Bitter Orange Tree Read online

  Bitter Orange Tree

  ALSO BY JOKHA ALHARTHI

  Celestial Bodies

  To the man of wisdom

  Bitter Orange Tree

  Contents

  Fingers

  The Father’s Platter

  Brown Rings on a Woman’s Head-Shawl

  How to Behave Suitably

  Mud and Charcoal

  The Widow Marries

  An Austere Party for the Passionately Ascetic

  The Bride, and the Baby Repelled

  Life Is a Paper Kite

  Names

  The Virgin

  The Gypsy Woman

  Love Sets Conditions

  The White Room

  The Wood Gatherer and the Lion

  The Dynamo

  A Day Trip

  Bliss

  A Leaf Falling from the Mango Tree

  Nostalgia

  The Color Blue

  Bonds of Sympathy

  The Three Monkeys

  Miracles

  War

  A Good-Enough Excuse

  Eyeglasses

  A Yellow Rain from India

  Perfection

  The Theater

  The Snowman, and the Man of Ice

  Talisman

  To Be Delirious with Joy

  Young Love

  Pardoning

  Curiosity

  The Scorpion

  Imran

  The Heart Is Made of Clay and Water

  The Holy Night of Revelation

  The Fiancé

  Triangle

  Sheets

  The Valiant Horseman

  Fingers

  I open my eyes suddenly and see her fingers. One by one I see them, fleshy, wrinkled, the nails rough. A single silver ring; and her thumb with its thick, tough black nail, preserving the traces of a bad injury that all but severed it.

  I didn’t see that strange fingernail as strange. She always asked me to cut it, but the heaviest nail clipper wasn’t strong enough. Every time I tried, she would shake her head. “Khalaas. Forget it—try the knife.” And a small blade really would appear, all of a sudden, from nowhere, it seemed. I didn’t attempt it, though. I cut the rest of her nails, the ordinary, healthy ones, leaving her the business of the hard black thumbnail deformed by injury.

  Waking up to snow falling outside the window of my top-floor room in the university residence hall, I climb out of my narrow bed and stand barefoot on the wooden floor in my long nightgown, staring into the snow and the darkness. And suddenly what I am seeing is not the nighttime landscape but the hard, black, crooked nail. Right there, plain before my eyes, leaving me wakeful with remorse. I go back to my narrow bed, and finally the voices of my classmates in the kitchen fade away and the loud music from my neighbor’s room grows faint, as I toss and turn in an agony of regret.

  I could have done something for the black nail instead of leaving it to grow so long, neglected and askew. It was possible for the word ignore not to exist. But it did. It existed and it grew, and it got longer, just as the black nail lengthened, just like any confident, healthy fingernail would grow long enough to leave a scratch or not. Like this nail of mine, still bearing traces of the polish I had put on for my Pakistani friend’s birthday party the day before. Yes, the word ignore could go on and on—without a nail clipper, without any polish even, and when I felt like I was suffocating, wrapped up in my long nightgown, in my little bed on that snowy night, it was the remorse, the guilt, that choked me. Neglect. Negligence. Looking the other way. Pretending not to notice. Ignoring it.

  Was there ever a day when I asked her, “What happened to your finger?” Maybe, but if so, I don’t remember what she said, if anything. I remember collecting the rough slivers cut from the healthy fingernails, ready to toss them out. She wanted me to bury them in the dirt, but I ignored her. I pretended not to know that this was what she wanted. She’d tug at her white pouch of medications, concealed beneath her outstretched leg, and hand it to me. There was nothing there one could read, not really, perhaps two or three lines of ink on every little plastic bag. The white pills twice a day, the pink ones three times a day. What were the pills for? I don’t know. I never asked. I had twenty problems in my math textbook that I had to come up with solutions for: I wasn’t about to start asking questions about the medicines with hurriedly written lines of ink sprawling across them.

  I would forget the fingers, forget the medications. Then, on some night, any night, a night without insomnia, or grief, or memories, I would see her in a dream. Sitting, the way she always was sitting during those last ten years, her face sweet and all wrinkles, her smile radiating goodness, her arms reaching out for me. When she stretches her arms toward me in that way she always had, the long, bright-colored tarha draped over her head cascades into dozens of little folds and pleats, and the silver ring on her healthy, straight little finger flashes with light, concealing the afflicted black nail. And then I fall into her embrace.

  It would already have been autumn. The large trees ringing the university residence would have gone yellow and the leaves would have fallen. The caretakers would be sweeping the yellowed leaves from the pavements, and the female students would be showing off how well they could endure the colder weather by choosing to wear their shortest skirts. But just a moment before, I had been there: just before I opened my eyes and autumn plunked itself down in my consciousness. I was in her embrace, I was smelling her scent, a blend of civet musk, precious aloeswood oil, and ancient soil. We were switching roles. I was repeating the words that she’d always said over and over: “Don’t go.” No, we didn’t exchange places exactly, because this time she was smiling softly, sympathetically. I hadn’t done that back when she was the one saying “Don’t go.”

  I had gone. And then she had gone. And it wasn’t possible to change anything. What the hand of fate had written could not be unwritten. That ancient line of poetry: All your tears, all your pleas, will erase not a line of that which is written. For I had gone, and I went away without smiling. I just went, in my cocky presumption that I could look the other way. That I didn’t know; that I didn’t need to know. And then: remorse. Harsh, grating regret, making me more fragile than the brittle autumn leaves crumbling under the janitor’s broom beneath my window.

  My svelte Pakistani friend’s fingers were perfectly symmetrical and polish never touched those nails. Her name, Suroor, means “happiness.” And yes, she was the picture of happiness. Suroor: jet-black hair rippling down her back and a dazzling smile. Her slender fingers with the precisely clipped nails raking through that beautiful hair of hers. No scratch ever blemished her nails. It was as if life itself had deposited her in a remote and sheltered spot, protected from storms or high winds. No scratches, no swellings, no scars. I was always teasing her. Looking at her fingers brought ancient poems to mind. “You are made for love, Suroor.” She would laugh. In my defense, I quoted the ancient Lubna’s beloved Qays, the sad and lovelorn poet.

  Love’s own tokens etch themselves,

  the youthful form grows thin

  Love will strip from the lover’s hands the

  very finger-bones

  Suroor didn’t like that at all—“the very finger-bones,” imagine!—and she herself wasn’t made for love. Her sister was.

  On her birthday—the day I painted my nails bright red—Suroor’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. For her older sister, Kuhl, had married her beloved in a secret temporary marriage. No one else knew, and Suroor had to conceal that severe secret. It was a heavy, heavy weight on picture-of-happiness Suroor. Born in her father’s luxurious villa in Karachi, speaking nothing but English all of her carefree life, Suroor didn’t know what to do with this knowledge. It overwhelmed her; it
perplexed her. She didn’t understand how her sister could have gone from a few silly flirtations to the calamitous business of marriage. And for whom? A boy with only secondary school English he had learned in his remote village somewhere deep in the interior of Pakistan. His father wasn’t a distinguished banker like hers was, and his peasant mother had never heard of a city called London. But in her final year studying for a medical degree, Kuhl found a shaykh who was willing to bind her and her beloved in a mutaa marriage. And Suroor, on her twenty-second birthday, was bearing the secret, dragging it around with her like a mutilated finger with a misshapen black nail.

  Her long black hair falling disheveled over my shoulder, Suroor sobbed. “Just imagine, Zuhour, imagine! My sister. . . my very own sister, marrying that peasant!” Suroor was prettier than her sister; she resembled their mother, who had grown up in London and, had it not been for her marriage, probably would have become a star of the London stage. Suroor didn’t wear any makeup. Her tears were pure, clean drops, not darkened by kohl or tainted by face powder. They were large drops, glistening pearls, proper tears: suitable tears. But my tears—they had been thin brownish lines edging down my dirty face.

  As my grandmother had rubbed them off my cheeks with her black-nailed thumb, she handed me her walking stick and said, “Go after them! Give them a good beating, will you.” I had pretended to go off, but instead I hid in the enclosed prayer alcove behind the main house. It was the summer before she went lame and could do nothing but sit. She was still walking every late afternoon then, between our house and the orchards, cutting across the narrow lanes where we played. And then there came the day when she witnessed a scene that had happened many times before, unbeknownst to her. Me, sprawled on the ground, and Fattoum rolling my face in the dirt while her brother, Ulyan, yanks my hair, and tears run in dirty lines down my face. Suddenly she was there: her massive frame, her distinctive height and full, strong body. The walking stick that always supported her came down on Fattoum and Ulyan. They scampered away, slipping into their house, but she followed them, and she swung that cane upward and thwacked the wood door, nearly splintering it. When Abu Ulyan opened the door, it was a miracle that he escaped having an eye gouged out by her cane. “If you don’t punish those kids of yours,” she said, “we will.” And she turned away and marched home without as much as a glance at me.

  There was still some birthday cake and paper cups half-full of juice on the table. Very few classmates had shown up: Suroor didn’t serve alcohol. She was studying classical and medieval Arabic. For a while now, she had been more at ease reading the medieval scholar al-Tabari than she was reading the newspaper. Reading ancient scholars’ interpretations of the Qur’an, she’d become convinced that her father was wrong to have served drinks at his boisterous parties, whether at the Karachi villa or in the London flat.

  I was thinking that we ought to clean the place up, but Suroor just went on moaning about her sister. “He’s a peasant. His mom and dad are illiterate. A farmer.” But he wasn’t a peasant farmer. He was a student pursuing a university degree in medicine, just like her sister.

  “My grandmother would’ve given anything to be a peasant farmer,” I said. And then immediately I regretted my abrupt reaction. Suroor raised her head. “Your grandmother?” Right. The words had come out and they couldn’t be put back. I had said it: my grandmother. Why don’t words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves? But there are no threads attached. Those words had been said. What’s done is done.

  The Father’s Platter

  Everything happened in the course of the First World War.

  Shipping was at a standstill in the Gulf, and goods were hard to come by. The price of a sack of rice shot up to a hundred qirsh, each qirsh coin the old, heavy silver Maria Theresa thalers that circulated in Oman back then. A bag of dried dates cost thirty. A woman’s cotton head-shawl couldn’t be had for less than two entire qirsh. Drought struck. Famine. The irrigation canals dried up, the date palms were dying, and whole villages emptied as people left home, heading to parts of the country where hunger was not so widespread or acute, and life was more affordable, or to the east coast of Africa.

  She and her brother were born not long after the war, in one of the villages staggering under the burden of inflation and drought. Her mother died of fever when she was only a few years old. These were the years when people were circulating rumors whose source no one knew, about a British company that had been granted oil-drilling rights. Her father was a fine equestrian and a horse trainer, skilled at taming recalcitrant horses. But his new wife tamed him. She convinced him that it was best for the two of them, and for the children they now had, to expel the brother and sister whose mother had died. And so that is what happened. As his son was reaching out for a bit of food from the family’s shared platter, the father slapped his arm, and the precious grains of rice flew from the fingers of the fifteen-year-old boy. His sister, two years younger, started shivering and stopped eating. The father began to shout. “Shame! Don’t you feel shame eating from your father’s platter? Eat from the toil of your own arm! Do you think your father is yours, and yours alone? He’s not always going to be here for you.”

  She told me this story the day she roughed up Fattoum and Ulyan, rescuing me once and for all from having my face rubbed in the dirt and my hair torn out. Yet I didn’t believe her. I imagined my own father gripping my brother’s hand and then putting my hand in his and expelling us from the house. It wasn’t possible. Surely such a thing could not happen. But she told the story countless times after that, and every time, one little tear from her single good eye would roll down her face. Not because they’d been kicked out as two lone orphans but in memory of her brother who had not been able to endure the misery and pain of working as a day laborer building mud-brick houses. He died less than two years after their expulsion.

  “Your grandmother?” asked Suroor. “She wanted to be a peasant farmer?”

  It really is true, one cannot yank the words back, there are no threads attached to them that we can tug, to make them disappear. “She always longed to own some land,” I responded. “Just a tiny patch, with date palms growing on it, even if there was only space for five or so. And a few little fruit trees—lemon, papaya, banana, bitter orange. She would even plant those herself. She would water them and take care of them. And eat from them. And rest in their shade.”

  My friend was silent. She probably didn’t have a clue what I was trying to say. We gathered up the cups and plates and wiped the tables clean. The party had ended. Suroor would go to sleep, suppressing the thought of her sister’s marriage. My grandmother’s dream would remain, wakeful and alive.

  She dreamed of the tiny plot of land that she would tend, living off its proceeds, until her death. But her dream never came true, nor did any other dreams she had. None of them at all—even when she climbed into the Bedford truck that took her from her village to the outskirts of Muscat for an appointment with Dr. Thoms, or “Thomas” as the locals called him, the famous missionary doctor, reviving the fantasy of regaining her sight completely in the eye that the herbal remedies of the ignorant had obliterated. But Dr. Thoms reduced her dream to nothing. He told her that the pain in that eye would go away on its own but the herbal infusion that had been repeatedly applied had caused permanent loss of sight in it. No surgery that he could perform would bring it back. She had to be content with her one good eye, he said. She would have to make do. So she was content. She made do. She climbed back into the truck bed, without a word, and returned to the village.

  And I. . . My sight still misty and blurred by the dream-fog I was in, the open arms she held out to me, I would sometimes forget that she had died. Getting up to look for her, I searched the corridors between rooms. I could hear my Chinese classmates arguing, and the little screams of my Nigerian neighbor having sex with a Colombian student she’d taken a liking to recently. I would find myself wandering barefoot into the ice-cold
kitchen. The snow would not have stopped. Finally, remembering that she was dead, I ceased searching the corridors.

  Kuhl had been trying to convince Suroor to give up her room now and then, so that she could be alone with her husband. He was living in a tiny flat with five other Pakistani men, so it was impossible for her to go there. Kuhl lived with a married relative of theirs and her husband, since their flat literally abutted the college of medicine, while the university’s residence halls were quite a distance away. Even if she tried to apply for university housing now, she wouldn’t be allowed to complete the paperwork and move before the end of the term. The two of them had used up all their funds on cheap hotels and B&Bs, and her father the banker was not going to increase the amount he transferred monthly to his daughters. Suroor said no at first, but finally she gave in, leaving the key for her sister and spending those hours at the university library or trying to study in the park. But it didn’t get any easier, and she never did get used to the idea. She couldn’t even stand the thought of it. She confided to me that it made her feel filthy. Their parents weren’t stingy with anything. And here were Suroor and Kuhl, so far away, conspiring behind their backs. She couldn’t stop thinking about what the pair of them were doing in her room. About that hand—that rough peasant hand—on her sister’s soft, smooth throat; his coarse lips on her pampered body. This was torture, Suroor said. She couldn’t stand it.

  Brown Rings on a Woman’s Head-Shawl

  I walk through the antique streets of this city that carries so much history, my book-filled bag on my back, the laces on my trainers neatly tied. I walk through the streets, an alien here in my feelings, my gestures, my speech. As the poet al-Mutanabbi put it, “a stranger in face and hand and tongue.” I am thinking about Suroor’s pain, about filthiness, about the justifications people drum up. In the end everyone does what they want to do, and they always find ways to justify it. Their words of excuse come into existence along with the acts they validate—and it’s an easy birth these excuses have.