Alia Mamdouh is an Iraqi novelist and journalist, who graduated in psychology from al-Mustansiriyah University in 1971. She worked for the daily Al-Rasid for ten years and published her first collection, Overture for Laughter, in 1973. In 1982, she moved to Paris.
Her works, banned in Iraq, tackle family and social taboos and denounce the many forms of oppression experienced by Iraqis. In 2004, she received the Naguib-Mahfouz Prize for Al-Mahboubât (Like a desire that won't die). Her novel Al-Tanki (The Tank) was a finalist for the International Prize for Arab Fiction in 2020. In 2022, the Institut du Monde Arabe honored her for her body of work.

And then another day...
(This evening will be different.)

Since dawn, the woman has not stopped pacing the house, bustling about. She has washed the driveway leading to the small garden, where a few solitary shrubs stand in scattered rows, short, hunched over one another, sagging in places as if burdened by an age too heavy for their size. She coaxed the cat from its shelter and picked up one of its kittens: it seemed twitchy, flinching nervously before slowly relaxing its claws...
Meow... meow...

When she had shaken the dust from the small wooden shelter, she took the mother cat in her hands, hesitant to speak to it. The animal's gaze seemed poised to turn menacing at the slightest excess of human affection.
Gently... gently...

A peculiar numbness overcame the woman. She stroked her rough face and untied her blue scarf with its pattern of white and red circles. Straightening it out like a fragile banner, she swung it slowly from right to left to amuse the kittens, while their mother watches them, wary. The fabric trembles between her fingers, occasionally snatched up by the teeth of one kitten or another in a brief play-fight.

(Ah... if only I could confide in someone.)

She leaves the shelter door open. On her face, a veil of weariness thickens. Her constant internal monologue circles around an opening through which she hopes the answers should arrive...

Since the morning, she's been cleaning some of the furniture.
This sofa, for example, is hardly lucky: one day, her husband sat on it... and died.
As for this chair, every time she settles on it, her thoughts scatter, unable to settle on what she wants to say to others, unable too to draw attention to her own cause.
What, then, is left of all these furnishings?

She has only three woven-wood fibre chairs, a long sofa whose back legs are worn, and another, smaller, cocoon-like sofa: whoever sits on it immediately slips into a kind of half-sleep.
An old rug covers a good portion of the room, and earth-coloured curtains, clean but faded, hang at the windows.

She draws the curtains and opens the large window overlooking the garden.
The cat licks her kittens, piled on top of her like the sap of a tree gathering in the cracks.

Tonight, she will speak with a true voice.
And she will tremble with joy.

She leaves the window and enters her room.
From a large, carefully wrapped bag, she takes out white towels, a wide-toothed wooden comb and a large, cardamom-scented cube of soap...
Then she looks at herself in the mirror.

A woman in her forties: tall, brunette, generously shaped. Her black hair has a certain roughness to it, her muscles are strong, marked by a certain hardness, and her piercing black eyes radiate with a strange loneliness.
She gathers everything together and places it on a small, short-legged stool just outside the bathroom door.

(Ah... if I had a daughter, I'd have called to her to fetch me all this stuff, and she could wait outside until I got out of the bath).

She undressed hastily, feeling every fibre of her body awaken. The bathroom is the only place where she gasps, where she screams, where she no longer exhausts herself masking the modesty her own forms inspire, where she doesn't tense up at the thought of admitting she's starting to age...

She turns on the tap; hot streams of water cascade down.
The steam makes her dizzy, and she begins by washing her face.

On her wedding night, she had rubbed her face with a stone until the blood ran from it.
She had been told that this swelled the veins with pure blood, and that the red of her face would attract her husband to the "green" of her promised purity.
But her face remained only luminous... and luck, for its part, cut itself short.

She scratches her back with a wooden palm, groans, then laughs.
She'll remain an honourable woman: no one expects her to turn into something else.

On her last visit to the big souk - she went every Thursday - the vastness of it rose in her mind and new objects clung to her, as if she were really going to wear them.
The path from her house to the souk filled with possibilities, as if she was waiting for "something".
And all these possibilities, which she had thought impossible, suddenly reached her ears on each of her visits to the big souk.

Then, she saw her.

A star, haughty, insolent in beauty, a beauty that would almost merit insult.
Her abaya let through a harsh light through which she shuddered, laid bare in spite of herself.

Lost, she looked around frantically before her gaze finally settled on this vision.
When she bumped into her suddenly, the abaya slipped from her head, a head that trembled with modesty, with an expression somewhere between sin and innocence.

- I didn't intend to embarrass you...
The other woman didn't respond.
She remained motionless, candid, as if appalled by something that was about to happen.
She leaned forward and, in the heart of this crowd, became a quivering ball, tossed back and forth by vendors and buyers in turn.
She opened her arms and was suddenly overcome with the urge to hug her, lest she fall.
They looked at each other.

Their eyes seemed to be crossed by a match ready to ignite. Their two bodies released a fiery energy, and between their fingers slipped a cold dampness, a light sweat, a shared shiver...

- I come here every Thursday. What about you?
The woman didn't answer.

- I've never seen you before... Are you from around here?
As if stung by everything around her, the other finally replied:
- I'm just passing through.
- Are you with someone?
- My husband and children are waiting for me at the entrance to the souk.

How could she never have noticed that face?
That closed, alert, unsettling face, a face calling out for love.
And when the other wants to disengage, she holds her back, speaking to her in a tumult of words mingled with the shouts of tradersd, the screams of children, the twittering of women haggling, and the mewing of cats waiting, further on, for shelter of some kind.

- I come here every Thursday...
But her voice dissolves in the hubbub of passers-by.

And yet, the other woman behaves like a holy sinner.
All these scenes evaporate, as she wanders alone, despair haemorrhaging in her head.

Her eyes are half-closed.
Soap flows into her pores, its bubbles gliding over brown, naked flesh.
She stretches out her legs, a dark down sprinkling her knees.

(I'll look into her eyes first, then I'll recognise her. I want to believe she's right here in front of me. For the time between looking and recognising is always a new separation).

She'll want to start with her toes: tickle them first, to see her smile.
Maybe she'll cry out in joy, and joy sounds like death, and all she has left is death...

She leans against the bathroom wall and begins singing an old folk song.
She puts her dirty clothes in an old basin, scrubs them with her hands and continues singing.

She'll sit her across from her and look her in the eye first, not waiting for the signal to raise the curtain.
She too will be alone.

She'll have already left food out for the cat and her kittens so their meowing won't disturb the encounter.
She'll turn off all the bells and alarm clocks, and sit waiting for her like a child waiting for her holiday present.

She wrings out her clothes.
(I'll massage her knees first, because the only time I've ever seen her, her knees looked like two fruits welded together on a huge tree.)

She leans against the wall for a moment.

She won't turn on the light too bright, lest she flee at once.
She stands, full height, in the middle of the bathroom; her shadow seems thick, compact, one-piece.
Her chest is heavy.
Her shoulders, broad.
Her hips, full.
Her thighs, taut.

Her hair falls majestically over the nape of her neck; the nape is smooth, and her entire face gives itself over to the half-moon that will approach her shortly.

(On the second Thursday, she didn't come. Nor the third, nor the fourth, nor the fifth, nor the sixth. Yet she still went to the souk, in heat approaching fifty degrees. Her eyes were sticky, her belly soaked with sweat and desire, a desire she refused to see dissipate since the other had approached her.)

She threw herself at the merchants, shouted pointlessly at the rising prices, bought useless things.
On one wall sat a cat, tongue dry, body on fire.
At home, she sometimes went days without eating, and as punishment for all these dark moods, she deprived the cat and her kittens of food.
Then, in the mirror, she would look at herself:

(I aged six weeks in one fell swoop.)

She no longer knew her own name: all names crashed into her head like a nightmare.
She no longer knew her address: all addresses swirled around her the better to fade away, one by one.

They had met in a tremor, and every morning she threw the sheets to the floor, threw the pillows against the wall, banged her head with her fist, and called herself a ruined woman.

After their first encounter, she went a whole week without washing: she feared that the trace of the other woman, her signature, would fade from her body.
Every Thursday brought her a new defeat, and the burn of empty promises.

When she sat down one day on the small wooden bench, she folded her legs into a triangle, let her hair down and began to comb it.
The smell of henna,
infused cardamom,
burning steam,
and that feminine presence that assaulted her like a slap,
all of it went through her at once.
She wanted to stay alive,
young,
fresh.

(We'll be alone, and no one will suspect a thing.
Neighbours will say she's my friend,
and merchants will salivate if she comes in.)

Anyone who heard her humming would have thought heaven was about to break loose.
And anyone who saw her emerge from the bath, gleaming with silky perfume, would think that she was about to marry.
A woman cloaked in a dark childhood,
a naive adolescence,
and a timid youth.

A woman consumed with regret,
vulnerable at every fall,
but who didn't want to slice her life,
didn't want to dissolve like vapour,
or shine like a star.
She only wanted to become capable of weaving a bond with some other living being:
cat,
spider,
woman,
bush,
snake...

And this exile was filled with a clamour of spells,
a despair that shackles heart and body,
and a nagging question:
so what is the path to peace?

On the seventh Thursday, she trembled like a pomegranate tree with short branches when she saw the other woman's face:
it was white, waxy.

-Will you go to the back street?

They walked together,
two shadows weary of memory and missing,
visible,
awake,
dazzled by the hell they were about to enter.
They stopped at last,
while the passers-by around them were like a radio needle wavering between two stations.

- The night I left you... my husband left me in turn.

The night rustled around them,
a slow, deep black.
Things ceased to pass through them.
Fear, that sin stretched between them, didn't even touch them.
They were two unique beings.

- And the children?
- I left them with my mother.
- What about you?
- I want you...

She took her hand.
She said, in absence:
Let's go - everything is already discovered,
and yet everything begins now...

On the seventh Thursday, their hands brushed against each other with a new gentleness.
She led her by the hand.
They crossed the back street.
Boarded a large bus.
Sat in the same seat.

- I want to touch you now...
- No, not now.

She pointed out her house,
and the woman got off.
The whole hour would come,
and then she would remember all the shame that had already been inflicted on her.

Years earlier, a violent shudder had run through her -
as white blood cells expel microbes.
The blood had not become infected,
but it would flow again, now laden with a multitude of tremors.

The pallor of that past life,
the pallor of that ancient history,
and the vanity of all these tiny unions begun somewhere and ended elsewhere.

Slowly, she turned her head around the room.
She sat down to dry her body.
A silent question took hold of her:

What if she refused?
What if she left me, pulled away?

What trickery in the clash of interlocking fires...
She stood up abruptly,
put on a long red woollen nightgown,
let her hair fall back over her shoulders after wringing it out,
and slumped onto the sofa.
The scent of the bath - soap, henna, cardamom - wafted through the room like incense.

The robe came off easily; the long nightgown had only a few buttons on the chest, nothing more.

She pushed the door open with a bang,
then closed it gently,
without knocking.

- Who?
The other woman poked her head through.
- You...
- Me...

Her face was dark, defeated, as if she'd just come out of a trap.
She remained standing.
The other woman absorbed everything in the room with an all-encompassing gaze.
She threw down her abaya and sat on it, leaned against the wall, took a deep breath, and it seemed to her that the room was shrinking, becoming a tomb.
The first woman, still motionless on the sofa, looked like a frightened angel.

They remained silent for several minutes, tense, unable to know where to start, or what shape this evening would take.
The woman sitting on the floor snapped her knees; fever paralysed her features.
The other slowly turned her head, casting anxious but forthright glances at the earthly being standing beside her.

Waiting for this hour had sealed this solemn pact:
isn't everything, deep down, just a series of desires by which we imitate unions we can only accomplish in dreams?

The cat's meow was sharpening the two women's nervousness.
- What a meow... she's hungry.

How do they say the body retires?
Where does that complex saliva in the throat and arteries come from?
And doesn't the cat, too, have blood vessels?
What's the difference between the prick of a needle and the whips of thought...
Where's the meaning of a victory if won over only a small force?

The woman thought that the discovery of magic was more powerful than magic itself.
Suddenly, she stood up; it seemed to her then that surrendering to the enchantment was tantamount to gathering all the little particles that were colliding within her.
She sat down on the floor next to the other woman.
The mewling outside interrupted their brief bliss.

What ceremony was she going to perform to recognise herself?
What infernal spell was driving them both towards rebellion?

The cat, that little virtuoso of pleasure mastery, appeared at the window, her eyes bruised, her tail frantic...

Thirst and appeasement,
hunger and satiety,
night and morning,
birth and death,
flight and presence -
what an obscure, yet harmonious union.

- Did you see the children?
- I stopped by to see them before I came.
- And him?
- That cursed man remarried right away.
- Didn't he explain anything to you?
- Yes, he did. Can't you see my face? He hates pregnant women.
And you're unhappy?
- Terribly...
But why, did you love him so much?

Her complexion paled.
Love lasts but a brief moment.
Let mundane endings congeal,
let great disappointments solidify,
and let people meet without laws - for everything, in the end, recalls pallor.

Then she resumed:

-But me...

The other's pulse quickened.
The mewing became insistent.
A persistent look settled on the three faces, two women whose bodies spoke of fullness, and a cat inventing a thousand cries to mark her kingdom.

-I still think of him... Do you know how he looked at me in the midst of people? And when we were alone, how he possessed me, how he guided me? It was, my sister, a magnificent devastation - you can't pretend to give it up. Look at this dress: he gave it to me before we broke up and jokingly said, "Make sure it comes off quickly." And then... and then...

- Enough. Enough. Enough.

The frantic mewing,
the panting heartbeat,
the searing emotion,
the memories piled up from one hour to the next,
the invisible chases between the brief moment of desire and the long minutes of disappointment,
the cat's thirst,
the woman's pain,
and this multiple assault between the three creatures...

The woman turned her head towards the window.
She looked at the cat with a hint of defiance.
The cat stared at the two women.

The other woman picked up her abaya, pulled it under her, straightened up; the rustle of her cloth sighed with naked joy.
She was beaming.

She whispered through her teeth:

- How close you are to me... Your arm is like his, your muscles strong like his, and your gazes overflow with that burning fever...

She leaned back, raised her head to the light.
The cat began to moan.
A white line shone between the two mouths.
Their lips murmured...
The cat leapt against the glass, entered, bloodied, charged with the desire for hunger and thirst.

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This story was first published 1974 on ist own in al-Tariq, the magazine of the Communist Party in Lebanon. It was later included in a 1977 short-story collection published by Al-Adab in Beirut under the title Footnotes of Lady B (Hawamish al-Sayyida Baa’). It is considered the first Arabic short story to address sexual relations between women.

English adaptation based on the French translation from Arabic by Rita Barrota