Free Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shaykh

come and see you in a little while, darling,’ I said apologetically.
    I went into my room and I knew how risky it would be to cry now but I couldn’t help it. I looked at the photo of me with Umar and Basem on my dressing table and turned it face down in case their eyes bored through me and saw the recent scene with Nur. Then I turned it back again and stared at Basem with his spectacles and pale eyes and smooth hair, andhis big nose that was out of proportion to the rest of his features. The sight of his striped shirt whose collar I always sprayed with some special cleaner for collars and cuffs made him appear familiar, like a brother or friend or someone who had sat next to me at school.
    I went about the house like someone immunized against hearing and seeing until Umar’s bedtime. Then I went to bed the same as I did every other night, while Basem sat watching a film on the video until late. I closed my eyes and I felt as if I were emerging from a dark cave on to a blue sea glowing with light. I opened a window in my head and looked through it and saw a motor working soundlessly in a room lined with velvety wallpaper just as I’d pictured it before, with red and blue wires around it. I opened a window looking on to my heart and saw a motor boiling and thudding there. I asked my noisy heart, and my mind, which went silently back and forth in its room, what was on the pages which I hadn’t yet read. What was passing along those red and blue wires? What were the subjects of the paintings hanging on the velvet walls? What was the significance of a heart being heart-shaped when I didn’t even know who was beginning and who was reaching an end, who growing, who diminishing?
    I am Suha. I am twenty-five-years old. My mother is Sitt Widad and my father is Dr Adnan. I’m not bent like Sahar, although I’ve laughed and joked and exchanged comments and gestures about men with other girls like me. I’m normal. I saw myself on a bed in the cold of the mountain with Suhail, Aida’s friend, in the middle. All the guests had gone, carrying bags of grapes under their arms. I’d held a party to pick our grapes at the end of the summer. I’d had the idea because my parents were in Europe and I liked having my friends to visit me in my house. The three of us were drunk and I wanted some coffee to sober up. I got it ready but when I took it to the others I found Aida stretched out on my bed facing the wall with Suhail lying beside her, and without thinking Icrept on to the bed behind Suhail. It was the smell of him perhaps, or the cold and being drunk, that made me squeeze up against him. He turned and reached his hand out to the back of my neck then moved it down my back and rested it there. I felt confused, comprehending all at once the sort of relationship which Aida and Suhail must have, but I let his hand reach under my skirt. ‘How are you feeling, Aida?’ ‘Fine,’ replied Aida, with her eyes closed. His hands were on my flesh, moving up the slope of my body, pulsating. Then he said, ‘Chopin,’ and Aida asked him, ‘Do you like Chopin?’ ‘I think he’s fantastic,’ answered Suhail, ‘and I like Ravel’s Bolero. ’ I knew that Aida wouldn’t believe what I was doing now even if she turned over and saw it. She said, ‘I tried to make Suha like classical music.’ Suhail had begun breathing more heavily. He answered, ‘Suha likes rock,’ and lifted himself over me so he was at the edge and I was in the middle. I wanted to stay where I was but at the same time I wanted to get up. I wondered whether to let myself go and disregard Aida, but I felt sorry for her whichever I did. She said, ‘Suha likes blues as well,’ and Suhail said, ‘Really?’ as he opened his flies. ‘My head’s heavy,’ I said. I began to talk wildly about anything and gathered my hair up off my head while Suhail moved faster and faster then suddenly got up and asked, ‘Where’s the coffee?’
    The heart and the mind opened their