The shop was quite luxurious and she realised that Selim was quite rich even when he was normally not flashing it. It also seemed as if the shopkeeper highly valued him. Together that lady, Maartje and Selim decided on two lovely dresses and slippers. The dresses nice and silky with beads and embroidery. Long scarves to match. When the woman reached out to some ornamental headgear Selim waved it away and said he had his own for her to wear.
They had driven home and there she was instructed to get in her nightgown and join the bride in her bedroom. The room was crowded with local women and family from afar. Aicha shrieked when she saw Maartje in a white cotton nightgown.
"Oh you are here at last. Come sit and have your hands and feet hanna-ed."
While the bride was covered in intriguing patters, Maartjes fingertips and palms and her feet were done more simple. She also did not have to sleep with her hands and feet wrapped so the henna would imprint best.
In the early morning Selim came to her bedroom. She had now a room upstairs as the study was used by the men of the family.
"Come I will help you dress."
"Do I need help?"
"I am sure you will have trouble with the girdle around your waist as that knot is quite complicated. Not to speak of getting your headdress done properly."
It felt strange to stand in her underwear and have herself dressed. When she was in her dress and slippers he wrapped the scarf around her head and opened a velvet pouch. A gold chain with coins fell in his hand.
"This you will wear on your head. It is your dowry. Aicha will wear the one Malik gave her. This one was my mother's. It is for my wife to wear it."
She picked the cold coins out of the warm palm of his hand. They looked old.
"For generations the wives of my family have worn these. According to the folklore tales in the family they once belonged to a beloved wife who originated from your country. Do you know what I am trying to say?"
"Yes," she said. "And my answer is yes too. The headgear is going full circle."
He kissed the palm of her henna-ed hand, each fingertip, her wrist.
"I promise to do all to make you happy. What is the best gift I can give you?"
Tears of joy dripped down her face.
"You are my gift. You." And then she added "And a baby please."
He let out a roaring laughter. "We will work on that once we are married, habibti."
-o-
After the wedding Maartje went home to Holland to finish teaching the schoolyear. Selim came to visit as they considered 5 months too long to be apart. They packed her stuff, sold what she did not want anymore and sold her apartment.
One evening when they visited the opera in Amsterdam to Maartje's initial horror she spotted her ex Jeroen in the crowd.
"That asshole cannot hurt you ever again," whispered Selim after she had told him who Jeroen was. "Come on let us go and you introduce me to him."
Maartje was surprised later on at how cheap she had thought Jeroen looked. His body showing signs of old age while Selim who was a lot older looked ready to jump on a camel and go loot a caravan. The woman on his arm garish. He had looked shocked that his ex wife had looked dashing in her silk dress from Tunisia and had the arm of a goodlooking gentleman around her waist. Maartje was ready to forget him.
In the summer she moved to her love in his white washed house on the shore of the bay. They married in a quiet family gathering as they both had different religious beliefs and both had had big fancy weddings in the past. For them it would only be them, Aicha, Malik and a few close friends and familymembers. Still they wore beautiful traditional cloths and had a great meal with the wedding party. The guests dancing under the stars on the terrace. Aicha had just found out she was pregnant and kept telling she hoped for an uncle or aunt for her baby to follow soon.
At night home alone in his big room with the balcony overlooking the bay, he slowly peeled her wedding finery off her. She stood shivering in the moonlight. Shivering while it was still quite warm outside. The desert nights might be cold but not the ones at the shore with the sea climate. His skin felt hot on hers. His hands caressed her everywhere. He trailed kisses along her neck and shoulders.
"Come to bed with me my beauty," he urged, shedding off his robes.
At first they laid there. Just staring at each other in the faint light of the one candle they had lit. Then she moved into his arms and kissed him. Her hands cupping his face. When she stopped she saw the loving look he gave her.
"I do love you my clever one."
"Clever? Is that my endearing quality?"
"No my Selim, it is just how your name sound in my language!"
"It was the name of the sultan but you have to wait for your next history lesson and I have a wife to kiss."
They kissed. He stroked her breasts. She wrapped her hand around his rockhard member not wanting to wait any longer while he was sucking on her breasts. She was so wet already. He slipped inside her. Her legs folded themselves around his waist.
It felt so good, so right. So different from Jeroen. The hairs of his beard tickled her skin. He felt so much bigger. A feeling of euphoria rose up with every stroke inside her. She started to shake.
"That good my sweet?"
"Yes, yes."
She clamped down on him and shivered and shivered. Then her orgasm hitting her so hard that she had the feeling her whole underside was shaking in waves, small moans escaping her. Half aware of how he flooded her with his cream.
-0-
Their marriage was a happy one. She found herself a part-time job at the Bardo museum in Tunis and started on a PhD on the gardens and the ruins of the Roman bathhouse. The university wanted to have the history of that area researched. Maartje was fluent in Latin so the Roman period would not be that difficult, the Arab one was more complicated as she was still in the middle of learning that language. However her professor said she could start with the Cathageans and the Romans and by the time she would start on the Arabs her Arabic would be good enough.
Sometimes when she was sitting in the garden studying the ruins she had the strange feeling as if every moment the children of the Bey could come around the corner laughing at their game of tag. How strange it was she had dreamt it all up. It was as if she had been timetravelling so real it had all felt. She could still feel the Beys arms around her, his rod buried deep in her backdoor, the feeling of the twins in her arms, Selim drinking her milk. She had quite an imagination had she. Had she?
She could not imagine to live here as a slave. To never see your homeland again. On the other hand Sara had really loved her Bey and although he had been a hard man he seemed to have loved her too.
If they had been real and not just in her dreams.
Maartje started to map out the buildings and insisted she should stop daydreaming. Only mad people believed in things that eerie.
-0-
Aicha had given birth to a beautiful babygirl. Selim was a happy grandfather but Maartje knew he hoped to have her pregnant as well. But somehow she did not. She saw how he tried to swallow his disappointment every month. After a year she made an appointment with a OBGYN in Tunis. The lady told Maartje she was fine but they best tried IVF anyways because the parents where not that young anymore and it would increase pregnancy a lot. She went home to explain.
But now half a year later Maartje was standing in front of her long mirror and was looking at her swollen breasts and heavy belly. Selim was kissing her shoulder. His beautiful, slender, tanned fingers stroking the life under her skin.
They were just back from the hospital and had seen their twins on the ultrasound. Twins! One boy and one girl had the doctor explained.
"What if I pick a name for our daughter and you pick one for our son," suggested Selim.
"You already have something in mind?" she asked.
"What would you like to call our boy?" he asked.
"Well, I think it must be something that he can use here and in The Netherlands. Who knows where he will decide to go and live when he is grown up. Maybe he wants to study there...."
Dreams of a tall man with dark curls coming out of the door of her alma mater came to her mind. Oh dear, and he was not even born.
"I would like to call him Adam. He is our first son and Adam is the father of all men, Tunesian Muslims and Dutch Christians."
"I like that one. Do you want to hear your daughter's name?"
"You mean the name we COULD pick?"
"Hush woman."
He kissed her earlobe.
"I want to name her after my mother, Fatima, and after that Dutch lady who came here centuries ago and who was the mother of the father of father of the father etcetera of my father. The original owner of your coin headdress"
"Oh that sounds nice. What was her name?"
"They called her Sara. Might even have been her own name. Maybe a different spelling. The Bey of those days fell head over heels for his slave and married her. Her son was the first Selim in our family. Probably named after the ruling Sultan or something."
Maartje had the feeling she was about to faint.
"Or she thought the name sounded so much like slim what meant clever."
"Yes maybe who knows," said Selim and then realised his wife was about to faint. Quickly he walked her over to the bed and laid her down. "Are you feeling unwell?"
"I think I am just tired my love. You were talking about Sara."
"Well Habibty I can see why the Bey fell in love with her if she was anything like you."
"He was like you. Just more a man of his times. More harsh, more cruel if he thought he needed to be."
Selim looked at her oddly surprised by what she said. He wondered how she could talk as if she had known that Bey whose name he did not even remember. It was just Sara, the slave princess, the grandmothers told their grandchildren about. The woman with hair like honey who had come from a land far away and had melted the heart of a despot in days women were just possession but to whom she had been the love of his life. Well more or less how this woman had melted his heart that had seemed frozen after his beloved had died all those years ago in the crash and he had resigned in just being a dad.
-o-
Hours later Maartje was still awake. Sarah Fatima and Adam seemed to have woken up when their father had been making love to their mother, so they now kept her awake by kicking around in her womb. She was still thinking about Sara. For years she just had thought that what she had dreamt off while she was in hospital was just that: a dream. But she could never had come up with all those details herself. Details Selim now told her but also strange coincidences when she seemed to know where things were located in the dig. The dig that had once been the garden of the Bey's palace. A palace that had vanished probably because younger rulers had built their own villa on the area the palace had stood.
Sara had just survived the clouds of time because the grandmothers had told her story as a family fairytale. A blue eyed, blonde beauty who had given her genes to many generations who came after her. Maartje wondered if that Sara was the same woman as the woman her own family told about. The sister of an ancestor who had been taken by pirates but who had managed to write to her family
Sara who had been very unhappily married. Who had longed for children. Who had found love and a family in Tunisia.
No she did not believe in timetravel. But did she believe in ghosts? Had Sara and her Ali looked down from heaven and realised their descendants were about to meet and were as unhappy as they had been and tried to leave the message of their love so the newer generations would be willing to hear the call of their hearts? Or was it just fate and genes that had made them connect and had that somehow triggered a faint memory lodged in their instinctive brains? She more or less liked the idea of that cruel face changing into a smile while he was cuddling a woman with honeycoloured hear in his lap with a Turkish cat snoring on hers and then winking to Maartje now she got their message.
She turned on her side and wrapped an arm around her snoring husband as best as she could with her protruding tummy and kissed his shoulder. The snoring ceased for a bit and then started again full force. She smiled against his skin and then whispered of so softly "Thank you Ali Bey and Sara for telling me to trust your offspring. I love him. You will be grand grandparents in three months." "I am going to suggest my son to be called Adam Ali. They can be proud of me and my Selim," was the last thing she thought when she fell in a dreamless sleep.
The END
Now I have some questions for you. I use these stories here as drafts for future novels. Please give me feedback on this story. What do you like and what not? It will be edited but if you see mistakes I am happy to hear them. Were you able to connect with Ali and Sara? And with Selim and Maartje? I was afraid that by splitting the story over several centuries it might break the storyline. I also hope I managed to show that Selim and Maartje are different personalities compared to Ali and Sara. Ali is harder and Sara has more guts compared by their descendants who are both more timid in voicing their love. Is there something you suggest I add to the story? I hope you guys liked I placed the story in countries outside of the US or England. I can imagine for some it mind sound all very foreign but just let you be enticed by stranger shores.