Free The Marsh Birds by Eva Sallis Page A

dizzy.
    After two weeks Thurayya stopped wearing her veil. She swayed around the compound with her mother, wearing the maddening abaya and a white embroidered hijab. Dhurgham followed her in an ecstasy of shyness and expectation until she turned around. She had a narrow face and huge dark eyes that for a moment Dhurgham thought unbearably beautiful. She looked him straight in the face and laughed.
    â€˜Mother-fucker,’ she hissed.‘Cock-sucker. In your wildest dreams and then only my bum hole.’

    His love for Laila Qahramani was of much longer duration. She was sixteen and Christian. Laila never affronted him. She didn’t notice him. She could speak English and taught as a volunteer in the classes. The brush of her abaya on his forearm burned for hours. He would convert her, he thought. His steadfast punctuality and one hundred percent attendance in her classes would slowly attract her attention and she would see that he was a man of good character and decent aspirations.
    His love for Laila only faded when he noticed Marwa. He had taken to staring surreptitiously at all the women and girls, studying them, trying to get a notion of their shape, their different forms, their breasts, necks, faces, legs. They were endlessly fascinating, endlessly different from each other. Marwa was just another object of fascination at first.
    But Marwa became a friend, and his feelings about her body and his love became much more complicated. At the height of their friendship, he thought with some pride that he was really becoming a man, really learning to be responsible about passion. At the height of their friendship, he stopped staring at other women. He noticed them but without needing to divert himself all day with studying them.
    Dhurgham noticed Marwa first because of her eyes. They were gazelle’s eyes. Large, almond-shaped, black-rimmed. She was also tiny. She was about the size he was when he was maybe ten years old. And she had breasts—perfect, conical, pointy ones, with nipples pointing outwards. They were, suddenly, his favourite sort.
    She was like a perfect miniature woman.
    Marwa was dark and fiery. She spoke to him first, which shocked him. He didn’t know that girls like her could do that. She was from Somalia but spoke perfect Arabic.‘I am as Arab as you are,’ she said haughtily. She was pleased to tell him what an ignoramus he was about everything. Within two weeks they were as inseparable as they could be while flattering themselves that they were preserving the secrecy of their friendship.
    Marwa and Dhurgham were behind the dongas, resting in the shade. It was a forty-nine degree day and everyone was inside, wilting under the fans while trying to keep small children and babies cool with wet cloths. The guards were nowhere to be seen—it was too hot for patrols.
    The heat in the shade sizzled around Dhurgham. He said it was his halo. Marwa said it was his hell cloud. But it was almost too hot for talk and the walls were too thin to talk or shriek. Dhurgham twined Marwa’s long sweaty fingers in his and leant back against the donga’s stump. They had begun holding hands when no one was watching, outraging themselves at their own daring. They had begun competing for who could be the more daring lover, who could fly closest to the inferno of discovery, who could excite the other more.
    Marwa pulled her hand away and faced him.
    â€˜You haven’t done this before!’ she whispered nervously, her eyes alight. She knelt in front of him, raised her hands, looked quickly along the deserted compound and took off her hijab. She shook out brilliant black curls, flowing from her high brow to her shoulders. With them wafted a perfume, the same as Dhurgham’s shampoo, but somehow exotically different. She laughed nervously, breathlessly; she reached for his hand and placed it on her glittering hair.
    He knelt facing Marwa knee to knee and stroked her hair in long