I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops by Hanan al-Shaykh Read Free Book Online

future tenses. This made her feel that she was being useful, but she also derived pleasure and amusement from the examples he gave her, which were at once strange and simple. She remembered some of them: “I will not tell anyone my secret even if my head is separated from my body and my limbs are cut off.” “I have an aircraft.” And he wouldn’t leave that sentence there. The blood had rushed into his face and he had refused to continue the lesson, shouting, “I have an aircraft! I have an aircraft! And yet I let myself rot away here.”
    But now he wasn’t responding to her. He sighed deeply, and she wasn’t able to persuade him to become involved in the lesson, or give him advice about his work as a low-grade accountant in an airline company. Not that she had a special interest in him, but she had taken it upon herself to hand out advice to the villagers who had adopted her. She used to urge them not to be satisfied, not to surrender to their fate, repeating, “It is written,” but to transcend their circumstances, which means she encouraged secondary-school pupils to go to university and small farmers to grow crops they hadn’t tried before.
    Mahyoub sighed again and Ingrid guessed he was going to return to the subject of emigrating.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked finally.
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” he answered.
    She didn’t ask him what it was that he didn’t want to talk about. She knew it was hard for him to earn enough to live on, his prospects of promotion were poor, and he had been waiting for a year for a visa to join a relative in Saudi Arabia.
    The car jolted and bounced over the potholes and around the hairpin bends and Ingrid recovered her equilibrium, lost momentarily when her focus on what she represented here, and what she wanted from living here, had been blurred by a trivial gesture toward her hair. Mahyoub’s behavior had made her think again and she realized that she had to allow some unspoken complicity to exist between herself and the village. She could not become part of their lives and identify with their particular ways while she remained in their eyes as remote as a heroine from one of their folktales, or a princess imprisoned in a palace that no one could enter. But she said nothing. The days were gone when she used to try and persuade him that he was better off here and should give up his ambitions to go to Europe, and she no longer criticized the men who migrated to Saudi Arabia and left their wives and children for years on end.
    She would have loved at that moment to tell him abouther recent experience when she went back home: how all she had thought about was these mountains, this earthly paradise, this secure life, remote from outer and inner turmoil and moral decay. Here it was possible to while away the time without being troubled by modern civilization. Peace of mind existed in these half-empty houses, which contained only mattresses to sleep on, dishes to eat off, a toilet, a lamp. This was paradise.
    Ingrid turned toward him calculating whether, if she said this out loud to him, he would fly off the handle, and shout, “What’s the point of being in paradise if you don’t have enough to eat?”
    Or would he nod his head in agreement? “I know. I know. But we have to try the other life. See what it’s like working there, then choose.”
    What? You want to try working over there? Pitiless work which will rob you of your pride as you scrub toilets and sinks, and sweep up the dogshit in public parks, then spend hours purifying yourself from their filth?
    Mahyoub was the one man who didn’t accept what she said open-mouthed, content merely to stare back at her captivating features like the rest of them. He argued with her and lost his temper, especially on recent occasions, and once, when she was envying them their happy life, he had shouted, “It’s all right for you. You’ll go homeand turn on the hot tap, sleep with your head on a pillow, eat off your