— How was the journey.—
— The journey was fine, but you know it is very far — where Ibrahim and I came from.—
— We know. He sent us a letter. Some day it came. I hope you will like it here. It is a village only.—
— I hope you will show me your village.—
— Ibrahim will show.—
The two young women looked at one another in deep incomprehensibility, each unable to imagine the life of the other; smiling. It was perhaps right then that she made the decision: I have to learn the language.
One of the doors led from the party directly into the room that obviously had been vacated for Ibrahim and his chosen wife. The elegant suitcase and the canvas bag stood as they had, way back in her cottage. He closed the door on the company clearing up the feast in the communal room.
There was the huge old, high bed with its carved head-and footboards. An array of coloured covers under a crocheted white spread. She was admiring: how splendid. Ibrahim, what a bed.
He saw it; it is his mother’s and father’s bed, the only splendour of their marriage, the absurd pretension of the start of driven poverty, the retreat into which each has collapsed exhausted every night for all their years. It is the bed in which each will die.
It’s the bed in which he was conceived.
Julie began to unpack gifts they had brought.
No. Not now. Tomorrow we’ll give them. It’s enough for today.
He tugged back the lace curtains at the window. Tomorrow. He would insist that his parents move back into this room, he and she must find somewhere else to sleep.
A little later she went over to him. What I need now is a long, hot bath. Where’s the bathroom?
There was no bathroom. Had she thought of that, when she decided to come with him. This place is buried in desert. Water’s like gold is in her country, it’s got to be brought up from deep, far down, pumped to this village — what there is of it. Had she any idea of what a burden she would be. So there it is. Madness. Madness to think she could stick it out, here. He was angry — with this house, this village, these his people — to have to tell her other unacceptable things, tell her once and for all what her ignorant obstinacy of coming with him to this place means, when she failed, with all her privilege, at getting him accepted in hers. Tomorrow. The other days ahead.
And it was as he knew it was going to be.
She wants to see ‘everything’. They haven’t been in his parents’ house more than two days when she says, if he doesn’t feel like coming along, if there are people he needs to consult, things he needs to do, she’s quite happy to explore the village, hop on a bus and see the capital, on her own.
Of course. Of course. Independent. This is the way she’s accustomed to living, pleasing herself. Again. But that’s impossible, here. He has to be with her, some member of the family, if there could be one who could be understood, has to accompany her everywhere beyond a few neighbourhood streets, that’s how it is in the place he thought he had left behind him. It’s not usual for women to sit down to eat with the men, today was a special exception for the occasion — does she understand. It’s enough, for these people, that she goes about with an uncovered head — that they can tolerate with a white face, maybe. He has sharply resisted his mother’s taking him aside to insist that his wife put a scarf over her head when leaving the house or in the company of men who were not family; resisted with pain, because this is his mother, whom he wanted to bring away to a better life. And she, the one he has brought back with him, all that he has brought back with him, is the cause of this pain.
Chapter 20
It’s not an alarm clock you fumble a hand out to stifle. The rising wail lingers and fades, comes again as if a dream has been given a voice, or — there’s the grey, lifted eyelid prelude of dawn in the room — some animal out in the desert sounds its cry. There are jackals, they say.
It’s the call to prayer.
The first adjustment to any change must be to the timeframe imposed within it; this begins with the small child’s first day at schooclass="underline" the containment of life in a society commences. The other demarcations of the day set by that particular society follow, commuter time, clock-in time, canteen break time, workout time or cocktail time, and so on to the last divide of the living of a day, depending on your circumstances. Five times each day the voice of the muezzin set the time-frame she had entered, as once, in her tourist travels, she would set her watch to and live a local hour different from the one in the country left behind.
After much discussion in the language she couldn’t understand but whose mixed tenors of hurt feeling and obduracy she felt intensely — somehow herself the cause of it — in the presence of the father’s and son’s contestation and the monumental silence of his mother ignoring her, they had taken the elegant suitcase and canvas bag and moved to the lean-to room and an iron-frame bed. There were shifting sounds beyond the house wall and the clang of the front door grille. The father accompanied by only one of the brothers went to dawn prayers at the mosque. Abdu-Ibrahim beside her turned and folded the pillow over his ear against the muezzin’s summons. At noon, afternoon and evening he seemed not to hear it, either, without having to block his ears. She asked what were the other functions of the muezzin?
There isn’t any muezzin, there’s a recording and a loudspeaker, you see it on top of the mosque, that is what we have in the miracle of technology in our place.
But he went, without comment, to Friday prayers with his father and a day after arrival had begun to wear the skullcap tossed aside with his clothes she could see from their bed when the muezzin opened the day for her. The cap was intricately embroidered with silver thread, she guessed by his mother; he warned her to keep respectfully clear and quiet when his mother spread her small velvet rug and swayed her forehead to it over her obeisant bulk in a private trance of prayer in the sheltered angle of a passage where members of the household came and went.
So she wanted to see the place. What is there to see in a place like ours.
Not Cape Town where they were going to start a business by the sea and famous mountain.
Tourists don’t come here, what for. The tomb of Sidi Yusuf, the holy man from long ago, supposed to be why this place grew. Not much of a shrine, only people from round about in the desert come to it.
She put her arms round his back and rested her lips against the glossy black hair above his nape. I’m not a tourist.
He took her with his sister, Maryam, to a large vacant lot with a trampled fence and a gate hanging without function. Market day. Rickety stalls distorted by heat were stacked and spread, spilling to the stony sand geometric arrangements of vegetables, fruit, dried teguments and strips of something unidentifiable — fish or meat — grain, flat bread, concoctions of things — creatures? — imprisoned in jars, towers of voluptuous watermelons swagged with green and gold stripes, and garlands of strung bicycle wheels, vehicle hubcaps and battered tools, old radios, gutted refrigerators assembled — an objets trouvés art work, she told him delightedly. She asked Maryam about a man squatting at work on an ancient portable typewriter while a woman spoke volubly at him. — Many don’t know how to write. They pay for a letter. — Another sat with bright powders of different colours in little dishes spread on a rug — spices rather than potions, she supposed. Cobblers: the piles of old shoes whose mis-shape taken on from living feet suggest the dead. A man with the appearance the blind have of talking aloud to themselves was intoning what must be religious texts. Ibrahim had to hang about while she gazed along the stock of a stall selling posters, the Kaaba in Mecca, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Dome of The Rock, the splendidly intricate calligraphy of inscribed verses from the Koran.