Not an old palace, it turned out, but an old museum. No room in it was very big or impressive, but there were a lot of them. False ceilings, open ceilings and abrupt cuts in wall paintings and wainscoting patterns made it clear that bigger rooms had been divided and subdivided. Most of the rooms held more than one bed or cot, and the huge kitchen was crowded with women making a meal or waiting to eat it. They were thin women, for the most part. It was noisy with talk and stove fans. 'What is this?' Budur asked Idelba under the hubbub.
'This is a zawiyya. A kind of boarding house for women.' Then with a bleak smile: 'An anti harem.' She explained that these had been traditional in the Maghrib, and now they were widespread in Firanja. The war had left many more women alive than men, despite the indiscrim inate devastation of its last two decades, when more civilians than soldiers had died, and women's brigades had been common on both sides. Turi and the other Alpine emirates had kept more men at home than most countries, putting them to work in the armouries, so Budur had heard of the depopulation problem, but had never seen it. As for the zawlyyas, Idelba said they were still technically illegal, as the laws against female ownership of property had never been changed; but male nominal owners and other legal dodges were used to legitimize scores of them, hundreds of them.
'Why did you not live in one of these after your husband died?' Budur asked.
Idelba frowned. 'I needed to leave for a while.'
They were assigned a room that had three beds, but no other occupants. The third bed would serve as desk and table. The room was dusty, and its little window looked out on other grimy windows, all facing in on an airshaft, as Idelba called it. Buildings here were so compressed together that they had to remember to leave shafts for air.
But no complaints. A bed, a kitchen, women around them: Budur was content. But Idelba was still very worried, about something having to do with ber nephew Piali and his work. In their new room she stared at Budur with a dismay she couldn't conceal. 'You know, I should send you back to your father. I've got enough trouble as it is.'
'No. I won't go.'
Idelba stared at her. 'How old are you again?'
'I'm twenty three.' She would be in two months.
Idelba was surprised. 'I thought you were younger.'
Budur blushed and looked down.
Idelba grimaced. 'Sorry. That's the effect of the harem. And no men left to marry. But look, you have to do something.'
'I want to stay here.'
'Well, even so, you have to inform your father where you are, and tell him that I did not kidnap you.'
'He'll come here and get me.'
'No. I don't think so. In any case you must tell him something. Phone him, or write him a letter.'
Budur was afraid to talk to her father, even over the phone. The idea of a letter was intriguing. She could explain herself without giving away her precise location.
She wrote: Dear Father and Mother,
I followed Aunt Idelba when she left, though she did not know it. I have come to Nsara to live and to pursue a course of study. The Quran says all of Allah's creatures are equal in His eyes. I will write you and the rest of the family a weekly report on my affairs, and will live an orderly life here in Nsara that will not shame the family. I am living in a good zawiyya with Aunt Idelba, and she will look after me. Lots of young women here are doing this, and they will all help me. I will study at the madressa. Please convey all my love to Yasmina, Rema, Aisha, Nawah and Fatima.
Your loving daughter, Budur She posted this off, and after that stopped thinking of Turi. The letter was helpful in making her feel less guilty. And after a while she realized, as the weeks went on, and she did clerical work, and cleaning, and cooking, and other help of that kind in the zawiyya, and made the arrangements to start studies at the institute connected to the madressa, that she was not going to get a letter back from her father. And Mother was illiterate; and her cousins no doubt forbidden to write, and perhaps angry at her for abandoning them; and her brother would not be sent after her, nor would he want to be; nor would she be arrested by the police and sent off in a sealed train to Turi. That happened to no one. There were literally thousands of women both escaping from home, and relieving those left behind from the burden of caring for them. What in Turi had looked like an eternal system of law and custom that the whole world abided by, was in reality nothing more than the antiquated habits of one moribund segment of a single society, mountain bound and conservative, furiously inventing pan Islamic 'traditions' even at the moment they were all disappearing, like morning mist or (more appropriately) battlefield smoke. She would never go back, it was that simple! And no one was going to make her. No one even wanted to make her; that too was a bit of a shock. Sometimes it did not feel so much that she had escaped as that she had been abandoned.
There was this fundamental fact, however, which struck her every day when she left the zawiyya: she was no longer living in a harem. She could go where she chose, when she chose. This alone was enough to make her feel giddy and strange – free, solitary – almost too happy, to the point of disorientation, or even a kind of panic: once right in the midst of this euphoria she saw from behind a man emerging from the railway station and thought for a second it was her father, and was glad, relieved; but it wasn't him; and all the rest of that day her hands shook with anger, shame, fear, longing.
Later it happened again. It happened several times, and she came to regard the experience as a kind of ghost glimpsed in the mirror, her past life haunting her: her father, her uncles, her brother, her male cousins, always in actuality the faces of various strangers, just alike enough to give her a start, make her heart jump with fear, though she loved them all. She would have been so happy to think they were proud of her, that they cared enough to come after her. But if it meant returning to the harem, she never wanted to see them again. She would never again submit to rules from anyone. Even ordinary sane rules now gave her a quick surge of anger, an instantaneous and complete NO that would fill her like a shriek in the nerves. Islam in its literal meaning meant submission: but NO! She had lost that ability. A traffic policewoman, warning her not to cross the busy harbour road outside the crosswalks: Budur cursed her. The house rules in her zawiyya: her teeth would clench. Don't leave dirty plates in the sink, help wash the sheets every Thursday; NO.
But all that anger was trivial compared to the fact of her freedom. She woke in the morning, understood where she was, leapt out of bed full of amazed energy. An hour's vigorous work in the zawiyya had her groomed and fed, and some of the communal work done, bathrooms cleaned, dishes, all the chores that had to be done over and over again, all the chores that at home had been performed by the servants but how much finer it was to do such work for an hour than to have other human beings sacrificing their whole lives to it! How clear it was that this was a model for all human labour and relations!
Those things done, she was off into the fresh ocean air, like a cold salty wet drug, sometimes with a shopping list, sometimes only with her bag of books and writing materials. Wherever she was going she would go by the harbour, to see the ocean outside the jetty, and the wind whipping the flags; and one fine morning she stood at the end of the jetty with nowhere to go, and nothing to do; and no one in the world knew where she was at that moment, except for her. My God, the feel of that! The harbour crowded with ships, the brown water running out to sea on the ebb tide, the sky a pale wash of clean azure, and all of a sudden she bloomed, there were oceans of clouds in ber chest, she wept for joy. Ah, Nsara! Nsssarrrrra!
But first on her list of things to do, on many mornings, was to visit the White Crescent Disabled Soldiers' Home, a vast converted army barracks a long way up the river park. This was one of those duties Idelba had pointed her towards, and Budur found it both harrowing and uplifting – like going to the mosque on Friday was supposed to be and never really had been. The larger part of this barracks and hospital was taken up by a few thousand blind soldiers, rendered sightless by gas on the eastern front. In the mornings they sat in silence, in beds or chairs or wheelchairs as the case might be, as someone read to them, usually a woman: daily newspapers on their thin inky sheets, or various texts, or in some cases the Quran and the hadith, though these were less popular. Many of the men had been wounded as well as blinded, and could not walk or move; they sat there with half a face, or without legs, aware, it seemed, of how they must appear, and staring in the direction of the readers with a hungry ashamed look, as if they would kill and eat her if they could, from unrealizable love or bitter resentment, or both all mixed together. Such naked expressions Budur had never seen in her life, and she often kept her own gaze fixed on whatever text she was reading, as though, if she were to glance up at them they would know it and recoil, or hiss with disapprobation. Her periph eral vision revealed to her an audience out of a nightmare, as if one of the rooms of hell had extruded from the underworld to reveal its inhabitants, waiting to be processed, as they had waited and been processed in life. Despite her attempts not to look, every time she read to them Budur saw more than one of them weeping, no matter what it was she read, even the weather reports from Firanja or Africa or the New World. The weather actually was one of their favourite readings.
Among the other readers there were very plain women who nevertheless had beautiful voices, low and clear, musical, women who sang their whole lives without knowing it (and knowing would have ruined the effect); when they read many in their audience sat forward in their beds and wheelchairs, rapt, in love with a woman to whom they never would have given a second glance could they have seen her. And Budur saw that some of the men leaned forward in the same way for her, though in her own ears her voice was unpleasantly high and scratchy. But it had its fans. Sometimes she read them the stories of Scheherazade, addressing them as if they were angry King Shahryar and she the wily storyteller, staying alive one more night; and one day, emerging from that antechamber of hell into the soaked sunlight of cloudy noon, she almost staggered at the realization of how completely the old story had been turned on its head, Scheherazade free to walk away, while the Shahryars were imprisoned for ever in their own wrecked bodies.