But now he wasn’t responding to her. He sighed deeply, and she wasn’t able to persuade him to become involved in the lesson, or give him advice about his work as a low-grade accountant in an airline company. Not that she had a special interest in him, but she had taken it upon herself to hand out advice to the villagers who had adopted her. She used to urge them not to be satisfied, not to surrender to their fate, repeating, “It is written,” but to transcend their circumstances, which means she encouraged secondary-school pupils to go to university and small farmers to grow crops they hadn’t tried before.
Mahyoub sighed again and Ingrid guessed he was going to return to the subject of emigrating.
“What’s wrong?” she asked finally.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he answered.
She didn’t ask him what it was that he didn’t want to talk about. She knew it was hard for him to earn enough to live on, his prospects of promotion were poor, and he had been waiting for a year for a visa to join a relative in Saudi Arabia.
The car jolted and bounced over the potholes and around the hairpin bends and Ingrid recovered her equilibrium, lost momentarily when her focus on what she represented here, and what she wanted from living here, had been blurred by a trivial gesture toward her hair. Mahyoub’s behavior had made her think again and she realized that she had to allow some unspoken complicity to exist between herself and the village. She could not become part of their lives and identify with their particular ways while she remained in their eyes as remote as a heroine from one of their folktales, or a princess imprisoned in a palace that no one could enter. But she said nothing. The days were gone when she used to try and persuade him that he was better off here and should give up his ambitions to go to Europe, and she no longer criticized the men who migrated to Saudi Arabia and left their wives and children for years on end.
She would have loved at that moment to tell him about
her recent experience when she went back home: how all she had thought about was these mountains, this earthly paradise, this secure life, remote from outer and inner turmoil and moral decay. Here it was possible to while away the time without being troubled by modern civilization. Peace of mind existed in these half-empty houses, which contained only mattresses to sleep on, dishes to eat off, a toilet, a lamp. This was paradise.
Ingrid turned toward him calculating whether, if she said this out loud to him, he would fly off the handle, and shout, “What’s the point of being in paradise if you don’t have enough to eat?”
Or would he nod his head in agreement? “I know. I know. But we have to try the other life. See what it’s like working there, then choose.”
What? You want to try working over there? Pitiless work which will rob you of your pride as you scrub toilets and sinks, and sweep up the dogshit in public parks, then spend hours purifying yourself from their filth?
Mahyoub was the one man who didn’t accept what she said open-mouthed, content merely to stare back at her captivating features like the rest of them. He argued with her and lost his temper, especially on recent occasions, and once, when she was envying them their happy life, he had shouted, “It’s all right for you. You’ll go home
and turn on the hot tap, sleep with your head on a pillow, eat off your individual plate, drink milk and Pepsi from bottles.”
Then he had criticized her for not giving the women advice about their medical and social problems. Ingrid had paused to collect her thoughts and laughed a series of short, irritable laughs. “Who am I to tell them to wash their hair?” she had said finally. “I’m here to speak to the mind, the heart. I’m here—”
He had interrupted, his fist clenched: “You’re talking to the soul? The mind? While the mosquitoes and bilharzia worms run riot and qat dries up the mothers’ milk?”
Something he had said on another occasion had sprung into her head, something quite different: “Qat, Ingrid I God sends it down like manna from heaven. He knows all about our poverty and gives it to us to chew so that we don’t want meat and chicken. We chew qat and its bitterness makes us forget the delights of food. Have some. It’s fresh. It’ll make your eyes shine!”
She hadn’t reminded him of this piece of popular wisdom, but answered defensively, “I’m not part of a medical mission, and I don’t have the money to improve conditions. I don’t work for a government organization. But can’t you sense how happy the women are to have me here? Don’t you think I’m having some effect on this village? Do you
remember when I wanted to revive beekeeping? I went to—”
But he had interrupted her sarcastically: “You talk to the soul? You’re so vain I You must be under the illusion that everyone listens to you and believes what you say and acts on your suggestions. Don’t you realize that the moment you walk out of the men’s sitting room we discuss why you’re not married and whether you’re still a virgin?”
Ingrid had suddenly felt afraid. Was her relationship with the village so one-sided? It couldn’t be. She had tried to convince herself he was sexually frustrated. She had a great relationship with the women, and the men too. When she was away, they all missed her.
Mahyoub stopped sighing and broke the silence, interrupting her internal debate with a blow to the solar plexus. “I didn’t think I’d miss you. I felt as if my hand had been cut off. Every couple of days I went down to Sanaa and knocked on your door.”
Ingrid attempted a laugh, and tapped him reprovingly on the arm like an older sister. She tried to explain to him that she had become part of his family, but soon lapsed into an uneasy silence. He reached out his hand, imprisoning her hand in his, then turned his face toward her, taking his eyes off the road. “I’ve fallen in love with you. I can’t change
that,” he said emotionally. “If you turn me down, you’ll break my heart.”
Her hand fidgeted under his. It was a measure of her rebellion that showed plainly in her eyes, in the reddening of her nose, and the uncomfortable pounding of her heart.
“I want to do it properly, Ingrid, the right way. I want to marry you and have children.”
She shuddered. This was what she had feared. He was clinging to her as if she were a life preserver, trying love as a way to escape to Europe. She was like the others, then: like Yvonne, like Ferial, the Turkish girl, whom Ahmad had made a fool of, lavishing words of love on her. They had married and gone abroad and he had disappeared in the airport in Geneva.
One foreign woman here obviously appeared indistinguishable from another. All she amounted to was a passport.
She didn’t answer him. She let him talk on in his own language, which she understood fairly well, about the void she had left behind her, how angry he had been with her because she hadn’t left her address or phone number, how he had gone to the head of her school, who had claimed not to know them either. He had been scared she wasn’t coming back and had thought about finding a way of going to Denmark to look for her.
Ingrid couldn’t help responding with scorn: “You know
Denmark well, do you? You’d have stood at the top of a hill and called my name and I’d have come running?”
The sentences flew out as images crowded in on her: when she had gone into the men’s sitting room Mahyoub had not shaken her hand. He had ignored her and looked at the school head, Marcel, suspiciously and without warmth. His sister Souad had welcomed her even more eagerly than on previous visits, trying to work out if Marcel was her fiancé.
How could Mahyoub make advances to her now? Abandon his morals and try to seduce her? He wouldn’t be able to act like this with a Yemeni woman, or any other Arab woman. The blue of her eyes obviously gave him license to be bold. Too bad. But what if he had known she was a missionary?
Ingrid’s eyes were wide and blue, but they filled up at the slightest pretext: a sudden breeze, bright sunlight, onions frying, a tender word. Her small nose was permanently red, but her mouth was impossible to describe. It changed rapidly depending on the situation: shut tight in a smile, pursed as a sign that she was deep in thought, moving all ways as she talked or expressed surprise; and when she threw her head back, laughing uproariously, it was like a cave full of uneven white rocks.
It wasn’t her height that distinguished her from the other women as much as her strange coloring. Even the
animals in the village were attracted by it. Iftikar swore that her cow never took its eyes
off
Ingrid and watched her wherever she went, and Husniyya too reported that her chickens were rooted to the spot in Ingrid’s presence and the cock crowed at odd times of day.
Ingrid was quite content to have acquired this image and compared it with the other buried inside her, concealed from everyone, even her colleagues at the school: her own image of herself as a Christian missionary. Certainly, she used to tell the men of the village stories from the New Testament and the life of Christ, discussing and comparing those common to the Bible and the Quran, but this was in the context of informing them about all the subjects they were ignorant of: that the earth was a ball floating in space, that man had walked on the moon, that there had been periods of famine in Europe too, and social breakdown, unemployment, housing shortages—even in America itself. She would illustrate this information with pictures from magazines, newspapers and books.
A missionary who danced with the women and had a taste for music, stories and gossip? She never talked to the women about the Bible, as she knew it would be risky for her and them. It was for the men to discuss things with her and then talk to their women.
With those thoughts in mind she began to calm down again, although she was afraid that Mahyoub’s confession of
love might mean that she had to leave the village, and she desperately needed to belong to this world now she had rejected her world forever. She had cut short her visit to Denmark. The image of the red cup floating in a sea of coffee grains on the Nescafe jar, the thought of which had filled her with nostalgia on her first trip to Yemen, no longer mattered to her. She had discovered back home that she didn’t even like the taste of Nescafe anymore, nor the cold, regular rhythm of life, the way people approached their daily lives in an organized fashion, with no place for chance or spontaneity, or a little of the anarchy that acts like a thermometer to show the variations in the soul of a place.
She had missed the dusty road where she lived, the flies that, undeterred by her annoyance, clung to her as if they needed her, the handshake of the owner of the shop opposite, although the same hand had been scooping up olives, cutting cheese, then finding its way to his nose.
When Ingrid saw families out walking on the mountain paths and the rocks with their leopardskin markings, she knew they were getting close. She had learned the colors of the rocks and the rare species of trees by heart. Almost at once children began popping up out of nowhere shouting, “Amina! Amina!” (This was the name they had given her in the village.) The women emerged from their houses like rabbits from their burrows that had smelled a juicy carrot, and when they pulled up Mahyoub presented her with a
bouquet of wilting flowers, which included sprigs of qat. They decided to leave most of the luggage in the car until nightfall, fearing that the women would pounce on it, and she got out clutching the flowers, her handbag and a few small carrier bags.
She attempted to kiss all the children who clustered around her calling, “Amina! Amina!” and asked them to run and tell Souad that she’d arrived. “Sweets for the one who gets there first.”
Her words acted like a fire spreading through them and they scattered and ran like a herd of brightly colored goats leaping over the bare rocky ground. More children came running from the hillsides and out of the houses. The women were waiting for her beside Souad’s house, and a few men stood diffidently to one side. The women kissed her and the men called to her, and in no time the valleys and mountains echoed with the sound of her name, and Ingrid felt like a queen again. The children fingered her dress and handbag, and the plastic carrier bags.
Souad rushed out and threw her arms around Ingrid. She tucked a sprig of basil behind her ear, pushing back her head scarf, and reproaching her nonstop for abandoning them. An old woman tried to make herself heard above the noise: “Fatima’s having a baby in hospital.”
Finally Souad led Ingrid into the house and the rest of the women followed them into the sitting room, which had
whitewashed mud-brick walls and was bare except for a few colored cushions on the floor and a heap of clothes on the broad window ledge. The room became a hive of activity. Souad brought in plates of bread and Iftikar followed with a stainless-steel jug, from which she poured coffee into little cups.
“Did you travel alone?” Souad asked Ingrid. “I’d like to try flying one day.”
She flapped her arms up and down like wings, then screamed at the smaller children, who were in the process of running off with the plastic bags. As she snatched the bags away out of sight she turned to Ingrid. “I’ll drink my coffee and call you,” Ingrid told the children reassuringly. “You count from one to five in English.”
The women began talking argumentatively about Ingrid as if she weren’t there. One said she was fatter and no longer looked like a camel without a backside because of her height. Another declared that the devil had told her Ingrid was dead. Souad silenced them by remarking jokingly, “And I thought she’d got married I Last time she was here I said to her, ‘If you get married, Iftikar and I will deliver your baby.’ And she seemed to like the idea.”
The old woman cut in: “You and Iftikar? Only the Almighty can deliver babies. And foreigners’ wombs have stones in them. She’ll be in labor for a year. Their kids have such huge heads.”
“Fatima’s had four children and they’ve all died,” said Souad, trying to switch the course of the conversation again.
“A child of Amina’s wouldn’t want to come into the world in one of our houses,” said the old woman. “He’d like it better in hospital.”
The children came back, having counted to twenty, desperate to know what was in the bags for them. They stood there, their hair matted with dust and the dry air, their feet small and black, their faces marked by the sun, chronic thirst and various skin diseases. The voice of Souad’s husband demanding to know why Ingrid hadn’t gone in to greet the men mingled with the children’s eager cries.