The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor

by Rana Haddad

  Something about Suha made Hilal want to both run to her and run away. He was no longer a young man alone. It was no longer just him and the moon. There was this other part of him standing there with a mind of her own, and one not very interested in him. Instead of looking at him, she looked at Dunya.

  Looking at Suha made Hilal feel that he was looking into a supernatural mirror, where he could see in one instant everything that he was and everything he wasn’t.

  She went toward Dunya again, opened her arms and put them around her.

  “Dunya,” he heard her say. She said it in such a tender way.

  Dunya held Suha for a moment and kissed her on her cheek. Then she pulled away, “Mum, I want you to meet Hilal’s mother.” Patricia and Suad stood opposite each other, one on high glittering heels with blond hair and the other one wearing all black, as if she were enveloped in a dark cloud. They were like night and day, but they liked each other anyway.

  “Come and help me settle into my room,” Patricia said to Suad, “and I will order us something to drink and we can talk more. Let’s leave the children to it. I can’t make head nor tail of what Dunya has told me. I want to hear everything from you directly.” Patricia took Suad’s hand in hers and Suha’s cousins carried her luggage and trailed behind.

  “I don’t know you, you don’t know me,” Suha said to Hilal in an off-hand manner. “Just because we both have black hair, doesn’t prove that I am your sister. It doesn’t mean a thing. And your mother might’ve lost her mind, has that occurred to you? There’s no evidence of any of the outlandish things she is claiming. I mean, what family gives up their children because of what a coffee cup says?” Suha raised her eyebrows. “Huh?”

  “I already have a mother,” she went on, “as I already mentioned to your mother. But it is nice to meet you anyway. I’ve heard a lot about you from Dunya,” she said. “And I’m glad you are a free man now and not a soldier. The army does not suit you. Your eyes are made to look at the moon, not through the eyepiece of a rifle. We do have the same eyes, I can see where all the confusion’s coming from.”

  Hilal wanted at that moment to put his arms around his sister, but he resisted the impulse. Despite her more friendly words, frost, invisible frost, seemed to envelop her, separating him from her.

  Outside the sun was setting over another day. But this day was unlike any other. “If you had not been lost, I would not have found Suha,” Dunya said when she came back, behind her a waiter with a tray of drinks. “You two are like the moon and its dark side: when one of you disappears, the other one appears. But today is unlike any other day, the two have become one. You two should never have been separated.” Dunya looked at Hilal and Suha. “I love you both so much.” Tears rolled down her eyes and she held Suha with one hand and Hilal with the other.

  “You already love her as much as me, even though there is still no evidence she is my sister?” Hilal said. “You do have a lot of charm, Suha, I can vouch for that.”

  “Today is a strange day,” Suha said. “The sort of day I find it hard to believe I am having.”

  “Why did you come all the way here with Suad if you don’t believe that I am your brother or that she is your mother?” Hilal asked.

  “I wanted to see Dunya. I thought that if I don’t see her today, she might go back with you to London and then I would never set eyes on her again.”

  “I see,” Hilal said. “You two have really hit it off then, haven’t you? Maybe you are my sister. Dunya seems to like you as much as me, but I don’t like to share her,” Hilal said, and he looked at Dunya. He could swear that he saw her blush then.

  Dunya linked Hilal and Suha’s hands together. “Maybe I can go away with my mother today and you can spend a day together. If you spend some time you will see that you two are twins. You won’t be asking for proof. You are two sides of the same coin.”

  “I am not a coin,” Suha said. “Nor half of a single coin. Don’t talk like that Dunya, don’t say such things. Don’t go, stay with us.”

  “I will go, but I’ll come back soon,” she said and walked off.

  Hilal and Suha continued to hold one another’s hands shyly, reluctantly.

  Hilal saw that Suha possessed his eyes; he possessed her eyes. It was not just the hair, not just her chin, not just everything about her that reminded him of himself, it was something that went much deeper. If he had met her by accident, somewhere else, in some other time or place, and even if no one had told him who she was, and what she was to him—he would have known. Who else could this beautiful girl be?

  He smiled at Suha and took her hand in his again, lifting it toward him. He touched each of her fingers as if counting them one by one and he inspected them. “We have the same fingers,” he said. “But yours are so much more delicate. And your lips, they’re the same as mine, a more perfect interpretation, and your eyes and your chin, they’re all the same as mine, but so exquisite.”

  “You think so?” Suha took her hand away from Hilal and put it on her lap. “You are how I imagined you to be, how Dunya described you. I’ll need time to believe that you’re my brother. I will need more time.”

  She looked away from him.

  “Suha,” Hilal whispered.

  He felt an overwhelming, irrational rush of love suddenly filling his heart. He did not know how this happened, but it did, though he could see that Suha didn’t feel the same. He felt shy and confused. How could he not love her, she who was a part of him once? The more he looked at her, the more he was convinced that she was the secret of his soul, the fire in his heart. How could she not feel it too? It was hard to understand her indifference. Instead of looking at him, Hilal saw how Suha looked only at Dunya (and when Dunya had gone, at the seat where she had been sitting). Perhaps she would love him one day too; he hoped that she’d love him more than Dunya. He was her brother, wasn’t he? Who was Dunya to her?

  “Mr. Joseph Noor,” the hotel porter announced, walking behind Joseph and carrying his luggage.

  Dunya, Hilal, Suha, Suad, Patricia, Badri, and Aziz all looked at Joseph in horror. How had he found them? And what was he going to do now?

  Joseph’s black curly hair, richly peppered with white streaks, seemed to droop in sorrowful shapes, his soft blue eyes looked at Dunya and Patricia sheepishly. “Good afternoon,” he said and sat down on an empty armchair next to Patricia. “A coffee without sugar,” he added to the waiter.

  After that Joseph did what no one had expected him to do by saying what no one had imagined he would ever say: “I’m sorry.”

  “I took away from you, Mrs. Shihab, your only son.” Joseph addressed Suad first. “I took him away simply because he fell in love with my daughter. I am sorry.” He spoke as if he finally understood the gravity of his action. Joseph looked at Dunya in a way that made her feel both happy and afraid: could this really be happening? But she couldn’t help herself and she ran toward Joseph and put her arms around him.

  “I know now where you get your stubbornness from.” Tears ran down Joseph’s cheeks. “It’s from your stubborn father.” His words came out with difficulty. He was finding it hard to speak. “How many fathers have a daughter like you?” he said to her, “Someone who never lies, who speaks the truth, who follows her heart, who disobeys?” Joseph smiled at Dunya.

  Joseph had had an epiphany few people have. It had dawned on him that maybe he was too old-fashioned, too spoiled, too rigidly attached to a bygone past, perhaps it was time that a man like him grew up and tried to learn something from his daughter. Perhaps Dunya and Hilal had the answer, let them try life their way. Living in a dictatorship meant that throughout his life, he, just like the president, could dictate his wishes to anyone who had the misfortune of having less power than him, and he now wondered whether this sort of power could turn any man into a monster.

  “Dad,” Dunya said in a tearful voice. She felt pity for him, for she could see how crestfallen and confused he was. If only he knew, she thought to herself, if only he
knew—that I am no longer the girl I used to be, that I, too, can lie and be untrue.

  Hilal came from behind Dunya and put his arms around her.

  “Do you really love her as you say you do?” Joseph asked him.

  “Yes,” Hilal said, and both Joseph and Dunya and Suha and everyone in the room saw clearly that he meant it. Dunya tried not to look at Suha.

  “True love is rare and must not be sniffed at,” Joseph looked up at Patricia, who came to his side and kissed him gently on his cheek.

  “I’d like to ask first for your forgiveness, Mrs. Shihab, and secondly for your son’s hand in marriage for my daughter.” Joseph bowed his head and crossed his hands in front of him like a shy schoolboy and waited for Suad’s answer. He seemed to be making a supernatural effort to overcome his natural prejudices. Dunya could hardly believe her eyes, or ears. She felt touched to the core, but also unworthy, guilty, confused. She wished she could hide somewhere and never reappear.

  “It’s for Hilal to decide,” Suad said. “As far as I’m concerned, Dunya is made for my son and he for her, as soon as I saw her, I knew.”

  Hilal lifted Dunya up in his arms with whoops of joy. “It was worth getting kidnapped for this,” he laughed. “Wasn’t it, Dunya?”

  Everyone crowded around the two of them and began to hug and congratulate them, including Aziz and Badri, both of whom lifted Hilal up in the air, and Suad, who covered him with kisses. And as for Suha, well, Dunya saw how Suha ran away. She did not look at Dunya, nor at Hilal, but ran out of the room. She ran and ran through the hotel lobby in her yellow dress and blue summer shoes, and then she disappeared.

  “Nobody asked me whether I wanted to be married,” Dunya said to Hilal and to her dad. “Yes, I love Hilal, but we are too young to marry, we’re too young, aren’t we Hilal?”

  “Too young? Really?” Hilal looked very sad. “But one day will you marry me? Do you still want to marry me one day?”

  “Yes,” Dunya uttered that one word faintly and then said no more. After so much rebellion and so much loud proclaiming and all the wild risks she took for him and what she put him through—this one faint word was like a stab in Hilal’s heart.

  Joseph seemed even more deflated than Hilal, but he did not say anything. She’s never going to change, he thought to himself. That poor boy. I bet my full head of hair that he doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for.

  Joseph patted Hilal on the back in a gesture of camaraderie.

  Later, when Dunya knocked on Suha’s hotel bedroom door, Suha did not answer.

  Early the next morning when Hilal rushed out of bed to go and find Suha he found his mother standing outside her room. Suad looked at him with her large dark eyes—full of dark pain.

  “She’s gone,” she said.

  “Who’s gone?” Hilal asked.

  Hilal looked at his mother’s hands, which were shaking like two leaves on a pale winter tree. In them she held a yellow dress.

  “She took everything with her except for this, the dress your father and I made for her.” Suad pulled the dress up to her mouth and kissed it, and then she held it to her chest.

  “Why does she not want it?” she whispered. “Why does she not want us?”

  That day Hilal and Dunya filed a report about Suha’s disappearance at the local police station, while Badri and Aziz hired the most expensive private detective in the city of Istanbul to look for her. Every one of them and everyone they knew or met looked for Suha for days and for weeks to come. They looked and they looked; they looked for her everywhere.

  But Suha Habibi, unreal daughter of a sad baker, true daughter of people who didn’t have the strength to love her, had left nothing behind her: no letters, no words, no sentences, no songs. Not a sign or clue, that could lead anyone to her—not a hint, not a trace.

  22

  The Last Photograph

  In a way, one might say Dunya Noor had always possessed the personality and character suitable for a budding scientist of the future, even though she chose to become a photographer. But her purpose from the beginning was always to discover the Truth about Love and to prove that truth with her camera, which she used exactly as a scientist might use a scientific instrument.

  But as with most explorers and scientific pioneers, the very thing that Dunya had believed would lead her to her One True Love and to discovering the Truth about Love, was also the thing that led her to its opposite.

  And so to recap. In the beginning, and for a happy period of time, Dunya believed the following:

  1.When love occurred, the object of her love would begin to sparkle, because True Love appeared in the unexpected form of light.

  2.All she would need to do was to take a photograph of that light if and when it shone in the face of her beloved, and that was how she’d prove that he was the One.

  3.For there could only ever be One.

  So what was she to do now that her camera had accidentally proven that her theory was so flawed and that she or anyone else might easily find the Light of Love in the faces of not only One person but Two?

  (Or, God forbid, Three).

  Did that mean that True Love didn’t exist in the first place or that it can come in an unexpected variation of numbers?

  After returning to London with Hilal, Dunya’s once passionate journey in pursuit of light turned into a desperate flight from it. She now sought shelter in darkness, which she found was a safe cloak under which she could hide—her heart.

  Giving up on light also meant that Dunya had to abandon her camera, which she hid in the darkest cupboard she could find. In that same cupboard Dunya also hid all the photographs she had taken of Suha. She could not bear to throw them away, nor could she show them to anyone, especially not Hilal.

  “All of Suha’s photographs were overexposed,” she told him. “There was too much light.”

  Dunya could no longer touch her camera because there was nothing she wanted to photograph now that Suha was gone. After taking those last few photographs of her, Dunya could not imagine taking any other photograph.

  During her first night in London, Dunya Noor could not sleep. Instead, she went upstairs to the loft where Hilal kept his biggest telescope, with its large eye facing the dark night. She sat down on a stool and searched in a specialized book of stars to find out which direction she must point the telescope in order to be able to gaze in the direction of the constellation known as ‘Mizar and Alcor.’

  These were two stars, which always came as a pair, one of which is visible while the other invisible. To Dunya they were Hilal and Suha. Perhaps by contemplating this double star, she would find an answer to her new question: how can One True Love possibly be torn into Two? Can one describe such love as True Love, or does its division into two mean that it is no longer True, but False and invalid?

  She looked up at the night sky through Hilal’s telescope. She closed her eyes. Where are you Suha? Where are you? When and how will I find you?

  In the silence of that night, and the many nights after it, Dunya could feel the broken parts of her heart, each one like a spark of light shooting up into the sky above her, each one calling out Suha’s name.

  Suha, Suha, Suha.

  She gazed up into the sky, where she wished her secret love for Suha to hide—a truth she could never tell.

  Hilal did not dare admit it to himself, and he wondered whether he was imagining things, but was Dunya Noor losing her light?

  Ray by ray, sparkle by sparkle, hour by hour, and day by day?

  He watched as Dunya appeared to be disappearing right in front of his eyes, piece by piece, curl by curl, minute by minute, night after night. It was as if she were melting away, dissolving like sugar. Why was this happening to her?

  He had always known that Dunya was the kind of girl to whom the most unexpected things would happen, but he had never expected this: that she would leave him while still in plain sight.

  That light would become dark and day turn into night.
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  After many months like this Hilal could not stand it any longer and he opened the cupboard where Dunya had hidden all the photographs she took in Syria, as well as her camera.

  He picked up an entire stack of photographs and began to carefully examine them one by one. And there, as he had known all along, he found not one, nor two or three, but many photographs of Suha. But there was one photograph which caused him the most pain to look at. It was of Suha sitting on her bed with her bare arms spread out like wings—and light, an intense brilliant light, shone all around her. On the back of that photograph in Dunya’s handwriting he read the following words: the last photograph.

  Hilal held it in his hands like a document that proved everything. He could see it. He could see the truth and he understood it.

  This photograph was a declaration of love.

  That night, Hilal lay next to Dunya in their bed and could not sleep.

  And before the next morning broke he began to cry. His tears fell silently one by one by one.

  They fell next to Dunya.

  Each one falling near to her but never on her.

  Each one falling somewhere different.

  Then in the end they circled her silently, One by One by One.

  Not long after that, Hilal opened a small letter, which was waiting for him on his desk at the Moonology Institute in London, postmarked: Istanbul.

  I live above the Oud School in Istanbul. I want to see you, Brother. Come to me and bring with you Dunya. Without you and Dunya, my heart is empty. I cannot sing. Forgive me for running away, Suha.

  And so Dunya and Hilal found Suha Habibi—a ‘New Rising Star,’ according to a poster they saw next to the local grocery store, on a stage in the Oud School in Istanbul—soon after she began making a name for herself in the city as a young woman who sang beautiful Arab songs and played the oud ‘Like No One Else Could’ (also according to the poster).