The Cat’s in the Bag

TAWIDA WAS BEING HELD in a brothel under the supervision of a woman who took her orders from al-Figgi.

After delivering Tawida to her, he instructed the woman, “Keep her as a trust. Don’t use her.”

He left her some money in return for Tawida’s room and board, then disappeared. Tawida was placed in a dirty room in a large house under the strict management of the fiercest, most formidable of the slave women. She would bring Tawida her food without talking with her, or even asking her what had brought her there in such a miserable state. She would force her to drink an earthen jug full of marisa, a kind of locally made wine, and would stand guard over her, stiff and unfeeling, while she ate and bathed, as though she were a machine rather than a human being. When Tawida asked her, “Where am I?” she wouldn’t reply, and when Tawida cried she would just tell her to be quiet. When Tawida blamed her and chided her for not doing anything to help her own kind—since the woman was also black—she slapped her across the face and bit her. One time she bit her on the shoulder and pinched her thighs until they bled.

Eventually, when Tawida heard the prostitutes’ bawdy laughter and the loud ruckus they made with the clientele, she figured out what kind of a place she’d been brought to. So then: she’d ended up in the worst place in the world. The faces that peeked in and gawked at her belonged to the older, more seasoned whores, who went around all made up even when they weren’t working, while the ones she saw out her window were the younger ones who walked the streets full-time. The brothel was populated by a mixture of blacks and whites, beautiful and homely, young and old. The place had a director, an administration, and a cadre of employees, each of whom had specific assigned duties. Some worked as hairdressers; others’ job was to groom and depilate the other prostitutes; still others were responsible for makeup, hair dying, henna, oral hygiene, massages, and abortions. Each service had a certain fee and was governed by specific regulations.

The shushana who’d been assigned to oversee Tawida was a huge, extraordinarily cruel woman with bug eyes. She carried out orders down to the last detail and didn’t appear to be moved by anything, not even by the tips or protection money she was paid.

As for the brothel owner, she was a short, thin, aging woman who acted and dressed younger than her age. She loved to chew gum, she wore lipstick all the time, and her hands and feet were always decorated with henna. She wore fancy silk dresses, beautifully embroidered vests, and loads of jewelry. She went around singing marskawi, and she got a kick out of calling her younger prostitutes bad names. She used to set a chair under a leafy bitter orange tree in the inner courtyard, and would sit there embroidering and smoking while she watched customers come and go.

One day the brothel owner came into Tawida’s room and asked her why she cried all the time. Tawida told her that her baby had recently been killed before her very eyes, and that she felt wounded and hopeless. The woman said nothing, seemingly moved by what Tawida had said, and withdrew. A day or so later, she surprised Tawida by offering to help her forget her painful past and overcome her crisis. She pointed out that when we pay attention to all the things there are to worry about in the world, they can take over our lives. So, she said, Tawida needed to forget about her little boy, and about the white man who’d enjoyed her for a while and then gone his way. She needed to go on with her life, she said. She shouldn’t hold onto anything or grieve anything’s loss. After all, she added, Tawida was young and petty, and could still have a decent life if she took proper care of herself. As for the baby boy, he would have been worthless to her as a black slave woman. He would only have brought her more suffering, since he would either have been taken from her and sold as a slave or, if his father had acknowledged him as his, he would have become a slave to his white brothers. When he grew up, he would have been conscripted by the Ottoman governor and forced to go fight somewhere for the caliphate state. The boy wouldn’t have offered her any protection or provided her with a respected place in society.

She advised Tawida not to get her hopes up if she heard that this or that slave woman had gained her freedom based on the system known as umm al-walad, “mother of the son,” which was supposed to guarantee that a slave woman who bore her master a son would be granted her freedom. That sort of thing only happened in fairy tales, she said. In reality, and for long centuries, slave caravans had brought more females than males. Every one of those slave women had become umm al-walad, but not one of them had received her freedom and a life of dignity. On the contrary, prostitution had spread and brothel babies were thrown in the street or left on mosque doorsteps.

After talking to her for an hour, the woman brought in a Bedouin man who’d come to the city to sell firewood, and who wanted a room to stay the night in so that he could sell the rest of his bundles the next day. He also wanted a Negro woman to keep him from getting cold and lonely.

But Tawida threw him out, filling the house with her screams. At the sound of the ruckus, the prostitutes came out of their rooms or checked out the bizarre spectacle through their windows. Some of them demanded that Tawida be shut up so that they could finish with their customers, while others made no comment. They figured this was her first time, and that she’d get used to it after a while.

“Be quiet, damn you!” the brothel owner barked. “You’re causing us a scandal!”

The girls who’d come out into the hallway told her, “Don’t make a big deal out of it. Pretty soon she’ll get the hang of it and stop making such a racket.”

As for the Bedouin, he said, “Let her scream. I like my women wild and unwilling! Leave her to me—I’ll quiet her down. Here, take what I’ve got now and I’ll give you some more tomorrow.”

“That’s not enough,” retorted the brothel owner as she counted the money. “Don’t you see how young and beautiful she is? No, no, that won’t do!”

“Why not?”

“Her owner will punish me.”

“I’ll give you more, I swear—tomorrow, after I’ve sold the rest of my firewood.”

A young prostitute who was assisting the brothel owner said to him, “But she screams. There are others who wouldn’t be so loud.”

“Shut up and go back to your work!” the brothel owner shot back.

Then, changing her mind about the agreement with the Bedouin, she said to him, “I’ll give you another young pretty one. Don’t bother yourself with this one. All she does is spout bouri.”

“I want her young, mean, and clean.”

“Damn the whole lot of you!” the brothel owner snapped, tying the hem of her dress at her waist. “You’re ugly, filthy, and old, and you want girls that are young and clean!”

Shutting the door on Tawida, the eccentric shushana disappeared briefly, then came back carrying a sack. Then she took Tawida to the kitchen and set her to work crushing date pits to make fodder for their livestock. It was exhausting labor, especially with all the other chores she had to do now: cooking, washing the prostitutes’ clothes, cleaning the house, foddering the donkeys belonging to customers who’d come from the outskirts of the city, and clearing the dung out of the place where they stayed in one corner of the house.

For several days, Tawida tagged along behind the shushana assigned to guard her and did all her work for her. Then suddenly the shushana asked Tawida to henna her hands and feet and put on lipstick and eyeliner. When Tawida asked her why, she replied curtly, “It’s none of your business.”

But Tawida would have none of it.

“No!” she objected vehemently. “I don’t want to!”

Forced now to take extreme measures, the cruel shushana called on other women in the house, who tied Tawida’s arms and legs to a chair, then started depilating her and decorating her hands and feet with henna to the sound of her loud shrieks. Accustomed to such situations, the shushana slapped Tawida, stripped her naked, and stuffed a piece of cloth into her mouth. When Tawida could hardly take any more, the shushana had her drink some locally brewed date wine known as lagibi to calm her down. Tawida downed the whole glass, hoping to God it would kill her and she could be done with it all. When Tawida’s strength finally gave out, the shushana smeared lipstick on her mouth, plucked out her eyebrows, and drew them in with kohl.

By the time her guard had finished plying her with booze, Tawida was roaring drunk, and alternately singing and ranting incoherently. The massive shushana picked Tawida up, slung her onto her back, lugged her to the bathroom, and set her down in the washtub. She proceeded to scrub her like a filthy garment as Tawida cursed her and called her every name in the book. Undeterred, the shushana just pinched her or slapped her hands. Then she put Tawida’s clothes back on, slung her onto her back again, and carried her to her room, by which time Tawida was too exhausted to put up a fight.

In a room redolent with incense, its sole window covered with a red curtain, a lantern flickered, and the man for whom all these preparations had been made sat expectantly on the edge of a canopy bed, incredulous that he had finally gotten to her.

The shushana came in, flung the object of his lust onto the bed, closed the door behind her, and left.

The brothel owner stood nearby, personally looking after the comfort of this special customer, while at the same time taking care to look just right in her newly acquired silk robe. She was pleased with the profit she’d made off this slave woman, who could fetch four times the price of some “baby zucchini,” or inexperienced prostitute. She was also counting up the contents of the basket the night’s distinguished guest had sent before coming. It contained a large quantity of food, for which she was grateful. So what could she say but “praise be to God” at the end of this day? After all, she’d been paid liberally, and she intended to give her brawny shushana a tip.

“This girl’s a real money horse,” she whispered to her shushana.

With a blank stare, the shushana nodded her head, repeating mechanically, “Yes, Auntie. Yes, Auntie.”

As the shushana spoke, she was munching on something she had pilfered from the gift basket. When her mistress noticed, she cuffed her on the back of her neck.

“How dare you! Did you lick the jar of natural honey al-Figgi brought? Well, then, you’re not getting a tip from me, damn you!”

With a mischievous gleam in her eye, the shushana said confidently, “I don’t take money as tips.”

“God damn you, you filthy dyke! Get away from me!”

The brothel owner rearranged her new silk robe and tied it more securely around her waist. Then, singing a tune under her breath, she did the rounds of her venerable establishment to check on the progress of the work.

The one who comes to us when we call

Approaches with a grace divine.

Graceful as a gazelle, admired by all

He comes clad in silk so fine.

Oh how handsome, how handsome he is,

Let us come to him when he calls.

We want him with everything in us,

The one who our hearts enthralls!

Tawida opened her eyes slightly, pondering her situation. Why is this happening to me? What sin did I commit to deserve these never-ending punishments and curses? She’d slept away a good bit of the time that weighed so heavily on her. But as soon as she woke up, she found herself in a vortex of black thoughts. First she’d lost her baby boy, and now she was being held prisoner in a whorehouse. If she stayed there, the brothel owner—the head whore—was sure to turn Tawida into a whore herself sooner or later. It seemed she really was a slave by divine decree. But Tawida wasn’t a whore, and she never would be, no matter how much certain people wanted her to be. She’d been torn away from the man she loved and the household she’d known all her life. And now she could never go back to them. If she did manage to escape from the brothel, she wouldn’t know where to go. Besides, al-Figgi would be sure to have her hunted down and brought back.

She recalled stories of slaves who had tried to escape before her. She remembered the man who’d been a slave at the Senussi zawiya. A sheep under his charge had been eaten by a wolf, so he’d fled for fear of being punished. After wandering for days in the desert, he thought he’d found his way to freedom. But the local authorities captured him and brought him back, and his hand was cut off. He’d run away to escape punishment, only to be punished a hundred times over!

She thought about a boy slave who had accidentally put out the eye of his owner’s son while they were playing with sticks, so he’d run away for fear of being punished. When he was brought back, his master cut off his hand and kept him in his service. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, three days later the master forced the boy to prepare his food for him with his other hand.

Then there was the slave woman who had run away from the brothels in Fezzan and gone to Benghazi, as she’d heard that being black in Benghazi wasn’t as hard as it was in other places. She was raped repeatedly on the way, and by the time she finally found her way to freedom in Benghazi she’d contracted syphilis. She thought about others who had escaped from the farms in Jaghbub, Kafara, and Fezzan and made their way to the coast. But once they got there, no one was willing to employ them, and they ended up as beggars, forced laborers, prostitutes, and paramours. Worse than being slaves now, they were no more than human refuse.

Tawida thought about all sorts of people whose heart-wrenching stories she had heard. She had no desire to meet a similar fate.

So she closed her eyes and wept without a sound.

Tawida remembered Muhammad, hoping against hope that he would come looking for her and take her to wherever he was. She wanted to see him more than ever. She’d been in love with his very presence, which had equaled freedom, life, everything.

Glancing around in the darkness of the dank room, she called out softly to him.

“Come!” she whispered. “Please! Look for me the way I’ve been looking for you. Let me live inside you the way you’ve come to live inside me. Let me be with you and escape from all this sorrow! Are you even on this same earth, under the same sky? Do the same sun and moon shine down on us both? I don’t eat, I don’t drink. I’m a stranger to myself. I’m wounded through and through. I’m racked with pain, and I’m free game for anybody who wants to violate me. Beloved one deep inside me, between my spirit and my spirit, in the spaces between one moment and the next, I flee to you in my mind from this bizarre prison and the one who holds me here. I flee to you, knowing I won’t survive wherever you aren’t!”

I weep over the days of my misfortune,

Sorrow robs me of sense and sight,

My tears flow without ceasing,

My eyes are bereft of all light.

Constant weeping leaves my mind in confusion,

Bringing new sorrow every day,

With no companion to offer me solace,

And no guide to point the way.

Copious tears have I shed in sorrow

Over the loved ones from whom I didst part

Can no one find me the longed-for cure,

And bring health to my anguished heart?

In the evenings, the inner courtyard of the Arab-style house was transformed into a circle of merriment and affable exchange. Carpets were rolled out, coal stoves were lit, and incense was burned for the most refined of soirees. At times like this, the inside of the house bore no resemblance to its outside: elegant and cozy, it created a distance between itself and the external world that made it a center of gravity for minds and hearts.

It was the country’s lost paradise.

The brothel owner thanked the black singer who had come with her small band to entertain the evening’s gathering of elites. The musical strains made their way to where Tawida lay, her eyes alternately opening and closing. She craned her neck toward the window that opened out onto the courtyard, where delicate threads of candle light and the glow of a lamp flickering from beneath the bitter orange tree stole in to her lonely quarters.

The darabukkas were warmed up, and glass bottles and spoons were brought to be used as percussion instruments. Standing at the center of the gathering, the singer launched into a heartrending opening with her sweet, captivating voice:

Aaaahhh! Wa ya la la la la li! Ya li ya li ya laay!

She asks not for a drop of water

to wet her parched tongue.

Though dying of thirst, she seeks no relief,

To her dignity she has clung.

To complain of your sorrows

to any but the Almighty

brings humiliation and disgrace.

But in patience lies wisdom,

and though privation now reigns,

abundance will take its place.

Oh, my aching heart!—Ah, ya ‘ayni, ya daay!

At the sound of the music, Tawida crawled up to the window on her hands and knees. Drawn in by the singer’s rich, melodious vocals, she took hold of the bars on the window, pulled herself up, and started to watch. In a perfectly rounded evening, the singer’s voice proved the perfect vehicle for the mournful sounds of the marskawi. Every now and then the singer would take a swig of Nazli Durna from a glass that had been set in front of her before continuing with her rapturous musical production. Meanwhile, the rest of the band sang with her as the dancers took turns on the stage. Some of them covered their faces with long, gauze-like scarves; others tied sashes around their hips, performing the dances with a professional agility and grace.

After the first break in the program, Tawida burst into tears.

As for the second part of the performance, its lyrics spoke directly to her, baring the gaping wounds in her heart. She cried as though she were hearing the voice of her soul as it sang of her loneliness and insignificance:

They’ve taken my beloved away, and he’s so far from me now!

Meanwhile, in another part of the city, on another side of its advancing night and velvet silence, Muhammad sat on his doorstep talking with his nephew Ali after a grueling work day.

“I’m not finding her, Ali,” he said morosely, “no matter hard I look. If you know of some other way, or somewhere else I can look, help me out. I’ve sent out spies all over, and there’s no sign of her. I’m afraid they might have carted her off to some far-away place outside Benghazi.”

Where could you be, Tawida?

Ali gave an empathetic nod. “You’ll find her one of these days,” he reassured his uncle. “Let’s do another search in the Slave Yards. We can also look in Al Birka, Al Kish, Ra’s Ubayda, and Zurayri‘iya. Pray they didn’t give her to one of the Senussi brothers. If they did, we’ll never get her back. The Senussis will fight to the death to hold onto their slave women, even the ones they don’t use as concubines anymore.”

“I’m lost, Ali. I’m done for.”

A sense of defeat hung over him nearly all the time. Tawida had been the first attempt at rebellion by this traditionally raised young man. In his relationship with her, rebellion had mingled with the urge to experiment, and a decision to indulge the urge. It was a quest to please himself for once, to live his own life, and to shed an unquestioning subordination and dependence that had been passed down from one generation to the next. When he was with Tawida, he was freed from all the ways in which he resembled the society around him, and he’d discovered a unique individuality in himself that he approved of. Loving her had awakened a heart sated with mundanity and erased the boundaries between black and white, master and slave. It had brought about a rare realization of the soul’s capacity to form itself anew. He liked who he was when he was with her. He was unearthing a personality that had been buried beneath that of his father, the family’s effective ruler. He wanted to be himself, not what he was expected to be. With Tawida, Muhammad had found everything he lacked, and experienced what he had never been able to experience under the weight of his father’s overbearing authority. The person he was in Tawida’s presence was the Muhammad he loved: whole and complete. So with her sudden disappearance, he had disappeared too. He had been lost to himself.

When Tawida woke up, she shouted out her window to her guard, “I want some poison. I want to die! Get me out of here!”

As soon as she heard Tawida, the shushana came running. Then she closed the door behind her and proceeded to beat Tawida mercilessly all over with her thick, coarse hands. Dripping with sweat, she screamed, “Die, then! Die! Isn’t that what you want? Take that!”

Her nose bloodied, Tawida fell to the floor, writhing beneath the shushana’s blows. Instead of stopping, however, her tormentor started trampling her with her bare feet. Then, as though someone had reached out and stopped her, she stepped away from a half-dead Tawida and stood there without saying a word, her eyes glazed, her parched lips quivering. She pondered the corpse-like body before her, the thoughts in her head a confused jumble. She glanced out the window. All the rooms that opened out onto the inner courtyard had their windows closed and their red curtains drawn. It was still early in the day, and the brothel owner had gone to take care of some personal business in her private coach.

Unless the prisoner’s heart really had stopped beating, this was her chance. She hurried to her room and knelt down in search of something under the bed. Then she brought out two bottles containing the remains of two types of locally brewed liquor—Nazli Durna and Wardi Mass. She hurriedly opened both bottles, took a swig from each one, and rushed them to Tawida’s room. Once there, she hoisted Tawida over her shoulder. Tawida was breathing with difficulty through her mouth, her uvula clinging to her palate, blood streaming out of her nose. As the shushana forced her to drink from both bottles, the liquid ran down the sides of her mouth. But she kept pouring them down Tawida’s gullet, wiping her mouth with her hands, saying, “Drink, drink! Never in your miserable life have you tasted anything like these! Didn’t you ask for poison? Well, these are the best poisons around, little one. Drink up now!”

Between the two of them, they emptied both bottles. Then the shushana dragged Tawida’s limp body to the door. After glancing outside to make sure the coast was clear, she hoisted Tawida onto her shoulder again, Tawida’s head dangling over the shushana’s buttocks and blood dripping from her nose as she whisked her to the bathroom. Once there, the shushana stripped Tawida naked, set her in the bathtub, and lit the burner under a large kettle of water. She stuffed Tawida’s mouth full of chewing tobacco and sat watching and waiting, not taking her eyes off the wretched prisoner.

When the water had heated sufficiently, she got up and secured the door with the big wooden latch. With nothing to see by but the light that emanated from the burner, and from the eyes of a cat that lay on a stone bench built into the bathroom wall, the shushana began dipping water out of the kettle with a metal cup and pouring it over Tawida’s head. Then, loofah and soap in hand, she went to work scrubbing off yesterday’s filth and today’s blood. In the course of several delirious rants, the inebriated Tawida told the shushana a jumble of things about Muhammad and her life in the livestock pens. She laughed and she cried, she ranted and she raved. Meanwhile, in a cloud of inscrutable calm, the shushana carried out her task to the rhythm of the splashing of the water and Tawida’s spitting, gurgling, and loud guffaws. Then, like a sleeper stung by a scorpion, the woman suddenly stopped scrubbing Tawida’s back and, in a series of rapid and unexpected moves, took off her caftan and trousers, and stuffed her voluminous torso into the tub with her.