The Woman at the date grove: The Tale of Umm al-Duwais

I first saw her at the edge of the date grove, where the irrigation ditch makes a silver mouth in the sand. Night had settled its black tent over the village, and the wind smelt of cardamom and the sea. I was walking the dogs I did not own—strays that padded at my heels, loyal, as if I had once been kind to them—and I, lost in thoughts of everything I had not yet said sorry for.

She stood with her back to me, hair as long as the canal, a ribbon of darkness moving against black. Her dress whispered like a hand over velvet. I would have turned away—someone’s wife, someone’s sister—but then she tilted her head and, in the water, I saw her face as a trembling reflection, more suggestion than truth: eyes rimmed soft as kohl, cheekbones like the river’s banks. My grandmother used to say beauty is a lantern that invites moths. I have always been a moth.

“Are you lost?” I asked, ridiculous question in a place where every man pretends to know the way.

She did not answer. She stepped forward, so I had to step closer or be rude, and the dogs—braver than I—refused to cross the ditch. One of them growled, then folded into a whine. The other stared at me with the look of a friend about to tell you the truth.

“I can walk you home,” I said. “Or where you are staying.”

“Home,” she repeated, as if tasting the word for the first time. “Do you know the road?”

It is hard to describe the feeling that took me then. Not desire—though I am guilty of that, too—but a strange old loyalty, as if some promise I had made when young had come to collect its due. “Of course,” I said, because men from my quarter are taught to say of course, and to learn the path later.

We walked into the grove, under the tall listening fronds. The moon was thin as a fingernail; the world smelled of sap. She never looked fully at me, only sideways, with a smile that flashed like a fish in shallow water. Once I glanced down and saw, near the ditch, two wet prints like the halves of a cleft hoof. I told myself they were palm roots, split and lifted by flood. I told myself many things.

She asked for stories. She wanted to know about the pearl divers, the boys who swore oaths at dusk and came home men at dawn, the old merchant who kept a mirror beside the cash box. I told her everything I thought she wanted, because that is another thing men from my quarter are taught—to be interesting, to be larger than our shadows. When I ran out, she said, “Tell me the one you do not tell.”

“I don’t know which that is.”

“The one that makes your tongue heavy.”

So I told her about the night I left my cousin on the road with a broken axle and told myself the sand would not remember it, and about the girl whose bracelet I kept because it felt like treasure, and about the promise I made to my mother to stop staying out so late that the light had to pull me back by the collar. When I finished, the dogs were far behind us, only their absence walking at my heels.

“We all like to think we can outpace the sunrise,” she said. “We cannot.”

We came to a clearing where the palms fell away and the sand opened its book. She stopped. In the faint light I saw her hands—delicate, hennaed, the nails polished like dates. She lifted one and touched my shoulder, as gently as a moth alighting. The place burned. Not pain; remembrance. Every oath I had bent, every mirror I had enjoyed, every hour I had stolen thrummed beneath my skin.

“There is a kind of woman,” my grandmother used to whisper, “who is only a woman the way flame is only light.” I stood very still.

“Home,” she said again, but now I understood that she had not lost the word; she was asking if I knew mine. I thought of the stray dogs who trusted what I would not, of my cousin waiting in the dark for a help that did not arrive, of my mother sitting by the window like a lighthouse that never tires.

“I should go,” I said.

“Yes.” Her voice was almost kind. “Run.”

I ran. The grove closed behind me like a mouth. The dogs found me at the ditch, spun circles of relief, and led me on as if they had always belonged to me. Twice I looked back. The first time, I saw only palms and the thin thread of water. The second time, I saw her—standing at the line where irrigated land surrenders to dunes—smiling in that sideways way. Something glinted at her feet: a little mirror, no larger than a coin, half-buried. I did not pick it up. I do not pick up mirrors anymore.

At home, my mother was awake. She looked at me hard, then softened as if she had been practicing anger and decided against it. “You smell of saffron,” she said. “And smoke.”

I slept with the dogs by the door and woke before the call to prayer. The world felt rinsed. I fixed my cousin’s axle. I returned the bracelet. I took my mother’s hands and told her everything in a single breath. When night came, I stayed put. The palms rustled at the edge of hearing, like someone turning pages. Once, far off, I thought I heard a laugh, but it might have been the canal.

If you ask me whether I believe in such women, I will say that belief is the wrong lantern. I believe in promises that fetch their makers by the collar. I believe in mirrors that cost more than they show. I believe they still tell boys, in a voice like a conch, not to wander where the sand keeps its own account.

And if you ask me for the road to her, I will give you a better map: Go home.