Fareeha and the Water Table of Sa' An
a novel by Paul S. Davey
Chapter 1
A
�Shoo, shoo.�
The voice came from behind a makeshift door that rippled in the warm afternoon breeze. The door buckled and from its side appeared a tall woman with invective frothing from her mouth. She bent for a rock that lay with others in the rubble outside her house.
�If you touch my door again I�ll have you on a skewer.�
The rock missed its target but the dull animal understood its message: it reared backwards out of the hole, brayed, and then limped away down the street from where it had come.
�Kebab!�
The woman was hardly being fair: the door wasn�t really a door (it was simply a sheet of linoleum hung from a surviving beam in the roof down over the gap in which a door had once stood), and it made perfectly good goat-food, especially in these hard times.
�Sorry, Mrs Azziz.�
She had not expected anything human in the vicinity and reeled around to see who was there. �Mahmoud, what are you doing here?�
�Food, Mrs Azziz,� he said.
The woman put a hand to her mouth and gasped. �My goodness, Mahmoud, you should have said; I . . .�
�Not for me,� he laughed. �My goats; they are starving. Nothing over there any more.� He reached with his outstretched arm to the patch of scrub on the hill east of Sa� An, where he lived in a hovel with his goats. �Thought I�d try some of the municipal land down here in town.�
�Oh,� Fareeha Azziz said, trying to tie up the headscarf that she had hastily thrown over her long black hair.
�Do you know if it�s still municipal? Much has changed since I was last down here.� He kicked a rock into the crater and followed it with his eyes, as if lost in the fast-forward of life.
�Well . . . I suppose so.� She was hesitant. �They couldn�t take that from us, could they?�
�Suppose not. Soon find out anyway.� Both of Mahmoud�s hands arrived at a buckle that clasped the leather satchel hanging from a belt around his shoulder. He pulled out a pouch and began to sort through its contents with busy fingers. �Last bit,� he said.
Fareeha was not paying any attention. Her eyes had wandered along the street and were scrutinising a puff of smoke that had just shot up from a mountain peak. She cupped her ears long before the boom reached them. She need not have bothered: it was low in pitch and lifeless, far away. �Sorry, Mahmoud, what was that?� She dropped her hands.
Mahmoud held up the cigarette that he had by now rolled. �Last bit of Turkish.� He smiled then added, �be smoking goat shit tomorrow.� He lit a match and drew hard on his last cigarette. �Still at it, I see.� He threw the smouldering match towards the smoking mountains.�
�Yes,� Fareeha sighed, �when will it stop?�
The old man exhaled and bent to pick up his crook. A cloud of blue smoke wafted over the crater towards Fareeha.
�Well, I hope . . .� She stopped, suddenly, as the membrane in the her nose sensed the sweet aroma of the freshly smouldered tobacco. It was as if a genie somewhere had frozen her with a spell. She finished her breath, drawing the smoke slowly through her flared nostrils. She then sighed and looked back up at the looming mountains. Her mind quickly followed her eyes to the peaks�as if she were dreaming of somebody, an image conjured up by that genie or by the rich scent of burnt leaf.
�Better save a bit for later,� Mahmoud said, as he pinched the hot tip from the slender white tube. He blew away the remaining ash and put the leftovers in the pouch. He quickly put the pouch back into the satchel, as if immuring a valuable treasure out of reach of prying hands (and hungry goats). His hands met again at the buckle.
Fareeha had yet to return from the distance, where her mind played, spellbound, among the puffs of gun-smoke and the jagged mountain tops. Even the call from the local place of worship failed to break her reverie.
�Time to pray,� Mahmoud said, before turning his attention to the goats. �I can�t stand this much longer.� His comment was meant for the woman but was directed at the blackest of the goats. �I�ve been thinking for a long time of going up into the mountain myself. Not to fight of course, but to look for Mansoor, the Sufi.� He put his crook into the rim of the crater and pushed off. �Ah well,� he sighed, �good morning to you Mrs. Azziz.�
Chapter 2
By the time Fareeha returned, Mahmoud and his starving goats had gone and all that remained of them was the far-off clanking of neck-bells and a partially-remembered sentence about prayer. And that aroma: spicy and biting, but wonderfully exotic and enchanting�so much so that it had briefly transported her back to the distant past.
On her way back inside, she checked the extemporised door for damage; but it was difficult to tell if any new goat-bites had been added. She clucked and wondered how much longer the linoleum was going to last. In fact, most of her one-story house was now made-over in one way or another: sisal and flour-sacks from the bazaar, planks and bricks from the ruins of nearby houses, and other, less identifiable, things�all had been woven into the dilapidation of her hovel. It was mess and it was precarious, but still a home.
Coffee was a sombre affair most mornings: Fareeha would wipe the dust from the old table in the kitchen and sit on one of the broken chairs with her small bitter brew, sipping to the back-beat of cannon fire from the mountains�if she could get the beans. Rarely now would she take it outside and share it with a neighbour and long gone was the time when she would occasionally buy it in a caf�, down near the bazaar. Today she followed the dull routine faithfully but became distracted by a pimple she found under her bottom lip. Instinctively, she turned for the mirror that she had kept on a shelf next to the window. Her eyes found not what she was looking for; she closed them as she silently admonished herself and then raised them to heaven, cursing that day on which she had almost lost her life and then lost her mind. Her fingers left the pimple and moved up to the small scar on the left side of her forehead.
The rocket had missed the house�by a good two yards�but it shook the foundations and shattered the woman inside; and by the time the smoke had cleared, the dust settled, and her forehead stopped bleeding, she knew that everything had changed: life, she realised, was real and now. And with that new understanding, she went around the blasted house picking out everything she considered superfluous to survival, packed them all up in a box, and threw them into the smoking hole outside�mirrors included.
A few days after the rocket, when her mind returned, she cried and called herself rash�the few neighbours that hadn�t fled were using different terms�but she didn�t regret the clearout: vanity, she thought, had no place in a world like hers. Since then the war had conspired with her scar and had stolen the rest of her beauty. She felt herself first becoming plain and then ugly; there was nothing left to be proud about and she was pleased that she had rid the house of all means of reflecting that growing mask of despair.
She returned her attention to the pimple but soon left it alone, glad that she couldn�t see yet another sign of her own deterioration. Vanity was not the only thing that had gone into the crater: her hope had followed it, together with other less identifiable things that depended on a husband, money, and a stable future. And most of the Mrs. Azziz now sitting at the kitchen table was new, made over: her short temper, her fear, her belief in the present, and, strangely, her consolation in fate, which on a good day she might put down to the will of God.
She reached across to the shelf and picked up a magnificent ivory-handled comb. She held it up and stared at it, as if she were a child who had just found a lost toy. A single reminder of a happy past? A feint hope that life might some day change and be worth living again? Perhaps; but that was the only one, and she kept it ostensibly to take care of the long, shiny black tresses that when not hidden beneath a dull headscarf fell shimmering down her neck and over her shoulders. She told herself the comb was a necessity, but whenever she passed it through her silky hair she felt a layer or two of filth lift from her heart.
Still sitting there at the old kitchen table, she pulled away her head covering and released a mass of black hair; she tugged at it once with the comb but got no further than the first few knots. She stopped as a big tear welled up in each eye; she snatched the comb away and threw it back onto the mirrorless shelf.
She picked up her glass, sipped her coffee, and thought again of her husband, up in the mountains, squandering his passion on a war. She had few fond memories of him and knew that his heart was with the revolution; so why, she wondered, had the aroma of Mahmoud�s tobacco�his last�sent her flying over the mountains looking for him? The drawing, burnt-wood smell that deceives the senses wafted again through her mind. Something smouldered in her heart, like a cigarette: without a flame. Love? Hardly!
She bolted up and went to the front window. She didn�t have to draw the flour sack to see out but even at the most acute angle she couldn�t quite see the hills. She ran out into the street, her hair blowing in the wind, and stepped around the crater, craning her neck up and to the south; she cupped her right hand along her brow, shielded her eyes from the sun in the east. �If only . . . � she muttered to herself. �If only I could survive without you.� She kicked a stone towards the hole and watched it roll in.
Fareeha put her hand on her chest and felt her heart which was beating with a renewed vigour. She followed another puff of smoke shoot out of a valley on the distant horizon and waited for the boom. This time she didn�t put her hands over her ears; she left them above her eyes as she raised her head to the sky. It was clear and blue, as it would be for the rest of the long dry season�an extended summer sealed at either end by a short spring and autumn. A long and hard time; and even if Hassan made it back at the end of it, the winter was short, hardly time enough to earn more than a few miserable dihrams�if any at all. And then he�d be gone again, back up there with his gun and his dreams of freedom. Mahmoud�s words came back to her, words she thought she hadn�t heard: �I can�t stand this much longer,� she echoed. Boom!
She saw Hassan firing that very gun: he pushed at a button with one of his delicate, slender fingers, more used to writing and office work than fighting; and then he ducked away with a mischievous grin. The same grin that before the marriage had stolen her heart but afterwards had bared its teeth, shown the anger beneath. He melted into the anonymity of his comrades, just one more man lost to one more war. Then she felt the morning sun grilling her face; she turned and took her wandering mind and her fluttering heart back into the dim coolness of her battered home.
The half-full glass of coffee was still warm; she wrapped her fingers around it, as if to keep in the heat, and sat back down at the old table. For some reason she looked around the kitchen for a physical reminder of Hassan, something to swear at perhaps, or spit upon. There weren�t any: they had gone into the crater with the mirrors; there was just nothing left. Her fingers took the lukewarm coffee to her lips. She sipped and tasted bitterness.
�Fareeha, are you in there?� A voice entered he kitchen through the rice sack that covered the window-frame in the back wall (the flour sack fluttered over the one in the front wall).
�Mrs. Sharwalla,� Fareeha said, but hardly loud enough for her neighbour to hear, and then she sighed. She left the kitchen through another extemporised door (leaning pieces of charred floorboarding) and entered the back yard. �Good morning, Mrs Sharwalla,� she said over the fence, struggling into her headscarf.
Her neighbour whooped and scolded her for not using her first name. � . . . Jameela from now on,� she said, �or I�ll let you feel Farooq�s hand.�
Fareeha watched Mrs. Sharwalla wobble in a burst of laughter, but she couldn�t share the joke. It was Farooq, her neighbour�s husband, and his vicious hand that had swiped at Mrs. Sharwalla�s face and taken out one of her eyes. Her laughter was now lopsided.
�Jameela,� Fareeha repeated, as if she took the threat seriously. She tried not to look into the woman�s face, but she was glad that her neighbour hadn�t gone behind the veil, hadn�t tried to hide the disgrace that should be her husband�s.
�Well, Miss Chamoun,� her neighbour said, at last controlling her laughter. �Have you heard the news?�
Another name game. Fareeha had been a Chamoun until she married Hassan, a young Azziz. And until the couple produced a baby, Mrs. Sharwalla, her one-eyed neighbour, would use her maiden name, as a gentle reminder of her duty to procreate.
Fareeha wanted to tell her that she liked her using her old name, Chamoun, and that she wished that she could go back to being a Chamoun again, undo the mistakes she�d made. But she didn�t. �No,� she said instead, �what news?�
�Prices are up again in the bazaar. Everything�s doubled overnight.� Mrs. Sharwalla adjusted her eye patch and whooped.
Fareeha tried to make some kind of noise, whistling air through her lips to please her neighbour; but she was hardly surprised.
�. . . somebody ought to do something about it,� Mrs. Sharwalla continued. �Do it myself if I had both my eyes.� She broke off in another peel of laughter, the rolls of middle age wobbling beneath her ample dress.
Do what? Fareeha thought to herself. What on earth was there left to do?
�Now then,� Mrs. Sharwalla said, squinting her eye down at Fareeha�s flat stomach. �Are you sure he hasn�t left you with anything this time? You know . . .�
Fareeha tried not to listen to what had become her neighbour�s constant refrain. Mrs. Sharwalla never tired of saying that a woman as beautiful as Fareeha should quickly pass on her looks to the next generation, before they begin to fade. �Poor old Hassan,� she would say as part of her weekly speech, �he disobeyed his father to get a jewel like you, and still no baby!�
�. . . another Azziz to make the world a better place?� She whooped again.
�Well . . .� Fareeha shifted her sandalled feet on the stony ground. It was another thing she should just tell the old woman�that she was glad that she had not produced another Azziz and hoped she never would.
�Shoo, shoo.� Mrs. Sharwalla�s head had suddenly turned to the back of her garden and her tongue lashed out at a goat that had somehow pushed its horns through the fence and was nosing towards her tomatoes. She pulled up her skirts and gave chase, her single, squinting eye guiding the way.
© Paul S. Davey, 2002
Chapter 3
For the remaining chapters please drop me an e-mail
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Miles Off (home)
Paul S. Davey is a freelance travel and fiction writer. He started life in the UK but now turns up in the strangest of places around the world -- usually with his notebook handy
short stories:
Kanch': A Bridge on the River Home
The Collector
Loek. A Tale from a Lagoon
O'Keefe's Dog Day
The Enema
travel:
Tryin' to Get to Mexico
Freedom in Cambodia
Saigon Gary
Pedalling Taipei
Tofu Culture
Urban Betel Adventure: Sex, Drugs, and Spitting
Hawking Carrot-Cake and a new President
Cambodia, Freehand