by Raja Alem
He lifted his eyes, entranced by her lightness. He had felt her presence like a burden weighing him down, and here she was, so light she was almost flying; and he was profoundly aware of the red at the heart of the water drop.
But this was only a foretaste of what was to come. Two days later, without warning, Sarab’s mood flipped. It was almost nine in the evening; the sun had set at quarter to five, cutting the day dramatically short and giving the impression that there was no time for living.
Raphael was shocked when he opened the door and found the apartment immersed in darkness. He could have cut the curtains of depression with a knife. He had spent a long day in a series of meetings, repelling relentless interrogation about what had happened during his sudden disappearance from the Grand Mosque.
Despite the darkness, he spotted a pile of clothes on the sofa. All the clothes he had given Sarab were carefully folded and left there, returned to him probably. For a moment he stood frozen in the doorway, stunned at the thought she had left him and gone away. But the bedroom door opened suddenly and she appeared, silhouetted in the doorway . Rays pierced through her body, alleviating the tragic darkness of the living room. Even from a distance, Raphael could sense the tension in that slim body; it seemed suffocated in her austere, male outfit. He felt threatened by this recurrence of the same outfit in which she had fled to France. His tired eyes washed over her. They stood, her hair bound tightly inside a scarf; in that soft covering, he sensed the barrier that had been erected against him, keeping him out. Stifling the anger that had erupted along with his fear, he called sarcastically, “So, it’s back into the breach?”
She was shaken by his sneering tone and responded in kind: “In these clothes . . .” Words failed her as she pointed in disgust to the pile of clothes on the sofa. “I feel naked.” She could sense the violence pounding his veins. “It drives the angels away when I leave my skin exposed to strangers in the street.”
“You’re afraid of liking it?”
His scornful tone stung her and she shouted back defensively, “You’ve come between me and my fate!”
“If I were in your shoes, I would be down on my knees right now, thanking God for giving me a second chance at life.” Each seemed compelled to hurt the other. “Anyway, I’ve already seen your hair—I cut it myself. So what good is it hiding it from me?”
“Of course, what would it matter to you if I left my hair uncovered to men’s eyes and fell to the deepest pit of Hell?”
“So now covering up your hair is your biggest worry?”
Sarab paled. His words bored right through to her hidden self-contempt, the fanatical soldier latent within her who enjoyed practicing the utmost aggression against the self.
“Of course!” She flared up at his attack. “You Westerners encourage women to go outside naked. It’s one of the weapons you use to tempt the world into sin.” Once more, Sarab was shocked to hear herself repeat Mujan’s recordings.
Raphael stepped forward until they were eye to eye. He took a lock of her hair and rubbed it defiantly between his fingers.
She shoved him in the chest and raced to the door, and before he could react she had left, leaping down the stairs ten at a time.
He hesitated a moment before running after her.
When he came out of the building there was no sign of Sarab. There was nothing but Place Saint-Sulpice bathed in a melancholy, dramatic light. Drizzle fell, obscuring and fragmenting his vision, and a feeling of doom squatted on his chest. He ran to the middle of the square, hoping to see her on one of the roads that led away in every direction. Suddenly he spotted a slender apparition running up Rue Bonaparte toward the Luxembourg Gardens, and he raced after it. Like a wounded animal, she needed to hide, and the small park called out to her; she turned into it, blending in with the darkness of the trees. Raphael swung after her, bounding up the six steps with a single leap, but there was no trace of Sarab in that narrow walkway—nothing but bushes and the long, dark-green benches, and he was tempted to think that she had entered one of the buildings lining the path. But she burst suddenly out of her hiding place between two shrubs, and in a flash she was back on Rue Bonaparte. He caught up with her again in the middle of Place Saint-Sulpice. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her against the wall of the fountain, trying to subdue her resistance.
“Sarab, please calm down. I’m sorry.”
She punched him in the chest, trying to escape. “Let go of me!”
Tears mingled with the streaks of rain on her face, and her scarf fell down. Raphael hurriedly caught it and clumsily tried to cover up her hair by way of apology. But she pushed his hand away angrily and the scarf fell to the ground, soaked.
Raphael’s voice came deep and quiet: “Please, slow down. Where do you think you are going?”
“To Hell . . .” Like a suppressed flame given oxygen, that wail shattered the barricade she had erected around herself.
“Please.”
“I will hand myself over to the police,” she stammered. “Maybe they’ll send me back to my country.”
“Come here, please. Let’s understand each other.”
“Why did you drag me here? You kidnapped me!” she screamed hysterically. He was forced to smother her mouth with his hand, and she tried to bite him.
“You claim you’ve given me freedom, while you want to control even what I wear. What you really want is to convert me. I am a Bedouin in a form that is not me—I’m not a Western woman, and I’m not a toy you can dress up in whatever clothes you please. I am Bedouin.” She said this in a voice devoid of anger; it was flattened, drained, empty of blame or protest.
“You think that a few shreds of European clothing can erase who you are and where you come from?” he asked. Her body shook with sobs, and his right hand stroked her hair soothingly while he whispered, “I think what’s most important is your heart.”
They stood there under the rain, which suddenly began to pour down, their faces illuminated by the misty lights of the square, while the birds hidden in the surrounding trees watched two people engaged in a ritual of purification.
And there she was that morning, all in white. A feeling of alarm stirred in him. Her breath smelled of coffee as she took the seat beside him. Raphael stared at her, and she avoided his searching gaze.
“Who could believe that a little girl like you wrestled a GIGN officer to the ground and took him captive?” he joked, to lighten her nervousness.
“Thanks to the rock that fell from the ceiling and knocked him out. But it wasn’t long before the jijin recovered the machine gun and stripped his captive down to her underwear.”
He burst out in sincere laughter, making her heart beat wildly. Suddenly Sarab remembered the miracle that had come to her aid that day. She recalled the blackness anointed with the perfumes of the last remaining eunuch, whose presence had filled the prayer cell. His words about the blackness that would save her from the lion’s mouth still lived and resounded in her head. Was it the ceiling that had fallen that day, or was it the eunuch who had leaped out of the shadows to bind her fate to this foreigner, sending them both on this long journey?
“You know, I always called you jijin. I was sure that you were a sort of infidel jinn that had possessed me.”
He laughed incredulously.
“And now, Sarab, the time has come for the jijin to throw away some of your fears. Let’s ease your mind.”
He drove along Boulevard Saint-Germain toward the fifth arrondissement, passing the Institut du Monde Arabe by the River Seine, turned right alongside the Jardin des Plantes, and then left onto Rue Georges-Desplas. In front of them rose the Grand Mosque of Paris, its architecture inspired by the Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez.
The tranquility reigning over the mosque provoked a feeling of guilt in both of them, as if someone might deny them entry, so Raphael hurriedly said, “This beautiful building came about as the result of a bloodbath.”
This shocked Sarab, and pulled her out of the melancholy th
at had enveloped her when her gaze fell on the minaret. It had been influenced by the minarets of the Zaytouna Mosque in Tunis and was nothing like the minarets of the Grand Mosque of the Holy City, but even so she still felt the warmth of her brother’s blood as it oozed over her body.
Raphael went on, trying desperately to dispel the agony on her face. “It was built in 1922 after the First World War to honor the seventy thousand Muslims who fought and died in the French army.” Raphael swamped her with information to distract her thoughts from the task which awaited them.
“It seems like a paradox, but during the Second World War, when Paris was occupied by the German army, the imam of this mosque used it as a secret hiding place to shelter Jews from Europe and Algeria. He supplied them with forged birth certificates confirming they were Muslim, to protect them from the concentration camps.”
At last they found the car park and he took her toward the mosque; when she realized his intention, she stopped dead in the middle of the street.
“I don’t think I can go into a mosque.”
“But it’s one of the most beautiful places in Paris, and you’ll find it reassuring.”
She was embarrassed to say that she was menstruating; she had never spoken about that shameful topic to anyone before.
“I’m not clean.”
“But we haven’t come to pray. We won’t stay long.”
She found herself with no choice but to follow him, painfully aware of the delicate cotton towel between her legs, although it was like a breeze bearing her up by its lightness. She was recalling her first period in Paris. It had arrived suddenly, on the day she threw away the antidepressants. She had woken that morning with the sensation that her nether regions were exploding; when she rushed to the bathroom, she was startled to see a stream of blood. She undressed and stood in the bathtub to bathe, but whenever she washed, the effusion would return and run down her legs, and it didn’t stop. She was sure that an old, hidden wound inside her had started to drain and she would surely die of it. Exhausted, she sat naked in the bathtub and waited for death while the pool of blood widened around her frozen buttocks. It didn’t seem possible that such a torrent could come from her wasted body.
When an hour had passed and she was still fully conscious, she was tempted to think it was nothing but the blood she had waded through in the Grand Mosque, leaking out of her in thick clots like pieces of liver. She recalled that she hadn’t menstruated at all during the siege; her cycle had been interrupted by her fear of dying and her dread of polluting the house of God. Was it reasonable to think that all this filth had been trapped inside her? She dismissed the idea as nonsense.
She had completely forgotten that she was female and obliged to undergo such squalor. Here she was now, in this Parisian bathroom, without even her mother’s rags to help her. She looked around her; there was nothing but a hand towel. When the stream eventually stopped, she folded the towel and pushed it between her legs, sorry to pollute its snowy whiteness, and directed a spurt of water to wash away the clots of blood collected in the tub.
Before the end of the day, Raphael noticed the washed towel hanging to dry below the bathtub. That same evening, he presented her with some sanitary pads, and her face flushed dark red. They made her feel as if he had opened her legs and was pointing at the blood, mercilessly emphasizing that she was female and irreversibly marked with sin.
In a pathetic show of stubbornness, she left the pads in the bathroom cabinet on the shelf, a declaration that they didn’t concern her, she would never use them, he had no right to creep into the red zone of her privacy. The pads had robbed her of her biggest secret, her shame, and in retaliation she furiously regarded his interference in such trivialities as her period as proof of his lack of manhood.
But during her next period, she found herself driven to try the pads. As soon as the strip was settled between her legs, she felt it sucking up all the ooze that had accumulated for years in that secret region of her body; the resulting feeling of lightness eased and smoothed her step. It was the drying-up of the shame represented by her monthly flow. A piece of her past was stolen from her, easing her burden.
Sarab and Raphael entered the mosque silently, followed by the eyes of homeless women from North Africa who had rolled out their blankets on the steps of the mosque, their huge bodies wrapped in long, loose robes. Sarab was struck with guilt at seeing their veiled hair; hers was uncovered. On entering, Sarab and Raphael were immediately swallowed by the calm blue of the surging sea of tiles, a startling miscellany of intricate mosaics that merged the soul and the genius of master craftsmen from North Africa. The gardens were laid out in welcome in front of them, their water channels and azure fountains a haven of peace hidden in the heart of the City of Light. It was not yet eleven and not a prayer time, so tourists were scattered around, wandering peacefully through the mosque and taking pictures against the celestial blue background.
Raphael led Sarab to the door to the left of the entrance, where the mosque’s offices were situated. He greeted a Moroccan guard and asked where they could find the imam. The guard led them to the last room of a narrow corridor of offices, where the Moroccan imam sat sipping tea with two Arab men.
“Excuse me, Imam, I would like speak to you in private,” Raphael said.
The imam darted a quick, searching look at Raphael; the aura of authority in Raphael’s body language did not escape him. He gestured to his two friends, who stood up grudgingly and left the room.
“Please sit down.” Although his greeting had included both of them, the sheikh studiously avoided looking at Sarab, as if she didn’t exist, increasing her consciousness of the sin of being uncovered.
Raphael and Sarab sat side by side, careful to leave a gap between them.
“How can I help you?” The question was pointless, as the imam could foresee what would be asked of him.
“We want you to draw up a marriage contract according to sharia.”
The imam had probably lost count of the number of times he had heard this, and he had a ready reply.
“Very gladly. But we need official papers to complete the process. Are you both French citizens?”
“It doesn’t matter what nationality we are. All we want is for you, as the imam of the Muslim community in France, to join us as husband and wife.”
“Are you both Muslim?”
“Yes,” Raphael replied without batting an eyelid and Sarab fidgeted, remembering the previous night in his apartment. They had been eating takeaway pizza in the kitchen when she surprised them both by blurting a question that came out of nowhere.
“Can you convert to Islam?” She bit her tongue with remorse as soon as she asked.
But he smiled and replied simply, “It’s been done.”
Her eyes widened happily, and he added, “In front of the appropriate authority.”
“I’m sorry, Sir, but our hands are tied by the law.” The steely refusal in the imam’s tone pulled her back to the siege and the other imam’s refusal to give up the microphone to her. “We can’t grant a marriage certificate unless we receive sanction from both your governments.”
“We’re not asking for a marriage certificate. We’re not trying to get official documentation; all we want is for you to witness a verbal marriage contract to give our connection legitimacy before God. Just like the marriage contracts in the days of the Prophet, when he was married by word without the contracts imposed on it by the needs of modern society.”
Irritation showed plainly on the imam’s face, and he repeated with icy courtesy: “But now we are a part of modern society, and we must respect its laws safeguarding individual rights. I am sorry, but it is not in my power—nor is it appropriate for me to do what you ask.”
“Can’t you just witness our marriage before God?”
The imam turned away, refusing sympathy or understanding. “I cannot get involved in situations that might create problems or complications. What about your children? Where will they be ra
ised? Or will you bring misfortune on me by saying that I have married you?”
“There won’t be any children. All we want is peace of mind about living under one roof. I want this girl to feel safe and pure in front of her Lord.”
Sarab squirmed.
“Her Lord?” the imam asked.
Raphael lost his temper. “Her Lord, our Lord, what’s the difference? You’re our witness. We came to you and you know now . . .” Raphael recognized the futility of what he was about to say. “Please, Imam, recite the Fatiha and bless us as husband and wife.”
The dry look on the imam’s face made it clear that he wouldn’t relent. Finally Raphael resorted to the last card in his deck.