The Homecoming

I KEEPING with his parents’ desire to forge marital ties within the family, which had lived on the same street for generations on end, Muhammad’s brother Amin was soon to wed a relative’s daughter. The occasion would also include circumcision ceremonies for Sadeg’s and Isma’il’s little boys, and everyone on the block was busy getting ready for the upcoming festivities. Muhammad’s caravan was bringing a number of elder uncles from Misrata, and the travelers were expected to arrive a few days before the wedding. It had been agreed to postpone the celebration until after Muhammad had returned safely from a commercial voyage. It had been an arduous, months-long journey, and there were times when there had been no news of him at all. During his absence there had been a new outbreak of the plague in and around Fezzan, which had worried his parents and other relatives, and left Tawida’s heart crushed and sick with longing. Everyone, young and old, was increasingly anxious to have him home again. His absence was mourned openly by his mother, and in secret by Tawida, who by this time was passionately in love with him and thought about him her every waking minute. She often confided in Aida about him, venting her longings, desires, and worries.

Once she told her, “I’ve stopped feeling like a slave woman who’s just giving pleasure to her master without getting anything in return. I receive pleasure from him too and, as far as I’m concerned, we’re equals. We’re one. In love, he’s even more my slave than an ordinary slave would be. When he’s with me, Muhammad is a different man than the one people see on the outside. He’s not my master. He’s my sweetheart.”

Muhammad was in love with Tawida too. In her he had found what he would never have expected to find in a slave woman. With every passing encounter she excited his passions more. She made love to his very heart, where she’d come to embody womanhood itself. Not surprisingly, his fondness for her had aroused envy and rage in various quarters. However, his parents figured that whatever had developed between their son and a slave woman was nothing but a passing fancy, and that as familiarity and boredom set in, its flame would gradually die out. As for his wife, her fears had turned to resentment and complaints. After all, who was a lowly, wretched slave woman to compete with her for her husband’s affections? Her fears were being fueled and intensified by her husband’s sister Halima, who lived in Derna.

In short, Muhammad and Tawida had become everybody’s business, and nary was there a gathering in which they weren’t the topic of conversation.

When at last the traveling party arrived from distant Misrata, trills of joy filled the air, slaves sprinkled the entryway with rosewater, and sweets were passed around. Muhammad’s nephew Ali was ecstatic to see his uncle, his father, and the friends who had traveled with them. Embracing his uncle joyfully, he started chattering nonstop.

“The Shatwan clan isn’t worth a lick without you!” he said breathlessly.

“Be quiet, boy,” Muhammad replied with a grin. “People are going to get so jealous our uncles will cart us back to Misrata!”

With Aida by her side, Tawida stood watching the scene from a distance while his mother, his wife, his sisters, and his daughters crowded around the door to meet him.

“I can’t believe I’m actually seeing him again. He was gone so long, and not having any news about him made it seem all the longer and more excruciating.”

“So,” Aida bantered gently, “if I pinch you, will you believe it?”

The two slave women, who had left the kitchen to watch Master Muhammad being received by the women of the family, were being watched themselves. While everyone else was busy with the reception, certain individuals had their eyes on Tawida. She followed Aida’s advice and kept her feelings under control when she saw the long-lost beloved whose seed was growing inside her with every passing day.

As she watched him from her remote observatory, Tawida was moved as deeply as she had been the first time they confessed their love for each other. She thought back on their last encounter, the night before he left. He’d been bowled over by her forwardness. Yet it was a forwardness he loved. In fact, it was something he’d long dreamed of. In his surprise and delight, he’d wondered to himself how he could have been so oblivious to the love that waited so near him for all that time, and how he could have failed to see that his real life lay hidden on the far, neglected side of his household!

He didn’t see Tawida among the women clustered around him. However, as he told her later, he’d begun watching for a chance to see her as the crowd began to thin. As he sat among his sisters, his mother, his maternal aunts, the wives of his paternal uncles, and all his other female relatives, his sister Fatima said, “The servants have requested permission to greet you and welcome you home.”

“Have them come in,” he said. A long line of slaves then filed into the room. But it didn’t include Tawida, who had slipped back into the kitchen alone, fighting back the tears. When she heard footsteps approaching the kitchen, she busied herself with the pots and pans. Aida had come to report the latest news to her the way Ahbara reported the latest kitchen news to her mistress, Lalla Uwayshina.

“We were the last ones to welcome him home,” Aida told her. “The women were shocked out of their minds when he asked Fatima where you were!”

Tawida’s heart practically fell into the soup pot. But she revived again when, to her amazement, the master came into the kitchen to say hello to her. He was thin, his beard had grown out, and his eyes were full of longing. Tawida didn’t utter a word. She froze in place, her eyes brimming with all the love she had reserved for him alone, and with the yearning borne of separation. Ahbara stood at the door watching them, preparing to relay what she’d seen to her mistress.

Fed up with the girl’s obnoxious skulking, Aida tried to get rid of her.

“You get out of here!” she barked. “What do you think you’re doing, hovering around us like a damned fly?”

When, that evening, Lalla Uwayshina learned from her spies that Muhammad had been asking about Tawida, she issued instructions to keep Tawida working late into the night. However, her plan was foiled when her son sent Aida to her with the words, “Master Muhammad has sent asking for Tawida. What shall I tell him?”

Hearing what Aida had whispered in her mother’s ear, Fatima suggested, also in a whisper, that it would be wise not to make problems in front of the guests, who had come from near and far to congratulate them on her son’s safe return and to attend another son’s wedding. After all, she added, they wouldn’t want to give busybodies a reason to gossip.

Lalla Uwayshina sat in silence for some time, pondering her daughter’s advice. At last she nodded her agreement.

The minute she’d been given the word, Aida rushed to get her friend out of the kitchen, telling her to go take a bath right away because the master had called for her and was waiting for her in his cousin Siddig’s men’s reception area. Tawida was ecstatic. No one made any objection to the arrangement, since Muhammad had just come back that same day.

In the wee hours of the morning, Muhammad’s mother said to his father, “He sent for the slave woman that’s robbed him of his senses and driven him to neglect his wife. It’s a total disaster! I swear by the soil over my father’s grave, she’s bewitched him. Only a piece of trash would do this to him! And how can he be so reckless? That boy’s going to give me a heart attack one of these days!”

The father didn’t like what was going on any more than his wife did, but he was so overjoyed to have his son back again, he hesitated to say very much. After urging his wife to calm down and leave their son to his own affairs, he added, “Let him be this one night. Then I’ll take care of it myself.”

Undeterred, the wife went on, “Without a second thought he replaces his beautiful wife with a black woman descended from his grandfather’s slaves. Isn’t he even embarrassed by the fact that she’s pregnant? I swear, she’s put a hoax on him to drive him mad and rob him of his money. And it’s working!”

“Your son isn’t some little boy that could be duped by a slave woman. He’s just taken her as a concubine, that’s all. After a while he’ll get bored with her and brush her aside.”

“I’m curious to know what he finds in her that he couldn’t find in some other woman. I mean, why is he so attached to her?”

“Let’s leave off thinking about him tonight,” the husband urged. “We’ve got more important things to attend to now.”

“Well, alright,” the wife conceded grudgingly. “But only for tonight,” she added, raising her freshly hennaed index finger in her husband’s face.

“Only for tonight,” he repeated after her, sensing a plot in the air.