Sulha

by Malka Marom

  “I give you no wedding trinkets because you are a man,” Abu Salim says to the retarded child-boy, as he hands Tammam a set of festive clothes for her daughter, and to A’ida a turquoise stone set in a silver filigree ring. Last, he presents to me—a stunning hand-worked, full-length, wide-flowing thowb!

  “Why do you look surprised?” he says to me. “Did you think we Badu have no manners? We do not honour our wedding guests with gifts?”

  “You better not wear this new thowb Abu Salim has presented to you, for you might trip, just as you did when you had tried on Tammam’s clothes,” Azzizah says to me. She, Tammam, and I laugh, remembering that day with nostalgia already.

  “It is not because you might trip that you would be wise not to wear your new thowb to the wedding, but because we Badawias would rather a stranger-woman sit on our welcome-carpet as you do—with your boots on, not proper—than like a Badawia, wearing our clothes and our jewels to lure our men,” says A’ida.

  I ask her if guests present no gifts to the bride and groom at Badu weddings. And she looks at me as if I accused her of being stingy, and then says, “The gifts we will present Abu Salim will be over and above the gifts he had presented us when we had celebrated the circumcision of our son.”

  “What would be the proper wedding gift for me to present?” I ask her.

  “The proper gift is something led—meaning, a goat or a sheep, or a camel,” A’ida replies. “A camel I doubt any man would be willing to sell you. But a goat you could buy from Azzizah or Tammam, or from one of the neighbouring Badawias.”

  “How much would a goat cost?”

  “Ask Abu Salim or my husband,” she says. “Only men know the current price.”

  I also changed clothes for the wedding. But the blouse, jeans, and scarf are not exactly fresh—they’re as stained and full of sand and spark holes as Badu clothes. How many days, weeks, have I been here? And why? For whose benefit do I write-to-remember? Can I help Tammam? Does she need help? Does Azzizah? Abu Salim? And even if I can help, should I? At what point does interference become welcome? Just like on my first day here, I feel like a stranger, an intruder, an ignoramus. I don’t think I’ll ever know these true Arabs.

  It’s time to leave, I feel. I’m homesick, lonely. People are getting married; starting a new life, a long journey . . . till death do us part . . .

  “Look! Wallah, look! The bridal procession!” cries A’ida’s girl-child.

  The Badawias cover up, shawl over veil, as if any man could see them sitting cooped up here in Azzizah’s tent—the bridal tent.

  Standing at the entrance, the girl-child acts like a radio commentator at a royal wedding, broadcasting to the sequestered Badawias: “The camels are kneeling . . . And now Abu Salim himself is helping the bride to dismount . . . Wallah, how beautiful the bride, how tall—taller than Salim . . . Wallah, how beautiful her veil and dresses, how beautiful her procession: the white flags, the red carpets . . . But Salim is still dressed in his ugly old work clothes . . . I wish he will dress beautiful. I love his homecoming clothes . . .”

  “Salim is dressed proper-wise,” A’ida tells her child-daughter. “Only a man overly pleased to enter his bride would dress up for his wedding.”

  “Hush, hush . . .” her little daughter whispers, “Salim is now escorting his bride here, to this tent.”

  He leaves her at the entrance of the bridal tent—the women’s tent—and joins the men.

  “Mabrouka al-arus — blessed be the bride!” A’ida cries, punctuating it with a long, high-pitched trill. She wasn’t exaggerating by much when she told me the blemished bride is as graceful and as tall as a palm. Her demeanour is regal. Greeting the Badawias, she has to bend to touch her forehead to the forehead of each Badawia in turn. She murmurs blessings—sort of like Moses meeting his father-in-law: “Did obeisance, kissed, asked about each other of their welfare and then they came into the tent . . .”

  The bride exchanged salutations with the child-girl, and me last. Her voice is richly timbered and deeply resonant like a cello’s. There is no trace of shyness in her voice, or in her eyes. She does not avert or hide her glance, like Badawias do, but confronts with them, in pride and arrogance, like a Badu man. And maybe because of the story that precedes her, I see in her eyes the embers of the fire that drove her to cross borders and to be bewitched by a lover. In that glow you can imagine a Badawia maiden, tethered to her own rock of isolation, leaving her parents, her tribe, her goats, and running off to Jordan with some guy she just met. How many of us Western, “liberated,” women would have the fire, the faith, the madness to do that . . . And even if her father did send her on a mission, it takes muruah—courage, balls—to cross a couple of deserts all alone at night—and it would have been at night; she’s too remarkable, too memorable, to get away with crossing borders by day. Wallah, what a wife Abu Salim has chosen for his son.

  And what a punishment he has chosen for Tammam—a woman who would make his adulterous wife grateful to be allowed her subservience.

  Azzizah may have initiated this match to save her son’s life, and if she did it to punish Tammam, she gives no indication of it. It worries her, or so it appears, the look in Tammam’s eyes, which seems to say that love is too high a price to pay for life.

  “Sit-stay,” Azzizah urges her neighbouring Badawias. But the Badawias mutter, “Laa—no . . . we should leave you alone with the bride.” “Sit-stay,” Azzizah insists, time and again, and finally the neighbouring Badawias relent.

  “It is not proper to crowd the bridal tent,” A’ida whispers close to my ear. “The women guests should be sitting in the women-guest-tent, and the men in the wedding-celebration-tent.”

  “Wallah, wallah, they are approaching to present the sacrifice,” cries the girl-child from her watch at the entrance.

  “Already? So soon? Wallah, Salim must be overeager to marry.” The neighbouring Badawias whisper and giggle under their veils.

  “We Badu celebrate two-three days, even a week, before sacrificing to sanctify the marriage. Not one hour or less, like here,” A’ida whispers in my ear.

  At the entrance of the tent, Salim and Akram present a goat; it is trembling, as if sensing it is about to be sacrificed.

  The women fall silent. All have modestly covered up, shawl over face veil, except the bride and Azzizah.

  Taking advantage of my androgynous status here, I step out of the women’s tent to watch the men crowding around Salim, restraining the sacrificial goat while Akram pulls out his shibriyya—dagger—and, loud, for all the women in the tent to hear, he says: “This is Salim’s sacrifice for his bride, in keeping with tradition of Allah and the prophet.”

  “Allahu akbar—Allah is great!” the mountains thunder after the men.

  “I slaughter you . . . Allah deems you pure-proper for slaughter.” Akram bends over the trembling goat.

  “Allahu akbar—Allah is great,” the mountains thunder again as Akram slits the goat’s throat.

  The mountains spin.

  Death throbs.

  Silence.

  Salim dips his hand into the blood spurting from the neck of the dying goat, and then he enters the women’s tent and sprinkles the blood over his bride. Leaving the women’s tent, he re-joins the men.

  “Why did he sprinkle blood on his bride?” I whisper to A’ida.

  “That is the custom,” she whispers back. “A marriage of two families must be sealed with blood.”

  “You mean the marriage is sealed already?”

  “Aywa, half-sealed, all too soon,” replies A’ida. “Now the wedding feast will begin. But it is only when and if Salim will enter his bride, plant a child in her womb, only then will the marriage be fully sealed.”

  “Women are not allowed to slaughter, butcher, and cook meat,” explains A’ida’s husband, as he begins to build a cooking-fire next to Tammam’s tent.<
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  The compound looks divided. There seem to be two separate camps—one of women, one of men—and only the children and the stranger-guest can cross over from one to the other.

  Salim’s brother-in-law, El-Hajj, Mutt and Jeff’s father, helps Tammam’s brother to butcher the goat and dump the meat into a pot of boiling water.

  Abu Salim leads his thoroughbred camel over to Salim. He unbuckles his shibriyya—dagger—and hands it to Salim. Now, for all to hear he tells his son, “I have married you off, armed you, and provided you with a mount.”

  “Wallah, Abu Salim wants all to hear that he had fulfilled his obligation to his son,” whispers A’ida. Her husband and Akram carry a tray laden with boiled goat meat over to the women’s tent.

  The children choose to eat with the men—“because the choice cuts are always on the men’s tray,” Mutt and Jeff explain, carrying trays piled with rice and pita over to the men’s fire-circle.

  I choose to eat with the women. They were crowded close to the tray—hungry and rarely given a chance to eat meat—not one of them noticed that I had no space. Only the bride: in her cello-rich voice she asked the women to make room for me. But, after all that, I couldn’t bring myself to touch a morsel. I saw on that tray the terrified goat, quivering now with globs of yellow fat. And the Badawias are licking fingers shiny with grease and digging those same fingers back into the food.

  The bride must have seen a stranger or two at her father’s maq’ad. She selected a lean morsel of meat and handed it to me, saying, “Koli . . . koli—eat . . . eat.” She didn’t see the hair stuck to the meat, I guess. In order not to offend her, I force the morsel down, then before she hands me more, I mutter, “I’ve had my fill, feasted with the children and the men.” Her eyes said she saw through my story. But polite-proper, she said nothing. She was dressed in traditional tribal black, embroidered not in red thread, like the married Badawias, but in blue, the colour signifying maidenhood. Some of the neighbouring women wore long striped coats; others, colourful embroidered jackets. All had tied hand-woven tassels to their braids.

  After the trays of meat and rice were polished off and the greasy fingers wiped clean with pita, bitter coffee with no sugar, then sweet tea, with triple sugar, was consumed. And then they sang, “Abu Salim’s kinsfolk are people of tradition. Praise Allah for their good reputation . . .” Again and again, the same refrain.

  Azzizah and Tammam kept rinsing glasses and serving.

  The bride kept checking her wristwatch, as if afraid she’d miss her honeymoon flight to Niagara Falls.

  “Why is she looking at her wristwatch?” I whisper to A’ida.

  “Allah aref—God knows,” she whispers back. Her little daughter nearly knocks us over when she runs in and whispers, “Salim left for the mountains, riding on his new thoroughbred camel.”

  “Already?” mutters A’ida. “I see Salim cannot wait to find out if his bride will submit to him, or if she will reject him—flee from him in the mountains and seek protection with an elder who can convince her father to release her from obligations he made without consulting her . . . Salim should not be entering her tonight, for it is shameful to enter a bride when wedding guests are still celebrating. A proper man will wait a week, a month, even two, after his wedding guests have departed. But if Salim suspects his bride will flee from him, he might force-enter her tonight and then, even were she to desert him, her womb will be swollen with his child and his honour will be upheld . . .”

  The bride is gliding out to the ditch—to relieve herself, I guess. But the little girl comes running back and whispers, “Tammam’s brother and Salim’s brother-in-law, El-Hajj, waited not far from the entrance, and as soon as the bride emerged, they whisked her off on a camel decorated with carpets and flags.”

  “Did they appear to be guarding the entrance? Abducting the bride?” A’ida asks her daughter.

  “No,” replies the little girl. “They were just waiting to escort her to meet Salim in the mountains.”

  “How did the bride know they were waiting so soon after the feast?” A’ida wonders.

  “She must have heard the camel approaching the tent,” whispers the little girl. I don’t say anything about Salim and his bride synchronizing their watches.

  Mutt and Jeff pulled my cassette recorder out of my brown knapsack and then asked my permission to cassette-record stories and songs. Right away, all the children formed a third circle in the compound, a children’s circle, around the cassette recorder. And on cassette after cassette, they record the same story, the same song, the same refrain, the same melody.

  It’s my last set of batteries. Won’t last long. I’m spent, like them. If my Jeep was here, I’d be going home this minute.

  I gave the kids all the cassettes they had recorded, except one—I don’t know why I wanted to keep it since I didn’t know if the Badu would ever let me declassify any cassettes or this journal. I also saved a notebook full of what the children call writing—mostly doodling, but a few drawings of themselves, dwarfed by their goats, and by adults looming larger than tents, camels, airplanes, Jeeps—almost as large as the mountains. Why do Badu children draw themselves so tiny and adults so big, when Badu adults rarely, if ever, say or do anything to make a child feel small? Badu adults don’t spank children and only rarely raise their voices to reprimand them. The men are softer with the children than the women, and yet the children seem to take fewer liberties when the men are around.

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  The wedding guests scattered soon after the bride departed. Azzizah’s brother took off early this morning, and Tammam’s brother is leaving now. The flies are sticking around for their own feast—the sun-baked sacrificial blood and the wedding trays, pots, pans, glasses, cups. No one has bothered to clean or clear anything away. There is no wind to usher out the flies today, no air-borne whispers of good or ill. The air sags, limp and vacant.

  The Badu sleep in their wedding clothes and wear them to draw water, tend the goats, gather wood, build cooking-fires, ride to the maq’ad, and to do their tasks that are more important than work.

  “Why do you wear your festive clothes? Is it not better to save them for the upcoming holiday?” I ask Tammam.

  “Who will see tomorrow,” she replies as if life still hung in the balance. But I have yet to see a mountain Badu or Badawia seize today to spite tomorrow. These people live today for tomorrow’s stories, “for everything dies, only the stories live on.”

  Remembering the ruthless ambition of King David for immortality, what we lost when the first temple was destroyed; remembering the glory, the lust, the vengeance—you can begin to understand the Badu, the true Arabs.

  Is that really what brought me here, in the dusty tatters of my wedding clothes?

  As is the desert, the Badu are formed of contrasts—their dress, speech, noble manner as against their squalid living conditions, oppressive heat and frost, murky water, monotonous diet. The mind cannot process it and retreats to what came before: How I remember and long for an ice cube or two; a crisp, green salad; a juicy orange; a long, hot shower; a clean white towel; a bed; sheets, pillow, blanket; a chair and table; a fork and knife. Imma, Abba, Levi—I am homesick . . .

  A’ida is packing up her tent—her love-room, her kitchen—loading all her belongings onto a kneeling camel, while her husband rests from the exertion of doing nothing. “Tying and untying is woman’s work,” she explains. “The tent and everything therein belongs to the woman—to me, not to my husband.” Her children belong to her husband, and he is a good caring father, but feeding and caring for them is woman’s work. In this the Badu are every man—our own men are no more helpful. Our own ghetto women busted their butts to raise children and earn money to support the family, while their husbands did nothing but study and pray. This anger speaks across time; I feel my mother’s exhaustion in my bones.

  “On your way to your home compound, would it be
possible for you to stop at Hillel’s-Hilal’s post and tell him to dispatch my Jeep to Abu Salim’s maq’ad? It is time I went home,” I say to A’ida, during her cigarette break at the lookout point.

  “Aywa, a guest should never visit-stay for more than three days,” she says, sounding like my husband, Dave, who likes to say, “Guests, like fish, stink after three days.”

  “But you, yourself, stayed here many days more than three,” I say.

  “I came here, not to visit, but to remedy my son,” she responds. Next breath she advises me to ask Abu Salim to dispatch a fast camel-rider to Hilal—“for we, encumbered by children, travel slow. Might take us a week, or maybe a month, to reach Hilal’s post.” She turns her back to the wind and lights a cigarette under her veil.

  “Did you hear the latest?” she says when I am about to walk away, like a Badawia, without a parting word.

  “Salim is escorting his bride back to her father’s dwelling-place, meaning he was eager to show his bride, and her kin and his, that he is a man strong of will and character,” A’ida tells me, revising her explanation yet again, as I do in this journal, reason shifting like the desert view—eternal and diurnal, timeless but responsive to the hourly changes wrought by sun, shade, and wind.

  “Aywa,” A’ida goes on to say, “the whole desert is bound to know that Salim, as befitting a true real man, is ruled not by his zubi, but by his noble blood, character, manners. For whoever sees or hears that he is escorting his bride back to her father’s tents is bound to know that Salim will not be entering his bride there, for this will shame-offend her kinsfolk. Aywa, Salim may leave her a maiden there for a month, even two, but not longer, for this would humiliate her.”

  A’ida gives me a list of presents to purchase and bring in my Jeep when I come to visit-stay with her. “The Badu knowledge you will gain will be well worth the gold chains and the gold watches I ask you to purchase-bring,” she says, urging me to leave this compound and visit hers.