Джоха Альхарти - Celestial Bodies

The buses coming from Asma and Khalid’s wedding were back in al-Awafi just before dawn. The women’s passion for song and dance had given way to exhaustion, and some of them had fallen asleep. Mayya, though, sat wide awake next to the window. Everything, all of it, had seemed like a dream sequence. Without any warning, she had been married to the son of Merchant Sulayman. Next, her sister was married to the son of Issa the Emigrant. Her youngest sister Khawla was still waiting — waiting for her cousin Nasir.

During Asma’s wedding festivities, she had whispered, over and over: Lord, bring Nasir back to me. Everyone knew that Nasir wasn’t coming back. But stubborn Khawla would not listen to anyone.

Mayya stared out the window at the hills still half-submerged in darkness, and tightened her arms around her baby daughter, only a few months old. If that was it, simply, if life was a dream, when would anyone wake up? She stroked her little one and whispered her name almost silently. London... London. Will you be happy, my baby darling?

Barely twenty years later London would be a new divorcee, extracting herself from a marriage contract though not yet in her marital home. With the divorce finalised she began struggling with all of the difficult-to-untangle emotions that bruised her sense of self-respect — an incalculable blend of longing, fury, antagonism and regret. She was certain she would never again be that person she had been before. What people called ‘an experience’ was in reality a chronic disease, surely — not one you can die from, but not one that is ever cured. Not one you ever really manage; you’re never free of it, either. Wherever you go it comes along with you, and it’s liable to erupt at any moment, reminding you of consequences it carries that you were either unaware of or were diligently ignoring. And the advice people give us to ‘turn the page’ is nothing more than a sick joke. London had tried to turn the page on Ahmad. To close that page and open a new one. How many people were doing the same thing, day in and day out?

London, come on! Hanan said to her. Life goes on. Where Ahmad’s concerned, just hit Delete, okay? Let it go , she said, in English to underline her point. But this page was a heavy one indeed, and trying to turn it, she couldn’t keep her hand steady. My God, people are so different. How do other people turn the page? She tried to turn to a new page but she already knew there were no blank pages in life. She’d felt this scar deepening into a wound, her dignity festered and she saw humiliation stamped in the very spot where desire still burned. She arranged her stuffed teddy bears against the pillows, sprayed her expensive Gucci perfume around the room, lowered the curtains on Muscat’s night-time and tried to sleep but could not.

Her hard gaze turned inward and ripped open her heart. In her mind’s eye, her heart was a triangle. When memories began to rise from the base of the triangle, they were so powerful and so disturbing that they shook all three sides of the triangle hard. The words pelted down, all of the words he’d said to her since the very first time she’d encountered him in the lecture hall, and the long telephone conversations too. The sides of the triangle collapsed, pulverised by all the words, and leaving only tiny word-shards in its place. She turned her eyes away but then she couldn’t see anything.

Hanan’s words echoed, over and over: Let it go! As if this were a rewind of some foreign film: he was a treacherous lover and so the heroine left him. When a friend said to her, Oh dear... my dear, let it go! the heroine forgot him immediately. Bygones were bygones, the heroine turned the page. End of film. So why did London’s hand remain frozen in place, letting itself be crushed under the weight of the page, until she could no longer turn it? Why did this pain, obscure but ruthless, squeeze her so hard? Why couldn’t she shake this humiliating sensation, desire and failure in equal measure? London thrashed about in the darkness. She couldn’t sleep. Or turn the page.

Zarifa returned from Asma’s wedding in a state of collapse prompted by all of the dancing, singing and constantly serving guests. But Merchant Sulayman was wide awake and waiting for her. He particularly liked taking her when she had just come back from a wedding, both because she was still in her outside finery and because she carried with her the allure of the new marriage, which excited him. Zarifa wanted badly to get some rest but she gave him what he wanted as quickly as she could and then he did fall asleep.

She thought she would drop off immediately too, but a sense of unease was edging its way into her though she couldn’t pin down the source of it. Weddings didn’t bring her the pleasure they once had. And, as proud as she could be of how true her dance steps still were, she really had gotten too heavy for such things. Anyway, what more did a wedding really hold for her than the endless service she had to give to the women who were there as guests? Constantly supplying them with food and drink, and on top of that, the dancing and singing, and all the gossip as well. There was no real pleasure to be had in weddings any more. Only in zar exorcisms.

Those endless ceremonies intoxicated her, everything from the grilled meat and the drinking to the heavy and incessant pounding of the drums, until the ecstasy of it all lifted her outside of herself, beyond consciousness and into one sort of trance or another. In such a state she might walk across live coals or lie beneath horses’ hooves or roll in the dirt under the careening circles of dancing bodies. Her mother — God be merciful to her mother — had been the zar’s Big Mama, the one who decided on when to hold one of these events in the first place, and then who presided over them. She was the medium, after all, the woman in direct contact with the jinn who had attached themselves ruthlessly to the human beings writhing on the hot coals. So let Merchant Sulayman whip her for an absence of two or three days while she was immersed in the zar. Let him accuse her of playing around with one of his slaves, let him curse her mother as the child of generations of runaway slaves! Let him do whatever he might, but she simply couldn’t put an end to these raging blistering ecstasies.

Even Habib couldn’t keep her from going. She’d leave newborn Sanjar there next to him and slip out silently during the night to join her mother. Habib never did anything to bring himself any pleasure, she told herself, and so he didn’t want anyone else to get any joy out of anything. If it weren’t for this unmanageable son of his she would have forgotten him completely. He was a lot younger than she was. From his mother he inherited his pale skin and short stature. When he clutched her she felt like she was being held by one of the teenaged sons of Shaykh Said who used to put their hands on her when she was barely a teenager, before Merchant Sulayman bought her. She made her aversion clear in every possible way until Habib left her, before she could cause a total scandal, acting as her mother had done with her own husband, Nasib.

Before long, Habib was gone. She thought she was well rid of him, no longer forced to put up with the way he screamed, from the depths of his sleep, We are free people, free! No longer forced to listen to his ravings about the corpses that were thrown into the sea, the pirates, the eye disease. But here was his son turning out exactly like him. Sanjar, too, would run away before long and her heart would burn with grief. If only she had never had him. It still made her groan to remember the long hours of labour and Sanjar’s difficult birth. Her mother tried everything to ease the way. She made Zarifa drink a rotten-smelling viscous oil, followed by water into which was mixed soil from a grave, and then more water, this time collected from the dirt floor of an abandoned and collapsed mosque. She made her drink the dissolved leaves of a lotus tree, and honey over which Judge Yusuf had recited verses from the Qur’an. She even turned Zarifa upside down, so frantic was she by this point. When she despaired completely she said to her daughter, Your grandmother died giving birth. Death is fate. But Zarifa did not die, nor did the baby. Ankabuta stuck her hand up the birth passage, tugged until the bluish flesh appeared, and slapped the shapeless thing several times until life surged into it. She performed the date-in-the-mouth ritual, tossed the baby into Habib’s hands, and buried the afterbirth under the threshold after smearing it with ashes and salt. She sprinkled the soft sand around exhausted Zarifa with water, gave her fenugreek and clarified butter to drink, placed a knife at her head to ward off any evil magic that might be making its way to her or the baby, and went home to sleep after a vigil that had gone on for several nights.