haggle

It was a cold blue morning, the beads blowing with an irritating regularity with the gusting breeze. Arwa had expected scorching hot days, dust, and flies. She’d packed accordingly. Thin scarves, light skirts, long-sleeved cotton tops, summer clothes. But the first night she got here was no balmy Mediterranean night. She might as well have been in Sweden. The sea slapped its icy waves against the gritty, cold white sand, churning up black weeds like coils of discarded tape, and flinging up perfect picture book pine logs. White crabs scuttled invisibly in the sand, only visible when they scratched their way over the bridge of her bare feet. She had walked back to her aunt’s home against the wind, deeply disillusioned.

Her aunt was not as she had remembered or expected either. Since her husband had died, Aunt Huda had started to sell bits and pieces, baskets and rugs and her own paintings. Arwa had always visualised her shop in impeccable order, with subtle lighting and low music. Or perhaps it was the opposite extreme, a hive of activity and creative chaos, a bewildering mix of colour, noise, dust. But the shop was neither this nor that, it smelt of paint and turpentine, and had white plastic functional shelves. There was a well-worn order to things but no museum atmosphere. The only concession her aunt made to artist status was a thick, purple shawl, as she sat squarely reigning over her kingdom in a grey plastic chair behind a sanded wooden desk which shook a little, a tattered Oxford pocket dictionary serving to balance its rickety legs. She sat there for four hours of the day and listened to the radio, stroking one of her three cats. As Arwa soon found out, her aunt didn’t mind much about the shop, it was more of a passtime now that she was retired. But she had very strict rules about her home. Shoes were to be removed before heading upstairs to the flat. There too, Arwa’s expectations were not quite met. It was nothing like a studio, and it wasn’t very ethnic either. It had wooden shutters but no fretwork, mirrors to widen the space but no Persian rugs, only sheepskin and scratchy striped blankets, already taken out from the little cupboard in which they spent most of the year waiting for the onset of the fast-approaching winter.

Arwa made the best of what was available to her. She knew that her friends, who had no other home than home, envied her this other place she talked about so much, a place that in reality did not exist except in her head. It was, she thought, a little like the adventures co-workers had around the water-cooler, re-spinning their vacations into something out of a tourism brochure. She’d promised she’d bring them each something, a little bit of home. Postcards wouldn’t do for this, and she would not be able to live with herself if she bought the usual tourist knickknacks. Ornately-wrought heavy silver, perhaps. She took carefully posed shots with a bejewelled knife precariously balanced on the corner of a table, she went and looked for old mosques and waited for the sun to turn red behind them, she photographed her hand wrapped in turquoise beads, and she went to the souk, which was as cheerfully chaotic as fiction prescribed, but left a bad taste in her mouth somehow, a burned in black picture of a small child guarding a box of cigarettes and tourists in mirrored shades paying a fistful of money for a stuffed toy camel with moronic blue eyes. She detested mirrored shades.

Arwa watched the beads clink against each other absently; wondering what was taking her aunt so long. She had gone to borrow something from a neighbour, she’d said, taking a quick look at the mirror and tucking in stray strands of hair into her head scarf before she went, leaving Arwa sitting in her grey plastic chair, trying to coax one of the cats to come close. They stared at her with a bemused, tolerant look and returned to washing their faces in neat co-ordinated movements. Arwa remembered her grandmother saying that when a cat washes its face for no apparent reason it wan because someone would visit unexpectedly. Cats always wanted to look their best, arrogant creatures. Time passed slowly even when she switched on the TV in the corner of the desk. There was no satellite down here, and no DVD player, that was upstairs with the real TV. Here there was only a stack of battered videos, this one half-way through an old play.

The sound of laughter shut out the clacking of the wooden beads, as well as the footsteps approaching the entrance. Arwa only realized that someone had come into the shop when a shadow fell on the desk and she looked up to see a woman framed in the doorway, holding the beads out of the way. She had spiky dyed red hair and wore heavy gold earrings and a t-shirt with an unrecognizable cartoon character on it. Ukrainian, Arig guessed. The woman came in and asked rather doubtfully if she owned the shop, in heavily-accented English.

“My aunt does,” Arwa replied. “She’ll be back soon.”

The woman nodded, casting a look around. Arwa turned back to the play but kept one eye on the customer. The woman was wandering around the shop, running manicured nails along sea-shell boxes and cloth-bound books. She picked one up, rubbing her finger on the rough texture of the blue cloth her aunt had printed with black bold beautiful Arabic letters. One of them had all the sounds that didn’t exist in English.

Arwa wanted one herself, they looked different, interesting. They declared her different. As though by buying it she would buy back part of her ‘heritage’, that contentious word, that security blanket. She knew it would be a facile thing to do, but she determined to do it anyway. She could look at it. Pretend.

But the woman put the book down after a while and moved to the paintings. There were two groups, her aunts, and the few that were left of Mohammed’s. Her aunt’s, before her husbands death, were done with a brush, but recently she had begun to use a knife, laying on the paint so thick it seemed about to drip off the canvas.

The woman pointed to one of the smallest paintings, barely bigger than a book, green waves rising up like a wall against cowering black rocks, and palm trees clashing like swords.

“How much is for?”

The sticker above said, clearly enough, fifty. Arwa pointed. The woman shook her head divisively.

“No, no, is too much. It is very small.”

“Well that’s what it says.”

“Twenty.” The woman said. She opened her odd-looking clasp-purse with a snap. She had a tiny smile on her face, not satisfied, not challenging, just a small simply smile, very sure of itself. Her lipstick was light, contrasting with her tanned skin. She looked kind, like she worked at a daycare centre. “Yes?” Arwa shook her head. She hoped her uncertainty didn’t show. She’d never seen her aunt negotiate prices, but maybe the paintings were overpriced on purpose. “Ok, Ok” the woman said. “Twenty-five. Is not worth more.” There was a little half-laughing warning note in her voice, a disbelieving note, as though to say she would not be tricked. Her penciled brows drew together slightly. The woman came closer, laid down twenty-five carefully and turned, holding the painting loosely, confidently. She turned to leave, walking away with quick, sure steps.

Arwa half got up, a little irritated. “Excuse me, but you haven’t paid yet.” The woman shook her head. “It is for 25. See.” She displayed the painting as though to convince her.

“Fifty.” Arwa insisted. She began to feel uncomfortable under the sideways look of the woman’s kohl-lined weak-coloured eyes. That smile was still in place, like a permanent fixture. It wasn’t that it was patronizing. Just very sure of itself. Too sure, like the freckled hand that had applied the kohl. The woman finally shrugged, put the back down and turned away.

Arwa frowned. Maybe her aunt wanted the paintings sold. She hadn’t had many customers in the past few days. She could haggle. Haggling was in her blood, wasn’t it?

“Forty-five” she said, before she could fully think it through. The woman turned with a wider smile. Let the game begin! She moved purposely to the counter, all enthusiasm. It was clear, Arwa thought with some amusement, that everyone had got it all wrong, all the adventure seeking tourists who had been to Tunis and Egypt and Morocco and boasted about beating the hagglers at their own national pastime. Haggling was a tourist sport, as European as grey weather.

“Thirty,” the woman said.

Arwa sighed. “Look, I already took it down. I don’t know what my aunt will say.”

“Yes, yes and you have to make a profit. I know all this. But really this not worth that much.”

Arwa frowned. “Actually, that’s my aunts work. Its not about profit, its about a fair price.”

“Thirty fair.” She held out the money.

The beads clashed like bamboo sticks. Her aunt had walked though them rather than holding them to the side as she usually did. She plucked the painting from the woman’s hand. “This is for fifty,” she said, calmly, in aggressive clipped English.

The woman stared. The hyper-correctness of the sound of those words hurt. Someone once told Arwa that Scandinavian English sounded like a phonetics guide. Arwa thought her aunt sounded like a mix of peculiarly precise enunciation and a fast-paced delivery of last-will and testament diction. “If you would like to purchase it, all you have to do is pay the price.” Huda said, straight-faced. She pointed behind her. A cartoon, on yellow card. A woman in shades, shorts and a T shirt gesticulating wildly in the air, and another woman in a turban, striped jalabiya and impossible curled slippers was shouting back, red-faced as a tomato.

Above it, read the legend: No Haggling!

“I thought you could read.”

For a moment, Arwa thought she was talking to the tourist, then realised with a silent squawk of outrage, that her aunt’s contemptuous sarcasm was aimed right at her. The cat looked up from the desk with a sneer. Arwa felt mortified.

Her aunt ignored her, going to hang the painting back up on its place on the white wall, looking at the thick greasy green waves smashing down. She turned towards the desk, tapping her niece on the shoulder. Arwa vacated the throne, watching as the oldest cat stalked towards the chair with a businesslike air and jumped on her aunt’s lap. The Ukrainian woman looked on without a word. Her hand was still open.

11/07

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