Women of Sand and Myrrh Read Free

houses. I supposed that I would invite them to visit me in the new house, but as it turned out I never saw them again from that morning onwards, or even caught sight of them at a distance. I used to turn and look the other way every time I passed the compound. The sight of the yellow wooden roofs and walls and the dusty oleander plants reminded me ofmyself when I lived in there among those god-forsaken helpless women.
    On the other hand, the thought that living in this country was only a temporary phase prevented me from feeling the same firmness of purpose as Sitt Wafa did towards her home: she planted basil and radishes and kept hens and a rooster in a coop that she built for them; the rooster had developed a nasty nature and when Sitt Wafa ran after him with a broom he turned round and chased her in turn. An odour of permanence emanated from her home and I saw jars of jam, dried yoghurt, thyme and cracked wheat stacked in the kitchen. I used to love going into her house and drinking mulberry juice, and made the excuse that I was coming with Umar to ask her about him so that I could see the children gathered around her while she instructed them one by one, or gave them dictation while shelling peas and shredding beans. The children loved her, although she shouted and pulled the ears of those who made mistakes, and called them ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and continually threatened to take them off to the sheikh’s school under the trees. They laughed at this because they’d seen the open-air school and the old man with his stick.
    My life seemed to change after I moved to the new house. I no longer felt time stagnating as I had in the compound. I began to amuse myself making curtains and cushions, hanging pictures, tidying cupboards. I borrowed books about gardens and dug the garden and planted seeds, waiting from one day to the next for the green shoots to appear. I invited women to visit me, proud of my beautiful house, and offered them cake and tea in cups that matched the curtains. I decided to make my stay here useful, and joined an exercise class at Maryam’s house, three times a week for an hour, another class for baking and decorating cakes, and a literary discussion group. I even became a pupil of Stephanie’s learning embroidery and patchwork, and would have taken classes to learn how to arrange artificial flowers if the time hadallowed. However I knew deep inside me that the way I was handling my life was doomed to failure; I was scared of the enormous disgust that I felt because I was leading such a sterile, unnatural existence, and to counter this I began to defend the way of life here, as a means of instilling into my mind what it ought to be thinking. In my discussions with women who hated it here, both Arabs and foreigners, I used to struggle to find objections to their arguments and take the discussions to absurd and trivial limits: I told them that the situation here was ideal in a way, and that they were lucky because they were seeing how cities were built, and witnessing the transformation of man from a bedouin into a city-dweller. This was a great opportunity for them, I added: nothing was laid on for them as it was in other countries, and they would have to fight for what they really wanted. Despite what I said, I myself thought that time was wasted in searching for and constructing what existed and was recognized as normal or obvious anywhere else in the world.
    Things didn’t progress as I’d convinced myself they would when I was forcing myself to attend classes. When the women at the exercise classes with me began to look like birds and animals, and when at the cake-decorating class I became involved in a vengeful struggle with the lid of the confectioner’s cream instead of directing my energies to creating a rose on a cake, or when I began to drink coffee and eat biscuits instead of discussing books, and spent an age trying to make the thread go into the eye of the needle, or even just