Women of Sand and Myrrh Read Free Page A

searching for the needle, I gave it all up and stayed at home. At this point, like most of the women here, I began to think in earnest about how fed up I was, how miserable I was, and how much I’d like to go away somewhere. The only solution was to get out of the house again, this time to work in the store.
    I handled the paperwork, writing letters and demands and putting prices on everything. I used to flick through the shinyillustrated catalogues of goods and foodstuffs choosing whatever took my fancy. When the things arrived I rushed to the crates, excitedly comparing the real thing with the picture I had of it and feeling that I had a link with the outside world as I turned a glass or a packet over in my hands. In spite of my knowledge and my zeal for my work, I made mistakes and these mistakes led to Amer’s goods being censored by the port officials. They set fire to his crates to get rid of the pâté de foie gras which I’d ordered without noticing that pork fat was listed among its ingredients; I ordered games without realizing that they contained playing cards, and bay leaves and dried radishes and rosemary not knowing that they’d arrived saying on their packets that they added a delicious aroma and flavour to beef and chicken and pork. Amer had to make his employees cross out the word ‘pork’ on a thousand packets with their black pens. Although I grew more accurate with my orders there were still some boxes that had to be burnt.
    The psychological tension that began to hang over the place became a bigger problem than hiding in the cardboard box. Amer and his wife were both extremely edgy, and the day he handed me the notification from the customs authorities to read, he was smoking like a doomed man having his last cigarette. He’d lost thousands: the boxes from the United States had been confiscated and their contents destroyed; I asked excitedly if someone had smuggled whisky or obscene videos in them. The soft toys and dolls had all been destroyed, every one that was meant to be a human being or animal or bird, since it was not permissible to produce distortions of God’s creatures. Although I was sorry, I laughed, and imagined those men turning over Barbie dolls and Snoopies and Woodstocks in their big hands and picking up china birds and crystal ashtrays in the shape of cats and thinking hostile thoughts about them, while they stared silently back.
    I remembered how keen I used to be to watch the ‘Muppet Show’, how I’d laughed at Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy: ithad never occurred to me that these creatures singing and bobbing about giving amusement and pleasure to their audience were no more than dumb puppets. That was why when Umar asked me one day if they got new ones when the old ones wore out I felt sad, because I’d pictured them being real in spite of the strings attached to their arms and legs. I thought of them piled on top of one another in a box or cupboard in the studio when they weren’t being used, their eyes dead, mouths closed and bodies lifeless.
    I didn’t actually leave my job until one morning I came face to face with the security man in the doorway of the storeroom, whereupon I rushed in past him, up the stairs and made for the offices to hand in my resignation.
    This time I knew that I wasn’t going to visit anyone. My desert experience had to be related to the place, not just the people: I determined to try and communicate with my surroundings.
    Claiming that I wanted to help my husband Basem with a study he had to do for the bank, I asked the driver Said to take me around the town, street by street, starting with the airport. He puffed out his chest proudly, although he had no idea what I meant, and touching his headcloth deferentially he answered, ‘At your service.’ As soon as we’d left the airport I began to take things in, making believe that I’d just arrived from a faraway country, and had never seen the desert before except in pictures. But it wasn’t