A Steed of Wind

SPREADING OUT the mat on the beach, Aunt Sabriya piled sand on one end of it to keep it from being washed away by the waves. She stood looking at me, ankle-deep in the water, her black-and-white striped dress being buffeted by the wind. She gripped the corner of it in her mouth, making it into a sail that billowed in the wind but without taking her anywhere.

I liked the feel of the air and the water against my spindly frame as my wet clothes clung to my skin. Aunt Aida’s son had brought a donkey to transport the mats after they’d been washed, and a bunch of boys were amusing themselves jumping on and off its back. Exasperated, Aida’s son pushed them away with his feet. Then, turning the humble mount into a mighty steed, he barked in his gravelly little voice, “Giddyup, horsey, giddyup, horsey, giddyup!”

Abandoning the mat I’d been working on, I went over and started playing with the boys on the donkey. I’d been away so much, helping my aunt serve in people’s houses or sifting sand for the construction workers, I think I must have really missed playing.

“That’s enough,” Aunt Aida scolded. “You’re going to kill the poor thing. Leave him alone now!”

Using the little donkey as their point of reference, the children started needling each other.

One of them said, “It hasn’t turned into a big fat ass like you yet, Nani!”

“You mean like you, Baraka!” Nani retorted.

“No, like you, Magawi!”

“Like you, Masouda,” Tijani chimed in.

“No, like you, Barnawi!” echoed Arabiya.

Aunt Aida shooed the children away from the squat little pack animal and we loaded the clean mats onto its back. Baraka led the donkey along and I walked beside him, my hand on its back to keep its load from slipping off. We headed for a big empty lot that served both as a dumping ground for everybody’s old stuff and as a border zone that divided the Yards into two different neighborhoods. Whenever we washed the mats for some household, we would spread them to dry on the palm tree stumps there. The place was littered with empty tin cans, rocks, charred palm tree stumps, garbage, driftwood, and various and sundry pieces of junk. Many items came from houses in the city and had been dumped outside the city gates by municipality workers. Residents would pick them up and take them home, thinking they might come in handy for one thing or another.

The empty lot provided a space for playing ball and tug-of-war, and for social gatherings. At night it was occupied by the men, who would get together to drink and shoot the breeze. It was also the place where dance events were held and where stray animals would spend the night.

As the night progressed, the Yards would gradually get quieter and quieter. Some people would get drunk and collapse on the ground like war casualties, and the ones who had no wives or mothers to take them back to their huts would sleep where they were till morning. In fact, there were some who would spend the night out in the open even though they had mothers and wives, since they were so stone drunk that it would have been too hard to drag them home through the sand. At one point we had to step over a man who lay sprawled motionless across the narrow path. Dogs would come by and sniff him, and ants and other small insects were crawling up his nostrils.

As we passed Durma’s shack, I had the urge to go in and talk to her but I didn’t want my aunt to know about it. So I said to Baraka, “You go ahead of me to the empty lot and I’ll catch up with you. But don’t go back to the beach without me.”

He led the donkey away while I stood in the dark looking at the shack. I tried to push the tinplate door open, but it was locked. I had the distinct feeling that Durma was inside. After all, where else would she be at that hour?

My bare feet were sinking into the sand, so I got down on all fours and started crawling back and forth in search of a crack in the hut wall so that I could see what was going on inside. Durma had plugged a lot of the cracks with pieces of old clothes, some so recently that they still smelled like sweat. I was quietly unplugging one of the cracks when I heard a rustling sound come from inside. I brought my ear up close to the tinplate wall, being careful not to touch it for fear of making a noise. At the same time, I steered clear of the shack’s foundations, which she had surrounded with barbed wire to keep busybodies from peeping in at her. I listened closely, wanting to make sure what I’d heard was actually coming from inside and that I hadn’t just imagined it. It sounded like murmuring mingled with a low moan. I was itching to know more about what was happening to Durma. Did she have a fever? It was a possibility, since Durma lived alone and had no family. Besides, she had asthma.

Or was she groaning from the taste of that nasty-smelling liquid? I’d noticed it in a wooden cup when I went once to take her some donkey milk that she could use to treat her asthma. Aunt Sabriya had sent it with me that day in a motor oil can. Durma had been lying on the mat inside and coughing like mad. She’d even put a pot beside her in case she needed to throw up, and she was moaning and groaning.

Whatever the cause, Durma’s shack with racked with fever, with the heat of something I’d never encountered before. The place was completely dark. But it was a nice sort of darkness. It was delicious like curiosity, and warm like the sea on a summer morning. Whatever was happening, I wasn’t the one experiencing it. Durma was. She had a direct knowledge of it that I didn’t have. The moaning was coming from her, while the murmuring was coming from somebody else, whose pleading voice seemed to be coming from between her legs.

I felt drawn toward the feverish whatever it was in the darkened shack. At the same time, I was worried about taking too long to get back to Aunt Sabriya. Baraka hadn’t come back for me, so I knew he might have gone back to the beach by himself to tell Aunt Aida and Aunt Sabriya where he’d left me. I jumped up, wanting to get my ear away from that tinplate wall, and to stop thinking about Durma being sick, but I was haunted by the murmuring and moaning I’d heard. As I tore through the sand on my way back to the seashore, my clothes billowed in the wind and started to dry. But the closer I got to the beach, the more scared I felt of what Aunt Sabriya might do to me.

When I got back, I found her and Aunt Aida washing some clothes. Aunt Sabriya had finished the bundle she’d brought from somebody’s house and was helping Aunt Aida wash her dresses. The two of them were sitting and talking as they did the laundry. Not far away there sat some elderly women who weren’t doing anything. A few young men were swimming, but they weren’t paying any attention to the evening laundry gatherings since they didn’t include any girls. A little group of puppies in search of food ran around barking here and there, while the moon lit up the evening hours for one and all.

Aunt Sabriya saw me coming. I couldn’t tell at first how she was feeling, so I tried to read the expression in her eyes. But I could see right away that Aunt Aida was hopping mad. Baraka must have come back and told them that he’d unloaded the mats by himself, which meant that I’d spent longer at Durma’s wall than I’d thought I had, and that my sprint through the sand had been for nothing. I hated Baraka now, and I cursed that nappy hair of his that hadn’t been combed since the day he was born. By this time he’d disappeared with his father’s donkey. I expected Aunt Sabriya to hit me, but she was uncharacteristically calm, and didn’t even make a move in my direction. Instead, she beckoned me over to where she was. Then she slipped her hand inside my clothes and, digging her fingers into my flesh, gave me a hard pinch somewhere not far from my private parts. I yelped. It smarts like all get-out to have somebody pinch you right there of all places, and my aunt’s fingers found their way to the spot without any help from her eyes. The fact that there was a pair of underpants between her fingers and my skin did nothing to mitigate the sting, and Aunt Aida did nothing to defend me. Gritting her teeth, Aunt Sabriya hissed, “Haven’t I told you not to go to see Durma or even talk to her?”

The only thing I could think of to deliver my thigh from those pinches was to confess, beg and plead, and make promises.

“Ouch!” I yelled. “That’s the last time, Auntie, I swear! I swear by the dirt on my mother’s grave!” And maybe it really was the dirt on my mother’s grave that delivered me from her that day. The only thing I’d ever been told about my mother was that she’d died. In any case, I decided to try swearing by the dirt on her grave more often, since my aunt wasn’t going to stop disciplining me with pinches no matter how old I got, and I was bound to need it in some other crises along the way too.

I finally broke loose from her grip and threw myself in the water to cool myself off. I rubbed my thigh, moaning in pain, while the two women looked over at me and called Durma bad names. I could feel the water cooling the spot where I’d been pinched, and putting out the fire that had been lit inside me by the tinplate shack. It also helped me recall what I imagined to have happened there. Deep down I supported Durma, who had mounted her own peculiar steed, determined to follow the path she’d chosen for herself now that Heaven had turned on her red faucet and her master’s lips had given her fruit wine to drink. The people of the Yards had nearly eaten her alive with their gossiping, envious tongues on account of the things that had started showing up in her shack. They were things they could never have dreamed of owning themselves: clean food, new clothes, a pair of good leather shoes cobbled especially for her long feet, a silver bangle instead of the bead bracelets servant girls wore and, most important of all, money stashed under her newly budding breasts.

So whose lips had Durma been kissing that night in her shack, and whose lips had been kissing her?

After cooling the blaze of the punishment I’d endured on account of Durma and the one who’d been pleasuring her, I looked into the sky and wiped the saltwater out of my eyes. Then I squatted submissively beside my aunt as she poured more prohibitions and threats into my ears. I stole a glance over at Aunt Aida, who had put the angry words in Aunt Sabriya’s mouth.

I wanted to be gutsy like Durma, brazen like the prostitutes whose ranks she had joined. I felt like telling my Aunt Aida, “You just hate Durma because she’s turned into a first-rate drummer. Have you forgotten that one of your own kids robbed her shack one time? And now you’re working to stir up everybody in the Yards against her because she figured out who the thief was by noticing what you were wearing around your neck! She exposed him in front of everybody. As for you, you got so riled up defending your boy that bouri was oozing out of your pores!”

As the two of them went on with their laundry, they talked about the Ridwan wedding.

“Did she sing yesterday?” Aunt Sabriya wondered aloud.

“Yes, she did,” Aunt Aida replied. “They say Khalifa was stone drunk, and that he swore not to let anybody leave. So the party went on all night. No doubt she was drunk too, and didn’t make it back. I’ll bet somebody took her to his house and she spent the night there.”

Aunt Sabriya offered no comment. Aida started singing something Durma had performed at recent weddings. The youthful new singer, tall and slender, who’d swept out of the Slave Yards on a steed of wind, not only had a beautiful voice but she could spend all night dancing, singing, and playing her drums without getting tired, and her songs had spread like wildfire all over the city. According to the men who’d slept with her, she had a warmth about her that they’d never found anywhere else—and they’d tried out their share of women. So this might have been another of her distinctive features.

As she scrubbed Jaballah’s trousers with both hands in a big cooking pot, Aida started singing a song of Durma’s that she was good at imitating:

I went to hunt the gazelle on my own,

But my shotgun let me down!

I don’t know who or what she was singing that song for: for herself or for Jaballah’s trousers, which never came out of the cooking pot. But she kept it up the whole time she was doing the laundry. And who was the gazelle, I wondered? As for who had brought guns to Benghazi, the Maltese merchants who’d settled there would have known the answer to that question.

The two of them laughed together, and then Aunt Sabriya sang another one:

They’ve kept me from my beloved, near though he be,

I’m thirsty even though the water’s right in front of me

When you come to the well you need a long rope.

But mine’s too short and I’ve lost all hope!

Aunt Halima quickly joined in along with another group of women who had been drawn by the night, the sea, and the singing, which went on until the last piece of laundry had been done. After I’d finished fetching water, I squatted in the sand looking out at the waves of the sea, dreaming of mounting a steed of lightning, thunder, and wind.

From that time on I started to perceive something new and mysterious that nobody else could see.