by Ghada Samman
The second response article was signed by a group referred to in the article as “the Daughters of Hama,” who objected to being given the right to vote!
Zain’s response this time was an article entitled, “Pray for the Slave Girl Who Revels in Her Servitude.” In it Zain put forth the view that these women had been robbed of their will and that the article that purported to represent their views had been authored and signed by a male religious cleric who considered it his duty to ensure their chastity, as though women were lascivious by nature and have to be reined in.
Zain called Mr. Wadee to thank him, but without mentioning her travel plans. However, he learned from his son Raja’i that Zain was on her way to Beirut to continue her studies at the AUB and to write for newspapers in the “Seaside Capital of Freedom” as the city was known among Arab intellectuals.
“So we’re losing her,” Wadee remarked sadly, “and most people won’t even notice. They’re trying to destroy her writing career. They’re even launching legal and political attacks against her the way they did to her mother.”
* * *
The only way Zain’s Grandma Hayat knew to pamper her granddaughter was to give her big hugs and feed her her favorite dishes. With Haroun rubbing up against her legs, she said, “I can feel a trip in the air. I gather from things you and your father have been saying that you’re going away to study. Well, good for you, girl! You’re not like your old granny, who only knows the A-B-C song!”
Zain giggled and threw her arms around her grandmother, who added, “I made fattat makdus and imam bayaldi today, and before you go, I’ll make you sitt zabaqi, basmashkat, zunud al-banat, tabbakh rouhou, shaykh al-mahshi, baba ghannoush, and harraq isba`u!”
When Zain’s father got home, he delivered a perfunctory greeting and said to Zain, “I need a word with you in the study.”
Wriggling out of her grandmother’s arms, Zain followed her father out of the room.
“You’re not going to be able to go anywhere, Zain,” he said, getting straight to the point.
“Why not?”
“When Najati went to the Passports Department to add Egypt to the list of countries you can visit, the employee—the son of a friend of his—showed him a circular forbidding you to leave the country. If you’re caught at the border, you’ll be arrested.” My father doesn’t know anything about Lieutenant Nahi and what happened—or rather, what didn’t happen— between us, or how I exposed him in front of Comrade Alwan and left the two of them on the verge of a fist fight. If I don’t want him to worry, I’m going to have to lie to him. I never want to make him unhappy again.
“Oh!” she said with a feigned giggle. “I heard about that, too. It seems there’s been a mix-up between me and somebody else with the same name. Early next week I’ll go get a paper that clears up the confusion, and then I’ll be able to leave. Don’t worry, Baba.”
Sighing with relief, her father said, “Najati and I nearly flipped when we heard about it! While we were talking it over, Dr. Manahili happened to walk in with a relative of his who’s a client of ours, and we told him what we were worried about. Dr. Manahili told us he was friends with Lieutenant—I can’t remember his name now—and that he’d look into it and report back to us.”
“Forget about it, Baba. I’ll call him right now and tell him about the name mix-up.”
* * *
The next time Zain and Dr. Manahili had an appointment to meet at the outdoor cafe, they both arrived half an hour early!
“I hear you found out from my dad about the travel ban I’m under.”
“And that they’re accusing you of spying for West Germany!” “That’s right. I’m the Matahari of the Arab world. So I suppose I’ve got no choice but to escape to Beirut without Lieutenant Nahi’s knowledge.”
“He wants a favor from me, and I was planning to say I couldn’t do it, but now I’ve decided to agree to it so that I can help get you out. Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Well, it beats being convicted in a kangaroo court presided over by a judge on the take, and then rotting in prison!”
“All right, then. I’ll help you make your get-away.”
“Please… I don’t want to mix you up in this. I’ve got the travel permit he signed for me earlier. So I’ll use that, and try to distract the border official from opening the register that contains the list of people wanted by the authorities. I’ll offer to autograph my book for him, and I’ll ask him for the names of his family members so that I can include them in my dedication.”
“I’ve got a better plan. I’ll give you a ride there and claim you’re my cousin.”
“No…,” Zain hesitated. “I don’t want to implicate you in this, since I might be discovered.”
“Are you worried about me?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t you think it was a mistake to expose him in front of your friend Alwan?”
“Maybe. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, or by what criteria. All I know is that if I’m an agent or a spy, I’m not doing it for West Germany. I’m doing it for the truth.”
“Anyway, don’t worry. We’ll go by your plan. Then, if you see the border official starting to open the big black notebook that lists the people who’ve incurred the wrath of the powers that be— which includes you now—tell him your cousin’s waiting for you in Lieutenant Nasser’s office. Nasser heads the Jdaidet Yabous checkpoint on the Syrian-Lebanese border. So don’t forget that name. Lieutenant Nahi’s going to tell him to give me special treatment. I’ll be with him if your plan doesn’t work. So now let’s agree on the day and the time.”
* * *
As she descended the dirt staircase, Zain soaked up the sight of Damascus’s orchards and domes with love and longing. The thought that her weekly visits here would soon be a thing of the past made her ache inside. She almost started to cry, she was so overcome with nostalgia and affection. She gazed up at barren Mt. Qasioun and thought: In Bavaria I saw mountains covered with lush green forests, their peaks haloed by mists that came rolling magically down their slopes like a lover bathing his beloved’s neck and arms with impassioned kisses. But to me this will always be the most beautiful mountain in the world!
The minute she walked in the house, she said to Grandma Hayat, “What do you say we go to Grandpa’s house in Ziqaq Al Yasmin? I miss it!”
“All right,” her grandmother replied agreeably. “I’ll get dressed and cover my head real quick.”
Zain didn’t tell her grandmother she wanted to go there to say goodbye. And her grandmother, for her part, didn’t tell her that the old ladies in Ziqaq Al Yasmin didn’t want to see her anymore. As far as they were concerned, Zain had corrupted the other girls in the neighborhood by saying that when any of them got married, she should have her right to initiate a divorce written into the marriage contract so that if things didn’t go well, her husband couldn’t demean her or force her to stay with him against her will and best interests. The neighbor ladies had even gone so far as to call down God’s mercy on her late mother who, as they put it, “was so meek and mild she would have let the cat eat her dinner without saying a thing!”
With Zain supporting her grandmother on her arm, they made their way to the center of Souq Al Hamidiya.
“Let’s stop for some ice cream at Bakdash,” the grandmother suggested. It was clear she needed to rest a bit. Cars couldn’t drive through the market’s narrow, pedestrian-packed passageways, so Zain had parked at the market entrance, which was a fair distance from their destination. Zain ordered hers with an extra dollop of cream on top, and devoured it in no time at all. As she gobbled down her delicious treat, she got a lump in her throat thinking about the fact that it might be for the last time.
Zain had expected to receive a warm welcome when they got to her grandfather’s house, but she’d been mistaken. She rapped the knocker on the beautiful old door, and then walked in with the reverence of someone entering a sacred space. It made her happy
to see that Ziqaq Al Yasmin was the same as it always had been.
She wanted to check on the goldfish in the pond at the center of the courtyard and to breathe in the scents of jasmine, honeysuckle, basil, roses, narcissus, and bitter orange. She wanted to hear the call to the mid-afternoon prayer coming from the nearby Umayyad Mosque and the other sounds she remembered from Ziqaq Al Yasmin—orange sounds, green sounds, lavender sounds, the sounds that had been imprinted in her memory from childhood: from the trills that rang out at weddings and other happy occasions, to the wails that pierced the air at funeral processions, to the gurgling of hookas, the purling of the wall fountain, and everything else she knew she’d pine for once she was far from her beloved Damascus.
To her sorrow and amazement, Zain encountered very little of what she’d imagined she would. With no one around to pamper them and whisper sweet nothings in their ears, the plants had dried up and withered, and she heard cousins, neighbors, and friends engaged in one shouting match after another.
“You infidel Communist!” shrieked a voice.
“You reactionary!”
“You Marxist!”
“You’re one of Michel Aflaq’s yes-men.”
“You’re a rabble rouser.”
“You’re a Palestinian, an Arab nationalist, so you’ll never get where I’m coming from.”
“You’re a Syrian nationalist.”
“You’re a foreign agent.”
“You’re a bourgeois traitor.”
“You’re just like everybody else in your family!”
Accusations hurled back and forth across the aisle. Shouting. Wailing. There wasn’t anything remotely resembling a dialogue. If one of them had been holding a revolver, he’d have been sure to fire.
Her aunt Buran came and gave them a grudging welcome. The atmosphere wasn’t to Grandma Hayat’s liking, and it saddened her to see her son Abdulfattah sitting on the stone bench with a blank stare on his face. His illness was upon him again, and he didn’t recognize either her or Zain. If only he were well enough to remember me, even if that had meant lashing out at me and calling me names! Lifting her gaze, Zain saw a huge procession of the living and the dead. Her mother smiled down at her from the balcony as her owl flapped her wings in welcome. She even caught a glimpse of her uncle Sufyan, who had died before she was born and who had fought in the Great Syrian Revolt on Jabal al-Druze and in the Ghouta between 1925 and 1927. She saw women and men present and absent. Before her eyes leapt images of Lu’ay, Hamida, who had left the house a little while earlier, Fadila, now in Kuwait, Fayha, married and living in Aleppo, Muti`a, Buran, Duraid, Qamar, Razan, Mawiya, Hani, and… and…
Against the raucous arguments going on in the background, Grandma Hayat announced with her accustomed diplomacy, “I’m going to the reception at Umm Mazhar’s house. Anybody want to come along?”
Before she and Zain left, Zain looked into the courtyard pond to say goodbye to the goldfish, but was shocked to find that they were gone. They’d either died or been taken away, and the pond was nearly dry.
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” she said, “but I really don’t feel up to attending the reception.”
“Don’t worry,” Grandma Hayat reassured her. “Mazhar can walk me to the end of Souq Al Hamidiya, and then give me a ride home in his car. I used to be his nanny, and I’m closer to him than his own mother.”
Zain made herself scarce as fast as she could. Hearing the hostile exchanges between her relatives and their so-called comrades had stabbed her like a knife. Hooting all the way with her trusty owl, she tore through Souq Al Hamidiya like someone fleeing a ghost, or rather, a legion of ghosts. I try to make my way into the future, but I keep stumbling onto the past! I know I can’t forget, but maybe I can forgive myself and others.
When she reached the house, Haroun lunged at her happily as if to cheer her up. Returning the sentiment, she said, “I won’t be seeing you after today, sweet Haroun. I don’t know where I’ll spend tomorrow night—whether in some prison here, or in Lebanon.”
* * *
It was her last night in Damascus, and the next day’s journey was full of unknowns.
Zain got in bed, but she couldn’t sleep. As she tossed and turned, her owl hopped around the bed as if she were worried too.
I doze off and wake up again. I’m in a tunnel, and I’m running toward the light at the end of it. The sheikh who has it out for me is on my trail. His beard, now braided, has grown into a rope that he wants to hang me with. Nahi runs after me with a Che Guevara-style beard that’s down to his feet, and he wants to hang me, too. I’m also being chased by the neighbor lady who put a hot coal on her daughter’s tongue for admitting she was in love. She’s carrying a brazier filled with burning embers and wants to empty it on my head. Ziqaq Al Yasmin’s gossips, smoking hookas that they want to smash into my face, are after me, too.
Another of my pursuers is some self-styled literary critic who’s determined to force me into submission either with a carrot of praise or with a blow of his pen on my backside as if I were a little child. As he runs, he reads the book of my body from head to toe: line by line, comma by comma. He’s panting, simultaneously ablaze with lust and hatred. After all, as a woman I’m a work of the devil! He unsheathes his pen and tries to stab me in the heart, but I get away from him, and he accuses me of having a man do my writing for me. After all, no woman would be competent enough to write the way I claim to, and divorced women are there for the taking. I keep racing toward the end of the tunnel, my owl right behind me.
Is this just a bad dream? Or is it that, when we go to sleep at night, we jump through windows in our pillows into an alternative reality where we’re stripped bare of our masks and pretenses?
My owl swoops down over my pursuers’ heads to frighten them away. But then they’re joined by my paternal aunt. She’s carrying some kind of food I hate and tries to force it down me. Her eyes glint with a malicious determination to repress the girls of the family on the pretext of raising them to be “good.” I sob inwardly, knowing that if I didn’t have to run for my life, I wouldn’t be leaving, and that if I weren’t so weary, I would have blown down the streets in a loud, stormy farewell. I would have swept through Sahat Al Muhajirin, Souq Saroujeh, Al Miskiyeh, Al Qubabiyeh, Souq Tafadhdhali Ya Sitt, Al Maydan, and Al Shaghour. I would have gone wailing like an ambulance down every Damascus road I’d ever fallen in love with. I would have visited every school I’d ever gone to and cried in every one of their courtyards. My spirit would have gone wandering through the university campus, and hovered wistfully over the shelves of a library that lives in my heart. I would have planted a goodbye kiss on every book I’d ever catalogued before depositing it lovingly on its shelf. I would have bidden farewell with caresses of longing to the books I kept on the shelves in my dad’s study. I would have burst into sobs over every tome that had taught me so much in whatever language. I would have thrown my arms around the ancestors I’d come to know through the books that hold my literary heritage—the ones I read at first because my father made me read them, only to fall in love with them on my own, the way a girl might fall serendipitously in love with the man she’s been forced to marry.
I haven’t said goodbye to anyone. I haven’t even told anybody of my plans for fear that I might weaken and change my mind. When I keep things to myself, I hold myself together better.
It’s three-thirty in the morning, and everybody else in the house is asleep. I get out of bed. I pick up my little suitcase and a briefcase that holds drafts of some stories and other things. Then I sneak out to my car, put them in the trunk, and come back inside without waking anybody up. I don’t want my dad to see me leaving with my luggage. I don’t want to tell him goodbye or cause him any more worry than I have to. I’ll call him from Beirut—if I get there!
Zain got back in bed and tried once again to sleep, but without success. The myriad faces of repression went parading again before her mind’s eye. Her limbs and organs lay scattered on and around
the bed, and her head had fallen on the carpet.
At length she was rescued from her troubled thoughts by Haroun, who had slipped into bed beside her. She got up to get dressed. The time for her to leap into the political boxing ring had come.
* * *
As Zain drove to the ominous Jdaidet Yabous checkpoint where she might well be arrested, she was trembling with fright. To calm herself she began reciting some prayers she had memorized as her owl flew alongside her with anxious sounding hoots. When she passed the burial site of Yousef Al Azmah in Maysaloun,12 she didn’t stop to pay her respects the way her father had always taught her to do. I admit it: I’m terrified. I don’t regret anything I’ve done or said. At the same time, I don’t want to join the people whose screams I heard coming from Nahi’s underground cells the night I went with Alwan to his office at the Intelligence Bureau.
But when she pulled up in front of the border crossing, she didn’t feel frightened the way she’d expected to. Instead she felt exhilarated, as if she knew this was part of the process of taking hold of who she really was. I seem to enjoy the kind of adventure that sends the blood rushing through my veins with the speed of a waterfall. Instead of being scared, I’m excited. I can almost hear my heart beating. I’m high on the thrill of dangerous adventure. Like a gambler, I want to win the round. And it’s a hell of a gamble. I might win my life, or I might lose it. I feel as though I have an enchanted glow about me that could make people do my bidding. Or am I just imagining things?
Putting on her prettiest smile, Zain strode coolly into the office where passengers’ travel documents were checked and handed the border official the semi-forged travel permit she had filched from Lieutenant Nahi. As she did so, her owl perched on his shoulder without his noticing a thing. Then, to keep him from opening his large black notebook and finding her name on the wanted list, she placed a copy of her book in front of him and said innocuously, “I’d like to write you something in the front flap of this book (she didn’t tell him she was its author). So can you tell me your name, and the names of your wife and children? That way I can include them in the dedication.” Man, what an idiot I am! What ever gave me the idea I could get past border officials this way? Of course I’ve seen movies where the lead character makes his getaway like this, but real life isn’t like that. This is what I get for watching so many action flicks.