He’d wasted his breath, because almost as soon as he began with all that I put my hands over my daughter’s ears. She protested loudly, but I kept them there. “What you’re talking about is a different matter,” I said. “It doesn’t explain or excuse your being here. Not to this child. And don’t say ‘always’ to her. You have to think harder or just leave it alone and say sorry.”
He didn’t argue, but he didn’t apologise. He felt he’d spoken the truth, so he didn’t need to argue or apologise.
Later in the evening I asked my daughter if she was still racist against soldiers, and she said loftily, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.” When she’s a bit older I’m going to ask her about that little outburst, what made her come out with such words in the first place. And I’m sure she’ll make up something that makes her seem cleverer and more sensitive than she really was.
We were expecting our scrawny soldier again the following afternoon, my daughter and I. My daughter’s friends had dropped her. Even the ones she had helped find favour with the other children forgot that their new position was due to her and urged the others to leave her out of everything. The women I knew snubbed me at market, but I didn’t need them. My daughter and I told each other that everyone would come round once they understood that what we were doing was innocent. In fact we were confident that we could convince our soldier of his wrongdoing and send him back to his country to begin life anew as an architect. He’d confessed a love of our minarets. He could take the image of our village home with him and make marvels of it.
Noura waited until our mothers, mine and hers, were busy gossiping at her house, then came to tell me that the men were discussing how best to deal with me. I was washing clothes in the bathtub and I almost fell in.
My crime was that I had insulted Bilal with my brazen pursuit of this soldier. .
“Noura! This soldier — he’s just a boy! He can hardly coax his beard to grow. How could you believe—”
“I’m not saying I believe it. I’m just saying you must stop this kind of socializing. And behave impeccably from now on. I mean — angelically.”
Three months before I had come to the village, Noura told me, there had been a young widow who talked back all the time and looked haughtily at the men. A few of them got fed up, and they took her out to the desert and beat her severely. She survived, but once they’d finished with her she couldn’t see out of her own eyes or talk out of her own lips. The women didn’t like to mention such a matter, but Noura was mentioning it now because she wanted me to be careful.
“I see,” I said. “You’re saying they can do this to me?”
“Don’t smile; they can do it. You know they can do it! You know that with those soldiers here our men are twice as fiery. Six or seven of them will even gather to kick a stray dog for stealing food. . ”
“Yes, I saw that yesterday. Fiery, you call it. Did they bring this woman out of her home at night or in the morning, Noura? Did they drag her by her hair?”
Noura averted her eyes because I was asking her why she had let it happen and she didn’t want to answer.
“You’re not thinking clearly. Not only can they do this to you but they can take your daughter from you first, and put her somewhere she would never again see the light of day. Better that than have her grow up like her mother. Can’t you see that that’s how it would go? I’m telling you this as a friend, a true friend. . My husband doesn’t want me to talk to you anymore. He says your ideas are wicked and bizarre.”
I didn’t ask Noura what her husband could possibly know about my ideas. Instead I said, “You know me a little. Do you find my ideas wicked and bizarre?”
Noura hurried to the door. “Yes. I do. I think your husband spoilt you. He gave you illusions. . You feel too free. We are not free.”
I drew my nails down my palm, down then back up the other way, deep and hard. I thought about what Noura had told me. I didn’t think for very long. I had no choice — I couldn’t afford another visit from him. I wrote him a letter. I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to take back all that I wrote in that letter; it was hideous from beginning to end. Human beings shouldn’t say such things to each other. I put the letter into an unsealed envelope and found a local boy who knew where the scrawny soldier lived. Doubtless Bilal read the letter before the soldier did, because by evening everyone but my daughter knew what I had done. My daughter waited for the soldier until it was fully dark, and I waited with her, pretending that I was still expecting our friend. There was a song she wanted to sing to him. I asked her to sing it to me instead, but she said I wouldn’t appreciate it. When we went inside at last, my daughter asked me if the soldier could have gone home without telling us. He probably hated good-byes.
“He said he would come. . I hope he’s all right. . ” my daughter fretted.
“He’s gone home to build minarets.”
“With matchsticks, probably.”
And we were both very sad.
My daughter didn’t smile for six days. On the seventh she said she couldn’t go to school.
“You have to go to school,” I told her. “How else will you get your friends back again?”
“What if I can’t?” she wailed. “What if I can’t get them back again?”
“Do you really think you won’t get them back again?”
“Oh, you don’t even care that our friend is gone. Mothers have no feelings and are enemies of progress.”
(I really wonder who my daughter has been talking to lately. Someone with a sense of humour very like her father’s. . )
I tickled the sole of her foot until she shouted.
“Let this enemy of progress tell you something,” I said. “I’m never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that’s almost as good as being there yourself. You’re in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the farther away your friends are, and the more spread out they are, the better your chances of going safely through the world. . ”
“Ugh,” my daughter said.
I’ve grown a beard or two in my time. Long, full, Mosesin-the-wilderness — that type of beard. Mainly as a way to relax, hiding my face so I can take it easy behind my beard. A while ago I went to London, to see a play they’d cooked up out of one of my favourite novels — I couldn’t wait the eight months it would take to cross the Atlantic. And in the weeks leading up to the visit I must have just quietly left shaving out of my mornings, so quietly I didn’t notice I was doing it, because when I got to London the beard was so bushy it distracted me from the sights. Big Ben and my beard. Buckingham Palace and my beard. The Tower of London and my beard. Caw, caw, said the ravens. (Were they making reference to the beard?) I had a great time. No one bothered me that entire trip. Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards — I’d grown the beard so that no one would bother me. Time to start another beard. If only I could remember how long it took for the last one to grow.
I want to be on my own for a spell. But there’s nowhere I can be on my own. I went to the library in town, thinking, It’s such a nice Saturday, so fine out, no one will be there — but it was full of bespectacled girls “studying.” The bluestockings of today. Dressed up just to go to the library, making eyes at a fellow across a room, bold as anything. I like to look, but I don’t like it when they look back. All you’re doing is taking an appreciative moment, maybe two or three, if she’s a serious matter, and she’s staring back and thinking, I’ve caught his eye. Good. Now what I’d really like to do is keep it until his dying day. It’s some kind of God-awful whim she has. This isn’t just talk; I know this type of girl, the type who looks back. I know her all too well. She’s the type who’s really trying to start something. Rousing at the beginning, the heated command, until you realise she can’t get enough attention, and she needs all of yours, every last scrap of it. And then come the ugly scenes. And I don’t mean confrontations but hissed exchanges, half hours of being kept waiting for her in some lobby or other for no good reason, parties where she bestows one freezing-cold glance upon you and then spends the rest of the evening holed up in some cosy corner with someone else; that kind of scene fixes the equivalent of a jeweller’s loupe to your eye. You examine your diamond and find her edges blurred with tawdry cracks; stay involved for a few more months and you’ll find she worsens over time. Rapidly, too. All these tactical attempts at mind control; I’m not kidding. It sounds like an exaggeration until someone tries it on you. It’s hard to find a woman without tactics. That’ll be why I made one up. Then she started a game, had me pursue her through Africa. She cast me as a desperate spinster with an antique sword. She cast me as a fellow who ditched his woman out in some foreign country because he couldn’t handle her. Mary Foxe has been taking more than a few liberties. So I’ll correct my statement. It’s hard to even imagine a woman without tactics.