Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  We ate and danced and laughed, first at the beach and later with his friends. My shoulders were slightly sunburned, and Mhammad rubbed aloe on my skin. We were tired, barely able to stand by the time we finally made it to our apartment. I thought we would go right to sleep, but Mhammad insisted we finish off the night with what little was left of his own contraband liquor stash. He took out his oud and began strumming, tuning it first. My hips took hold of the music and made love to its notes. I was swimming in the joy of it, took off my top and brassiere until I was dancing naked, only a scarf around my hips. He kept playing, I dancing, neither of us wanting to stop. Eventually we succumbed to the alcohol and exhaustion, and later we made love. I learned that evening that we could love each other best if we were drunk. But even then, on that fine day, he didn’t look at me, flipping me onto my stomach, and I knew he was making love to Tamara, not me.

  I tried to duplicate the closeness of that night on other occasions, encouraging him to drink at home with me and play his music. But we’d just flounder through the awkwardness until we went to sleep drunk and disappointed.

  The next months are a blur of a few images and sounds, mostly arguments, followed by tears and a slammed front door. Like my father, he’d come back in the middle of the night, telling me he had been at the coffeehouse with his friend Jamil. But unlike my father, Mhammad did not love his wife. He did not want to be with me and did not enjoy touching me. And in time, I didn’t want him either, but not before something tender inside of me hardened.

  I was nineteen when my husband walked out. It was not a fight, nor was it the first time I’d accused him of leaving to go find his precious Tamara. But this time he left and didn’t return, not even to collect his things. He didn’t show up at his job, and I spent the first week of his absence searching for him in hospitals and police stations. Jamil, Mhammad’s best friend in Kuwait, didn’t know where he had gone either.

  Jamil’s face was like nothing I had ever seen on a man. He looked devastated, as if he were the one who had lost his spouse.

  “I believe he’s made his way back to Palestine, maybe to look for …” Jamil hesitated. His eyes welled up. “Tamara. He went to Tamara, I think.” My heart sank. There was that name again—a name with no face, voice, or story.

  “He told you about Tamara?” I asked. “Do you know her? Who is she? Where is she?”

  Jamil looked away. “I’m sorry, Nahr. I hope he will at least give you a divorce so you can, enshallah, remarry and not live in limbo.”

  Divorce? I hadn’t even considered the possibility until Jamil said the word.

  I have revisited that moment with Jamil many times. Knowing what I do now, I see in his face what was not evident to me then. I know now the meaning of Jamil’s tears, the secret in the furrows of his brow. Tamara meant something to him too.

  I met Um Buraq in the wreckage of my marriage. I was at the wedding of a former classmate, who was a distant relative of hers. I didn’t know this classmate well and only went because Sabah begged me. “If you don’t want to leave the house for your own good, then do it for me. I really want to go, but I’m too shy to go alone,” she told me.

  “Liar. Lots of our friends are going.”

  “Well, you’re the most popular, and everyone will want to see you dance. It’ll give me status if we go together.”

  “Still a liar.” I stared at her, half smiling. She knew me well enough to know that I had already given in. And I knew her well enough to know that she was sincere. Sabah was truly sorry that my marriage was over.

  “Great! It’s settled. I’ll pick you up in the morning. We’ll get a scrub at the hammam, then we’ll get lunch, get our hair done—”

  “No! I’ll go to the wedding, but I’m not going through a long salon day too. It’s not like I’m part of their family,” I protested.

  “It’s not for the wedding, Nahr! You look terrible. And you smell!” It was the middle of the afternoon and I was still in my nightgown. My hair was an unwashed, frizzy mess. I hadn’t bathed in days.

  “Fine. Since you’re paying!”

  For many years, I have wondered what my life would have been had I not agreed to go to that wedding. It was the first time I’d been outside the house in weeks. I had taken too much time off from work and expected to be fired soon.

  Sabah and I passed the day getting groomed and pampered. The steam and hard scrubbing of a Moroccan hammam reawakened my skin. I felt renewed, reinvented by water. We lay side by side through the scrubs, massages, and body oiling. We got facials, manicures, and pedicures. Our hair was blown out and styled. And after we ate lunch, we took a nap and went back for makeup, then got dressed and headed to the wedding.

  I don’t remember much about that evening except that the more I danced, the less my heart hurt. The music was mostly pop Khaleeji, Egyptian, and Lebanese. But they played some of the classics with a takht orchestra and some instrumental taqseem. There were enough of us from the Levant that they even played a jafra, and we lit up the dance floor, stomping out a high-stepping dabke. I dragged the bride into the middle as we dabke’d around her, and she liked that. I only stopped dancing when the DJ paused for the women of both families to exchange compliments and declare what an honor it was to give away and to receive the bride.

  An older Kuwaiti woman sat down at our table and squeezed into a chair next to me, introducing herself simply as a relative of the bride.

  “It’s a good thing Khaleeji weddings are segregated. All these women would have torn you to pieces if you were dancing like that in front of their husbands. Palestinian weddings are mixed, right?” she asked.

  “Usually. But it depends on the family. Some are more traditional and keep things separate. But usually they’re mixed. Except for the henna night and sometimes the zaffa.”

  “Does your husband let you dance at mixed Palestinian weddings?”

  I hesitated, unsure if I could still claim to have a husband. “He doesn’t mind.”

  “I hear your husband is a Palestinian hero,” the woman said.

  It was the way she said it, like she knew something. I nodded and turned away.

  “Pardon me for being nosy,” she said. “I tend to run off my mouth, but I mean no harm. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Um Buraq. It’s nice to meet you, Yaqoot.”

  It seemed this bitch knew a few things about me. My legal name wasn’t a secret, but not many people knew it.

  I stared her down.

  “Oh! There I go again, running off at the mouth. I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how I know your name. I’m sorry. I was intrigued watching you dance. I asked, and the bride told me.”

  I didn’t respond, unsure what to make of her.

  She smiled. “I know I’m older than you, but I am just trying to strike up a friendship. A few of us are going to finish out the night at another party when this one breaks up. I wanted to see if you’d like to join us.”

  To my twenty-year-old eyes, she looked ancient, but I know now that she was barely forty. “The wedding party will go on well past midnight. Who is even still awake at that hour?” I asked.

  I’ll never forget her reaction. Her lips widened more than seemed possible, expanding over large teeth with a prominent gap that was off center from her nose, and she laughed—a frightening, high-pitched cackle. “Oh, darling! A whole part of Kuwait comes alive only after midnight,” she said. I must have recoiled, because she closed her enormous mouth and stopped laughing.

  “Here, take my pager number in case you change your mind.” She handed me a card. It surprised me she had a pager. Only doctors and businesspeople used them. I thought maybe she was someone important, and that changed my attitude. I accepted the card with gratitude and gave her my home number.

  “Why’s an old woman giving you her pager number? It’s weird,” Sabah said, watching Um Buraq walk away.

  Going to that wedding got me out of
the house and finally helped me create a new rhythm in my life. Or rather, I just reverted to the way things were before my brief marriage, as if it had never happened. I stayed in our marital apartment as long as I could, pretending Mhammad was away on business whenever the landlord came to collect the rent, trying to hold out as long as I could in case he decided to return, or at least send money. After two months the landlord’s wife told me the whole building knew my husband had walked out on me and said I had better pay up or be hauled out by the police.

  Mama and I went with Um Naseem, Mhammad’s aunt, to withdraw money from the joint account they had set up for our wedding, only to find that Mhammad had emptied it months ago. He left me nothing. Um Naseem was deeply apologetic and gave me a few hundred dinars, which I knew she couldn’t afford. Then Hajjeh Um Mhammad, my mother-in-law, called me from Palestine. She cried through the phone and promised to help me however she could. I know it broke her heart too. I wouldn’t accept her money, because I knew she had already sold so much of her inheritance to pay legal fees and Israeli fines just to keep her home. She was a widow living alone, and I wasn’t going to add to her burdens. She sent a thousand dinars anyway, and Um Naseem insisted I take it. I didn’t tell Mama at first because she would have made me use the money to pay back rent. But I was being evicted and didn’t want to stay in that apartment anyway. I didn’t share Mama’s moral sensibilities and was happy to rip off the landlord. I even broke the handle on the bathroom fixture on purpose.

  Jehad and Mama helped me move in the middle of the night. Mama made me leave the furniture in lieu of rent. She wouldn’t accept that I could just skip out on paying, because “stealing is haram.” She said God would punish me eventually for it, as if being an abandoned bride when I was barely twenty wasn’t punishment enough. It turned out that my nice appliances weren’t even mine. Mhammad had been renting them from the landlord. I’d have to go back to hand-washing the dishes and using the semimanual washing machine. But I took comfort in imagining the landlord’s face when he saw the broken bathroom fixture.

  Before long, I had a new job as a clerk at a private school, and my life continued as it had been before I got married. I still threaded eyebrows on the side. Occasionally I did makeup and nails for weddings and partygoers. The familiarity made me wonder sometimes if my marriage had not just been a dream. Mhammad slowly faded from my thoughts. I might have put him out of my mind completely had not Sitti Wasfiyeh reminded me occasionally that I’d failed to keep a husband for even one year; or had not the inevitable question of why I wasn’t pregnant yet come up when I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in a while. Sabah was usually with me when this happened, and she would intercede.

  “This is the 1980s. A woman doesn’t have to have kids right away,” she’d say, or “Nahr is a modern woman. She doesn’t want children just yet.”

  Sabah had my back, especially when it came to outsiders. So I trusted her when she confirmed my unease about Um Buraq, and I didn’t return the old woman’s call when she left a message on our machine at the apartment shortly before I was evicted. I thought Um Buraq was just overbearing (though intriguing), but Sabah detected scandal.

  “Good thing you’re not at that number anymore,” Sabah said. “You know I don’t like repeating things like this, but I heard that her husband married a second wife because she can’t have kids. She goes by Um Buraq to have a veneer of respectability at her age. But since her husband doesn’t visit her much anymore, there’s no one around to keep her in line. I heard she sleeps with other men. Istaghfar Allah!”

  “Well, of course! How else is she going to cool her fires?” I joked. I had heard those rumors too, but that’s what made Um Buraq interesting. Sabah shoved me good-naturedly.

  “What?” I protested, and assumed the wisdom reserved for women who’ve actually fucked before. “Someday you will know that bliss,” I said, pretending my experience with sex had been anything but traumatizing.

  I remained curious about Um Buraq. The unapologetic confidence she exuded, despite her compromised standing as an abandoned first wife, made me respect her. Somehow she got our family’s telephone number and left a message with my mother. Sabah was unusually harsh because I planned to call back.

  “People are already gossiping about you because of your lousy husband. Why would you consort with someone like Um Buraq? She’s also not even a native. She’s Iraqi but pretends she’s Kuwaiti because her husband is,” Sabah said.

  “How do you know they’re gossiping unless you’ve participated in the gossip? And what does her being Iraqi have to do with anything?” I shot back.

  “Come on, Nahr. You know I’m just trying to look out for you,” she said, and I did. But I hung up on her anyway. Usually Sabah and I would reconcile within a day or two after an argument. But that would not happen this time. It would be a long time before we rekindled our friendship, because I decided that day to call Um Buraq. I didn’t care if the rumors about her were true. I thought she would understand me; that she would know how it felt to be a discarded woman.

  UM BURAQ

  HERE IN THE Cube, I contemplate every decision I made. Turning to Um Buraq stands out as pivotal in altering the course of my life.

  “Well, well. What a nice surprise, and great timing,” Um Buraq said. She was going to a party with friends that evening, and she’d love it if I could come. I said I’d like to but couldn’t. “My family wouldn’t believe a wedding could go on that late,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll stay with me. All my girls do,” Um Buraq said. Had I been more sophisticated, less naïve—had I been smart, prudent, more like Sabah—I might have wondered what she meant by “all my girls.”

  I asked what I should wear. “Something sexy,” she said.

  “Is it a mixed party?” I asked.

  She chuckled. “Yes, it’s mixed.”

  I assumed it would be mostly couples, since that was the only kind of late-night mixed party I had ever been to.

  “I’m not comfortable being at parties with couples,” I said. “Will there be other single people?”

  Then came her enormous laugh. Even through the phone, it was shocking. I imagined the big teeth, the wide gap, the fat lips. She realized I was starting to back out and immediately said, “You have nothing to worry about. I’m going without a husband, aren’t I?”

  “I’m glad you’re making new friends and moving on with your life,” Mama said. But Sitti Wasfiyeh warned, “People are going to talk. Someone in your position shouldn’t be staying outside of the home.”

  “Leave her alone,” my mother said. “All she does is work. At the salon, at the school. Sabah is her only friend. She needs to live her life.” I still hear Mama’s words in my head.

  Jehad was on his way out to play football when Um Buraq’s driver beeped the horn under our balcony. He and I descended the stairs together, and he glimpsed Um Buraq, who was dressed in a traditional black abaya in the passenger seat. “You’re hanging out with old Kuwaiti women now?” he teased, and went on his way as I walked to her car. I was surprised to see two other women in the backseat when I got in. We exchanged greetings, and Um Buraq introduced us. Their names were “Susu” and “Fifi.” I could tell from their accents that Susu was Lebanese and Fifi was Egyptian. They were my age and quite beautiful.

  “We have to find a good name for you too,” Um Buraq said.

  “What do you mean?”

  At a traffic light, she turned to me. “Pick a name other than Yaqoot,” she said.

  “Almas,” I blurted out spontaneously. Diamond. I have thought much about that decision to choose another name. Was I making a commitment to something? To a rebellion, perhaps. A rejection of the script to achieve a respectable life—modesty, a husband, children, social status, money? Was I wanting to try life on the margins of all that was unnaturally proper? And if so, why? Was it the excitement? A desire for relevance? Attention? Unfettered sexuality? Or maybe something less interesting. I had already been rej
ected and abandoned by my husband before I was twenty. I hadn’t even had a proper wedding, which only cheapened me in the eyes of others and intensified their scorn. Maybe I turned to Um Buraq because I thought she could understand the shock and heartache of my fall from grace.

  Um Buraq beamed and raised her eyebrows approvingly. “So it is! Almas. A fitting name for a gem like you.”

  Now I had three names—four, if you count Nanu, which my brother sometimes called me.

  Um Buraq’s house was a modest but elegant home in the Rumaithiya district. A South Asian woman in her fifties opened the door. Deepa was one of two servants in the home. The other was Ajay, the woman’s husband, our driver. People in Kuwait were often harsh and unkind to their servants, but Um Buraq, though demanding, seemed to relate to her housekeeper as family. I was surprised to hear her speak a few words in their language.

  “Do you speak Hindi?” I asked.

  “No! Malayalam,” Um Buraq snapped, perturbed that I didn’t know the difference.

  Deepa had come to Kuwait for work some twenty years before when Um Buraq was first married, and had seen her through the heartbreak of miscarriages, then abandonment. Deepa herself had been childless and escaped the shame of it to work in Kuwait. Only later, after her husband tried to conceive with another wife, was it revealed that he had been infertile, not her. Ajay begged Deepa to take him back, and Deepa begged Um Buraq to bring him to Kuwait. But since Um Buraq could not afford another servant, she brought him on the condition that she could hire him out and take a portion of his earnings. He agreed and abandoned his second wife to escape his impotence, and the three of them lived together in childlessness and the unspoken shame of it. They were all around the same age, but both Deepa and Ajay called Um Buraq “Mama.”

  “The dress you brought will not do,” Um Buraq said, and she gave me a few skimpy things to try on. One little red dress she chose clung to me, accentuating my curves. I ran my hands over my body, watching in the mirror how it slid from my breasts to my waist and glided over the arches of my hips. I felt glamorous. It was probably the most expensive clothing I had ever worn. In this dress, I could be someone other than a twenty-year-old failure, who’d only learned to read well enough in her teens, fallen in love with and married the first man who came along, then wound up little more than gossip fodder. I could be Almas, a diamond, in this dress.