Read Online Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shaykh - Free Book Online

words, always the same, ‘I don’t know how I’d live without you, my sweet.’ An hour and she was gone, leaving me to go into my room looking for traces of Nur’s meeting with the man so that I could get rid of them, and thinking why does she get inbetween the sheets? Why isn’t she more sensitive to such things? I would open the window and change the sheets, to chase away the smell of Nur, then go over to the table to see if she’d forgotten a ring or a necklace or a bracelet. It was plain that these clandestine meetings were dispelling all the grief and confusion that she’d been suffering from, leaving her calm and in control of the rest of her day. They were like food and drink to her, so that when Basem had the painters in to the house for several days and when even after it was painted she couldn’t resume her meetings for several more days, she pleaded with me to come instead to her house at eleven in the morning and let in a man who would be carrying a black briefcase. I received him pretending to the world that he was the doctor and let him into her room after asking the servant girl nicely to shut the door behind her. I went into the bathroom and turned on the tap as hard as it would go looking at myself in the mirror, asking my reflection how long I would be in Nur’s life. I opened the cupboards and saw rusty razors and razor blades and bottles with remnants of men’s cologne in them in among the face creams and bags of henna. The water was still running and the sound of it drowned out any movement in the bedroom. I opened the curtain at the window and a cloud of dust flew up. I could see a little bit of the swimming-pool and some patches of green grass and trees with pale, sickly leaves. Over the wall came the noise of the water pumps, and I could see the colourless houses with their metallic doors and window frames glinting in the sun. Would anyone passing by this house believe that in one of its rooms there was a woman in bed with a man who wasn’t her husband? This man she’d met in a store, and there had been many others like him; one she’d met at a street crossing, another on a visit to the hospital; she’d slept with the man who’d come selling jewels and material to her in her house and the landscape gardener who advised her on the design of her garden when she was considering planting it with Japanese trees. I thought to myself how human beingscontinually manage to overcome their circumstances, thinking up the strangest ways to give substance to their desires. Before I’d always doubted if sex existed in houses like these and here I was listening to Nur laughing behind the locked door. I turned off the tap to hear better and then turned it on again.
    These meetings weren’t Nur’s lifesavers for long. She began to dream about going abroad again saying that she didn’t like daytime encounters, although she didn’t stop doing it until I asked her to; one of the men whom she’d seen in my house came to the door one day to ask me if he could bring his foreign girlfriend there. He handed me a bottle of whisky and a big piece of pork. Trembling, I gave them back to him and didn’t answer. I wanted to shut the door in his face or to scream at him to make him understand me and Nur and the risks we had taken. But it seemed complicated to explain, and I couldn’t look him in the eye and say to him straight out that Nur and I were playing with fire.

5
    I didn’t hesitate for a moment when Nur asked me to come to her house early one morning, and it wasn’t because her voice sounded weak on the line. She was in bed enveloped in a light cloud of steam rising from a vaporiser. It seemed to have opened up her features so that she looked like a fruit that had ripened prematurely in a greenhouse. I said jollily to her, ‘Well? What’s the fairy princess doing today?’ and she wept silently. I didn’t take any notice. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to her complaining. This was the first