The Two of Them by Joanna Russ

Author:Joanna Russ
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Published: 2018-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

In her best clothes, choice poems up her sleeve, Zubeydeh trots along the corridor with her hand in Zumurrud’s. Zumurrud has scrubbed Zubeydeh’s face until it hurt and then covered it with the veil. Zumurrud has dismissed El-Ward fi-l-Akmam. She has stuck gold butterflies (on springs, so they seem to be flying) in Zubeydeh’s hair until Zubeydeh shrieked with pain and is now telling her how to behave in front of the foreign lady: to subside gracefully on to the cushions, to hold the skirt of her robe with one hand, and never, never to look directly at the foreign man.

Zubeydeh says, “I know all that,” sulkily tugging at her mother’s hand, trying to make Zumurrud slow up. She thinks that sometimes it really is easier to get along with mother when mother’s medicated. She wishes she could live with only her father. At the curtains to the visiting room Zumurrud stops and elevates her right arm, shaking it delicately, thus ringing the chimes on her Visiting Bracelet; inside Daddy will hear them and say, “Come in, thou.” The Visiting Room is beautiful; Zubeydeh has been in it only twice before, but she knows it’s the most beautiful room in the house. Zumurrud, of course, has been in it many times before, to supervise its cleaning. Yanked through the curtains by her mother, Zubeydeh tries to catch a glimpse of the carved molding that portrays an undersea scene with the abstract curves of red and blue imitating the curl of the waves, but she has no time to find it. She does manage to catch a glimpse of the benches and pillows, the little tables, the tabourets, the tesselated floor, and best of all, she gets a real look at the foreign man through her face-veil as she gracefully bows and then finishes the bow by lowering herself on to a cushion on the floor. Her mother says curiosity is the worst female sin. Zubeydeh thinks she’s done pretty well by getting her rear to settle right in the middle of the cushion without any wobbling on the way down or last-minute shifting. She hopes Zumurrud won’t find it necessary to slap her in public; mother can be beastly. Actually the foreign man is disappointing, since he looks so very much like the foreign lady; it shocks Zubeydeh’s sense of what is proper that the two of them are so alike and she is genuinely scornful to find that the foreign man has no beard. A man without a beard looks like a eunuch or a youth (Jaafar, for instance), and one would expect him to he married to a youth and not a lady. She knows perfectly well that the foreign man and the foreign lady are married, even though Zumurrud insists they’re not. She feels surreptitiously for the papers in her sleeve. The strange man and woman are sitting with Daddy on the far side of the room and everybody is making social noises; then the side curtains are pushed open and Jaafar comes in.

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