Before Juhayna, you declared confidently to us that his liking for other women wasn’t serious, otherwise you wouldn’t have moved to Beirut. When my mother married again, you had me to live with you in your house there, where you’d rarely spent more than a week at a time in the past. You sensed a germ of intelligence in me and realized that the fact that I didn’t do better at school could have been due to the abnormal atmosphere at home. In fact, there were two atmospheres pulling against each other, with me in the middle: my father’s praying on one side, my mother’s singing on the other, and if they were in agreement over the act of weeping, they disagreed on the reasons. My father wept out of fear of God every time he lay facedown on the prayer mat, and my mother because the film she’d been watching hadn’t turned out the way she wanted.
Nobody knows if your move to Beirut was just for my benefit or for yours as well. As time passed, I began to understand why you visited the village less and less often. You grew to like city life. Everything you did was of such delicacy that it appeared to be wreathed in drifting smoke. You woke up in the morning, reveling in your bed, which looked as if you hadn’t slept in it, unlike the violent turmoil of the bed you shared with my grandfather. Even your pillow appeared untouched. You did your ablutions, prayed, and drank your tea before I got up, and I marveled at the calm enveloping the house.
You rose full of pleasure in the morning and I heard you addressing the sun or the clouds from your window. Then you looked in the mirror and murmured to yourself, “Perhaps I didn’t sleep well. My eyelids are swollen.”
You fetched a bottle of rose water, poured some onto a clean piece of gauze, and placed it over both eyes and lay down. “Bless the Prophet and his descendants. Rose water is fragrant, like the gardens of Paradise,” you murmured.
Afterwards you went around the house as if you were walking on eggshells, swaying gently from side to side. You listened to the news and songs that made you happy, read translations and the traditions of the Prophet, and walked in the garden every afternoon. You received neighbors or women who came visiting from the village; after a while you felt that they were an interruption, as the boredom began to outweigh the pleasure. The conversations you had with them were ordinary. You preferred talking to yourself or to young students. You liked eating alone, explaining, “God forbid that anyone should see me chewing my food like a cow.”
You sat looking as if the dishes of food were beneath your notice, taking even your favorite things slowly and daintily, and eating in abstracted silence to convey the impression that, rather than eating, you were thinking about important matters. You chose the moments when everybody was preoccupied elsewhere to go to the bathroom, for we never even heard the cistern flushing. Only when you performed your ritual washing did you pray in a loud voice. You prepared for the night, for your tidy bed again, picking a jasmine blossom or a sprig of honeysuckle to put in a coffee cup on the little table by your bed, calling to Zemzem to make green tea and sipping it as if it were the elixir of life. “The smell of it gladdens the heart,” you murmured.
Then you changed your long white dress for a nightgown and sat in your room listening to the radio, leaving Zemzem to watch the television news in the living room because it disturbed the calm waves around you, even if you turned the sound down. You didn’t like the way the people looked, letting fly at an overdressed female newscaster and describing the program’s suave male host as tedious.
If I came back from school and saw you with your head bound, I knew you had a headache. You would wrap it in a piece of red cloth and say, “Red. Like the blood pounding in my head.”
When you called me to lie beside you, convinced that your pain would vanish as soon as I was close to you, you would lay a piece of gauze on the pillow so that I wouldn’t be infected by your sore eyes. But having done that, you would take me in your arms and kiss me all over my face, head, hands, neck, chest, back, and even on my mouth, telling me how much you loved me.
When I saw your vanity case, my curiosity got the better of me, even though its contents never changed; nothing new in it, nothing missing: hairpins shining in their little packet, various kohl jars, dried grasses in a paper bag, a sheet of paper folded inside another one in an envelope, a ring with a dark blue stone set in diamonds. I took the box to my room and sat cross-legged like you poring over it, leaning forward like you did, and took out a kohl jar. You made up your eyes, looking in the little mirror in the lid without blinking like my mother or Zemzem, your gaze wide and steady, and I tried to imitate you. Then I took out the box of face powder and opened the lid, which had a picture of a woman like a Roman empress on it. What color was this powder? How was it I’d never seen any like it before, although I was quite familiar with different types, including what my mother and Fadila kept on their dressing tables?
One day I asked you about this strange color, and you smiled proudly and assured me that you didn’t follow others blindly like a sheep. You told me how you mixed three types of powder together to produce it. I asked you how you’d come to invent it. “When the spring comes, I’ll show you,” you answered.
I looked into your eyes. The big greenish-brown iris almost dominated the white, which was so white as to be nearly blue. Then I looked at your strong, slim fingers, your short nails, and the sleeves of your dress, which almost covered your slim wrists. You were like a queen bending over to pick a flower.
The spring had come. “Please forgive me, little one,” you said, prising open a flower bud, and showing me the color of the powder inside, pink, brown-red, peach, and even white. I also remember you showing me the “shy plant” and you said I mustn’t let anyone else know the secret, to protect the plant. You struck it gently as if caressing it. “Come on. Be shy,” you said, and the plant responded at once by going limp. After a while it stood up as straight as before. “You see. A woman must be shy like that sometimes too,” you told me.
I’m sure I’ve said before that I’ve never seen you shy, but I’ve seen you humble when you read religious books and say your prayers.
You live in Beirut without my grandfather, whose idea of a serenade is:
Oh, your pretty red panties
Aren’t half as pretty
As what’s inside them
And their fringes and lace
Drive me crazy.
He flies into a rage if he’s hungry and there’s no food on the table, wants to be able to tell his jokes, say what’s upsetting him, recount his dreams whenever he feels like it, even if it’s the middle of the night. Everyone criticized you for living between Beirut and the village, not staying with my grandfather. None of them guessed that you were happier doing that, because you had worked out that when you lived with a man you needed to have an airing from time to time, like clothes in your wardrobe.
I realized that you weren’t happy with a lot of things to do with my mother and Isaf and our house, even though at the mere sound of your name my mother listened intently to the conversation and stopped laughing and joking. She was afraid of you, and always tried to see to it that you didn’t know all her business. She wanted you to approve of her. It seems I too needed to hear your reaction to what went on in our house, and I told you things that I knew were supposed to be kept from you. As a result I was the cause of your final break with my mother. You took me in your arms, asking me if I loved you. “I want to stay at your house,” I said, preparing the ground for your next question, “Why, my love?”
I knew full well that I was going to regret what I said. “Because Mom and Isaf argue about you and my grandfather, about my Mom’s friends that Granddad loves,” I answered, my heart pounding.
You told her in a voice gentle as the breeze that you were afraid for me because of the way she carried on and it was wrong for a child like me to live in a place that was more like Khan Toomain than a family house. You grabbed my hand without discussing the subject further, and led me towards the door. I looked back at my mother and Isaf, upset at being the cause of thei
r distress. They wouldn’t let me go with you. They swooped down on you, trying to pull me away from you, and you suddenly let go of me, your chin trembling, swearing that you would never set foot in this house of ill repute again as long as you lived. “Unless there’s an illness or a death,” you added as a parting shot.
My mother screamed after you that you wanted to bring us bad luck; you were hoping for our downfall; you’d never loved her.
You stopped visiting us after that. My grandfather still came, in spite of that day’s events, which I tried to blot out of my mind. For a long time I even suppressed my curiosity about the place called Khan Toomain because I didn’t want to remember my bad feelings. A long time afterwards I found out it was the place where the peasants rested themselves and their animals on long journeys. For two piastres they bought a ticket which allowed them in, then they unloaded their donkeys and lay down on their blankets wherever they could find a place.
To this day I’ve never told you exactly what happened when my grandfather visited us. I was frightened that you would accuse me of betraying you. And I was betraying you, even though I was so young. My mother’s face used to light up when Grandfather appeared. She would exclaim delightedly at the good things he brought with him and hover around Ali like a bee around nectar as he unloaded the car. Grandfather said to her, “For heaven’s sake, you don’t have to be so pleased about a bit of flour and cooking butter! Be more serious. You’re married to an important merchant.”
My mother laughed in reply, rushing to see to the boxes and bags in case Isaf hid them somewhere and she couldn’t find them.
My grandfather tried to tell her in a lighthearted way that it wasn’t all for her: he’d brought presents for the women who pampered him and gave him their affection. He had a reason for everything he brought. He’d give them a bag of almonds and delicate little green plums, saying, “To make you drool like I do when I see you!”
He even told my mother that whoever had the biggest breasts would get the lion’s share. “To be eaten raw without salt or spices, just like you!” he would say as he set a piece of meat before them.
They snorted with laughter and struck him playfully on the shoulder until Isaf came and snatched it away from him and began to beat it to make kibbeh.
They waited impatiently for his visits, taking it in turns to pray that he would soon be there. He took them to summer resorts and invited them to dine in famous restaurants, where they relished being among the beautiful rich women who dominated the gossip columns. Sitting there with garlands of jasmine around their plump necks and plates of food in front of them, they were exultant; not that they were desperate to eat, but it was just so enjoyable to have someone waiting on you while you smoked a cigarette or a water pipe, and it made you feel important.
Did my grandfather bury his face in Juhayna’s breasts, or was he content to touch them? Did he ask her to take off her clothes for him? And was he bowled over by the parts of her which he had only pictured in his mind till then? Or did he just like chatting, and find that affectionate talk, which was sometimes honest too, made him feel masculine?
And what about desire?
I can’t imagine my grandfather doing anything less than planting a kiss on both cheeks, reaching out a hand to the shoulder and the thigh, and then as he touched the breasts, saying, “God bless you! You’re getting very strong and healthy. God bless you!”
Zemzem and Naima were like two lionesses eager to hunt Juhayna down. They were afraid that her stomach would swell up and bring shame on our family, and my grandfather would be forced to marry her. It didn’t seem to occur to them that he might not have any seeds left, as they were certain that the men in the villages didn’t age unless they were ill and approaching death. Zemzem was eager to stay awake till first light to catch them alone together, but I refused to join her, although I was curious, and I deliberately put the idea out of my mind. He must think he’s entitled to his relationship with Juhayna, that it’s fate. If we asked him about it and mentioned her age, he’d probably say that he hadn’t forced her, and she often seemed older than him.
I must admit I stopped bothering about what was going on between my grandfather and Juhayna after a few days. When I saw him looking happy from time to time, I even thought their relationship was a blessing. His cheeks were pink, his hair looked less gray, he was in love again and forgot the pain, for a time at least, although it must be like pincers in his flesh every time he turns his head and sees the orchards.
Until I found myself listening to her, perhaps because it was nighttime, and at night conversations become real. She was in her nightdress, with no gold, no chewing gum or blue hair ribbon. She usually kept the ribbon in to protect her from the evil eye, since her sister—who was veiled—had tried to cut off her hair while she was asleep. To my surprise she seemed innocent, sitting on my bed with her chin propped up on her elbows, and I could see nothing in her face but a young village woman’s naïveté, as she asked me if I had been in love with one of Yasir Arafat’s comrades.
I had no doubt she had brought up this topic in order to talk about my grandfather. But she didn’t talk: she undid the buttons of her nightdress and I wondered what she wanted me to see. Then she peeled off her nightdress and bra while I sat there dumbly, too shocked to react. I saw mauve bruises made by teeth or fingers. My grandfather’s? Her nipples were big, round as moons. I pictured my grandfather’s hands on them, his teeth, and shuddered in disbelief. I looked down at the floor. For the first time I calculated that he must be in his seventies. I didn’t think about why this had happened, but I felt annoyance rather than the sympathy she seemed to want. I was still dumbfounded by what I saw and disconcerted by the fact that I couldn’t imagine what was going on between them. Had I encouraged her without realizing? Had my silence been taken as acquiescence?
It was as if he didn’t care about keeping their relationship secret. As the dark bruises grew larger before my eyes I wondered if he intended to marry her because everything around him had run dry. Marry a girl and become young again, turn a new page and bury you, me, the land, and the past.
I remember Ruhiyya warning me against having Juhayna as a friend because she was scheming to get control of the land, especially if she could give my grandfather a son. As soon as the old man died she’d be off in a fur and diamonds to a famous composer; he’d write a song for her and she’d be a star. She’d progress from tea and cookies to Nescafé and gâteau. “Listen, Asma, my dear,” Ruhiyya had admonished me, “everyone wants something from someone else. The ant wants a grain of wheat. The wheat wants the soil. Why they want it isn’t important. It’s what they want that matters. I wanted my husband to love me without being out of his head. He wanted drink. Death wanted him. It’s not easy to figure out!”
I looked hard at Juhayna. Was she being extremely clever when she chose my grandfather? Whatever the reason, in choosing him she was merely choosing the past, which had proved its authenticity compared to the bearded leaders, the conflicting voices, the clash of arms.
Juhayna sighed as if she understood my silence. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. If I left your grandfather, I swear he’d die.”
Then she was silent in spite of herself, for there was eloquence in her silence too. She fastened her bra and put her nightdress back on. How had it happened? My grandfather seemed like a sick child with you, looking at you with a lost, tearful expression, his eyes begging, “Please God I die in your arms.”
You put hot vinegar poultices on his head to try to bring his temperature down, read to him from your book of prayers, and invoked the great leaders of the faith one by one. Did he make dark bruises on your body, or didn’t he dare? I can’t picture you closing your eyes in shyness or ecstasy when you’re in bed with him. I know how you’re always full of thoughts and feelings, and I’m sure you’ve never abandoned yourself in his arms.
I didn’t know why Juhayna was showing me these bruises or how to respond. Then, suddenly angry at mysel
f for this uncertainty, I was you in a flash, answering her with practiced hypocrisy, “You’re young. He’s old enough to be your grandfather. Don’t bother about whether he lives or dies. Think of your own situation. You’re the important one.”
“I love him. You won’t believe it but I do. He’s like a little boy. He’s no older than me. He’s not like my grandfather. I love him with all my heart.”
I let my eyes rest on her for a while, on her hair streaked with gold, and wondered why she wanted him. Why she was planning to become mistress of this house and these fields, allow an old man’s hands and false teeth to roam over her body, let his rough vests and underpants rub against her. Or were mine the feelings of people with possessions, while those who had none went through their lives like thirsty travelers blind to everything but the trickle of water they had glimpsed in the distance? What did she expect when she showed me her bruises and talked to me like this? That I would arrange their marriage? She had stuck to me like a shadow before finally telling me her secret. She wanted me to be a witness to her love and give it my blessing. She must have told him that I’d guessed what was between them and yet had done nothing to break it up, and that my failure to say anything meant that they had my agreement. And here she was waiting for a sign from me so that she could tell him that his family had no objection, as if she assumed that you and I were the same person.
I knew she distracted him, a little at least, from brooding about the land. She involved him in all her gossip and this became their own private world, their source of entertainment—how Zemzem looked at her, what you said and whether you were aware of their relationship or not—and in the end this world also became a protective armor for her when she had to confront people’s criticism.
Beirut Blues Page 16