I found Saint Andrew’s Church in the lower town close to the Pisan Harbour, and bought my two-pound candle from a Christian chandler at its door. But ’though I knelt on the stone flags until my knees were numb, I couldn’t picture Jos in purgatory or paradise. Or even in his grave.
The hammam bath-house, one of a number in the twisted maze of streets behind the harbour, was a low building with three white domes perched like huge eggshells on its roof – each pierced, as I found when I entered, with rings of little windows to vent steam from the hot water of the pool.
I stripped and paid to be allowed to wash myself amongst the other bathers with a cake of perfumed soap. But finding it a strange enough experience to show my shapes to dozens of unknown and naked men, I refused an oily massage by a hairy pool attendant wearing nothing but a breechclout, and paid the extra for a shave instead. Then I limped through the crowded thoroughfares of the Venetian Quarter, to reach Khadija’s house more by luck than skill from the far end of the alley.
‘Clean now?’ she asked when she had closed the door and heard my news of John.
I told her that I’d bathed but had refused the massage and the oil. ‘Is good,’ she said, ‘we do this here. Come I will show.’
While I’d been out, she had distributed the mutton and restored her house to order. Alia, would be staying with a neighbour who had children of her own.
‘It is to be alone, muhibb.’
I’d swear my lower body heard it and reacted before she told me that the word muhibb meant lover. And then she led the way a second time into the sunken garden, where she’d laid a rug and cushions by the pool.
From a long-spouted jug she poured a drink for me which she called ‘nabidh’, a mild wine made from fermented dates and permitted to the faithful by their Prophet – then left me on my own to listen to the night song of the cicadas, and watch the moon rise through the branches of the fig.
Returning with a spangled scarf tied round her hair, Khadija brought me first one tray of victuals, then a second and a third. The scents she wore moved with her in the warm night air to mingle with the perfume of the roses. She served me spiced and shredded mutton wrapped in vine leaves, pigeons stuffed with almonds, and rice stained with saffron, blessing every item as she brought it. She tempted me with sugared chick-peas, honey cakes – and a strange fruit called citrus, with flame-coloured rind and a sharp flavour unlike anything I’d tasted. We faced each other cross-legged on the carpet, eating only with our right hands, until our bellies all but begged for mercy.
And only then, the thing I had awaited from the first.
She fetched me cotton towels and a small flask of scented oil which she’d had warming by the stove.
I had already taken off my boots. Khadija helped me out of hose and breeches, and drawing off my tunic, bent to place a kiss on my bare chest. Arranging towels for me to lie face-down with head on hands, and broken toes propped on a cushion – she started with my neck and shoulders, kneeling at my head.
I closed my eyes. But at the first touch of her hands, I couldn’t help myself. My body clenched into a solid mass of muscle.
‘Mmm-hrrhh!’ I groaned – or something very like it.
‘No, no Seigneur.’ Khadija laid a palm flat on my back between my shoulder blades. ‘Last night we break the dam, but now we mend,’ as with both hands she began to knead my rigid shoulders.
‘Now I teach what young men in Damascus must learn to please a wife.’ And easing her way down, she spread her hands to smooth the knots from either side of my tense spine, exploring the healed scars she found there, pressing outwards, downwards, sliding in the oil. Each time lower. Each time reaching closer to those working parts of me which – if I could only tell her – were beckoning, were crying out, were standing up and waving flags for her attention!
‘Lower, lower… Touch me, stroke me, grab me, pinch me – anything! But lower!
LOWER!’
I am ashamed to own, that’s all that I could think.
‘Seigneur, is honey sweeter in throat or on thy tongue?’ Without waiting for an answer, she moved to kneel beside me, the better to work on my lower back. I felt her thumbs push hard into its hollow and then move lightly – for God’s sake far too lightly! – over arse and thighs, and reach too soon the safer areas of knees and calves and after them my twitching, swollen foot (by then entirely free of pain).
But naturally I knew that what goes down must surely rise. By then my eyes were open wide – and sure enough, she was soon moving slowly, infinitely slowly, upwards. Smoothing leg hairs. Dipping in behind the knees. Rising still, still rising, back to thighs, both hands…
I gasped for air. The hands moved upward. Inward. Closer – CLOSER…
Christ in heaven!
Too much altogether! Next instant, with a yelp, I’d bucked and buckled. Bobbed up like an ungraceful cork! I couldn’t help it! Hairy buttocks in the air. Legs wide apart – with all between them swinging wildly!
And when she laughed and pushed me back onto the towels – a picture of Elise the morning after our first night together, flashed into my mind. Complete with the humiliating smile!
How easy for a woman, I thought sourly – to mock all men as captive unicorns in thrall to their own horns. To laugh at us like dogs!
But I was wrong. There was no mockery in Khadija’s laughter. Only understanding and amusement.
‘Slow muhibbi, slow!
No one will come.’ She smiled at me. ‘We have five gifts of sense: a
l-
Lams, Annadhar, Ashamm, Adhdhauq, As-sam
–
touch, sight, smell, taste, hearing. Now we have time for all.’
Then what had I to do but submit gratefully to all she had to teach me – things I’d never dreamt of. And if I thought myself experienced, I came to see that I knew little more of copulation than a ram does. Or a barnyard cock. Less probably, considering how often those beasts perform the act in their short lives.
‘Men fight men, fight women too. But Allah makes a game for both to win. Is true, I teach you how.’
She helped me turn onto my back persuading parts of me I’d never thought of as interesting, to be interested in her.
‘You see, we are not foes. Thy zabb is not a sword. We are like plum-fruit, we ripe better when we touch,’ she said – and having shown me what she meant with my fast-ripening plums, and heard my strangled gasp, she placed my hand where
she
most needed it. To show me how to do the same for her. ‘If only take, thou wilt take less. Forget thy Christian priests. Know Allah fashions man and woman, each to be good to the other.
‘Taste here, muhibb
,
’ she told me – later, when she judged that I was making progress. ‘Is true all men who leave mother’s breast are eager to return.’
An idea I was in no state to deny!
Then later still, and lower down: ‘Taste hungry Abou beldoum,’ she whispered with one hand on my neck, the other parting the soft hair to show me her most precious, secret place. ‘Here kiss, ah here! Breathe, taste, is ripe for you. Yes there!’
And, when I felt her rise to meet my mouth, to enslave me with me the salt-tide oyster taste of Abou beldoum. And when I entered her, and saw her eyes beneath me blacker than the blackest pool – and heard her moan, and felt the hunger of her mermaid’s clasp. And when I dived, and dived again with her into the tropic fathoms. Dark and deep and warm. Then I remembered how Elise had been with me, and how I’d been with her the second time we bedded – and in that moment knew that I was capable of learning. For then I understood the need in all of us to give as well as take.
And who better for a teacher than Khadija?
All my life I had been taught to think carnality a weakness. An unfortunate distraction. At worst, a sin. In camp they’d talked of fitting ends as if that’s all it was about. Men’s swords and women’s scabbards. Men’s pestles, women’s mortars pounded with a will to grind the seed. Ways to thread a needle. Ways to peg a beam. But this woman saw the act as God’s gift to marriage of the sexes, and the instruction that she gave me changed how I saw it too.
There were times, Khadija would allow, when haste in lovemaking could hardly be avoided. But the oriental virtue she called ‘sabr’, which in a siege we knew as patience, was what she chiefly recommended. While gnats danced in the lamplit doorway of her chamber with the red-stained thumb and forefinger of her right hand she introduced me to the skill that the Moslems know as ‘imsak’, to bring me to the simmering height of ecstasy without, to my intense surprise, allowing me to boil! I felt as if I must explode with pleasure, but could not. Or not until the woman let me cross its threshold – the patience being hers not mine.
I wasn’t in control. I didn’t have to think – just give myself to feeling. It seems ridiculous, considering what we were doing. But it was like regaining innocence. In turn she inflamed and humbled me. Sometimes both at once – and with a kind of joy that purged me of my guilt, and made me wiser in the morning. Because amongst the things I learned was my own power of speech.
Al-Samit, the Silent One, Khadija called me as I lay moaning wordlessly beneath her expert hands. ‘One gift we have is hearing, so make me the words, muhibb. Say what is good in me, what makes thy breath come fast. We are God’s gift, there is no shame to speak of what He makes.’
And so I did. I told her all I loved about her body. And when I saw that my rude choice of words did not displease, I used some even ruder.
Later still, while we lay at our ease in the pale light of early dawn, I told her how I loved her simple house and its secluded garden – spoke of its peace and safety after the horrors of the siege. And then, because I’d found my voice and couldn’t stop I told her of the heat, the dust, the falling masonry, the screams on that last day before the city fell. I spoke of Jos’s death, the sight that met my eyes when we rolled back the stone, the gaping grave, his shrouded corpse amongst the tangle of dead limbs.
‘So now he’s dead,’ I said at last as if it were any kind of news.
‘Muhibb
,
accept.’ She held my face between her hands and kissed me gently. An act as intimate as any she’d performed.
‘There is a saying of my people: “If we could find a merchant who would buy regrets, we must be wealthy all.”
Death waits for us as Allah wills.’ She smiled. ‘We are as roses, we bloom then blow and fall in dust.’
‘But he was always there beside me, stitched my clothes and oiled my armour, got my horse aboard our ship when no one else could do it – found me food when we were starving. That was Jos. He always had a joke to cheer us – and the reddest hair, you’ve never seen hair redder, and not an inch of him that wasn’t freckled…’
She made me stop, to show her with a dotting finger what I meant by freckles, and I think pronounced them, ‘namash’.
The moonlight shining through my tears gave her thin face a silver halo. And like a supplicant before a church Madonna I just kept babbling on. ‘He always knew what I most needed, even seemed to know what I was thinking. The only thing he didn’t know, you see, was just how dear to me he was. He couldn’t know, because I never told him,’ I ended hopelessly. ‘And now it is too late.’
‘He is in Paradise. Be sure he hears, he understands…’
‘That’s not what Saracens believe,’ I interrupted. ‘You think as we do that all infidels must burn in hell.’
‘No. Is false, muhibbi.’ She raised her chin to tilt her head back in the way her people do to stress the negative. ‘Only one God, Allah, makes all from Adam’s rib, loves all His children – Jews, Faithful of Islam, even Christians who see Isa as a man – all People of Book who worship only one God may enter Paradise.’
‘But that’s not true. How can it be?’ I heard myself blurt out. ‘When the reason for this whole campaign is for our Christian armies to take back Jerusalem for God!’
‘To take back for Him? When He is there already?’ Khadija looked at me in real surprise. ‘Is not why you fight. You fight for land, for trade. Is always so.’
I told her I could not accept that.
‘Is maybe how they bring you here?
’
was her response. ‘You not believe. So you will fight.’ And staring back at her uncertainly while that idea sunk in, I must have looked as foolish as I felt. The idea of Christians and Saracens squabbling like selfish children under the eye of an indulgent father who was common to them both, was new to me entirely. It made no sense. Or rather must make nonsense of the way that I’d seen good and evil. And of the Kings’ Croisade. It was as if the world I knew, proved suddenly to be no more than painted canvas, and our campaign a mummers’ play performed with wooden swords!
At any other place or time the thought must have appalled me. But that night, lying in a state of total drainage by the moonlit pool, it came as a relief. It told me what in my heart I’d recognised when I first heard Khadija’s voice. That friends and foes are cut from the same cloth. That all humans share some kind of a kinship. That it’s better to discuss two views of God, than kill each other to deny them.
‘It is not pain, is joy. We smile at the loving gifts of Allah,’ Khadija said.
And in that place and at that time, it wasn’t hard to smile.
Through all the nights that followed, while the city slept we sprawled on rugs beneath the fig. Barefoot or bare of everything. Entwined or otherwise. Or on the roof, where in the daytime washing was put out to dry. Or sat cross-legged before the red glow of the oven, and talked of life and love, of birth and death and all that lay between them.