Burned alive (9 page)

“Yes, I went to her, I thought she could help me, hide me . . .”

“Go upstairs!”

My whole body is trembling, my legs won’t support me. I don’t know what will happen to me once I’m locked up in the room. I can’t make myself move.

“Souad! Get up there!”

My sister has stopped speaking to me. She is as ashamed as I am and she doesn’t leave the house anymore. My mother works as usual, my other sisters take care of the animals, and they leave me locked up like someone with a contagious disease. I hear them talking together now and then. They’re afraid that someone may have seen me in the village, that people have started talking. In trying to save myself by going to my aunt, I have especially shamed my mother. The neighbors will know, the tongues will be wagging, the ears will be listening.

From that day on, I can’t put my nose outside. My father has installed a new lock on the door of the room where I sleep and it makes a sound like a gunshot every night when he secures it. The garden door makes the same sound. Sometimes when I’m doing the washing in the courtyard, I feel suffocated when I look at that door. I’ll never leave here. I don’t even realize that this door is stupid because the garden and the embankment of stones that protects it are not objects that can’t be crossed or climbed over. I’ve gone out that way more than once. But the prison is secure for any girl in my situation. It would be worse outside. Outside there is shame, scorn, stones thrown, neighbors who would spit in my face or drag me home by my hair. I don’t even dream about the outside. And the weeks pass. No one questions me, no one wants to know who did this to me, how and why. Even if I accuse Faiez, my father won’t go looking for him to make him marry me. It’s my fault, not his. A man who has taken a girl’s virginity is not guilty, she was willing. And even worse she’s the one who asked for it, who provoked the man because she is a whore without honor. I have no defense. My naïveté, my love for him, his promise of marriage, even his first request to my father, nothing of all that counts for anything. In our culture, a man who has self-respect doesn’t marry the girl he has deflowered.

Did he love me? No. And if I committed a fault, it was believing that I would hold on to him by doing what he wanted. Was I in love? Was I afraid he would find somebody else? That is not a defense, and even to me it had stopped making sense.

One evening, another family meeting: my parents, my older sister, and her husband, Hussein. My brother isn’t there because his wife is about to give birth and he’s gone to be with her and her family. I listen behind the wall, terrified.

My mother speaks to Hussein: “We can’t ask our son, he won’t be able to do it, he’s too young.”

“I can take care of her.”

Then my father speaks: “If you’re going to do it, it must be done right. What do you have in mind?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll find a way.”

My mother again: “You’ll have to take care of her, but you’ll have to do it quickly.”

I hear my sister crying, saying she doesn’t want to hear this and that she wants to go home. Hussein tells her to wait and adds, for my parents: “You’ll go out. Leave the house, you can’t be there. When you come back, it will be done.”

I had heard my death sentence with my own ears and I slipped back up the stairs because my sister was about to leave. I didn’t hear the rest of it. A little later my father made the tour of the house and the door of the girls’ room clanged shut. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t comprehend what I had heard. I wondered if it could have been a dream, a nightmare? Are they really going to do it? Is it just to frighten me? And if they do it, when will it be? How? By cutting off my head? Maybe they’re going to let me have this child and then kill me after? Will they keep the child if it’s a boy? Will my mother suffocate it if it’s a girl? Are they going to kill me first?

The next day, I act as though I’ve heard nothing. I am on my guard but I don’t really believe it. And then I start trembling again, and I do believe it. The only questions are when and where. It can’t happen immediately because Hussein has left. And then I can’t imagine Hussein wanting to kill me!

My mother says to me that day, with the same tone as always: “It’s time for you to do the washing, your father and I are going to the city.”

I know what is going to happen. They are leaving the house just as they’d told Hussein.

Recently, when I remembered the disappearance of my sister Hanan, I realized that it happened the same way. The parents were out, the girls were alone in the house with their brother. The only difference in my case is that Hussein was not there yet. I looked at the courtyard: It was a big space, part of it was tiled, the rest covered in sand. It was encircled by a wall, and all around on top of the wall were iron spikes. And in one corner, the gray metallic door, smooth on the courtyard side, without a lock or key, with a handle only on the outside.

My sister Kainat never does the laundry with me, it doesn’t take two of us. I don’t know what work they’ve told her to do, or where she is with the little ones. She’s stopped speaking to me. She sleeps with her back to me ever since I tried to escape to my aunt. My mother is waiting for me to gather the laundry. There is a lot of it because we usually do the laundry only once a week. If I begin around two or three o’clock in the afternoon, I won’t be finished before six o’clock in the evening.

I first go for water from the well, at the back of the garden. I arrange the wood for the fire, I place the big laundry tub on it, and I half fill it. I sit down on a stone while I wait for the water to heat. My parents leave by the main door of the house, which they always lock on their way out.

I’m on the other side, in this courtyard. I keep the coals going all the time. The fire should not be allowed to burn down because the water has to be very hot before the laundry is put in. Then I’ll rub the stains with olive oil soap, and I’ll go back to the well for the rinse water. It is long and tiring work that I’ve been doing for years, but at this moment it’s particularly painful.

I’m sitting on a rock, barefoot, in a dress of gray cloth, tired of being afraid. I don’t even know anymore how long I’ve been pregnant with this fear in my belly. More than six months in any case. From time to time, I look over at the door in the back of the courtyard. It fascinates me. If he comes, he can only enter by that door.

The Fire

Suddenly I hear the door clang. He’s there, he’s coming toward me.

I see these images again twenty-five years later as if time had stopped. They are the last images of my existence in that place, in my village of the Palestinian Territory. They play out in slow motion like films on television. They come back before my eyes constantly. I’d like to erase them as soon as the first one appears but I can’t stop the film from playing. When the door clangs, it’s too late to stop it, I need to see it all again, these images, because I’m always trying to understand what I did not understand then. How did he do it? Could I have gotten away from him if I had understood?

He comes toward me. It’s my brother-in-law Hussein in his work clothes, old pants and a T-shirt. He stands in front of me now and says, with a smile: “Hi. How goes it?” He’s chewing on a blade of grass, smiling: “I’m going to take care of you.”

That smile, and he says he’s going to take care of me, I wasn’t expecting that. I smile a little myself, to thank him, not daring to speak.

“You’ve got a big belly, huh?”

I lower my head, I’m ashamed to look at him. I lower my head even farther, my forehead on my knees.

“You’ve got a spot there. Did you put some henna there on purpose?”

“No, I put the henna on my hair, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“You did it on purpose to hide it.”

I look at the laundry that I was rinsing in my trembling hands. This is the last fixed and lucid image that I have: this laundry and my two trembling hands. The last words that I heard from him are:
You did it on purpose to hide it.

He didn’t say anything more. I kept my head down in shame, a little relieved that he didn’t ask me other questions.

I suddenly felt a cold liquid running over my head and instantly I was on fire. It is like a movie that has been speeded up, images racing past. I start to run in the garden, barefoot. I slap my hair, I scream. I feel my dress billow out behind me. Was my dress on fire, too?

I smell the gasoline and I run, the hem of my long dress getting in the way. My terror leads me instinctively away from the courtyard. I run toward the garden as the only way out. I know I’m running and I’m on fire and I’m screaming. But I remember almost nothing after that. How did I get away? Did he run after me? Was he waiting for me to fall so he could watch me go up in flames?

I must have climbed onto the garden wall to end up then in the neighbor’s garden or in the street. There were women, it seems to me two of them, so it must have been in the street, and they beat on me, I suppose with their scarves. They dragged me to the village fountain and the water hit me suddenly and I screamed in fear. I hear these women shouting but I see nothing more. My head is down against my chest. I feel the cold water running on me and I cry with pain because the water burns me. I am curled up, I smell the odor of grilled meat, the smoke. I must have fainted. I don’t see much of anything after that. There are a few other vague images, sounds, as if I were in my father’s van. But it’s not my father. I hear the voices of women wailing over me. “The poor thing . . . The poor thing . . .” They console me. I am lying in a car. I feel the jolts of the car on the road. I hear myself moan.

And then nothing, and then again this noise of the car and the women’s voices. I’m burning as if I am still on fire. I can’t raise my head, I can’t move my body or my arms, I am on fire, still on fire. I stink of gasoline, I don’t understand anything about this sound of the car engine, the women’s lamentations, I don’t know where they’re taking me. If I open my eyes a little, I see only a piece of my dress or my skin. It’s dark, it smells. I’m still burning but the fire is out. But I’m burning all the same. In my mind I’m still running with fire all over me.

I’m going to die. That’s good. Maybe I’m already dead. It’s over, finally.

Dying

I am on a hospital bed, curled up in a ball under a sheet. A nurse has come to tear off my dress. She pulls roughly on the fabric, and the pain jolts me. I can see almost nothing, my chin is stuck to my chest, I can’t raise it. I can’t move my arms, either. The pain is in my head, on my shoulders, in my back, on my chest. I feel sick. This nurse is so mean that she frightens me when I see her come in. She doesn’t speak to me. She comes to tear off pieces of me, she puts on a compress, and she goes away. If she could make me die, she would do it, I’m sure. I’m a dirty girl, if I was burned it’s because I deserved it since I’m not married and I’m pregnant. I know very well what she’s thinking.

Blackness. Coma. How much time passes, days or nights? No one comes to touch me, they don’t look after me, they give me nothing to eat or drink, they are waiting for me to die. And I would like to die, I am so ashamed of being still alive. I’m suffering so much. I can’t move. This mean woman turns me over to tear off pieces of skin. Nothing more. I would like some oil on my skin to calm the burning, I would like them to raise the sheet so the air would cool me a little. A doctor is there. I saw pant legs and a white shirt. He spoke but I didn’t understand. It’s always the mean woman who comes and goes. I can move my legs and I use them to raise the sheet from time to time. I’m in pain on my back, on my side. I sleep, my head still stuck to my chest, down the way it was when the fire was on me. My arms are strange, extended out away from my body and both of them paralyzed. My hands are still there, but I can’t use them. I would so much like to scratch myself, to rip my skin to stop the pain.

They make me get up. I walk with this nurse. My eyes hurt. I see my legs, my hands hanging on either side of me, the tiled floor. I hate this woman. She brings me into a room and takes a shower spray to wash me. She says I smell so bad it makes her want to vomit. I stink, I weep, I am there like some dirty rotting refuse on which you’d throw a bucket of water. Like the turd in the toilet, you flush and it’s gone. Die. The water tears off my skin, I scream, I weep, I beg, the blood runs down my fingers. She makes me remain standing. Under the stream of cold water she pulls off pieces of blackened skin, the shreds of my burned dress, stinking filth, which form a little pile in the bottom of the shower. I smell so strongly of rotting burned flesh and smoke that she has put on a mask and from time to time leaves the washing room, coughing and cursing me. I disgust her, I ought to die like a dog, but far away from her. Why doesn’t she just finish me off? I return to my bed, burning and icy at the same time, and she throws the sheet over me so she doesn’t have to look at me.
Die,
her expression says to me.
Die and let them come and pitch you somewhere else.

My father is there with his cane. He is furious, he raps on the ground, he wants to know who made me pregnant, who brought me here, how it happened. His eyes are red. The old man is crying, but he still frightens me with that cane and I’m not even able to answer him. I’m going to go to sleep, or die, or wake up, my father was there, he isn’t there anymore. But I haven’t been dreaming. His voice is still ringing in my head: “Speak!”

My head is supported by a pillow and I succeed in sitting up a little so as not to feel my arms stuck to the sheet. Nothing gives me any relief but I can at least see who passes by in the corridor, since the door is half open. I hear someone, I see two bare feet, a long black dress, a small form like mine, thin, almost skinny. It’s not the nurse. It’s my mother.

Her two braids smoothed with olive oil, her black scarf, that strange forehead, a bulge between her eyebrows over the nose, a profile like a bird of prey. She frightens me. She sits down on a stool with her black market bag and she starts to weep, to snuffle, wiping her tears with a handkerchief, her head rocking back and forth. She weeps with unhappiness and shame. She weeps for herself and the whole family. And I see the hatred in her eyes.

She questions me, her bag clutched against her. I know this bag, it’s familiar to me. She always carries it with her when she goes to the market or to the fields. She carries bread in it, a plastic bottle of water, sometimes milk. I’m afraid, but less than in my father’s presence. My father can kill me, but not her. She moans her words, and I whisper.

“Look at me, my daughter. I could never bring you home like that, you can’t live in the house anymore. Have you seen yourself?”

“I haven’t been able to look.”

“You are burned. The shame is on the whole family. I can’t bring you back. Tell me how you got pregnant? Who with?”

“Faiez. I don’t know his father’s name.”

“Faiez, the neighbor?”

She starts crying again and jabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief, which is rolled up in a ball, as if she wants to force it into her head.

“Where did you do it? Where?”

“In the field.”

She makes a face, she bites her lip and cries even more.

“Listen to me, my child, I hope for you to die, it’s better if you die. Your brother is young, if you don’t die, he’ll have problems.”

My brother is going to have problems? What sort of problems? I don’t understand.

“The police came to see the family at the house. The whole family, your father and your brother, and me, and your brother-in-law, the whole family. If you don’t die, your brother will have trouble with the police.”

Perhaps she took the glass out of her purse, because there is no table near the bed. No, I didn’t see her look in her bag, she took it from the windowsill, it’s a glass from the hospital. But I didn’t see what she filled it with.

“If you don’t drink this, your brother is going to have problems. The police came to the house.”

Did she fill it while I was weeping with shame, with pain, with fear? I was crying about a lot of things, my head down and my eyes closed.

“Drink this . . . It’s me who gives it to you.”

Never will I forget this big glass, full to the top, with a transparent liquid, like water.

“You’ll drink this, your brother won’t have any problems. It’s better, it’s better for you, it’s better for me, it’s better for your brother.”

And she was crying, and so was I. I remember that the tears ran down over the burns on my chin, along my neck, and they stung my skin. I couldn’t raise my arms. She put a hand under my head and she raised me to the glass she was holding in her other hand. No one had given me anything to drink until then. She was bringing this big glass to my mouth. I would have liked at least to dip my lips into it, I was so thirsty. I tried to raise my chin, but I couldn’t. Suddenly the doctor came into the room, and my mother jumped. He grabbed the glass from her hand and banged it down on the windowsill and he shouted: “No!” I saw the liquid run down the glass and spill over the windowsill, transparent, as clear as water. The doctor took my mother by the arm and made her leave the room. I was still looking at that glass, and I would have drunk it, I would have lapped it up like a dog. I was thirsty, as much as for water as for dying.

The doctor came back and said to me: “You’re lucky I came in when I did. Your father, and now your mother! No one from your family will be allowed in here!”

“My brother, Assad, I’d like to see him, he is good.”

I don’t know what he answered. I felt so strange, my head was spinning. My mother had talked about the police, about my brother who supposedly had enemies? Why him, since it was Hussein who had set fire to me? That glass, it was to make me die. There was still a wet spot on the windowsill. My mother wanted me to drink it and die, and so did I. But I was lucky, according to the doctor, because I had been about to drink this invisible poison. I felt I had been delivered, as if death had tried to charm me and the doctor had made it disappear in a second. My mother was an excellent mother, the best of mothers, she was doing her duty in giving me death. It was better for me. I shouldn’t have been saved from the fire, brought here to suffer, and now take such a long time to die to deliver me from my shame and my family’s.

My brother came, three or four days later. I will never forget that transparent plastic sack he brought. I could see oranges and a banana. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since I’d arrived there. I wasn’t able to, and anyway no one tried to help me. Even the doctor didn’t dare. I knew they were letting me die, because it was forbidden to intervene in a case like mine. I was guilty in everyone’s eyes. I endured the fate of all women who sully the honor of men. They had only washed me because I stank, not to provide me care. They kept me there because it was a hospital where I was supposed to die without creating other problems for my parents and the whole village. Hussein had botched the job, he had let me run away in flames.

Assad didn’t ask any questions. He was afraid and he was in a hurry to get back to the village.

“I’m going to go through the fields so no one sees me. If the parents know I’ve come here to see you I’m going to have problems.”

I had wanted him to come but I was uneasy having him lean over me. I saw in his eyes that I disgusted him with my burns. No one, not even he, was interested in how much I was suffering in this cracking, decaying, oozing skin, slowly devouring me like a serpent’s venom over my whole upper body, my hairless head, my shoulders, my back, my arms, my breasts. I cried a lot. Was it because I knew it was the last time I would see him? Did I cry because I so much wanted to see his children? They were waiting for his wife to give birth, and I learned later that she had two boys. The whole family must have admired and congratulated her.

I couldn’t eat the fruit. It was impossible alone and then the sack disappeared. I never saw any of my family again. My last vision of my parents is of my mother with the glass of poison, my father furiously striking the floor with his cane. And my brother with his sack of fruit.

In the depths of my suffering, I was still trying to understand why I hadn’t seen anything when the fire reached my head. There had been a gasoline can next to me, but there was a cork in it. I didn’t see Hussein pick it up. My head was down when he said he was going to “take care of me” and for a few seconds I thought I was saved because of his smile and the blade of grass he was calmly chewing. In reality, he wanted to gain my confidence to keep me from running away. He had planned everything the day before with my parents. But where did the fire come from? The coals? I didn’t see anything. Did he use a match to do it so quickly? I always had a box next to me, but I didn’t see that, either. So it must have been a lighter in his pocket. Just enough time to feel the cold liquid on my hair, and I was already in flames. I would so much like to know why I didn’t see anything.

It’s a nightmare without end at night, lying flat on my back on this bed in the hospital. I am in total darkness, I see curtains around me; the window has disappeared. I feel a strange pain like a knife stuck into my stomach, my legs tremble. I am dying. I try to sit up but can’t. My arms are still stiff, two filthy wounds that are of no use. There is no one, I am alone. Then who stuck this knife into my stomach?

I feel something strange between my legs. I bend one leg, then the other, I try to disengage this thing that frightens me. I don’t realize, at first, that I’m giving birth. I feel around in the darkness with my two feet. Without really knowing what it is, I push the child’s body slowly back under the sheet. I stay still for a moment, exhausted by the effort.

When I bring my legs together, I feel the baby against the skin on both my legs. It moves a little. I hold my breath. How did it get out so quickly? A knife stab in the belly and it’s there? I’m going back to sleep, it’s impossible, this child didn’t come out all alone without warning. I must be having a nightmare.

But I’m not dreaming, because it’s there, between my knees, against the skin of my legs. They weren’t burned so I have sensation in my legs and my feet. I don’t move, then I raise a leg, the way you would with an arm, to brush a tiny head, arms that move feebly. I must have cried out. I don’t remember. The doctor comes into the room, parts the curtains, but I’m still in darkness. It must be night outside. I see only a light in the hall through the open door. The doctor leans over and he takes the baby away, without even showing it to me. There’s nothing between my legs now. Someone pulls the curtains closed. I don’t remember anything more. I must have fainted, I slept a long time, I don’t know. The next day and the following days, I am certain of only one thing: The child is no longer in my belly.

I didn’t know if he was dead or alive, no one spoke to me about it, and I didn’t dare ask the unkind nurse what they had done with this child. May he forgive me, I was incapable of giving him a reality. I knew that I had given birth but I hadn’t seen him, he wasn’t put into my arms, I didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy. I was not a mother at this moment, but human debris condemned to death. My strongest emotion was shame.

The doctor told me later that I had given birth at seven months to a tiny baby, but that he was alive and being cared for. I vaguely heard what he was saying to me, my ears had been burned and hurt so terribly! I was in pain all over the upper part of my body, and I kept passing from a coma to a half-awake state, with no awareness of day or night. They were all hoping for me to die and they expected it to happen. But I found that God would not have me die so quickly. The nights and days were confused in the same nightmare and in my rare moments of lucidity I had only one obsession, to rip with my nails this infected stinking skin. Unfortunately, my arms wouldn’t obey me.