It was dark. I was floating in a spectral wave between sleep and wakefulness when I was awakened by the Nigerian girl’s screams.
It was a recurring ritual that annoyed some of the students, though most didn’t care. The worst thing that happened to her in response was when a student, who had already been threatened with expulsion from the university if he did not pass the end-of-year exams, broke down her door and attacked her and the guy who was with her in the room. They were naked, utterly bewildered and shaking in terror, until the student blurted out that he needed to concentrate on his studies, and that she was no longer in the jungles of her home country, and that she had better figure out how to quiet down. It was said that she made a formal complaint about his racist behavior, but it was also said that she agreed to remain silent if he paid for repairs to the door he had smashed open.
I couldn’t go back inside my apparitions. My grandmother’s face filled the darkness and lit it with a sallow glow. That mouth—could it ever have been a young person’s mouth? I only ever saw her in old age. No one had taken a photo of her before the wrinkles began to show. Wrinkles around her mouth, carved by the drudgery of her life. Wrinkles that arrived before any man’s finger or mouth could touch the soft skin of a young woman. Lips that went dry before they could be met by the lips of a lover or a husband. A face that drooped, its freshness gone, before any one man on the face of the earth could savor it. No young admirer ever gazed into that one good eye of a young woman, and saw the intelligence, determination, and magic in her gaze. No finger quivering with desire ever traced the path of her eyebrows before they turned to white. No man was ever there to put his hand out, trembling, hesitant, to her hair, to part it or to lift its locks or to inhale its beauty. She carried herself tall like a date palm or a stallion, and then she withered like an ancient tree, unseen by human eyes and untended by human hands, other than those of the physicians who pushed the sleeves up her shriveled arm abruptly to plunge their needles into the thin flesh, and those of the women who washed the dead, who stripped the clothes off this octogenarian body, the virgin body of my grandmother, before sending it, cleansed, to the grave.
Those long legs, how many times my siblings and I slept cuddled on the lap they made. How many times we played around and between them, and swung on them, and how much of our childhood filth those legs bore, before dragging us to the toilet for training as they had dragged our father years before. Legs that we so often hid behind, trying to conceal ourselves from my father’s whippings and my mother’s loud calls. Yes, how often we scuttled behind them to avoid a lashing that fell across her legs instead of ours, or a scolding that confronted her rather than us. Her legs never learned any other love but ours; never had a chance to give themselves to anyone but these little ones; were never desired by a man and never possessed by anyone other than us, the possessive children.
This chest against which we slept, all of us, until we were quite grown up—did it really nurse our father? It was just beginning to bud when the shop owner noticed it, and it came into full flower as the true home of our father, and then it was ours. And then it collapsed, it wilted, without a man having ever retreated into its pure clarity, to remain there, in desire, held within its warmth.
I was swept up again in the bewilderment that had overpowered me when the corpse washers surrounded her and stripped off her clothes. Don’t do this to her! Keep her covered by what covered her in life! The perplexing, awful sight of what they were doing upset and confused me so much that they had to drag me to a spot far enough away that I could see but only at a distance. Only so that I could observe my grandmother’s body, there at the mercy of strangers’ hands, she whom no hand had ever touched in her very long life. Some woman put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s fine, Zuhour, you can be assured that it’s all fine. We are covering her with sheets. We’re protecting her modesty, shielding her in all these layers.”
Later on, my sister, Sumayya, told me I was imagining things. She wasn’t stripped of her clothes out in the open, it only happened behind sheets that curtained her, and no one else washed her body for the burial. Only us, and a few women who were helping us. Only us. Her grandchildren, who were not really her grandchildren. We who were not related by blood. We washed her. “And you, Zuhour, you were screaming at people, so they took you away from it for a bit.” But my sister is the one who was imagining things. I saw them! They were tearing off her masarr. She had kept her hair concealed but now it broke in white waves all over the place, everywhere, her hair that we washed and oiled once she no longer could do it, and then only occasionally. Ah, they have perfumed it now, Grandmother. Look, Maah—they have put aloe and camphor and musk on it. As you would never have dreamed we would do, in your final years on this treacherous deceitful earth. They perfumed your white waves of hair that no husband ever sought shade in. Only the son and the son’s children ever knew the shelter of that hair.
Her dead body looked nothing like her. It looked a lot like me.
When they laid out her corpse in our sitting room, I saw myself.
I crept away, as far as I could go. Away from her, away from me, away from my corpse laid out there for loved ones to mourn.
There were no loved ones other than us. Mansour, his wife, and his children, that’s all. Those who came to gather around us only did so out of courtesy, or to please us.
The neighbor women came silently. They came to give us their solid assurances that we had done exactly what we ought to do, supporting the old woman in her weakness and illness, seeing her through her final years. They said to my mother, “You did all you could.” They said to me and to my sister, “You didn’t fall short.” They said similar words to my father. “You did enough.” As if she wasn’t his mother, or the mother of his children, as if all her life she was only that old woman, crawling and crying out to us all, “Don’t go.” Don’t go!
If our neighbor Shaykha had still been alive, she would have truly mourned. She loved my grandmother, and she probably felt in her bones, even after she had lost her senses, that my grandmother was the only person in the world who cared for her and knew how she felt in the years before her mind took its departure and began wandering down fantasy paths. Shaykha used to come by late in the morning, every day, to drink coffee with my grandmother. She didn’t have a piece of mending in her hand, or a kumma ready to embroider, as the neighbor women always did. She came with empty hands, which were always ready to come to my grandmother’s aid. Shaykha’s hands picked through the fresh dates just off the trees, removed pits from dried dates, watered plants and trees, separated and peeled garlic cloves, removed the pith from the peel of dried lemons. Shaykha never talked about anything or anyone but her son, the angel who was kidnapped by a sly wicked jinni woman so she could take him into exile, to those foreign lands, the lands of the unbelievers. Those people who never washed the filth off their bodies and never asked for news of their own mothers.
And then we all got older. Me, my siblings, my grandmother; and our neighbor Shaykha. I would be studying in my room, my window open, and suddenly, there she was, my grandmother. I would see her springing up from the shade of the bitter orange tree to scurry toward the door. That’s how I knew that our neighbor Shaykha had come out of her house again and over to ours without her trousers on, and that my grandmother would be taking her home and helping her get dressed again.
An hour later she would return to the shade of the narinjah tree, panting. I would guess, seeing her, that she must be seventy or so. And I would think, that whatever her exact age was, she was certainly the most determined person there could ever be. And, coming home from school, I would almost always come upon Shaykha, wandering through the lanes barefoot, her hand gripping a little coffee cup full of pounded rice. She would shriek at me. “Zuhour, Zuhour, have you seen Hamid? I’ve been looking all over for him since morning. He went out to play and he didn’t come home. He didn’t have his meal, the poor boy—I’ve pounded some rice for his lunch. If you see him, tell him to come home, his food is getting cold.”
I would shake my head and move away quickly. My girlfriends from school would be laughing. Our neighbor Shaykha went on trudging through the narrow lanes, looking for her son who had emigrated forty years before, so that she could feed him the cupful of pounded rice. My grandmother was the only one who could get Shaykha to go home. She would put a plate over the rice, and show her where her sandals were, so that she wouldn’t go out again in the hot sun without having them on.
We were not there to witness Shaykha’s death. I don’t know whether her corpse looked like her. It was the summer and we were in the Emirates. We’d been rewarded for our success in school with a trip to Hili Fun City. When we returned, happily weighed down with our plastic animals, brightly colored balls, and little diaries with pink hearts on the covers and gilt locks, we found our neighbor Shaykha’s door locked. My grandmother told us that she had missed her for a whole day, so around the time for sunset prayers, she had gone over. She found Shaykha stretched out full-length, fully dressed, her shoes on her feet, surrounded by coffee cups holding ground rice that were giving off a fermented smell. She was dead.
Less than ten years later, we shut the door to my grandmother’s room with a steel lock. She had died, gone silent, left the world as she lived in it, without a home, without a field, without a beloved to hold her close, without a brother to take care of her, and never having had children who came out of her own body.