Джоха Альхарти - Celestial Bodies

Najiya did not return home. She went to her friend’s. Standing outside the wood door she shouted. Khazina! Khaziiiiinaaa!

Still arranging the burqu over her face, her friend came out. All well, Qamar?

Come on, said Najiya. Come and stay at my place tonight.

They walked for a long time before Najiya’s home came into view. My brother is camped out on the eastern sand bank, so we can sleep inside.

Khazina didn’t say anything until they had sat down, face to face.

What happened?

He ran away, her friend answered quietly.

Khazina laughed so hard she crumpled flat onto the floor. God forbid! He’s no man! He ran away? Hahaha! He ran away from you, Qamar?

Najiya did not laugh. She waited until her friend stopped shrieking.

I want him. I will have him.

Khazina wiped the tears from her eyes with the edge of her robe and tossed a piece of wood onto the fire. Qamar, this man doesn’t seem much use.

Najiya stretched herself. But I want him. And he will come to me. When the Moon longs for something, the Moon gets her desire.

Khazina shook her head. Sister, this man is married to the daughter of Shaykh Masoud, and he’s the shaykh of their whole clan. You think he will leave her to marry you?

Najiya laughed that famous, ringing laugh of hers that revealed her pearl-like teeth. She really does deserve that nickname, Khazina said to herself. She’s the Moon in full. No wonder people have all but forgotten her real name.

Slowly and elaborately Najiya extended her arms over and behind her head. Who said I want to marry him? Qamar doesn’t let anyone give her orders. I wasn’t created to serve and obey some man. Some fellow who would steal what should be mine and keep me from seeing my brother and my girlfriends! One day saying, No, you cannot go out, another time saying, No, don’t even get dressed, don’t even think about going out! One minute saying, Come here! and the next, Go away! No, no, Khazina — Azzan will be mine but I won’t be his. He’ll come to me when I want him, and he’ll go away when I say so. Ever since I saw him that evening, sitting with the others, talking and laughing, I knew this man would be Qamar’s. And he runs away? He flees? That man scampered off, like I was a jinni taking him by surprise, so he fled! Refuse me? Qamar? There’s never yet been a man created who can refuse me, Khazina. Azzan will come to me on his knees.

In silence the friends watched the fire die down until they were drowsy enough to fall asleep.

Najiya lived in two rooms opening onto a reception room that overlooked the courtyard, with a low wall that went only halfway up to the roofing. But when she was growing up, home had been a tent. Her father couldn’t hang onto money. She had never seen her mother and she never bothered asking about her. She had one love in this world — her little brother. The scars on her body were the traces of old wounds picked up in the fights she’d had defending him from other boys. She would hurry home every day from primary school to ask him who had hurt him today. Stuffing her yellow school pinafore inside her loose trousers she would go and confront them, in another day of fights. By the time the lads stopped beating her brother or calling him Mental, she was already in middle school. That was when she began figuring out that she hadn’t been created to sit in a hot, humid classroom with fifty other girls listening to strange words about grammar and numbers and science from dawn until the late-afternoon call to prayer. She thoroughly disliked the white school shoes they had to wear, with the plasticky soles that turned blackish after no more than a week, and the utterly plain grey middle-school uniform which was always crumpled and damp from the hot, crowded space. The strange dialects spoken by the Egyptian and Sudanese women who taught them made her uncomfortable, and she never got used to the idea of sitting in one little place all day long. Leaving school saved her from having to ride stuffed into a pickup truck with ten other Bedouin girls, their small bodies vibrating, buffeted by the wind and stung by the sand particles it slapped across them, for an hour or more before they reached the school building.

Her father was oblivious to anything but his raucous sessions — men grilling meat and drinking, and the zar exorcisms — and so Najiya took over. She handled all his property. She tended his sheep and camels, and in a few years their numbers doubled. She fed their thoroughbred she-camels dates, country samna and honey, and entered them in the races until she succeeded in selling one to a shaykh from Abu Dhabi for twenty thousand riyals. She had to get a passport for the camel, whom she had named Gazelle, before shipping her off to Abu Dhabi. When the money came, she replaced the tent with a reinforced concrete house. She bought carpets and fancy wooden trousseau-chests from the Matrah souq. She openly mocked her neighbours, who had built a full two-storey house but still did their business under the desert rush-bushes right outside, even though their new house had five bathrooms.

Najiya did not give in to her brother’s condition, either. She would not let him stay idle. She trained him to tend the camels and sheep. Her father’s death came as a relief. Now she could truly consolidate her authority over her life, her property and her freedom. As her developing womanhood started to draw attention, and word of her beauty spread near and far, people began calling her Qamar for she was as radiant as the moon. Making light of the suitors who flocked to the house, she devoted herself completely to her brother and to her growing wealth. When she saw the right man, she told herself, she would know him — and she would take him. She selected her friends carefully. She sold her distinctive Bedouin needlework, and her home became a magnet for visitors and a refuge for those in need. Woman or man, Najiya’s acquaintances held her in respect and a lot of awe.

When her brother suddenly developed polio and couldn’t move, she closed up her house. For months she lived with him in the faraway hospitals of the government, relying on the women she had befriended to take care of her flock. Time after time, the hospital authorities expelled her from the men’s section where her brother was kept. Najiya simply rolled herself up in her blanket and slept in a corridor. The doctors told her openly, as well as by insinuation, that her brother was a congenital ‘Mongoloid’. Now his legs would never work again, and so what hopes did she still have for him? When people urged her to look forward to his salvation through death she turned her back on them. When she lost hope in the hospitals she carried him home and shut the two of them in, closing the doors to others. She treated him herself, for a long time, trying everything that experienced healers prescribed and then treatments she devised anew, concocting various herbal mixtures. She rubbed his legs with hot olive oil and crushed cloves. She tried to get him to stand up by leaning on her. She took his weight on her strong back and dragged his legs around the room, back and forth, trying to get him to walk. She blended colocynth with makhyasa herbs and made him drink the bitter stuff every morning, wiping away his saliva with her sleeve. She would never allow that look of futility in his slit-like eyes to deflect her or to defuse her determination. She shut her ears to anyone who mocked her attempts and she vowed her life to her brother.

When Najiya bint Said opened the door to her house and slaughtered a pair of camels for almsgiving, her brother was walking on his own two feet.

You keep up this aura of friendly care but what are you really thinking and feeling, my hostess of the air, as you spend all your waking days suspended between sky and earth? I was just like you, hanging between the heavens and the earth, when I saw her first.