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.