Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  I was in awe. “This is a treasure, Mama.”

  “You’re the treasure,” she said. “And here, look closely at these shapes. Verse twenty-one from Surat el Rum in the Quran. A prayer for marriage.”

  It was hard to make out the convoluted script, but Mama read it to me. “And of His wisdom is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy. Indeed, for in these are wisdoms for those who think.”

  I ran my fingers over the intricate stiches of cyan, terra-cotta, emerald, maroon, and apricot. Life was sweeping me up in an unexpected dream.

  Jumana stayed by my side on my wedding day, helping me prepare. Mama had invited cousins I didn’t know from Ein el-Sultan and Haifa. It seemed entire villages showed up to celebrate. Even news cameras from Palestine TV were there to report on the wedding of a national hero. The day turned into evening and into night in a blur of song, dance, food, revelry, zaghareet, prayers, well-wishers, and gifts. My brother footed most of the bill. He knew Bilal and I could not afford it. “Actually, it’s mostly from our grandmother,” he said. Bilal was uneasy about accepting. Jehad said, “Consider it my contribution to the revolution.”

  “As if you’re not running websites.” I grinned at him. He smiled too. That was all we had the opportunity to say on the matter of his being our Jordan Contact.

  Bilal and I were exhausted at the end of the night. We wanted to have a romantic ending to our wedding, but we barely got out of our clothes and washed up before collapsing to sleep in each other’s arms. I suppose such an uneventful wedding night would concern most couples, but it felt natural and precious. Besides, we still had guests in the house, and we were mindful of making noise.

  We were the last to awake the next day, forced to get up by the commotion in the kitchen. “So much for a quiet, romantic morning after,” he whispered to me. My mother and grandmother were arguing in the kitchen. “It’s the opposite of romance,” I said with a grin.

  We greeted Sitti Wasfiyeh and Mama. Jehad was on the terrace drinking coffee. “Your mother is making the eggs wrong,” Sitti Wasfiyeh complained.

  “Please, Hajjeh. I’ve been making your eggs for at least thirty-five years,” Mama said.

  Sitti raised her brows, signaling a thought she wanted to share. She shuffled toward me, the curve in her back pushing her head downward. “I forgot to tell you about your friend. Did you hear?” she said.

  “What friend, Sitti? Hear what?”

  “The crazy one that almost killed us with her driving when we left Kuwait.”

  “Um Buraq?”

  “How should I know her name? She’s your friend!”

  I laughed. “What about her?”

  “I forget. Ask your mother. Something happened in the newspaper.”

  I looked at Mama, who was frying garlic and tomatoes. “I don’t know much, habibti. The article said she might be released soon on humanitarian grounds.” Apparently, Um Buraq had cancer, and Kuwaiti officials were urging the justice department to release her on the condition she relinquish her Kuwaiti citizenship and be deported to Iraq, where she had family ties. It distressed me to think of my old friend like that, sick and penniless at the doorstep of distant relatives in Iraq, asking for charity. I remembered her parting words to me in Kuwait: Whatever happens in this ungenerous world, we will meet again, my sister.

  The five of us ate breakfast on the terrace—Sitti Wasfiyeh, Mama, Jehad, Bilal, and me together in Palestine. The winter rains of December and January had been heavier than usual, ushering in a dense and diverse cover of wildflowers across the hillside. Red, white, and purple anemones and pink and white cyclamen carpeted the eastern hills rolling around us. Poppies, buttercups, and red everlastings overlapped in random pockets. Rare wild tulips rose here and there. Bull mallow, Jerusalem sage, mustard, and thyme found their places around rocks and boulders.

  Soon the blue lupine and yellow corn marigold would replace the anemones. The crocuses and squill were waiting dormant in their bulbs to bloom in summer. The honeysuckle had already begun creeping over the bushes and trees, and the hyacinths, daisies, and narcissus bloomed on the higher ground.

  Mama and Jehad were impressed that I knew so much about the local flora. Hajjeh Um Mhammad, God rest her soul, had taught me the names of plants and their medicinal values. I couldn’t remember everything she’d imparted and wished I had written it all down, though Bilal also had much indigenous knowledge of our botanical heritage. Hajjeh Um Mhammad used to say there was no illness on this earth for which God had not also given us a medicine.

  “Palestine suits you,” Jehad whispered. “You look the most radiant and alive I’ve ever seen you.”

  “More than when we were in Kuwait?” I asked.

  “Kuwait was another lifetime. We were too young. Too different.”

  It was true. Jehad had changed. We both had. There was a gravity to his presence, a kind of solid, sturdy thing I could depend on. He and Bilal were similar in that way.

  “I suppose you’re right. We’re a long way from our little apartment in Hawalli. Remember our summer business ventures, your science experiments, and my girl gangs?”

  “Who can forget? Nobody messed with me because of you and your girl gangs.” My baby brother laughed, putting his arm around me.

  As I take stock of my life, as one does in the Cube, I realize that my wedding, surrounded by family in February of 2002, began the happiest days of my life. My family didn’t stay long after the wedding because they planned to take Sitti Wasfiyeh to spend a few days in Ein el-Sultan before heading back to Amman.

  “I’ll come back in two months,” Mama promised. She had more time off coming up. We kissed and hugged farewell at dusk. Sitti Wasfiyeh used Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s old motor cart to get to the car, though she seemed slower on it than if she had walked.

  “You can make it go faster, Hajjeh,” Mama urged.

  “You’re trying to get me killed,” Sitti shot back.

  “Hajjeh, you’re indestructible. Give that thing a little more gas,” Mama said.

  “I curse your gray hairs, woman! Stop rushing me!” Sitti waved her off.

  Before they drove away, Sitti whispered to me, “May God bless you both and bless your marriage and bring you many babies. Don’t mess this one up like you did the first one. God loves you and we all love you.”

  Bilal made a fire outside as it grew dark. He could walk without a cane now, but his gait was still not what it had been. We curled up together, wrapped in a blanket by the glow of the firepit. “Alone at last.” He kissed me. The closeness was familiar, as if we had always been together. It was hard to remember life without Bilal.

  We gazed at the blackness of the sky lighting up an incomprehensible universe.

  “Everything I worry about feels impossibly small and unimportant when I’m confronted with a sky like this,” Bilal said softly.

  I snuggled against his shoulder, kissed his neck. “I got in so much trouble in second grade for trying to fathom the universe,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Bilal pulled away to look at me.

  “My religion teacher told the class how big and vast God made the universe. She said He made millions of planets and some might even have life like earth. Of course, I asked perfectly logical questions, like: Why does God only care about people on earth? How does He manage to keep track of everyone everywhere and account for who might eat pork? Did little alien girls have to wear hijab too? And finally, the straw that broke my teacher’s back: Why would He really care what we eat or wear? Doesn’t He have more important things to deal with?”

  Bilal laughed. “Most people live their whole lives without having such obvious questions.”

  “The principal suspended me for a week.”

  “These stupid school systems beat the curiosity and creativity out of kids,” he said.

  “But no one holds a grudge like I do. When I got to fourth grade, I slit the tires
on both of their cars. No one ever knew,” I confessed.

  Bilal roared with laughter. “I love it! You’ve been a rebel and revolutionary your whole life, woman!”

  “True. And you’re the lucky man who married me.”

  “Indeed I am.”

  We stayed that way for a while, talking, laughing, sharing, making out. I wanted to make love, but my body did not. Or maybe it was the other way around, my body wanted it, but I didn’t. He too seemed lost in his own internal conflict.

  He spoke first. “We’re both thinking about it, aren’t we?”

  I smiled.

  “I respect and accept your wishes, Nahr. You already told me and don’t have to tell me twice. What I wanted to say then is that only we will determine how our relationship should be. We can be whatever we want to each other. We don’t have to make love now, and maybe never, as long as it’s what we desire. All I ask is honesty. I will give you the same, and I will always work to earn and keep your love, respect, and loyalty,” he said.

  I burrowed my face in his neck, fulfilled, grateful for this life, and impossibly in love.

  He shifted awkwardly. “There’s something else I want to tell you.”

  I waited as he searched for the right words.

  “I wanted to tell you this the day you confided in me. But I didn’t have your courage,” he began. “When I was in prison the last time, they tortured me in different ways. Years ago, they beat me all over, especially my groin, but this time they hit me over and over in my genitals. I was vomiting constantly, and everything was swollen between my legs. They left me alone after that, but it became infected and they wouldn’t take me to a doctor. That was when I started the hunger strike. By the time they transferred me to the military clinic, the infection was too far gone and the damage could not be repaired.” He shifted again in his seat, holding me hard. “They had to remove one of my testicles.”

  He was nearly in tears. I tightened my arms around him.

  “I was too ashamed to tell you. I’m sorry I didn’t.” He paused, ran his palm over his face. “And here I am asking you for honesty.” He sucked air through his teeth. “I wanted to tell you then. That I’m only half a man … and I don’t know if I am physically able to make love.” His jaw muscles were contracting under his skin. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  I kissed him gently on his lips. “Don’t do this to yourself.” I kissed the side of his face. “I love you, Bilal. People are complicated, you said that yourself. We’ll figure out what works for us, and we’ll do that as we go along.” I cupped his face in my hands. “For now, we have honesty, trust, and love.” I wanted to describe to him how the emotional intimacy growing between us was shattering my heart in the most life-affirming ways, but I didn’t have the right words, except to say that I loved him, which wasn’t nearly enough.

  We spent that night, and every night together after, in a closeness I had never known, or even thought possible with another person. I was happy. Truly content.

  Drifting to sleep in Bilal’s arms, I thought about the hills beyond the terrace. Soon wild plum, peach, pear, fig, medlar, mulberry, date, and almond trees would bloom. I would tend to Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s loquats and pomegranates in the summer.

  Mama and Jehad had returned to Jordan just before Ariel Sharon ripped through the land and tore the sun apart, less than two months into our marriage. He bombed all of our major cities to push up his domestic approval ratings. He pulverized Gaza’s airport and tore up the runway, which had been a small symbol of Palestinian sovereignty. Their military executed our leaders, made rubble of schools and universities, stole population databases and student statistics, and put us all under months of curfew, during which we could not leave our homes at any time, for any reason, unless specifically announced by the military.

  Bilal still wasn’t fully healed, and doctors thought he might never walk without a limp because some of the musculature in his groin and hip had also been removed to take out the infection. But he had regained weight and strength. He spoke infrequently on the phone because our calls were monitored, but he worked for hours from his computer. We were luckier than most to have a home computer. It kept us from dying of boredom inside the house twenty-four hours a day, with no relief in sight. Ours was called a Dell. I only used it to check e-mail once a week, but Bilal was on it daily researching chemistry topics I didn’t understand, and using chemistry software to do with the brews he cooked up in the kitchen sometimes.

  “What are you making?” I asked him.

  “Just tinkering to pass the time.”

  But when I started to make a snack for us in the kitchen, he wouldn’t allow it until he had scrubbed, rinsed, and wiped the entire kitchen. “I need another space for this stuff,” he mumbled to himself.

  “I’m guessing those aren’t new pastry recipes?”

  He pulled me by the waist. “Your sarcasm is so sexy.”

  The next day he made a work space in the second-floor bathroom and modified the fan to an exhaust hood over his work surface. My curiosity grew.

  He read a lot too, and although I tried to read with him, abstract political theories didn’t hold my interest. I preferred stories, human dramas. Sometimes we cuddled on the sofa for hours, watching television or doing nothing at all. Other times he read aloud to me. It started with an essay by an American named James Baldwin. It was a letter to his nephew, Big James. “Go back. Can you please read the last line again?” I asked.

  “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”

  There were others in the world who, like us, were seen as worthless, not expected to aspire or excel, for whom mediocrity was pre-destined, and who should expect to be told where to go, what to do, whom to marry, and where to live. Mr. Baldwin tells Big James:

  “Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

  Bilal continued reading, but my mind lingered on that sentence because I knew that, despite everything, I was loved. I was loved hard. At once and forever against the loveless world. I missed my family. Um Buraq too. But I was home here.

  “Habibi, I’m sorry, can you reread that last bit? I was thinking about previous lines.”

  “I know what you mean. Reading Baldwin ought to be slow. Every sentence beckons not only the mind, but also one’s heart, history, and future.” He paused.

  “… if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.”

  “Do you think that’s how we’ve survived?” I asked.

  He put the book down, thought for a moment, and looked at me. “I don’t see how else anyone can survive colonialism. Understanding our own condition, I think in saying ‘loved each other,’ Baldwin doesn’t just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from,” he said, and after a silence for both of us to soak up that thought, he continued reading.

  “There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

  To be committed is to be in danger. I have never forgotten those words.

  Reading Mr. Baldwin together was how we passed our time for the next few days under curfew when he wasn’t doing chemistry experiments upstair
s. I never told anyone, not even Bilal, that the first book I ever read cover to cover was the first one we read together—The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin—when I was thirty-four years old.

  “Do you think Baldwin would say we should love Israelis?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”

  Next we read Ghassan Kanafani—I loved him too—starting with his book Men in the Sun, which we finished in one day. In this story, Palestinian men inside a water tanker being smuggled into Kuwait die quietly from the scorching desert heat. “Why didn’t they knock on the tanker wall to get out?” is the question that haunts the book and haunted me.

  Baldwin and Kanafani were contemporaries thousands of miles apart, who never met but lived parallel lives. They wrote with the same passion, the same irreverence and defiance; with overlapping wounds and bottomless love for their people. Baldwin was forced into self-imposed exile and Kanafani was assassinated by Israel. To be committed is to be in danger.

  Those weeks cloistered together in the house, alone, unable to leave or receive guests, having to sneak into the garden for fresh air and a bit of food, were perhaps the most profound honeymoon anyone could ask for. We packed a few years into a couple of months. We roamed inside each other—our memories, insecurities, and dreams. We explored each other’s bodies, inching toward an enchanted precipice that was both frightening and irresistible. Behind me, he ran his fingers along the scar on my back.