The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor

by Rana Haddad

“You say that because you’re a snob. You think the only worthwhile place on earth is England. You English are so cold, your judgments can’t be trusted.”

  Latakia had many problems as a town: it was full of unpainted buildings with television aerials sticking out of them like unkempt hair, its streets were half-finished, and its trees were painted white up to the top of their trunks, to deter cockroaches from traveling up and devouring the leaves and likely fruits of the season.

  Despite its many glaring defects Latakia seemed to exert a strange influence on its inhabitants, most of whom developed feelings for it that could only be described as romantic. Most dyed-in-the-wool Latakians often thought of their city as a beautiful girl. Her official moniker was ‘Bride of the Sea.’

  Patricia thought that this might be a psychological condition, brought on by a mixture of heat and totalitarianism, as Syria was a superstar police state, and Latakia—which was the apple of President Hafez al-Assad’s eye—because he was born in a village nearby—had fast become a satellite beach resort of neo-Stalinism. It had an array of Russian ships regularly patrolling its harbor and pictures of the heartthrob president pasted on every surface imaginable, from car windows to school classrooms. In one such picture, his head replaced a pearl inside an open shell; he smiled beatifically. Everybody’s heart had to beat for one person: Mr. al-Assad. Everyone insisted that they were ready to sacrifice their lives for his beautiful eyes or for his alluring mustache.

  Anything less than that was considered political treason.

  Joseph couldn’t understand why Patricia didn’t fall for Syria’s charms, or why she was constantly pining for the abnormally green grass of England, because like most Syrians he believed that his country was the best country on earth, that they had the best trees, the best food, the best mountains, and the best sea.

  Latakia seemed to generate a syndrome in some of its inhabitants generally known as Superiority Syndrome, and otherwise known as a Superiority Complex. Not only, as general opinion had it, did ancient Latakians (in nearby Ugarit) invent and give birth to the alphabet as we know it (A, B, C, D)but the genius Arabs had also given the world algebra, and the mystical non-number zero—as well as three world religions. They had given the world God himself.

  Latakia was born lucky, at least four thousand years ago, and had survived seven earthquakes in the interim, as well as many natural, social, and political disasters—so people assumed it was an immortal city. They also assumed that whatever disasters might befall her at present, she would inevitably rise again like the phoenix and take the world by storm. Superiority Syndrome reigned supreme.

  Patricia never understood all of this and never forgave Syrians, and particularly Latakians, for being so pleased with their past achievements that they ignored their present failings to a point that, in any European city, would be regarded as criminal neglect.

  But despite her barely hidden scorn and because of her striking looks and blond hair, Patricia became an instant hit in Latakia and was treated like visiting royalty from the moment she set foot in the city; all of Joseph’s friends were green with envy.

  Although she enjoyed the attention at first, Patricia soon fell into a deep state of depression, because, apart from socializing and gossiping, there was nothing for a woman of her social status to do. Even going shopping was considered too low class for her and could cause a major scandal, which would destroy Joseph Noor and his entire family’s carefully guarded reputation in a matter of seconds.

  Moments after her mother-in-law Marrouma saw Patricia going into a butcher’s shop one morning wearing a slightly flimsy summer dress, Joseph received a hysterical phone call. “How can you let your wife go and mix with all the lowlifes? Why is she shopping in the first place? Can’t Dr. Joseph Noor send a boy to buy his wife’s groceries for her? And if you saw what she was wearing your heart would’ve exploded! She even smiled at the butcher and chatted with him as if he were her long-lost friend. What will people say, Joseph?”

  It only took Patricia a few months of residence in Latakia to grow to reciprocate her mother-in-law’s open hostility. From Marrouma’s point of view, Patricia was “Not From Here,” and she didn’t deserve the most handsome young man in Syria. A man not just intellectual and kind, but who also possessed blue eyes. “Where she comes from, most men have blue eyes and she could have had her pick,” she often said. Marrouma regarded Patricia as a cunning son-thief skilfully disguised as an elegant and beautiful woman, who was as foreign as the French but, in fact, English. Altogether she must be a thief, because it was a commonly acknowledged fact that “all the colonials did was to rob our country dry”—even when it came to husbands.

  Despite the relentless negative publicity campaign orchestrated against Patricia by her mother-in-law, almost everyone in Latakia fell head over heels for her. She became an instant celebrity; their token blonde woman, their local fashion icon, and a reminder of the outside world, which most people had never been to but had watched with fascination and awe on cinema and television screens.

  Poor Marrouma swiftly turned into an archetypally evil mother-in-law, while Patricia’s popularity only served to fan the flames of her hatred.

  3

  Mustache Power

  Dunya’s curly hair, which she inherited from her father Joseph, flew up in small circles, defying the laws of fashion and gravity. This was not a good look to have for a girl in Latakia.

  And, as if to make things worse, Dunya was also born with what was generally considered a big mouth—also regarded as a major handicap for a girl in Latakia. Instead of learning how to say the right thing at the right time, she seemed to relish saying the very opposite of what was expected.

  She had another strange quality, which in Latakia was considered unbecoming and even dangerous for a girl: curiosity. She liked to look at things—almost anything—as if she thought that the more she looked at it, the more an object or a person would reveal their mystery to her. She appeared to see mysteries in things that were commonly believed to have none. On the whole, it was agreed that it was as if she were not really the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Noor. She was neither sufficiently Patricia-like nor Joseph-like, nor a gratifying combination of the two.

  Granny Marrouma, who was increasingly exasperated at Joseph’s continued adulation of his wife and his refusal to publicly acknowledge that he had made a mistake in marrying an English woman, revenged herself against him by also persecuting Dunya—whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t get your mother’s blond hair, although it does make her look a little unintelligent. Still, it helped her catch a husband, didn’t it?” Marrouma would mutter while Dunya sat on her lap. Then she would play with Dunya’s hair as if it were a weird shrub and say plaintively, “Such curls don’t suit girls. I wonder who will ever marry you when you grow up. And, what’s more, you’re neither this nor that, you’re a mongrel!”

  Patricia would try to protect her daughter. “Madame Marrouma, stop talking to her about husbands, she’s too young for that.”

  “I’m only telling the truth,” Marrouma would insist.

  Things only got worse when it was time for Dunya to go to school.

  When Patricia saw the sort of uniforms that girls were required to wear, she almost fainted. Even in the most exclusive school, the School of the Carmelite Nuns where she was expected to send her daughter, military khakis with black boots and black socks were de rigueur (after the age of eleven). Wearing even brown or dark blue socks was against school regulation and punishable by caning. Wearing yellow or red socks was considered a sign of open mutiny and could lead to serious disciplinary action. Short nails were compulsory and no jewelery allowed, apart from the plainest earrings, which were to be affixed to some girls’ ears within hours of their birth (as a mark of their gender), and always in the color blue, which it was rumored had the power to avert the dangerous influence of the evil eye—a curse mechanism believed to be widespread in Syria and caus
ed by excessive envy.

  When Patricia heard that her soon to be Syrian-educated daughter would be trained to use a machine gun as part of her future education, all her fears about living away from England were confirmed. “Joseph, I told you this is not a place for our daughter to grow up!”

  Joseph thought his wife was being racist and that she was overreacting to what in fact was nothing more than a show. He believed that this sort of show of patriotism was important in a country that was, technically speaking, at war. Once peace was established, all this totalitarian nonsense and playing with guns would be abandoned; Joseph was willing to be patient.

  Since the late forties, Syria had been at daggers drawn with one of its newly created neighbors, Israel, a country that had not existed since biblical times and whose traumatic rebirth had caused all hell to break loose. The Syrian army kept sending them their tanks, which always came back battered, but always claiming victory. What kind of victory it was, no one dared to ask.

  “It’s your fault anyway. You British,” Joseph often told his wife. “You gave it to them and it wasn’t yours to give!”

  “Yes, darling. Everything is always our fault. We are always apologizing, darling. We are always so very sorry.”

  Joseph wished that he hadn’t fallen in love with an offspring of the colonials, but he couldn’t help it. And now it was too late. Marriage, he mused, was an eternal knot. Patricia became increasingly unhappy at living in what she saw not only as one of the least known cities on Earth, but also possibly the ugliest one! She was unable to accept her fate as a citizen of Latakia and considered herself a reluctant visitor who was always about to leave. But despite her regular attempts, Patricia miserably failed to convince her husband that it was time for them to abandon his patriotic experiment and move back to England. So she spent most of her spare time crying and crying. Sometimes Patricia contemplated running away, though she was afraid that if she took that route (which would involve kidnapping Dunya as in Syrian law the father always keeps the children), she might inadvertently kill Joseph—because of his volatile heart. Joseph’s illness gave him the power of veto: it was, as ever, the ace up his sleeve.

  At other times Patricia tried to use Joseph’s heart as an excuse for immigrating back to England, where the health care was vastly superior. “You can’t operate on yourself, can you? Who can you trust in Latakia to operate on you? Are you telling me you’re prepared to die for love of your country?” But Joseph was stubborn as a goat, and his answer was always, “Yes, I am.”

  When Patricia finally understood that she would have to spend the rest of her life in Syria, she went to the hairdresser Shahira and asked to have her hair dyed black. This was not only a public display of depression at discovering the truth of her dark fate; she also did it because she had become sick of being stared at. Her blondeness had turned her into a local sex symbol; a status that was inappropriate for the mother of a young child, she thought. She also did it to upset Joseph, of course.

  The hairdresser, who loved Patricia’s hair and felt lucky to be honored with the task of trimming it, shed a tear while she was applying the chemical dye and refused to take payment.

  “You’re not the woman I married,” Joseph said. “You look like everyone else’s wives now.” Patricia’s physical transformation came to him like a stab: sharp, deadly, and straight where it hurt (his ego).

  That was when Patricia started her long vigil of mourning for her own life. (Although her black hair did not last for more than a season.)

  What Patricia had failed to appreciate was that Syria was in the throes of a rather interesting revolutionary experiment: a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was something that sounded so novel at the time that most well-meaning people didn’t immediately run a mile. On the contrary, it actually motivated some men, like Joseph, to return home instead of living abroad. The man who had started it all was Mr. Hafez al-Assad (whose name happened to mean the ‘Protector Lion’) and he had called it ‘Demoqratiya al-Shaabiya,’ meaning ‘Democracy of the People.’ Patricia was not unimpressed by Hafez al-Assad to start with. Women loved him because he was considered good looking (the usual) and men admired him because he used to be a pilot and because it was rumored that he cried when he was forced to kill one of his two rivals during the ascent to power. Three men had undertaken to rule the land. That was clearly impossible. Assad promised a golden age but instead he promptly turned his own country into a cage. A huge number of people were sent to jail either for thinking, saying, or doing the ‘wrong’ thing. He took most of the land and the factories from a handful of Sunni and Greek Orthodox men and redistributed them to the people. This happened on March 8, 1970.

  As the number eight in Arabic looks like a Syrian mustache:

  Ever since that day, having a mustache of that sort was considered a patriotic gesture.

  Joseph came back to Syria because he wanted to see his country progress and to give a helping hand. Why not? What is patriotism for, if not for men with mustaches to help one another? Joseph didn’t dare to grow any type of mustache, however, because Patricia forbade him to.

  A Syrian mustache was one of the highest male expressions of patriotism, a gesture where both mind and body were united.

  The men in mustaches did a lot of good. First of all they changed the law and gave women greater equality with men (in theory, at least, more than that would be indecent). There was a mushrooming of free education for all and free hospitals (where rats could run freely). The countryside was to be electrically empowered and water, water everywhere, though (often) not a drop to drink. And this was all thanks to the Euphrates Dam project, which made damn sure that Syria’s biggest river was turned into a god again—becoming the source of most electrical enlightenment.

  The reason that the Democracy of the People traumatized Patricia so much was because it was nothing more than a euphemism, and soon the dreams of the masses turned into a nightmare as bad and grim as what had transpired before them; as bad and grim as the four hundred years of Ottoman rule by bamboo stick and feudal rule by the boot, followed by colonialism, when Syria was flooded with French nuns and priests, who prayed loudly and preached, while French colonels stole all the tobacco that grew on Syria’s shores and shipped it to Paris. The French had found it hard to leave Syria because they loved hummus far too much and got a taste for a dish called kibbeh, as well as kebab, but the Syrians convinced them to leave in the end using a world-renowned, much-tested traditional method: the barrel of the gun.

  After hordes of Phoenicians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Caledonians, Romans, Byzantines, Muhammedans, Ottomans, the feudal lords, and the French, Hafez al-Assad’s Baath Party and its band of mustachioed young men decided that it was time for them to rule Syria. And it was then that the rule by mustache officially began.

  Since then only a man with a mustache born in the vicinity of Kurdaha (a tiny Alawite village near Latakia) was allowed to have any sort of political power. Hafez al-Assad was born in Kurdaha and because his brothers and cousins were also born there, many of the uncouth and streetwise toughs of Kurdaha swiftly rose to the highest echelons of government and ruled Syria Mafia-style.

  The barrel of the gun was still as popular as ever.

  4

  First Love

  When Dunya fell in love for the first time, the object of her undying love and affection raised many eyebrows. It had never been heard of before nor considered possible that an eight-year-old girl could fall in love with a camera. It just wasn’t normal. She’d been absent-mindedly walking with her mother when she glimpsed the window display of the only photography shop in Latakia, Studio Maurice. Dunya froze where she stood, forcing the bewildered Patricia to stop, too. She looked at the black metallic machines that lay demurely there—wasting away—and settled her gaze on an antique-looking Kodak camera.

  The shop owner Maurice warned her that it was an old-fashioned model and that one couldn’t use it for taking quick snaps, but promised her that if she boug
ht it he would teach her its secrets. Buying this particular type of camera, he said to her, was like buying an oud, but instead of playing with musical notes, one needed to learn how to play

  with light.

  “It is a box of light, a machine that can see. If you buy it, I promise to teach you its secrets,” he told her. And so, photographer Maurice explained to Dunya how her camera was no ordinary camera but an instrument—of light.

  No child—let alone a girl—had ever bought a camera of that type since Maurice opened his shop, during the years of the French mandate, in 1943.

  *

  Patricia was happy that Dunya wanted to own something useful instead of merely another toy; it was proof that her daughter was finally growing up. But when she noticed that Dunya was developing an unhealthy attachment to her camera, that she even went to bed with it, she changed her mind.

  From behind a crack in the door Patricia would observe Dunya pointing her camera at the night sky. She would point it at the air sometimes, sometimes at the wind. Instead of sleeping as she had been ordered to do, she would spend endless hours taking photographs of what seemed to Patricia to be nothing in particular.

  In the end, Dunya confessed to her mother that she was trying to take a photograph of the moon, but that each time she tried to do so, the pale white circle of his face did not appear in her print.

  “Who cares?” Patricia said to her daughter. “What is the point? Why don’t you take photographs of me and of your father and your friends? Who cares about the moon? It is famously difficult to take a photograph of the moon, isn’t it? You must start with something easier.”

  “I want to start with what’s most difficult and then everything else will be easy,” Dunya said. “You’ll see.”

  Patricia noticed over time that Dunya seemed to be using her camera not only to take photographs of something as impossible as the face of the moon, but of many other impossible, even invisible, things. She seemed to be using her camera in a way that Patricia had not encountered before. She used it the way a scientist might use a telescope or a microscope, to discover and dissect things, as an instrument of curiosity, to document and prove and illustrate her eccentric ideas and illogical perceptions. Patricia was also concerned that playing with any type of mechanical object was not something that a girl should take too much to heart, particularly not a machine that made her look. Patricia believed that it was boys who looked, while girls should be looked at. A girl who looked was a contradiction in terms.