In the Country of Men

16

The thrust of Osama's palm-heels still echoed in my chest. I was sure I would bruise, that two blue shadows would reveal themselves above each nipple. I had also grazed my elbow on the hard pavement. Fear, but more self-pity, reverberated through me like an electric current as I lay on my bed. I curled into a ball on my side and recalled how the rest of the boys, clustered with concern around Adnan, had glared at me. Kareem was the only one not surprised; he had already decided, or so it seemed, on the kind of person I was. Masoud seemed shocked, but also relishing the excitement as he fussed around Adnan's injured ankle. His young brother, Ali, did what he had always done when overwhelmed by a situation, he cried, looking repeatedly at his older brother for guidance. Adnan was solemnly attending to his wound like expected bad news that had finally arrived, neither encouraging nor objecting to Osama's attack on me. Perhaps he didn't even notice it. But Kareem, if anything, seemed relieved that day, as if something doubted had now been confirmed. Perhaps doubt is worse than grief, certainty more precious than love.

By rushing to my rescue Sharief had split the sea, created an undertow that would pull me even further away from Kareem. We drift through allegiances, those we are born into and those we are claimed by, always estranging ourselves. I recalled how, pulling me off the pavement by the hand, Sharief had sighed, 'Slooma' – the sugary variation of my name used only by my family, and which I now seldom hear – whispering it almost, claiming me. And I recalled also how minutes later he had closed the ambulance door behind the horizontal figure of Adnan, his gun bulging through the split of his jacket, accepting Osama's anger, agreeing that I wasn't innocent, that Adnan was the ultimate victim and I the ruthless, or at best careless, child, puncturing the skin that can't stitch itself.

The spot on my elbow, which these days is hard and coiled like the skin around an elephant's eye, was the colour of beetroot, burning but already sealed.

As I lay on my bed I tried hard to remember names. I could only think of Ustath Rashid, Nasser and Moosa. I was sure this wasn't enough; still, hope tickled my chest. I couldn't wait to run to Sharief. I lifted the mattress, took the book and ran out, silently mouthing, Rashid, Nasser, Moosa, both hands clasped tight round the book, squeezing it as if it were a fish trying to get away. But Sharief wasn't there. The boys too were gone. A circle of tyre marks was drawn in the dirt. Concerned for Adnan, he must have raced after the ambulance, maybe even gave it an escort, I thought. I stood there feeling hollow. Rashid Nasser Moosa. The names still in my head, bubbling on my tongue, strangely unfamiliar, as if I were hearing them for the first time.

Concern. I think that was what I craved. A warm and steady and unchangeable concern. In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern. And although I didn't think of it then in these terms, my self-pity had soured into self-loathing.

I put the book beneath the mattress in my room and curled again on my side. I listened to the crickets that were now carving the air outside my window. The deep azure sky was weakening, grey entering it. I heard Mama walk into the room, but I pretended to be asleep. My bed was narrow, made for one person, but she found a place beside me and buried her face in my neck. She had always seemed captive, captive in her own home, continually failing to prepare herself for anything else. Her breathing became unsteady. I felt her tears on my skin, her breath smelled warm and salty, sharp with medicine.

'What am I to do?' she said. 'What am I to do what am I to do what am I to do what am I…'

'Mama,' I interrupted. Her voice was like sand rising, it scared me.

'What if they can't or won't help us?' she suddenly said.

'Who?'

'This Jafer and Um Masoud,' she snapped angrily. I felt blameworthy. 'I don't want to live if I must live like this.'

'When I am big I'll take you to Scotland. I promise, on my life.'

Then my mind went back to the time when she was imprisoned; every fantasy about the future revived that original dream: the rescuing of the girl she once was.

'Mama, tell me what happened after Uncle Khaled saw you in the Coffee House.' This was the first time I had asked Mama to talk about the past. Normally, when she was ill, I remained as silent as the wall, hypnotized and horrified.

She said nothing.

Is she thinking how to start, I wondered, or is she pretending she doesn't know what I am talking about?

She took a deep breath and began whispering into my neck. I felt a great relief wash over me. I could have listened to her for ever. I wanted to turn around and hug her, but I was afraid if I moved everything would change. 'Your Auntie Nora was the one who told me,' she started. 'She eavesdropped on the High Council's first hearing,' she said and giggled that strange giggle that was somewhere between laughter and crying. I smiled, thankful to have her back on familiar ground. 'It was our curse to have seven brothers. They were all gathered with your grandfather. Khaled was at the centre, of course. The poet is finally listened to, finally given full attention by the "hypocrites". That's what he used to call them because they used to mock him, couldn't understand his sensitivity, his complex ideas, the gifted poet.' She was definitely ill. But it didn't matter somehow. It was good to have her there, holding me and telling stories again. Even her medicine breath was tolerable, more than tolerable, it reminded me of the past, it was part of us now, part of the stories. Because if the past had a smell it was this, sharp, hard and piercing.

The section of the sky visible through my window was darkening. Thin veils of cloud drifted in and were brushed orange and crimson by the setting sun taking its last deep breath before sinking into the sea. The merciful breeze that came in the early evening was gently turning around us. My limbs relaxed, and I wished, silently, deeply, that nothing would come to disturb us, that the telephone and the doorbell would remain silent. I even hoped Baba would delay his arrival. We were both captive, our house and the past our prison, but it was familiar, not full of shadowy urges and cold alienation. I remembered the boys, the ambulance, Sharief, and squeezed Mama's arm more tightly, darkly content with the world I was given, thankful to be hers, happy she was a mother because, as Sheikh Mustafa had confirmed, all mothers will enter Heaven. I was surprised how easily his words spilled out of my mouth: ' "God has promised every mother Paradise because the suffering endured by women surpasses all kinds of human suffering."

'Once, when I was near your age,' she said. 'I stood talking to the next-door neighbours' boy. He had said something and I laughed. Your grandfather saw us. I still recall the lash of the hemp rope chasing me down the street, the people on the street, their eyes savagely curious, my own uncontrollable and hideous yelps, the rope making the sound of hiccups behind me, and your grandfather's mysterious silence and strained smile that he always had on his face at such times. I ran into our house screaming. When your aunt and grandmother saw him they screamed, begged him to stop. He said nothing, chased me into the courtyard. I was closed in, trapped. His hand fell with the weight of a sandbag on my cheek.'

Mama's description of my grandfather's smile reminded me of Ustath Rashid's smile when he was breaking up the fight between his two students in Lepcis, and Baba's smile when Nasser called on Eid.

'Later, when Khaled told your grandfather that he had seen me in the Italian Coffee House sitting in mixed company, they locked me in my room for thirty days and rushed to find me a groom. Khaled had sentenced the flower, the young, stupid, naive fourteen-year-old girl, to life imprisonment.

'For one month I was locked in my bedroom,' Mama said dreamily. 'One month,' her arm tightening round me. I felt such immense love for her. 'When your grandmother said, "Stay here until you have contemplated your actions a thousand times," I thought of your Scheherazade. The word "thousand" was what evoked the memory of that wretched woman. But, somehow, thinking of her, I didn't feel so alone. I remember promising myself I would read more, widen my choice of companions, but part of the punishment was to leave me with no books. "Don't give her any more ammunition," your grandfather had said. "A corrupt mind twists everything to its advantage." I missed reading. I missed school. But most of all I missed him, the boy who was sitting opposite me at the Coffee House – I don't even remember his name. After Khaled paid for our cappuccinos and left, I was so moved I held his hand across the table, not below it as we had been doing before in secret, there where all could see. My eyes were brimming with tears of pure happiness. The boy – I wish I could remember his name, he had such beautiful eyes, I can still see them – was more embarrassed than I. He blushed so sweetly. In my captivity I thought of him, and thinking of him made me stronger. I thought to myself, "All of this doesn't matter because he and I exist in the same world, with the same rivers and seas and mountains." The foolish girl I was. "No matter where he is," I told myself, "and no matter how hard they try to keep us apart they'll never stop us gazing into the selfsame sky, the selfsame moon, and being warmed by the selfsame sun." It gave me great joy to glimpse one of those eternal objects; the sun, a cloud, the blueness of the sky made me feel victorious over their punishment. But, in the end, it was they who won. My arsenal of literary characters shrank rapidly from then on, even Scheherazade would betray me. Now I am unable to read anything longer than a poem or a newspaper article. Books demand too much trust.

'When they released me I went to the garden to stretch my eyes and breathe the fresh air. My only protest during that month was not to bathe. My knee-long hair was bound up in a bundle and ignored. My eyes fixed on things in the distance that melted. Being able to stretch my sight was like yawning. A breath of stale air escaped from within my blouse. In the fresh air my stench was stronger. I smelled of boiled potatoes. I wondered how he would smell on the nights I will have to lie beneath him? The impulse to cry was replaced by what I understood as anger, but now know was hate. I felt its sudden and swift grip, warm and dependable, mine. That was what spurred me to talk aloud to myself like a mad girl, revealing my thoughts to my father, who I didn't know was on the other side of the wall, listening. I raised my voice in argument, as if Libya and my family had all appeared before me. "What do you want her to do?" I said into the wind, "Die? Disappear off the face of the earth? You forbid her school, lock her away for thirty days and now want to marry her to a complete stranger with a big nose. How fantastic!" I saw him coming towards me with that strange serene smile that preceded every beating, not so much a smile as an expression of pain. His lips strained and affected his eyes, he seemed almost regretful. This time the inevitability of it drained me, I couldn't even get myself to speak, to say "No," let alone run. I remained still, sitting under the grapevine-shackled trellising that shaded an area spread with rugs where we sometimes gathered in the late afternoons to drink tea and roast almonds, listening to your grandmother recite from A Thousand and One Nights.'

I felt my heart tense in fear for her, wondering if he was going to strike her down again with the sandbag-weight of his hand.

'Discussing the nose of a suitor suggested desire, a suggestion I preferred to die before making in the company of el-haj Muftah, your grandfather.'

Mama liked to refer to her relatives by how they were related to me: her father was 'your grandfather', her brother 'your uncle'. It made me feel responsible, as if I was to blame for their actions, and made the fact that they were completely absent from our lives even more peculiar. My grandparents' house was in Benghazi, where the family is from, twelve hours' drive away, where my uncles, Auntie Nora and my countless cousins also lived. I always thought that it was because of the distance they never visited, but I later discovered that it was my father's political involvement that had scared them away. People were sometimes arrested just by association. It had seemed quite normal then, as most things in childhood do, but, thinking back on it now, I realize how isolated we were.

'A good, virtuous, chaste girl,' Mama continued, 'ought to only be concerned with the character of her suitor, not his nose. A beating, I thought, was now inevitable. But there was something in the way he had prolonged the moment that made me think he relished it. My hate tightened round my heart. Then he sat beside me, wrapped his arm around my shoulders and spoke in a way he had never done before. At that moment his strange smile gained a new meaning. Because it had always accompanied the beatings, I had come to read it as an expression of regret towards something he felt he was obliged to do; that the inevitability of the situation was causing his spirit to stir with the contradiction of love and justice. I never suspected he took pleasure in hitting me. In fact, although I always disagreed with his punishment, I also believed that perhaps due to an ancient failing that kept father and child from ever being reconciled I must endure the receiving of it as he must endure its administering. And so I came to interpret his smile as the smile of a troubled man, torn between desire and duty, between what he would rather do and what he must. In this way I rescued him in my memory. Because I never doubted his love. But now, as he sat beside me, his smile seemed to mean something else. Along with his gentle voice and embrace, it was also there to comfort me. I cried. I cried because his mercy was harsher than his justice; I cried because I understood that I was now the property of another man, that beating me was no longer a privilege he could allow himself. That stifled smile now looked like his farewell.

"Would I ever sell you?" he said, sitting beside me beneath the entangled grapevine. "Would I ever give you to a man that didn't deserve you?"

'And that was how I knew it was over. A word had been given and a word had been received, men's words that could never be taken back or exchanged. My eyes were no longer yawning, I could focus well now. I remembered his beatings and felt my back grow taller at the realization that they had for ever ended. I looked down at my knee touching his and was amazed at how able and enduring the human body is.'

I remembered how my back too had grown taller after the white car stopped following us. Then I thought of Ustath Rashid – I had no idea what Baba was going through – how he must be locked away, his body bruised and dirty. Perhaps he too was now sitting beside one of his interrogators, and they had suddenly, and to Ustath Rashid's utter astonishment, placed an arm around his bruised shoulders, then smiled at him. And perhaps he too looked down at their two neighbouring thighs and was amazed at how strong the human body was. I touched the places on my chest where Osama's palm-heels had stabbed me, and although they still ached the pain was duller, felt less crucial.

Outside in the garden the crickets sounded. Out of nowhere a bird broke into song, then, as if embarrassed, realized it was alone and fell silent. After a little while Mama's breathing became deep and long; she had fallen asleep. Her arm, still wrapped round my waist, became slack. I imagined what I would have done to save her. In my fantasy I would tap on the window of the room where she was held captive and help her jump out. We would run away somewhere where no one could find us. And to avoid people's gossip we would pretend to be brother and sister, because I would be nine and she fourteen. I would make sesame sticks and sell them to children, delivering them on my big motorcycle. I would spend the money I made on books for her. And one day she would meet that boy she was with in the Italian Coffee House – perhaps by the sea shore, or at a cafe, or in a line in a bakery – and fall in love with him again. Many times I would drive by on my motorcycle and see them holding hands above a table in a cafe, big, silent smiles on their faces. And after they had found many reasons to be together and all the books in the world were read, it would be time for me to be born. My imagination turned the tale in my head – I saved her, went away with her, then came back to save her again – until sleep curled itself round me and I sank in it, feeling the dark, warm glow of hope spread itself within me.