That trivial speck of nothingness of a woman lies and says things like this:
(“At dawn, lying in his arms, I woke up suddenly, burning for you, Yusuf.
If, while sleepwalking, I’d rushed to the doorway of my bedroom, to our old radio, a note waiting for me would have woken me up.
In your old handwriting. But didn’t you say, ‘the handwriting of Zayd ibn Thabit?’
You’d be crazy to stop writing.
Yusuf, if you were to write to me about lying here with him,
‘I read it and then re-read. To bring it to life …’ That’s from the lines you wrote, among whose capers I grew up; they lived for me more than I’ve lived myself.
Who was it who said, ‘Nothing has any taste unless it’s written with your saliva’? Can’t you see my engine runs on your confused, impassioned words? My lips mutter with the pleasure of reading what you’ve written.
At dawn, in his arms, I saw that you, Yusuf, were writing me more than you were writing the world or yourself. I was the page on which you would scrawl out your being. Drafting and revising your attempts, failures, and retries.
I’m your ink, your scribblings.
No matter how hard I tried, Yusuf, Mushabbab wouldn’t be written. This night is bigger than me. You’d have been better off writing it. If it had been you writing me, I’d at least feel pleasure.”)
I’ve put the lies between parentheses.
Yusuf or Azza
Next were some huge scrawls that had been erased:
June 12, 2006
The fourth night.
Should I write her or not?
I can’t decide.
I’ll stop writing so she can die in her sleep.
Yusuf.
This outpouring of naive sentimentality annoyed Nasser. He wanted to know what crime had been cooked up in that disastrous marriage. Nasser could find no other option but to race breathlessly between Aisha and Yusuf, who’d both fallen into a funk. Nasser sensed that Azza’s fall had happened at the same time as the loss of morale that came across in Aisha’s letters; Azza had taken a leap toward Mushabbab while Aisha was planning a cold end.
The alliance between Azza and Mushabbab was the breaking point in this case and any detective worth their salt would have been skeptical about Nasser’s capabilities after seeing how late in the game he’d discovered it. Nasser began to read the diary entries and the letter as one, unbroken text. He came across this page in the diary in a strange hand:
June 15, 2006
Like a falling stone,
It wasn’t in her, but in the well
Lying between the three springs that feed it
And he drinks, not just like a dove a cat or a beast, but also like a plant. Like a stone, with all its pores, with its skin and its heart all at the same time.
It drinks saltiness and the taste of metal, from the ankles upward. Who’s that who can’t be in two places at once?
Crowned with saltiness all the way down to his ankles,
When he was inside her mud, all the jars in his bathroom fell, spilling their mud all over this cosmic flesh.
In this volcanic landscape.
The earth became salty, metallic, centered on his lap whenever he wanted to penetrate to her core.
His body could only respond by collapsing. O God, how they’ve colluded against him: desire and its collapses!
There was no one left in the Lane of Many Heads that didn’t celebrate the news: the devil in the orchard was impotent!
I die and he’s reborn in the same lap. Where whatever’s watered dies.
The Lane of Many Heads had no entertainment so it amused itself with Sheikh Muzahim’s beard, which was led to a Mercedes that took him out of the neighborhood on shady errands, dropping him at offices where men showed him statements from his bank accounts and those of his son-in-law, the descendant of the Sharifs’ slaves, alluding to possible solutions and get-outs; but these meetings soon ended definitively with the nullification of the invalid, impotent contract he’d concluded in the shack in the orchard between his daughter and Mushabbab. They produced a notarized document for him laying it all out.
Even contracts can be nullified: marriage contracts, ownership contracts, sale contracts, rental contracts, The Unique Necklace (or Contract), your contract.
Yusuf.
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 27
It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a cul de sac and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species.
(Women in Love)
Isn’t it a strange thought that I could fail to develop and be replaced by my siblings!
The Chinese write the character for crisis by combining two characters: danger and opportunity. It’s as if crisis equals danger with the possibility of resisting it, like a vaccine to induce the antibodies of change inside a body. This current is you.
^, I write to you with two words, with a hug that crushes my left rib as happened on that rainy day when my ribs were crushed by your embrace — you, the healer — and I don’t show the slightest sign of pain.
An energy that prepares me for everything, anything, even death itself.