He shrugs the way she posed the question—unnecessarily precise. The tangled sheets shift over their ankles as she lights one, two fags on the wick of a near-spent candle.
“Well?”
“Sure.” He winces. Without the bar’s background noise, he sounds much too like his father. “Alright then,” he amends.
She wonders if he’ll judge her smoking—indoors—when she passes the ڭارو to him.
“So, yuh study then?” he nods to the thick stack of books.
“Not like you do.”
“How’d yuh know I’m a stud—”
With a curled lip, she exhales smoke lazily, warily. “Look at you.”
He does, frowning at the scattering of blonde hair trailing across his belly and down his trunks. “Go on, tell me about it. Art history? Religion? No, it has to be linguistics.” She chuckles at how his chest puffs, at how easily she chips his vintage china. Perhaps in mockery, she does the same, breasts bobbing with her lifted chin.
“Honestly, I must know, what makes yuh think I’d be in the humanities?”
“Literature? No! Postcolonial studies.” Her eyes are the stuff of muqarnas—catching the light in vaulted brown clusters. “I’m close, aren’t I?”
He can’t help a small smile; she’s clever too. “I’m an Arabic scholar.”
Though the window is shut against the London rain, she itches to bundle up in her puffer jacket, to tuck her chin in the fabric weathered from a few too many hot breaths. Her spine hunches in search of whatever warmth they made a few minutes before. “Why?”
“Because it’s a beautiful language.”
“Beauty seems like a silly reason to devote your life to something.” She laughs. Maybe one of these days she’ll learn that lesson—her mother’s lesson—herself.
His face sours just a touch before smoothing out like the Egyptian cotton of his forgotten button-down. Even in the throes of pleasure, she’s not sure he so much as gasped.
“I also find Arab culture fascinating, generally.”
She finishes her fag, thinking how very evident that is. Now. If only she had spotted the evidence before he pressed his body into hers.
As she climbs, on hands and knees, to excavate her lacy bra from beneath the bed, he remembers his own cigarette. “Do you speak Arabic?” he does not ask in English.
“Coffee?” she asks in English.
“No, I was asking if yuh speak Arabic.”
There’s a metallic jingle in her ear, a steady ding-dong, ding-dong that she can’t quite place. He hears the French school bell too.
"هدا كان خطأ حمار" she says.
His mouth goes dry as her eyes lose all their warmth—from dates to darkness. She clips her bra behind her, flicking on the electric kettle and pouring instant coffee into a mug. Only one. “I—I don’t—sorry, what was that language you just spoke?”
She matches the pace, the pang of his voice: “Arabic.”
“I’m quite sure that’s not the case.”
A splotch of paint sits between her thumb and her pointer finger, and she works to rub away the scarlet letter—she works not to mind his audacity. But she does. Something between satisfaction and exhaustion accompanies the kettle’s hiss. “I grew up here,” she says with a glance at the poster of Princess Diana; she had hung it up ironically. He takes it as proof. “But my family’s Moroccan.”
“Oh.” He shakes his head at his own folly. “Of course, yuh speak a dialect.”
She replays his words, scouring for his emphasis until he becomes a palimpsest she has rescripted entirely. If “speak,” is he mocking her literacy? If “dialect,” is he mocking her first language? She isn’t sure which—there’s something distractingly trained about his English lilt.
“So do yuh read then?”
Lyrical abstraction is her specialty on canvas, and yet, the room cracks into two simple, savage halves. “No.”
She is low, she is common, she is deviance, she is الدارجة. He is high, he is holy, he is prestige, he is fuṣḥā. Only the words she has on him, the tongue of her mother, scumbles that truth with the paint still stained on her skin.
“Well, I’ve always fancied seeing Morocco.” Images of deserts and moorish arches and just a touch of danger crawls across his vision—Delacroix’ gaze resummoned.
She closes her eyes and listens to the crescendo of boiling water behind her, to the fall of rain beyond her, and something far, far past—ما مفاكينش.
“Do yuh miss home?” The click of the electric kettle follows his question.
She pours the water from too tall a height, some splashing on her skin. “Home is here,” she says as she stirs. She doesn’t say that home is المغريب too. That home, here and there, are both Wests she feels no right to miss. He had her body, perhaps, but he will not know her hesitations—her nostalgia—her truth.
“Family expectations can be a bit of a pain.” He understands her clipped words as shame. The shadow of his father is one he thinks universal. “Especially when yuh bring religion into it—” “What does that mean?” It’s a rhetorical question. It’s a warning to stop. It’s a dose of the anger she is trying to contain—for her own safety, for her own sanity.
“Islam’s a bit strict, innit?” he asks, but he already knows. “Verbose too. Yuh wouldn’t believe how ruthless I’ve got to be with my religious translations. But I reckon that’s what makes me so successful, maybe.” He leans into her headboard, at ease before such an active listener. She hangs onto each of his words, not unlike his own students—with utter rapture. “...and I’m not saying repetition isn’t a decent rhetorical device, but there comes a point when it’s just redundant, excessive, and dare I say, contrived. It’s best to privilege simplicity over density…”
She chokes on coffee with eyes wide open. He speaks as if Arabic were an equation, and only he has that special formula to solve for X. It’s that logic she tries to evade when she takes paint to paper. The tender scrape of a palette knife, caking layer upon lattice, making lines into lies that are true—all of them. Every single hue. Each and every contour. Especially if they can’t be understood. “…but I guess I’m predisposed to Islamic translation, what with my Catholic upbringing—”
“Islam is nothing like Catholicism.”
She is rather keen on interruptions, he concludes silently. Surprises too. “I suppose I thought yuh were…”
“Yes, you thought.”
“But how can yuh even be Muslim if yuh can’t read the /kʊˈrɑːn/?”
The innocent question appears to offend her, but he’s not sure how to apologize—he’s not sure if he’s done anything wrong.
His voice’s sharpness chases the coffee down, down, catching on her heart. She wheezes at the pain. “The words of النبي were first passed down orally, you know.” It does not seem wise to whisper صلى الله عليه وسلم out loud, but it feels as if she screams it in her mind.
“I mean, yuh work in a bar, yuh smoke, yuh—yuh—” he gestures to her uncovered hair, and she sips her coffee soberly, flippantly. Right. She’s offended. “I apologize, it’s not my place.”
“Isn’t it?”
He can’t tell if she’s kidding—she knows she isn’t. At least, with her tongue and throat scalded from coffee, the scolding feels a little too close to warranted. She’d never have brought him home knowing he’d pick apart what she is and what she isn’t and what she should be. She’s a story he’s already written, in perfect Modern Standard Arabic, no less. So perfect that she can’t even read it.
“I hope to pick up one of the dialects eventually, probably the Egyptian one—no offense. But honestly, all the translation work is in /fuːsˈħaː/. And I reckon I’m better with words on the page than I am with people,” he tries to lighten the mood with half-truths. “Then again, I’m so drawn to Arabs. I feel a bit like one myself.”
Despite herself, envy curdles the coffee in her stomach. How many years has she been speaking English? When will she start to feel a bit English herself? The pain piercing her heart diverts her attention, and her lips twitch, hungry to curl up as they had before.
Perhaps he is a master of Arabic on paper, but he has nothing of her voice. “You can’t speak to us—to me,” she says first in dialect, then in English.
“We’re speaking right now, aren’t we?” He tilts his head in the same way she does—skeptically, credulously.
“Is this why you slept with me?”
“I slept with yuh because yuh’re beautiful.”
Like the language he studies. She is beautiful, of course. But though they say the nine letters the same British way, they are still speaking in different tongues—and hers is something not even he can translate.
“Are yuh upset?” He decides to acknowledge her discomfort. “I didn’t mean for our…rendez-vous to end on a bad note.”
When she twists her head slowly, he shivers at her piercing stare.
“What did you just say?”
“I didn’t mean to make yuh upset—”
“No, not that.” She set her mug on the bedside table with a thump. His true accent is almost entirely erased, but the French word betrayed him. “I’m sure you’ve a long journey on the tube ahead of you. You should get going.”
“Sure.”
Their eyes meet, one last time, trapping them in the au-delà: here and there. The spent candle seems to resprout, the stack of thick books seems to sink beneath sand—the water returns to its kettle, and cockroaches nest in the instant coffee. They blink against that uncanny in-between until he finally dresses, until he finally leaves. Then she sits on the bed and smokes another fag.
Miranda Jensen
Miranda Jensen is a creative activist with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through her writing and critical theory, she seeks not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. Her work has been published in Nature Futures, Across the Margin, and Reverent: An Anthology of Divinity, among others. You can find her at www.mirandajensen.com and on @MirandaLJensen (X).
