by Emily Danby
Why hadn’t she heard any news from them in all those years? What could possibly have happened? Out of nowhere, a terrible thought seized her: what if a fire had broken out and taken them all? Then, just as quickly, she felt euphoric, seduced by the hope that perhaps her father alone had met his death and neither her mother nor her brothers and sisters had known the way to Hanan and Anwar’s villa. But the joy was destroyed as swiftly as it had arisen; it was impossible that death could have even come close to that tyrant. Perhaps he had disappeared with a woman and the way to the villa was not known, since it was the old house that he had taken her to, where he had counted the bundle of notes twice, and then left.
Her walk towards home brought back the feelings of that day – the day of the picture, which was stored safely in her bag.
After her fight with the boys, he was waiting for her at home. In the rain she had walked slowly – just like now – as though to delay confrontation. But time marched on and the way to the room was short. There was no escape; she had come to the place where she slept at night and there was nothing to do but enter.
When Aliyah arrived at the door to their room she found it banging against the frame and was surprised that her mother had left it so, allowing their body heat to escape. She did not know that those were the orders her father had given, as he lay in his usual position stretched out on his mat, exhaling the smoke of his cheap cigarette and waiting in fury for his devil of a daughter to arrive. He wore nothing but a thin shirt and a pair of coal-coloured jeans. It was around that time that he had adopted the habit of twirling his moustache pensively, before picking up a small mirror and gazing into it. ‘My youth all gone, wasted and lost,’ he would mutter. Then he would curse his wife, the woman who had embroiled him in a life of difficulties the moment he had married her.
What would he look like now, she wondered. Had he changed much? Would he recognise her? What would she say to him? That her mistress had thrown her out? Why had she thrown her out?
Aliyah’s father was a dark, strangely attractive man. His skin was a golden, coffee colour and his voice deep and gruff. All of the women in the neighbourhood envied his wife, even more so after one unfortunate night when he had come out of the house and displayed his equipment for all of them to see. ‘It’s so big, it needs four women!’ they teased Aliyah’s mother after that.
The women would turn green with envy as they watched Aliyah’s mother stagger towards them in the mornings while gathering around the bus, to set out for the homes all over Damascus where they worked. Aliyah’s mother never paid their comments any attention. Fate had caught her in a trap between pleasing her husband, who spent most of the time unemployed, fulfilling her employers’ wishes, and taking care of her nightmare children, who would have her running after them in the middle of the night to drag them from the streets.
Even though she had worked in other people’s houses since she had married him, when she had first realised that there would be no peace with this man and no money from him, she still retained an inkling of pride in being his wife. Yes, he plucked his pubic hair with the tweezers she used for her eyebrows, and yes, he insisted on having sex several times a day. ‘He is never satisfied!’ she would tell the women of the neighbourhood. Her complaints were genuine, yet tempered with pride.
He would wake her up in the middle of the night, when her strength was spent from the day’s work, and pull her out of bed, anxious not to wake the children. In the beginning, he would screw her just next to the bed, but then his daughters – Aliyah the biggest gossip of them all – began telling the neighbourhood women about what their father got up to at night. After that he became more cautious, dragging his semi-conscious wife into the bathroom – the space which doubled as a kitchen and was barely wide enough for two to stand. He would make her kneel, then mount her for a few minutes, before withdrawing quickly. At first, Aliyah’s mother would cry, but once she got used to his behaviour and her movements became automatic, he no longer had to ask. She would take off her clothes and lay still beneath him and when he had finished, she would wash quickly, without looking him in the face. Afterwards she would return hastily to bed where she plunged into a deep sleep.
In the morning, she would gesture that her back was hurting, in the hope of just a single day’s peace. ‘A woman who doesn’t follow her husband’s orders in bed doesn’t go to heaven,’ he would say, without meeting her eyes. Aliyah’s mother shook her head. ‘And where’s the bed?’ As he fell silent, she grew a little more courageous and raised her voice. ‘I can’t, not every day. My back’s killing me from working all the daylight hours.’ But he avoided meeting her eyes and when evening came, he would do just the same as the previous night, telling her that if he didn’t have sex with her every day, he would find a prostitute instead. The threat always made Aliyah’s mother cry, not because she was jealous, but because she feared that he would take the money needed for the children’s food and spend it on a prostitute. She kept quiet, then went out to work, while he stayed at home with the children, who would do all they could to please their father. Even though it was she who did the house work and put bread on the table, she left it to him to give orders, as a man and the true master of the household. And so, when he asked her to leave the door open, she didn’t say a word, sensing the extent of his rage. She decided not to interfere in his manner of punishing his daughter. After all, he was the man of the house and the girl’s father, and a girl had to learn to face her elders, or so she repeatedly told herself. She didn’t want him to leave, not because she loved him – whatever love there was had departed in the early days – but because she lived life by the words her mother had taught her: ‘Any man’s better than no man at all.’
Aliyah stumbled along the dusty track, struggling to drag her bag. She tried to see through the curtains covering Hanan al-Hashimi’s closed window.
‘Any man’s better than no man at all,’ she called out sarcastically. Aliyah listened to her mother’s words as they fell into the air and her anger intensified, her mind returning to al-Raml.
On entering the house, she had found the door open and her father still stretched out on the floor. Her clothes were in tatters. She licked away her snot and dried the tears from her face, which was stained with streaks of chocolate. Now that she had stopped moving, her body had started to turn blue with cold and her breathing was loud and rasping. Tears came and she gasped for air as if teetering on the edge of an abyss. Aliyah stared at her mother, who forced herself to appear not to care; were she to take her daughter in her arms as she wanted to, she knew that the girl’s father would fly into a rage. He didn’t wait long before grabbing Aliyah by the hair and pulling her into the room, where he started to kick her, screaming death to her whore of a mother for bearing him daughters. Her mother began to plead with him to let the girl be, biting her lip hard each time he called her the daughter of a whore. ‘But I’m the one who puts food on the table,’ she muttered repeatedly, her voice barely audible.
Aliyah had never known her father to lose it like that. She couldn’t understand what provoked him to want to kill his own children. The thought of the first punch, or the first strike of his giant foot against her body filled her with terror, but she soon lost consciousness, only to wake up a few hours later with every limb of her body in pain. Her mother’s refusal to go to work so she could look after her daughter – her way of punishing him for the beating – exacerbated his frustration. She wept all day as he cursed and swore, having realised that his wife would not be returning with the necessary provisions to fill the hungry stomachs surrounding him.
It was the same image of him which seemed to be coming towards her now, drawing closer from the distant horizon as she stumbled along on her high-heels. Aliyah paused for a minute and turned her head. The window was still closed and from a distance it seemed a dark, black speck.
She had no other hope but to return to al-Raml. The district formed a partial wall around Damascus, like a viper encircling the
city. On the inside of the wall, the city was cramped, standing motionless before the parade of concrete houses and the peculiar clans of people setting out in every direction, in search of a morsel of bread.
Despite the sectarianism which, over recent decades, had given each clan its own character – from al-Riz district, to ‘Ash al-Wurud, to Jaramana Camp – each group resembled the rest and they were all interconnected. Their slums reached out into the heart of the city, like Dwel’a, which stretched into Jaramana and on to Bab Touma.
Al-Raml was home to an odd assortment of poor folk, who had carried their humiliating poverty with them when they fled to south Damascus. The people built small rooms for themselves from sheets of tin and badly made cement bricks. Impoverished Palestinians and dark-skinned Ghouranis – people of the Jordan Valley – lived alongside the destitute people who had arrived one day from the coastal mountains, dividing into large groups. The new arrivals lived in miserable settlements, established chaotically by mobsters, cheats and traffickers. Senior military officers took hold of the fringes of the city and sent their own ‘communities’ to live there, the new settlements forming the officers’ spheres of influence. They created ‘ghettos’ too, laid out like a monochrome mosaic, the colour of poverty and despair. Those who migrated from the neighbouring countryside and from more distant rural areas, dreaming of a decent life, became mercenaries, bodyguards, secret police and smugglers. The rest – among them the people of al-Raml – turned their daughters into servants, just as they had done over a hundred years previously when the girls were pawned to Aleppan tradesmen. Meanwhile, the girls’ fathers became day labourers, scattered about Damascus’s public squares, where they would accept any offer of work that came their way. Very quickly, the district attracted a group of poor university students, who lived by the dozens in adjoining rooms. Tenth-rate prostitutes settled in the area too, making deals with the taxi drivers to bring in the night-time punters. The place was an oddity, even to itself. There wasn’t the slightest sense of closeness drawing the neighbours together, or linking the adjoining houses, even though the residents could hear their neighbours’ lustful cries at night. In the mornings, the women would joke about the noises they heard, imitating the animal cries as they crowded in the doorways, before most left for work.
Al-Raml district was like a public square that was alien to its own times. Everything there seemed comical, like a cartoon or a black-and-white western. The place was arid, isolated and languishing in dust: the glass windows covered with cardboard; the rusty iron doors; the walls made of tin and iron sheeting; the little shops like bandits’ grottos; the houses on top of houses. This latter sort was rare, perhaps because of the innovative way in which they were constructed. The owners would fix four iron posts into the ground, cover the walls with pieces of durable sheet iron and then hold them together with a little cement. Were it not for the rattling winter gales, this would have provided protection against the wind and made the walls solid. The roof was fixed with the same sort of resistant iron sheeting, held in place with a few kilograms of cement. There wouldn’t necessarily be a window to the room; the gaps in the walls, which appeared in every building despite the precautions taken, provided ventilation. On a winter’s day those very same holes became streams of rainwater.
The other innovative way to create a home with adjoining rooms was to construct a partitioning wall which acted as two, since it was attached to two rooms. Then, both rooms would be covered with tin sheeting and the inner sides of the stone walls masked with pieces of coloured fabric, stuck down with cement until they became a part of the wall. After that, all the residents had to do was spread a mat on the floor and gather a few covers, and the place would become a real paradise.
It was striking how the men’s eyes in al-Raml drowned in fatigue, despite the women’s beautiful faces, made up with bright red lipstick as they strolled by, flirting restlessly. This strange neighbourhood – cloaked in dust and boredom – was capable of turning even the red shades of the women’s lips a sombre, ashen tone, since deep down the men realised that the girls’ flirting glances were put on for the first pleasure-seeker they came across.
The alleyways which ran between these buildings acted as a sort of boundary, no more than half a metre wide, which kept the women inside as their bellies swelled year upon year. During the final months of their pregnancy, the women were prevented from leaving the house, since their inflated stomachs couldn’t possibly fit through the tight alleyways all at once. The fact that there was a mosque in the neighbourhood made al-Raml all the more peculiar. Its magnificence was an oddity amongst the startling gloom of the houses. The mosque was built from iron and cement and decorated with marble. It was constructed by a charity worker, to provide a space for the neighbourhood men to gather in the evenings and sort out their differences and to receive handouts from the charities. The mosque’s Imam came from al-Midan and was not a local, but over the previous few years he had become a guardian to the whole community. Even though he was over fifty and already had two wives, the Imam married a third time – a girl from al-Raml who could have been no older than fifteen. He had spotted her one day as he made his way back from the mosque and she was leaving the house with her head uncovered, he felt a shiver run straight through his body as he leered at her curvaceous backside.
The people of al-Raml could still recollect how everything had changed after the man from the religious charity had built them a mosque, and how the women started to behave differently. When the man began bringing groups of his followers there, with their long beards and loose trousers, most of the women began to cover their heads. The man would bless them during his Friday sermons and beseech the other women to join them in rejecting sin.
Aliyah’s father visited the mosque daily. He found solace in the courtyard and his visits gave him the opportunity to catch up on the neighbourhood gossip, but the other men would avoid him, fearing his volatile temper. Even though they freely allowed their wives to work for unmarried men, the women were warned against Aliyah’s father nonetheless. The men envied him for his beautiful Ghourani wife, who was tall and wonderfully full-figured with dark eyes, slender lips and a bronze glow to her hair. Hearing her screams in the daytime when he hit her for some trivial reason, or in the evening when he took her by force, the men were of one opinion – that Aliyah’s father was unworthy of his wife.
A cold sweat, born of fear, seeped through Aliyah’s clothes, heightening her sensitivity to the morning chill as the gust of a passing lorry swept over her. Something about the lorry reminded her of her father. Perhaps it was the dust storm that had almost knocked her off her feet, just like her father’s tempests, which left no opposition standing.
Aliyah stood fixed to the spot as she remembered the night when her mother had gone out into the alleyway, wailing and having torn her clothing in grief. The events of that night were crystal clear in her memory; she could still hear her elder sister’s voice.
Her sister had been on her way back from work in one of the factories, where they made socks, not far from al-Raml. Many such places, around the suburbs of Damascus were described as factories in exaggeration; in actuality, they were workshops running on the energy of young women working for little pay, who were happy to complete the tasks their bosses gave them without insurance since, after all, it was better to work morning and night than to loiter on the streets of Damascus in search of a late-night punter.
Aliyah Senior was one of those young women. She was given an opportunity that many girls were not, after having almost mastered the craft. Life had been hard for her, accompanying her mother from one house to another, assisting with the cleaning, carrying heavy goods for the dainty mistresses, preparing teas and coffees and tidying the textiles workshop. Eventually, she became a skilled seamstress herself and took up her position behind a machine. Aliyah Senior worked earnestly in everything she did. It was important to please her boss, she felt, her mind focused solely on helping her mother to provide s
ome stability for the family. Aliyah would daydream that her father might unexpectedly meet his death. It would be a relief if he went, she thought, not only because he took hold of the whole household income, but because without him her mother’s annual pregnancies would cease and life’s burdens would no longer grow. She rarely thought about buying herself a new dress, nor did she expect to receive any attention from the boys as she followed her daily route, crossing the threshold of the family’s room and walking until she reached the workshop door.
Her calmness and nonchalance made Aliyah a dream girl to the boys who loitered in the alleyways, and yet it was the factory boss whom she let fondle her, although within certain limits. Aliyah would restrict his advances, particularly when he reached his hand between her thighs. He could pull down his trousers and she would allow him to kiss her breasts, but never to approach the danger zone – that deep part of her anatomy which, if trespassed, would bring shame on her family. Aliyah had the feeling that she was courting danger, that there was a dividing line between keeping him at bay and holding on to her job.
As she washed her face clean of the boss’s slaver, Aliyah thought about arrangements for the coming month and slipped the money into her pocket. Prudently, she kept a small amount back, without the slightest suspicion of what was to happen on her return home. She was still wearing her work dress, her socks and headscarf when her father appeared out of nowhere. Aliyah jumped. They had been busy, she and her pregnant mother, counting the costs of a numerous family. Perhaps it was her mother’s bad luck which had prompted him to enter at the very moment she had spread the notes out on the thin sponge mattress. No, her mother wasn’t the bad omen: it was her.
