by Rafik Schami
Noura’s mother was delighted by her daughter’s dressmaking skills. All her life, she was proud of the housedress that Noura had given her for the Eid festival. It was dark red, with a pattern of pale arabesques. The cut was simple, and Noura hadn’t even gone to any particular trouble with it.
But never before or afterward did she see her mother as moved as she was that day. “All my life I wanted to be a dressmaker and make people look beautiful in the fabrics they wore,” she sighed. “But my father thought it was shameful for a woman to earn her living by working.”
Curiously enough, her mother had complete confidence in Dalia, although she could be so ungraciously outspoken. When Noura once told her that she had been invited along with Dalia to the house of a rich man for whose wife Dalia made clothes, her mother had no objection. “Dalia is a lioness, she’ll look after you,” she said confidently, “but don’t let your father know. He doesn’t like the rich, he’d spoil your fun with a sermon.”
“Let’s stop work for today,” said Dalia one late afternoon, finishing the last seam of a dress for a good friend of hers.
She examined the dress one last time, and handed it to Noura, who put it on a hanger and smoothed it down. “Sofia will look at least ten years younger in this,” she said.
Dalia took the arak bottle, her cigarettes, and a glass and went out to the terrace, where she turned the fountain on. Water splashed softly into the little basin. Noura followed her. Her curiosity finally brought the conversation around to Dalia’s life after the death of her first husband.
“My second husband Kadir,” Dalia said, “was a motor mechanic. He was my cousin, and he worked in a big car repair shop on the outskirts of Damascus. I knew him as a silent boy who was as hairy as an ape. Family members joked and said his mother must have had an affair with a gorilla. But it wasn’t as bad as all that.
“Kadir turned up when my first husband died. He was opening his own workshop. I still wasn’t even seventeen, and I didn’t live in the streets of Damascus at the time, I lived in the films I went to see.
“He was a good motor mechanic, and customers came flooding in. When he came to visit he always smelled of petrol. Most of the time he either kept quiet or talked to my father about cars. My father was one of the first at that time in Damascus to drive a Ford.
“I didn’t like my cousin Kadir, but my mother did, and my father liked him even better. From then on he got his car repaired for free.
“‘Kadir has lucky hands,’ he said. ‘Since he first touched that car, the old tin can hasn’t given me any more problems.’
“My fiancé was the exact opposite of the lover I had imagined in my dreams. The dream lover was good with words, a slender Arab with large eyes, a small moustache, and neatly trimmed side-whiskers. He came to visit whenever I liked, with his face smoothly shaved. His hair was wavy and glossy, and he always had a newspaper or a magazine under his arm. And this lover was more interested in my lips and eyes than my behind. He thought my words were exciting, and he drowned in my eyes.
“However, that lover fell dead when faced by my bridegroom on our wedding night. Kadir didn’t think much of elegant hairstyles, or magazines, and films, as he saw it, were mere pretence. Anything not made of flesh or metal didn’t interest him. He ate no vegetables, he never sang, and he never went to see a single film in his life. He didn’t even notice that I had a mouth and eyes. He was looking at my bottom and nothing else.
“On the first night, I lay underneath him without getting a single kiss, and he whinnied like a powerful stallion and sweated. His sweat smelled of fuel oil. I could only just manage to keep down the lavish wedding feast in my stomach.
“I didn’t just have to be his lover in bed, I also had to be a mother looking after him, and a businesswoman, and a household servant. His work clothes alone would have kept a washerwoman busy full-time. He wanted clean clothes every day. I’d have rather had one of the old school of Arab men! They kept everything neatly apart, a mother, a wife to run the household, a slave girl to do the housework, a cook, a beautiful mistress as playmate, a governess for the children, and heaven knows what else. These days men want to have all that in a single woman. At as cheap a price as possible, too.
“For a year he climbed on top of me twice a day, so that soon I could hardly walk in comfort. And then, one night, came release. Right in the middle of his orgasm he let out a shriek and fell sideways on the bed. He was dead – dead as a doornail. I cried for three days with the shock of it. People thought I was crying for grief.”
Noura heard some amazing things. She would have liked to ask some questions, to get to know more about the details, but she didn’t dare to interrupt Dalia’s stories.
This time the dressmaker had been clever, and she moved rather faster than her husband’s family. She sold the workshop to his oldest journeyman, and she sold the big 16-cylinder Cadillac to a rich Saudi for a large sum of money, and she laughed herself silly when her husband’s brothers and sisters were left empty-handed.
Dalia never talked about her third husband. Even when Noura asked about him, just before she left after nearly three years training with Dalia, the dressmaker dismissed the subject. It seemed as if she had suffered a deep wound. The wound was indeed deep, as Noura learned later from a woman neighbour.
Dalia had met her third husband when she was visiting a sick girlfriend in hospital. He was young, but he was sick with cancer, and it was incurable. The wife of the head doctor at the hospital was an enthusiastic customer of Dalia’s, so she could get permission to see the man she loved whenever she liked. She decided to marry the sick man, whose name she never mentioned. All her friends and family warned her against it, but Dalia had always had a will of her own, and it would have stood comparison with iron. She married the man, took him home with her, and nursed him lovingly until he could stand on his feet again, the pallor of death left his face, and some colour came back to it. Dalia was in Paradise, with a witty, handsome man beside her. It never troubled her than he was an idler, she was happy for him to do nothing, and replied to everyone who criticized him, “You just let him enjoy life, you envious misers! He’s suffered for so many years.” She spent money lavishly on him and worked like a woman possessed to make sure she ran up no debts. Her husband was very charming, and at first he was very loving to her, but then he began to be unfaithful. Everyone knew except Dalia, who refused to look facts in the face.
One beautiful summer evening Dalia was waiting for him to come home for the evening meal, because it was the third anniversary of their wedding, and she hoped that three was a lucky number. Then the telephone rang, and a woman’s voice said in curt, cold tones that she’d better come and collect her husband’s body, he’d had a heart attack and was lying on the stairs.
The caller was a well-known madam in the new part of town. Sure enough, Dalia found him lying on the stairs of the brothel. His face was distorted into an ugly grimace. Dalia called the police, and it turned out that same evening that the dead man had been a regular visitor to the place, and the women and servants in the house knew him as a rich, extravagant man who only wanted very young whores. The heart attack had carried him off.
After that shock Dalia loved other men, but she never wanted to live with one again. Noura was sure that Dalia had a lover, for she sometimes saw a bluish love-bite on her throat. But Noura never managed to find out who the lover was.
As an experienced woman, Dalia advised her assistants and her customers when they complained of their husbands to her. Noura often had the impression that some of these women didn’t need dresses, they just wanted the dressmaker’s good advice.
From where Noura sat working, she could hear every word spoken on the terrace as long as she wasn’t using her sewing machine. So she heard all about the troubles of elegant Mrs Abbani, a rich young woman who was not exactly blessed with beauty, but had an enchanting voice. Noura noticed a wonderful change coming over Mrs Abbani; as long as she kept quiet, you felt quite so
rry for her, but once she began talking she was transformed into a very attractive woman. She was very well educated, and knew a great deal about astrology, poetry, and above all architecture. But she had no idea about men, and she was desperately unhappy with her husband.
Mrs Abbani ordered twelve dresses a year from Dalia, so that she could drop in once a week and pour her heart out over a coffee. The boss was allowed to call her Nasimeh; all the assistants addressed her as Madame Abbani and showed her the utmost respect.
Nasimeh Abbani had been the best student in her class at school, and had never wanted anything to do with men. She dreamed of a career as an architect, and in her girlhood she drew ambitious designs for houses of the future that made the most of the hot climate and could almost entirely manage without heating in winter. The secret of these houses was a sophisticated ventilation system that Nasimeh had seen on holiday in Yemen.
Her mother had been widowed very young, but she was extremely rich. Her great ambition was to make sure that her late husband’s property didn’t go to a fortune hunter. So she decided to consider only good matches for her two sons and her daughter, and she achieved that ambition. All three married into even richer families.
In Nasimeh’s case, her husband was the son of a friend of her mother’s. Obviously the fact that she was this man’s third wife troubled no one but Nasimeh herself. Dalia knew Nasimeh’s husband. He owned many buildings and landed properties, and he was a powerful man in Damascus.
Nasimeh’s great problem was having to act the part of a wife yearning for her husband every third day. Afterward she hated herself for the next two days. She could never say an honest word to her husband, she could only ever agree to what he said. It made her feel exhausted, because telling lies is tiring work if your heart isn’t in them, and Nasimeh’s heart was as pure as a five-year-old girl’s. She always had to act cheerfully and massage, kiss and arouse him until he got going properly. But she didn’t like his body. It was snow-white and doughy, and as he sweated profusely he was as slippery as a frog. He always drank arak before making love, so that soon she couldn’t stand the smell of aniseed. In addition he had a prick that was unequalled in Damascus, and the more she asked him to spare her the more arousal he felt. It was torture having to lie under him. By now she had three children whom she loved, and she enjoyed life with them as a means of recovering from her husband’s visits.
One day Dalia advised the woman to smoke three hashish cigarettes before having sex with him. Some of her customers did that, and it helped them to put up with their husbands’ attentions. However, Nasimeh decided that she wouldn’t tolerate the effects of the hashish because the sight of her husband nauseated her.
Dalia tried to console her customer by saying that her husband obviously produced too much semen, and had to get rid of it whether he wanted to or not. Nasimeh laughed bitterly. “If you ask me,” she said, “my husband has semen on the brain and his is made of nothing else.”
Both women laughed, and for the first time it struck Noura what a delightful, gurgling laugh Madame Abbani had. If she were a man, thought Noura, she herself would fall in love with her instantly. She had no idea how close to the facts she had come. Nasri Abbani too had decided to marry the young woman when he heard the sound of her laughter in her parental home. He wasn’t allowed to see her at the time, but he had taken his mother’s advice and married her.
And at some point, just before the end of her training, Noura heard the dressmaker giving her friend Nasimeh Abbani another piece of advice. “All you can do is get divorced! And after that you can look around for a man you can love.”
Toward the end of Noura’s third year she was also allowed to work by herself on the most expensive materials, like velvet and silk. And then, if she carried out an order entirely on her own, Dalia showed her clearly how much she thought of her, which in turn aroused the jealousy of her long-standing assistant Fatima.
She could have come to the end of her three years’ training with pleasure and satisfaction if the aunt of a famous calligrapher had not turned up one day.
On the morning she was to meet this woman, Noura saw two policemen shooting a dog on her way to the dressmaker’s. There had been local rumours for weeks of a gang catching dogs, writing the name of President Shishakli on their backs in hydrogen peroxide, and then letting them loose in the city. The dog that had been shot before Noura’s eyes had a light brown coat, and the bleached letters shone white as snow on it.
That morning, when Noura told Dalia how miserably she had seen the dog die because the shot didn’t kill it outright, Dalia froze. “This means bad luck,” she said. “God preserve us from what’s about to come.” In the course of the day, however, Dalia and Noura forgot the dog and the president.
Colonel Shishakli, who had come to power in a coup, was overthrown by an uprising in the spring of 1954. But it was to be years before Noura understood that on that morning Dalia had not fallen victim to mere superstition. She had uttered a true prophecy.
14
It took Noura years to piece together the image of her marriage from the separate scraps of her memory. And as she did she often thought of her grandmother, who used to sew whole landscapes of brightly coloured scraps of fabric into patchwork.
As she discovered shortly before she ran away, it had been her school friend Nabiha al-Azm who inadvertently led Hamid Farsi to her. Nabiha’s rich family lived in a beautiful house less than fifty paces from Hamid’s studio. Her brother, who had known Noura since she was a girl, was crazy about calligraphy, and a good customer of Hamid Farsi. One day he was telling Nabiha about the lonely life led by the calligrapher, and a name instantly sprang to her mind: Noura!
Later, Noura recollected a chance meeting with Nabiha in the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, where she was buying special buttons for Dalia. She had plenty of time to spare, so she accepted her former classmate’s invitation to eat an ice together. Nabiha, who was already engaged and very soon to be married, said she was surprised to find Noura still single.
“I always thought that, with your beautiful face, you’d snap up a rich husband the moment you were fifteen. I’m a bedraggled chicken compared to you!”
Two weeks later, Noura’s father said some rich man or other, the descendant of a noble tribe, wanted her as his fourth wife. He had, of course, said no, he added, because his daughter deserved a husband who loved her alone.
A month later their neighbour Badia invited Noura and her mother to coffee. Noura did not want to accept, but she went with her mother out of politeness.
If she thought back carefully she always came to the conclusion that her mother already knew, that day, what it was all about, and that was why she had urged Noura several times to make herself look pretty. That was unusual, because neighbours usually visited each other in everyday clothes, and often in their slippers.
A distinguished-looking lady of a certain age was sitting in Badia’s living room. She was introduced as Mayyada, and she was the daughter of the well-known merchant Hamid Farsi, said Badia, and was a friend of hers. Her husband was working in Saudi Arabia, so she didn’t often come to Damascus. The lady told them, several times, how highly the Saudis thought of her husband, and said they lived in a positive palace, but she thought the country itself very tedious, so she liked to go to her little house in the Salihiyyeh quarter of Damascus for a visit in summer.
As she talked she fixed her small but sharp eyes on Noura, and Noura felt the woman’s glance going right through her clothes. It made her uneasy.
All this was nothing but a farce, only she hadn’t seen through it. On that first visit Badia asked Noura to make the coffee, saying that she particularly liked the way she brewed it. Noura had never in fact made especially good coffee; she made it as well or badly as any other girl of seventeen in Damascus. But as she knew her way around her neighbour’s house, she got up and went into the kitchen. She had no idea that the stranger was checking the way she moved with a practised eye. When Noura served the c
offee, she cried enthusiastically, “So graceful!”
The women discussed all sorts of subjects very frankly, and Noura thought the conversation was a little too intimate for a first exchange with a stranger. Suddenly Badia began praising the woman’s nephew, a rich calligrapher who had been left a widower prematurely, and she evidently knew a great deal about him. Noura’s mother assured the others that the prospect of a widower made no difference to her or to any other sensible woman, not if the widower in question was childless.
“Yes, he’s childless, thank God, but if he takes a young gazelle as his second wife, he’d like to have a few nice children with her,” replied the stranger, examining Noura and making her eyebrows dance in a meaningful way. By now Noura realized that she herself was being discussed, and felt greatly embarrassed.
A little later she and her mother said goodbye, and left. Once outside the door her mother stopped, and indicated to Noura that she should listen to what the other two women had to say about her. They didn’t have to wait long before the talk inside the house turned to her again. The stranger said to her hostess, loud and clear, “A gazelle. God protect her from envious eyes. She’s still rather thin, but with a little feeding up she’ll be a beauty. Her build is beautiful, she moves in a very feminine way, her hands are warm and dry and her gaze is proud. Perhaps just a little too proud.”
“To be sure, to be sure. All women who read books are proud, but if your nephew is a real man he’ll break her pride on the first night and show her that he is master of his house, and if he doesn’t, well, never mind. Then her husband will live as ours do with you and me, which is not too bad either.”