The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor

by Rana Haddad

  “I will find out for you, Madame Noor. Leave it to me, I will find you someone. Perhaps a princess from the Gulf will be able to afford it. I’ll spread the word.”

  “Keep the matter under wraps, Rafi. Would you consider it too English of me to ask you to sign a confidentiality agreement? I don’t want my husband to hear of this yet.”

  Rafi looked at Patricia and smiled. He plucked a hair off his mustache and handed it to her. “This is my confidentiality agreement; a man’s word is his honor.”

  Patricia quietly put the valuable mustache hair in a safe pocket in her handbag.

  The next day Rafi inspected Mr. and Mrs Noor’s penthouse apartment, while taking notes. “Ahem,” he said. This looked like the sort of home people in Latakia only saw on TV. It was full of exquisite velvet curtains, expensive blue Chinese porcelain, rosewood statues, and the scent of freshly cut flowers. Rafi had often heard rumors about how it was strangely arranged on two floors, something unheard of in Latakia, and today he saw with his own eyes that this was true. He whistled in admiration.

  There was no other apartment or house in the city of Latakia with an indoor staircase, with the bedrooms, en-suite bathrooms, and a second lounge upstairs. It was on the seventh floor but also on the sixth floor. That was quite a selling point. The views of the harbor from so high up were breathtaking, though this also had its drawbacks in Latakia, where the electricity supply was very erratic and visitors were often too scared to take the elevator and preferred to walk up the dark staircase. But Rafi was not going to mention this in his report.

  Almost every wall in the Noors’ home was covered with mirrors; hundreds of mirrors of the sort and type Rafi had never seen before, the sort one might find in royal palaces or international museums. He had heard once that Patricia Noor was responsible for at least ten percent of all antique mirror sales in the Republic of Syria and some people had claimed that she was a mirror addict. Yes, they said, Patricia liked to sneak glimpses at herself as she walked around her apartment, to keep an eye on her most important assets (and who wouldn’t if they looked like that?). But there was another, deeper truth—that some of her female friends had gleaned from her and gossiped about—which was that Patricia needed the mirrors to survive. Living in a foreign city Patricia was afraid she would one day forget who she was, were she not to constantly remind herself by looking in the mirror.

  Rafi’s heart bled for Patricia. How could a woman like her live in a city like ours? he thought. It must be love, he realized, she must really love Joseph.

  By the time Dunya had reached the delicate age of thirteen things had begun to change. The school uniform was now basically a miniature military outfit, complete with shoes, epaulets, and military cap. A new class appeared on the curriculum: the Youth Military Education class, every Wednesday afternoon, taught by Miss Huda, a twenty-two-year old despot with scary contacts in the Baath Party and extra-black kohl that she used to enhance her terror-inducing eyes.

  Miss Huda came in one day and told her pupils they had to go on a demonstration the next day whether they were ill, feverish, or had broken bones, whether their mothers had collectively died or their houses were on fire, or else! Dunya decided then and there that she wasn’t going to go. It was not the first time this kind of threat had been made and Dunya always joined in the compulsory ‘voluntary’ marches. She and everyone at the school would stand passively in the playground without daring to utter a syllable.

  While one could hear a pin drop, Miss Huda and a band of disturbed-looking assistants would furnish everyone in the school with a placard chock-a-block with angry anti-American and anti-Zionist slogans. Since everyone, including children and teenagers, agreed that Palestine should be liberated and that Palestinians needed to get their homes back, she didn’t understand why they had to be forced to march, or why they were not allowed to write their own placards. The venom, humiliation, and rule by fear were beginning to disturb her. Although she was only just a teenager, living in a politicized country meant that Dunya had often heard the word “freedom,” but when she added two and two together her calculation was that there was zero freedom in Syria. She saw how her generation was being bullied into submission for no reason that she could understand. The buzzwords everywhere were democracy, freedom of speech, and liberation. There were constant claims that the Baath (or Renaissance) Party had finally given those precious gifts to the people of Syria and how everyone was deeply joyous, but it soon dawned on Dunya that this was just a lie.

  “A lie, a lie, a lie,” she told Maria.

  “Sh, sh, sh,” Maria replied.

  “I won’t go to the demonstration.”

  “You’re just saying that. You can’t not go. Don’t be silly, Dunya.”

  When Dunya fulfilled her promise to Maria and didn’t turn up to the march as she and all the other children had been ordered to do, she did not know that this was going to be the beginning of the end of her life as a Syrian child.

  What really put the nail in the coffin of her short-lived childhood in Syria was her refusal to apologize for her absence, and her refusal to make up an excuse for it. She also categorically refused to accept the harsh punishment of crawling like a caterpillar along the cement playground, and when Miss Huda asked her, “Is this because you are against the Baath Party?”

  Dunya nodded.

  “Yes? Did you say yes? Say it, say it to me to my face, say the word! Are you against our great Baath Party?”

  “Yes,” Dunya said.

  A frozen silence filled the air. Miss Huda’s strange, blow-dried hair seemed to stand on end. She simply couldn’t believe her eyes or ears. No one, no one in the whole length and breadth of the Democratic Republic of Syria in their right mind would dare utter such a blasphemy.

  Miss Huda wanted to slap Dunya across the face and flatten her, as she usually did with pupils whenever an opportunity presented itself, but she decided to restrain herself and to go instead to the local headquarters of the Baath Party to discuss the matter. She and most of her peers at the Party were convinced that if spoiled children like Dunya Noor were allowed to express such dissent, without undergoing public humiliation and punishment, the revolution would lose its authority. It must never be allowed.

  “You will be crucified for this, Dunya Noor. You watch,” Miss Huda said, and walked off in her cheap white heels and her military outfit, which she wore in a figure-hugging style that added a strange, tatty glamour to her generally menacing appearance.

  The next day all of Latakia was breathless to find out whether Dunya Noor would be arrested for nodding in the wrong direction. But Patricia had already packed her and her daughter’s suitcases and taken a taxi all the way to Damascus Airport.

  Dunya walked onto the airplane carrying a small red suitcase, with her old black camera around her neck. She was still not sure what this meant. Why did she have to be flown out of the country because she said that she didn’t like the Baath Party? Is liking something compulsory? Do you have to pretend that you love something you hate in order not to be flown out of the country? Why did the government care so much whether people loved them or not? And why did they feel that they had to resort to the use of force to get this love that they so craved?

  “They all just need a bath,” she said to Patricia in English as the bossy-looking, multilingual stewardess gave her a blanket and a small cushion and perked up her ears to try and catch the gist of the conversation. Many stewardesses doubled up as intelligence agents to earn extra cash, and a tall foreign woman with a quirky, naughty-looking, curly haired Syrian daughter was not an everyday sight on these night flights.

  “I do wish you didn’t have such a big mouth, Dunya. Don’t you understand we are living under a dictatorship? Do you not understand what this means? Keep your voice down, Dunya. If the stewardess hears you, we’ll be flown back in no time!” she whispered anxiously as the Syrian Arab Airways plane buzzed its way across Europe, heading toward the island that was a kingdom and Queen Elizab
eth’s home.

  So, thought Dunya, if one expresses one’s true opinion, one either gets flown out of the country or flown back to it?

  That night Joseph lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. When dawn broke he waited a few hours until it was a decent time to ring Mr. Ghazi, and in a hot-headed moment of fear he agreed to sell him his precious penthouse apartment. Then he packed his suitcase and prepared to escape the country, fearing his career would be tarnished by the revelation that his daughter was an anti-establishment figure. But only a few moments before he left his home the phone rang. It was one of his old clients: an influential Baath Party official whose heart he had rescued from certain explosion a couple of years back.

  “Dr. Noor,” he said. “We know you’re leaving and we know that your daughter and wife have already left. We could’ve stopped them if we’d wanted to and we can stop you too—you must know that—but we didn’t and we won’t. Do you know why?”

  “No,” said Dr. Noor.

  “It is because you saved my life all those years ago. And now it is time for me to save your and your daughter’s life. You don’t have to leave your homeland, Dr. Noor, if you don’t want to. All my colleagues want from you is to make sure that Dunya never ever opens her mouth again. Surely you can control your own daughter?” the official said gently. And then he added, “Also she will have to publicly apologize to Miss Huda in front of the whole school and crawl up and down on her arms and legs across the playground fifty times. This is not much to ask, is it? She’s a lucky girl, Joseph, because she’s your daughter,” the official said.

  “Thank you, my dear brother,” Dr. Noor said. “You are a true friend.”

  Since he had already given his word to his friend Ghazi, there was no way Joseph could ask for his penthouse apartment back and keep his manly honor, so he pretended that he was planning to get rid of it anyway and that he had never had any plans to leave the country. He cancelled his flight to London and within days he’d bought another two glitzy apartments that were built one above the other across the road. He planned to link them up later with an internal staircase, thus reproducing his unique duplex (with extra large balconies), and giving his friend Salman Ghazi another inferiority complex.

  He unpacked his boxes and suitcases in the new apartment and drank some black coffee. That same afternoon, Joseph moved all the family furniture in, with the eager help of Mr. Ghazi and his son George, as well as a bunch of young men who had not yet reached their prime.

  When Patricia arrived at her parents’ house in Surrey, her father Cyril smiled a deep paternal smile. He was too polite to say, “I told you so,” but her mother Sally sighed a loud sigh of relief in celebration of her daughter and granddaughter’s return to the civilized world, where children were allowed to have political opinions without fear of being locked up—a freedom which caused them to lose all interest in politics.

  Patricia’s attempts at luring Joseph back to England failed once again, and, in no time, Joseph managed to convince her to come back to Syria, simply by writing her a postcard:

  Darling Patricia,

  1.I can’t live without you.

  2.You can’t make me choose between you and my country.

  3.I am needed here.

  4.There are millions of doctors in London.

  5.I need to stay.

  6.Come back, my sweetheart.

  After seven weeks of being a mother in England, Patricia booked her flight back to continue her life as a wife in Syria. Both Joseph and Patricia decided that it was safer for Dunya to stay in England, for how could anyone be sure she would not open her mouth and tell the truth again?

  7

  England

  Dunya’s grandmother Sally spent most of her days in the garden where she bred many species of flowers and plants. She loved roses most of all, which she pruned and fed and watered in an elegant Victorian greenhouse.

  After Patricia, her only daughter, abandoned England and her aging and long-suffering parents—all because Joseph said so—Sally consoled herself with Dunya, whom she saw as a new species of rose, one she was going to set about implanting in English soil. Sally noticed how, since Dunya’s arrival in England, her curls were drooping, her eyes were losing the brightness of their light, and she suddenly stopped laughing—almost overnight.

  It was incomprehensible to Sally how her son-in-law Joseph could put his love for his country ahead of his love for his wife and daughter. Even after what had happened to Dunya, he preferred to pretend that it was all her fault rather than face the fact that his country was ruled by a bunch of insecure men who couldn’t handle criticism, even from a little girl. Sally had often wished that Joseph was English, because then, she reasoned, he would’ve been more sensible. It was Joseph’s fault that Dunya, her only granddaughter, was neither English, nor sensible. Sally tried everything to find a method by which to turn Dunya into an English rose, but after countless attempts, she finally realized that it was going to be impossible.

  “Come and sit on the sofa, my darling, next to us,” Sally said to Dunya every time she caught her sitting under a table with her back to the radiator.

  “I’ll knit you a thicker jumper and you’ll never be cold again,” Sally held Dunya in her arms.

  But however many jumpers Dunya wore, she always felt cold in England. Even while sitting next to the fire, she felt cold. Even when it became warm outside, she continued to feel the cold inside. And when she covered her heart with the palm of her hand, she could feel the cold there too.

  “Perhaps if I make you a bowl of porridge, my darling, every morning.” Sally said, “you’ll begin to feel warm.”

  “Perhaps,” Dunya said in the old-fashioned, cut-glass English accent Patricia had taught her.

  “This, my darling, is a spoon for you. I’ve engraved your name on it.” Cyril handed Dunya a beautifully designed silver spoon. “With it you must eat your morning porridge and soon you’ll be as right as rain.”

  Cyril was a keen spoon collector and had a room full of spoons in every shape and size: silver, tin, gold, copper, ladles, teaspoons, Italian spoons, Syrian spoons, French spoons, adult, and baby spoons. Any sort of spoon was of intense interest to him. And he didn’t just collect for the sake of collecting. He collected in order to try and find a pattern, to see something, to understand.

  “Lie down on the carpet, Granddad, I would like to take a photograph of you. We can then post it to Mama, as a souvenir.”

  Cyril lay down on the floor in his study on an old rug. “Why do you like spoons so much, Granddad?” Dunya asked him, arranging his silvery locks of hair in a pattern she found pleasing. She rested a brown bowler hat on his head and made him hold a long black umbrella in his right hand.

  Cyril answered in his textured Queen’s English baritone, while staring dreamily at the ceiling. “I like spoons because they help me understand human nature. Spoons, my dear child, symbolize the modern English, the new spirit of England. We are a Nation of the Spoon!”

  Dunya opened one of Cyril’s glass cabinets and took out one spoon at a time. She positioned them in a strange formation, some like a halo around his bowler hat, others next to his ears and the rest distributed around his outstretched arms. She climbed onto a chair and began to take one photograph after the other of her grandfather Cyril and as she photographed him, Cyril told her about the historical case of Spoon Fixation in Anglo-Saxon societies. “We are obsessed with spoon-bending, spoon-feeding, children born with silver spoons in their mouths, and those who were born with tin spoons. We are plagued by greed, and the need for bigger and better spoons, a national wish to devour and grow. We’re plagued with physical plenty yet the need to gobble more things up. And why? It is to fill the hole in our hearts, my darling, the terrible emptiness!” Cyril said. “England found its head years ago, but in the process it lost its heart. In your country it is the opposite.”

  Only Cyril seemed to understand why it was so difficult for Dunya to be happy in the rational wor
ld of England, where logic ruled and magic had been forgotten, where facts were collected but meaning had been lost, where it was not only tomatoes, roses, trees, grass, but also children that were made to grow too fast, whose dreams and illusions were not allowed to last.

  At school, English teenagers of her age thought of themselves as fully fledged adults and appeared to be fixated on sex, but never mentioned love. The idea of spiritual love, where one becomes besotted with another’s soul through gazing into their eyes, did not make any sense to them, because (they said) it wasn’t scientifically proven. Anything that cannot be proved by science does not exist. When Dunya mentioned “spiritual love” to one of her classmates, a girl whose name was Samantha, the girl wondered whether Dunya had taken to the bottle or was deeply into Ouija boards. When she mentioned the word “soul,” Samantha thought she meant the fish.

  Her school friends’ attention seemed to be focused—laser-beam like—on the intricate and intimate personal lives of the Higher Beings who peopled TV soap operas and the worlds of pop and rock. To someone from a softer and warmer culture like Syria’s it seemed incomprehensible that being hard and ‘rock-like’ was a desirable asset in England and that being ‘cool’ was considered such a must-have quality for social and even romantic success. England’s view of the world was upside down, and the qualities she’d been brought up to cherish were equated here on the British Isles with weakness.

  And so, instead of only worshipping one god (Hafez al-

  Assad, Jesus, or Muhammad), young people here had the option of worshipping a vast array of sex gods, who were invariably either members of the Pop Aristocracy or Soap Luminaries. They also had the option of worshipping themselves. Instead of being pressurized and almost forced to be exactly the same as one another (like in Syria), English teenagers tried instead to find themselves by becoming special, unique, and ‘individual.’ But when Dunya discovered that most of these ‘individuals’ had found their own brand of individuality in a magazine—by slavishly copying one of a hundred or so role model options—her disillusion was complete. Glossy magazines were the manuals that competed like gospels to provide the masses with a guide to that Other Life that everyone craved so badly. The bank manager was the newly ordained priest.