The Occasional Virgin

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  It was enough for her to enter the water, as if she had been thirsty for a lifetime, her body making a sound like the whisper of liquid extinguishing the flame on a cooker. It was enough for her to walk on the sand, the warm grains massaging her feet, getting in between her toes, enough for her to feel proud of her body, whose beauty was shown off at its best as she lay on a towel in her swimsuit: slender waist, long legs and a pretty back, while in her clothes she looked too skinny.

  She was lucky to be naturally brown, not because these days there were songs on the radio extolling brown beauty, but because her visits to the sea would not be discovered. All the same, she took every precaution, wearing a long skirt over a short skirt, removing the long skirt and putting it in her bag in the hallway of an apartment building close to her house before she got in the taxi or bus, then putting it on again before she went back home, making sure not to forget the long-sleeved white blouse over her sleeveless top. She learnt not to remove her bathrobe before switching out the light, not to hug her pillow or wrap her arms around herself as usual, but to keep them straight down by her sides as if they were in splints, hands clasping her thighs, for fear her arms would reappear outside the cover. She didn’t think about her face, and that’s the place where the sun lands first in summer. Her brother would whisper suspiciously to her, ‘Your face only goes that colour by the sea.’ Defiantly she would answer that she sunbathed on the roof, exposing just her face, and did he want to stop her doing that as well, when she had already been forbidden to go to the women’s swimming pool?

  He tried to catch her out sometimes, helped by her mother who sneaked in and looked through her clothes, even smelling her shoes, while he made an effort to leave work at odd times of day, in the hope of surprising her on her way to the beach. Eventually he grew frustrated and gave up watching her: she was like one of those little lizards with eyes that move in all directions, allowing them to see their enemies, even if they are behind them. Until, one day when the summer was nearly over, taking with it the fun – the music coming from all around the beach, the daydreams in which she pictured a boy lying at her side and promised herself that next summer they would become a reality – she heard her name being broadcast over the loudspeaker. She jumped to her feet from the sun lounger as she had seen other girls do, and walked unhurriedly to the reception, imitating their nonchalant air. How often in the past she had longed to be one of them, all conversation turning to her, all eyes upon her.

  It must be her friend Salwa, Huda thought, the only person who knew she was here. She was probably contacting her either to say she couldn’t make it or to confirm that Huda was at the beach, since the sun was taking its leave of the sea that day and there was a rain cloud preparing to burst the moment the swimmers stopped praying for it to hold off. But Huda was suddenly rooted to the spot, her heart in her clenched teeth. In front of her was her father, with their neighbours’ son, a taciturn youth who never raised his eyes from the ground to look at her or any other girl.

  She prayed the earth would open up and swallow her. She gasped, a deep intake of breath she hoped might be her last. She put her hands up to cover her chest and thighs. If only she could go blind, turn into a pillar of salt. Her father, in his black robe and green turban, had trusted the pious, dignified neighbours’ son when he asked him to come along to the opening of a Shia technical school, only to find himself in surroundings he could never have imagined. Then, before he had a chance to ask what was going on, hearing his Huda’s name over the loudspeaker, and seeing her, his daughter, but different.

  Her father had struck his face, then buried it in his hands. The sound of his sobbing had risen until it was as loud as the waves. He swayed his head from side to side as if he was trying to save her from drowning before his eyes. If only she had been caught dancing or with her head uncovered, or with a boy – but to have been caught in a swimsuit in the water’s embrace? Water, a source of sorrow as well as cleanliness and life in their house: ‘a drop of water’, ‘the water’s cut off’, the word ‘thirsty’, they all reminded her parents of Ashura and the battle of Karbala, and here was Huda throwing herself not into a few drops of water, but into the whole big water, into the sea.

  Yvonne does not head straight for the rocks as she intended, but finds herself walking into the water.

  She proffers her lips to the sun, closing her eyes as if waiting for a kiss, examines herself in her swimsuit, its various shades of pink, and the bikini top exposing a large part of her breasts. She looks at her stomach, her navel with a gold stud in it where you might expect sand, the slight redness at the top of her legs caused by the salt water.

  The sea seems to have put on a new suit of clothes in this spot, its colour blue and green now. When she was diving into it earlier, it was dark, indigo. She closes her eyes, picturing the water slapping against the rock, over and over again, always making the same sound, giving off spray. This excites her, and she finds herself swimming now like a knight on a young horse, undoing her bikini top, so her breasts go free in the water and she races after them, the bikini top attached to her wrist. Then she lets her hand move down below her belly and removes the bikini bottom, then rides the horse for a while before dismounting and lying on the surface of the water. The water pounding on the rocks pounds against her breasts, her navel and below her belly. She closes her eyes and surrenders to the water, letting it do what it pleases with her, moves further out, afraid someone will hear her moaning, then remains in the water for some time until she has become completely still and quiet. She has no desire to swim, wishing the water would carry her to the shore, relaxed from the pleasure. Inertia seizes her as it always does after she climaxes on her own, and she doesn’t want to think much. She hurries towards the high rocks again, and this time she is weeping as she dives, shouting, ‘I’ve come back, I’ve come back,’ and the waters of the Mediterranean carry her to her house in Lebanon. The waters wash her, as two women bend over her, like at the public baths, scrubbing her body with a loofah and soap, and when the colour of the water changes, Yvonne cries, ‘Am I really that dirty?’ Her arms are made of iron. Her blonde hair is the same as her older brother’s, her trouser suit is Harris tweed, she carries a leather briefcase, wears shiny shoes and walks with a confident step.

  The waters of the Mediterranean carry her to the steps of their house in her seaside town. She looks in through the windows, where the sun used to enter, despite her mother’s best efforts, through cracks in the wooden shutters, making a shadow like a black question mark in the room. The paint is still fresh and green on the inside although it has faded outside, like the love between her mother and father; her father who had kidnapped her mother, Violette, when she was asleep in bed in her family home. Violette hadn’t woken up until she was sitting beside him in the car. Was it conceivable that Violette would have remained asleep? Violette who was descended from stock that broke rocks with their bare hands, and whose mother said nothing when her husband dropped dead as they visited their land in Syria, just hurried to dress him in his best suit and tie, placed his hat squarely on his head, put him in the car and told their driver to go back to Lebanon, convincing the Syrian authorities at the border that he was asleep, dead drunk, cursing him, vowing she would ask for a divorce as soon as they reached Lebanon? All this to avoid paying death duties and being subjected to Syrian inheritance laws; as she explained to anyone who expressed surprise at her strength and shrewdness, ‘Naturally, laws are a nuisance in death as well as in life.’

  Violette, the bride kidnapped while she was sleeping, started to have regrets a few months after her marriage to the man her mother had refused to accept, because he was not the same class: he was a lawyer, not a feudal landowner like her family, ‘So how will he understand the language we speak, which has been shaped by the land?’

  Only a few months after the marriage, the bride Violette began repeating her mother’s phrase, comparing her old life with her new one, often weeping as she did so. Only at night when
everything was shrouded in darkness, did she feel really happy, when it was time for her to have a glass of whisky and make love to her husband. She gave birth to three boys and two girls, cursing each time she had a girl. She forgot what a monthly period was, or what the tops of her legs looked like. She wanted boys that would replace her mother and brothers, who had never made their peace with her and had cast her out of their lives for good. She wanted boys who would succeed in restoring her pride, a beautiful lily that had bowed its neck and drooped prematurely.

  Now everyone in the house rushed to greet Yvonne, taking her leather bag and suitcase from her, flinging the doors wide. Yvonne entered, hugging everyone, for she was the one who had left with a hundred dollars in her pocket and endured the hardship of working as nanny to a Lebanese family for years, then studied, worked hard and acquired her own company, raising her family to its previous status.

  She sat, while they all hovered round her, competing with one another to talk to her and make her feel welcome. Her mother was preoccupied with making coffee and bringing sweets, piling up the food in front of Yvonne and trilling with joy. Her father’s eyes filled with tears of delight, while her three brothers passed the time by biting their nails and shifting their watches or their genitalia from side to side, and rooting around in their ears with the nails of their little fingers, which they had left to grow, in order to distinguish themselves from the other peasants who ploughed and worked the land. The voice of Umm Kulthum still played, cigarette smoke rose in clouds and the shutters remained closed: the living room was unchanged; the television screen was alive and well and the dish of sliced carrots in its usual place as Yvonne’s mother went to squeeze lemon juice over it.

  ‘In the name of the Cross, in the name of the Cross,’ murmured her mother, studying Yvonne as if she had forgotten her face, never braided her hair for her. She looked at her daughter’s clothes and handbag, the rings, watch, bracelets, earrings. I wonder if she travelled first class? She felt a hot wave of anger tickling the back of her throat. My daughter’s selfish. Why doesn’t she travel tourist class and give us the difference?

  She looked at her, thinking: I used to sit like that, feeling pleased with myself, before I was married. I didn’t give a damn! I wonder how such thin heels can bear the weight of her body? Her eyes met Yvonne’s and she was afraid her daughter would guess what she was thinking, so she said hurriedly, ‘Glory be to God, you’re the spitting image of my father. You sit just like him. If I put a pipe in your fingers, a black cloak round your shoulders and a felt cap on your head, you’d be him, I swear to God.’

  Yvonne smiled at her in embarrassment, not believing a word, but knowing what her mother was getting at: It’s not surprising you look like your grandfather, because you’ve made a success of your life, while your brothers are still scrabbling about in the dirt trying to earn a living. Yvonne looked at her brothers, smiling as if apologising for her mother’s harshness, and noticed they were jamming their fingernails even more energetically into their ears. Her mother did not continue, but Yvonne and everybody else in the room knew the monologue by heart: Why did I pretend to be asleep and trust my fate to a young lawyer, even though there was every indication things wouldn’t work out? For example, he was used to eating tabbouleh that consisted almost entirely of burghul wheat: you could count the bits of tomato on your fingers. That wasn’t a trivial difference: their tabbouleh indicated weakness, a sense of failure, even in the people eating it and the dish it was served in, while the tabbouleh in our house filled our stomachs and we derived strength and confidence from every morsel we ate . . . But why return to the wretched past, when I have my daughter Yvonne here briefly restoring my youth and energy, briefly of course, only briefly, as she’s sure to marry soon and then she’ll regard her husband and children as her family, not us. That’s what always happens: my boys married but they’re constantly in the house, around me, loyal to me and their father, while Yvonne’s far away, and I only see my other daughter every couple of weeks now that she’s married. I don’t believe the boys are loyal to us because we still help them with money and make sure everything Yvonne sends us goes into their pockets, nor do I think they’re waiting for us to die so they can divide the house between them, although that’s what Yvonne claims, so does her sister, who repeats everything she hears. Both of them still accuse me of spoiling the boys. Maybe it’s because I sent them to school with cushions, fearing for their bottoms on the hard wooden seats. Or because I was pleased with them when they were thrown out of school. I knew they were fighting for their rights, and if they could stand up to their teachers, they could stand up to the world.

  Unable to contain her nosiness, her mother got up and went over to Yvonne’s suitcase, deliberately stumbling against it and taking hold of the label, to check whether Yvonne travelled first class, as she had heard.

  I’ll ask her tomorrow . . . Perhaps if she grilled a fish for her and smothered it in tarator sauce, sent someone out to catch sea urchins for her and sprinkled them with salt, garlic and lemon juice. But she couldn’t wait and found herself asking Yvonne, as she opened her suitcase, whether she had brought what she’d requested: ‘a silk robe de chambre for your brother Tanius’. Yvonne rummaged intently through her luggage, bringing out various clothes that she held out to her mother, murmuring, ‘For Tanius and the kids’, but her mother didn’t take the things from her and asked stubbornly: ‘The silk robe de chambre?’ at which Yvonne shouted that her son was a parasite and didn’t deserve to wear silk.

  Her mother put her hands on her hips and spouted all the resentment that had been accumulating inside her, like a camel that had forgotten how to regurgitate for a while, then remembered suddenly what it had to do: ‘The fact he didn’t succeed is all because of you. You’re the one who humiliated him, in fact you humiliated all three of them. You wanted to compete with them, dive off the highest rocks, travel abroad. You’re selfish. And they helped you humiliate them out of the goodness of their hearts, otherwise you’d be rotting away in this kitchen now.’ Before her mother had finished and began dabbing at the spittle around her mouth, Yvonne heard again the sound of their house roaring like the waves, its walls seashells whose loud rumble hurt your ears when you listened to it. She hurried to take leave of her family, recalling what the teacher had told them about seashells: ‘Spineless creatures that live in the water.’ She left them on the first wave, plunging deeply beneath it, and the place where she dived crumbled in pieces, as if she had caused an earthquake. The waters of the Mediterranean groaned in pain, like a giraffe with backache.

  They drag themselves back to the hotel in complete silence. Neither of them asks the other why are you so solemn, why so quiet, is anything wrong? Because they are both certain that spending the first day of the holiday on the beach ought to have refreshed their bodies, set them free, let their minds stretch out in a delicious, but temporary, stupor. And then each of them is trying to extract herself from the maelstrom of the past with a couple of simple questions: do you think Roberto is married? Are we going to spend this evening alone in the hotel?

  In the evening they are sitting in the hotel garden instead of facing the sea.

  After a couple of glasses of red wine, Yvonne turns to Huda and asks her if she’s enjoyed the day. She doesn’t expect her friend to answer, and lets out a deep sigh: ‘The sea made me remember, no, not remember, because I hadn’t forgotten, the sea brought me face to face with my family and Lebanon and everything again, and made me realise for the first time how these memories ruin my life.’

  ‘Me too, me too!’

  ‘No! You too!’

  ‘OK, OK, let’s forget. The best thing is for us to forget, just like the proverb says, “Talk to the sea, it won’t tell.”’

  ‘But we were so enthusiastic about this holiday! Is it possible that when we arrived we began dancing with joy at the sight of the sea, and now we’re avoiding even talking about it, as if it was going to infect us with some awful disease?’
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  The phone breaks in on Huda’s melancholy as she is about to go to bed, ringing with messages that obliterate the past and thrust her into the present. Three messages from her secretary in Toronto. Huda’s heart lurches as she reads that the biggest potential backer of her play has been in touch asking to see the whole text before he commits to financing it. I’ll have to go back to Toronto tomorrow, she thinks in a panic, picturing the holiday cancelled.

  Huda had contacted a big Arab–Canadian financier in Toronto, telling him that she wanted to direct a stage version of One Thousand and One Nights, and how the play was going to tell the Canadians and the West about a whole new side of Arab and Muslim culture. She said she’d read around a thousand pages of the book and decided to find someone to write her an adaptation for the theatre, a play that would be about a time of passion and openness that lay at the heart of these magical-realist stories.

  ‘That’s music to my ears,’ the man had cried enthusiastically. ‘I’m behind this project heart and soul!’

  Huda calls her secretary at once. ‘What’s going on?’

  She listens to what the secretary has to say, full of apprehension as she sees herself landing in Toronto and making straight for the backer’s office, Najib is his name, talking to him, arguing with him, smiling at him. ‘Fine, I’m coming tomorrow,’ she shouts at the secretary. She rushes to Yvonne’s room, banging on the door, telling her she’s leaving.

  ‘OK, I get it, you’re going home. But why? Has someone died?’

  ‘Yes. My play’s about to die. The backer wants to strangle it.’

  ‘OK, I understand. Thank God he hasn’t strangled it yet. Let’s think of a solution.’

  Breathlessly, Huda tells Yvonne how the Arab actor she’d chosen for the role of Shahrazad met the backer at a party and enthused over her part, adding that the Canadians would be shocked by the play, and would never believe it was an Arab play and all the actors were Arabs. ‘What a stupid girl! She probably flashed her eyes at him and stuck her tits out, then he got worried about his reputation and didn’t want to have his name associated with the play after all. He should have been proud that it had the potential to change the West’s view of us, and show them that we can be bold in our art, not just in acts of destruction.’