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

have come running?”
    The sentences flew out as images crowded in on her: when she had gone into the men’s sitting room Mahyoub had not shaken her hand. He had ignored her and looked at the school head, Marcel, suspiciously and without warmth. His sister Souad had welcomed her even more eagerly than on previous visits, trying to work out if Marcel was her fiancé.
    How could Mahyoub make advances to her now? Abandon his morals and try to seduce her? He wouldn’t be able to act like this with a Yemeni woman, or any other Arab woman. The blue of her eyes obviously gave him license to be bold. Too bad. But what if he had known she was a missionary?
    Ingrid’s eyes were wide and blue, but they filled up at the slightest pretext: a sudden breeze, bright sunlight, onions frying, a tender word. Her small nose was permanently red, but her mouth was impossible to describe. It changed rapidly depending on the situation: shut tight in a smile, pursed as a sign that she was deep in thought, moving all ways as she talked or expressed surprise; and when she threw her head back, laughing uproariously, it was like a cave full of uneven white rocks.
    It wasn’t her height that distinguished her from the other women as much as her strange coloring. Even theanimals in the village were attracted by it. Iftikar swore that her cow never took its eyes
off
Ingrid and watched her wherever she went, and Husniyya too reported that her chickens were rooted to the spot in Ingrid’s presence and the cock crowed at odd times of day.
    Ingrid was quite content to have acquired this image and compared it with the other buried inside her, concealed from everyone, even her colleagues at the school: her own image of herself as a Christian missionary. Certainly, she used to tell the men of the village stories from the New Testament and the life of Christ, discussing and comparing those common to the Bible and the Quran, but this was in the context of informing them about all the subjects they were ignorant of: that the earth was a ball floating in space, that man had walked on the moon, that there had been periods of famine in Europe too, and social breakdown, unemployment, housing shortages—even in America itself. She would illustrate this information with pictures from magazines, newspapers and books.
    A missionary who danced with the women and had a taste for music, stories and gossip? She never talked to the women about the Bible, as she knew it would be risky for her and them. It was for the men to discuss things with her and then talk to their women.
    With those thoughts in mind she began to calm down again, although she was afraid that Mahyoub’s confession oflove might mean that she had to leave the village, and she desperately needed to belong to this world now she had rejected her world forever. She had cut short her visit to Denmark. The image of the red cup floating in a sea of coffee grains on the Nescafe jar, the thought of which had filled her with nostalgia on her first trip to Yemen, no longer mattered to her. She had discovered back home that she didn’t even like the taste of Nescafe anymore, nor the cold, regular rhythm of life, the way people approached their daily lives in an organized fashion, with no place for chance or spontaneity, or a little of the anarchy that acts like a thermometer to show the variations in the soul of a place.
    She had missed the dusty road where she lived, the flies that, undeterred by her annoyance, clung to her as if they needed her, the handshake of the owner of the shop opposite, although the same hand had been scooping up olives, cutting cheese, then finding its way to his nose.
    When Ingrid saw families out walking on the mountain paths and the rocks with their leopardskin markings, she knew they were getting close. She had learned the colors of the rocks and the rare species of trees by heart. Almost at once children began popping up out of nowhere shouting, “Amina! Amina!” (This was the name