by Rafik Schami
One day, when Noura had been learning dressmaking from Dalia for over a year, the assistants were all talking excitedly about the singer’s latest film, Akhir Kizbeh (Last Lie), which was coming to the Roxy in a couple of weeks’ time, and saying that Farid al-Atrash, who had been living in Cairo since he was a child, would be here for the première.
Dalia never told anyone where she got the five complimentary tickets, but in any case she and all her assistants went to the cinema.
Ninety percent of the audience were women who, as Dalia had prophesied they would, had come in the most expensive and fashionable dresses to please the singer, that confirmed bachelor. When he appeared a soulful murmur ran through the auditorium.
The singer was not as tall as you might have expected from the poster. His face was pale and smooth, and he did not sport the moustache usual at the time. Noura blushed and felt her heart sinking to the depths as the singer’s large, sad eyes rested on her for a moment. She instantly fell madly in love with him. She didn’t take in much of the plot of the film, but when Farid sang she felt as if he were singing not for Samia Gamal, the girl he loved in the film, but for her alone. She wept, and laughed, and then there was the brief encounter that was to rob her of sleep that night.
As the audience left, the singer stood at the entrance flanked by the important personalities of the city, who liked to have themselves photographed with him, handing out copies of his signed portrait. And the women of Damascus, who never usually formed a queue and would scratch each other’s eyes out at the vegetable sellers’ shops when they were in a hurry, lined up meekly like good girls in a convent school because they wanted the singer to think well of them. They accepted the picture and walked demurely out. Dalia, who was standing behind Noura, whispered to her, “Now or never.” But Noura was feeling far too excited in the expensive dress she had borrowed, which really belonged to a bride.
When it was her turn the singer gave her his portrait, smiled at her briefly, and touched her fingers. She was almost fainting.
Not so Dalia. Plucking up her courage and seizing her opportunity, she gave the startled singer a resounding kiss on the cheek.
“I, Dalia – Dalia the little dressmaker, a widow three times over – I’ve kissed Farid al-Atrash. Now I can die and God can send me to Hell for all I care,” she said triumphantly on the way home. Her assistants giggled.
When Noura went home at noon next day, she found that the picture under her pillow had been torn into a thousand pieces.
She froze. And then she felt rage that almost took her breath away. More and more often these days she felt a desire to get away from her parental home. She wanted to get married soon just to be rid of her mother.
Nothing escaped Dalia’s notice. “Oh, child, dry those tears, here, you can have another photo,” she said, giving Noura her own picture. “I’ve finished with it. Isn’t he cute? And such a lovely smell!”
Noura hid the photo under a loose board at the bottom of her wardrobe at home, but she soon forgot it.
Only after she ran away did she remember it again, and wonder whether someone, in some century to come, would discover the picture at the bottom of the wardrobe and guess at the story behind it. She shook her head and smiled.
Dalia was a true mistress of her craft. She hated sloppiness, and was sure all her life that everything only half done would be avenged. She herself had great patience, but it was often her bad luck that her assistants didn’t put the necessary enthusiasm into their work. Many of them thought themselves dressmakers already just because they had once made an apron or an oven cloth at home. “Girl, girl, you’re not attending to what you’re doing,” was Dalia’s most often repeated remark, because most of her trainees only wanted to learn to sew a little so that they would be considered a good catch for a man. After cooking, sewing was the ability most prized by a Damascene in his future wife.
“Scissors and needles, thread and a sewing machine are only an aid,” she told Noura in her very first week. “You can cut out a dress properly after two years at the latest, but you can’t call yourself a dressmaker until you know, the moment you set eyes on a fabric, what dress it would be best to make of it. And you can’t find that out from any book. You have to get a feel for the craft before you can pick the raisins out of the porridge of possibilities.”
Noura watched closely to see how Dalia unrolled the material her customers brought her, touched it, held it to her cheek, thought, picked it up again and held it up to the light. Then a shy smile would appear on her mouth, a sure sign that Dalia had an idea now. She would take a sheet of paper, draw the cut of the dress on it, and then hold her drawing against the fabric to check. Once Dalia was happy, Noura saw how the idea went from her head to her wrist, moving from her fingers to the fabric. After that there was no more hesitation, and soon the dress was held together with pins and tacking stitches.
None of the assistants was allowed to cut fabric except for Fatima, who was already experienced. But Dalia encouraged them to practise on the pieces that were left over. “With cotton first, cotton is kind to you, and then onward and upward till you reach the majestic heights of velvet and silk.”
In her first year of training, Noura often marvelled at the long discussions Dalia had with her customers. As a rule they came with very definite ideas of what kind of dress they wanted. But Dalia often thought that a dress like that wouldn’t suit her customer.
“No, madame, orange and red don’t suit your eyes, your hair colour, and particularly not the curvaceous figure you’re blessed with.”
“But my husband loves red,” wailed the wife of al-Salem the bank manager.
“Then either he should wear it himself, or you should lose ten to fifteen kilos,” said Dalia, showing her how well blue would suit her and how slimming it would be.
“How do you manage to see all this?” Noura asked one day, when the wife of a famous surgeon was quite beside herself with delight and gratitude over her new dress.
“I’ve learnt to know what it should be like before I make the first cut. Try to understand the rippling of the waves, the enchanting green of orange leaves, the white of jasmine flowers, the slender palm trees, and you’ll find that they have all mastered the art of elegance.”
Dalia was never satisfied, and not infrequently she was unjust. Even Fatima was not spared. “Look at Fatima,” she often said in mock despair of her oldest and best assistant. “She’s been with me for ten years, and to this day she can’t make a proper buttonhole.”
Fatima hated buttonholes, but otherwise she was an excellent dressmaker. She was the only assistant who had been in the workshop before Noura, and who was still there after Noura had left. She didn’t just work hard enough for three, she was the heart of the workshop, offering comfort, helping the younger women, and even contradicting the boss out loud if Dalia went too far.
There was a rapid turnover among the other assistants. They did not love the work. They came with the idea that after a year they would have mastered the craft, and only then did they realize how complicated it was.
Sometimes the girls left of their own accord, sometimes Dalia sent them away. “You know enough now to make underwear for your husband,” she said.
She paid a minimum wage, just enough to cover the monthly expense of a tram or bus ticket. But every assistant got a hot meal once a day and unlimited coffee. No one but the boss was allowed to drink alcohol.
In retrospect, Noura found the first year the most difficult one. From the second year on she was full of enthusiasm for the work, and she could soon make dresses entirely by herself. When she began dreaming of her work, Dalia laughed and patted her on the shoulder. “You’re making progress, even in your sleep,” she said. But the dream was far from enjoyable. Noura dreamed of a customer visiting the dressmaker to try on her wedding dress. The dress was almost ready, in real life as well as in the dream. The customer was not satisfied, although it was a wonderful dress and hid her pregnancy very well. Noura t
hought she had better make coffee to calm the customer, who was standing in front of the mirror in her new dress, close to tears. On the way to the kitchen Noura asked her boss to speak to the customer, who felt great respect for Dalia. But at that moment she heard relieved laughter. “It’s all right now,” cried the woman happily. She had cut the dress off a hand’s breadth above her knees with a big pair of scissors, leaving it pitifully short with a zigzag hem.
Noura had woken up, gasping for air.
“Now the profession’s in your body and your blood, and soon it will set up house in your brain,” said Dalia, laughing, when Noura had finished her story. The dress had been the first one that Noura made by herself.
She worked hard, and went to her room every day after the evening meal to learn the difficult names of all the different colours and dress materials, practising many different cuts and many different seams on the scraps of fabric she was allowed to bring home from the workshop. Dalia could recite the eleven shades of the colour blue in her sleep, from marine to plum blue, a colour also called prune. There were even sixteen shades of red, from cardinal red to pink, and she never got any of them mixed up.
Dalia was very direct in her manner, even to her customers. Once one of them put on weight at alarming speed between the various fittings of her wedding dress, because of all the invitations out that came during the preparations for the ceremony. She was fatter from fitting to fitting in the workshop, and Dalia had marked it all out and pinned it in place again three times already. But at the next fitting, when she saw that the customer wasn’t going to be able to fit into the dress at all, she waved a dismissive hand. “I make dresses for fashionable ladies, not for lumps of dough. So make up your mind, my girl: do you want a wedding dress or would you rather have pistachio nuts and cakes?” The young woman went red in the face and hurried away. Ten days later she came back looking very pale, but slim.
“Beautiful people don’t need dresses. God has made the loveliest of clothes for them himself. But those people are few and far between, and for all the others our art is to emphasize their good points and conceal the bad ones,” was the way Dalia summed up her profession.
She sat working for hours at her Singer pedal sewing machine, which she was very proud of. There were three older machines worked by handles for her assistants to use.
Even years after her flight, Noura often thought of Dalia, and of all she had learnt from that mysterious woman.
13
“Of course I married my first husband partly because of my parents,” the dressmaker told Noura one day. “They lived here in the Midan quarter, they were well respected and kept an open house. My father liked to drink arak and my mother liked it even more, just as if they were Christians. Yet they were both devout Muslims. However, they considered the commandments and prohibitions to be only rules necessary for regulating primitive societies. I never saw them the worse for drink.
“Our Midan quarter had been known as a trouble spot ever since the days of Ottoman rule, and it stayed that way under the French. Sometimes the whole quarter was barricaded off with tangles of barbed wire, and everyone going in or out was checked. And when not even that did any good, the French bombed the district.
“In a way my father was the leader. We all lived very close together and knew each other well. My parents were famous for their hospitality, and so any stranger was taken, either politely or by force, to my father. If the newcomer was all right he was welcomed as a guest, and all the neighbours held a festive meal for him. But if he had bad intentions he was shown the way out, or treated even more harshly. During those years of unrest two spies were unmasked, executed, and their bodies left beside the barbed wire with a piece of paper on their chests saying, ‘Best Wishes to Sarai.’ General Sarai was the leader of the French forces in Syria.
“One cold day in the year 1926 – the country had been in turmoil since the great uprising against the French in 1925 – a young man from Aleppo arrived. He wanted to learn how the people of the Midan quarter organized their resistance to the French. His name was Salah, and he could recite poetry beautifully.
“When he saw me he wanted to marry me on the spot, and my father agreed at once. The man came from a well-respected family, and was quite prosperous. From my father’s point of view, it made sense to give a man who revered the Midan quarter a daughter of the Midan as his wife. No one asked my opinion. I was a young thing of sixteen, and the way the man looked at me made me feel weak. He had beautiful eyes and long, curly hair.”
Dalia poured some arak into her glass, added water, and took a good gulp. “Salah was charming to me all through the wedding evening. And while the guests danced and sang, he recited love poem after love poem to me. I was in love with him. After the celebrations, we went into the big bedroom. He closed the door behind him and smiled at me. I felt breathless, as if he had tied a sack around my head when he closed the door.
“I tried to remember my mother’s advice. Put up a little resistance, she had said. I was shaking all over with uncertainty. How did you pretend to put up a little resistance? He unbuttoned my dress. I was almost fainting. ‘Would you like a sip of arak?’ he asked. The bottle had been placed discreetly in the room, in a bucket full of crushed ice. I nodded. Alcohol gives you courage, I thought. And my mother had told me it would also awaken a woman’s own desires, so that she’d get some pleasure out of the first night herself. Salah took a small sip. I tipped a whole glassful down my throat, and felt the liquor hissing as it met the heat inside me. His hands were busy trying to get at me, and unbuttoning his fly at the same time.
“When he touched my breasts, so my mother had said, giving me a good tip for the wedding night, I ought to groan to make him go on, and if he touched me anywhere I didn’t like I was to go as rigid as a piece of wood.
“But the moment Salah put his hand between my legs I went rigid from head to foot, like a raft trying to break free but stuck in a log-jam somewhere. Everything in me was numb. He undressed me entirely, and then I saw his prick. It was small and crooked. I couldn’t keep from laughing. He gave me a slap because his prick wasn’t reacting. He pushed my legs further apart as if he were an elephant. I looked at him, naked between my legs. How ugly he is, I thought. Any desire of mine had flown away through the open window. He was sweating, and he had an odd smell, not strong but strange, almost like freshly sliced cucumbers.
“Over the next few hours, he kept trying, quite considerately, to push his semi-limp prick into me. In the end he got proof of my virginity with his finger, making my parents and relations rejoice volubly and with relief outside the room.
“Three weeks later Salah was stopped at a checkpoint. He was carrying weapons, so he tried to run for it, and he was shot. The whole quarter followed his coffin, with everyone swearing to take revenge on Sarai and the French. Grown men cried like orphaned children. I’d be lying if I were to tell you I mourned Salah myself. He had seemed a stranger to me all those three weeks. Onions helped me out at the time. I think God made the onion to help widows save face. It worked with me. My relations soothed me, and worried about my health. I felt like a monster, but my heart was mute.”
Noura had always been slightly long-sighted, and soon she was finding it difficult to get her thread through the eye of the needle. So she got a pair of glasses. They were the cheapest, ugliest glasses shown to her, but that was what her mother wanted. So that Noura wouldn’t go tempting anyone in a prettier pair, was her explanation. Noura was ashamed to wear those glasses in the street or at home, and kept them in her drawer at the dressmaker’s. Her mother advised her not to tell anyone about them, because no one wanted a daughter-in-law who wore glasses, let alone a long-sighted one.
Dalia, on the other hand, always wore glasses with thick lenses, and Noura was surprised when she once took them off. Suddenly she had big, beautiful eyes, and not, as usual, little buttons under the discs of glass.
Noura liked the peace and calm of doing light mechanical work for ho
urs on end, because then she had time to think of all sorts of things. Oddly enough, unlike the other women in Dalia’s workshop, she never thought about marriage. She very much wanted to love someone passionately, someone who would captivate her heart and her mind, but she never met him. Often, in her imagination, she put together the man of her dreams out of separate parts: he would have the eyes of a beggar, the mind and brain of her father, the wit of the ice-seller, the passion of the bean-seller, the voice of the singer Farid al-Atrash and the elegant bearing of Tyrone Power, whom she had admired onscreen at the cinema.
Sometimes she had to laugh when it occurred to her that some mistake might put the wrong parts together, and the man of her dreams would turn out to be as small as her father, with a belly and a bald patch like the bean-seller, the singer’s expressionless face, and Tyrone Power’s bad character.
One day one of the assistants came to work in floods of tears, and said, sobbing, that she had failed the test. “What test?” asked Dalia.
“The bride test,” said the young woman, weeping. Relieved, Dalia went back to her sewing machine. The assistant had to clear up the kitchen and make coffee that day, and at midday Dalia sent her home to get over it, so that none of the customers would see her tear-stained face.
What had happened? The parents of a young butcher had their eye on the girl as a bride for their son. They examined her, tugged her this way and that, and were not pleased with her because she had bad teeth and was sweating with anxiety. The bridal inspection ended in the hammam with a defeat: two large, ugly scars on her stomach were discovered. The dream was over!
While the young woman was despairingly lamenting her fate in the kitchen, Noura remembered a book of pictures of French paintings, one of them showing a beautiful naked woman with a delicate body and pale skin in a slave market, being felt all over by a heavily built man wrapped in robes. He was looking at her teeth, like a farmer when he is thinking of buying a donkey.