by Rana Haddad
Receipt
Attention: Dr. J. Noor (Latakia District)
This is to confirm delivery of item and payment for the delivered item and to confirm that instructions regarding the item will be fulfilled for the duration of four years, no more, unless additional, more generous funds are made available.
Yours Truly,
Lieutenant Qasem Bakr al-Shughour
(It was a fateful and fortunate accident that Lieutenant Qasem Bakr al-Shughour’s personal tea maker and tea glass washer and server, Bilal, was Badri’s brother-in-law, and he was able to copy this receipt and find out all the rest with great ease and some highly risky and courageous eavesdropping.)
“Joseph. Tell me you didn’t do it, Joseph.” Patricia looked like she was about to explode. “Joseph?”
“Corrupt! You are corrupt!” Dunya said. “Your are selfish and corrupt! Is that why you have friends in the Baath Party, and in the army? Because you’re selfish, ruthless, and corrupt like them? Because you’re one of them? Hilal’s only crime was that he was in love with me, and I with him! For this you’re prepared to destroy his life, his career, and his future before it even began? Since when did love become a punishable crime?”
Instead of looking at his wife or his daughter, Joseph looked out of the window for a minute and enjoyed the view of the Mediterranean. The weather was rather windy today, he noticed. Yes, perhaps there would be rain that afternoon. How unusual for a summer’s day. But it would be good for the trees and for the flowers. He began to whistle a tune. And without quite understanding why, the tune that he accidentally began to whistle was the Syrian National Anthem, “Syria my beloved, you have returned my pride to me, you have returned my freedom.” How could a daughter and a wife whom he loved so dearly and worked so hard to provide for and protect be so ungrateful to him? He could not understand it. What heart-breaking creatures women were, they were born to break men’s hearts, whether as wives or as daughters. How unpredictable they were, what misery they caused. What disgrace and what distress. He really should’ve never married an English woman, never; his mother was right.
“You are heartless, Joseph, heartless. I married a man without a heart,” Patricia said.
“So now it’s me who is heartless and lacking in love, not you and your daughter who, instead of worrying about me and my health and happiness, spend all your time worrying about a complete stranger?” Joseph looked deeply hurt. “I was trying to be the head of this house but you two would much rather I was a mouse.”
He looked at everyone standing in front of him rather grandly, as if the people who looked at him with such disappointed eyes were no bigger than flies, no more important than cockroaches. With both his hands firmly ensconced in his pockets, he walked out of the room and then out of the house.
“What happened to the Joseph Noor I fell in love with? What happened to the romantic young man for whom I gave up everything?” Patricia said.
*
Later on, Aziz wrote his phone number on the back of a box of matches and gave it to Dunya. “When you have everything ready and you need us, just ring us and we’ll turn up, in a flash,” he said.
Before leaving, Suha put her arms around Dunya and kissed her behind her ears. Dunya didn’t say a word. Soon after that Suha and her two cousins ended their lightning visit to Latakia, and returned to Aleppo in a puff of flour.
Lieutenant Qasem Bakr al-Shughour, who had ‘welcomed’ Hilal into the army barracks twelve days or so ago, had done so by first confiscating his telescope and then by inspecting his notebook, where he read the following page, which he didn’t understand:
A NEW THEORY OF MOONLIGHT
Moonlight is a finger pointing to the sky, asking: why?
I will call the Darkness X and Moonlight Y
X + Y = I
Who am I?
Who am I?
Who am I?
(Everything looks either black or white in Moonlight).
If it weren’t for Darkness there would be no Light.
The Moon only looks so beautiful because of the Night.
“What nonsense,” the lieutenant thought to himself. “This man isn’t a scientist: he’s a girl. Pathetic.” He then tore Hilal’s notebook up and threw it into the nearest trash can.
“Next time you interrogate him, ask him why he looks into the sky so often? Ask him and report back to me,” the lieutenant commanded one of his officers whose name
was Iyad.
“He’s already told me, Sir. He said he’s looking for his father.”
“Nonsense. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” The lieutenant spat on the floor. “Don’t relent until he tells you the truth.”
After that, the barracks barber shaved all of Hilal’s hair off and then swiftly swept it with a broom into a dustpan and threw it out of the window.
Hilal’s long black curls were collected by the wind and scattered into the four corners of the Syrian desert.
Early one morning at the Aleppo military barracks, Hilal was hosed down like all the other soldiers, and after grueling morning exercises, a mind-expanding ‘Imperialism
Post-Hitler’ class began.
“We will cure our country from the cancer of Zionism and imperialism,” the morose major who was teaching the class growled. “And the only way is with this,” he threatened, taking his gun out of his back pocket.
“If you don’t listen carefully to me I might start practicing on you!” he laughed.
The class full of bald men (who all wished they were tucked up in bed) nodded.
“Hilal Shihab! Stand up! Wake up or I shall push that knife into your head, or empty a bullet belt in you brain, if you’d rather that. Wake up, you foreign girl. This isn’t a daydreaming workshop!”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I’ve heard that you’ve been a bastard recently. You abandoned your bride mid-wedding, didn’t you?”
“Did I, Sir?”
“Don’t play the innocent! We heard that a decent and law-abiding father is furious with you because you expressly promised to marry his daughter and then joined the army before you fulfilled your promise. Her reputation is now in tatters because of you and she’s in danger of becoming a spinster. What sort of man are you? Have you no morals and no decency? We are still amassing evidence about your spying activities, but meanwhile you need to marry the girl in question, whose name is Dunya Noor. This is her father’s wish.”
“Her father wants me to marry her? Are you sure of that? Of course I’ll marry her.” Hilal was flushed with excitement. Dunya had found him, and not only that but she had also convinced her father that he was the One. What a victory.
“Blushing like a maiden, now? You are, as I’ve said many times before, pathetic. If you don’t tie the knot with her today before sunset you’ll be finished, do you hear me? And if you don’t come back here by midmorning tomorrow, I’ll set my dogs on you. Now get out!”
Mr. Saddiq, big-bellied and big-hearted, was waiting in the Aleppo barracks main reception area with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He looked at Hilal with a paternal air. “Are you Hilal?” he asked.
“Yes, and who are you, Sir?”
“This is for you.”
In full view of everyone in reception, Mr. Saddiq handed Hilal a transparent bag with a pitch-black bridegroom’s suit in it, folded on top of a crisp white shirt. “Go and put it on,” he said to Hilal and also handed him a bottle of cologne. “That too.”
Behind a rock, behind a tree, behind a stretch of the sea, near the mountain village of Kasab—a popular mountain resort close to Turkey, where Joseph happened to own a holiday home—a white van was parked.
Hilal looked up to the sky at first. The light blinded him and he couldn’t see the van for a moment. He had a dark tuxedo on, shiny shoes, and no hair. He walked with his hands covering his eyes. And then gradually he was able to see her: Dunya.
“Dunya.” Hilal ran toward her, and she walked faster and faster toward hi
m. But as soon as she was within his grasp and he tried to put his arms around her, she took a step back. She looked at him as if she wasn’t sure who he was—or as if she wasn’t sure it was him. Yes, she’d never seen him wearing a tuxedo before or without his long unkempt curls, but here he was, it was him.
She touched his cheek. “Where were you?” she asked.
“I was busy looking for this.” Hilal took a little red flower from his pocket. “And then I lost my way.” He noticed how strangely Dunya looked at him. “You shouldn’t have worried. I was planning to come back. See?” He pointed at his suit. “I just had to find something suitable to wear to our wedding, and that took time.”
“Our wedding?” Dunya said. “What wedding, Hilal?”
“I thought your dad wanted us to get married today?”
“My dad? No, my dad paid the army to kidnap you, he wants to get rid of you and wants me to marry Maria’s brother George. Look, Hilal.” Dunya pointed behind her to the white van, which was near enough now that he could read the sign inscribed on it: Aleppo Central Bakery. “These men are smuggling us out of the country.” She took his hand in hers. “We must hurry.” She pulled him behind her.
“Stop,” Hilal said. “First, I must kiss you. Kiss me.” He took her face into his palms and tried to kiss her, but Dunya moved her lips away from him. He put his arms around her and held on to her waist tightly as if a strong wind was blowing. Why did she not want to kiss him or be held by him? Hilal looked behind Dunya and glimpsed a blonde woman in a pair of flimsy high heels coming out of the van, and soon afterward two mustachioed young men appeared.
“What’s your mother doing here?” he asked Dunya. “And who are these men?”
Patricia sat excited as a schoolgirl, next to Aziz, who was sitting between her and Badri, who was driving the van at great speed. He stuck a tape into a cassette player and some extremely melancholy Arab pop music came out.
The Aleppo Central Bakery van slowed down as the border station came into view.
“Please don’t say anything, Mrs. Noor,” Aziz said to Patricia. “Just look out of the window.”
“What do you mean?” she asked him.
“If they ask you what we’re carrying in the van, just say bread.”
“But what about Dunya and Hilal?”
“Precisely,” Aziz said. “Don’t mention them. Say we have bread. Or pretend you don’t speak Arabic.”
The van was now crawling as slowly as a tortoise behind yellow taxis, falling-apart cars, buses, trucks, and motorbikes.
A large brown donkey passed by the van on Patricia’s side. It stopped as its head was filling the window frame and looked at Patricia demurely. Patricia rolled the window up in panic.
“Don’t worry,” Badri said. “He wouldn’t dare touch you.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Patricia said.
“Yasine,” Badri called out of his window. “Yasine.”
A border guard with a delicate mustache and double stars on his epaulettes recognized Badri and his van. He waved and then walked briskly toward them.
“You’re back again, my friends?”
“Yes, we’re taking another bread cargo to Istanbul. They only like our bread apparently. They sell it at high prices,” he bluffed.
“Mmm, I like it too.”
“I know,” Badri said, handing the man a large sack filled to the brim with bread.
“Are these top-notch?” Officer Yasine asked.
“Of course they are, my friend,” Badri insisted. “And I found these for you too.” Badri gave the man three packets of Marlboro cigarettes, and then they shook hands.
In the back of the van Hilal and Dunya sat on a small rug hidden from view by hundreds of loaves of Arabic bread and dozens of large bags of flour.
“Your mother is on her way to Istanbul in a private taxi,” Dunya said to Hilal, “and in the taxi with her she has brought you a beautiful white suit which she made especially for you. But also in that taxi is your sister who wants to meet you,” Dunya said.
Hilal sat upright. “I don’t have a sister. Who is this person who wants to meet me?”
“You have a sister. I accidentally found her,” Dunya said, “when I went to Aleppo looking for you.” Dunya put her arms around Hilal and hid her face from him by leaning it against his neck. She could feel how hard his heart was beating and how wildly he was breathing. What part of the story could she tell him, and what part must she hide? She was not a skilful liar and Hilal normally read her like a book.
“Her name is Suha,” Dunya said now sitting back and trying to look at Hilal directly and appear relaxed. “You won’t believe how I found her. She was dressed as a young man who looked just like you. Basically, I thought she was you and so I followed her around the streets of Aleppo.”
“Are you making this up? Have you been drinking? My ‘sister’ looks like a man, a man just like me?”
“She was in disguise you see, theatrical disguise,” Dunya said.
“Stop pulling my leg, Dunya.” Hilal now laughed. “You are something else. Even on a day like this!” He smiled. “This is why I love you.”
“This is no laughing matter Hilal . . . I followed her thinking she was you, then she went into a men’s café where she sat on a table and sang a song. She also played the oud. Then I knew she wasn’t you since you can’t sing, nor can you play the oud. But I thought perhaps she was one of your relations or might know you and I wanted to ask her—him, I mean.”
“What fantastical nonsense!”
Hilal’s laugh was loud and rang throughout the van.
“Don’t laugh, Hilal,” Dunya said. “I am telling you the truth.”
“So when finally you discovered he was a she, what evidence did she give you to prove that she is my sister? She sounds like a charlatan. She is playing a trick on you and you are so gullible. Oh, Dunya.” Hilal took Dunya’s hand in his and pulled her nearer to him while the van swayed and swivelled left and right and up and down, and the bags of flour and bread shook and shifted.
“Let me continue,” Dunya said. “It is your mother who swears she is your sister. And not only that, but your twin.”
“My mother says that?” Hilal muttered. “Well, then, she must’ve lost her marbles. Losing my father and then me disappearing like that, it was too much for her. I have to talk to her. But a sister, no. If I had a sister she would’ve told me long ago. Why would she hide it?”
“Your mother has confessed to everything, and she will confess it to you once we arrive in Istanbul, and you will then see Suha and you won’t have a doubt about her identity. She’s basically you, had you been a girl. I swear it.”
The Aleppo Bakery van rushed toward the city of Istanbul like some swift, imagined wind. Dunya told Hilal all the parts of the story of her encounter with Suha that she felt she could tell him. Hilal found it very hard to believe any of it, but Dunya continued and then she told him in detail everything that Suad had told her and Suha about how and why she and his father decided to give her up.
As he listened, Hilal lay down on the floor of the van and put his head in Dunya’s lap. “All those questions I had, that empty feeling, their dark and endless sadness, their secrecy. I was not imagining any of it? I was being lied to all these years.”
This was why he had felt as he had for so long: as if a piece of him had been torn out, as if a piece of him had gone missing. That it was Dunya who had first seen that lost piece in him and who then found it, only made him love
her more.
“Kiss me, Dunya,” he said.
And Dunya kissed him.
The two of them sat behind columns and columns of bread, which hid them from prying eyes. Some light was streaming in from cracks in the ceiling of the van, which was hurtling along, speeding over Turkish steppes, moving smoothly over Anatolian tarmac, with the two of them stuck in its belly, tears streaming from their eyes. Were they tears of joy or tears of fear—what sort of tears were these?
When
Hilal saw his twin sister Suha for the first time since the hour they were born, she was sitting opposite his mother on a table on the balcony of the Ibrahim Pasha Hotel in Istanbul.
He, Dunya, Patricia, and Suha’s baker cousins walked toward their table looking like a group of vagabonds after their twenty-four-hour drive from the Syrian border.
Suad cried out when she saw her son. Hilal buried his face in his mother’s hair and held her tightly to his chest, even though he was angry with her and wanted to ask her a thousand questions. He let Suad brush off all the flour from his black tuxedo, which smelled of bread and tears. He then dared to look at Suha. “Is she really my sister?” he asked Suad.
“She is,” Suad said.
Hilal noticed that as soon as he looked at Suha she turned her eyes away from him and instead looked at Dunya.
“Dunya,” she called out. She stood up and put her arms around her. It was as if they had known each other forever. Dunya put her arms around Suha.
Suad pulled Suha up by her hands and brought her near to Hilal. “This is your brother. How could we have done this to you? I don’t know how we had the heart to do it. . . .”
“Why are you asking me?” Suha said impatiently. “How am I supposed to know?”
“I understand how you feel,” Suad joined Suha’s hands to Hilal’s and held them both between her palms. “But your brother is another matter. He did not do anything to you. You and he should never have been torn apart and now you must reunite, in the heart. I can see how he loves you even though he does not know it yet or know you. Will you love him too?”
Both Hilal and Suha could see the sorrow and regret that were etched on every line of their mother’s face. And she in turn saw the pain in their eyes, the pain whose clumsy author she and their father had been.
Dunya felt deeply ashamed of herself as she looked at Suad holding both her children in her arms, and when she saw how reluctant Suha was to accept her mother’s and Hilal’s love, and how she looked at her, only at her.