Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  She took her time before answering. “If you’re married in name only, abandoned and humiliated by your husband in the prime of your life, without a legitimate means to support your family and yourself in any meaningful way in this materialist culture that spits in your face if you’re not driving the right car, then you are just like me.”

  She stared until I turned to look at her. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about the contents of the safe at home, the stranger on top of me at the beach, glass pushing into my back. The knot in my stomach I’d had since that night tightened its grip. I wanted to vomit. Was she right? Was this my fate?

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, concentrating fire in my eyes, but actually feeling defeated.

  “I want us to be friends. We can help each other, and I believe in time you will see things differently. I know your brother is one of the top students in the country and has been every year.”

  I went cold. My anger was suddenly real and powerful. “Listen to me. I will gouge out your eyes if you mention my family again. Do you understand?”

  But she continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “Your brother deserves to get a good education. I know your family cannot afford to send him to university. But I can help.”

  It’s true I wanted Jehad to become the surgeon he dreamed of being. And I wanted to be the person to make it happen. To be my family’s savior and protector. But the reality of what she was offering made my stomach churn again. “I need to go back to work,” I said, stiffening, trying to hold my gut together.

  The waiter walked by our car and took Um Buraq’s empty glass. I motioned for him to take mine. “Was something wrong with the juice?” he asked, seeing it nearly untouched.

  “She’s not feeling well,” Um Buraq answered for me, reaching over to tip him. After he left, she said, “I am offering you a chance to make a month’s salary in one hour.”

  “And if I say no?”

  She shifted in her seat, stretching her body to open the glove compartment. It was full of junk and papers. “Open that,” she ordered, pointing to another blue envelope.

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “It’s not money. Open it.”

  I did. And there I was, in that tight little red dress, a glass of liquor in my hand, dancing between three men ogling my body, showering me with money, money all around my bare feet on the floor. “You took these pictures? You planned this?”

  I opened the car door, retching. If those photos ever got out, I would never be able to show my face anywhere. I could also be imprisoned for prostitution. Prostitution!

  “Take some time,” she said grimly, and started the car.

  Two months later, I went to another party with her, Susu, and Fifi. Again, married men without their wives, showing off photos of their kids.

  I would learn that Um Buraq always asked to see photos when the men were drunk enough, not because she wanted to see their kids, but so she could collect the four-digit codes for their bank cards. “Men like this have several accounts. They’re too stupid to remember the codes, so they keep little pieces of paper in their wallets with the numbers,” she explained. She taught me how to steal the bank cards that went with those codes. We’d withdraw as much as possible, without raising suspicion. For men with that kind of money, a thousand dinars was like pocket change. They wouldn’t miss it at all, she taught me.

  Um Buraq had an apartment in Hawalli for her girls. We went there when she told us to. We kept it clean, stocked with food and lingerie. We also went there sometimes to be alone. Fifi was a student, and I often found her there with her books spread on the table. She’d hurry to gather her things and leave. It’s strange, but I never got to know much about her or Susu, not even their real names. I kept my clerk job and went to the apartment only a few hours a week. It was easy to hide it from my family, because I had many legitimate reasons to be out—eyebrow-threading clients, going to the mall, seeing friends, running errands.

  Susu gave me a pill to relax the first time in the apartment. She also advised me to lie about my age. “Tell him you’re sixteen years old. It’ll make him finish faster. The younger they think you are, the faster they get off,” she said. I did as she suggested. He lasted 173 seconds (I counted), paid four hundred dinars (I counted twice), and left. A few weeks later, he returned with an expensive gold necklace and paid the same amount for less than half an hour. There were others. Each bought a little piece of me and took it away forever. I remember them all.

  Abu Nasser was the most pathetic. Married with five kids. From a wealthy family. Generally thought pious, a pillar of his community and an upstanding public figure. He spoke on platforms about virtue, caliphates, and better times when morality was woven through social and legal fabrics that wrapped tightly around women. He repulsed me initially, but in time I came to pity him. Now, in the Cube, I am grateful for him. Abu Nasser showed me what lived beneath public piety. From him I learned who those legislating morality and pretending to be more virtuous than the rest of us really were.

  I was one of the few, if not the only one, privy to the stagnant cesspool behind Abu Nasser’s eyes. He believed the devil was weakening his resolve. He always rationalized violating the rules of God by using technicalities. He said it wasn’t technically a sin if he didn’t touch me. He always came to me when he knew I had my period. All I had to do was hand him my filthy panties, lined with a bloody menstrual pad, and leave him be. He’d pay more if I had worn the same pad all day without changing. Even more for two days’ worth of my body’s sludge. The nastier the better. He’d hold it like a precious gift and slowly bring it to his face, inhaling while he jerked off. I had to sit in the same room but could not look at him (another absolving technicality for the Day of Reckoning). But he made sure I heard him. Little-man noises, like a whimpering dog, that made me hate myself. As soon as he finished, he’d start crying, his face smeared with my blood. Then he’d curse me. “Temptress! May God punish you for luring me here.” He’d be-seech God, “O Lord, I call upon your mercy to keep the devil and the devil’s temptress away.” Then he would throw money on the floor and run out, surely to the mosque to purge his soul. But on schedule, he came back in twenty-eight days, at the peak of my heaviest menstrual flow.

  Once, when I didn’t have anything for Abu Nasser, he accused me of carrying someone’s bastard child, called me a whore, and left. He came back three days later to apologize for having committed the sin of disparaging a woman’s honor without evidence. In his apology, he exonerated himself since “technically” I wasn’t an honorable woman to begin with.

  His timing was impeccable because I had just begun to bleed. I went to the bathroom and came out with a dirty pad dangling from my fingertips. He paid extra that time. If nothing else, he was generous.

  Abu Moathe was a bank branch manager who alternated between violence and sentimentality. He wanted me to fight him, to act out rape scenes. Only, I was never acting, because even though I was getting paid, it felt like rape, my screams muffled by his hand. Sometimes he went too far and left bruises on my body.

  Abu Moathe was one of the rare mitkawteen, Palestinians who had been granted Kuwaiti citizenship, because his father had been a high-ranking military general before Kuwait struck oil. Most mitkawteen were intellectuals and high-born merchants who took pride in being Palestinian. But Abu Moathe hid his Palestinian origins and went out of his way to deny it. Once, he slapped me hard enough to knock me out because I asked what village in Palestine his family was from. The swollen left side of my face turned out to be a fractured cheekbone.

  Um Buraq never liked him and warned me to stay away. “Don’t get me wrong. Money is money, but not at any price. That man is crazy,” she said.

  But after he broke my cheek, Um Buraq paid him a visit at the bank. She had good timing too, showing up just as his father, the general, was there with several men to congratulate Abu Moathe on the birth of his second son. Um Buraq pretended to apply for a loan, but by
her presence, she was really delivering a message that she could create a scandal and ruin him.

  “His face went white when he saw me,” Um Buraq later told me. Concerned about explaining my swollen, bruised face to my mother, the morning after it happened, I sneaked out of the house before my family awoke and went to work early at the school. I made myself fall in front of the guard, Abu Zhaq, a kind, elderly Palestinian man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and dentures and passed the time reading the Quran and Sufi poetry. He rushed to help me, but he didn’t ask how my face bruised that quickly. He knew my fall was for show and played along. I could tell he pitied me, which made me all the more ashamed.

  “May God give you long life, Ammi,” I said. “I’m fine. It was just a minor fall.”

  Abu Moathe apologized, tearfully. He always did that. He would tell me he loved me. That I was the first woman he’d ever really loved. That his Kuwaiti wife could not understand him the way I did, on account of my being Palestinian. He would kiss my feet, sobbing, and I would feel sympathy for him, which made me think I loved him too—that perhaps it was possible love could be nestled between revulsion and hatred. It wouldn’t be long before he would hurt me again. But after Um Buraq went to him, he changed. There was a plan in his remorse. He asked me to marry him, confessing a fantasy of walking around with two wives, one on each arm.

  It is difficult now to admit that I thought this a reasonable thing to want; that I imagined—even fantasized about—being his second, preferred wife. I wanted to be chosen, maybe loved. I wanted out of my life, out of my skin, and his offer seemed like the best someone like me could hope for.

  “But I’m already married,” I reminded him.

  “I can take care of that,” he said. Wanting to seem purer to him, I confessed how Um Buraq had coerced me into this work. I told him how she had blackmailed me with photos, and he promised to end it all and take care of me forever. I told him I loved him too, and confessed that my real name was Yaqoot, though I kept Nahr to myself.

  Abu Moathe threatened Um Buraq in the same way she did to him. He visited her estranged husband on pretense about some business. He was letting her know that he knew who her husband was and could just as easily ruin her. As he expected, she was waiting for him at the apartment on his next visit to me. He had a triumphant smirk as he jabbed his fat finger into her shoulder.

  “Yaqoot doesn’t work for you anymore,” he said, demanding she hand over the photos.

  Um Buraq looked mockingly at me. “You told him your name, you stupid girl? And you want him to have the photos?” she said, incredulous. She turned back to him, laughing her terrifying laugh like she had already squashed a million bugs like him before. I thought that would enrage him, but it confused him instead, and it taught me an important life lesson: when you don’t react predictably, it throws people off, hopefully long enough for you to get the upper hand.

  That’s what Um Buraq did that day. She said she wouldn’t ever call me again. And when I insisted she turn over the photos, she shook her head and repeated, “You stupid, stupid girl,” and agreed to everything, provided Abu Moathe paid her for them. She made him feel like he had won, and he stupidly agreed to her conditions. Then she could just name her price—any price—because a man’s word is unbending. There were codes of honor among degenerates. He paid her handsomely.

  That’s how Abu Moathe became my sugar daddy, for a while anyway. I no longer had to face Um Buraq, and my days became more predictable, but now I had to let him slap me around. He agreed never to strike my face or neck where marks would be visible, as long as he could bruise the rest of me.

  His secret apartment was also in Salmiya, where I’d go whenever he paged me. I’d pretend to be an unsuspecting housewife or maid going about my day cooking and cleaning, and he would play my rapist, who’d sneak in when no one else was home. I had to fight back at first, to provoke him into beating me into submission, then I’d succumb to him and beg for more. This theater happened once or twice a week. It’s how I paid all our bills and began to build up Jehad’s college savings. Abu Moathe even taught me about investing in the stock market. I tried it out for a while with a bit of money. Although I didn’t gamble my money in the market, stocks would provide an easy cover to explain extra income to my family.

  Abu Moathe showered me with gifts of jewelry, clothes, shoes, and purses. But I had to leave those at the secret apartment because Mama was already perplexed by our change of fortune. She didn’t know about the college savings, and I kept my previous jobs to account for my income and time out of the house. For the first time, we didn’t teeter on the verge of eviction, and Mama could spend her sewing earnings on herself. “May God bless you, my daughter. You are worth more than all the gold in the world,” she’d say. She believed my stories, because what I was really doing was so far from her imagination.

  I teased Abu Moathe once about his promise to marry me, and he said, “Um Moathe would probably cut off my balls in my sleep if I went through with it.” I never mentioned marriage again, and he soon stopped paging and changed the lock on his apartment. He had moved on to another woman.

  That’s what I told Bilal years later. But it isn’t the whole truth. Abu Moathe didn’t just stop paging me. I let myself get pregnant, thinking I could trap him into marrying me. I thought he could help me get a divorce. But he took me to Egypt instead, my first trip on an airplane. There, we went to a clinic. Two elderly women assisted me onto the table in a filthy room. A nurse stuck an IV in my arm, and when I woke up, I had thick bloody pads between my legs. The same elderly women walked me out of the filthy room. I bled for two weeks straight, got a fever and terrible cramps. Terrified to go to a doctor, because what they’d find could send me to prison, I turned to Um Buraq, and she took care of everything. She brought me to her home and fetched a doctor, who said I could die of sepsis if they didn’t get me to a hospital, but agreed they could wait one day to see if the intravenous antibiotics would kick in. I barely remember any of this, but it’s what happened. Um Buraq brought a traditional healer after that, and they nursed me back to health. She covered for me with my mother, telling her that we were camping in the desert where there were no phone booths. It took me a week to regain my wits and some strength. The doctor said my pussy was messed up and scarred inside; he said I was no good for kids anymore.

  Abu Moathe’s callous dismissal helped to crystallize the reality of my life. I tried paging him, but he didn’t return my calls. After I called his office several times, he rang Um Buraq to deliver a warning that he would destroy us both if I continued to harass him. I curled my body around my hollowed womb and lay there, encrusted in profound loneliness. I felt small in the world, unlovable and worthless. I bore stains that could never be washed away, and I had a true desire to die, until Um Buraq shook me one day from the bed, Deepa standing next to her with a drink.

  “Listen to me!” she demanded. “First thing, you drink this herbal tea. And then you climb out of whatever pit you’re in.” Deepa put a pillow behind my back as Um Buraq lifted me. I took the glass of tea and sipped slowly. The taste of sage and cinnamon filled my head as the warm liquid slid down my throat, into my excavated belly. I stared at Um Buraq blankly.

  “Now, you listen to me,” she began. “Abu Moathe is shit. Every man is shit. The sooner you accept this truth, the easier your life will be. I thought you knew this by now. What were you thinking? He was going to marry and make you respectable? You take what you can get from them. They have all the power in the world, but it’s possible to have power over them. This is what you must learn.”

  I leaned forward and let my head fall onto Um Buraq’s shoulder. She put her arms around me, then pushed me gently back. “You get one more day of self-pity, but tomorrow morning you get out of bed, clear your head, and decide how you will live. It is that simple. You make that one decision. Then you make another, and another. There are no forces holding you in this pathetic state. You are young, beautiful, and healthy. You have a hom
e, family, and friends. Start from there.”

  Deepa nudged me gently to drink more of the tea before they both left the room. I lay there through the night, watching memories and imagination play on the ceiling, much the same as I do now in the Cube.

  Before sunrise, I made the decision to roll out of bed at the call to fajr prayer. My scarred, empty womb felt like a boulder in my abdomen as I walked to the kitchen to make coffee. To my surprise, Deepa was already awake, boiling an ibriq of coffee. She poured two cups and pushed one toward me where we sat at the table, sipping in silence, because words had no place in that moment. I made another decision to pray, performing the ritual wudu cleansing, then donning the prayer robe Um Buraq had left for me and performing the fajr salat . It felt good to pray. I made another decision to wash my hair and shower, scrubbing every inch of skin on my body. Then a decision to dry and style my hair. A decision to apply light makeup. When Um Buraq awoke at noon, I sat down to eat with her and Deepa.

  “You look good,” Um Buraq said, taking a large bite of eggs and bread. “What have you decided to do?” The chewed-up eggs tossed around in her mouth as she spoke.

  “I want to be normal,” I said.

  “You have always been normal, girl,” she said. “Normal isn’t what other people do. You make your own normal.”

  I knew what she meant. Um Buraq was always railing against social propriety, pointing out the layers of hypocrisy everywhere, hating on men.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore. I just want to work as a school clerk and a saleswoman at the mall, and support my family,” I said.

  Um Buraq looked at me and I held her gaze, refusing to be the first to look away. She moved her eyes first, running her tongue over her teeth and sucking air to dislodge food from the crevices of her vast mouth. “Then that’s what you shall do, my dear. I am here if you ever need me,” she said.

  We held each other in a stare again. “Thank you for taking care of me these past days. I’ll pay you back for the doctor bills,” I told her.