Bitter Orange Tree Page 2

  When I’m tired of walking, I sit down at a café, a table by the window overlooking the street, and I order a black coffee. I stop worrying over Suroor and her sister and people’s excuses. But I’m not really seeing this large cup or the black liquid it holds. What I see in front of me is a tiny cup filled with dark brown coffee gripped in fleshy, wrinkled fingers.

  In my mind, I see the pale shadow cast by the house’s outer wall onto the ground inside the compound, and I see her sitting on a mat in the courtyard, her legs stretched in front of her, absorbed in drinking her coffee. She is not weighted down by thoughts. She is not remembering anything, not missing anything or wishing for it, not dreaming of anything as she sits under the ample shade of the bitter orange tree.

  The children had grown up and her lap was empty now. Her one good eye had gone dull and she could barely see; there was no needle and thread in her hand these days, no length of fabric. Her legs were infirm now and she no longer made her way from the house out to the fields in the late afternoons. She sat. That’s all. She sat, drinking her coffee, nothing else; returning neighbors’ greetings when the women stopped by to say hello, as they were on their way home, waving away the relentless flies, once in a while uttering a couple of words or a sentence, sipping her coffee, without any of it returning her to the past, to memory. As if nothing existed beyond this moment, beyond drinking her coffee; or as if it were an eternal moment that had always existed and always would. As if the past never happened, as if her father’s justifications for throwing her out of his house, along with her brother, did not still linger somewhere inside her head. As if her brother’s youth—her brother’s life—had not collapsed beneath the many mud-brick walls he had built back then, receiving a paltry five bisa coins for every wall.

  She sat in the gloomy shade drinking her coffee. The past was obscured now; the time when she had roasted the black-brown beans herself, and ground them by hand with her cast-iron pestle, and watched closely as the coffee began to boil in the little brass pot, lifting it off the heat at exactly the right moment. Now all she did was drag her body with its lifeless legs over the ground, from her room out to the shade of the wall in the courtyard. The Bengali would emerge from the kitchen with a thermos made in Taiwan, and a little cup, setting it all down beside her without looking at her, and then he would go away. Like us. Like all of us, we all went away, hurrying off to friends, to homework, to our little secrets, to the TV, to racing one another on our bicycles, to little quarrels in the neighborhood, while she remained there, sitting in the shade of the wall, even if she was not yet calling out, “Don’t go.” She conducted herself properly, suitably, as one must, understanding the justifications that people had, or not thinking much about them, self-contained, drinking her coffee.

  I left the café, slinging my bag over my shoulder. The snow had started falling again, and I hugged my wool jacket closer around my body. How do our bodies find it so easy to obey clothing that they’ve never before learned to wear? When I was little, in the cold season she always insisted on bringing out that square green woolen shawl and knotting it around my neck. I never dared to object. In the summer, I wore whatever lightweight garments she had sewn for me, and in the winter I wrapped myself up in the shawl and breathed in the heavy, pungent smell of wool. When I started school, I changed out of the traditional clothing everyone wore in the village into my blue pinafore. And later, when I went to Muscat, I replaced my traditional village clothes with a skirt and blouse. When I traveled to this cold land, I changed out of my traditional clothes and wore a jacket and trousers instead. She never shed the clothes that were native to the village she came from. Even when her legs could no longer carry her and she had to drag herself out to the shade of the courtyard, she did not complain about her long, loose clothing getting in her way. She went on sitting there looking as she had looked, it seemed, for all eternity: in her bright-colored cotton tarha and the black tunic that fell below her knees, embroidered at the bodice, with light, colorful sleeves, and her closely fitting sirwal trousers beneath, showing their inches of fine silver embroidery around the cuffs. Never in her life had she put on an abaya, nor any garment other than these with which she had grown up. The small trunk in which she kept her clothing held a few tunics and pairs of finely worked sirwals, and nothing else. Her night clothes were simply the daytime clothes that had gotten too old, the fabric too thin to wear in daylight. There were no underclothes. Her small, carved wooden mandus held an array of little glass bottles, their colors faded, emptied of the perfumed oils they were meant to hold. That little chest also contained a silver anklet that had been her mother’s, a few fine Chinese porcelain bowls, and tightly packed rows of colorful tarhas all made out of similar cotton fabric, all with repeating designs: large red roses, or green trees, or yellow stars. Running down the long edges were a few words in Swahili, stamped onto the fabric in big letters that she couldn’t read, just as she couldn’t read any other language. In this village where she now lived—in our village—the women called these colorful African head-shawls ghadfas or liisus, but she called them masarrs, as she had always heard them called in her own village.

  When she was still a girl, and her brother could provide barely enough food for the two of them, she had yearned for a colorful headdress like all the women had. She had longed desperately for that masarr, before she learned to let go of all yearnings and the foulness they could bring in their wake.

  One day, she went to the owner of the only shop in her village. She greeted him and fell silent. As she stood there, not moving, he was busying himself with his stacks of canned food and jars of samna and honey. When he spoke, his voice was very loud, as though she were hard of hearing. “What does Bint Aamir want?”

  My grandmother stared with her one good eye at the piles of dreamed-of masarrs. “I want a masarr,” she said, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. The shopkeeper sighed. “But a masarr costs two qirsh, and you’re completely dependent on your brother, and all he gets are day wages.” He went back to his work, now straightening the imported fabrics, soft, expensive duryahi cloth and silk from India. But she didn’t go away. She just stood there. She wasn’t looking at the silks but at the cotton masarrs. A few years after Bint Aamir stood in the shop, their price would dwindle to less than a quarter-qirsh each. But at that time—in the days of hunger and inflation—a masarr did cost two entire qirsh. Her fist had never once closed around such a sum of money. The shopkeeper gazed at her quizzically. “I want to buy a masarr,” she said. “Bi-s-sabr, with your patience—on credit. I’ll make charcoal. I’ll bring you the two qirsh.” It all came out in one rush of breath. Bi-s-sabr wa-basakhkhim wa-barudd lak al-qirshayn. As the words came out, no longer imprisoned inside her, she felt her chest expand with air—the chest of a girl who had barely said goodbye to childhood as she stepped into adolescence. She had never paid any notice to that chest, the slight swellings on her front, but the shop owner noticed. He gave the wood door panel a little push and suddenly the windowless shop was dark. “Come over here,” the shop owner said. “You can look at the masarrs and pick one out. You’re not below any of those women who have them.” She came closer to him, scarcely believing he was ready to let her buy one. Both hands gripped the soft fabric, while the shop owner’s gaze fixed on her chest. He was very close to her now and he gasped out, “I can show you something sweeter than that masarr.” With a quick movement of his hand, there facing her, he opened the izar wrapped around his waist. She had no mother. She was poor. She had been thrown out of her father’s care and protection. But she was still his daughter. She was the girl who belonged to the proud horseman whose courage the women chanted in their melodic poem-songs. For just a moment the shock of it froze her. She didn’t understand what it was she was being shown. But she understood that he wanted something unacceptable from her. Something despicable. That some kind of bargain was on offer. She found some strength, retrieved some pride, as the daughter of the father who had thrown her out.
“I am Bint Aamir!” she shrieked, over and over, as she threw the masarrs in his face and fled the shop.

  Two days later, the shopkeeper’s sister came to her door clutching a masarr that was patterned in interlacing brown rings. She entered the dilapidated room that was their home, the half-collapsed structure to which she and her brother had come seeking some kind of shelter. She unfolded the new masarr in front of Bint Aamir. “Pretty?” she asked. Her listener swallowed. The shop owner’s sister went on. “Here, take it, on credit,” she said. “But you have to pay back the two qirsh before the feast day.”

  For the first time since her mother’s death, Bint Aamir felt a glimmer of joy in her life. She promised she would repay the debt before the feast day. After their goodbyes, she laid the masarr out on the mat. Her fingers traced the brown rings, around and around, one after another. She would have preferred one imprinted with red roses, but this masarr was now hers. And it was new, and the fabric was soft, even if it was covered in dullish brown rings. She was walking on clouds. Her eyes were wet as she hugged the soft fabric of her own new masarr to her face and fell asleep.

  That was when she began to spend her time with the musakhkhammat—the coal-faced women, they were called, because they made and sold charcoal. Provisioning herself with dates and water, she went out with them, walking far from the village, beyond the fields, and out to the desert. They gathered dead wood all day long. At sundown, they set fire to the wood and then buried it in the sand. As the embers smoldered, they formed a circle around the hole they had dug. They waited for the wood to die, eating their dates. They spent the whole night waiting for the embers to turn to charcoal. In the predawn light, they brushed away the layer of sand, dug out the black sukhkhaam, and divided it up. Each woman tied her share in a bundle that she then hoisted onto her back and carried home before the sun was up. In the suq, a load of coal would fetch a half-qirsh. She had to go out every day for a week to amass as much as a wiqr of charcoal, enough to sell. The loads of wood frayed her thin, tattered her clothes even further. But before the feast day she had managed to acquire two silver qirsh coins.

  She went out once again, though, with the charcoal women to help them and to say goodbye. She told them she would come back from time to time to make charcoal. Doing so would help her brother, even if only a little. But that night she couldn’t leave them, because Umayra suddenly went into labor. The other charcoal women had to tend to her instead of their embers. Bint Aamir was left to attend to the embers as they turned into charcoal, and she was the one who gathered it all up. Just before dawn, Umayra gave birth. She wrapped her tiny, puckered baby boy in a rag and tied him over her share of the coal. She began to walk, carrying both bundles, her charcoal and her baby boy, back to the village, arriving home before the sun came up.

  How to Behave Suitably

  I wake up. It’s still dark, and from my bed all is silent. But I was there, in that dirt space in the back courtyard of the house and I was running, and that little forgotten space was itself like some kind of misdeed, and I was chasing this feeling, of having done something wrong. I was there by myself, running. She wasn’t in my dream. It was a dream of the place, of the childhood misdeed that place meant. No, she wasn’t there. Where had she gone, and how had she left my dreams? Why was she no longer stretching out her arms, and why weren’t her wrinkles forming little smiles, smiling at me? Where was the civet musk I always smelled? Maybe she had just gone out for a little while. Gone out of my dreams just long enough to take home our neighbor Shaykha, who was out of her mind and had gone wandering outside again without putting her sirwal on. Or perhaps she had left my dream just long enough to grab my little brother, Sufyan, by the underarms and pitch him high and catch him again, as she sang out a mother’s rhyme, again and again. Misk wi-zbbaad wi-uud wi-hall, tammayt sanatayn la adhan wa-la akhal . . . Musk and civet essence and aloeswood and oil: Two years with my baby, no call for tinctures or kohl! Or maybe she had walked out of my dreams to go and pay her respects to the Tomb of the Prophet, which she had dreamed of visiting but never could. Or perhaps to line her one sound eye with kohl, though her eyesight was now too weak even in that one working eye to see what she was doing. Whatever it was, she had walked out of my dreams and she hadn’t come back. She was no longer there.

  I no longer shouted those words in my sleep: “Don’t go!” She no longer smiled tenderly as she buried me in her embrace. She had gone. She abandoned me. She left me behind, thinking backward through the succession of time: winter snow, autumn, summer, spring. . . and all that time, she didn’t come back, not even once. Maybe she had not forgiven me? Maybe she had grown tired of trying to interpret the excuses that people made for themselves? Maybe, probably, she decided to leave us once and for all to our little occupations, our oblivious bustle. She decided to retract those words, Don’t go, to return them to the place from which she had launched them. Maybe she did have in her grip those thin and magic threads that pull words back from the consequences they bring and return them to where they first form inside us. Maybe she gathered up all the Don’t gos, those we said to her and those she said to us. She spooled them in to where they belonged and kept them there. Most likely she’d had enough of forgiving the sins and faults of the world.

  I was in the dark, in a bed that was mine for now, in a foreign land. My spirit was burning, consumed by my human helplessness, the impossibility of regaining or restoring just one moment from the past. I was asking only for one single moment, no more, but even that was impossible. All I wanted was to make one little swerve, to take just one step back: and then, from there, I would not go away. Her hair, which she always treated so carefully, applying oil and combing and braiding it. Her hair, which scissors never touched, had gone bunched and frizzy around her face and shoulders. It had become intensely, purely white, pure like the truth. She had gotten very thin, as the flesh clinging to her tall frame seemed to melt away. Her fingernails, neglected now, were no longer encased in what had been the full, strong flesh of those fingers I remembered. Her eye could barely make out the shadow outlines of people, and her mouth was almost incapable of taking in food of any sort. Going into her room, I had to hold my breath, trying to fend off the stench of urine, before greeting her in a brisk voice loud enough that she could hear me.

  “Zuhour! Zuhour,” she would rasp, “I want some rice.” I would tell her I had brought some. But she couldn’t chew it. I fled from the odor, from the grains clinging to the sides of her mouth, from the black nail beneath which dirt had collected. I fled as she was calling out. “Zuhoooouur. . . don’t go. Stay with me a bit, just a little. I want someone here with me, don’t go.” But I would go. No. This moment, this one moment, would not come back, no matter how hard I begged it to return. I would go. “Zuhoooouur. . . Zuhour.” Maybe I was not truly Zuhour; how could I have a name that meant “pretty blossoms,” when now I was someone who did not even turn around, or pay any attention? She called and called, for an entire month. “Don’t go away, don’t anybody go away, stay with me.” We didn’t stay: not me, not my brother, Sufyan, nor my sister, Sumayya. We all fled from her messy white hair and her stench. From her unsuitable behavior, her inappropriate looks and smells, her calling out, those sounds that disobeyed the old, old boundaries of the way one ought to be—where whatever one was offered, one felt thankful for, favorably treated, and nothing further was asked.

  I would walk through the city, and sit in lecture halls, and eat cold sandwiches in the cafeteria, and drink tea with Suroor in the kitchen in our university housing block. But there was a blindfold over my eyes. I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know why that was, or what it was that I could not see. I could feel the blindfold, and I could sense my unseeingness, but I couldn’t understand anything.

  Finally, Suroor had confronted her sister. “For how long did you contract this mutaa marriage? A month? Two? My patience has run out.” But her sister responded with calm assurance. “The contract is six months, but we are going to make
it permanent. We were made for each other.”

  Suroor came to me. “She says they were made for each other, Zuhour. No one is created just for someone else. And especially, no illiterate peasant from the lowest of the low is created for a refined, soft-skinned, pale-complexioned princess! But she says she means to make their marriage permanent. My father will just die if he finds out.” Yes, Suroor was very pretty, but she was not created for passion, and she would never be in love. The blindfold over her eyes was thick indeed, and she did not see.

  Bint Aamir wrapped the brown-ringed masarr around her head and knotted the two qirsh coins at one end, and went to the shop. She found it closed. Some boys who were tossing around a handmade cloth ball told her that the shop owner was at home. He was dying. She went to the house and his sister let her into his room. It was as dark as his shop, and the smell of the olive oil, black pepper, and clove mixture they had rubbed into his skin could stop one’s breath cold. She saw his wife sitting at his feet, her eyes red. He was panting and rasping as if trying to get a bit of air. The mutawwib was standing at his head. “Say: I ask God’s forgiveness for all my sins, the trivial ones and the important ones, the open and the hidden, the small and the vast, the ones I know and the ones I don’t know.” The shop owner did not say a word. He simply coughed and moaned hoarsely and leaned toward the cup of water in his wife’s grip.

  She came into the room and walked firmly over to his bed. She spoke in a very loud voice, as though he were hard of hearing. “I am Bint Aamir, and I have come to repay my debt, for the masarr I took on credit.” The hoarse breathing stopped and he stared in her direction. She undid the knot at the end of her masarr and took out the two big silver coins. He put out a thin, weak-looking hand and closed it around the money. His fingers trembled and his rasping resumed. The mutawwib ordered, “Forgive her debt, give her back the two qirsh.” But the shop owner’s fist tightened around the coins, and then he pushed them under his pillow. She left his room. She walked out of his house. Now the masarr was hers. She had freed herself.