When Her Hand Moves

By Omar Imady

When Her Hand Moves is a lyrical symphony of three captivating movements: The Passion of Sidra, The Seduction of Jude and The Rage of Fatima.
Literary fiction that combines the sensual and the sacred, the intellectual and the imaginary, the divine and the dangerous. Three stories come together with the light touch of magical realism, to examine, interrogate, and challenge our understanding of universal truths and spirituality.
An English nurse becomes possessed with unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of a Syrian woman in the twilight town of King's Lynn, stumbling along the way upon a history and present replete with magic and mysticism.
A Syrian professor escapes Damascus only to find himself in another surreal and dangerous setting, uncovering a conspiracy that places his life in even greater peril.
An Oxford scholar and an eccentric Syrian journalist embark on an adventure through Portugal and Spain, seeking to decipher an ancient manuscript and uncover a religious conspiracy with explosive personal and universal implications.

Quotes:
"Imady pairs the best of literary fiction – wry absurdity, witty interpretations of religion, and unabashed lyricism – with adrenaline-rich chase scenes, surreal sexual encounters, and moments of magical realism…" Publisher's Weekly/Book Life Review
"I am speechless. I am never one to be interested in literary fiction. This is my first and when I tell you IT DOES NOT DISAPPOINT, I MEAN IT DOES NOT DISAPPOINT! The writing details, visualizations, emotion…the story grips you and spits you out. It tugs on everything strong of emotion! The way the three parts unite is so beautiful and how every little detail is portrayed without it being boring! I am in love." Simpingfor_fiction_jayne Bookstagrammer
"Omar Imady is one of the most important writers to come out of Syria." Mary S. Lovell, New York Times best-selling biographer.
"Provocatively controversial, inspiring, thought provoking and deeply spiritual. Imady poses questions that we have stopped asking ourselves. I don't know another male author who can represent a woman's voice with such authenticity." Rime Allaf, Syrian writer
"Three suspense-filled novellas replete with adrenaline-rich chase scenes, surreal sexual encounters, and moments of magical realism. These are so well written, completely gripping so make sure you set aside many hours so that you can greedily devour them one swoop. Michelle Coates (Reviewer/Netgalley)

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781940178530

Book preview

When Her

Hand Moves

When Her Hand Moves

Copyright © Omar Imady, 2022

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information, contact:

Villa Magna Publishing, LLC

4705 Columbus Street

Suite 300

Virginia Beach, VA 23462

www.villamagnapublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-940178-53-0

Cover Design by Noel Hagman-Kiziltan

Also by Omar Imady

Fiction

The Gospel of Damascus

Non Fiction

Historical Dictionary of Syria

The Rise and Fall of Muslim Civil Society

The Syrian Uprising: Domestic Origins

and Early Trajectory

Syria at War, Eight Years On

When You’re Shoved from the Right, Look to Your Left: Metaphors of Islamic Humanism

Coming in 2022: Fiction

The Celeste Experiment

Catfishing Caitlyn

Coming in 2023: Non Fiction

The Unauthorised Biography of a Damascene Reformer

About the Author

Omar Imady was born in Damascus, Syria. He is an author, poet, and historian. His first novel, The Gospel of Damascus, was a Book of the Year Award finalist in 2012, and has been translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic. He has also authored and co-authored many books and articles on Syria and Sufism. He currently lives in the United Kingdom, between Scotland and Essex.

Table of Contents

Movement One - The Passion of Sidra

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Movement Two - The Seduction of Jude

Evicted

Selected

Sealed

Baptised

Marked

Movement Three - The Rage of Fatima

XY

XX

X

XY

XX

X

Epilogue

The Celeste Experiment

Image Credits

The hand is the visible part of the brain.

― Immanuel Kant

Praise be to You, the We of all stories, lived and recorded, known and forgotten, Who speaks to humans through humans, the ink and the pen, the writing and the erasure, Who permeated the cosmos with lenses, prisms, and mirrors through which You, the We of All, are beheld.

Movement One

The Passion of Sidra

Designated across planets unnumbered are minds, minds who translate vibrations into words, frequencies into sentences, and waves into stories, as flawed as the filters through which they arrived, as perfect as the source from whence they swelled.

On this earth, held in its orbit twenty-five thousand lightyears from the centre and rim of the galaxy in which it spins, are geographies – villages, towns, and cities – that have, since time began, been reserved for the minds through which such stories were upheld.

Of them, Siwa, Jerusalem, Damascus, Nauvoo, Amritsar, Lourdes, Lalish, Bethany, Fatima, Mount Nur, and Lynn.

Lynn, on the eastern shores of England, where women - known to men as witches and wailers, known to others as saints and seers - lived, and were killed, for daring to speak and for daring to sin.

*

It could have been any Saturday, but it wasn’t. The air that blew frailly over the forearms of Susan Chard smelled of burnt toast. Her satnav glowed fluorescently on its wobbly stand, stuck to the windscreen like a sink plunger, and for the third time, the voice of the navigator insisted that she turn right.

No matter how hard she strained her gaze through the heavy mist that had settled over the tarmac ribbons of country roads, no right turn materialised. No road, no street, no lane, no alley. Nothing that by any stretch of the imagination could be construed as a turning. The irritation that only the voice of an erroneous satnav can produce boiled over. She allowed herself seven and a half minutes to compose herself following the tirade she directed towards the machine, the ineptitudes of modern technology, and the what-the-hell-kind-of-place-can’t-be-reached-by-satnav place she was trying to find, before she brushed the crumbs off her chest and lap, sucked in her stomach rebuckling her belt, wrapped the green and white chequered scarf around her ears which were always cold, and stepped out of the car into the gloaming. On foot, with feet tingling from the three-hour drive, phone in hand cutting a rectangle of light through what was now a persistent drizzle, Sue Chard turned right.

Excuse me…? Excuse me, sir. Excuse me!

The man’s dog turned around before he did. Each of its eyes were a different colour. In its refusal to give her directions, Sue’s phone had forced her to seek human interaction. This man would not have been her first choice, but unfortunately for her he was her only one. She crossed the damp excuse for a lane.

Do you know where I can find the High Street?

Dog and man cocked their heads. A broad, slow grin stretched across his face. Each of his eyes looked in a different direction, neither of them at Sue.

No.

The dog turned its head and continued its path into the soggy distance. The man followed.

By the time Sue had trekked across the three fields, four looping lanes, and a dual carriageway with no pedestrian crossing, five o’clock had long picked itself up and headed home after a hard day’s work. Rattling the handle of the solicitor’s office door on the High Street did nothing to reverse time and allow her access to the keys to her recently deceased Great Aunt Kitty’s bungalow. For what other reason would she possibly have found herself in the High Street of a town in the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Norfolk?

Sue lent against the glass door, sheltering under the miserly ledge that stuck out over it, taking what refuge she could from what had now become a nagging grey shower. She watched the rain drip from the overhang of her hood and ignored the tepid squelch in her shoes. She had never imagined she would find herself wishing to be back at work. She would have been on the ward, roundabout now, starting her night shift, taking notes on patients in handover, avoiding the urge to flick a stream of paper clips at the indifferent faces of some of her colleagues, who had long ago lost any interest in human life, their own or others’, and whose familiarity and their knowledge of the desperate shortage of nurses made them lazy and unbearable.

Her hands were too cold to wipe away the wet sheen from her cheeks and nose, which now collected as a droplet and joined its like in a small stream trickling down the waterproof jacket Sue had wisely worn. She thought longingly of her car, and the whisper of warmth from the pathetic heaters and the half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives she had left on the passenger’s seat. She sighed. It did not do to be ungrateful. Two weeks off to see to selling a house bequeathed to her by, until very recently, her only known living relative. Sue was from a long line of one of those uniquely English one-child families, which meant that the passing of her mother and grandparents, from rather inane and unpredictable causes, left her with only memories of a family. Her father had moved out and moved on after the terrifying revelation of his impending fatherhood and, thankfully, not a word had been heard from him since. Great Aunt Kitty had been an unwelcome glitch in an otherwise perfectly unadulterated single-child lineage. Had she been a boy she may have been rather more welcome, but as it stood, she long outlived her brother, Sue’s grandfather, dying at the ripe old age of ninety-seven.

Sue stared at the rickety old iron gate of the bungalow she had made her way to in the gloom. She jostled through the jungle of weeds that hid what may have once been a lawn. The rain had stopped, replaced now by a wind that nudged against Sue’s side, badgering her to listen to it. The streetlamp next to the fence cast an orange glow over the property, turning the greens to brown. There was no key under the mat, and the lock on the door was even more immovable than the solicitor’s office. The house seemed to sigh at the disturbance she was causing it. It was used to the deliberate, arthritic movements of its owner. Four decades were hard to overcome in just one night.

Each of the windows Sue checked, wiggling and prising, refused to allow entry to this intruder. No one had informed them of a visitor. The back door, too, stood sentinel, rebuffing the barges of Sue’s left shoulder, rattling its panes at her in protest. Sue dragged her bag, which had gained at least six kilos since she had left her car, back to the front of the house. With a final frisk of the front door, which yielded nought, she slumped down against the frame in the narrow porch, her knees bent, her boots against the opposite, crumbling pebble-dashed wall. A small shower of damp debris sprinkled itself over her shoulders. A perfectly formed spiderweb in the upper corner of the porch bounced in the wind, like a chuckling paunch. Sue hugged her bag to her chest and pulled down her hood. She hated spiders.

The light was not bright enough to read by, though of course she had several books with her. A Gillian Flynn and at least two Agatha Christies. To comfort herself instead, Sue pulled out two jumpers, and a long woollen scarf, and bundled them strategically about her. Cupping her hands, Sue breathed on them. It did little more than the car heater. She tucked them into her armpits instead and imagined what she could be watching at home, in her little rented flat, with its clunking radiators and thick curtains, faux-fur slippers, and chunky china. She pulled another sweater from her bag and balled it up into a makeshift pillow. The familiar scents of artificial patchouli and soapy lavender rushed up her nose to greet her. To avoid the stream of thoughts that ached to take her elsewhere, and with a final glance at the spiderweb, Susan Chard sought solace in sleep.

*

The woman was naked, standing in three inches of water, rubbing the rough hessian cloth against her wet skin, watching with relief the tiny grey rolls flake away. The folds of flesh, once full, flared scarlet from the scalding water and stubborn scrubbing. The harder she rubbed, the redder she became. Though the nodules of her spine stood out like steps, her buttocks were round and full, dimpled and framed by the soft folds that fell over her hips. Her skin was pale, of a shade that spoke to how little it had ever seen the sun. Blue and red veins grew branches from the backs of her knees. The silvery scars that flecked her loose stomach spoke to the many lives she’d carried within it, her breasts, the nipples generous and pink, to the many mouths she had fed. She tossed aside the sodden cloth and reached for another, beckoning the maid who had stopped at the door, the porcelain pot of boiling water hot in her hands beneath the folds of linen she held it in. Dousing her thighs, she scrubbed them again, her flesh pulling and resisting. The damp ends of her hair stuck to her chest and shoulders. Her sweat mingled with the hot droplets that trickled down her back and arms and collected in the crevice of her navel. Her hands now crimson, sought desperately to scour away her sin.

*

Being awoken by a stranger is never the most pleasant of experiences. It is all the more uncomfortable when you are half covered in a blanket of clothes, and a small pool of dribble has formed on your sweatshirt pillow. The hood of Sue’s coat obscured the view of everything but the man’s legs. She hoped he had not heard the involuntary snort she had given upon her awakening. Where the fuck was she? She was not sure if she thought this aloud.

I’m not homeless. She considered this, in her still semiconscious state, an adequate explanation for her dishevelled presence on a doorstep at the break of a reluctant dawn.

If the man who stood before her had wanted to laugh he hid it well. Putting down the two coffees he was carrying, he offered her a hand. She straightened out the parts of her that were not straightened out by gravity and wiped her face as discreetly as she could with the back of a cold sleeve.

It took her four seconds longer than she would have liked to realise that the steaming proffered cardboard cup was meant for her. The unexpected kindness brought her almost all the way out of her lingering stupor. Her neck hurt. And her knees.

You’re an angel.

The hot, wet, caffeinated steam gave her a friendly, and oh-so-welcome, smack around the face. She took a long sip, of the type you can only do with your eyes closed. She lowered the cup, opening her eyes again.

Ah shit. Of course the person to find her looking like a complete bum would be a bloody Jude Law look-alike. Grey woollen city coat, black buttons, and a dark green scarf wrapped around his neck. Something inside her died. Possibly her dignity.

Anger is the natural corollary to shame. The solicitor, whose name was James, though at this point Sue did not much care, responded with a thousand apologies, although her lateness had not been his fault.

The bungalow, which seemed to have taken pity on the woman, allowed them entry with a swift turn of the key which James pulled from his pocket, the little plastic red tag dangling gleefully at its reunion. The stale scent of stagnant time and cat urine met them at the door. Mog, who had refused to be taken to a sanctuary and had hidden in one of the numerous nooks and crannies that only a cat could find, ambled slowly out of the sitting room into the hall, sat on her haunches, and after a brief interrogation, decided she did not have time for them, and left.

The house had reached its prime sometime in the late 1950s. It was withered, tired, and cat-clawed. The chintz armchairs had sprouted threads from years of feline kneading. There were breadcrumbs on the table, and a pair of slippers, the imprint of a sole worn firmly into them, waited patiently at the foot of the armchair. Sue looked around, dismayed at the work that lay before her. The property was in no sellable state. She wiped a heavy hand over her face.

The bathroom was becoming an increasingly urgent priority. The sight of duck-egg blue porcelain had never been so welcome. She ran her fingers under the squeaky tap, which grudgingly sputtered out a stream of hot water.

Oh, thank God.

Sue unzipped her coat, which was met by an urgent fit of forced coughing from behind her.

I’ll wait outside.

Oh God, you’re still here? she called after James’s swiftly retreating back, zipping her coat back up quickly, realising what he must have thought.

Yeah, I’m sorry. You know, I think I should let you get your bearings. I’ll bring back the documents tomorrow. You go ahead and…

For the third time in the space of the ten minutes since James had left, Sue groaned. Mog, who had been sniffing at the trousers now around her ankles, looked up at her with eyes of an alien green. Sue ventured to pet the jungle of grey and white fluff between her ears, which met with the creature’s disapproval. Her elbows had left pink grooves in the tops of her knees. The toilet paper looked at her limply. It was apricot.

The thick white plastic chair in the bathtub proved a useful shelf for Sue’s shampoo and conditioner, the only other perchable surface in the vicinity taken up by an immovable cracked green bar of soap. The water pressure slickened out her dark brown curls. She rubbed her calves where her socks had left ridged red imprints from being kept on all night. There was an imprint of half a belt buckle just below her navel, and her compression bra had left behind wiggly lines where the waist band had been, of the type made in cement before one sticks down tiles. Her breasts cast angry glances up at her for imprisoning them for so long. It was bad enough that they were vacuum-packed on the best of days. She showered her chest with hot water in apology and explained to them again her conviction that a cup size such as theirs did not belong on an otherwise narrow rectangular frame.

*

The coffee cup tumbled itself along the road before her, leading Sue to the cafe where James had ordered it that morning, turning every once in a while to make sure she was following. Pretty Little Teashop. The sign over the shop smiled at her and opened its door with a jingle of its bell. She needed something hot, something sweet, and something savoury, in that order. She ordered a pot of breakfast tea, a slice of carrot cake, and a burger. The food was cheerful, the cakes warm and merry beneath the glass of the counter, the colourful macarons played ring-a-ring-o-roses in the bottom corner, cheering naively when the customer before Sue ordered six to be boxed and taken away. The tea, when it arrived in its flowery china pot, embraced her from the inside and out, and reassured her that the ordeal of last night was well and truly over. The carrot cake nodded in agreement. The burger was the last to verify this. It came coated in melting cheese, the knife sticking up out of the bun like a tribute to Brutus, as an audience of golden chips looked on aghast.

Outside, King’s Lynn slowly took on a brighter sheen, the veil of Sue’s hunger now lifted. All places look better on a full stomach. People milled about the streets like dandelion seeds at paces that matched the urgency of their tasks. Sue picked at the scraps of chips left on her plate with her forefinger, failing to notice the two who had fled and were hiding behind the salt and pepper pots whose arms were interlinked. The clock on the wall behind her craned over her shoulder to see what this unfamiliar face was doing. Though finished, and full, Sue could not bring herself to head back to the bungalow, nor could she face the arduous task of traipsing around a supermarket to collect a trolley full of cleaning supplies.

A bookshop beckoned her inside. It had the distinct knack, passed down from the earliest form of its kind, for luring in those whose eyes marked them out as readers – the irresistible urge to look that swelled at the sight of small rectangles, knees to the shelves, leaning back, chests bared like medieval sacrificial offerings. Hooked, the slowed walk followed, the head turn, the scanning of the displays, and the eventual, inevitable stop. There was a warmth inside that is only found in bookshops. It wrapped its arm around Sue’s shoulders and walked her to the first row of shelves. Books jostled in excitement, calling out to her, elbowing their rivals back, whistling, flashing their covers, and making promises not all of them could keep. Others sat nonchalant, jaded, so shelf-bound they had long given up the fight to be slid from their slots, cradled in palms, caressed by fingertips. Then there were the arrogant ones. The ones who knew their time would come, who scoffed at the displays of their soft-spined neighbours clamouring for attention with colour and gloss. They would be bought on the merit of their metal, not the quality of their coats.

Sue pulled four off the shelves, and three more followed her to the chair hidden away amongst the columns. They perched on the arm rests, leaning against her as she cracked the spine of a shiny paperback about the women Jack the Ripper had killed. By the time she had decided to buy it, two of the younger books had fallen asleep. Placing them neatly back on their shelves, for no one likes to wake up in a strange place, she went to meet the pink and grey dusk that was edging its way through the streets.

*

It was not until the pin pricks of burst blood vessels blossomed across her skin that she was absolved. Visions of soft sheets, the meeting and parting of flesh, the swelling of currents, the frenzy, the fervour. The outpouring, wave upon wave haunted her. Movement, motion, stillness. Regret. Remorse. Disgust. Her wet feet, translucent and slender, left missives on the wooden floorboards, dark and inky. She pulled the dry linen cloth over her face. Every drop must be dried. The stain of her betrayal entirely blotted out. The room looked down upon her body, the candles spitting their flickering orange flames at her. She clawed her fingers over her skin, the grooves between the gatherings of her stomach, the thighs that stroked each other as she walked, the flesh that rippled imperceptibly with her every step. She fell to her knees. Why must it betray her? Why must it want what she had forsaken? Why did it prickle with longing, ache to be entered, make her head spin with lust? Why did it choose earthly vows over those she had made with heaven? Never again, vowed the weeping saint of Lynn, would she weaken. Never again would she be seduced back into her husband’s bed. Not tonight, at least.

*

Mog and the debris of last night’s ready-meal supper met Sue disapprovingly on the kitchen counter. The sun raised an eyebrow at the hour at which she had awoken. Sue explained her plan to the bungalow. She would begin with the kitchen, she told it, as pulled on her rubber marigold gloves and she tried to shake off the eerie sense that the strange scenes that had visited her in sleep had left her with.

Though she knew it had been the same woman she’d seen, the water lapping at her ankles as she scoured and scorched her skin in a desperate plea for salvation, Sue did not know her name. It had been at least six hundred years since Margery Kempe, the weeping saint of Lynn, had lived her life of ardent and conflicting desires, leaving behind her a legacy of longing and tears, before she simply disappeared.

In her work, Sue had witnessed many a final full stop at the end of a person’s life script. But as she scanned the kitchen, she realised that never had she seen the sentences they left behind. The theatre of their life eternally paused, props forever frozen. Spice jars half full. The clementines casually mouldering in a wicker bowl. The stale water in the plastic kettle. The milk souring in the fridge. Sue’s marigolds flapped around her wrists. The stage was slowly cleared. Her legs goose-pimpled beneath the hems of her pyjama shorts, as she worked.

She worked her way out of the kitchen, now fizzing with bleach and foaming with sprays advertised by brawny men, and into the hallway. She collected the pile of papers on the mat, sifting through the junk mail, supermarket coupons, and local advertisements, which looked longingly up at her as she tipped them into their black plastic grave.

Have you seen this woman?

The paper was canary yellow. The face, half obscured by her own muddy footprint from the night before, stared up at her from the shadowy depths of the refuse. The dark eyes blinked, and the hairs on Sue’s arms stood up on end. She pulled the crushed bundle of envelopes from the letter box and sprinkled them over the grainy profile.

There are faces one struggles to remember, and faces one longs to forget. Faces that force themselves upon you. Sue found the face in the bathroom cupboard, under the armchair in the sitting room, behind the coat stand in the hall, and in the rippling surface of the water with which she filled the mop bucket. It blinked.

Have you seen this woman?

It was inevitable that when James arrived Sue would still be in her pyjamas, pink marigolds, and fluffy brown dressing gown which she tied tightly around her. He placed the tin of biscuits down on the dining room table which Sue hastily cleared of cleaning accoutrements. Two piles