Baal—the twelve women of The Curtain

Baal’s relationship with the twelve women of The Curtain turns a collective impersonation of Mahound’s household into a marriage-like life that neither side can keep at the level of performance. The women choose Baal as their husband after growing into their assumed identities; he accepts, and the role gives him intimacy, authority, and a renewed impulse to write. Their bond becomes both an intimate arrangement and a profane mirror of the domestic order associated with Mahound, with fatal consequences when their shared fiction is exposed.

From impersonation to marriage

The relationship grows out of the women’s work at The Curtain, where they have taken the names and roles of Mahound’s wives. Their performance has lasted long enough that their former selves begin to recede from view. They had previously been symbolically married to the Love Spout in the courtyard, but come to regard that arrangement as inadequate, even faintly idolatrous. Wanting a husband they consider more fitting, they tell the Madam that they intend to marry Baal, the poet who has been living among them.

Baal is startled by the proposal; the women escort him to the Madam, and his alarm is registered in his sudden loss of balance. He nevertheless agrees, and the Madam arranges the marriages. The change is not simply a new title for their performance. The women now expect Baal to take up the husbandly role in their shared life, while his acceptance binds him more closely to the fiction that has governed their work. The former clients and the world outside The Curtain remain beyond this private arrangement, but the identities it supplies begin to feel increasingly real within it.

A household built from roles

The women organize a rota so that Baal can spend a day with each of them. They ask him to behave more like the husband they are impersonating, and one challenges him to change his name as the women have changed theirs. Baal refuses: he holds on to his own name and distinguishes his position from the women’s work at The Curtain. Yet he does not reject the rest of their request. Ayesha encourages him to take charge, and he gradually finds confidence in ordering the women, settling disputes, and punishing them when angry.

The arrangement gives the women a version of ordinary married life as they imagine it: they want to be devoted and submissive companions to a wise, loving, strong husband. The narrative makes the contradiction pointed. Their chosen marriage is an exercise of agency, but the domestic ideal they pursue repeats a conventional fantasy of male authority. Their work performing men’s desires has not made them immune to those desires; in the secluded world of The Curtain, the roles they enact shape the life they wish to have.

Baal, meanwhile, becomes more than the passive object of their proposal. The women care for him and compete for his attention, and he takes pleasure in the authority their roles allow him to exercise. His attachment to Ayesha deepens: he identifies her as the woman whose company brings on his verses. When he is discovered with Mary the Copt on Hafsah’s day, he asks Hafsah not to tell Ayesha. She does, and Baal is kept away from Mary for a time. This episode gives the household its own jealousies and rules, while showing Baal no longer merely imitating Mahound from the outside. He has become invested in the marriage and in the women’s regard.

Writing and the changing balance of power

As the household takes shape, Baal begins writing again. He describes his poetic process as a sensation of standing beside himself and giving speech to that other figure; Ayesha, in particular, is connected to the arrival of the verses. His writing is therefore bound to the relationship: the women’s roles and attentions provide the immediate setting in which the poet regains his confidence and voice.

That recovery also sharpens the resemblance between Baal and Mahound. Baal’s authority over the women is an intimate imitation of the authority they associate with the Prophet, but his poetry gives the imitation a public and oppositional dimension. The women are not simply passive figures in Baal’s story: they initiate the marriages, set expectations, enforce their own household arrangements, and decide that the fountain is no longer an adequate husband. At the same time, their adopted domestic ideal organizes those choices around a husband’s command. Their relationship with Baal thus holds independence and submission together rather than resolving the tension between them.

Arrest, names, and public exposure

After the women are arrested, their adopted identities prove difficult to put aside. They have become so accustomed to their assumed names that they cannot recall their former ones; too frightened to give their jailers the names they used at The Curtain, they give no usable names at all. The jailers register them by numbers. Their former clients keep silent, fearing the consequences of revealing the secret, so the relationship might have remained undiscovered had Baal not begun posting his poems on the city jail’s walls.

On the third day after the arrests, Baal appears at the jail and sings love poems that draw the women to its windows. He returns each evening with another set of verses. Each of the twelve poems is dedicated to a different woman, and the names in them match the names of Mahound’s wives. For the first time, their private marriage arrangement becomes legible to the public: the women’s roles, Baal’s writing, and the household they have made together form a single, deliberate affront. Baal identifies himself and refuses to recognize any authority over his poetry beyond his inspiration, making the relationship visible as both attachment and defiance.

Trial and ending

Mahound postpones Baal’s execution until after the women’s trial. The twelve are sentenced to death for the lives they have led, and Baal is brought before Mahound afterward. Asked to explain himself, he recounts his time at The Curtain plainly, including his earlier cowardice. His account provokes laughter from the assembled crowd, which recognizes the comic force of the marriages even as soldiers threaten the audience. The scene brings the relationship’s double character into the open: the arrangement is intimate to Baal and the women, but also a satire that challenges Mahound’s household and authority.

Baal is sentenced to be beheaded, and the women’s death sentences mark the destruction of the life they had built with him. Their relationship ends not with a return to the identities they once had, but with those identities already lost or inaccessible, their assumed names exposed, and their shared performance converted into evidence against them. The closing confrontation makes the bond consequential beyond its private setting: Baal and the women have made a life out of roles, but the power to define those roles—and to punish their enactment—belongs to the order they have mocked.