by Ghada Samman
The things she says are a pile of crap, if you ask me. All she does is try to show off how “cultured” she is. So even though I’m her husband, it looks like she’s written me off, and the kisses we used to steal in the orchards outside her father’s house in Sahat Al Midfaa don’t mean a thing anymore. Even back then I remember her going on ad nauseum about books until I started to yawn. All she really wanted was a house of her own where she could spread out her books and papers and study non-stop. I’d come home drunk at dawn after a night of carousing in taverns and bars, and she wouldn’t say a damned thing. She’d just go on getting dressed for work as if she couldn’t care less what I did. At first it made me suspicious. I thought maybe she had a lover. So I had my driver start spying on her. After a month of following her around, he told me she really did just go to work and to the university, and that she holed herself up at the library every evening till it closed. And that made me madder than ever. Damn it! No woman has the right to think she’s my equal, and that her job is more important than whether I spend my nights with her or out on the town.
She doesn’t care about money or threats or anything, and it irritates the hell out of me. Zain doesn’t give a damn anymore. It’s as if she doesn’t even hear my voice. Like an idiot, I thought of asking her grandmother Hayat to talk her into coming back. A lot of good that would do! I doubt if she’d even ask Zain why it is that after raising hell to get married to me, she’s raising hell now to get away from me.
Anyway, I’m not going to let her ruin my chance to get to know Lieutenant Nahi, who can help me bring in cheap merchandise from Beirut and sell it in Damascus for double the price.
A week earlier, Waseem’s business partner Badee had told him he’d met with Lieutenant Nahi and that after a wild night out, they’d talked about money. They’d also discussed the businessmen who were afraid of Socialism and who were bitter over the nationalization laws instituted under Abdel Nasser when Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic. He’d reassured Waseem that business would flourish thanks to people like him and that they’d make huge profits trading in basically everything. He also hinted at a huge cut he’d be getting off every deal.
* * *
After starting her shift at the Syrian University Library one day, Zain received an unexpected visit from her cousin Fadila. It was the first time anybody in her family had come to her work place.
Zain felt concerned when she saw the look of distress on Fadila’s face. Still in distress herself over her abortion, she bypassed the usual niceties and asked Fadila straight out, “What brings you here?”
“Well,” Fadila hesitated. “I wanted to talk to you alone. It’s about Najm Rabi`ee, my first and only love. I need your encouragement.”
Zain’s features tightened. Misinterpreting the look on Zain’s face to mean she objected to Najm because he was poor and from a village, Fadila quickly added, “Najm isn’t poor, by the way! You may have read in the newspapers a few days ago that an uncle of his who’s emigrated to Gabon left him a huge fortune. Maybe he did it as a way of thumbing his nose at everybody else!”
Appreciating the fact that her cousin had sought her out for help, Zain measured her words with the greatest of care. “Well,” she began, “even if the news reports are true—and I doubt that they are—money isn’t the problem here. The problem has to do with love itself. What I mean is that something changes after people get married.”
“But I really do love Najm, and I need your support,” Fadila pleaded. “You’re the Ziqaq Al Yasmin Troublemaker, as the neighbor ladies refer to you, or the Ziqaq Al Yasmin Insurgent, as my educated Najm prefers to call you!”
The two of them burst out laughing. “Excuse me,” Zain said. “Dr. Jean needs help checking out some books. I’ll be right back. Wait for me here.”
Hardly had Zain taken a step in Dr. Jean’s direction when her coworker, Ikram, came rushing enthusiastically to the professor’s assistance. Ikram was obviously smitten with Dr. Jean and determined to catch his eye. Love… it bubbles up all around me in the faces of friends, relatives, and strangers alike. Love… that colorful, infectious sentiment surrounded by Beethoven’s music to Elise, and Chopin’s tears dripping blood-like onto the piano keys as he played for the hard-hearted George Sand. Chopin professed to belong to Sand. She believed him, and so did the critics. But I don’t. Artists aren’t faithful to anyone or anything but their craft. I know it from my recent experience with words.
When Zain rejoined Fadila, the latter gushed, “I want to be like you! So I’ve told people I’m in love with Najm and that I don’t want to marry Mutaa! But I need you to stick up for me to other family members, since you led the way by telling people how things were going to be and marrying the person you were in love with.”
Zain nearly weakened before her cousin’s barrage of earnest pronouncements. She was so impassioned, and her heart so on fire for her beloved Najm. Zain felt ashamed not to be able to play the role of the self-sacrificing heroine of movies and romance novels. However, the owl came in through the window, perched on Zain’s shoulder, and said what needed to be said.
“Listen, Fadila,” Zain confessed. “You know I love you. But the fact is, I left Waseem a couple of days ago and I’m asking for a divorce. Things didn’t work out. I made a huge mistake. But that doesn’t mean every first love has to be a failure. It’s just that mine was a failure.”
“Oh my God!” Fadila gasped. “I don’t believe it.”
“Life is unbelievable sometimes,” Zain conceded. “But like I said, my failed relationship doesn’t mean everybody who falls in love will fail the way I did. And it doesn’t mean you’re going to fail. You’re another girl, with another man, and the two of you have your own story. I’ve lost hope in this love, but I haven’t lost hope in love itself. Go ahead with what you think is right for you, and don’t be afraid. But just remember: There’s no such thing as a ‘love insurance policy.’”
“And why would you want to divorce him?” Fadila sputtered in an outburst of what seemed like personal hostility.
Remembering her grandmother’s advice, Zain said evenly, “It just wasn’t meant to be. Everything comes down in the end to what was, or wasn’t, meant to be. It’s a matter of destiny.”
A student came up and requested help finding a book. Excusing herself momentarily, Zain accompanied the student to the bookshelves. But when she came back, Fadila had disappeared.
Once she was home, Zain holed herself up in her old room, the room where for so long she had sworn by Waseem’s name and lit him love candles. She nearly cried. But the friendly owl that her mother always sent her in times of need landed comfortingly on her bed. She heard her mother whisper, as she had at the moment she died, “Don’t be afraid of any of them. Don’t back down. Don’t give up your life for somebody who doesn’t deserve it.”
Zain stretched out on the bed, still exhausted from the abortion a few days earlier. I made a mistake, and now I’m correcting it. I’m paying the price. I have to get a divorce no matter what if I’m going to survive. Then let come what may. I’ll be rebelling against people’s love for me, and that’s hard. I’ll also be rebelling against their rejection of me, and that’s a relief! I’m a boulder on Mt. Qasioun.
Chapter Three
Two clouds of rage had now emanated from Ziqaq Al Yasmin where I grew up. When I’d insisted on marrying Waseem, it had come from the older generation, and now that I was insisting on divorcing him, the younger generation was in an uproar. The telephone rang.
“Your cousin Hamida wants to talk to you,” my grandmother told me.
Her voice trembling with rage, Hamida demanded, “How dare you announce that you want a divorce after the hell you raised to marry this guy! How could you do this to me?”
“And what does that have to do with you?” I asked, taken by surprise.
Her answer pained me. “When I announced my decision to marry Suhayl, the guy I love, I was following your example after what you’d done w
ith Waseem. And now they’re pushing back against me because your grand revolution flopped, and now you want a divorce. My mom told me the news and was gloating in my face. So, is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true,” I admitted. “I fell in love and announced it to everybody, and we got married. Then the marriage didn’t work out and I announced that I wanted a divorce.”
“How could you do this to me?” she repeated dolefully, as if she and Suhayl had already married and divorced.
Trying to reason with her, I said, “Just because this is happening to me doesn’t mean it has to happen to you! Suhayl might be better than Waseem, or he might be worse. The point is, he’s a different person. Every man has his own set of fingerprints, and no two relationships are the same. I failed. I admit it, and I’m trying to take responsibility for it. But neither you nor Suhayl has anything to do with it.”
“You’re the one who gave me courage,” Hamida went on forlornly. “And here you are backing out and letting me down!”
“I’m not letting you down,” I insisted. “On the contrary, admitting my mistake and retreating takes the same courage it took me to insist on marrying the guy I loved. And this is what I have to do, or I’ll destroy myself. Regardless of what image you have of me, I have to live my own life. Besides, like I told you, the fact that I failed doesn’t necessarily mean you will, or that love itself will fail. Life is pretty risky when the other side of the equation is an unknown, and you can’t claim you know somebody for the simple reason that he says he loves you.”
“Everybody in the neighborhood is gloating over you,” Hamida informed me. I wasn’t surprised. “Your Aunt Buran said the neighbor lady had done a good thing when she put a hot coal on her daughter’s tongue for saying she was in love, and that your dad should have done the same thing to you. In fact, he should have done it twice: the first time when you said you were in love, and the second time when you said you wanted a divorce!”
Then she added with a note of satisfaction, “As you probably know, there’s never been a single divorce in our family.”
“You’re right about that,” I concurred. “We cover up our festering wounds for fear of what people will say. But what people say doesn’t mean a thing to me. All I care about is what my own mind, heart, and conscience tell me.”
When Hamida ended the call, I couldn’t tell whether she was feeling braver than before, or more miserable.
After the call from Hamida, Zain thought to herself: Nobody’s on my side. And nobody approves of the writing I do. But I’m determined to go on. No one has the right to stab me with his dagger. If I deserve a dagger in my chest, I’ll put it there myself.
* * *
After her brother Amjad left Ziqaq Al Yasmin for the Sahat Al Midfaa neighbhorhood, Zain’s Aunt Buran had become more outspoken and overbearing than before. One day she said to her daughter Fadila, “Mutaa Ribati’s mother came by yesterday and talked to me about moving up the wedding date for you and Mutaa, and I agreed to it. The boy’s father is excited about the idea, and he and his brother will be coming over to recite the Fatiha with your dad.”
Fadila was stunned. How could her mother agree to let her marry a man she didn’t know just because he was rich and had a respectable position on the Damascene social scene?
“No!” Fadila burst out. “I’m not going to marry somebody I barely know. I don’t love him. In fact, I don’t even like him! I’m not some rag doll people can buy and sell. I’m a human being, and I’ve got feelings. If I’m going to marry him, I need to spend time with him and get to know him first.”
Horrified, her mother replied, “We’d have to write up the marriage contract before you could do that.”
“All right, then,” Fadila countered with unaccustomed decisiveness, “provided that I have the right to divorce written into the contract. It isn’t fair for men to be the only ones who can initiate a divorce. And they shouldn’t be allowed to subjugate their wives and demand their obedience. Those are things of the past, Mama.”
Jumping as though she’d been shocked by a live wire, her mother shrieked, “Who told you wives could have the right to divorce?!”
“Zain did,” Fadila answered simply. “I’ve been visiting her at the library lately. She told me she hadn’t known about it before, either. But Islam gives women this option. She said Uncle Amjad had told her about it one day when she complained to him that Islam isn’t fair to women. He explained to her that Islam liberates women in a number of ways. It started when the Qur’an forbade people’s ignorant practice of burying their baby daughters alive. Islam gave women rights that, at the time, were quite progressive, including the right to divorce their husbands on their own initiative. Zain tells me that the purpose of Islam is to free women, not to oppress them the way society was doing before Islam came, and the way some people still want to do now. She says we have a duty to enlighten women about their rights, and she’s been giving copies of an article she wrote, ‘Liberated Girls,’ to girls and women in the neighborhood.”
* * *
Fadila’s brother, who had been eavesdropping from behind the door, couldn’t stand to listen to another word. After reading Zain’s first article, which she had published in the Readers’ Mail column along with her picture (for shame!), he had slit her owl’s throat and put its carcass in her bed. He figured it would give her the scare of her life, and that she wouldn’t dare do something like that ever again. Instead, though, she seemed to have gone even farther off course than before. When he stalked her with a rifle, he was sure she’d either die or shut her mouth for good. Dying would have been the preferable outcome, of course, as far as he was concerned.
He walked into the room, pretending not to have heard anything but the last part about copies of the article. “So,” he asked his sister with feigned nonchalance, “did she buy copies of the newspaper and pass them around to your girlfriends?”
“No,” replied Fadila. “She can reproduce documents at the library with a mimeograph machine and a stencil. That’s how they make copies of test questions for all the students.”
My, how times have changed! Buran thought to herself.
As she lay in bed that night, Buran thought back on how she used to put up with her husband’s snoring without daring to slip out of the room to catch a few winks of her own. As moonlight poured through the window onto her face in magical streaks of liquid silver, she wondered: If I’d been free to decide who I was going to marry, would I have chosen this man to be my husband? And if I’d ever dared to think of divorcing him, would I have stayed with him all these years? Didn’t I deserve to live my life, too?
She ran her hands over her body in the moonlight, exploring its cobwebbed recesses and the curves that had grown flabby without ever having been pleasured by her husband’s lips, even on their wedding night. She rose quietly and went over to the mirror. She took a close look at her face, perhaps for the first time in years.
* * *
Nawal, who’d been visiting her uncle in Aleppo, got back to Ziqaq Al Yasmin dying to see her sweetheart Waleed, and more determined that ever to declare her love for him. But when she got to the house, her mother shouted at her gloatingly, “Have you heard? Zain, the one you say is your inspiration because she fell in love and married the person she’d chosen herself, has come running home to her father’s house and is asking for a divorce!”
The news descended like a bolt of lightning. She had always drawn strength from Zain’s example. Zain was the one who’d given her the courage to stand up to the people around her and tell them straight up, “I’m in love, and I’m going to marry the person I’m in love with!” At least that’s what she’d been intending to do.
Now she felt chilled to the bone, and with a horrified shiver she wondered: Might the same thing happen to Waleed and me? She dialed the number to Zain’s house. No answer. Then she tried calling Zain at her father’s house. Her grandmother Hayat answered. Without the usual niceties, Nawal asked to speak to Zain. The minu
te she heard Zain’s voice, she shouted furiously in her ear, “So, is it true this news I’m hearing? Are you asking for a divorce from the guy you raised hell to be able to marry?!”
“Why don’t we get together and talk about it?” Zain suggested, maintaining her composure. Even more enraged now because Zain hadn’t denied the report the way she’d hoped she should, Nawal snapped, “There’ll be no need for that.” And she hung up.
* * *
Fadila heaved a sigh of distress. A neighbor woman had seen Mutaa trying to kiss her in the courtyard, and the whole thing had come down on Fadila’s head. I can’t believe the way my family reacted when they heard about it. They’re all against me. If it weren’t for something I’d done wrong, what happened wouldn’t have happened, they say! Working a job the way I do now is sinful. The fact that I wear a short headscarf instead of the longer, traditional kind is sinful. And what happened is all my fault. As for Mutaa, he’s the perfect gentleman, since he still wants to marry me even though I didn’t slap him when he tried to kiss me, but just moved politely away! My God! I don’t understand anything anymore. Najm’s found a job in Kuwait, and I’d give anything to go there with him. The situation here was hellish enough already, and then Zain went and made it even worse by getting a divorce.
* * *
Grandma Hayat was planning a visit to her ailing centegenarian sister, and Zain was going along. Am I really going in honor of my great-aunt? Or am I just going because I’m nostalgic for Hayy Al Maydan, the neighborhood where she lives? My dear Damascus has become so hostile toward me that I may have to leave her.
The room was empty of visitors when they arrived, and her great-aunt’s daughter-in-law had seized the opportunity afforded by Hayat’s and Zain’s presence to escape briefly from Lord Death’s gloomy presence.