The Cry of the Dove: A Novel (31 page)

Heart held tight, chin quivering I asked, `What about my daughter, Mother?'

`The little one? I took her from the Socials. I said to your brother she was innocent. She filled our hearts with joy, so fresh, so beautiful,' she said and wiped the cracked corners of her mouth with her index and forefingers.

`Thank God I am blind. If only my heart could be blind too,' she said and covered her face with both hands.

A chill ran through me all the way from the ends of my hair to my toes. I pressed my hand on my chest to stop my heart from jolting out.

`Two months ago her good-for-nothing uncle threw her in the Long Well. "Like mother, like daughter," he said. Your father and his friend Jadaan fished her out and buried her remains in the cemetery against the wishes of the men of the tribe.'

She pulled the mask against her face and said, `Then, grief-stricken, your father died too.'

`Yubba! My father! Yumma! My mother!' I howled blowing my cover to the tribe then collapsed on the floor and began chanting my grandmother's keen for the dead one, `My precious eyesight, I could not save you from him. Smear soot on my face! Wrap me with her sash shroud! Bury me instead! Ya Allah, where is she? I want to see her face. Bring me a lock of her hair!'

Face blackened with ashes, T-shirt sticky with spilt tea, sweat and tears, I sat on the ground sprinkling sand over my dishevelled hair. My right arm flopped down in my lap paralysed. Her grave was almost indistinguishable from other graves. The ground was slightly raised and my father had stuck on it a makeshift rotting wooden box with `Died 1990' carved into it.With my left hand I began pulling the weeds and thorns covering the mound and clearing the space around it.

The black iris at the end of the graveyard looked taller and more menacing in the twilight. Standing there covered with sand, arms cut and bruised stretched towards the sky, Layla tingled her way back to my heart. I knew that breeze. A sudden chill ran from the roots to the ends of each hair on my body and my chest collapsed as if I were drowning. She was tired, whimpering, hungry, looking for a foothold for her tiny feet. I knelt down and embraced her grave. My familiar smell, tender breasts and warm ribcage might reassure her, make her feel safe and protected. One day she, `the buried one', might stop crying.

Layla was standing there, where the white clouds met the shredded blue sky, a thoroughbred mare, her taut body dark, coffee with milk, her eyes bright amber, Hamdan's mouth, ripe pomegranate seeds, her hair cascading on her shoulders. She smiled, a pearl in her grave, and walked away among the vines, glittering through the soft young leaves, a column of diamond dust. I tried to hold on to her, but the column whirled towards the black iris then disappeared where John, holding our baby, our son, against his ribcage, was standing between the black iris and the overcast sky.

Suddenly I heard voices behind me. A woman was pleading with a man not to do something. A young man saying, `It's his duty. He has to hold his head high. Il `aar ma yimhiyeh ila it dam: dishonour can only be wiped off with blood.'

`Let go of me, you old senile woman!' a man cried.

I thought I heard my mother say, `You can have the farm, everything I own, she has a suckling now, I beg you...

When I turned my head I felt a cold pain pierce through my forehead, there between my eyes, and then like blood in water it spread out.

I started writing The Cry of the Dove in 1990, but a winter of despair had set in.I finally emerged from under the yew tree and picked it up again in January 2005. While writing, and not writing, The Cry of the Dove, I had guiding spirits of my own: Angela Carter, Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage, now dead but their souls will always soar above my head.

The story of King Shahriyar's visit to his brother Shahzaman is adapted from Tales from the Thousand and One Nights translated by N. J. Dawood. Gwen's father is based on factual accounts by my dear friend Gwyneth Cole. They were adapted with her permission.

I am also grateful to Mike Daley, Sue Rylance, Sue Frenk, Anne Woodhead, Carol Seikaly, Carmen Boulton and Ronak Husni for their friendship, which sustains me in the grey towers of Durham. I am also indebted to my Welsh friend Roger Fenwick.

I am grateful to my nucleolus and extended family for their continual support, especially my fine mother, my youngest sister Eman, malikat ruhi: the queen/holder of my soul, my brother Salah, and my cousin Samir Makanay. Shukran jazilan habayib!

I am indebted to Xinran and Toby Eady, my agent, whose friendship and limitless kindness have brought me so far.

This novel would not have been possible without the numerous cups of tea and the attentive heart of my Magyar/Irish/English husband, Dean Torok. Koszonom szepen!