Sometimes I see an old woman, and I think she must be seventy at least, then I find out she is forty, and has had ten kids, four of them dead, and she is a widow.
I can’t stand any of this. I can’t understand it.
I am of the West and I believe in the equality of women. This is what I am. So does Olga. But when Olga is with Shireen and Fatima she is exactly like them. She laughs and is gay and intimate. These women have a marvellous time. They make fun for themselves out of nothing. I envy them. Believe it or not. They are supposed to be miserable and downtrodden. And they are. The dregs of the dregs. And so are their husbands. When you compare these lives, pared down to nothing, with what I can remember only too clearly of America I want to vomit. The fat vulgarity of it. When these women get hold of an old American magazine, a women’s magazine, they all crowd around it and laugh and get such pleasure from it. One tattered old magazine, the sort of thing you leaf through at the dentist and think what a load of old rubbish, they handle with such respect. Each rubbishy advertisement gives them entertainment for days. They will take an advertisement, and go off and stand in front of the only mirror in the building. It is an old cracked thing and the woman who owns it takes it for granted everyone must use it. They pull some cheap dress around one of them, and match it with the advertisement, and laugh.
I watch and think of how we throw everything away and nothing is good enough.
Sometimes they say they are going to learn languages like clever me and they sit around and I start off with French or Spanish. They sit, with the children all crowding around wanting attention, then one has to go off and another. I am sitting there, handing out my marvellous phrases, while they repeat them. But the next time there is a lesson, there are fewer of them, and then only one or two. Fatima is learning Spanish from me. She says she could get a better job than she has. She is a cleaning woman. If you can call a seventeen-year-old girl that. The language lessons haven’t come to much, but they made an occasion for fun while they lasted.
Shireen is delighted she is having a baby, though she is too tired to drag herself about, and it means even less food. And she worries all the time because it is time Fatima is married.
Fatima is very slim, and not pretty, but striking. She knows how to make herself attractive. She uses kohl and henna and rouge. She has two dresses. She washes and cares for them. Benjamin says they are fit for a jumble sale. But he would. I hate it when Benjamin comes anywhere near these people. They are all so slight and elegant and quick-moving. Like air, because of never having eaten enough. And then there is Benjamin, a great brown hairy bear. George fits in with them. He is like them. Quick and thin.
Benjamin knows he is out of place and that they find him amazing so he keeps away.
Shireen wants Fatima to marry a friend of Naseem, who is a clerk in the same office. Naseem thinks he will marry her. They joke about it. Naseem says, Have a heart, or words to that effect, why do you want the poor thing to be married and saddle himself with all this misery. Indicating Shireen and the five children. He laughs. She laughs. Fatima laughs. If I am there and I don’t laugh, they all turn on me and tease me, saying I look so solemn and boring, until I do laugh.
And then there is a sudden wave of black bitterness. It is awful, an irritability that gets into Naseem and Shireen and they hate each other. The children whimper and wail. The two rooms seem full of children’s dirt and vomit and worse. Flies. Bits of food. It is horrible, squalid and awful.
Naseem then jokes that perhaps his friend Yusuf would like me instead of Fatima because at least I am educated and can keep him in luxury. At which Fatima calls me into the cubbyhole she shares with the three older children, and she takes down her best dress from a hook in the mud wall. It is a dark blue dress, of a soft cloth, very worn. It smells of Fatima and of her perfume, heavy and languishing. The dress has beautiful embroidery on it in lovely colours. Fatima made the dress and did the embroidery. This dress is a big thing in her life. She puts on me gold earrings, long, to my shoulders, and then about a hundred bangles. Gold, glass, brass, copper, plastic. Yellow, red, blue, pink, green. The gold bangle and the earrings are precious to Fatima, they are her dowry. But she puts them on me and is delighted.
This has happened several times. She loves doing it. It is because she admires me for being so educated and able to do what I like. So she thinks. She thinks I am marvellous. My life seems quite beyond her and utterly amazing.
Yesterday afternoon she put all this on me and then made up my eyes. She made my lips a dark sultry red like a tart’s. She stood me in front of the cracked glass in the neighbour’s room, and the women came crowding around to watch. They were all excited and delighted. Then she took me back to her sister’s rooms and sat me down to wait for supper. Yusuf was coming. I said to her she was mad. But it was the wrong note, I could see that. She had to do it. Meanwhile, Shireen was all worldly-wise and smiling. Naseem came home, worn out. Thin as a rake because he does not eat what little there is for him, he always gives it to the children. He laughs when he sees me. Then in comes Yusuf. He is handsome, with dark liquid eyes. A sheikh of Araby. He laughs. He pretends I am his bride. It is funny and sweet. As if everyone is forgiving everyone for something. I say to them, cross, that all this is silly because I have no intention at all of getting married. But I am quite wrong to say it, because it is a sort of game. They are making an alternative event. A possibility. Their lives are so narrow. They have so little. So here is this spoiled western girl Rachel. But they like her really. But they have to manage her. And after all, she might marry Yusuf, who knows! Strange things do happen! Yusuf might fall in love with Rachel! Rachel might fall in love with Yusuf! A romance! But of course they don’t believe this for a moment. And so it is a sort of acted-out possibility, no hard feelings. It was a feast. Vegetable stew and meatballs. They hardly ever eat meat. And I had insisted on bringing in a pudding Mother had made for us. It was a pudding of yoghurt and fruit. Shireen made sure the children stayed up to get some of it, after their share of the stew. She couldn’t waste the chance of their getting some nourishment into them.
There I sat, all dolled up, a sacrificial calf. It was a lovely meal. I adored it. All the time I was furious. Not at them. At the awfulness of this poverty. At Allah. At everything. And it was all ridiculous because Fatima and Yusuf might just as well be married already. There is that strong physical thing, and the antagonism. They quarrel as if they are married, and are sure of each other.
After the meal, the feast-feeling faded away. The children were excited and a nuisance. Everything was a mess. Naseem and Yusuf went to a café. Shireen put the kids to bed. Fatima cleaned things up. Then she sat with me and said, Do you like him Rachel? Quite seriously, but laughing. I said, Yes I like him and I shall have him! Oh, you are going to marry him then? Yes, I shall marry him, I said. She laughed, but looked grave, in case there was a chance in a thousand I might mean it. And I kissed her so she should understand of course I wouldn’t marry her Yusuf. All the time I was wanting to howl and weep. But I personally think on relection that I am extremely childish and they are not.
Then Fatima took me into the court.
It was a night with a moon, last night.
People were sitting around in the shadows of the court. We sat by the pool. It is a tiny rectangular pool. The lilies in the earth pot at one end were smelling very strong. Olga was there, sitting quietly in the dusk. She had one of the babies on her lap. It was asleep. I don’t know where George was or Benjamin. Olga knew I was in with Shireen and Naseem and Fatima because I had asked to take the pudding. She knew about Yusuf. She was worried in case I hadn’t behaved well. She didn’t want me to have hurt their feelings.
When I came out and sat by the pool with Fatima she was looking at my face to see if I had behaved well. So I gave her a look which meant Yes I have.
The moon was overhead. It should have reflected in the pool. But there was this dust on the water. Also little bits of twig. Also bits of p
aper. The water is never clean. A woman will take a child that has made a mess and wash it there. Or someone will bend and splash water over his face, in the heat. Olga began by trying to stop people using the water but she has given up. She says by now they must be immune to any germs. Fatima leaned forward, and began carefully with the side of her palm to scoop the dust and rubbish off the water. Then Shireen came out from her quarters and she sat by Fatima and she too creamed off the dust. She knew what Fatima was up to, but I didn’t. And Olga didn’t. They were obviously up to something. This went on for some time. People sat quietly around, tired after the hot day, watching the sisters using the sides of their palms to scoop off the dust and wondering what would happen next.
Then Naseem came back from the café. He had been gone only an hour. He was tired, and kept yawning. He stood for a while leaning against a wall watching the sisters. Then he sat down by his wife, close but not too close, because they behave with dignity in public. He was close because he wanted to be. His leg and thigh was at least six inches from Shireen’s folded-up leg, but I could feel the warmth of their being close. I could feel the understanding between them, in their flesh. They were conscious of every little bit of each other, even though they scarcely looked at each other and Shireen went on clearing the water. I was amazed by that thing between them. I mean the strength of it. If I could only understand it. Those two sitting there together in the dusk on the edge of the little pool, with the moon shining down – all the rest of us might just as well not have been there. I don’t know how to say it. I was staring at them and trying not to.
And all the time Shireen went on competently scooping and skimming, and Fatima scooped and skimmed. And I was sitting there, all dolled up. Then the pool was clear. It was a little dark rectangle of water with a slit of moon shining brightly in it.
Then Fatima, smiling and delighted, and Shireen, smiling and pleased, came to me, one on either side, and gently pushed me forward to look in the pool.
I didn’t want to. I felt ridiculous. But I had to. Naseem was sitting there, cross-legged, alert, watching, smiling, very handsome.
I was made to look at myself. I was beautiful. They made me be. I looked much older, not fifteen. I was a real woman, their style. I hated the whole thing. I felt as if Shireen and Fatima were holding me and dragging me down into a terrible snare or trap. But I loved them. I loved that strong physical understanding between Naseem and Shireen and I wanted to be part of it or at least to know what it was. It wasn’t just sex, oh no.
The girls kept exclaiming over my reflection and softly clapping their hands, and making Naseem bend forward to look into the pool and then he clapped his hands, partly sardonic, and partly genuine. And the other people around the pool were smiling.
I was afraid of George coming in and seeing this charade going on. Because he hadn’t seen what had led up to it. I could feel the tears start running and I hoped no one would notice. But of course Shireen and Fatima noticed. They exclaimed and kissed me and scooped the tears off my cheeks with the side of their palms that were still damp from the pool, and they said I was beautiful and lovely.
Meanwhile, Olga sat there watching, holding the sleeping baby. She did not smile. Nor did she not smile.
Olga, I will put down here as a fact, is not beautiful. This is because she is always tired and doesn’t have time. Olga is English to look at, in spite of her Indian parent. She has the stubby solid look. She has dyed blond hair that is not always properly dyed. She has dark eyes that are sensible and considering. She is in fact too fat. This is because she forgets to eat sometimes all day, and then goes ravenous into the food cupboard and absentmindedly crams in bread or anything that is there to fill herself. She doesn’t care. Or she will eat pounds of fruit or sweet stuff instead of a meal while she is writing a report.
She has nice clothes which she buys all at once to get it over with, but then she forgets about looking after them.
She sat there looking at this daughter of hers, who was so beautiful and exotic.
She was most interested in it all. I knew perfectly well she was thinking that all this would be good for me. Educational. Just as living in this poor building in this poor part of the town is good for us.
I could not stop crying. This disturbed the girls very much. Suddenly they did not understand it at all. Soon Naseem made them go off with him to their rooms, but first Shireen and Fatima hugged and kissed me, very affectionate and concerned, and I wanted to howl more than ever.
I stayed there on the edge of the pool. So did Olga. Then the others went off to sleep. They all had to get up early and they are tired with their hard lives.
That left Olga and me. I leaned forward and took a good look at the glamorous beauty. I have got thin in the last year. Sometimes I look at myself naked. The Queen of Sheba has nothing on me. Breasts and lilies and goblets and navel and the lot. But I don’t want it. How could I want to be grown-up and marry and have six kids and know they are going to die of hunger or never have enough to eat.
When there was no one but me and Olga, and no chance of anyone coming out into the court, I did something I had been wanting to, but I couldn’t while Shireen and Fatima were there. I loved them too much.
I took some sand from the pot around the lilies, and gently strewed it over the still surface of the gleaming water. Gently. Not too much. Just enough so that when I looked in I could no longer see the beautiful exotic Miss Sherban, Rachel the nubile virgin.
Olga watched me do this. She did not say a word.
I leaned over the pool, to make sure I couldn’t see myself, only the blurred outline of the beautiful moon, shining down from the stars.
By the morning, if Shireen and Fatima remembered, and chanced to look, all they would think was that the winds had blown dust across the sky and some had fallen into the pool.
Olga got up and took the baby off to the room it belonged in. Then she came and put her arm around me and said, Now come on, go to bed. And she led me into our quarter. She hugged me and kissed me. She said, Rachel, it really isn’t as bad as you think.
She said it humorous but a bit desperate.
I said, Oh yes, it is.
And she went off to bed.
I went through to my little mud room. I sat on the door-sill, with my feet in the dust outside, and I watched the night. I was still in Fatima’s best dress of course, with her precious bits of gold. Being in that dress that she had been in a thousand times was something I can’t describe. If there is a word, I don’t know it. The cloth of the dress was full of Fatima. But that wasn’t it. It smelled of her and of her skin and her scent. It was as if I had put on her skin over mine. No dress I have ever had in my life could possibly feel like that. It could never be that important. If I had a fragment of that cloth, wherever I was in the world, if I came on it in a drawer or a box, I would have to say at once, Fatima.
The feel of that warm soft cloth on my skin was burning me.
I understand that old thing, about a woman rending her bosom with her nails. If I had not been in Fatima’s precious best dress that she would need to get married in, I would have raked my nails through the dress and into my bosom. And I would have raked my cheeks with my nails, too, but the blood would have hurt Fatima’s dress.
I sat there all night until the light began to get grey. There were some dogs trotting about in the moonlight. The dogs were very thin. Three of them. Mongrels. So thin they had no stomachs, just ribs. I could feel their hunger. Living in this country I have a fire in my stomach which is the hunger I know nearly everyone I see feels all the time, all the time, even when they sleep.
Then I go into meals with the family and eat, because of course it is ridiculous not to. But each mouthful feels heavy, and too much, and I think of the people who are ravening. I am sure that even if I lived in a country where everyone had enough to eat all the time, and lived there for years, I would still have this burning in my stomach.
I did not go to bed last night. When th
e sun came up I took off Fatima’s beautiful dress and folded it and put the earrings and the dozens of different bangles with it. Later I shall take these things over to her. One day soon I expect that I and Shireen will help Fatima into this dress so that she can marry Yusuf.
A letter from BENJAMIN SHERBAN to a college friend
Dear Siri,
Here is my promised account of the circus.
On the afternoon before leaving, George ‘received’ – the only word for it I am afraid! – representatives of the three organizations he was to represent. The Jewish Guardians of the Poor. (Female, black.) The Islamic Youth Federation for the Care of the Cities. (Male, a very superior fellow, combining a brand of marxist socialism peculiar to himself and I gather perhaps four others, with an ancient lineage of which he has no intention anyone shall remain in ignorance.) The United Christian Federation of Young Functionaries for Civil Care. (Female, brown.)
These three entrusted inordinate quantities of messages, briefs, reminders, cautions, and good wishes to their delegate and departed to three different far-flung areas of Morocco, well pleased.
I travelled with George only because he seemed to insist, and on our arrival we were put up in the house of one Professor Ishak. The usual interminable confabulations went on from dusk until after midnight, and again George seemed to need my support, otherwise I would have gone to bed. The pre-and/or post-conference junketings have never held any appeal for me.