The Dark Side of Love (125 page)

Medication: begin with imipramine and low dosage of levomepromazine. Chloral to help her sleep. If effects insufficient, perhaps chlorpromazine.

In view of the presumably neurotic factors, Dr. Bishara to have regular conversations with her on the ward. Patient to come to my office once a week.

Farid was laughing at her. And as if he were an appetizing dish to eat, she found her mouth watering. When she woke up, the sky was looking in through her window. It was very early, the garden still lay in shadow, and a rooster was crowing far away. She felt strong, and opened the window. The air smelled of jasmine and orange blossom. She held the bars and breathed deeply with relief. She was free. She was feeling better every day now that she was here.

Over the last few days she had felt a curious sense of peace. Questions surfaced, could not be answered, and left her in melancholy mood. Why had Jack always been preferred to her? He had been
allowed to go out into the street any time, visit his friends, go to the cinema. But every outing she wanted to make had to be carefully checked first. And when she and Jack made the same mistakes, she had always been punished more severely, on the grounds that mistakes do girls more damage than boys. And then everyone was so serious. She had always liked laughter, and as a child she loved anyone who smiled at her.

She liked the peace and quiet of this institution, so she refused to see any of her family. Dr. Salam understood, and went along with her wishes without any ifs or buts. He had even spoken angrily to her mother when she pestered him, and sent her off home. Dr. Salam said nothing about this little altercation, which had been conducted in his office. Rana heard of it only from Adnan, the nice male nurse with the glass eye. When her mother left, Dr. Salam had told Adnan that they would have to keep her in the closed ward for a couple of years.

Adnan was a joker who kept taking his glass eye out, hiding it in his mouth behind closed lips, and then putting on sunglasses. When he met anyone he laughed, and his eye would peep out of his mouth.

She didn't want anyone to know that she had begun to feel better here after only a few days. Not even Dr. Salam the medical director. It wasn't difficult for her to feel unwell; she just had to think of the day when her cousin had raped her in her family's drawing room.

She didn't have to split into two people here. For years she had been able to endure life with Rami only by leaving herself as soon as he touched her. He had her body captive, she put her mind to one side and watched, or walked through the house and quite often outside it too. And she didn't come back until she heard him groaning in orgasm. He used to bellow and snore at the same time; he sounded like a bull. She wasn't used to that from Farid. Farid made sounds like a little puppy yelping when he reached his climax.

She remembered one icy cold winter. She was lying in bed, running a high temperature. A cold followed by flu had left her very weak, but her husband wouldn't take a single day off work to look after her. The President trusted him, he said, and he wasn't about to disappoint the President just because she had a sniffle. She exploded, calling him and
the President names, saying the President had enslaved him. He turned pale and went into the kitchen. An hour later he came back, drunk, and shouted at her never to say such things about the President again. Then he beat her as she lay in bed. She was afraid he was going to kill her. Finally he left her alone, and disappeared for a week. At the end of that time he came back, beaming as if nothing had happened, and called her “little pigeon” again, because he wanted to sleep with her.

When Dr. Bishara came into the consultation room on Monday morning after two weeks of vacation, the staff were discussing the new admissions: one was a case of emotional menopausal depression in a recently divorced woman patient of fifty-two, with abuse of medicaments and suicidal tendencies. The second case was one of acute recidivism of chronic schizophrenia with delusions, patient not responsive at present.

Hanna Bishara was not asked to take on either of these two new patients that morning. Nor did she offer to; she was thinking of her old patient in the closed women's ward who had jumped out of a window two days earlier, breaking a leg and three ribs.

After a short discussion, her colleagues left the room. Dr. Salam beckoned to Hanna Bishara to follow him into his office.

“Young woman, late twenties, married, no children, chronic depression and severe lack of appetite, borderline anorexic with a weight of forty-three kilos and height of one metre sixty, high degree of anxiety,” explained Dr. Salam, glancing several times at the papers in front of him. He seemed very glad to have this particular patient here. A slight smile showed on his face. “Rana Shahin is my patient. You'll need to go particularly carefully with her. Her father – an excellent lawyer – is a good friend of mine, her husband a high-ranking army officer. Would you please get to know the young woman? And tell me how you're doing with her now and then,” he said in an unusually gentle tone, making preparations for his daily rounds.

Dr. Bishara knew that Edward Salam had a particularly soft spot for young women patients, whom he treated with paternal care. He had always wished he had a daughter, but his wife gave him four sons, and he didn't get on well with any of them. However, that wasn't the only reason for Rana's preferential treatment. The medical director needed her and other patients with relatively slight mental disturbances to raise the reputation of his psychiatric hospital and rescue it from the derogatory associations of a “nuthouse” – not altogether easy in view of the condition of the majority of patients, about whom no one asked any more.

Hanna Bishara, a specialist in neurology, also saw a good opportunity for herself in these endeavors of the medical director. She had spent years doing further training in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and Salam had made her his closest confidant, in preference to five older doctors. And she would get no chance at all outside this hospital. There wasn't a single private psychiatric practice in the whole of Damascus.

When Hanna Bishara entered the room she saw a deeply disturbed young woman: the curtains over the window were drawn, leaving only a tiny gap between them, and Rana was sitting in a corner in the semi-darkness. When the doctor came in she visibly took fright, but immediately tried to recover her self-control and sit up straight in the chair at the small desk. At the same time, however, she turned away and said nothing, so there was no eye contact between them, and no conversation. Dr. Bishara was clearly surprised by the sight of the fragile, delicate figure, sensed her great fear of all intruders, and sat down at a suitable distance. After a while she broke the silence and spoke gently: she'd like to get to know Rana, she said, so that she could form a picture of her life and the time before her admission, and then perhaps she could help her to understand the inner reasons for her own suffering better. Rana stood up as if she
felt pressure being put on her, and took refuge on her bed, where she sat wrapped in a blanket to protect herself from further questions. The doctor said quietly that she respected Rana's reserve, and then rose, adding as she left the room that she would look in again that afternoon.

But she had no luck that afternoon either. I'm getting nowhere at all, thought Hanna Bishara in the evening, feeling disappointment and perplexity. A beautiful young woman from the best circles of society, practically without a care in the world – and now this happens to her. What could have caused it? In the corridor she met her older colleague Hisham.

“Well, how are you doing?” he greeted her, as usual.

“It'd be easier opening an oyster with your bare hands,” she said, quoting his own dictum about mute patients. He smiled. “Just as I always say. I've come from a similar case. Two hours, and it's not just my tongue that's all furred up.”

Hanna Bishara went to the ward office to take a closer look at Rana's case notes and the medical director's admission report on her. But they were not much help either over the next few days. Dr. Bishara felt Rana's distrust as a personal failure, particularly as the young woman reacted to the medical director himself in a remarkably positive, almost confidential way. Hanna Bishara began to suspect that on a deeper plane Rana's distrust of her related to her mother.

This idea was fully confirmed in their next session. The doctor very cautiously broached the subject of Rana's childhood and her relationship with her mother. At first the young woman just shook her head with a wry twist of her mouth, but then, after a silence, she began to talk after all, and at the end of their hour together she found relief in a fit of tears.

“I suspect your mother felt so hurt that her first child was ‘only' a girl that she never forgave you, and was always taking her disappointment out on you,” said Hanna Bishara.

Rana looked up. She felt that the doctor was not just quoting from medical textbooks but speaking from her own experience. She smiled at her.

When Hanna Bishara came next afternoon, everything seemed
just the same as at their first meeting – except for her patient's shy, questioning look, as if the young woman had been waiting for her.

Hanna Bishara recollected that, in passing, Rana had told her how as far back as she could remember her mother had never let her have anything she said she wished for. So she began by asking if there was anything that Rana would like just now. After a short pause the answer came in a soft but very clear voice, “Could someone tell Dunia I'd like to see her?” Dr. Bishara learned that Dunia was a very good friend whom Rana had known since childhood. The doctor promised that she would see about it. “But perhaps we ought to discuss your medicaments first, and work out a plan together to improve your appetite,” she said, and was astonished when Rana quietly but audibly agreed with her.

Unfortunately the experienced Dr. Salam was right when he said he doubted whether Rana's friend would comply with her wish. Dr. Bishara had been more optimistic, but her phone call to Dunia was a disappointment. Dunia wasn't going to visit a psychiatric hospital; like many Arabs she seemed to be afraid of them, although she didn't say so. But still, she was ready to talk to her friend on the phone.

Rana smiled quietly when the doctor said that, sad to say, Dunia couldn't visit her. “I ought to have known it,” she murmured, “but I was being silly.”

“Would you like to go into the garden?” she asked. Rana looked up, and was surprised to find the doctor reading her own thoughts. A little later she was walking in the garden with Dr. Bishara, shyly exchanging greetings with the other patients.

No, she had certainly not been a highly gifted girl, Rana thought, before carefully answering that question from the doctor out loud. She'd just worked hard, that was why she had done well in school and passed all her examinations without much difficulty.

Had she been popular, Dr. Bishara asked? No, she replied. The
doctor did not press her further. That was kind of her, but the way Rana had answered at once, as if “no” were the answer only to be expected, alarmed them both.

Rana fell silent. The doctor felt as if she were standing in a dark wood, and must grope her way out of it laboriously. Her questions were probing fingers. Rana replied briefly, with long silences in which she often seemed to have entirely forgotten both the doctor and herself.

But then a moment came when their conversation reverted to mothers. Rana remembered moments in her childhood when she had felt something like affection for hers.

“Did your mother kiss you often?”

“Kiss me?” Rana actually laughed for the first time. “My mother's mouth isn't made for kissing. She could never bring herself to do it.” She felt silent again and ignored all further questions. The doctor sensed deep sadness behind her withdrawal.

Hanna Bishara, said the male nurse Adnan, was Dr. Salaam's right hand. She came from a rich Christian family, and was the first woman doctor to work in this mental hospital. He liked her. Head Nurse Kadira did not. That was another reason to like Hanna Bishara, though Rana. She herself disliked Kadira and her cold manner.

Head Nurse Kadira was not tall, but she was strong, with masculine features and fiery red hair. She wore shoes with crescent-shaped iron reinforcements at their toes and heels, so that as she walked down the corridor she sounded like a soldier on the march, but with a curiously teetering step. She said little, and her eyes were windows with no curtains over them; you looked straight into a void.

There was a lot of talk about the head nurse. People said she was wedded to the hospital, and crazy herself. One woman patient told Rana that she had seen Kadira urinating, and she was a man below the waist, female only from the waist up.

Had Rana been particularly afraid of being with boys, the doctor wanted to know. Hesitantly, she said no, and then preserved a long silence. Thinking about it, she decided her answer was not quite right. Then she remembered the incident in the summer of 1954, when she was fourteen. There was to be a family outing, with a picnic on the river, one Sunday in July. At first it seemed a delightful idea, but then she found out that Jack had been allowed to ask two friends, the Interior Minister's twin sons. Rana suspected that her mother was trying to ingratiate herself with their powerful family by inviting the boys. Or perhaps she only wanted to be able to mention at her coffee mornings what good friends her son was with the Minister's twins. Rana would have preferred to stay at home. Then she could have phoned Farid, or gone to the cinema with Dunia, but neither her mother nor her father would allow it. Her father waxed enthusiastic about the beautiful river that flowed into a lake. “Water as clear as glass, just the thing for a little fish like you.” He knew that Rana loved to swim.