hour after the midday prayer when the market was quiet, and shopkeepers rotated fruits in their crates to hide mould, or sat and chatted on chairs outside their stalls, watching children roll balls between the arches. Ahead, the clock tower; to the right, the Nasr mosque. The three black figures turned past the mosque and through a stone entrance into the hammam.
Widad took her daughters to the baths once a week. It was important for the health of the physical body, but even more important for a healthy social body, because aside from the istiqbalat held in private homes a hammam was a place for ladies to talk. It also gave one a chance to inspect the other daughters of the town for one’s sons: at an istiqbal a girl would be covered in velvet and embroidered lace or whatever drapery best displayed her twin virtues of wealth and taste, as much as she had them—but here, unclothed in the steam, one could observe what nature had given her.
“Who is Kamal?” said Nuzha.
“Give me the towels, habibti.”
Their mother led them into the darkness of the vestibule, and they removed their veils as she paid the attendant. In the first room they unbuttoned their gowns and pulled on striped wizra robes and wooden clogs, and in the second room the other bathers congregated in groups, glossy as creatures of the sea, clouded with steam. Widad ululated at her friends. Pretending to keep her gaze to the ground, Fatima transferred her eyes to where the women entered the private khulwa washrooms. She liked to watch as they dropped their robes. Don’t stare, her mother always told her. How could one not stare? Displayed before her, the anatomies of all the ladies from town. Flesh shining with water and sweat, dimpled and variegated in the coloured light from the roof. She liked the backs of older women the most, the way the fat draped down over the hips in thick rolls like layers of cream.
Fatima followed Nuzha into a khulwa. She looked down at the stammer of her heart pushing her chest up down, up down, as the arms of the gown fell off her shoulders, and then she peered down at her feet, already wrinkled around the heel, the base flushed with walking, the black debris of stockings caught in the sweaty clefts between her toes. The only thing Fatima’s mother ever told her about her body was that she must scrub it. Or be scrubbed, as the maids released the scrolls of dead skin in a froth of olive oil soap, leaving limbs and belly and back soft red with attrition. And that was it, the job was done, and they would leave the hammam into the dry air without another word said about it. When Fatima changed clothes at home she did so at speed and without much thought for the body she was covering and uncovering, but here at the hammam, where the hot dark rooms carried a religious charge, where the light from the tinted circles in the roof caught on the mist, and the slow women striped in wizra gossiped on benches around the walls, inhaling vapour as they picked at watermelon and cheese brought by the maids on cane trays—here Fatima looked down at her own naked legs with interest. Blue veins spread from her groin down her thighs. The blood pulsed in her feet.
Two maids dipped luffas in a copper basin. The water clicked in the walls, the marble floor blared heat. The sisters sat on the benches in the khulwa, and Nuzha’s breasts swayed as she leaned forward. She was only fifteen but her breasts were already larger than Fatima’s, though Fatima’s were rounder. Fatima’s veins dipped away from the surface, and her ribs showed through the skin, and below that her belly curved, the lacuna in the middle broad and deep as though the cord that once tied her to her mother was unusually thick. Her sister was wider in the hip, but otherwise their bodies were quite similar. It was in the tangle of hair below that lay the strangest accident of biology, and Fatima had never seen her sister’s to compare. Another mouth hidden under there, ugly and red. Not only was that where the blood came from but other secretions appeared there also, or began there and spread elsewhere: briny odours, strange nocturnal aches that shuddered up her limbs. This body, with its hectic motions and sensations, was the central