One of the youths, whose name was Mustafa, asked her tentatively if she had any children. When she said no, their faces took on expressions of sympathy mixed with another sentiment that Samr could only guess at. This prompted her to add that they were thinking seriously about it and she was considering resigning from her job. She wanted to convey to them that she had a good relationship with her husband, and although she was always joking and laughing it didn’t mean she took her marriage lightly. Since the aircraft had set her down in this city that still lived as it had done for thousands of years, she had been happy, all her senses were activated, she was full of questions, tolerant and easygoing, never focusing on one thing for long, and abounding in life and energy. These feelings didn’t stem from the fact that she was on holiday, far from the clouds and the ordered reality of life in Europe. She had spent
many Holidays in sunny places by the sea or in the mountains, yielding to an inner calm that was more like laziness and boredom, and sleeping and eating. Now she was like a fly buzzing from one place to another, alighting on everything animate or inanimate. She realized the young men were interested in her and it reassured her to feel that she was not a stranger, fumbling her way around like the tourists, visiting all the right places and yet unable to see anything, as if the treasures were locked away in a box. When she was with them the city opened its gates wide, lit up its anterooms for her and lavished its secrets on her. She had even gotten to know the caretaker of the mosque and seen where he hid the keys. It also made her happy to know that she was still attractive to men even though she was nearly thirty-five. Attracting the opposite sex was a serious and difficult exercise in Europe because most of the time it was directed toward actually having sex. She guessed that they were not only drawn to her because it gave them the chance to flirt innocently like adolescents, although their ages ranged from twenty to twenty-five; they also saw in her and her husband a glittering pathway to the outside world that they had heard so much about. She imagined the two of them as a strange light descending suddenly on this place, which the rest of the world had overlooked and left to its own devices; it existed in a state of semidarkness and inertia, always eagerly on the lookout for the visitor who didn’t
see what lay behind the surface liveliness. She therefore listened gladly to their stories, and did not object to them asking her why she had married a foreigner when there must have been plenty of Arab men after her.
She felt a certain warmth toward them. She had always had a poor opinion of Arab men in general, without ever putting it to the test. And here they were, talking to her as an equal, saying whatever came into their heads without concealing anything from her husband, even if the last question had been directed at her in Arabic.
“Because I loved him,” she answered, picking up the glass of sweet mint tea. She moved on to talk of generalities and let her husband do most of the talking after that. He had begun to look at her reproachfully as she became less conscientious about translating the words he missed.
When she was in her teens Samr had loved anything that came from the West: language, fashion, food, music, films, (medicaments), names, magazines and countless other things. She adored Western singers and movie actors, and even believed that she was in love with their neighbor, a Frenchman twenty years her senior, because his smile reminded her of Yves Montand’s. She waited for him every morning and evening at the entrance to the building where he lived, just to hear him say,
“Bonjour, ma petite fille,”
or
“Bonsoir, ma petite fille.”
Her admiration for all things Western didn’t disappear
when she left her adolescence behind. If anything it grew. She preferred going out with foreign boys, and felt at ease with their different approach, which made them seem like an extension of her favorite actors on the screen, except that they paid her an enormous amount of attention. To them she was like an exotic bird, and this was how it had been with her husband, who was working as a language teacher in the college opposite their house when she had pursued him and succeeded in catching his eye. She married him and went back with him when his contract ended, over the moon because her dream had come true.
She threw herself into all aspects of European life, including home decor. During his stay in Beirut her husband had acquired some pieces of Oriental furniture: brass trays, a mother-of-pearl table, a patterned rug. But Samr had left them wrapped up in cardboard boxes, dismissing his requests that they be allowed to see the light of day, always with the same reply: “They remind me of my grandparents’ house.”
She didn’t share his passion for Arab music, a subject in which he had become an expert, and was not remotely interested in studying books on Arab architecture. She would even make fun of him for it: “Who’s the Arab? You or me?”
Nostalgia for her roots came back to her at odd moments—for example, when a Turkish musician played a
rebec
in the street near her office—but she never thought of doing anything about it until she saw a film on television about Yemen made by a European woman journalist. Samr was not merely captivated by the country’s rugged beauty and its customs; the film opened doors for her that had been stuck fast for years, and she remembered her own country with feeling, and could see a certain area vividly in her mind because of its similarity to the pictures on the television.
She realized why she had been obsessed recently with countries like Nepal and Bhutan and Kashmir. She had thought it was a reaction to Europe’s frostiness, to its tidy, monotonous reality, to the predictability of life there. The real reason had eluded her, which was that she had begun to concern herself with the essence of things and spend large amounts of time thinking about why and how things were as they were. This had happened since she had started living in Europe and people had asked her about her country and that part of the world, and she had craftily changed the subject, because she knew nothing about it. Eventually she had begun to read foreign books about the area, since the books that she found in the only Arab bookshop in the city were irrelevant: they discussed the interpretation of dreams, or gave advice to female university students in Arab countries. She began ordering books from her own country and visiting the section in the museum devoted to
antiquities from the area, and she became addicted to Arabic music, discovering the best of it, thanks to the fact that this was what Western musicians had chosen to hear.
Her husband welcomed her return, since he had been attracted to her mainly because she was an Arab. He liked saying her name, and liked what it meant: the beautiful and convivial and exciting side of the night. He liked the way she spoke and the color of her skin, which, according to him, meant that human beings had really existed for thousands and thousands of years, and were born from the soil and colored by the sun.
He was asking now if they could go back to the hotel, as he’d been told that sunset was one of the nicest times to have a cup of tea on the balcony. But Samr was still revolving like a spinning top, her thoughts in a whirl and her eyes darting everywhere. She’d always put her lack of energy down to her low blood pressure, but now she realized it was because she had lost her enthusiasm for life.
She went reluctantly back to the hotel with him, tearing herself away from the cafe. She listened to the youths commenting on the women and girls going in and out of the public baths opposite and telling exaggerated stories, and felt like one of them. She seemed to be missing a time in her life she had never known. She guessed her husband wanted to go back to the hotel so that he could be alone with her,
and things could be normal again. He had surely begun to feel that she was interested in everything but him. She had even stopped translating the jokes for him.
This showed that she was detaching herself from him, but she would return to him when they went home. There was a gap in her relationship with him that she had only stumbled into here. She tried to push this new feeling into a corner of her mind and interrogated herself again, refusing to accept that it revealed anything complicated. It was simply that she wanted to be alone in these surroundings, away from the Orientalist spirit that had characterized him in their excursions so far. Although he was able to understand this culture and had studied it in depth, his heart remained immune to it, as if it were mummified like a pharoah, protected from life and even from death. The difference, which had been the magic drawing her and binding her to him, had begun to change here to impatience and exasperation at having to explain things and dispel misunderstandings. She tried to clear away the boulders of resentment and incomprehension that had begun to accumulate and interfere with their enjoyment, especially when they were in the mosque.
When she stepped off the narrow street, she had not expected to see a big piece of the sky descending into the vastness of the mosque, and its blues and whites and mauves and pinks forming a mosaic that shifted and
changed according to the position of the sun and the direction of the breeze.
They entered a courtyard seething with life and vigor. Men doing their ritual ablutions were jostled by children anxious to play in the fountain and sail their paper boats in the water, while the women sat as if they were on a social visit, at home in the heart of this space, away from the gloom of their houses, chewing gum, cracking seeds between their teeth and drinking tea from thermoses.
Tears rained down Samr’s cheeks. Her husband examined the mosaic, appraising the restorations and comparing it with Alhambra, seeing nothing beyond the artistic achievement.
Samr restrained herself. She couldn’t persuade herself that this difference which had brought them together was what was now driving them apart. She had to be more honest and acknowledge that his presence was a hindrance to her because she wanted to become immersed in this city on her own. She needed to think up some excuses, and from now on she mustn’t let her husband see her impatience and exasperation.
The following day she persuaded him to let her go shopping alone with one of the boys because if he came with her the prices would shoot up like the mercury in a thermometer. Mustafa was the one who went with her; he was the linchpin of the group.
Samr almost bounded along. She was alone and free, to shop, to stare, to bargain and haggle. She bought leather goods at rock-bottom prices once she discovered Mustafa’s bargaining skills and learned from them. All she had left to buy was henna. Mustafa led her in and out of the alleyways until they reached an open square where two huge sycamores sheltered the vendors’ barrows from the sun. She was delighted to see this open space, which was almost a rarity, being in a public road rather than hidden away behind closed doors like most of the space in the city. She clutched the dried henna leaves, finding it hard to believe that the powder that tinged hair red came from pale green leaves like these. Mustafa greeted a youth buying a juice from a
street
stall. Samr noticed the two of them looking at her as she sniffed the henna. She smiled at them and picked up the bags containing herbs and clay for strengthening hair, which Mustafa insisted on taking from her. He introduced her to his friend, Jalal, and the three of them walked on together in the direction of a building at the far end of the square. Mustafa volunteered the information that it was a historic building, which Jalal was in charge of restoring.
When she was sightseeing with her husband they had been shown a number of places that were supposed to be out of bounds to tourists, and in the process of being restored, but these had been no more impressive than unlit building sites. In the garden of this ruined mansion there
were cats stretched out in blissful indolence in the sun and orange trees with fruit on them, glowing like lamps. She would have rather stayed outside than visited yet another gloomy building site, where not even the heaps of rubble and dirt gave any hint that the building would be returned to its former glory or justify its renewed existence. Besides, the sense of abandonment and neglect surrounding these places, lying there like hidden pearls, made her sad rather than angry and eager to act, like her husband.
She was taken aback by Mustafa’s friend’s coolness. He was quite unlike Mustafa and the other young men, who had pleasant, open expressions and had been welcoming to Samr and her husband. He was indifferent, self-contained and didn’t even ask her what country she came from or express surprise at her knowledge of Arabic. He played with a bunch of keys as he continued talking to Mustafa and ignoring her existence. Finally she asked him if she was intruding, but he merely shook his head without comment, while Mustafa laughed and made some self-conscious remark about his friend being dumb.
Jalal went toward the stairs, which Samr knew in advance would be in complete darkness. She found it hard to adjust to the gloom, and she didn’t want to let Mustafa help her, as he had on previous occasions, by taking her hand or guiding her by the elbow. Jalal continued climbing even though she was eager to look in some of the rooms they
were passing. He seemed to be used to these requests from tourists as he continued to mutter indistinctly at intervals that it would still be there later, and nothing was going to disappear.
When they came out onto the roof, Samr was entranced. Her heart began to thump as it often did when she was flying in her dreams, and she soared out over the colored rooftops.
She flew above the dusty, ordinary buildings, above the roofs with green and blue tiles, the colors of lapis lazuli and emerald, above the high white domes crowned with copper, above fortresslike buildings and colored circles—strawberry, mustard, wine and indigo. Men were dipping cloth in these pools of color, then squeezing it out, and in the same, open square other men gathered wearing velvet skullcaps and
jallabiyyas
, looking like grasshoppers with their limbs stuck out at various angles.