My Eye is a Button on Your Dress: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Hanan al-Shaykh

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress

      Footnotes

      Note on the Author

       A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       MY EYE IS A BUTTON ON YOUR DRESS

       HANAN AL-SHAYKH

      translation from Arabic by Catherine Cobham

      My beloved Amal,

      Come and take my breath away.

       Yusuf

      I CLUTCHED AT MY heart for fear it would roll away, just like people in films and books. ‘Come and take my breath away.’ I became my own private earthquake: the ground was no longer in its normal place beneath my feet, my job didn’t matter any more, my relationship with Simon had lost all meaning, in fact it seemed like a sheet of newspaper I’d fixed over a broken windowpane to keep out the draught. Freezing-cold London vanished in the warmth of his letter, and the Eye of Horus on the postage stamp looked kindly at me, pleading with me to return to the land of the sun where I was born and raised, and where I’d been madly in love with a man for ten years until he clipped my wings and I crashed to the ground.

      I hurry to answer to Yusuf’s email address, my fingers conveying my eagerness: ‘I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Then I rush to ask my boss if I can take a week off, clutching the letter and lying that I have to go to Cairo for a family emergency. I text Simon, telling him that my mother has to have an operation, reserve a seat on the plane for the next day, and return to my emails. I read Yusuf’s reply: ‘Your body will gather up the fragments of my body like Isis gathered Osiris and made him whole again.’

      ‘I’m flying to you tomorrow.’

      ‘Tomorrow? Not now? How can I wait till tomorrow?’

      ‘You’ve lived without me for five years while I’ve suffered the torment of having you always here with me, on the sofa, in the bathroom, in the book I’m reading, in my bag, in the street, while I eat, wash my hair, dress and undress, sleep, yet despite all of that I never see you, touch you, hear from you.’

      I don’t write any of that, but ask if we can talk on Skype or FaceTime.

      ‘Don’t you think that would diminish the impact of our meeting, like someone fasting and breaking his fast on an onion?’

      His refusal kindled my desire and made my passion grow.

      He was a husband and a father. I never once asked him to divorce his wife, or to take me as a second wife. I was perfectly happy with our arrangement. I didn’t try to make him jealous by telling him if men asked me out, or wanted to marry me, and I never tried to turn him against his wife. I remember when he used to tell me that she knew about