Women Who Blow on Knots Page 6

  Enraged, Maryam shouts, “You are being unfair. And you know it! When Ennahda settles nicely into power here and you become a new buddy to the USA in the Middle East, just like Turkey, and when you are put in your place by your Sunni government, you’ll remember all too well what you’ve just said!”

  Having achieved his goal of annoying Maryam, the Irishman flashes her a friendly smile and says, ‘I’ll make you a coffee.’ And with that he believes he has ushered back in a calm and friendly atmosphere. As he heads for the kitchen he turns and calls playfully over his shoulder, “So you’re finished with dancing, Amira?”

  Her chest expands with an answer but then she fades. And there isn’t a trace of the woman who has just been taking on the world. She has shrunk. In the face of the jest, she is torn between attack and defence and she stumbles into a ditch of hesitation, swallowing her words before they can come out. Clutching the bag in her lap, she gave up.

  *

  Now the man who seems to be half-drunk is telling the covered girl all about an anarchist fanzine they are preparing to publish and she is responding with a lady-like softness, teasing him because there are no women writers on the project.

  “You anarchists and the hackers are a like an adolescent boys club.”

  Scrunching up his face, he isn’t taking her seriously.

  *

  I look at Maryam’s face. She seems uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with the political discussion but the way the man insulted Amira. Maryam is biding her time, waiting for the chance to show the Irishman that he has crossed a line. For some time she keeps stirring her coffee. Meanwhile Amira is still searching for a topic. She looks guilty. Saying nothing.

  Trying to maintain her composure, Maryam continues on her own.

  “No, he knows. He was the one who mobilized the revolutionary activity. Didn’t he organize the take down of government web sites and publish WikiLeaks documents? He’s a friend of people in Egypt doing the same kind of work. But only to provoke me…”

  This is an unexpected attempt to explain herself. Not an ounce of her manly pride left. Obviously the Irishman is an important figure and she can’t draw her sword to challenge him. She addresses the group.

  “This revolution is in our hearts. He also knows that. Nothing will be the same.”

  Coming back into the room with a tray filled with coffees, the Irishman is making a point of emphasizing that he is doing what is traditionally a woman’s job – executed of course with a manly flourish. Then he calls out to Maryam.

  “What were you saying, Mademoiselle?”

  Her answer punches him right in the face.

  “I was saying that only when you can speak to a woman who is both a dancer and a revolutionary will your revolution be complete.”

  The Irishman is stopped dead in his tracks. As if she’s been holding her breath, Amira says, “hah,” and leaves it there. She is back in her element. To conceal the sly grin on her face she looks down and rummages in her bag. Taking out a cigarette, she clicks a lighter. Maryam breathes in, preparing for another blow, or poised to twist the sword she has just plunged into the man’s gut when there is a knock on the door. Maryam chose to draw her blade for Amira, not Egypt.

  A group of poor, dark-skinned young men with wounded legs and arms shuffled into the room. They were accompanied by older women we assumed to be their mothers. With a diligence born of domestic courtesy, the young woman quickly rose to her feet. Compassionately she reached out and touched the women. The drunken anarchist sunk even deeper into his chair. Maryam greeted both the mothers and the young men, as if she knew them, as she had left behind similar young men in Tahrir Square when she fled to Tunisia. Disconcerted, the Irishman reluctantly introduced the new group:

  “Friends, these are the people wounded in the revolution who haven’t received medical treatment. For days they have been protesting outside the Ministry of Justice, all to no end. So now they will stay here and begin a hunger strike.”

  They stood in the middle of the room, like broken weapons of war, their faces held high but without ammunition and guns to fire. Their mothers looked shy and indecisive, like any other woman who might have left her kitchen to race after her child challenging the state. The boys moved between the bold gestures of street kids and broken pride. No one knew what to do. Finally the young woman broke the silence with the typical young-lady phrases women deploy when they are hosting – “Auntie, will you have a coffee or tea? Welcome. Are you tired? A glass of water?” Just to fill up space, break the silence. Signalling to her inebriated colleague, she said, “The chairs are inside, could you please bring them out?” The man reluctantly trudged off before swiftly returning with white plastic chairs which he placed on the landing. Amira wanted to speak with the boys but clearly they were revolutionaries who didn’t have the time to learn how to speak with women; they spoke to them in the same way they spoke to girls in their neighborhoods; they didn’t look Amira in the eye. And they couldn’t choose which expression to adopt: the face of an angry, proud revolutionary or the oppressed but proud, mature face of a young man. The Irishman was just standing there, indifferent. Typical of men in this part of the world, he had left the business of relieving doubt and pulling a situation together to the women. So it fell to Maryam to put these men without guns at ease.

  “Brother, how many days were you there outside the ministry?”

  Sprinkling her sentences with brotherly words, Maryam was able to get them talking. Soon she had established a warm conversation with the guests, and the Irishman now looked more comfortable, a weight lifted from his shoulders. Short sentences, a broken accent with starts and stops, the young men spoke and their expressions changed. Their voices rose from among the back streets and coffeehouses, from the gratitude they felt for a revolution that had brought them to this office in the middle of an old building, their voices rose in the need for the revolution to be grateful to them. Their bandages were soaked in sweat and grime. Their mothers wore slippers. Casually sitting down on the armrest of a chair, the Irishman turned to me and said: “Write to people in Turkey about these folks.” I felt restless. I was tired with the idea of writing about people destined to be a footnote in the history of a losing side. I held my tongue. And the birds began to sing. As if on cue, they were all singing together.

  The chirping grew to such a pitch I no longer heard the word revolution stamped like a holy sign among the broken words the boys were saying nor the sighing of their mothers nor the sound of them wringing their cracked hands. Most likely tomorrow they would become a news story in a paper, ten centimetres on the fifth page. How many times had I seen such a thing in different countries, and those classic plastic white chairs, a symbol of unhappiness in the Middle East? The birds were now singing wildly. The conversation had stopped and Maryam suddenly stood up. And we all followed her lead – the three of us, a kind of battalion, responding to the new order. The Irishman took Amira by the arm, pulled her aside and whispered in her ear. Opening a drawer, he pulled out a stack of envelopes and handed it to her. Brushing tears out of her eyes, she hurried out of the room. “I have an errand to run,” she said. She was reporting to Maryam, her protector, not me. Then as if ashamed, she added: “Let’s meet at the hamam in two hours. You know it, right? Next to the hotel.”

  Walking back to the hotel with Maryam, I said: “I’m leaving in a couple of days. Are you staying?” Her hands in her pockets and her headscarf wrapped around her neck, she said: “I don’t know. I need to have a look at Dido’s tablets and visit a few libraries. Then I’ll be leaving too… But I’ll need to come back.” She stopped and suddenly changed the subject.

  “Why do you think an extremely powerful woman would commit suicide?”

  I was still thinking about Amira.

  “Amira’s got a problem, and she’s not telling us.”

  Maryam smiled.

  “A woman in an Arab country who’s a writer and a dancer and who has problems with her mother and unsettl
ed accounts with her father. And there’s a fugitive lover who suddenly comes home. There’s a lot on her plate!”

  “A lover coming home? ” I said.

  “She mentioned letters from a guy called Muhammed and we never talked more about it. She wants to open a dance school but she hasn’t got the money.”

  “A dance school, eh? That sounds nice.”

  Maryam went on:

  “She needs money and her mother has got it but she isn’t willing to part with it. The only way is for her to save up money by working in this hamam of hers. But that’s not easy… and if she can’t do that… What was it that she said? Oh, yeah, ‘nobody respects me’.”

  “Sister, you don’t have it any easier. I mean in terms of respect and all that… In this ‘men only’ coffeehouse of a country.”

  Then I thought of how Madam Lilla had lorded over Eyüp Bey and I said,

  “Madam Lilla really is a strange woman, isn’t she?”

  Twisting her words like they were a dirty rag, Maryam said, “Not that strange!”

  We arrived at the hotel. In her room Maryam got down and prayed, the longest prayer I could imagine, and then she opened her computer and went online.

  The long afternoon hours went by just like when you lie down on a cool bed and twist and turn until you get too warm under a single sheet, watching motes of dust lazily waft in the sunlight streaming through the curtains. But until we left to meet Amira in the hamam, where those strange and difficult events were set in motion, everything seemed like a dark conversation with myself.

  Note

  1a member of a strictly orthodox Sunny Muslim sect advocating a return to the early Islam of the Kuran and Sunna.

  5

  As we undressed we were completely unprepared for what would happen next. Maryam and I had been under the impression that Amira only needed to speak with people in the office and then we would leave together. But treating us like we were European tourists, she insisted, saying, ‘seeing as you’re already here you can’t leave without coming inside’, and although we both told Amira how much we loathed hamams we ended up stripping down to our underwear and coughing and wheezing we clomped along the corridor in heavy wooden clogs, wobbling from side to side, clutching at the thin towels wrapped around our bodies until we finally found a safe haven on a ledge near one of the basins in the main room.

  Disgusted by every particle – visible and invisible – in the world of a hamam, Maryam was squirming to reduce her body contact with surface area. I was in a bad mood after spending all afternoon fretting about the state of affairs back in Turkey and how I didn’t have a job. Amira, however, was driving away whatever it was that had been troubling her. Humming under her breath, she danced flamboyantly in the middle of the chamber. I suppose Maryam and I were a little embarrassed by the public display. We found it hard even to look at her. But when she said, “ladies you have just heard a song by Amira, the rose of every stage,” and delivered a dancer’s curtsy, we couldn’t help but smile.

  At the basin across from us sat two women in their sixties who were chatting and pouring bowls of water over their heads. They couldn’t have cared less about the way they looked. Waiting for the warm water to loosen up the grime still clinging to their skin, they looked like two old wooden ships, creaking as they carried on. To peel off the dead skin one of them would every now and then rub her arm or her leg or do the same to her friend. They must have been discussing a matter of grave consequence because all the water that fell from bowls and streamed down over their faces and down thin strands of hair, loosening their hamam towels, did nothing to dilute the conversation.

  On the other side of the room were two middle-aged British tourists steadfast in their pursuit of the promised pleasure called keyif, as if out to fulfill a foreign mission assigned to them by their nation. Although red as beets, they were keen to conjure up an essence of keyif, which the Easterner finds by simply standing still and waiting. The women were holding out through the heat and the water so they would be justified when they would later expound upon the travails of their hamam experience as one segment in their holiday. Culturally estranged from the techniques of scrubbing and peeling, they suffered the most, along with Maryam.

  In the corner basin were three young Tunisian women who were doing everything they could to attract attention. Dressed in bikinis, they must have been in their thirties, and the way they held the copper bowls as if they were strange objects, dipped their fingers in the water as if they had never seen such a wondrous thing before and loudly carried on and fooled around in their own little world, all suggested one thing: they had come to the hamam to enjoy themselves.

  “It’s like the class distinctions are still there even when they are naked,” I said to Maryam as I nodded toward the women. “I mean the smoothness of their skin, the immaculate waxing, everything perfectly balanced … everything they do looks good…” Her lips glued shut, Maryam was afraid bacteria – or who knows what else – might hop inside her mouth. She only nodded in agreement. I continued to study the girls:

  “Is that kind of fussiness only a thing with middle-class women? I mean, just when everything seems to be in place there’s always something missing. Do you see what I mean?” Maryam was rooted to the spot, still dreading the germs.

  Meanwhile Amira was tapping out time on a bowl. But it was as if my observations had an effect on her and now she was frustrated with the Tunisian girls. It was only a matter of time before she would launch an attack.

  “How pretentious can you be, for crying out loud? It’s like they’re from Switzerland. Why all the drama?” Amira said. The girls let out a peal of orientalist laughter as they insulted the hamams of their country, slipping into French at least twice in every sentence. Amira stood up in preparation. I stayed put but Maryam finally separated herself from the marble. She was just taking her position next to Amira – indeed she stepped out in front of her to intervene – when one of the girls cried out, “Ah! It’s Amira!”

  In wooden clogs the woman teetered over to middle of the room, pinching and pulling her bikini top. She stopped to give the impression that Amira was the one walking over to her. One of the sly little games upper class women will play. I narrowed my gaze. And then – bam – she kisses Amira on the cheek! “Cherie, I was just thinking about you the other day! Girrrls! Amira’s back.”

  In a few seconds Amira became the housemaid at a private high school tea party, dressed up in her finest holiday clothes. Her face was blurred in the steam but she was so clearly a woman: the way she held herself and the way she moved, even the muscles in her back. How horrible to be such a woman in this world…

  Maryam was unsure whether or not to leave Amira on her own. The girls brought her to the centre of the room. For them Amira was a class act but she wasn’t one of them – she was an interesting specimen. Indeed they must have lived vicariously through her; she was someone they watched, a kind of TV serial. “So you were in the US!” “Oh! That’s so interesting!” “We read your blog!” “You did so much work for the revolution.” “Of course you suffered the most because you had to run away and everything, I mean, how terrible.” “We were all in Kasbah that day.” “We wished you were there. The day the revolution started.” “So what are you going to do now?” “Of course, she’s going into politics, sweetie.” “Now I’m working at the Ettakatol Party. Why don’t you come?” “Oh sweetie, that’s real light weight for someone like Amira!”

  Now Maryam stood up, ready to challenge the girls. There was an eerie silence. Amira was saying something important… in whispers and then whistling. There was the sudden contortion of their faces, twisting into all different shapes. We had no idea what Amira had just said but like a victorious commander she tightened her towel over her breasts and came over to us with her head held high and sat down at the basin. Pouring cold water over her head and her breasts, she let out a series of sighs. And with the nervous energy of show horses, the girls retreated to their basin. If they h
adn’t gathered up their things and left the room the tension might have jumped from basin to basin.

  “Whatever you just did there you did it right, sister,” I said.

  “Sometimes I get the job done,” said Amira. “Sometimes I’m able to remind people just who they are. If only I could do it all the time…”

  Once the girls were gone we were free of all their ‘oh’s’ and ‘ah’s’ and we could settle down. Scrubbing dead skin off her leg, Amira was now speaking from the heart.

  “Those girls, I mean the whole lot of them, they’re tourists in their own country. They hit the streets once Ben Ali was gone. You’d think they were the ones who’d started the revolution. Now they are all racing after ‘democracy positions’. Proud to be Tunisian. And supposedly they’re planning to work for the current political parties. Now they say the most important thing is doing something positive for their country. But not one of them can write in Arabic, they don’t even really know their own language. They are all interested in politics now because they are afraid of Sharia law.”

  “Aren’t they Tunisians? Why can’t they write in Arabic?’

  ‘Of course, they’re Tunisian. That’s how it is here. Not everyone can write in Arabic. It’s all French. Très intéressant, chérie,”

  I felt Maryam’s indignation cut my cheek like a knife. “Tell us what you said to them?” she asked Amira.

  “I told them I’d slept with all their husbands.”

  We stared at her as she continued dumping water over her head.

  “I didn’t do anything of the sort of course, but it just came out…”

  Maryam was angry and I imagined her tangled thoughts racing: you are handling a problem with exaggerated womanhood and then you get so disappointed because you are perceived only as a woman and not getting any respect so then why do you talk about sleeping with men? But she didn’t want to draw it all out. Turning to me, she said, “So when exactly are you leaving?”