The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor

by Rana Haddad

  Soon, soon he will change his mind, Hilal reassured himself, when he sees how much I love her.

  “Dr. Noor,” Hilal said with a strong but gentle voice, “I know you want a good husband for your daughter. I know you think that I’m not good enough for her. But I love her, Dr. Noor, and she loves me, and it’s not you or I or she who can make such decisions or choose the person we can or cannot love, it’s our hearts that decide. I promise you, Dr. Noor, that I will make Dunya happy. Don’t you want your daughter to be happy?”

  Joseph glared at Dunya and then at Hilal, “Happy?”

  “Yes, Dad, no other man could make me happy except for Hilal, he’s the only One. Can’t you see it?”

  “The only One?” Joseph said with incredulity. “As it happens, no, I don’t see it! What I can see, however, as brightly as the sun is that you two are pathologically naive and idealistic and that your idealism and naiveté are dangerous! You’re deluded and completely out of your minds! And furthermore, you have no manners whatsoever. How, how—could you turn up like this uninvited, knowing that I didn’t want to see you, Mr. Shihab?”

  “Dr. Noor, I thought that . . . well, that—well, I felt that I had no other choice.”

  “Dad, can’t you see how much I love Hilal and how much he loves me? Can’t you see our love? And can’t you see that Hilal isn’t the wolf that you think he is?”

  “A wolf? Oh no, he’s certainly no wolf, he is far, far worse than that, he’s a sheep! And I’m not having my daughter marrying a sheep. Look at his hair!” Joseph pointed at Hilal’s wild black curls. “A black sheep!”

  Joseph tried to pull Dunya away from Hilal by the arm, but Dunya held Hilal’s arm tighter.

  “If you decide to make a spectacle of yourselves and make sure everyone in this city hears of your and Hilal’s love for one another, you will be ruined, do you hear me? Not only will you be ruined, but you will ruin our family’s name! We will all be spectacularly ruined! Promise me you will keep Hilal a secret, promise!” Joseph said.

  “Why should I hide him, Dad? I love him and he loves me.”

  “Because in this city, in this country, in this house the art of keeping secrets is an essential survival tool and a highly prized social skill. The price of failing to suppress the truth is very high, my dear, anything—from social ostracism to prison. Are you prepared to pay this price, Dunya? Well, even if you are, I am not.”

  Joseph stood up and continued: “I’m not against love per se, Dunya, if that is what you think. What you don’t seem to understand is that this type of young man, a man of Hilal’s type. . . . If you knew his type, you wouldn’t be so starry-eyed about him. There are so many stars in your eyes, that what you see is not him, you’re blind. But I’m your father and I can see, I can see the truth.

  “Either,” he turned to Hilal, “either you go home to Aleppo of your own free will within the hour, and leave my daughter alone and have nothing to do with her ever again—or else.” Joseph waved his index finger in the air as if he had the power to cause terrible things to happen.

  Then he walked out of the lounge and slammed the door loudly behind him.

  Tea and biscuits soon arrived and Patricia went to sit on the sofa next to Dunya and held her in her arms. “Oh Dunya, Dunya, you haven’t changed one bit. Not one bit. You still don’t understand, not even the basics. You don’t even possess a basic working knowledge.” Patricia looked at her daughter with mounting anxiety. Ten years in England had not changed her one bit. It was probably the worst place for a girl like her, where eccentricity and freedom of speech were all the rage. There was trouble ahead. Yes, trouble ahead—Patricia could see it clearly, as if she were a psychic.

  “You should learn to conduct your affairs discreetly, darling,” Patricia said to Dunya while looking at Hilal in an ambiguous way.

  “But Hilal is not an affair,” Dunya said, “I’ll never give him up.”

  “You want to kill your father and you want to turn me into a widow, is that it?”

  “Of course I don’t want you to turn into a widow, nor kill my father,” Dunya said.

  “Well then,” Patricia continued on unabated. “Then you must try and be sensible, and Hilal, my son, you must try to encourage Dunya to at least pretend she’s a good daughter while you’re in Latakia. Don’t destroy everything your father has worked for, his name and his reputation, Dunya! Try to understand how he feels. And try also, for a moment, to think how awful it would be for me to live as a lonely widow in this city! Put yourself in my shoes for once, Dunya.”

  “You’ll never become a widow, Mama. Dad will not die just because I introduced him to Hilal.”

  “Won’t he?” Patricia averted her gaze from her daughter in a bid to increase Dunya’s sense of guilt and daughterly compassion.

  Dunya took a sip of her tea and a bite from her biscuit and then went upstairs to find Joseph.

  “So is it true you’re an astronaut?” Patricia asked Hilal while he tried to sip his tea.

  “Astronomer, you mean?”

  “Oh yes, so you look at the stars do you?” Patricia blushed.

  “I do sometimes look at the stars, but mostly at the moon. I’m a moonlight specialist. I study the effect of moonlight on our planet.”

  Although Hilal said this in a matter-of-fact way, Patricia was now really worried: what would Joseph think of him if he heard all this nonsense? Patricia realized that things could only get worse if he agreed to talk to Hilal. Joseph hated men who were too poetic, or radical in their thinking. He loved the down-to-earth, old-fashioned variety who could always be relied on to toe the line and do what they were told. Unlike Dunya and Hilal, who anyone could see were masters of the unexpected and the bold, and stubbornly refused to fit into any mold.

  People like Hilal who didn’t know their place and always wanted to be different, were a thorn in Joseph’s side, and being with a man like that would only exacerbate Dunya’s lack of realism, and would expose her to mortal danger were she to spend any length of time in Syria. But before making up her mind about Hilal, once and for all, Patricia decided to subject him to a little test.

  “I think you’re a wonderful man, Hilal,” she said. “And I can perfectly understand why Dunya loves you. But I must warn you about Dunya. She’s my only daughter, after all—and of course I love her dearly. But she has a flaw, Hilal, which you must be aware of.”

  “What flaw, Mrs. Noor?”

  “Well . . .” Patricia hesitated a little before spilling the beans. “I don’t know how quite to put it to you Hilal, you must’ve noticed it yourself.”

  “No, I haven’t, what is it?” Hilal asked.

  “Well, many years ago Dunya gave her heart to the art of photography. And a girl like that is not the sort of girl most men would consider to be a good future wife. She is different from the usual girls a mother might be looking for for her son. And if you are serious about her, you must take that into consideration and be able to accept it and live with it. She is not going to be a wife, if that is what you’re expecting her to be one day.”

  “But how can that be a flaw, Mrs. Noor? That is precisely why I like her. That’s what I love about her.”

  “You’re still young and you don’t understand these things, my son. A girl who gives her heart to art is a girl who doesn’t have a heart. It’s self-evident. To all intents and purposes you might be nothing more to her than an idea, or at best a dream. Real love between men and women is about much more than what you and Dunya think it is. Love is not just a series of loud heartbeats followed by passionate kissing, nor is it to be found in the exploding sound of thunder and lightning. Love happens after that, when the fireworks are over, when the lights are off, it happens in the dark—that is when you see clearest. When I was young . . . I was delusional too, like you two, and look what happened to me.” Patricia sipped the last bit of her cold tea and then stopped talking, because she could see that Hilal was not listening to her. But in his eyes she saw what she thought was
the twinkle of tears.

  “I was very sorry to hear about your father, Hilal. If there’s any way I can be of help, please let me know. You seem like such a sensitive man.” She took a handkerchief out of her handbag and gave it to Hilal, for she hoped that he’d start crying, and perhaps then she could put her arms around him to console him.

  What a good-looking and charming son-in-law he would have been in another country, or at another time.

  13

  God the Father

  The God Disorder afflicted Syrian fathers in the main—not only Joseph. It struck as predictably as a major type of flu might, a couple of years after a Syrian man’s wife turned into a mother by giving birth to at least one child (a son preferably). The father in question would often start to show symptoms of the disorder as soon as his child(ren) began to display any signs of independent thought or action. Soon enough, the tendency would develop into a full-blown condition where the father in question would become convinced that the proper powers and functions of fathers in a family setting should mirror the powers and functions of God (Version 0.1, Old Testament) with regard to humanity. This implied that their paternal powers included: Judgment, Punishment, Reward, as well as supernatural powers such as Seeing Into the Future (aka Prophecy).

  “Listen, Dunya,” Joseph said the following morning. “I have decided to give you my blessing to go and visit Hilal at his hotel. Why don’t you go and have lunch with him and then invite him over here for dinner. I think I might be ready to talk to him. If it’s true that he’s as wonderful as you and your mother think he is, then perhaps, if you really love him, well, then perhaps I will try to be nice to him. I’m not as hard-hearted as you two think.” Joseph looked at Patricia as if to check whether she was suitably impressed. “There’s no harm in giving a poor young man a chance, is there?”

  “Are you sure, Dad? Oh, Dad!” Dunya went to Joseph and put both her arms around his belly until she nearly suffocated him.

  “I’m not as evil as you thought I was, darling, am I?” Joseph said.

  “I never thought you were, Dad,” Dunya smiled.

  “But nevertheless, try to keep a low profile, don’t forget where we are—that this is not Honolulu.”

  Dunya couldn’t believe her ears. Perhaps Hilal was right after all and her father could be open to persuation.

  Hotel Bride of the Sea was a small two-star hotel perched on the Latakia seafront. It had once been painted yellow, in 1943, and had long, green, French-style wooden shutters, which let in sunlight and moonlight in equal measure but hid hotel customers from the excessively nosy gaze of passersby. Its balcony had unbroken views of the Mediterranean and its long horizon, which was drawn like a line that divided each day from the next like pages in a book.

  As Dunya approached the front of Hotel Bride of the Sea, a 1950s blue Buick taxi stopped next to her and a young woman wearing a pair of high-heeled, pistachio-colored sandals stepped out of it and waved at her.

  Who is she? Dunya wondered to herself.

  The young woman’s brown locks glistened in the sunlight, and as she came nearer to Dunya, Dunya saw her familiar, beautiful, almond-shaped, olive-green eyes, but she still did not know who she was. The young woman began to call out her name: “Dunya, Dunya! Oh my God. Ya Allah, Dunya, Dunya, my darling, habibti!” She put her arms around her and smudged her cheeks with her red lipstick and looked at her with utter delight.

  The young woman’s eyelashes were so long and undulating that they almost looked artificial.

  “Excuse me, but—who are you?” Dunya asked her politely as she extricated herself out of her arms. “How do you know my name?”

  “Who am I?” the young woman said. “How do I know your name? Shame on you! Shame on you, Dunya! I’m Maria. Have you forgotten me?”

  “Maria?” Dunya said. “But you look so different, so grown up! So made-up! I’ve never seen you like this!” Dunya put her arms around Maria again and kissed her on her cheeks. “Maria! Maria!”

  “You haven’t changed in the slightest! The same wild hair, the same dreamy eyes, everything the same! Why didn’t you call me as soon as you arrived, you traitor? My dad told me you weren’t coming until next week.”

  “It’s a . . . long story.”

  “If there’s a story, I must be the first to hear it. Tell me.”

  “Strictly speaking, it must be kept a secret. Can you keep a secret?” Dunya took Maria’s hand in hers and they walked toward the entrance of Hotel Bride of the Sea.

  “What a question?” Maria said. “I could teach a degree-level course in the art of keeping secrets,” Maria said.

  “Well in that case, come with me, my secret spent the night in this hotel. Do you want to meet him?” Dunya pointed at the hotel.

  “Your secret is a man?”

  “He certainly is,” Dunya said.

  “What sort of a man?” Maria looked at the hotel with suspicious eyes. “What sort of man stays in a hotel like this?” Maria looked at the shabby entrance. No self-respecting Latakian or any of their guests would be seen dead in a hotel like this—exclusively frequented by lowlifes, shopkeepers, truckers, and disreputable types.

  “The man I love.”

  “Oh,” Maria answered. “In that case I must meet him. Did you bring him with you from London? Is he English?”

  “Hilal’s originally from Aleppo.”

  “Hilal? From Aleppo?” Maria was taken aback. “I see. How do your father and mother feel about this?”

  “They both like him.”

  “Your father likes him?” Maria said incredulously. “That Joseph is full of surprises, I must say. My father would’ve killed me if I brought home a man like that. I never heard of such a thing. Hilal must be an exceptionally charming young man to be able to have that effect on your father, despite all the other qualities he possesses, such as his name. With a name like that he must surely be a low-class Muslim boy, right? How did you manage that, all the way in London? We all thought you’d come back with an English lord or someone impressive like that.”

  Maria decided to risk her carefully guarded reputation and step inside the disreputable Hotel Bride of the Sea in order to get a sneak preview of Hilal. Of course, she was going to do it discreetly and not mention it to anyone afterward.

  The possession of a secret or two was a necessity for any prim and proper girl with a reputation to uphold in Latakia. But Maria was neither as prim as she pretended to be, nor as proper. Some hardened Latakian gossips had even decided that she was a bit of a rebel because she sometimes smoked while she walked and on occasion had been spotted eating a sandwich on her way home. Eating sandwiches in public was considered vulgar and very unbecoming for a girl like Maria. Some people even thought that she was presumptuous because she’d entered the Miss Latakia Beauty Competition, and that she was vain and probably had corrupt contacts because she’d won it. Girls were both happy and unhappy because she wasn’t married yet. And before her recent highly publicized engagement to Shadi, many young women had been worried sick that she would steal their future husbands and that eligible men might ask for her hand—rather than theirs. It was preposterous. Her hand was in demand. And her prize of twenty pairs of Yves St. Laurent shoes, specially flown in from Paris, was the most irritating thing of all. Her designer-clad feet were now in demand too.

  As she stood inside Hotel Bride of the Sea’s main reception, next to Dunya, Maria half-closed her eyes like a little girl who hopes that if she can’t see what she’s doing then others won’t be able to see it either. “If someone sees us walking into such a trashy hotel,” she whispered in Dunya’s ear, “we’ll be finished.”

  The hotel receptionist Abu Zahra was busy filing his nails at the desk. He looked at Dunya and then at Maria and wondered whether they were a new type of traveling hooker. And if they were, would it not be bad for the reputation of the hotel, whose clientele included a prominent array of single men and sometimes families with high moral standards? This was a good qual
ity hotel. He wanted to keep it that way. He twisted the tips of his mustache. It was the sort of hotel where prominent shopkeepers came in the afternoons to discuss business over a hookah pipe. One didn’t want their wives to get worried.

  “What do you want? Don’t you know that single girls in hotels ring alarm bells!” he announced theatrically. He then put his nail file away and pulled out some worry beads out of his trouser pocket.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Hilal Shihab,” Dunya said. “Could you call him and tell him that Miss Dunya Noor is here?”

  “I would if I could,” the receptionist said, while grimly twisting the tip of his mustache with one hand while rolling his worry beads in the other.

  “Well, why can’t you?” Dunya asked.

  “Because he’s already gone.”

  “Gone where?” Dunya said.

  “Gone with two men who took him off in a Mercedes with darkened windows. One of them carried his suitcase and the other one carried that large instrument he claims is a telescope! And off they went.” The receptionist looked at Dunya with eyes as small and black as peppercorns.

  “So what you’re telling me is that he checked out?”

  “Yes, exactly so.” The receptionist coughed lightly, before producing a slim, green vegetable smile.

  “A Mercedes with black windows?” Maria interrupted.

  This was the sort of car unusually driven by members of the Hizb (the Baath Party) or the Mukhabarat (the secret service).

  “Yes, exactly that sort of vehicle,” the receptionist agreed. “He must be a young man with strong personal connections, a big wasta.” He stared at Maria. What eye makeup that young woman had. It turned his head, slightly. Makeup was made in the factories of Satan, the Lord of Darkness. And her perfume, well, these were the fumes of hell.

  “But Hilal doesn’t have these sorts of connections. Could that car have been a taxi?” Dunya asked.

  The receptionist took an al-Hamra cigarette out of his pocket, and lit it nervously. “Who am I to say?” he said.