Sometimes I see an old woman, and I think she must be seventy at least, then I find out she is forty, and has had ten kids, four of them dead, and she is a widow.
I can't stand any of this. I can't understand it.
I am of the West and I believe in the equality of women. This is what I am. So does Olga. But when Olga is with Shireen and Fatima she is exactly like them. She laughs and is gay and intimate. These women have a marvellous time They make fun for themselves out of nothing. I envy them. Believe it or not. They are supposed to be miserable and downtrodden. And they are. The dregs of the dregs. And so are their husbands. When you compare these lives, pared down to nothing with what I can remember only too clearly of America I want to vomit. The fat vulgarity of it. When these women get hold of an old American magazine, a women's magazine, they all crowd around it and laugh and get such pleasure from it. One tattered old magazine, the sort of thing you leaf through at the dentist and think what a load of old rubbish, they handle with such respect. Each rubbishy advertisement gives them entertainment for days. They will take an advertisement, and go off and stand in front of the only mirror in the building. It is an old cracked thing and the woman who owns it takes it for granted everyone must use it. They pull some cheap dress around one of them, and match it with the advertisement, and laugh.
I watch and think of how we throw everything away and nothing is good enough.
Sometimes they say they are going to learn languages like clever me and they sit around and I start off with French or Spanish. They sit, with the children all crowding around wanting attention, then one has to go off and another. I am sitting there, handing out my marvellous phrases, while they repeat them. But the next time there is a lesson, there are fewer of them, and then only one or two. Fatima is learning Spanish from me. She says she could get a better job than she has. She is a cleaning woman. If you can call a seventeen-year-old girl that. The language lessons haven't come to much, but they made an occasion for fun while they lasted.
Shireen is delighted she is having a baby, though she is too tired to drag herself about, and it means even less food. And she worries all the time because it is time Fatima is married.
Fatima is very slim, and not pretty, but striking. She knows how to make herself attractive. She uses kohl and henna and rouge. She has two dresses. She washes and cares for them. Benjamin says they are fit for a jumble sale. But he would. I hate it when Benjamin comes anywhere near these people. They are all so slight and elegant and quick-moving. Like air, because of never having eaten enough. And then there is Benjamin, a great brown hairy bear. George fits in with them. He is like them. Quick and thin.
Benjamin knows he is out of place and that they find him amazing so he keeps away.
Shireen wants Fatima to marry a friend of Naseem, who is a clerk in the same office. Naseem thinks he will marry her. They joke about it. Naseem says, Have a heart, or words to that effect, why do you want the poor thing to be married and saddle himself with all this misery. Indicating Shireen and the five children. He laughs. She laughs. Fatima laughs. If I am there and I don't laugh, they all turn on me and tease me, saying I look so solemn and boring, until I do laugh.
And then there is a sudden wave of black bitterness. It is awful, an irritability that gets into Naseem and Shireen and they hate each other. The children whimper and wail. The two rooms seem full of children's dirt and vomit and worse. Flies. Bits of food. It is horrible, squalid and awful.
Naseem then jokes that perhaps his friend Yusuf would like me instead of Fatima because at least I am educated and can keep him in luxury. At which Fatima calls me into the cubbyhole she shares with the three older children, and she takes down her best dress from a hook in the mud wall. It is a dark blue dress, of a soft cloth, very worn. It smells of Fatima and of her perfume, heavy and languishing. The dress has beautiful embroidery on it in lovely colours. Fatima made the dress and did the embroidery. This dress is a big thing in her life. She puts on me gold earrings, long, to my shoulders, and then about a hundred bangles. Gold, glass, brass, copper, plastic. Yellow, red, blue, pink, green. The gold bangle and the earrings are precious to Fatima, they are her dowry. But she puts them on me and is delighted.
This has happened several times. She loves doing it. It is because she admires me for being so educated and able to do what I like. So she thinks. She thinks I am marvellous. My life seems quite beyond her and utterly amazing.
Yesterday afternoon she put all this on me and then made up my eyes. She made my lips a dark sultry red like a tart's. She stood me in front of the cracked glass in the neighbour's room, and the women came crowding around to watch. They were all excited and delighted. Then she took me back to her sister's rooms and sat me down to wait for supper. Yusuf was coming. I said to her she was mad. But it was the wrong note, I could see that. She had to do it. Meanwhile, Shireen was all worldly-wise and smiling. Naseem came home, worn out. Thin as a rake because he does not eat what little there is for him, he always gives it to the children. He laughs when he sees me. Then in comes Yusuf. He is handsome, with dark liquid eyes. A sheikh of Araby. He laughs. He pretends I am his bride. It is funny and sweet. As if everyone is forgiving everyone for something. I say to them, cross, that all this is silly because I have no intention at all of getting married. But I am quite wrong to say it, because it is a sort of game. They are making an alternative event. A possibility. Their lives are so narrow. They have so little. So here is this spoiled western girl Rachel. But they like her really. But they have to manage her. And after all, she might marry Yusuf, who knows! Strange things do happen! Yusuf might fall in love with Rachel! Rachel might fall in love with Yusuff! A romance! But of course they don't believe this for a moment. And so it is a sort of acted-out possibility, no hard feelings. It was a feast. Vegetable stew and meatballs. They hardly ever eat meat. And I had insisted on bringing in a pudding Mother had made for us. It was a pudding of yoghurt and fruit. Shireen made sure the children stayed up to get some of it, after their share of the stew. She couldn't waste the chance of their getting some nourishment into them.
There I sat, all dolled up, a sacrificial calf. It was a lovely meal. I adored it. All the time I was furious. Not at them. At the awfulness of this poverty. At Allah. At everything. And it was all ridiculous because Fatima and Yusuf might just as well be married already. There is that strong physical thing, and the antagonism. They quarrel as if they are married, and are sure of each other.
After the meal, the feast-feeling faded away. The children were excited and a nuisance. Everything was a mess. Naseem and Yusuf went to a cafe. Shireen put the kids to bed. Fatima cleaned things up. Then she sat with me and said, Do you like him Rachel? Quite seriously, but laughing. I said, Yes I like him and I shall have him! Oh, you are going to marry him then? Yes, I shall marry him, I said. She laughed, but looked grave, in case there was a chance in a thousand I might mean it. And I kissed her so she should understand of course I wouldn't marry her Yusuf. At the time I was wanting to howl and weep. But I personally think on reflection that I am extremely childish and they are not.
Then Fatima took me into the court.
It was a night with a moon, last night.
People were sitting around in the shadows of the court. We sat by the pool. It is a tiny rectangular pool. The lilies in the earth pot at one end were smelling very strong. Olga was there, sitting quietly in the dusk. She had one of the babies on her lap. It was asleep. I don't know where George was or Benjamin. Olga knew I was in with Shireen and Naseem and Fatima because I had asked to take the pudding. She knew about Yusuf. She was worried in case I hadn't behaved well. She didn't want me to have hurt their feelings.