The next time she went home, Kathmiya was determined to suggest going to the matchmaker. But the conditions were difficult; Fatimah was pretending to be weaving straw but really hoping for more of the drama that had been brewing for the past month.
“Why don’t you check the sheets, see if they are dry?” Kathmiya suggested.
“You do it,” her sister insisted.
“I washed them,” Kathmiya countered.
There was an insidious little pause. “Okay, well, I’ll go.” Fatimah made too much of a show of walking out of the house to fool Kathmiya into thinking she was safe, but she had to use this sliver of a moment to press her parents for some action.
“Since last month with, you know…Uncle Haider and everything, I’ve been thinking,” Kathmiya said. Ali ignored her. She hadn’t bothered to pour him liquor because she was going forward whether he agreed or not.
“Yes, my sweet, but let’s give it time.” Jamila tried to put her off.
“Let’s not. Let’s just go to a matchmaker. Much more efficient, don’t you think?”
Ali was startled by her directness, but not enough to go along. “No.” He shook his lolling head on the grass-stuffed pillow where it lay.
“Please?” Kathmiya tried.
Ali didn’t bother answering. “Your father said ‘no,’” Jamila reported uselessly.
In came Fatimah. “No to what?”
“Nothing.” Kathmiya didn’t have to lose the fight and her pride.
“She wanted to go to a matchmaker,” Ali revealed.
“Is that so?” Fatimah asked, looking Kathmiya up and down. “Well, I think it’s a fantastic idea.”
Kathmiya waited for the blow, but when it came, it wasn’t that tough to endure. “I’m tired of everyone asking why my sister is single and working,” Fatimah said. “It makes us look bad. People talk. She might not get the best husband around, but at least she won’t be the subject of so many nasty rumors.”
Ali could never say no to his older daughter. And once he agreed to visit the nearest matchmaker, Kathimya didn’t care.
When they approached the large thatched tent the following day, hope was starting to thump a loud backbeat in her heart.
The old matchmaker, covered in black, peered at them. “What are you doing here, Sayed Ali?” she said, her astigmatic eyes shifting back and forth.
“Yes, well,” he said feebly.
Kathmiya could feel the weight that dragged down his efforts on her behalf until they were stone dead.
Like a person dumping water from a sinking boat, she started unloading some of her higher hopes. It doesn’t have to be a sheikh; any dung collector will do, she thought desperately.
“I am afraid your second daughter will be very difficult to match,” the old woman croaked. Kathmiya felt that familiar pounding in her heart. Like with Haider. Like it wasn’t bad enough that her circumstances were terrible—there had to be some mysterious reason that everyone knew except for her, something that made her smell bad, look awful, somehow repulse all good luck and even normal prosaic accomplishments.
But this was more serious than with Uncle Haider. Because as bad as Kathmiya felt, Jamila looked worse. Threatened, as though someone were scraping a blade against her neck.
The three adults, Kathmiya realized, were communicating without speaking. A raised eyebrow from the matchmaker. A nod toward Jamila from Ali. And then a look down—was it shame? contrition? regret?—from Jamila.
But Kathmiya’s mother tried to carry on the transaction as normal. “She is a great beauty, good around the house, very devoted and totally pure,” she trilled.
“True, she is beautiful—” said the matchmaker. Kathmiya wished she had one of her balled-up, stinking rags to throw in the woman’s face, but she clenched her teeth against her anger.
Smile.
Look Interested and Attentive.
Sit Gracefully.
Charm is Key.
“—no one disputes that. But there is a feeling around here—”
Now there was a dead certainty, like the way thunderclaps always portend rain, that the mystery was about to unlock, right then.
“—that her beauty might carry some danger,” the matchmaker said.
Danger? Kathmiya had always known she was unlucky, but dangerous? Was she diseased?
“The danger,” continued the old woman, “of having—”
“That’s enough,” shouted Jamila, loud enough to cut off the answer to that perplexing, defeating question: Why?
Besides disease, the only way Kathmiya could be so unmarriageable was if she were impure. But she wasn’t. She knew it, and even if they were wrong and they thought she was, they would have killed her a long time ago. Impure girls were disposed of with a rock to the skull.
And even if they had thought she was impure and miraculously let her live, that still wouldn’t explain how she would be a danger to anyone but herself.
Jamila had whipped around and was racing out through the small open entrance of the thatched hut, where the sun poured in too cheerfully. Ali followed right behind her. But Kathmiya stayed behind.
Charm was Dead.
“What do you mean, danger?”
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough,” taunted the matchmaker.
“Tell me!” Kathmiya commanded.
“Or maybe you never will, which is all for the best, but then you won’t be married.”
Kathmiya knew she would get nothing but riddles from this wicked purveyor of dreams.
When she got outside, though, she did catch a clue.
“How long has she known?” Jamila was asking.
“Known what?” Kathmiya grilled.
Jamila put her arms around her daughter and sent Ali off. “Go.” It was impossible that a woman should talk to her husband like that, but Ali, hobbled by alcoholism and the hidden devils that inspired it, was barely a man, and retreated.
Kathmiya had never paid much attention to the evil eye, but suddenly she was terrified of it. “Do I have the jinn?” she asked, gasping out a tearless, dry sob.
“It is not because you are cursed,” said Jamila, “but because you are blessed.”
What a ridiculous contradiction. But when Kathmiya looked up, she saw a stern conviction in Jamila’s eyes. “Really?” she asked. Against Kathmiya’s better judgment, her tense body was starting to relax.
“Really.” Jamila sounded so sure.
On one side was life in Basra. Kathmiya could despair and go back there. But on the other side were the wonders of the marshes, the water that cleaned everything, the tall grass, the bounty. Her mother’s faith. Hope.
“But why did she say I was—”
“I tell you what,” said Jamila, looking as worn as the bottom of Kathmiya’s only shoes. “I promise you I’ll find you a husband if you swear to me…”
“Anything!”
“…that you’ll forget about today and that whole conversation.”
Kathmiya would always wonder. She might even try to find out. But she wouldn’t tell her mother. “I promise.”