Women Who Blow on Knots Read online

  Amira was getting through her whisky fast when Maryam said, “It’s like the movie suddenly stops and you step inside.” The Purple Rose of Tunisia, I thought to myself. This is just that kind of night. I would have been scared at the thought of suddenly meeting a group of interesting men, a meeting which might have led to the bombing of Paris. But this felt more like the curtain at La Scala was rising and I was just getting to know some very interesting women. I was grateful. It was happening again…

  Amira turned to Maryam as if to say, what are you doing here?

  With little coloured lightbulbs flickering in her eyes, Maryam said, “Ostensibly I’m here for my research on Queen Dido, founder of Carthage. But I admit I’m also running away from my own movie, which is showing right now in Cairo.”

  Both of them stopped talking just when their stories were getting interesting – I wondered if this was because Arab women knew Scheherazade by heart.

  With that we sat down at a wrought-iron table in the darkest corner of the square terrace, the moonlight falling in bands across our faces, the straps of our white dresses repeatedly falling off our damp shoulders, and we laughed together as we inspected our legs, stretched out drunkenly before us. We laughed about the hotel receptionist, laughed about the hotel rooms that looked more like prison cells, at the women dancing at the wedding… Amira imitated Tunisian men and her impersonations had us bent double. Then we had a go at Egyptian and Turkish men. If we could have decoded the banter, put it all down on paper, we might have ended up with a Whimsical Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern Men. Then we were quiet for a while. Amira still hadn’t told us what she did for a living. I was curious.

  “So?” said Amira to Maryam, “why did you leave Egypt?” For a moment it seemed Maryam was going to tell her story. Adjusting her dry academic tone to fit Amira’s laidback style, she seemed to be drawing on a vocabulary she’d never used before.

  “Sweetie, I messed up. I slept with someone. And so now you’re graced with my presence.”

  Like a plump chicken, Amira clucked, “Go get ’em sister!”

  As she spoke Maryam’s body language switched from the male to female, but occasionally there was a blip and she got caught somewhere in between. One of her shoulders would jut out like a tough guy, but then suddenly she would throw her shoulders back like a woman. When Amira brought her breasts close to the table, Maryam leaned forward, and when Amira leaned back Maryam did so too. Inspired by the game, Maryam’s voice grew husky.

  “Till not so long ago your sister here was holding onto her innocence… I mean for that first night with that lucky man… But all bets are off now.” She laughed.

  The puffed-up street talk did her no favours, and neither did the attempt to sweep away her sadness. It was awkward to hear a proud, virile woman like Maryam resort to such loose talk. But Amira was compassionate and she quickly came to the rescue, scattering the sour taste in the air.

  “Oh! So that means we have our own bride!”

  With a finger Amira traced the curve of her smile up to her ear then raised her glass. The loud clink dispelled the lingering sadness that Maryam had failed to conceal beneath her words. She was clearly a woman who had a handle on the world but not on her heart. With visible good cheer, Amira jumped into a brighter mood. Maryam, however, still fumbled with the same forced slang.

  “I’m thirty-six years old, buddy! Studied at Cambridge. Got my Masters and PHD at Princeton. I’m a Muslim. And I mean the praying kind. So what I’m saying, honey, is that I never had time for that sort of stuff. And then … of course … you know how conservative Egypt is. Nothing like Tunisia.”

  Amira laughed.

  “Don’t go there!” she said, still laughing. A bitter laugh. Which made the game of lightening the mood more difficult. Obviously there was something else Amira couldn’t sweep away and it most likely had to do with Tunisia, and certainly with conservatism. Maryam suddenly pushed back from the table with a grim look on her face.

  “Then there was Tahrir Square…”

  Pulling a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, she went on. “When Tahrir happened … how can I put this? It was something else. Like magic … something like that…”

  Amira leaned back. She didn’t seem especially interested in hearing about magic and what actually happened at Tahrir Square. When people don’t pay attention to a story that’s being told for the first time I always get a terrible feeling, like someone might die.

  “A feeling of solidarity?” I asked.

  “Exactly. We were one. When people step out of themselves… It’s like women, men, together, they become brothers and sisters in prayer. Like we were washing together, praying together. Taking refuge,” Maryam said. An enchanted fairy-tale lantern was taking shape over her head.

  “Of course no more fear, no more sin… And in such a setting, one night in Tahrir, I…”

  “No way!” blurted Amira, anticipating the juicy details.

  “That’s right, mademoiselle,” said Maryam, coolly nodding her head.

  “You mean you did it in a tent?” I said, as if I had done the same and I wanted to give the impression that I fully understood how it happened. The truth was that Maryam didn’t look like the kind of woman that would do anything so bold. You could take off all her clothes but you wouldn’t find the woman inside. Still bent on teasing, Amira continued to make light of it all, deliberately shooting low.

  “Well? Was he any good?”

  Put off by the impertinence, Maryam didn’t answer. She forced a smile, and kept up the tough-guy style. I had no choice but to try to smooth things over.

  “A few years back I spent a year in Beirut. My mother was a little worried, and curious too. I went to see her in Turkey and we were talking in the kitchen. She wanted to know what I was doing in Beirut and what the Arabs were like. She wanted to know if they were all super religious, that sort of thing. Because when people in Turkey talk about Arabs they only think of the Gulf states or black Africa.”

  “Black Africa?” said Maryam.

  “That’s just the way it is, mademoiselle. Anyway, so then I tell my mum. I say, Mum, look, Beirut is more or less just like Turkey. Arabs aren’t what you think. You don’t just pray in Arabic. You make love in Arabic, talk politics in Arabic, and everything else. I talked to her about politics, starting in the sixties with the history of the Arab left and all that, and then my dad comes in, munching on sunflower seeds, and he says, ‘Of course, sweetie, you know there are modern Arabs!’”

  They both laughed. “And you two are certainly modern Arabs,” I said and they laughed even harder. Despite the posturing, loose talk and flirting – trying to work each other out – we were all trying to meet on common ground, that much was clear.

  When our laughter died down, Amira suddenly tilted her head, like a poppy by the roadside.

  “What’s that!?”

  We held our breath. Silence. The wedding was over, and then … faint music. Amira stood up, searching for the source, and as if catching the scent of the sound she tiptoed to other side of the terrace in her slippers. We shuffled after her. Amira leaned over and looked down at the neighbouring terrace to the left of the hotel entrance, and, draped over the wall, she said, “Yes, it’s coming from down there.”

  On a sliver of the terrace below an old woman’s hand reached out for a glass of wine. She wore a large emerald ring. Beside her glass was an old record player, playing The Bridge of Love by Oum Kalthoum. After every sip of wine she slowly, tremulously, placed her glass back down on the table, and, still holding the glass, she tapped out the rhythm of the song with her ring.

  Under her breath Amira translated the words into English, as if she were savouring the remnants of marzipan on her tongue.

  I have seen lovers… I have seen what will happen to them and that which they cannot see… / I have seen how they have fallen in love… I did not understand / could not understand / Then you suddenly came along… And then you…

  We could only se
e the lower half of her arm, red nail polish on her fingers. Her emerald ring stopped clinking against her glass every time the man in the song ‘suddenly came along’. And we watched from above, in the puzzle of the Old City. From one dark square to another dark square. Amira kept translating under her breath:

  I have seen the lovers / they were naïve / I said, I can’t be that way / And then you suddenly came along … and then you…

  Amira suddenly stopped translating and let out a deep sigh: “Ahhh… Oum Kalthoum… How many hearts has this woman broken? Asmahan, she’s the one that gets me the most. What a woman! You just have to tip your cap to such beauty. But such grace can’t command the kind of respect of a mannish woman like Oum Kalthoum.”

  Maryam was watching the wedding guests dramatically bid each other farewell, studying their hen-like gestures, so unlike her style, when she said, “Oum Kalthoum had no other choice. They left her no other choice but to become a man.”

  “I hate Oum Kalthoum!” said Amira but she was obviously referring to something else. Maryam laughed, trampling over Amira’s heart that had just cracked open.

  “There was this fervent Egyptian Imam,” she said. “He used to say that Egypt had lost the Six Day War with Israel because of Oum Kalthoum. In a speech, he said, ‘How could we expect our men to fight when her songs had softened their hearts.’ As if that thick voice of hers could actually soften anyone’s heart!”

  I laughed and Amira’s mood shifted. She was no longer a woman who had been through hard times, but a child thirsting for attention.

  “I’m for Asmahan … I like her. No reason to love someone just because she wins.”

  Maryam forced a smile.

  “Sweetie, do you really think manly women can ever win?”

  Our conversation and the song finished so abruptly that I thought we could hear the clouds drifting through the moonlight. And that might have been the end of our night – we were already out of whisky. But turning tough again, Maryam suddenly cried out in a young, rugged voice, “Madam! Madam! Good night! And bon appétit!”

  The woman’s hand quivered then clutched her glass. Her hand seemed to be thinking, surprised, sensing the surroundings. Then her face came into view, searching for Maryam’s voice. The old woman looked up at us. Three women in white nightgowns, holding empty glasses. Slowly she rose to her feet, as if she had all the time in the world. Maybe she was smiling but we couldn’t tell through all the wrinkles. She raised her glass. We did the same. With the intimacy of intoxication, we twirled our hands in salute to the old woman, La Scala-style. Then with her trembling hand she gestured, ‘just a minute’, and again, ‘just a minute’. She put on a new record. We sensed what was coming: we had heard the sweet, dark, intimate, whimsical idea flutter through her mind. Then the song started. It was Warda.

  Oh time… so much time without love!

  We laughed, we laughed out loud to show that we had understood she was making light of the situation.

  And that is how it all began. We were three women fated to take refuge in a story, looking out for each other as we moved forwards, three women soon to become four. We had no idea that the cure to all our problems was present in each other and that the balm we would blend together could protect humankind from evil. Indeed the strange events I am about to recount are entirely true. It’s just that I have trouble believing it all really happened.

  2

  I am holding the torn wing of an angel in one hand and in the other a magic wand, a pink-white fuzzy ball on the top. Waving the wand wildly in the air, I am shouting at a woman in a black chador.

  “Why in the world would you hit a kid like that? Why are you hitting her?”

  With the wand I point out the barbed wire to Amira and Maryam and I say, “Wasn’t there just a revolution in this country? The Arab Spring and all that? What’s all the barbed wire for? I mean who’s it supposed to protect?”

  Amira and Maryam are trying not to laugh. Shopkeepers are milling outside their shops close to the government building, which is surrounded by barbed wire. They are laughing with soldiers standing guard on the other side of the fence. The one-winged little girl is tugging at my leg while her mother shouts at me in Tunisian, which I can’t understand. The situation is desperate. With nothing to do but keep my cool, I say, “I’m talking to you, Amira! Wasn’t there a revolution in this country?”

  I have a good reason to be this wound up so early in the morning…

  *

  In a morning daze, Amira, Maryam and I are walking through the square at the entrance to the maze of the Old City, looking for a quiet coffeehouse. Barbed wire circles the Government Palace. This is the famous Kasbah Square, where the revolution started. Strolling about, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a situation.

  “Hold on. Let me try it this way,” I say, turning the child whose little angel wing has got caught in the barbed wire. The more she struggles to be free the more entangled she becomes. I look at her mother. She’s useless. So worried about keeping her chador from slipping that she can’t take care of her own daughter’s wings. Clearly she thinks this matter of her little girl’s wings is nothing more than an indulgence. When the girl sees that her wing is being torn, she starts to cry. And the silvery, feathery halo over her head slips down over her face; the feathers are now in her eyes, and she begins to sob. Then she starts whacking my back with her magic wand, a little wisp that couldn’t hurt a fly. Then her mother is suddenly gripped by a desire to educate her child. She slaps her daughter harshly for hitting a stranger with a magic wand. The blow brings the halo down to her lips and the poor girls starts chewing on the ring, spittle dripping from the corners of her mouth. Now my scarf gets caught in the wire and starts to choke me. Now the mother’s chador gets snared and suddenly we are two women and an angel caught in a web, flailing about and shouting. Springing out of their morning stupor, Maryam and Amira race over to help while I am yelling at the mother.

  “Why do you need to go and hit your kid like that?”

  We are three sea urchins trapped in a fisherman’s net in front of the Government Palace, soldiers standing guard beyond the wire, shopkeepers on the other side delighting in the spectacle.

  That’s when I grab the kid’s magic wand and wave it about in the air, crying out.

  “Wasn’t there a revolution in this country? The Arab Spring or whatever you call it?”

  Maryam starts gently tugging at my arm while Amira says something in Tunisian to the mother who looks back at her defiantly to show she knows exactly what she is doing. Now the soldiers on the other side of the fence are cracking up with laughter. Maryam whips the magic wand out of my hand and gives it to the one-winged little girl. The woman behind me is still screaming. Amira spins round and screams back at her even more loudly. Now a furious trio, bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of rage, we dive into the maze of the Old City. A smiling shopkeeper is selling T-shirts, souvenirs from the revolutions. One of them reads: Game Over.

  We are out of breath as we vent our exasperation and frustration at the needless beating of an anxious child and a crowd of men having such a good time looking on. Raising her arm high in the air, Amira says loudly, “What they should do is set up special units to deal with people who treat kids like that. Without any messing around they should say to offenders, ‘Thanks for everything you have done till now but that will be all,’ and take the kid away. If the revolution can’t change this sort of behaviour then what’s the point?”

  A little more calmly Maryam mumbles something like, “When everyone started laughing the woman felt ashamed and so…” But tying up the torn end of my scarf, I carry on in my rebellious mood. “I mean no way, I just don’t get the need for the barbed wire. I don’t get it. Isn’t this Kasbah Square? Weren’t you guys the ones who kicked everything off here? I mean who is the State still afraid of?”

  “That’s just the way it is,” says Amira, despondently. That was enough analysis for one morning.

 
; We walk single file into the labyrinthine maze of shops that is the Old City, keeping an eye on Amira’s heels until we come to a coffee shop. Still rattled by the episode in the square, my voice is harsh when I order.

  “Three coffees!”

  Responding in a voice that sounded like he wouldn’t care if the world came crumbling down, the proprietor says:

  “Lavazza? Normal?”

  “Normal,” I say. Whatever that means. He clearly doesn’t understand my quick reply and he snaps back, “Express? Amerikan?”

  I look at his face to see if he’s making fun of me. Then I snap.

  “Express!” And I can’t hold it back: “The Orient Express, Habibi!”

  Laughing, Amira takes me by the arm and whispers in my ear, “This isn’t Beirut, hanimefendi. You can’t go around calling these guys habibi and that sort of thing!”

  Maryam smiles and we feel the stress begin to slip away. Of course the ‘express’ refuses to come on time and the proprietor keeps wandering around us, nervous and threatening.

  The coffee shop is like a cave. To get there you leave the lobby in the Dar el-Medina Hotel, go past the Zeytuna Mosque and slip into the narrow passageway where they sell the souvenirs. Then take the passageway that leads downtown and it’s the shop just a little ways ahead, the only coffee shop that allows women. To get inside you have to squeeze past all those other little shops selling spices, perfumes, soap and leather, making a narrow passageway even narrower. And when you finally burst through the fragrant clouds and wiggle through the cumbersome intimacy that goes with a bazaar, you suddenly realize you are inside.

  “This coffee guy is really annoying, azizi,” I say. Amira swiftly lets out a soft sigh, fans her face with her hand, sits up, puffs out her chest and flashes the man a coy smile. Maryam seems a little put off by the flirtatious display. Loudly she clears her sinuses, leans back in her chair, hikes up her trousers, spreads her legs wide and nervously bounces a leg up and down. Thanks to Amira’s smile the Orient Express is already on the way. With the first sip of coffee my head must have cranked into gear. First I realized how right I was about my adventure the night before – if I had walked in the other direction I would have ended up in the centre of town. Then there were the fragments and shades of Amira and Maryam (and the dynamic between them) that I’d only just begun to make out in the light of the fireworks last night. They were much clearer in daylight. Amira had a body that seemed designed to support breasts. Her black eyes were almost too large for her face that always seemed to be smiling. Over her eyes were thin, striking eyebrows that looked like they were painted by a master artist in a single, deft stroke of his brush on the smooth, milk-chocolate canvas of her skin. That mysterious and enticing energy particular to small women turned her body into a kind of enticing treasure chest. She had bony feet but her hands were incredibly delicate. And she held herself in such a way that you felt she might suddenly spring into action, leaping to her feet in a flurry of motion. In her company you always felt a little on guard. She was a woman that gave you the feeling something big was about to happen.