Ruhiyya was trying to remember the last time we met. “It was ages ago. He started teasing you and I had a go at him and told him he was bothering you. Do you remember? I feel ashamed now. I was like a police agent. Or Atatürk.”
I nodded my head. I knew at the time she was cross with her husband because she was jealous when he flirted and wanted to touch my hair.
“I deserve to be punished! How cruel I was to him. And now I’m suffering for it.”
She stood up suddenly, one hand high in the air. Waving it to left and right, she chanted,
“We are widows and our sorrow’s deep inside
We are widows and our sorrow’s deep inside.”
The she stopped abruptly as if doing so cost her some effort. Wiping her face with the palm of her hand, she changed the subject. “What’s the nicest thing I can give you to drink, apart from my lifeblood?”
I laughed, but she wailed, “Didn’t I shed my last drop of blood over him when he died? If it wasn’t for these cigarettes, I’d have been abstinent for months out of respect for him. I even took tablets so that I didn’t have periods and could fast constantly. But I can’t give up these damn things.”
Looking at her cigarette, she stands up and goes over to the door and bolts it on the inside.
“He knew he was dying. That’s what was driving me crazy. Every time he took one of his anti-drink pills, he’d say, ‘You’re killing me, you’re killing me,’ and his eyes bulged like a frog’s.”
Taking her face in her hands, she wept.
“It was his brother that upset me. He wouldn’t agree to have the funeral at his place. He said his son was at the university and people would give him the evil eye. What an awful mentality! We held it here. Some people sat in the garden and some stood out in the street. You just hope for the best. You know how people feel about death. Not about life, though. My mother was right. She always said, ‘Put your trust in God and your store cupboards.’ She meant your cupboards have things in them which are worth cash.”
Ruhiyya’s husband was addicted to alcohol: arrack, beer, cognac, whiskey, then methylated spirit and cologne, anytime of the day or night. This addiction of his made her shut her mouth and draw her head in like a tortoise. She couldn’t bear being in a dark well, no longer performing her unbridled laments for anguished mourners, increasing and assuaging their suffering in equal measure. She didn’t think that she had a right to sing in the Passions of Hasan and Husayn, once everyone knew about her husband. Every year she used to re-create the tragedy of Husayn’s martyrdom in her sad, tremulous voice, recalling humanity’s eternal thirst, yearning to moisten the dry mouths. Her voice was the light in her life. She had discovered that she could do more with her mouth than eat and exchange trivial gossip, and that it
distinguished her from all the other women. It was her genitals, her sex. And yet she had to curb it now, because she was no longer free to speak out and have her revenge. Thorns pricked her tongue every time she tried to sing.
“God, it’s my fault! It was me who gave him a taste for drink. You know, I used to drink arrack secretly. From the time he found out that I’d turned him down because I was in love with my cousin, he went crazy. He no longer wanted to come near me. I said, ‘Have a glass of arrack.’ I thought it would make him high and relax his mind so that his body would get moving. Ah! There will never be anyone else like him. His mouth tasted sweeter than the sweetest fruit juice.”
Then her face brightened again and she laughed at me: “I ought to keep my mouth shut. Why am I singing love songs to someone six feet under, when you’re right here in front of me?
“Oh, Asma. Oh, Asmahan. Your name’s always on my lips
I love you blindly, I pray my wishes will come true
And I’ll see you here in a wedding dress
Before the oil in the lamp runs out
I want to ring the bells for you
And fire a round of bullets in the sky
In celebration.”
Laughing in embarrassment, I tried to change the subject. “Have you planted hashish or opium?”
Her mouth opened wide as a cave again. “Do you want some? It’ll be ready for you tomorrow.”
I had kept up my friendship with Ruhiyya in spite of the
difference in our ages. It made my grandmother and Zemzem jealous and confused the local people. Whenever she visited me in Beirut, the whole village knew about it as she made different kinds of bread and cream cheese balls in oil, picked pomegranates, and practiced her new songs. I was always delighted to see her, took her with me to the university, the movies, the café, and made her spend the night with me rather than going to one of her relations; I even introduced her to Hayat and my university friends, and then to Naser in the war years. I had been attached to her since childhood, when I used to sit beside her while she did the washing, and wish I could stay there forever, watching her hands rubbing and squeezing the clothes in the big bowl as she sang. She talked to everything around her, including a passing lizard. Drinking coffee in preference to tea, she would sit beneath the pomegranate tree once she had sprayed the earth with water to cool us down.
Year after year Ruhiyya kept me informed about her life; as a result, I found out unconsciously why I had been drawn to her when I was nine or ten years old. How did she work out that I was worthy of her trust and friendship when I was so young? How did she put up with my daily visits when she had so much to do, and her mother was still alive, being awkward and demanding? I had been fascinated by her since I watched her singing the Passion of Husayn at the feast of Ashura, in particular the part where she wept as she depicted Husayn’s thirst. I had tears in my eyes too; I really believed it was Ruhiyya herself who was thirsty and I wanted to fetch her a glass of water. The dust of Karbala which she sang about seemed to have settled on her lips and temples. I began
to sob out loud. The girls of my own age sitting near me thought I had a fit of the giggles, as one of us usually did when we were squashed in with the older girls and women at the passion plays. To us these occasions were a night out, like a visit to the movies. We regarded the women, especially the old ones who wept and wailed, as comic characters, and would giggle hysterically, our faces buried in our hands. Most of the time there was a break in Ruhiyya’s voice, but she usually suppressed the tears and kept control of her vocal cords. Her sad image would not leave me and I decided to visit her the next day to prove to myself that she was a normal human being who did not spend her daily life on the verge of tears but sat eating fried eggplant off a wicker tray like everyone else. But I was right; she was not like the others: she hadn’t been putting on the sorrow. She was suffering. She had lived through painful experiences which had scarred her soul. When they found a husband for her, she was in love with her cousin and had tried to resist marriage in a song:
Oh, Mother, Mother! Look at my red and swollen eyes!
How can you let me go?
Who will grind the wheat for you and make you macaroni?
“I don’t need anyone to grind the wheat, and I don’t like macaroni,” answered her mother. “The biggest favor you can do me is to go away and find yourself a husband. Then I can eat
faraka
made with the best meat.”
“Tomorrow you’ll sigh and complain and only the walls
will reply. It’s all over now. The mother raises the child and grows old and the daughter flies the nest,” chanted Ruhiyya.
She tried to escape from her husband, hiding in the vineyards, behind the water cistern, in her uncle’s house, and she managed to evade him for a whole month. But one morning when she was going out, her mother and her uncle’s wife blocked her path and grabbed her by the hands and feet. Although Ruhiyya was strong, she did not put up much of a struggle, believing that her husband would never throw himself on top of her with her mother and aunt there, and so she waited calmly with them. When she saw him approach her like a hungry dog who had found a bone, she felt both curiosity and desire.
“When he rode me, I didn’t know what had happened to me. I began to call out, ‘Get him off me. There’s a fire burning me.’ My mother and my aunt turned their faces to the wall, crying because they thought I would die from the pain of refusing him. They had got used to me shouting, ‘No. No. No. I don’t want to marry him. I don’t know why.’ Then I began to scream that I was being stung by a hornet.”
I asked her what she meant by the hornet and the fire when she first told me the story. She had burst out laughing and laughed until the tears ran down her face. Then she clapped her hand to her mouth. “God! I ought to put pins in my mouth. You’re still a child and I’m corrupting you. The things I tell you! But we mustn’t tempt fate! I forget you’re still a child. I talk to you as if you were twenty.”
In the end she was glad she had married him. She discovered that he liked her voice, her forceful tongue, the way she
always argued, her sighing, her moods. He told her he preferred her smell of cigarettes to the smell of newly washed bodies or perfume, and admired her because she was the only woman in the village who dared to smoke in public. She didn’t automatically answer the door to everyone who came knocking; sometimes she claimed to be tired or under the weather, preferring to be alone with him and distract him from his work so that he would come and sit beside her. But he kept goading her to tell him why she had refused him at first, and she acted coy, lied, and avoided answering, until one day she came out with the truth—that she had been in love with her cousin in Beirut.
When I visited her, she would smell me and say, “Please let me smell Beirut, the place, the people.” I asked her if she knew it and she sighed. “It’s where I lost my heart.”
She had known the city since she went to her maternal aunt’s there to help with the housework in exchange for board and lodging, while she learned sewing with a seamstress who turned out to be more interested in making her peel garlic than teaching her a trade. She put up with it all because she had fallen in love with her cousin, who was aware of how badly his family was treating her and had whispered in her ear one day, “It’s a shame this body only wears clothes from the market and those lovely legs don’t have better quality shoes to set them off. You should use a toothbrush and toothpaste on those pearly white teeth instead of rubbing them with salt like my mother does.”
To hide her emotion, and because he had pinpointed her weak spot, she burst into tears. “Where would I get the money to buy a toothbrush?” she wailed, striking her face.
The next thing she knew he was holding out his handkerchief to her and saying very tenderly, “I’ll give you one. Never mind. Don’t cry.” Then, as if he regretted his tone or was scared of what it meant, he went on in a louder, harsher voice, “I’ll get you a toothbrush. That’s enough now. Stop crying.”
He bought her a toothbrush, and a notebook and pencil; and he began teaching her how to tell the time, dial a telephone number, and other things.
She was in love with her cousin, but she perceived as she studied the words he dictated to her that there were things keeping them apart: for example, the huge books he carried under his arm, whose pages he delved into at night. She took some of them with her one day when she was delivering her uncle’s lunch to him at work. Holding them in her lap on the streetcar, she felt different from all the other passengers. She was certain that these books, and his tennis racket, white tennis balls, thick white socks, and especially his white tennis shoes were what divided them. That same evening she told her aunt that she wanted to enroll at the state school near the house, and she could see herself coming home in her black school smock with the white collar on which she had embroidered a green cedar tree.
But her aunt startled her by immediately broaching another topic: that of her return to her village. “Beirut’s a heap of ruins,” she began. “You know how to hold scissors and a needle, and there are men lining up to marry you back home.”
Ruhiyya blocked her ears and carried on dreaming. She begged her aunt to enroll her in the government school and
her aunt replied, “You’re seventeen years old and you’ll be doing the elementary certificate. How can you study with girls younger than you? The girls here are clever. They’ll laugh at you and say you’re old and stupid, the biggest moron they’ve ever seen.”
Ruhiyya didn’t give up. She even thought her cousin would help her prepare for the certificate exam, but he was not consistent in teaching her or buying books for her. He was changing. There was no longer the same tenderness and he did not seize the opportunity to be alone with her when she told him his mother had gone off to visit a relative. He only showed up in the evening, when she’d been sitting there all day waiting for him, thinking thoughts that made her pulse race. Ridiculous thoughts crowded in on her and images flashed before her eyes. She saw herself stretched out in front of him with no clothes on, pulling him to her, taking him by force, and becoming pregnant by him. Then she saw the sheikh performing the marriage ceremony and herself sitting in their new home with a white telephone at her elbow.
A few months later her aunt was reading her coffee cup. “The person you’re thinking about is going to marry his friend’s sister. I see a truck taking a Singer sewing machine to the village, and money in your pockets, and my sister buying meat and having
faraka
for dinner.”
Ruhiyya simply shrugged her shoulders, pretending not to care, but she felt as if she was choking at the meaning implicit in her aunt’s words.
“Why don’t you go to the village on Friday, and I’ll come too?” said her aunt.
Ruhiyya began to cry and beg her aunt to convince her son that he should marry her. Her aunt sighed deeply. “There’s nothing I’d like better. You’re like a daughter to me, but force doesn’t work these days.”
Ruhiyya did not know how another two years went by. She waited so long that time ceased to exist. She was waiting for him to look tenderly at her. She occupied herself with sewing and her aunt bought her a sewing machine and she made curtains and a cover for the radio and another for the television, chair covers, bedding for the family, underpants and shirts for her cousins. As she moved her foot up and down on the pedal, she sewed sentences in her head, all ending up in the same melody. Every time she sang it within earshot of the neighbors she heard them laughing and realized she had not stitched her words together well, especially the time she screamed them at the top of her voice: