I could see my grandmother coming down the stairs, leaning on her cane. The sight brought a rush of affection and concern; I was afraid that she might slip and fall, and I hurried to help her. She put her weight on me and mumbled a few words. Something like “waiting for you.”
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” I said. “I’ve missed you.”
“I see you,” she said.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” I repeated. “I’ve missed you.” She was silent. When we had reached the bottom of the stairs, she said, “I’m not hearing you.” So I spoke more loudly. But she only shook her head, to tell me she could not hear me. I had the sensation that suddenly she had gotten much older. “Are we nearly there yet? Much farther to go?” she asked.
“A little more,” I said. “But we can rest for a few minutes, if you like.” I sat down. I sat her in my lap. I couldn’t help looking at her hair. A thick layer of dirt had dried on it, making it stiff. It shocked me that things had gone this far. I started trying to scrape the dried mud from her hair, until it was falling onto my hands. I burst out crying. She seemed to sense what I was going through. Tears ran down her face.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I answered.
I had seen this dream before.
I had this dream the night my sister, Sumayya—my sister the bride—came back to our house. But that time, when my grandmother asked me, in the dream, “What is it?” all I could say was “Our world has collapsed. Our world, which you kept balanced on your head, like the clay jahla.”
Sumayya had returned from her Thailand honeymoon. She came from her honeymoon directly to our house, suitcase and all.
“I’m not going back to him,” she said to my father and mother.
“What’re you complaining about?” my father asked. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He frightens me.”
She stayed with us for several days, crying the entire time. Her nerves were a mess. The neighbor women whispered things to one another, and wherever she went, intrusive questions followed her. His family came to negotiate.
Sumayya didn’t show them her little finger, broken. She bowed her head and lived with the struggle that was tearing at her mind.
He came. He kissed her feet in the presence of my parents, who were bewildered by it all and didn’t know what to think. He told them that she was in his possession, and he was in hers, and he would not be able to live for even one moment without his wife, his beloved.
For the second time, Sumayya left our house, dragging her suitcase behind her.
A month later, she was back. She couldn’t stop trembling. He came to the house to beg her to return. He threatened that he would harm himself. He lined up the gifts, and he scattered flowers all the way from our home’s front entrance to the doorway of her room. And so she did go back with him. And once again, he forced her to circle around him as stars orbit the center of their galaxy. In less than a year, no one was using her old name, Sumayya the Dynamo. She was just Sumayya now.
When she had still been Sumayya the Dynamo, she danced in joyous celebration of her handsome fiancé, and she sat next to him on the fancy, ornate wedding couch. Her longed-for state of bliss was so close, she thought, that she could almost touch it.
But those brief days of her engagement ended, and she was still waiting for this impending bliss. She could almost see it there, envision what it would be like. She almost felt it was so close she could tap it on the shoulder, and then maybe it would turn around and attend to her needs. But waiting for this bliss of hers was like waiting for that one drop of liquid, sliding along the rim of a cup, waiting for it to roll down the side—and this cup was not even hers.
Her tongue was out, waiting, and she could see the drop slipping along the edge of the cup. She could all but taste the pleasant tang of it. But the drop rolled slowly. The drop was heavy. The sides of the cup drank it in before she could. When it reached the bottom and her waiting tongue, it had already dissolved. It had become part of the cup itself.
Sumayya said to herself, “Maybe the drop of bliss will slide into me along with the wedding, or as soon as the wedding takes place and is over.” And the wedding did take place.
More than a year later, on their outing to Misfat al-Abriyin, she was plagued by obscure sensations that her husband was going to slip while walking along the stones edging the pool. That little wet yellow leaf that had fallen from the mango tree—she could see it there—would make him slip. The thought froze her. In her dreams, eternally, she would go on seeing those two paces that separated her from him. She would see that as he walked, his shoulders were rigid and high, as always; hers were bowed, as always. She would see that his leather sandals were wet and her athletic shoes were dry. In her dreams, they would continue walking along the rim of the pool. The two-step distance between them would remain two steps, no more and no less. But this was a scene held hostage to dreams; and eventually, dreams fade and vanish.
In real life, the interval between those two paces was a single instant, one moment in time, after which she did not take another step. Any step. She was frozen in place there, and frozen in place forever.