by Rana Haddad
At six o’clock that same evening, when Suad’s doorbell rang it was not Hilal who stood at her door, but a girl with a large bush of curly light-brown hair, which framed her surprisingly cheeky face and bright green eyes. She was holding a small suitcase and looked as if she’d been on a long and arduous journey.
“Is Hilal here, Mrs. Shihab?’ she asked.
“No,” Suad said as her eyes fell on a second girl, who she had not noticed at first and who stood right behind the first one—a girl wearing a striking and most familiar yellow dress.
“Suha! Suha!” Suad called out and tried to put her arms around Suha, but Suha took a few steps back.
“I’ve waited for this moment all my life,” Suad said to Suha with a shaking voice. “Oh, to see you in that dress, my beloved darling girl.”
Suha touched Suad’s arm gently as if to comfort her. “Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding. I don’t know you. You sent me this beautiful dress and I wanted to thank you, but who asked you to make it, who gave you my measurements, who paid for it? And what for?”
“No. No. No, it’s not like that, it’s not what you think. Of course you don’t know me but I know you. Oh, Suha, Suha. No one ordered the dress from us, we sent it to you as a gift of love, as a distant embrace, and we hoped you might one day come over and ask us about it. And I waited for you, I waited so long, and then I gave up all hope that you’d
ever come.”
“But if you wanted to talk to me, why didn’t you just come and see me at home? Why send me a dress? Why play such games?” Suha said, and she looked at Suad as if she thought she had lost her marbles.
“I’ll tell you the truth if you come in,” Suad said in a trembling voice.
“What truth?” Suha asked her.
“The truth about you,” Suad said.
Dunya looked at Suad, who was dressed in black from top to toe, and at Suha, whose yellow dress seemed to shimmer and shine in a way that couldn’t be explained, neither by science nor by sense. And despite the differences between Suha and Suad—of age and dress and mood and attitude, it didn’t take her long to guess what the truth was.
The lights were off in Suad’s dark lounge, except for a tiny lamp in the corner. Some streetlight seeped in through the shutters. The floor was tiled with large, old-fashioned black and white tiles and the rest of the room was furnished sparsely, except for two old photographs in delicate wooden frames: one of Said and Suad on their wedding day; and the other of Hilal on his graduation day.
“Is this Hilal?” Suha pointed at Hilal’s photograph with a shaking hand. “He does look like Nijm,” she whispered in Dunya’s ear. She took Dunya’s hand in hers and sat next to her on a small sofa. She seemed afraid of what Suad was about to tell her.
“You were born here, my darling, right here.” Suad pointed with a pale hand to a bedroom on the side of the lounge. “You came five minutes after your brother,” she said.
Suad disclosed to both Suha and Dunya the truth in one long teary monologue without interruption, while Suha continued to hold Dunya’s hand and Dunya dared to look at her only intermittently.
Where is Hilal? Where is Hilal, she kept thinking, and wishing she could run, run, run, run out of this house and out of this city, back to a time before she had found Suha.
The truth about Hilal and Suha was stranger than fiction, and had been covered up with a dark cloak of silence and lies—for reasons few would ever understand.
It was the year 1970, only a few days after the Corrective Movement Revolution which took place on March 8, when the recently wed Mr. and Mrs. Shihab moved into their marital nest and decided to transform it into a professional sewing atelier. The short man who delivered their two new Singer sewing machines said to them, “What an honor it must be for you to be the neighbors of Farida, Aleppo’s most famous prophetess.”
Mr. and Mrs. Shihab had never heard of Farida, but they soon discovered that their famous neighbor wasn’t only a prophetess, but also the wife of Mustafa, the man who owned the soap shop downstairs and whose fragile ego was growing ever more fragile as he began to wake up to the fact that people were now visiting his shop not just to buy his excellent handmade bars of soap but to ask him for appointments to see his wife—thus forcing him to become her secretary.
Farida was celebrity number one in the mad souk of Aleppo. She was something like a grand mufti or even a pope in terms of her importance there. She told fortunes. Will you make a fortune? Will your child be fortunate? Or will your daughter have an unfortunate marriage? Who will marry and who will not, who will sinfully remarry or be unfaithful, who will have multiple wives or lives? Who will live and who will die?
In a country like Syria where there were so many secrets and where people lived in fear of the future and of the past, of what was hidden behind closed doors and round the corner, people could not live without professional secret-
decoders. They were either the religious imams, who so often misguided people, or vagabonds and clairvoyants who always claimed to know the truth and to be able to read it either in coffee cups, the palms of hands, crystals, or by looking at people’s auras. It was a very rare person in those days who had the courage to look for the truth in their own hearts. One of these rare people was Said, an unusual young man who found a tree leaf more interesting than the daily news of war and trade and who was a vehement non-believer in various subjects including the three official versions of God. To him bread was more important than God and love was more important than bread. Said knew that by only thinking this, he was joining a long line of heretics. The independent pursuit of truth had always been regarded as the ultimate act of arrogance and effrontery throughout every century, the most terrible profanity and the source of all blasphemy, the Original Sin committed by Adam at the instigation of Eve.
Suad and Said saw with their own eyes how people came to see their neighbor Farida from far and wide, but they were never tempted to join the queue. But over time Suad fell into a neighborly friendship with Farida, whom she soon discovered was an excellent cook. Farida, who was twice her age, taught Suad many of her traditional recipes, including her prized okra and lamb stew, and treated her like a daughter.
“You are pregnant, aren’t you, my dear?” Farida asked Suad one day while they were chopping fresh parsley leaves together.
“No, I’m not,” Suad said.
“Go and visit a doctor. I tell you, you are two months pregnant. I can see the beautiful soul entering your body; it’s the soul of a poet. But perhaps it is two souls, possibly two poets. I will need to look into it further.”
After a thorough medical investigation by the local doctor, Farida was proved right: Suad was indeed exactly two months pregnant.
The next day both Suad and Said gave in to their curiosity and requested a consultation with Farida in her professional capacity as a coffee-cup reader.
A round copper table with calligraphic religious text engraved on it, declaring God is the Greatest, carried a stack of letters and testimonials from all over the country sent in praise of Farida’s unusual powers.
Said saw Farida’s heavily mascaraed, big, black eyes and felt a tremor of fear. Why are we doing this? he wondered to himself.
A boy called Abdu came in holding an aluminum coffee jug. Silently and with much ceremony he poured the prophetic liquid into a porcelain cup and gravely handed it to Suad.
“Drink up,” Farida said.
Suad did as she was told and after inverting the coffee cup over a saucer, and waiting for the sediments to grow into meaningful lines, Farida picked up the cup and started to read. She pursed her thin lips, and began trying to decipher the minutiae of Suad’s coffee cup.
“You’re about to have twins,” she declared.
“Twins!” a gravelly man’s voice could be heard muttering from behind the left wall.
“Is there someone eavesdropping on us?” Said asked.
“Don’t worry,” Farida whispered to her young visitors. “The cak
e maker and his wife often listen in, even though I’ve told them a hundred times not to. Unfortunately we have thin walls and we can’t afford to change them. Neither prophecy nor soapmaking are lucrative enterprises. Anyway, you don’t have to worry any more whether you’ll be having a boy or a girl, because you’ll in fact have both,” she said.
“But we never worry about such things, Sitt Farida!” Suad said.
“The boy will be born first and then the girl.”
Farida’s expression began to change as she carefully inspected the sediments in her coffee cup.
“Tell me more,” Suad asked her.
“There’s nothing more to tell,” Farida said rather glumly; a cloud suddenly appeared to be hovering over her wrinkled complexion.
After Suad had gone home, she wasn’t able to forget what had happened. “Don’t worry,” Said told her. “Our neighbor is just the nervous type. She looks like the kind of woman who has hallucinations. Let’s be happy. If she’s right then we’ll have everything we want, both a boy and a girl, and you won’t have to suffer another pregnancy. And if she’s wrong, well, that’s only to be expected.” Said kissed his wife on the nose. “Perhaps she guessed you were pregnant not because she’s a prophetess but because, like most older women, she can read the usual signs. Don’t be fooled,
my treasure!”
But Suad couldn’t sleep that night, or the night after.
If it weren’t for Suad’s insistence, Farida wouldn’t have told her the unfortunate news she’d read in her coffee cup. But after Suad had a hormonally induced tear storm, Farida gave in to her request. “You don’t have to believe me, my lovely, but what I saw in your cup was that if your boy and girl twins were to be kept together they would—they would. . . . Well, it would not be good.”
“They would what? Tell me! Please don’t hide the truth from me.”
“Well, they—you will lose them both. . . . That is certain. I can see it behind the curtain. It is God’s will.”
Suad stood up in panic. “What do you mean, I will lose them both? What curtain? What do you mean, you are certain?”
“According to your coffee cup,” Farida said, trying to look like a savant or a world-famous intellectual, “the boy must stay with you throughout his childhood, but you must give the girl away.”
“What do you mean, we must give the girl away? How can I give my daughter up for no reason at all?” Suad said.
“All I can tell you is what I see in the cup.”
“And the cup says I must give my daughter away?”
“Yes. That’s what the cup says.”
“How can I choose between a son and a daughter, just because a coffee cup says I must? Why would I believe a cup?”
“The cup does not say you can choose. You must keep your son.” Farida raised one of her eyebrows as if she was beginning to lose patience. “No one is forcing you to believe the cup but if you don’t, then don’t say that I, or the cup, didn’t warn you.”
“Why are you lying to me like this? Can’t you bear seeing a young couple happy?” Suad raised her voice at Farida.
“I’m just telling you what I’ve read in your coffee cup. If the cup has decided to lie, that’s not my fault. I’m only a messenger.”
“You’re not a messenger. You’re a liar. You should be ashamed of yourself, Farida.” Suad ran out of the door.
Why did she come to see me in the first place if she thinks I’m a liar? People are so strange, Farida thought to herself and headed to the kitchen to put the final touches to her legendary dish of kibbeh.
Meanwhile gasps and giggles could clearly be heard from the cake shop next door. Instead of listening to the radio or watching TV while they made or sold cakes, the couple who owned the cake shop, an awful man and his awful wife, kept themselves entertained by doubling as professional eavesdroppers (it was a sort of job because it often paid).
In the beginning, Said and Suad didn’t believe Farida and they stopped talking to her. But when (seven months later) Suad gave birth to twins, first a boy, then a girl, exactly as Farida had predicted, Said gravely walked down the stone steps and knocked on Farida’s door.
“What shall we do, Sitt Farida?” he asked her.
“Who am I to say?” Farida said. “I’m a liar, after all, and I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m a bitter old woman who doesn’t like to see young couples happy, aren’t I? So why listen to me?”
“Please accept our apologies,” Said said. “We were upset. We’re young and naive. We dared to think we knew better than you.”
“I forgive you,” Farida said. “Let me ask around and see if there’s a suitable family who might want to adopt your daughter. It needs to be the right family. Not just anyone
will do.”
The answer came within hours, from the cake maker and his wife, who knew of a respectable baker and his wife who lived on the opposite side of town who were desperately looking for a baby. Even though they naturally preferred a boy, a girl might do, they’d said—particularly now that Basma, the baker’s wife, was in her ninth month of a heavy phantom pregnancy and had become sick and tired of wearing a duck-feather cushion inside a pair of extra-large red silk panties to dispel rumors about her infertility. Baker Bassam’s snooty family, who were the cream of Aleppo’s top baking dynasty, had threatened to disinherit him unless he produced an heir (or at the very least an heiress),
very soon.
The next morning a one-day-old girl was promptly delivered to Bassam’s bakery in what was possibly the most expensive breadbasket in history. This was because the cake maker had decided to make a fast lira, and he sold the baby girl to the bakers for an extortionate sum.
The only other thing that arrived in the breadbasket, apart from the baby, was a little note begging the new parents to call her Suha, a name that Said had always wanted his first daughter to be called because it was his mother’s name and also because it was the name of a distant star of great beauty, whose light could not be seen by human eyes. What better name for a daughter whom he and his wife would, from that point, be forced to love from afar?
Suha listened intently to Suad’s every word, but it was difficult to tell from the expression on her face how she felt about what she had heard. Dunya looked now and then at Suad’s eyes and then at her shaking hands and her plain, dark, and rather tragic shoes, the shoes of a woman who has spent her entire life in the shade, where neither light nor dark pervade.
Despite the stark superficial differences between Suad and Suha, foisted upon them by age and circumstance, Dunya could see it as clear as day that Suad was the origin of Suha and that Suha was the hidden shadow she had seen so clearly in Hilal’s face when she had first taken
his photograph.
This was the girl she had asked him about and whom he denied existed.
The girl he had lost without his knowledge.
Suha sat next to Dunya, her hands still entwined in hers, on a small sofa opposite Suad, who sat alone in an armchair. It didn’t seem strange that even though they’d only met that afternoon they were holding hands.
Dunya looked at Suha and she saw how she possessed Hilal’s eyes, how her hair was like his, how her lips curved like his did, how her nose was shaped like his. And she looked at her coal black, almost blue hair and thought of the night and all the stars in it.
She could now feel Suha’s hands shaking inside hers and knew that she was on the brink of tears. She could feel her shock at hearing the truth and the pain it caused rising in her like a storm. Dunya watched Suha as she stood up and flicked her hair away from her forehead. “Whether your story is true or false, Mrs. Shihab, I don’t care. I already have a mother. No girl can have two mothers.”
Suha picked up her handbag from the sofa, put her hand on Dunya’s shoulder and leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Come and see me soon.”
“I will,” Dunya said.
She wanted to stand up and carry her traveling suitcase and follow Suha
out of the door. It was hard for her to watch Suha disappear from sight.
“Suha,” Suad called out. “Suha.”
Every time she heard a noise at Suad’s front door Dunya stood up hoping that it would be Hilal. But Hilal did not knock on his mother’s door that night.
“I knew my son had found the woman who would complete him. I could see it on his face, in those photographs you sent us. I’m so happy to finally meet you in the flesh,” Suad said. “But how on earth did you lose Hilal and then find Suha? It simply doesn’t make sense.”
“By accident,” Dunya muttered. “Entirely by accident.”
“No, it can’t be an accident. Perhaps it was your fate to find her. Perhaps you will be the one who can bring sister back to brother. Will you help me do it?” Suad begged. “I need your help. Suha is so hurt and angry and as for Hilal, oh, he’ll be too upset to speak to me ever again. He’ll close his heart to me. That’s what I’m afraid of, and then I’ll lose them both . . . just as the coffee cup said.”
“I will help you, Mrs. Shihab. And Hilal, first he will be upset but then he will understand. He will be so happy that Suha exists. It will change his life.”
“Since he is so late, why don’t you come and sleep in his bed,” Suad took Dunya by the hand and led her to Hilal’s bedroom. “I will put out a mattress in the lounge for him when he comes later.”
Dunya spent her first night in Aleppo in Hilal’s boyhood bed, holding his pillow to her chest. From the shutters of
his bedroom window she looked at the rays of the moon as they touched his bedcover. But all she could think of
was Suha.
Ever since she had known him, Dunya had felt it in her bones that Hilal possessed the ephemeral quality of moonlight and that there was something about him she could not quite hold onto, and she had even occasionally imagined that one day if she blinked or if she turned her gaze away from him, when she looked back again she wouldn’t find him, and that she’d discover he was nothing but a beautiful dream she’d woven for herself, or a wonderful whimsy. Might she not one day lose him, the way another girl might lose her hat or scarf in a windstorm, or at sea? She’d imagined those unlikely scenarios, but it had never occurred to her that it would happen another way and that what she would one day lose was not Hilal but the certainty of her love for him, her certainty that he was the only One. That certainty and that feeling of eternity she didn’t lose in an afternoon breeze but during an unexpected and intense summer storm, which took place silently while she drank a glass of freshly made lemonade.