In the Country of Men Read online

  I shook my head to say no, happy to play her game, to pretend that some bad dream had broken my sleep. She patted the bed and I lay beside her. Just when sleep was curling itself round me, she started her telling. Her mouth beside my ear, the smell of her medicine alive in the room.

  The only things that mattered were in the past. And what mattered the most in the past was how she and Baba came to be married, that ‘black day’ as she called it. She never started the story from the beginning; like Scheherazade she didn’t move in a straight line but jumped from one episode to another, leaving questions unanswered, questions the asking of which I feared would interrupt her telling. I had to restrain myself and try to remember every piece of the story in the hope that one day I could fit it all into a narrative that was straight and clear and simple. For although I feared those nights when we were alone and she was ill, I never wanted her to stop talking. Her story was mine too, it bound us, turned us into one, ‘Two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the same book,’ as she used to say.

  Once she began by saying, ‘You are my prince. One day you’ll be a man and take me away on your white horse.’ She placed her palms on my cheeks, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘And I almost didn’t … You are my miracle. The pills, all the other ways in which I tried to resist. I didn’t know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my heart …’ This is why I often lay in my darkened bedroom dreaming of saving her.

  When Mama heard that her father had found her a groom, she swallowed a ‘handful of magic pills’. ‘They called them that,’ she said, ‘because they made a woman no good. For who would want to remain married to a woman who couldn’t bear children? In a few months, I thought, a year at the most, I’ll be free to resume my schooling. It was a perfect plan, or so I thought.

  ‘They rushed the wedding through as if I were a harlot, as if I was pregnant and had to be married off before it showed. Part of the punishment was not to allow me even to see a photograph of my future husband. But the maid sneaked in to tell me she had seen the groom. “Ugly,” she said, frowning, “big nose,” then spat at the ground. I was so frightened. I ran to the toilet ten times or more. My father and brothers, the High Council – who were sitting right outside the room – became more and more nervous, reading my weak stomach as proof of my crime. They didn’t know how it felt waiting in that room, where the complete stranger who was now my husband was going to walk in alone and, without introduction, undress me and do filthy, revolting things.

  ‘It was a dreary room. It had nothing in it but a huge bed with a square, ironed white handkerchief on one pillow. I had no idea what the handkerchief was for.

  ‘I walked up and down that room in my wedding dress wondering what kind of a face my executioner had. Because that’s how I saw it: they passed the judgement and he, the stranger armed with the marriage contract signed by my father, was going to carry out the punishment. When he touches me, which I was sure he was going to do, there will be no point in screaming; I was his right, his wife under God. I was only fourteen but I knew what a man had to do to his wife. Cousin Khadija, a chatterbox who had fallen as silent as a wall after her wedding night, had later, when she and I were alone, told me how her husband had lost patience with her and with his fingers punctured her veil and bled her. It was the duty of every man to prove his wife a virgin.’

  I didn’t know what Mama meant, but feared that when the time came I might not have what it takes to ‘puncture’ a woman.

  ‘Betrayal was a hand squeezing my throat,’ she continued. ‘Those hours seemed eternal. My stomach churned, my fingers were as cold as ice-cubes, and my hands wrestled with each other.

  ‘On one of my journeys to the toilet, pulling my wedding dress up and running like an idiot, I saw my father bury a pistol in his pocket. “Blood is going to be spilled either way,” were the words he had told your grandmother. She told me this later, almost laughing, relieved, giddy and ridiculous with happiness. “If, God forbid,” she had said, “you didn’t turn out virtuous and true, your father was prepared to take your life.”

  ‘Your father, the mystery groom, was twenty-three; to the fourteen-year-old girl I was that seemed ancient. When he finally walked in, I fainted. When I came to he wasn’t there. Your grandfather was beside me, smiling, your grandmother behind him, clutching the now bloodstained handkerchief to her chest and crying with happiness.

  ‘I was sick for days. The stupid pills didn’t work. I took too many and all that vomiting squeezed them out of me. Nine months later I had you.’

  The medicine changed her eyes and made her lose her balance. Sometimes even before seeing her I could tell she was ill. I would come into the house and notice a certain stillness, something altered. I knew without knowing how I knew, like that one time when, playing football with the boys, one of Osama’s mighty strikes had hit me in the back of the head and I was knocked out. Just before it happened I remember seeing Kareem’s face trying to warn me, then I listened to that strange silence fill my ears. This felt the same. I could be reading in my room or playing in our street, and that quiet anxiety would visit me. I would call out for her even though I didn’t need her. And when I saw her eyes lost in her face and heard her voice, that strange nervous giggle, I was certain that Mama was ill again. Sometimes I felt the panic then found her well, immersed in a book by Nizar al-Qabbani, her favourite poet. That upset me more.

  When she was ill she would talk and talk and talk but later hardly remember any of what she had told me. It was as if her illness got the spirit of another woman in her.

  In the morning, after I had fallen asleep exhausted from listening to her craziness and from guarding her – afraid she would burn herself or leave the gas on in the kitchen or, God forbid, leave the house altogether and bring shame and talk down on us – she would come and sit beside me, comb my hair with her fingers and apologize and sometimes even cry a little. I would then be stung by her breath, heavy with medicine, unable to frown or turn my face because I wanted her to believe I was in a deep sleep.

  She was shocked when I repeated to her the things she had told me the night before. ‘Who told you this?’ she would ask. ‘You,’ I would shout – shout because I was unable not to. Then she would look away and say, ‘You shouldn’t have heard that.’

  Sometimes she talked about Scheherazade. A Thousand and One Nights had been her mother’s favourite story, and although my grandmother couldn’t read she had memorized the entire book, word for word, and recited it regularly to her children. When I was first told this, I dreamed of my grandmother, whom I rarely saw, struggling to swallow the entire book. Nothing angered Mama more than the story of Scheherazade. I had always thought Scheherazade a brave woman who had gained her freedom through inventing tales and often, in moments of great fear, recalled her example.

  ‘You should find yourself another model,’ Mama once began. ‘Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death. You know the closing chapter? “The Marriage of King Shahryar and Scheherazade”? When she finally, after having lived with him for God knows how long, after sleeping with him – nothing, of course, is ever said of that – bearing him not one, not two, but three sons, after all of that she managed to gather her courage, your brave Scheherazade, to finally ask the question: “May I be so bold as to ask a favour of your highness?” And what was this favour that she was pleading to be so bold as to ask? What was it?’ Mama shouted, her eyes not leaving me. ‘Was it to rule one of the corners or even a dirty little cave in his kingdom? Was it to be given one of the ministries? Perhaps a school? Or was it to be given a writing desk in a quiet room in his palace of endless rooms, a room the woman could call her own, to write in secret the truth of this monster Shahryar? No. She gathered her children around her – “one walking, one crawling, and one sucking,” as the book tells us. All sons, of course. I wonder how successful she would have been if they were three harlots like her.’

  What scared me the most during such nights was how different Mama be
came. She said words in front of me that made my cheeks blush and my heart shudder. Saliva gathered at the corners of her lips. She didn’t look beautiful any more.

  ‘Your heroine’s boldness was to ask to be allowed to … ?’ she held the word in the air, staring at me, casting her hand slowly in a curve as if she was presenting a feast. ‘To live.’

  Her eyes fixed on me, expecting me to say something, to be outraged, to slap my thigh, sigh, click my tongue and shake my head. I faced my lap, pretending to be busy with something between my fingers, hoping the moment would pass. And when she started speaking again I was always relieved that her voice had come to fill the void.

  ‘To live,’ she repeated. ‘And not because she had as much right to live as he, but because if he were to kill her his sons would live “motherless”.’ Mama covered her mouth with the back of her hand and giggled like a child. ‘“Release me,” your Scheherazade begged, “release me from the doom of death as a dole to these infants. You will find nobody among all the women in your realm to raise them as they should be raised.” Stupid harlot. My guess: five, maybe ten years at the most before she got the sword. As soon as the “one sucking” became the “one walking”, and her muscles, Scheherazade’s fine, supple muscles …’ Mama said, frowning in disgust. The ceiling light seemed too harsh on her face. I wondered if I should switch it off, switch on the side lamps instead. ‘…those so important for pleasing the King, the Mighty, the Majestic Shahryar, had loosened …’ Her eyes were wet now, her lower lip quivered slightly. ‘As soon as she was no longer tempting, useful; as soon as she was no longer beautiful: whack! Gone with the head,’ she said and then her own head dropped and her legs extended before her. I thought she was going to fall off the sofa, but she remained still, silent for a couple of minutes. I imagined how it might be to live without her. A warm swirl spun in my belly, something warm and dependable gripped my heart and sent a rush through me. I wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement that I felt at the thought of losing her. Then she seemed to wake up. She looked at me as if it was the first time we had met. She scanned the room, paused for a moment, then lit a cigarette. ‘You should go to bed,’ she said, looking away.

  On the mornings after she was always nice. She liked to take me out driving. If it was a school day she would ask, ‘Anything important today?’ I would shrug my shoulders and she would say, ‘I’ll telephone the school and tell them you’re not well.’ In the car she talked a lot and wasn’t surprised by my silence. She didn’t mind stopping under the pedestrian bridge that crossed over Gorgi Street so I could watch the bad boys hanging above the fast traffic by their arms and some, the truly brave ones, by their ankles. Normally, when we passed under them, she would ask me to shut my eyes. But on such mornings she was happy to park beside them and let me watch. Sometimes she would even say, ‘I must admit, they are quite brave.’ Then, ‘Promise you would never do that. Promise you would always protect yourself.’ Sometimes I nodded and sometimes I didn’t.

  On some mornings she took me all the way to town just to buy sesame sticks. Or, if she had been very ill the night before, she would take me to Signor Il Calzoni’s restaurant by the sea, in Gergarish, for grilled shrimp and spaghetti. In winter I ordered the beet-and-tomato soup with bread and cheese and bresaola. I liked the way the beet painted my spit and tongue purple for hours.

  Signor Il Calzoni had a big machine that squeezed oranges all on its own and he would take me to push the button that set the whole thing working, cutting oranges and squeezing them in front of you. I didn’t like orange juice that much but some days I drank up to five glasses just to watch the thing work. After the meal I always got gelati. Mama ordered cappuccino and sipped it slowly, looking out on to the sea, squinting her eyes at the horizon where on a clear day we could see Malta, a giant biscuit floating on the sea.

  Signor Il Calzoni was always pleased to see us. He would take us to our table by the window and hover in search of conversation. He spoke about how much he missed Italy and how much he loved Libya. And occasionally he would chant, loud enough for all in the restaurant to hear, ‘Long live the Guide,’ towards a large mural he had had a couple of art students paint at one end of the restaurant. It showed the Colonel in his full military uniform, curling his eyebrows and looking very serious. And if the restaurant had a table of Revolutionary Committee men, or Mokhabarat, people we called Antennae, he chanted, ‘El-Fateh, el-Fateh, el-Fateh,’ punching the air with his fist until the waiters joined in. Sometimes the chef too came out and I got to see his tall, puffy white hat.

  The things she told me pressed down on my chest, so heavy that it seemed impossible to carry on living without spilling them. I didn’t want to break my promise – the promise she always forced me to give, sometimes over thirty times in one night, not to tell, to swear on her life, again and again, and then be warned, ‘If you tell a living soul and I die my life will be on your neck’ – so I tried to tell her. We were at Signor Il Calzoni’s restaurant. She kept interrupting me, pleading with me to stop. So I covered my ears, shut my eyes and spoke like a robot above her. She slapped the table and said, ‘Please, Suleiman, I beg you, don’t embarrass me,’ and whispered sternly through flexed lips, ‘A boy your age should never speak such things.’ Then she changed her tone and said, ‘Habibi, light of my eyes, promise you won’t tell anyone. Especially Moosa. I know how much you love him, but nothing ever stays in that man’s mouth. Promise.’ I nodded, wrapping my arms round myself, doubling over: this was the only way I could keep it all inside.

  Signor Il Calzoni avoided coming to our table when he saw us like this. He would stand beside his cashier, pretending not to look.

  Sometimes I couldn’t get myself to eat, and Mama would think I was punishing her. ‘What do you want from me?’ she would whisper angrily across the table, ‘I have given up everything for you. You’re not even satisfied.’

  If I began to cry, Signor II Calzoni would take me to squeeze more oranges, holding my hand and talking in his funny accent. Then, if the restaurant was completely empty, he would sit beside me, look out on to the sea and say, ‘Ah. Look how beautiful your country is, Suleiman. Now it’s mine too, no? I am also Libyan, like you. I speak like a Libyan, no?’ ‘No,’ I would say just to make him laugh. He had a wonderful laugh. His entire body would bounce beside me. The seats were spring-upholstered and so I would do the same. And that made him blush in front of Mama. ‘You should change your name from Signor Il Calzoni to Signor al-Husseini.’ That always made him bounce.

  On the way home I regretted all the talking and laughing, regretted breaking my silence, allowing myself to be tricked like a cat teased out from beneath a bed with a string. I knew I had failed when, on our way back home, late in the afternoon when the bread was no longer at its best, she would stop by the empty bakery. I would stand to one side pretending to be drawing shapes with my sandal into the flour-dusted floor and watch the baker Majdi reach beneath his deep counter and think, that’s the devil. He would hand her a bottle wrapped in a black plastic bag, and she would immediately bury it in her handbag. And when we were in the car she didn’t place her bag beside her as she normally did, but beneath her legs, well out of view. I knew it was her medicine, bad for her and bad for me, but, doubtful of the world and my place in it, I said nothing. I massacred the hardened ends of each loaf and she didn’t complain that I was ruining them.

  Mama and I spent most of the time together – she alone, I unable to leave her. I worried how the world might change if even for a second I was to look away, to relax the grip of my gaze. I was convinced that if my attention was applied fully, disaster would be kept at bay and she would return whole and uncorrupted, no longer lost, stranded on the opposite bank, waiting alone. But although her unpredictability and her urgent stories tormented me, my vigil and what I then could only explain as her illness bound us into an intimacy that has since occupied the innermost memory I have of love. If love starts somewhere, if it is a hidden force that is brought out by
a person, like light off a mirror, for me that person was her. There was anger, there was pity, even the dark warm embrace of hate, but always love and always the joy that surrounds the beginning of love.

  3

  That summer Ustath Rashid taught his son how to drive. He would prop Kareem up on a pillow and let him drive around the quiet streets of Gergarish. A week before we went to Lepcis, Kareem took his father’s car keys without asking permission and drove me to the sea. He tried to get as close to the water as possible, but as soon as we reached the shore the wheels sank into the sand.

  ‘Why won’t you come to Lepcis?’

  ‘Mama won’t let me.’

  ‘Stop making excuses, she already told Baba you can. What are you afraid of?’

  ‘I am not afraid.’ He didn’t seem convinced. I worried he would think me a mommy’s boy, so I told him. ‘She’s ill,’ I said. ‘I think she will die soon.’

  ‘But all women are ill,’ Kareem said. ‘Mama bleeds all the time.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes I go into the bathroom and find the toilet water red. It’s disgusting. It’s their curse. But don’t worry, it doesn’t mean they will die.’

  The sea was as flat and still as oil. We ran until the water tripped us. We raced towards the turquoise, where the deep sea was cooler. I felt bad for Kareem, but also relieved that at least my mother didn’t bleed.

  ‘You’ll love Lepcis.’ He dived and tickled my feet.

  Back on land we collected stones, wood and any rubbish we could find to stuff behind the wheels. The engine moaned and the car shifted sideways before it wriggled its way out of the sand.

  Kareem had been to Lepcis Magna several times with his father. He had also seen Ghadames and Sabratha, the cave paintings in Fezzan. He had even been on a boat to Crete, where he said women swam naked. Like me, he was an only child. This was very rare because parents with only one offspring were always at the risk of leading people to believe that either the woman was no longer good, or, God forbid, both the mother and the father were objecting to God’s Will. Mama was often asked why she didn’t have more children. She would blush at the question. Baba blushed too when he was nudged by a friend and asked in a whisper why he didn’t take another wife. Maybe it was this that in spite of the age difference – Kareem was twelve, where I was nine – had brought us close to one another. Because what united Kareem and me rarely felt like friendship, but something like blood or virtue. I wanted so much to be like him.