The Occasional Virgin

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  The bride and groom enter, followed by a man wearing no clerical garb of any sort, a doctor of theology according to the order of service. He begins by reciting some verses from the Quran in a disagreeable Arabic accent, repeating several times the word ‘Neeka, Nika’ which Yvonne doesn’t understand. Is it a foreign word? It sounds like an Arabic word for having sex, but a vulgar swear word. She remembers something the witty Tahir said at Speakers’ Corner about the ban on Nike sports shoes. Yvonne looks around the audience and when she doesn’t see any of Ghulam’s Iranian relatives smiling or looking disapproving, she begins reading the service sheet and quickly finds the word nikah. She never knew before that it was also a synonym for the word for marriage and was used with that meaning in the Quran and the official Muslim marriage ceremony.

  The word nikah is a thread in the spider’s web that she is spinning to catch the praying mantis. She acts as if she is fighting an overwhelming desire to laugh, covering her mouth with one hand and eyes with the other, but soon she is shaking with laughter, although she carries on pretending that she is trying in vain to suppress it. Praying Mantis nudges her and whispers ‘What’s so funny?’ and she whispers back, ‘He’s repeating an old word that must be a synonym for the usual word for marriage.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nikah. It means sex, screwing, fucking.’

  ‘But how do you know Persian?’

  ‘It’s an Arabic word. He’s reading from the Quran.’

  ‘Have you studied Arabic?’

  ‘I’m Lebanese.’

  ‘Neeka, neeka.’

  She spins another thread. ‘Nikah.’

  ‘Nikakh.’

  She brings her mouth close to his ear and repeats ‘Nikah-h-h-h’, making the ‘h’ like the hissing of a snake.

  ‘Shhhh.’ Somebody tries to shut her up.

  She can’t believe her luck. A totally attractive man of around her own age, sitting next to her and asking her questions about the word for having sex. He’s probably already had an image of the two of them together on a bed, or doing it standing up. She stops herself getting carried away by her yearnings. Perhaps he is just asking. Perhaps his curiosity to know about different languages, multiculturalism, is making him ask, not his desire for her. She regrets using the words screwing and fucking. Maybe making love would have sounded more feminine.

  She no longer allows her fantasies to play tricks on her. She’s tired of analysing and interpreting and feels like Eliza Doolittle: ‘Don’t talk of stars, burning above, If you’re in love, show me!’ Did a man behave like that to me because he …? Did he mean something else? Was he too shy to hold my hand, or was he disgusted by that single black hair on my chin that I forgot to pluck? She went so far as to imagine that men ran away from her because they were afraid she would put their manhood under a microscope and they wouldn’t be able to fulfil her desires, or she would take over their lives and their personalities would dissolve into nothing.

  A golden shaft of sunlight enters the tent and there is complete calm. The monotony of the marriage ceremony is sending the children to sleep. Yvonne is in a warm bubble, far removed from her surroundings. She feels happy and confident, the energy flooding back into her life. This change isn’t thanks to the hours she has spent with an analyst, following Huda’s repeated advice to her over the months, when she was still pouring out her suffering on to the pages of the internet, and in repeated calls to Huda across the Atlantic. She has lost weight. Her thighs, arms, stomach and waist have shrunk, as if the kilos have flown away into the air. Her eyes are larger, her neck longer, she looks taller.

  She sinks down among the cushions. The bride and groom are still listening to the man performing the ceremony, as if they are students and he is their teacher. She wonders if they are really listening to what he is saying. The guests follow intently a service that is religious and not religious at the same time, and now he is talking about the bonds of affection that will never alter or change as long as they live.

  She studies her neighbour’s long legs and gives a shudder of fear, not because he is the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, but because she is becoming eccentric. All she yearns for now is his legs. That’s enough. Please don’t play these games with me, she counsels herself. We’ve turned a page and today is the beginning of a new era. You want this praying mantis, not just his legs. She defends herself: His legs are what I like. I want to sit with his legs, embrace them, talk to them. I’ll ask him excitedly, ‘Can I see your legs this evening? Are they free? Please ask them when and where. Tell me where they are taking you and I’ll hurry to meet them.’

  The guests applaud and Ghulam bends to kiss Sophie after they have crammed wedding rings on each other’s fingers. Trills of joy rise from Iranian throats, while an elderly Englishman comments to his wife, ‘This is a strange wedding. I didn’t understand what the man said when he conducted the Muslim part of the ceremony. Is it to our darling Sophie’s advantage or not? She’d better be careful.’

  Yvonne leaves the tent with the others, dawdling to fasten her Chinese shoes. She looks around for Praying Mantis but just when she is beginning to despair, she hears his voice: ‘Ha! So you’re the owner of those amazing shoes. The only ones without heels. Where did you get them?’

  ‘From Shanghai.’

  ‘Do they speak Arabic there?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He looks at her as if to say, ‘You’re good fun. You look as if nothing bothers you.’

  They walk together into the courtyard where the newlyweds stand receiving congratulations. Praying Mantis stops to talk to someone. She doesn’t stand beside him as she would have done before, but keeps going, smiling and greeting people she knows and some she doesn’t, circulating until she finds out his name: James F. She looks for the room where the reception will shortly be held, then searches through the guest list pinned to the door for their names and table numbers. The room is still empty except for a few waiters and she exchanges a card with an Iranian name on it in the place to the right of hers with that of James F. She feels a pang of remorse but remembers the old saying ‘Luck helps those that help themselves.’

  She congratulates the couple before going to sign the big card, but wants to draw them, rather than write a message as most are doing. She makes it so the bridal veil takes up the whole length of the card and decorates it with little birds and flowers and butterflies and rainbows and her signature is the wing of one of the butterflies. She would go to huge lengths to make sure that James sees what she has drawn. The days are gone when she tried to attract men by giving them shirts and ties and embroidered robes.

  She goes over to settle into the seat beside Praying Mantis.

  ‘Cinderella Yvonne!’ he shouts. ‘I don’t believe it. We sat together in the tent and we’re sitting together at the reception!’

  ‘I worked miracles to get to sit next to you. I changed the place arrangement.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I believe you!’ He’d have been just as sceptical if she’d told him that she had imagined herself as his bride when they were in the tent. Techno music rings out.

  ‘Did you write anything on the card? The groom’s mother saw me drawing the couple and insisted that I make Ghulam taller, so I did, but she still wanted me to give him a few extra centimetres, and when I explained that it would be difficult to do for technical reasons, she suggested that I make the bride shorter than she really is!’

  James laughs and leaves the table suddenly without apologising or giving a reason. She thanks God they are sitting at a table, otherwise he would have claimed he was going to get a refill, then not come back.

  He returns with a delighted expression on his face. ‘Ha! Ghulam looks like a giant next to Sophie. I love the drawing. Are you an artist?’

  ‘I work in advertising,’ she says, taking it as a good sign that her drawing had caught his attention. That must mean he was attracted to her. ‘When I said to his mother that Ghulam looked much taller than Sophie, even th
ough Sophie was actually taller than him, she replied that Ghulam was taller than he looked, but the way he carried himself made him look shorter, and of course Sophie wasn’t short!’

  ‘Does your mother think you’re taller than you really are?’ laughs James.

  ‘When I was sixteen I asked her to buy me a pair of high heels and she answered sarcastically that I should remain as I was, then if I dropped an egg it wouldn’t break.’ James interrupts her with a laugh but she continues, ‘So what could I do but take an egg from the fridge and drop it on the tiled floor of the living room.’

  She doesn’t disclose to him what her mother said after she hit her: ‘You’re more trouble than you’re worth.’ Nor how her mother had made her spoon up the yolk and the white that looked like vomit, then fried it and tried to force Yvonne to eat it, until her father arrived and saved her.

  ‘You should thank your mother. Women who wear heels walk like giraffes with backache, whereas your wonderful shoes make you look graceful. Do you think Cinderella was graceful?’

  ‘Of course! But would you like to take my shoes and give them to your girlfriend?’

  ‘You’re wicked. You’re trying to find out if I have a girlfriend, or maybe a wife!’

  ‘Absolutely. I’m in a hurry to marry and settle down and have ten children with you.’

  ‘I know. Women say that all they want is to get married, but once they’re married they want everything, including a divorce.’

  ‘You must have read the word divorcee on my forehead.’

  ‘No, I read it in your eyes. You must have done well out of this divorce of yours.’

  ‘Maybe it’s better if I change the subject and respond to your accusation. Men can’t decide whether to get a tattoo or marry a woman with a good figure. My older brother, for example, was in love with a singer who had no voice but was extremely attractive. She sang on television a lot, and after they were married and had lived together for a few weeks, he cursed the day he bought a television.’

  ‘Is that true, or are you being funny?’

  ‘It’s a joke. I read it somewhere. Anyway, I haven’t asked you what you do for a living, so that I can decide if you’re suitable for me or not!’

  ‘I’m a food critic.’

  ‘Fantastic. So I’ll never go hungry.’

  As if the waiters take this as a signal, they begin covering the tables with dishes of food and opening bottles of wine. James and the others at the table throw themselves eagerly on the dishes and eat ravenously, while she eats slowly and deliberately, like their neighbour Zouzou who was known as the Sipper because he used to take more than twenty mouthfuls to eat a single circle of kibbeh.

  ‘You’re pecking at the food like a bird.’

  ‘Oh no, do you think I’m fat?’

  ‘I said like a bird.’

  ‘I heard you. But do you know that birds are very greedy? They either eat or look for food all day long until it’s time for bed.’

  He collapses into laughter. Luck is on her side again.

  ‘Oh, I like that. You’re funny, intelligent, and your dress is wonderful, wonderful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Why do you live here and not in Beirut? Ah, how I’d love to visit Beirut. It seems like a fascinating city.’

  Before her annoyance can turn into a loss of self-confidence at the idea that he would prefer her to be in Beirut and didn’t think how lucky he was to have met her here, she says, ‘I prefer living here because I heard with my own ears – before I escaped the war – some fighters in a Christian militia discussing whether it would be possible to kill three hostages with one bullet, by arranging things so that the bullet went right through the first body, then on through the second and third.’

  She is indulging him and herself: the war happened years before and now lurks in the dossiers of history.

  ‘I don’t blame you at all. The wars of this world are absolute hell.’

  What about the wars that families launch against their children for reasons that the children don’t understand until they’re adults?

  Praying Mantis becomes engrossed once more in helping himself to the food and talking about cricket to a man and his wife sitting to his left. When minutes pass, then quarter of an hour and half an hour, without him directing any conversation at her, she stands up and goes over to the newlyweds’ table, putting an arm round each of them, and thinks about going outside to talk on her phone, following the analyst’s advice for the first time: ‘Whenever you feel depressed, call me or someone close to you, or call 123 to listen to the speaking clock, and that will confirm to you that everything changes quickly, nothing stays as it is, and it’s the same with relationships. Always remember that men are sometimes embarrassed and shy, or absorbed in their own affairs and totally self-centred. They don’t mean to ignore you or humiliate you.’

  And you, Madam Yvonne, she addresses herself, remember that it’s only been a few hours since you first met him, so why all the rush and anxiety?

  As she picks up her bag and is about to go out into the courtyard, James calls to her and comes after her: ‘Don’t say you’re leaving!’

  ‘Leave without saying goodbye to you? I wouldn’t want you to kill yourself!’

  He hugs her delightedly. She likes his body and the way he smells and wishes he would hug her again, and realises that she has also fallen in love with his voice.

  He goes into the courtyard with her. ‘You’re really something else. I haven’t asked you what you do.’

  If a man had asked her the same question before, she would have been angry with him. Didn’t you ask me that a little while ago? Have you forgotten because you’re not interested in what I say, or because you’re stupid?

  ‘I work in advertising, and you’re a food critic, so you don’t need me and I don’t need you, and what brings us together now is this happy occasion and the beauty of the evening.’

  ‘I’ve drunk a lot. I don’t know why I drink more at weddings.’

  ‘You don’t seem drunk. You didn’t tell me what magazine you write for.’

  ‘It’s called Slow. It’s not as well-known as some of the other magazines, but we have a mission: we’re trying to bring people back to home-cooked food.’

  ‘I know it well. Fried ants and roast crickets and grasshoppers. The magazine asked permission, I think it was last year, to publish one of my drawings, and …’

  ‘Tell me you agreed for my sake.’

  ‘For your sake, of course. And you love Lebanese labneh in the shape of little balls like ping pong balls.’

  ‘No! I don’t believe it. Is it the drawing of what looks like men’s and women’s faces and it was hanging in a Lebanese restaurant called Ya Zaman?’

  ‘Ayyam Zaman. Yes that’s mine.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. It caught my eye when I went to the restaurant and I liked it. I asked my assistant to contact the artist to ask if we could publish it in the magazine, even though the restaurant assured me that we didn’t need permission.’

  ‘That’s incredible.’

  He looks at her in silence for a few moments before speaking again. ‘Since you’re the one who drew that picture, you’ll be able to understand why I’m so drunk. My wife left me two months ago, but I only found out yesterday.’

  ‘How did that happen? Were you away?’

  ‘No, no. Not at all.’

  ‘So your wife left her twin sister in her place!’

  ‘No, don’t rush things. She made me believe that she was still living at home with me, while in fact I was living with a robot that was the spitting image of her.’

  She smiles contentedly.

  ‘No, please don’t laugh. I’m deadly serious. I was very happy in my marriage until I fell passionately in love with a colleague who came to work at the magazine. To start with, I thought she’d just be like all the other women I’d taken out to dinner in one restaurant or another to try the food, but my love for her became more like an obsession. I asked s
everal of my male friends for advice and in the end I pretended to my wife that I was telling her the story of a friend of mine who had fallen in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife and was so confused that he was on the point of leaving his wife and two children to go and live with his colleague.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘I don’t know, but listen to what my wife suggested. Her advice was that my friend should leave home because love doesn’t come along that often, and he should follow his heart. This made things even more tangled up than before. My guilty conscience almost killed me because she was completely innocent and totally unaware that I was capable of such treachery. I could no longer sleep or taste food until I thought a waiter in a restaurant had come to my rescue when he asked me to write in the magazine about a robot he had made, as he worked in the daytime in a robot factory in Wandsworth. The robot he’d produced was a waiter like him and it was hard to distinguish it from the human waiter. Of course I let him think I was going to write about this robot of his, and we agreed to meet in the factory. I went early to the appointment and began to cry as I told the robot-maker about my situation and asked him to make me a robot that was the spitting image of me, if he could, so that I could put it in my home to live with my wife who was unaware of what was going on, while I lived with my lover with a clear conscience. The owner of the factory didn’t find anything odd about this. He pointed to the dozens of robots around him and said, “All these are exact replicas of real people who’ve had similar experiences to you and come up with the same solution.”