Chapter Kairouan
Kairouan
Perhaps we grow used to darkness, to loss.
Ibrahim takes his pleasures elsewhere; I do not enquire where and he does not tell me.
Djalila, I manage as best I can and sometimes her best is good enough for something close to happiness to be felt in the household.
The servants know themselves to be lucky, for they are underused, and so they care for the three of us well and manage their own affairs behind closed doors.
No doubt they are growing lazy, but I do not care.
Often, I walk in the souks, sometimes to seek out traders of medicinal herbs and speak with them.
I do not often buy their goods, for I use only a few, but they still respect me and ask for my advice on quality and freshness, on the best uses and care in preserving their goods and it soothes me to speak of healing.
Sometimes I pass by the house that used to be my childhood home.
My parents have both gone now, my father died suddenly with a pain in his heart and my grieving mother followed not long after.
I had seen little of them, over the years.
They never failed to ask me when I would return home and I always replied that my vow was not yet complete.
I saw their sad confusion at the turn my life had taken but could not think how to explain what had happened, it seemed too long ago now.
More often I only wander the streets, watch children at play and women gossiping, men bartering.
I inhale their lives as others might inhale a perfume, relishing their light-heartedness, their small concerns and greater joys.
I am thirty-five, unmarried, still promised to a vow I made when I was only eighteen.
I do not seek to escape that vow but I sometimes wonder what my life would have been without it.
But I put it away from me, for what other options do I have now?
Instead, I try to find peace in the life of Kairouan, in its daily rhythms and the changing seasons: sunlight, a cool breeze, the welcome rain after the hot months.
I listen to the conversations around me, allowing them to flow over me without attending greatly to what they say.
As predicted, our Amir, Al-Muizz, has shifted allegiance from the Fatimids, in part perhaps because of their excessive tributary demands of one million gold dinars a year.
Now he has sworn a new allegiance to the Abbasids of Baghdad.
“The Caliph is enraged,” says one man.
“What can he do?” asks another.
“Don’t speak too lightly,” warns the first. “If he were to send the Bedouin tribes here in revenge?”
I wander on. Kairouan is a rich and powerful city, it can withstand almost anything.
I do not want to hear of the squabbles of one king and another, I walk here to listen to happier topics.
I make my way towards the central square, where a storyteller is surrounded by an eager crowd of men and boys.
Women rarely stop to listen but I like his stories of old myths and legends, stories of princesses and djinns. I move closer.
“Then the lady Zaynab’s vision came true and her husband Yusuf gave her up!”
There are many Yusufs. There are many Zaynabs. But my breath comes a little faster.
“The King of Aghmat heard of Zaynab’s vision and he commanded his vassal Yusuf to give up his bride, that he might be the most powerful man in all of the Maghreb.”
My hands are clenched. Aghmat is close to Yusuf’s territory. Yusuf is the King of Aghmat’s vassal. What is this I am hearing?
I walk into the circle and the storyteller stops, confounded. “I am telling a tale, woman,” he berates me. “Be off with you.”
I face him, paying no attention to the grumblings around me. “These are yours,” I tell him, slipping silver coins into his hand. “Follow me to somewhere quiet and repeat the story you were just telling.”
Afterwards I sit, my head aching. How is this possible?
He told me that Zaynab had some kind of vision.
She claimed that she would be the wife of the most powerful man in the Mahgreb.
This in itself is strange enough. Zaynab does not have such powers, I would have felt them in her.
What, then, has really occurred? I do not know and there is no way to find out.
What happened next then, is that King Luqut of Aghmat decided that her vision was interesting enough that he wanted her for his own bride.
He commanded Yusuf to give her up and Yusuf—I curse him in my mind for this—gave her up as ordered.
What did he think he was doing? What of his vows to protect her with his life?
Zaynab, barely sixteen, married for only one year to Yusuf, is now the queen of Aghmat, torn away from a man whom she loved with a passion so hot it burned me to feel it.
The storyteller tells me she screamed when Yusuf told her what was to happen.
I wish this was only his embellishment but I fear it is true.
***
I walk the streets again but now my mind is swirling. I do not see what is around me but my feet know me better than I know myself.
“Hela.”
“Moez.”
I stand still, in front of him. I do not look at the contents of his stall, do not speak of this and that, do not smile. Perhaps this strangeness in me gives him courage to say what he has waited all this time to say.
“I do not have hundreds of camels,” he says. “I have only five, for you know that what I carry is light and small. I am not a rich man, for I serve only certain customers, those whose skills are such that they know what to ask me for.”
I say nothing. A brown camel, tethered close by, whooshes in my ear and I stroke its velvet nose without looking at it, my thoughts elsewhere.
“But I am not a poor man,” says Moez. “I can offer you a comfortable home, a chance to practice your healing skills.”
He waits for me to answer but I stay silent, gazing at him as though I cannot hear what he is saying.
He looks down and I see some colour in his cheeks before he raises his gaze to mine again. “And—and a man who cares for you,” he says. “I think of you often, Hela, with tenderness.” He swallows a little. “With love,” he adds, his voice grown thick.
He did not need to say this. I have felt it for a long time, perhaps for years, unfurling in him slowly, a kindliness, a friendship, then something more, a waiting for me, a nervous excitement when he sees me approaching.
He has been slow to recognise his own emotions, slow to name them for what they are.
And I think, perhaps I could love this man, perhaps his slowness would slow my own passions, would lead me to a gentler love that I need not fear the consequences of, that I could relax into, knowing comfort rather than anxiety.
Perhaps my vow to Allah was nonsense after all, the frightened prayer of a young girl too foolish to accept Faheem’s death as His will, proud enough to claim it as her own doing.
And the slave boy—it was an accident, nothing more.
Why have I bound myself to misery when I could find happiness?
Zaynab’s story is her own to fashion, Ibrahim and Djalila’s stories are also their own.
Perhaps all is only the will of Allah and I have no great powers to be fearful of.
I stand silent before Moez and then I hold out my hand to him and he takes it in his own. We stand for a moment.
“Will you come with me on my next journey?” he asks. “It is a trading journey, away from Kairouan, but my mother lives in the countryside now and I would ask for her blessing before we marry.”
“Yes,” I say.
“We will be away for a month,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“We must leave at dawn tomorrow,” he says and I only nod before I walk away, my heart thumping even though I try to quiet it.
***
“Away where?” asks Ibrahim.
“With a trader, to look at new healing herbs,” I say. I am not ready to tell Ibrahim; I do not have the words.
“A month?” says Djalila and I see her hands begin to clench and unclench. I know that the leather strip is not far from her mind, even though it has been a long time since she has used it.
“I will return,” I say, but I do not tell her that I intend to marry Moez, that this journey is in part to receive his mother’s blessing for our union.
Hayfa nods, uncertain. “Who is to give orders?” she asks.
“Djalila,” I say. In my new hope for the future, I think that perhaps I have cocooned Djalila too much.
Perhaps if I had not been here all these years, she would have had to build her own relationship with Ibrahim rather than through me.
Perhaps she would have had to give orders to Hayfa, like every wealthy woman who runs a large household.
Perhaps in my absence she will find her voice to order what she wants and maybe she will grow up at last. I have kept her a child and she is no child; she is the same age as I am.
Maybe this journey will be a new beginning for us all.
There is no reason why she and Ibrahim cannot find some small kind of happiness together that goes beyond the careful courtesy they each employ with one another.
***
I leave at dawn, taking little with me. A few silver coins, a couple of changes of clothes.
Moez has promised me a camel to ride on.
Djalila weeps in her room but I bid her a brisk farewell as though she were smiling and I nod to Hayfa, who stands silent in the doorway of her kitchen to watch me go.
Ibrahim has already left a little while before me and I am glad of it, there is no need for elaborate farewells when I will return soon enough.
There will be enough of all that when I leave this house for good.
***