The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor

by Rana Haddad

  Why does she care about such headache-inducing things? Patricia often wondered to herself. I do not understand it. And instead of helping her to grow up into the sort of ladylike society girl that her parents wanted her to be, her obsession with her camera seemed to be worsening Dunya’s tendency to escape from the real world and live in an imaginary one. Instead of spending her spare time shopping for dresses and shoes and looking at herself in a mirror, she only wanted to buy things for her camera. It was as if, from the moment she had found it, the world began to revolve around this silent seeing machine. It became her constant companion.

  Dunya spent all her pocket money in Maurice’s shop. Apart from providing her with black-and-white film rolls and lenses, he also opened her eyes to the powers that lay hidden in black-and-white photography and how to unlock them. The world in black and white might look like it is composed of only two colors, but in truth it is not so. And it can all be explained through a proper understanding of light.

  Over the years Maurice taught Dunya the difference between black and white.

  Black was hidden.

  White was light.

  But without some black and some white, one could not see the shape of things.

  When Maurice developed a set of Dunya’s negatives one day and found portraits of Joseph and Patricia in odd circumstances, he gasped in horror. Dunya had convinced Joseph, who was wearing a suit, to put a large bulb of garlic on his head and she tricked Patricia into wearing her cleaning lady’s rose-studded peasant dress and to stand in front of a tall mirror holding a large eggplant in one of her hands, as if it were a handbag.

  “Why don’t you take normal photos of your family and friends? A bulb of garlic isn’t a hat!” Maurice would advise, “An eggplant is not a bag.”

  “I know Maurice, but I like things to look as if.”

  Maurice often also worried about his protégée, as her approach did not seem purely craftsman-like. She seemed to want to use the camera to recreate the world in the way she wished it to be, or more alarmingly, as she imagined it to be. She didn’t seem afraid of moving things from their proper locations and testing the effects of positioning them in unexpected places. The world as she wanted it to be was upside down; objects, people, and ideas were never where they were meant to be.

  Now that they were well acquainted, Maurice would call Dunya “darling” and she would explain to him her latest idea for a photograph. “Just eyes, with no face, hair, or hat, nor a body. Yes. I love eyes. What do you think, Maurice?”

  Maurice was quite surprised that such a young girl dared to treat him as a peer, to casually call him “Maurice,” as if they were the same age, instead of calling him “Uncle Maurice,” or “Sir,” as all the other children did. “She seems to think everyone is equal. She can’t see the differences between people. She’s only interested in how they might appear in a photograph,” Maurice grumbled to his wife. “She has no concept of social hierarchy.” In Latakia there were strict hierarchies, and the hierarchy of adults and children was very strict. “You shouldn’t encourage her,” Maurice’s wife would tell him. “You have your own children to bring up. Don’t waste your time on other men’s daughters.”

  Maurice told his wife things about Dunya every other day, but he wisely decided not to tell her about the time Dunya asked him to stand on his desk with a cup of coffee in his hand and to act as if that were normal, while she took a few shots of him. When a customer passed by, Maurice blushed, his coffee cup fell down and stained his new year’s diary, and his blood pressure shot up to a dangerous degree.

  Dunya often talked to Maurice about things she wouldn’t have dreamed of discussing with her school friends, because she knew those things would only have bored them to tears. “You’re such a dreamer!” he would tell her. But he enjoyed listening to her talking about things he secretly found quite intriguing and which busy and reality-bound adults in his social circle were too self-important and self-obsessed to have time for. Also, if they dared to talk about such things in Latakia they would have lost all respectability. In this town it was important to be regarded as someone whose feet were firmly planted on the ground.

  “Don’t you think taking photos is a little like fishing, you never know what kind of fish will turn up?” she asked.

  As Dunya talked Maurice looked at her smiling, thinking to himself, What kind of girl is this? And then he told her, “I hope you’re not going to become an artist. There’s no bread in that. And you’ll only suffer. Look at Van Gogh.”

  Dunya nodded. She had never heard of Van Gogh. The word ‘Gogh’ sounded exactly like the word ‘plum’ in Arabic, which made that sentence sound stranger to Dunya than it was.

  “He cut one of his own ears off, you know, and posted it in an envelope!”

  Dunya didn’t understand.

  5

  The Truth About Love

  The Carmelite School for Girls, like every other school in Syria, was plastered with posters of Hero-President Hafez al-Assad, whose mustachioed face was used to ornament school notebooks, various textbooks, and the almost worthless lira coins. In the beginning, and to Patricia’s silent horror, Dunya became a child victim of brainwashing by the state, swallowing whole the hero worship of President al-Assad, whom she idolized as if he were a pop star. Her political naivety was only matched by her budding religious faith, a faith that had been drummed into her by a cast of nun-trained religious education teachers. “Those who haven’t been baptized will surely go to hell.” Their teacher used to break this good news to them, while waving a stick in the air.

  The Carmelite school had a separate religious education class for Muslim children, so that they could be spared the bad news. Christian children were often taught by fat women in black dresses (widows), while Muslims tended to have male teachers with strangely unfashionable brown suits and a mystical look in their eyes. They often wore silver wedding rings that were rumored to be a sign of membership of the Muslim Brotherhood—a secret and dangerous underground movement whose members promoted the growing of full beards rather than mustaches. They told their students in hushed voices that their non-Muhammad-loving friends were “infidels.” And even though both groups believed everything their teachers told them while in the classroom, they forgot all about it and played together later, hiding the terrible truths they learned from one another.

  In those early years, Dunya and most of her friends not only idolized and had blind faith in President Hafez al-

  Assad, but they also blindly believed in Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad, and miracles.

  “Faith is everything. Faith can move mountains,” Maria Ghazi once tried to explain to Dunya. Maria was an especially religious child who tended to obsess about God, Jesus, and Mary even during history lessons. “Ask God for something and he will give it to you. But you need to have real faith, you must believe it will happen, otherwise it won’t. He can read your mind so you mustn’t just pretend. . . . You must really feel it,” she whispered to Dunya.

  “So if I ask him to send me an object, would that materialize in front of me here in the room . . . right now?” Dunya asked.

  “Of course. Ask him for an apple, for instance—just to test him—and you’ll see.”

  “Apple. Apple. God Almighty, send me an apple,” Dunya mumbled and then waited. “Nothing’s happening,” she said.

  “Do you one hundred percent believe that God will send you the apple?” Maria asked Dunya. “Try to really feel it, believe it, here, here.”

  She pointed at her own heart.

  And sure enough, as soon as Dunya began to convince herself of the possibility that God would soon send her an apple, a huge red apple landed in her lap.

  When the rather plump Madame Georgette saw Maria take an apple from a bag hidden under the table and throw it onto Dunya’s lap, she came over with her long metal-centered cane and caned the two girls in front of a placid audience of pupils.

  “I will ring your father if you carry on like this,�
�� Madame Georgette said with a mouth full of rice as Dunya was going out for lunch break. Madame Georgette often brought to school a Tupperware container full of stuffed zucchini, which she would eat angrily because she thought that children shouldn’t be allowed such long lunch breaks.

  Although the Carmelite School for Girls was supposed to be mainly for girls, boys were allowed to attend it until the age of eleven. After that it was considered that friendship between girls and boys was impossible and so the boys were swiftly packed off to a private boys’ school called Kileye, where most of their fathers had also been indoctrinated in the arts of Syrian manhood and the highly evolved sciences of patriarchy.

  It was around that time that Maria Ghazi’s half blind grandmother Anaïs invited Maria and Dunya over for one of her regular preaching sessions and announced the following:

  “I want to explain to you the truth about boys. It is a universal truth and whatever anyone else tells you, don’t believe them! Listen to me carefully and etch these words in your brains. One day, you might accidentally look at a boy and he will smile at you; if you happen to be stupid enough to smile back at him, he will think that you love him. Boys are arrogant and vain. The boy will then begin to send you letters and slowly try to make you think you are in love with him. Don’t ever believe him! Never look a boy in the eyes, and never smile at him, never ever. This is essential advice, my girls. Looking a boy in the eyes is always the beginning of a calamity. If you look at random boys and let yourselves be tricked, the most terrible things will happen. You will become a laughing stock. Even the boy himself will laugh at you and tell all his friends about how he caught you in his trap. Boys like that usually write letters to a number of girls all at once, to see which one will answer. These are not letters, they’re bait. Boys are hunters and you’re their prey.”

  “But don’t boys fall in love too?”

  “Sometimes they do, but most of the time they’re lying. Don’t ever believe a boy.”

  “What about granddad? How did you fall in love with granddad?” Maria asked.

  “Fall in love? What are you talking about? Marriage is not about falling in love, my child. A sensible girl does not look for such things. No good marriage has ever been built on falling in love.”

  Although most of the boys who went to the Kiliye were from ‘good families’ that were well known and had been established in Latakia over many generations, only some of them were Christian, and it was only from that rather restricted pool of Christian boys that girls like Dunya and Maria would be allowed to choose a husband. And even if they couldn’t give up the idea of love or didn’t miraculously fall in love with one of these endangered species of boys, they would one day nevertheless be expected to marry one.

  Despite his years in England, Joseph was as traditional and conservative as any other father in Syria. When he began to notice that Dunya was beginning to look at boys and be looked at, he wished he could hide her in a cupboard and let her out of the house only with armed protection.

  One day, the greengrocer Kamil had the cheek to say to him, with a pained look in his eyes, “I’ve seen your daughter out with a boy called Malek, the son of a fisherman. And they were holding hands Dr. Noor, and he tells people she’s his fiancée. . . .”

  Dr. Noor felt a sense of deep shock and fear but pretended he didn’t take Kamil seriously. Kamil the grocer didn’t stop at that, however. He frowned and tut-tutted and added, “What will people think? And who will want to marry your daughter in the future, if she is seen with a boy like that? Also, she still wears shorts, Dr. Noor. Most girls stop wearing shorts by the time they’re ten. She’s almost a young lady now. She shouldn’t be exposing so much leg. Maybe her mother thinks we’re in England, but we’re not, Dr. Noor.”

  If a lowly shopkeeper like Kamil thought it fit to be giving Dr. Noor advice on how to bring up his daughter, then things were really getting out of hand. And Dunya was not yet twelve.

  That afternoon, Joseph sent one of his more stocky male nurses to Malek’s house to slap him once or twice on the face and tell him to keep his filthy, fishy hands off Dunya. “Who do you think you are?” the nurse demanded, after he slapped Malek a third time and threatened to report him to the police if he saw him with Dunya again. “Boys like you should be whipped. Next time I will have you whipped, do you hear me?”

  For many weeks after that incident Dunya was grounded, her bedroom was searched for love letters and photographs, any traces of the dangerous arsenal that boys used in their campaigns to ensnare unsuspecting girls. Dunya insisted that she was not, and never had been, in love with Malek, but no one believed her.

  Dunya had met Malek when she was trying to understand the truth about love. Granny Anaïs’ version did not ring true to her. Instead of avoiding love, she wanted to discover exactly what it was and why everyone was so scared of it; why was it seen as such a dangerous and dark force that must be combatted at all cost?

  And so, in addition to her interest in her camera, the only other thing that captured Dunya’s heart in those early years was the idea of love. She thought about it and read about it, and she talked about it with Maria over and over again. They secretly read love poetry to one another to try and discover the truth. Dunya could not believe that the people who had written these poems, many of whom were men, were lying.

  They had both heard that when love occurred, the object of one’s love would begin to sparkle and then he would look as if he were bathed in light. It was then that a girl’s heartbeats would accelerate and she would soon feel as if she had grown a pair of wings.

  On the day Dunya met Malek, she had seen him looking at her with his dark eyes that were framed by his long, dark eyelashes. She looked back at him and smiled. Then she waited to see if anything would happen. Would she? Wouldn’t she? Did she? Didn’t she?

  In her intensive researches about love, Dunya had come to the conclusion that what Granny Anaïs had said was partly true, that looking at boys and being looked at was the first and most guaranteed way to fall in love. But she also discovered something new that no one had ever revealed to her or to Maria before, which was that real love, the most intense and life-altering variety, was the sort where one loved a boy and was loved by him at first sight—without words having been spoken or letters received or exchanged. Love at first sight was produced when twin souls happened to look into each other’s eyes.

  But instead of experiencing the pain and pleasure of falling in love when she saw Malek, Dunya caused a scandal. And from then on, society women always talked about her and her fisher-boy lover—which was not a good reputation to acquire at such an early age. Falling in love with any boy was seen as a tremendous criminal offense in those days, but to fall in love with a fisherman’s son—that was beyond anyone’s understanding.

  6

  The Dangers of Nodding

  Patricia knew that her daughter would never be able to follow these restrictive rules of love and she dreaded the prospect of having to keep an eye on Dunya in a city where most men were regarded as forbidden fruit. She was still convinced, however, that Joseph was bound to realize that there was no future for Dunya here. “Latakia is so backward that it doesn’t even have its own supermarket, for God’s sake!” she often scolded him.

  Well, apart from Rafi’s Supermarket, which was more of a corner shop and whose only claim to the status of a supermarket was that it had a cash register—something unheard of in other shops. It was the only place in the whole length and breadth of Latakia that sold quite a few illegal foreign foods, such as English baked beans, Italian mortadella, Chinese canned meats, French mayonnaise, Australian bacon, French La Vache Qui Rit (or Laughing Cow) cheese, the more serious Kiri cheese, and baking powder made in the United States, all of which had to be especially smuggled in from Lebanon. Rafi’s shop had a decidedly foreign air, which was enough to glamorize it into a ‘super’ existence.

  Rafi had also begun to make a name for himself as an unofficial real estate agent, as
there were no real estate agencies in Latakia during that period.

  “If we decide to move back to England, Rafi, do you think you could sell our house for us?” Patricia asked him.

  “Are you going back to England, Madame?” Rafi asked with awe. The idea of a country like England filled him with admiration; he had heard it was full of huge, nay, gigantic supermarkets that were so enormous one could drive a car through their aisles. He also heard that instead of being served, customers in England were trusted to pick whatever items or products that took their fancy with their own hands and pile them up in large metal carts. An army of uniformed staff (wearing name badges and hats) were employed to refill shelves and operate cash registers. Oh, England, England! England was so high-tech and civilized. It was a veritable Vatican for devotees of supermarkets. (Rafi was Armenian and also a devout Catholic.)

  Patricia nodded smugly.

  Rafi was impressed. What an honor it was for him to be speaking to a real English woman and one who looked like such a lady. Just looking at Patricia reminded him of the glamour of cinema, the beauty of blond hair, compared to the ugliness around him.

  “We won’t sell for less than one million lira. Do you know people who might be interested when the time comes?” Patricia said with her heavily accented Arabic. Rafi wished his wife was English too and that she spoke Arabic with such a seductive accent. No house had ever been worth a million Syrian Lira at that point in history. Patricia was so posh that Rafi wondered whether he should bow to her.