Women Who Blow on Knots Read online

  “What’s a revolution if you can’t dance!”

  “Ah, Emma Goldman!”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s Emma Goldman. The American anarchist. In the 1920s…”

  “I don’t know her. I’m just saying. I mean, I’m just saying.”

  I kept silent. Shaking her head and trying to calm down, Amira went on:

  “You know it’s about respect. Do you understand? They don’t respect me. I thought that…”

  “Did you think that things would change after the revolution?”

  “Oh come on, what revolution? When my dad died … I mean … I thought the family oppression would end.”

  “Hmm…”

  Now she was fuming, and at me. She assumed I didn’t understand and she was so sure that it was making her really angry. She started to tear up. Just a little. Then it passed and she went on. “I couldn’t tell you last night. I’m a dancer.”

  “No way. Really? That’s great!”

  “Yeah, really great. I’m also a journalist, of a sort … more like an internet activist.”

  “Are you serious?”

  In no mood to indulge my surprise she nevertheless forced herself to give an explanation.

  “Before our dear dictator Ben Ali fell from power and when there was still all sorts of censorship in the country, Tunisians living abroad were hard at work. I was also pretty busy then. You know the Anonymous group? Well, working with them we were able to bring down government websites, that sort of thing, then…”

  “Wait up! Just a minute! You did what? Sister, you can’t just breeze over something like that. You did what?”

  She flashed me a wicked look and I covered my mouth with my hands to show that I would keep quiet. She continued, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Because after the revolution everyone was a revolutionary. Oh, it seems we had no idea just how heroic the entire nation had been! But we were just a handful of people. Now I look and see the public squares packed with all these ‘revolutionaries’. I waited, tried to stay patient… But dad died before I could tell him. Now it’s gnawing away at me. I’d told myself I should say it to his face – I didn’t want to write to him about it. I mean, face to face! So I was going to say, ‘your call girl, your dancing floozy of a daughter made this revolution, you beast!’ But the bastard went and died!”

  “So you beat Ben Ali but your dad had already kicked the ball out of bounds!”

  She wasn’t at all interested in the ‘depth’ of my observation.

  “And yesterday, mum…”

  She was overcome by more tears. Pulling herself together, she went on.

  “They are deceiving people, you know? Total deceit. For years you think your dad is the bad guy and your mum is the miserable victim. But they actually have a secret pact. There you are struggling to protect your mum. And you suffer for her. In fact you become a mother to her in this weird way. Then … then when your dad leaves the scene you see her real face, the face of someone who’s always played the good cop. Check it out, she says to me, ‘the way you’re behaving doesn’t do our family any favours.’ You’d think we were the Trabelsi family!”

  “Who’s the Trabelsi family?”

  She flashed me an infinitely humiliating look:

  “What sort of journalist are you, buddy? Ben Ali’s wife’s family. Before the revolution they owned more than half the country. Something like the mafia. You came here without reading up on this?”

  “I came in a hurry. You see, the thing is, I was fired from my job…”

  “Ah…” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. Like it was the most natural thing to do. For some reason I was still feeling really good. Her trivializing the fact that I got fired gave me this feeling of relief. Amira went on:

  “So she had to go and say, ‘let’s get you married and not suffer any more shame.’ That was when I got the letter and left home.”

  “What letter?”

  “Now that’s the real story. I mean, that’s why I’m crying.”

  “So you’re saying everything you’ve just said isn’t the real story.”

  “No. It actually has to do with Muhammed’s letters.”

  We heard footsteps on the stairs leading up to the terrace.

  A young man appeared in the twilight, hands in his pockets. Coming over to us, he said, “Hurry up and order me a beer!”

  “Oh my God,” I cried.

  In a hushed voice Amira only managed to say, “What have you done?” Maryam was standing across us with a military buzz cut. Leaning over the wall, she smiled and called down to the lower courtyard.

  “One more beer up here on the terrace, please!”

  She came and sat down, leaning back in her chair like a bloke. With a Casanova smile beaming on her face, she jiggled her leg up and down.

  “Just too hot. And they told me it was only going to get hotter. So I cut it off.”

  She ran her hand over her head from front to back.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Look good?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said both startled and amused, and then Amira started to cry.

  “Whoa! What’s with you?” Maryam said, taking her hand.

  “How should I know?” Amira said, sniffing.

  “Did you think I was someone else? Your lover or something?” said Mayram, laughing. Amira let out another sob. Puzzled, Maryam looked at me and then winked. I raised my eyebrows to say that I would tell her later. With Maryam now swaggering, Amira seemed nothing more than the stereotypical hypersensitive woman with nothing left to do but cry. Still holding Amira’s hand, Maryam looked at the invitation on the table then turned to me.

  “So you got one too. I say we go. Looks interesting. I’m especially curious about the rice in tangerine juice.”

  Amira laughed through the snot in her nose.

  “Me too!”

  Dressed and all done up, we knocked on Madam Lilla’s blue door draped in jasmine, right next to the hotel. Waiting, I whispered to Maryam, “Why did you cut it?”

  “I told you,” she said. “It’s hot.”

  “Interesting.”

  “That’s right! Interesting,” she answered.

  Without any hair she no longer looked like a movie extra squirming because she was stuck with the wrong outfit. Now she was oddly at ease, even cheerful. The door swung open and an old man with one blind eye said, “Do come in ladies.” He was dark and elegantly dressed in a suit. He wore patent leather shoes. The image of a perfect African gentleman. When he spoke, words came out one by one, like the counting of prayer beads: “Welcome and wonderful to have you with us, ladies. I am Eyüp, Madam Lilla’s assistant. She is expecting you on the terrace.”

  As we climbed the stairs, we heard Oum Kalthoum’s He’s Thinking of Me. Moving as slowly as I could, I looked around the house. Everywhere there were mirrors, cracked and conspiratorial. It was impossible to see yourself completely in them. Maybe a natural choice for an old woman who wanted to remember her face as it once was. A jasmine vine grew straight up through the middle of the house, its branches winding around the stairwell and up to the terrace. A dark green velvet armchair was placed facing the door. An ugly cat with spindly legs moved away from us. There were colourful birds in a gigantic cage in the middle of the room and countless lanterns of coloured glass. There was a whip on the top of a cabinet. There were original paintings and piles of black and white photographs inside an open commode beside the armchair. Eyüp Bey seemed like a character out of a haunted house tour when he flashed me a razor-sharp look out of his good eye. He might have been imploring us to help him, or trying to tell us to get out now. It was difficult to know which with just that one eye. A cheerful woman’s voice echoed through the room. “Welcome! Welcome!”

  Stepping through the terrace door covered in jasmine, we came to meet the woman whose voice had bounced down the stairs like a marble. She was standing in the middle of the terrace, her arms flung open. She was a tiny woman who
seemed taller than she really was. The kind of woman who seemed like she was in her late sixties but who had to be in her late seventies. You got the feeling her thin grey hair had been deftly pulled up into a bun years ago and had been like that ever since. She was a woman whose beautiful traits remained even after her beauty was gone. No doubt she could have starred in The Lady of the Camellias if they made a sequel to the film – she was that sort of lady. Her dark blue, gold-enamelled vintage belt draped down over her lilac-coloured dress with green patterns, nearly touching the floor. She stood with the patience of a lady of the salon who knew the weight of every moment. Her gestures seemed slow or rather she avoided the superfluous movements her younger counterparts might deploy to fill space. She was like a poem made plain with patience. Draped around her neck was a Hand of Fatima, a kind I had never seen before. Bracelets dangled from her wrist and her thin silvery hands were covered with rings adorned with diamonds and rubies. And there we were standing across from her like bums with shoulders slumped, one of us bald, one with swollen eyes and me a little drunk. Our modern day clothes fringed and frayed, we looked meek in the face of this black and white prima donna. We were steeped in the indifference of a decisive defeat. In the face of her womanhood, we looked like three young boys who had just finished a game of football.

  “Please come in, ladies,” she said. “Do make yourselves comfortable. Dinner will be ready soon! A glass of rosé wine?”

  As the perfect cross between a gentleman and a lady, Maryam pulled a maşmuum bouquet from her pocket: jasmine about to bloom.

  “Ah,” said Madam Lilla, “you are so very kind!” She stopped and flashed a coy smile, a throwback to her thirties. “Do you know why they collect the jasmine early in the morning and make these maşmuum bouquets before the flowers have bloomed?”

  With the flirtatious lilt of a baroness, every word she said flared up like a match.

  “For then the jasmine will always remember their dreams. If you bring them home and place them on a silver tray they bloom slowly, remembering the night, whispering to you of their white dreams.”

  I hadn’t brought my notebook. Sentences like that always slip away.

  “Oh! But I am speaking English. I just assumed it was our common language,” she said, embracing wholeheartedly the humility of her lead role. We sat down, keeping with our finest family dinner posture. Though we clearly looked like a second-league team, she must have taken us for women worthy of her social hours. Overlooking a pervasive anxiety and mistrust, she chose the momentary sadness of disappointment.

  “I assume Kamal has already told you. They call me Madam Lilla around here. You can call me the same.” Leaning over the table, we expected her to ask for our names.

  “Last night … when I raised a glass to you on the terrace … as you might imagine such grand gestures don’t happen in Tunis … I wanted to meet you. And I hope that sending you an invitation was not strange. I thought that instead of wasting my time trying to tell that curious hotel waiter, Kemal, about my tangerine rice I would…”

  We laughted loudly, with a dash of frustration.

  “You have so much jasmine here. I wish I had brought you something else,” said Maryam. Playing the role of offended child, Amira frowned and pouted and then said, “Forgive us for not really bringing anything.”

  “You have a wonderful home,” I said, only to make small talk.

  Choosing the line that best fit the unfolding play as she poured wine into antique crystal glasses, her frail hand trembling, Madam Lilla said, “The jasmine … yes… I love the one by the front door especially. It took root there all on its own.”

  Amira had opened her mouth and was about to say something when Madam Lilla continued, “Ah! So here’s the food. I can serve, Eyüp Bey. You have a rest.”

  Looking at Madam Lilla in the same way a fallen leaf might look up at a tree, Eyüp Bey quickly vanished. Then she served us rice as if that very morning she had travelled by phoenix over the hills of China to the mythical Mount Qaf to handpick each and every grain. Wafting out of the silver-lidded copper pots were bewildering smells. The faint scent of burnt almonds and, even fainter, the scent of tangerine swirled over the soft smell of rice. Then mint made a hairpin turn and lingered on the outskirts, as the sweet fragrance of prunes gathered in our noses and jasmine fluttered like a white paper airplane. To the naked nose it was a saturnalia of scents that was impossible to follow. And as for the taste…

  “More than eating tangerines this is like wandering blindfolded through a tangerine grove,” I said out loud. Madam Lilla let out a laugh as joyous as a queen.

  “How well you put it! Are you a writer?”

  “Not quite. But that’s the plan,” I said.

  “And you?” I asked. But Amira leapt in.

  “An actress! No?”

  After much wiggling, pouting, frowning, jangling of her bracelets and twisting her neck there came an inviting pause – all to ratchet up the tension – and she said, “Ah, I don’t want our first conversation to be like this.”

  How did she want it to be?

  “What I mean is that seeing how we met under such curious circumstances, it’s a little… How should I put this? Let’s not be like everyone else. And to be honest I have already given our first encounter some thought… So I say that each of us should describe a scene from a film. Imagine your life as a motion picture and you want it to start in the most riveting way. What would that scene be like?”

  She ran her eyes over the three of us. And then she began to explain her opening scene.

  Night. We are in some kind of forest…”

  …

  When we finally closed our mouths we looked at each other, hoping to find a flicker of enlightenment. “Did that really happen?” I asked. Madam Lilla let out another peal of laughter.

  “Not quite! But that’s the plan!”

  We had surrendered ourselves to the astonishing storytelling of this phoenix hunter, jasmine grower, wily goddess – call her what you will – because for the time being we were convinced she wasn’t normal.

  With a voice like a pearl from the bottom of the sea, Maryam said, “Tahrir,” and she went on:

  “Tahrir Square. Yellow lights. The day Mubarak fell. Night is falling. The camera shows the interior of a car. A man is sitting next to me. A friend… We’re in the car. We’ve been drinking, we’re in a good mood. We want nothing else but to be in Tahrir. It’s addictive. We’re hurrying to get there. Our blood can’t run freely through our veins until we do. Every moment away we’re afraid we might suddenly slip into space. As long as there’s Tahrir we can keep a hold on the world around us. That’s why everyone’s going. In fact the revolution is already over, but if we leave it means we have accepted the fact. I’m hiding something. Nobody knows about it. I won’t tell. Only when I am in Tahrir do I feel some release from the burden; you can understand that much from the look on my face. A close up. We reach the square. We’re so happy. Elated. Singing. The camera pans out over all the people hugging. But I’m not hugging anyone. I’m on the brink of tears. Sadness and joy both at the same time. Cut to the top of a street leading into the square; we see a street dog. Oblivious to what’s going on around him, he’s startled and terribly afraid. Under a yellow light he looks like a stray. Everyone is so happy but no one has told him why. He’s alone. I start running. From above the camera follows me darting through a crowd. My lungs expand. Fill with air. I run faster. I make it to the dog. I stop. He looks at me so calmly, as if Egypt isn’t falling to pieces. He’s filthy, thin as a rail, and covered in mange. But his tail is still wagging reluctantly. I start to cry. I sit down on the pavement. The dog is just standing there. I wrap my arms around him. It feels like this mangy dog is the only living thing that will still love me if I tell him my secret. He leans his head against mine. Then a man comes over. An old man in a grey robe, a very poor man. A dirty rag is wrapped around his head, an olive branch sticking out of it. Around his neck is a sign that reads: J
ustice. He walks as if he’s walking on water. He puts one hand on my head and the other on the dog. I look. His eyes are shut. ‘It’s time for you to go,’ he says, ‘your secret is too much for this place.’ The film ends with me buying a ticket to Lebanon the next day.”

  “Did that really happen?” I ask instinctively. Describing the scene Maryam seemed to shed layers of her outward appearance. But now she is sitting there like a tough guy again, all bottled up. Only a smile on her face.

  Pushing grains of rice across her plate, Amira suddenly leaps into her scene as if she’s lost her mind.

  “They are beating me. The camera doesn’t show their faces. But I won’t die. I’m so surprised I’m still alive I don’t even feel the pain any more. They are mostly hitting me in the stomach. I guess they think I’m pregnant. You know I dance, I’m a dancer… Flashback: Images of dance, me being taken off the stage, pushed into a room. But I’m not pregnant or anything like that. We see faces. My dad, my two uncles. The camera turns to my mum. From behind a locked door, she shouts, ‘Don’t do it.’ For some reason I’m counting. She shouts four times. I mean, ‘not even five’ is what I think at the time. My lips are fluttering and you see me counting between the blows. Why not five times for example? Why doesn’t she try to break down the door, I’m thinking. Instead of feeling any pain I feel disappointment. I’m not crying, I’m not shouting. A close up of my hand. I’m pulling up my trousers. I’m wearing a G-string and I’m afraid they’ll see. Your body feels bigger when you are being beaten. Not smaller but bigger. Till then I didn’t know I had so many places for them to hit… Anyway… They leave me. Then a long, slow creaking of the door. It’s been left open. Some time passes. I don’t know how long. I am breathing like an animal. I stand up. A close up of my mother’s face, crying, crumpled up at the foot of the door. Touching her head, I step outside. I leave the room. Cut scene. I am on a boat bound for Italy. They are trying to kill me and I’m running away. Cut scene. I am in France. Cut scene. I’m in England. Longing to be home. So homesick. I get news. ‘There’s a revolution,’ he says, ‘this couldn’t be a better opportunity. I’m fleeing the country. Crossing the Mediterranean with refugees. I am leaving you letters here, in Tunisia, so that I can find them when you get back.’ Then… Cut scene. I’m coming back to Tunis. I ask around. The man is missing. He was one of the many lost at sea … that’s it.”