For several days, I was intrigued by one particular person there, one who thought of himself as a warrior and faithful son of the Prophet. We watched his daily routines including the rituals and prayers his people engage in several times each day. Vess listened to his memories: remembered writings, oral histories, the battles he had fought and the victory his people had won. This man, whose name was Ben Shadouf, had been given a half-ruined house, badly damaged during the war. He spent part of each day rebuilding the house where he lived with his wife and his children.
Each evening, when he rose from his prayers, he went to the inner courtyard where his wife had set out his evening meal. On a particular evening, he sat contemplating the food for a long time, then summoned his wife and pointed at the plates before him, asking for meat.
“We had none,” she murmured.
“You have money to buy meat,” he said. I watched his eyes measuring her, examining her face with what I took to be concern.
When we first found this family, she had looked quite healthy and vigorous, as you do, dearest Benita, but she no longer did so. Now she coughed often, there were shadows around her eyes, and her hair was rough and uncared for.
“I gave you money,” he said.
“You had no time to go with me to the market,” she replied. Her eyes remained fixed on her feet. She seemed feverish and unwell. “I am no longer permitted to be on the street without a male relative.”
He gritted his teeth and waved her away, fingering the long scar that ran from his forehead down one cheek. Vess told me the man was proud of the scar, for he had killed the Russian soldier who had shot him. The bullet had nicked his cheekbone, however, and it hurt him still. Vess, feeling his mind, said the battles he had fought were more real to him than the present, more real than the victory his group had achieved. He had anticipated victory the way a starving person anticipates food. He had thought it would be satisfying, gladdening, but he found it to be only tiresome. He had agreed to the laws they would implement when the victory came, but he had not known how irritating and inconvenient those laws would be. He had not realized his wife would suffer from them.
The woman, Afaya, could not go into the street without a male relative to protect her modesty, even though she would be covered from head to toe with only tiny mesh openings before her eyes. Afaya had told her husband that wearing the robe was like being blind. The wife of Mustapha, his neighbor and commanding officer, had tripped on the pavement and fallen, allowing her legs to be seen. She was then beaten by those who named themselves Guardians of Modesty. She had died of this beating. Mustapha had shrugged it away, for she was old and there were no children at home for her to care for, but he, too, found the new rules inconvenient.
Vess and I puzzled over this. The woman was a receptor, of course. The men were all inceptors, except the very young ones, who would be, and very old ones, who had been. Was every one of them expected to go into breeding madness if he saw a receptor’s legs? Or her face? Were they totally without self-control or a sense of shame? Seemingly so, for any woman showing her face was charged with being an erotic-stimulator-for-hire who, by showing any part of herself, had stimulated breeding madness in men and must therefore be stoned to death. Actual erotic-stimulators-for-hire, of whom there were a good many, were not stoned to death. And, most interesting of all, even while the men were doing the stoning, theyknew the women they called whores were, in fact, innocent. And yet, they did it.
We examined Ben Shadouf’s irritation. He would have to hire a male servant to do the food buying for the household. He would have to sequester Afaya and his daughters to the upstairs of the house, for the servant, being unrelated to them, could not run the risk of coming into contact with them or seeing them. If his wife was not in the courtyard, where the kitchen was, she could not cook his meals! All these endless complications in order to keep his wife, a human being like himself, imprisoned from the sight and hearing of any other man! Even his consciousness of his own frustration annoyed him.