by Nihad Sirees
“Some people believe that if the bride stomps on the groom’s foot on their wedding night she’ll always have the upper hand in the marital home. Some would take part in that silly custom ironically while others took it seriously. At one wedding, a rather plump bride was dead set on the idea. She stepped down so hard on her groom’s foot that Widad, who was watching, thought she might have broken his foot. The groom yelped in pain, lifted his foot and grabbed his bride, hopping on one foot as he fought against tears. The music stopped abruptly and Malak stopped dancing. The women’s ululations came to a halt. Nothing could be heard except the sound of the groom whimpering in pain, then cursing and chastising the bride, and then his vow to divorce her. The young man railed against his wife’s clumsiness. He had signed a marriage contract with her without having set eyes on her. He went to sit in his place, all red in the face, and refused to let his bride sit by his side.
“Chaos broke out as the women struck up a debate. The bride’s relatives tried to calm the groom down, but to no avail. His mind was made up. He was going to divorce her. In order to prove how serious he was, he went over to Widad, asking her in an audible voice to marry him on the spot. The young woman froze in horror, ready to leap up and run away, but Bahira intervened, instructing him as firmly as possible to get away from her. The bride was in a sorry state, crying inconsolably over losing her groom right before her very eyes and ears. Tears, black from the kohl she wore around her eyes, streamed down her face and as she wiped them away, her face became monstrous.
“The groom got up once again and asked the young women still at the wedding which of them would like to marry him. He didn’t want to waste the money he had already spent on the party. And lo and behold a woman emerged from the bickering crowd, holding the hand of her daughter, who was barely thirteen years old. She walked up to the dais and presented the groom with her daughter, saying:
“‘This is my daughter Aisha. I consent to your marrying her right now.’
“The groom sized up the little girl. All the other women fell silent, holding their breath while they awaited his decision. He seemed to be looking back and forth at the little one and at his overweight wife, whose face was smudged with eyeshadow, comparing one to the other. He told his mother that Aisha was more appropriate for him. They had to find a suitable dress for her. All the relatives of the overweight bride stormed out in anger and tears, asking the shaykh to conclude a new marriage contract. Bahira had to ask for a larger fee because she would be forced to remain a little later.”
I chuckled as Ismail came in to set the table for lunch in the dining area off the living room. When he saw me laughing, he threw me a spiteful glance and went about his work. Just then the old man fell silent. I got up to stand by the window, staring up at the rainy sky in order to avoid making eye contact with Ismail.
After lunch I felt a sharp pain in my stomach and rushed out of my room towards the bathroom at the end of the hall. It was still siesta time. When I sat down on the toilet I was surprised by explosive diarrhoea with an unnatural colour and stench. I cleaned myself up and dried my hands before walking back out. It occurred to me that I might have been poisoned by wicked Ismail. My head was pounding and feverish, and I became overwhelmed by extreme concern for my health and for my very life. I went back to sit down on the toilet without dropping my pants and tried to think. Had Ismail laced my food with poison? I didn’t feel like making myself throw up, and I tried to avoid rushing to judge Ismail.
I struggled to recall the symptoms of poisoning from cases I had witnessed myself or read about. I felt I would need to pull down my trousers and sit on the toilet because I was sure to have explosive diarrhoea. Perhaps I’d feel slightly dizzy and my heart would start pounding violently. I could hear my voice ringing in my ears:
“It’s burning… Ismail poisoned me.”
Apparently the sound of my own voice convinced me that I had been poisoned. I was instantaneously overcome with panic as I realised that I would have to purge myself right away.
Ingesting a poisonous mushroom in the countryside or in the middle of the forest, far from hospitals and ambulances, was the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone like me. If you pass out, you may die. But if you know you’ve been poisoned and you manage to stay conscious, you have to shove your hand down your throat, press your finger as far down as it can go and make yourself throw up. Then you have to drink a gallon of water and repeat this forced vomiting several times, until your digestive tract is rid of the poisonous substance.
By the third round of my purging process, I saw that I was only throwing up water, which allowed me to relax. I stayed on the toilet in order to catch my breath. The process was so painful, I felt as if my digestive tract was going to come surging out of my body. Once I had calmed down completely I stood up and washed my yellow face, dried it off and opened the door to go out, which was when I bumped into Ismail.
He was just standing there, as if he had been pressed up against the bathroom door. He was blocking my path, fixing me with a wolfish stare. He knew full well what was going on inside of me. With a hint of sarcasm, he said:
“I hope you’re feeling all right, sir.”
“May God protect you.”
“Your face is a bit yellow, though. You were throwing up, were you? I could hear you all the way downstairs.”
I didn’t want to appear weak in his presence, so I didn’t mention the poisoning.
“It seems I’ve come down with some kind of a bug, or maybe I ate too much at lunch and my stomach couldn’t handle it.”
“I know what it is.”
“What’s that?”
“I added some wild herbs to the old man’s food. You pampered city folk are allergic.”
“To herbs?” I asked in bewilderment.
“There are various herbs that grow in these parts,” he said, threateningly. “Including poisonous ones, of course. Thank God you just had an allergic reaction this time.”
So that bastard had poisoned me after all. I was staring him straight in the face, unsure what to do.
“What’s your decision?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you just go home so you can be nourished by your wife’s reliable home cooking and the warmth of her bed?”
“I’ll go when the old man says it’s time for me to go.”
“As you wish, sir,” he said, as if saddling me with the responsibility for whatever might happen.
I started to walk towards my room but stopped and wheeled round to see him staring at me disapprovingly. I moved in close so I could whisper, as he had.
“Why can’t we be friends?” I asked him in a gentle tone full of goodwill.
“But we are friends.”
“Friends? You’ve been threatening me nonstop. Listen, let’s make a deal. I’m in good shape. My work often brings me out to the countryside, into the wild. I know how to flush out poison and how to take care of someone trying to break into my room at night with an oak switch. Anyway, I’m really stubborn and I’m always up for an adventure.” I was lying about this; I’m as skittish as a bunny rabbit. “Just leave me alone, and we can remain friends.”
“How about you just leave, and then we can remain friends, inshallah.”
“Is this because of the story?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you want me to hear it? What’s the worst that could happen to you?”
He walked away without responding, down to the ground floor. I followed after him. If he wasn’t going to tell me what the whole thing had to do with him, I hoped I could at least get him to give something away. I grabbed his arm to prevent him from going downstairs.
“It’s just the old man’s life story. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, as far as I can tell.”
He moved two steps back up, coming within a hair’s breadth of me. He was visibly upset. He could have taken a bite out of my nose just by opening his mouth.
; “Listen up, adventure-lover,” he snarled, breathing into my face. “Don’t forget that you stumbled out of a broken-down car and got lost in the wilderness on a rainy night full of hyenas and wild dogs. I swear I’m going to get rid of you.”
He clenched his teeth as he spat out that last sentence, then wheeled around and started down the stairs. I stood there for a moment before heading back to my room. I needed to think. I stood next to the window, looking out at the grey sky and the torrent of water pouring from dark clouds. I was vehemently against the idea of leaving. I was hooked on the story and couldn’t see a way around it or Ismail at that moment. If I left then, without hearing the rest of the story, I knew I’d regret it for the rest of my life. I was going to stay and wrangle with Ismail.
I heard a door close downstairs, and then the house was silent. I expected to see Ismail walking around the side of the house so I looked out the window at the backyard but didn’t see anything. I waited for five minutes and when he didn’t appear, I felt the need to lie down on my stomach to ease the pain of the forced vomiting. Because I make the bed every morning I had to pull back the blanket. When I did, I froze. Right there, on top of the white sheet, was a scorpion as big as my hand. Its tail was curled high above its body, as if it were about to strike. I was paralysed with fear. I had seen my share of scorpions out in the wild, but I had never seen such a gargantuan one. It was reddish brown, though its tail was yellowish and its stinger was white. If that creature had stung me, I’d have been a goner. Thankfully I’d pulled the covers back and seen it before lying down.
It took a long time for me to come up with such a vivid description of the scorpion because I was dumbfounded in the moment, my mind inert. The scorpion spun around and disappeared under the blanket. When it vanished from my sight I snapped out of it and attacked the spot where it was hiding, raining blows down on it, trying to smash it with my shoe. I continued to pound away until I was exhausted. I moved away from the bed and with two fingers I yanked back the blanket to see what had happened. Strangely, I found no trace of it. I pulled the blanket all the way back but the scorpion had escaped and must have been long gone. I searched for it in the folds of the bed, clutching my shoe, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. My fear grew. If I didn’t find it, I’d be staying in a scorpion-infested room. I was in a daze. I couldn’t stop looking at my foot, my hand, my shoulder. I was convinced that the scorpion was creeping up on me. I’d jump suddenly. Finally I retreated to the corner and crouched down, so I’d have a full view of the floor.
I could feel panicked heartbeats pounding against my knees, which were pressed up against my chest. Ismail was seriously trying to kill me, I thought, and I was getting close to giving up. Then I imagined myself fleeing the house, carrying Shaykh Nafeh with me, taking him to my house in Aleppo where we could enjoy the kind of peace and quiet that would allow me to hear the rest of the story without scorpions or poison. We’d be pampered by my dear wife Nadia instead.
Just then I heard the sound of something falling, like a box of matches hitting the bare floor. The scorpion had dropped from underneath the bed and it was now heading towards me, making a scratching sound, its tail curled up, its pincers at the ready. I may come across as a coward but when I find myself up against mortal danger I can be quite courageous; at least, that’s what’s happened in every exceptional situation I’ve ever been in. I crawled towards it on my knees, clutching my shoe, and at just the right moment I swung it down and smashed the creature. I heard a crunch. Yellow fluid came seeping out of its crushed shell—the poison with which Ismail intended to kill me.
I swept up the mangled scorpion and wiped away the fluid with a paper towel before heading downstairs to toss it in the garbage. When I was done I washed my hands with soap and water. The kitchen was tidy and clean, smelling of strong disinfectant. There was a set of shelves along the wall and a long block of shiny marble with another row of cabinets over the countertop. There was a huge refrigerator and a rectangular table against the wall, with a chair on each side. A hand towel hung there. I smelt it: it was clean and smelt of laundry detergent.
I opened a cupboard and discovered that it was full of tin cans. I opened another to find that it was for clean plates. Ismail was very neat, I thought to myself. A stranger like me could feel a kind of calm in this kitchen. I stood there for a moment and then turned to leave when I noticed that the open door concealed another door behind it. I had to close the kitchen door in order to see the other door, and that’s just what I did. The second door was quite narrow, no wider than sixty centimetres, and it didn’t have a doorknob. An old photograph of the Aleppo citadel hung at eye level. I assumed the door would be locked but I mustered up some courage and pushed. It swung inwards, just like that.
So this was Ismail’s room. The daylight illuminated it to reveal a carefully made bed and a bookcase with hundreds of books in Arabic, English and French. There was a large armoire and several smaller cabinets. I couldn’t imagine what they contained. I walked over to the bookcase. If it was strange to see so many books in one place, I found it even stranger that they should be in Ismail’s room, in particular. Apparently he could read three languages. He was educated, the bastard. At the side of the bed was a nightstand with a lamp and a book Ismail had been reading, with an ostrich feather as a bookmark. It was Déscription de l’Égypte, written during the Napoleonic campaign against Egypt in 1798. I opened it at the bookmarked page: here was a chapter in which the author described the Egyptian bridal procession, specifically the female dancers who would walk out in front. I returned the book to its place, exactly the way it had been positioned, so that when Ismail returned he wouldn’t suspect anyone had been there. I went over to the bookcase to examine the other titles. I was surprised to learn that he read about Egypt and dance and wedding ceremonies. The shelves contained works of history as well as nineteenth-century French and English novels by Flaubert, Stendahl, Balzac, Dickens, Conrad and others. There were historical books by Durant and Shaykh Kamel al-Ghazzi, the memoirs of Naum Bakhkhash, books about home gardening, a book about toxins, another about fighting snakes and another about mushrooms, and a copy of The Tribes of Syria by Ahmad Wasfi Zakaraya.
I had to squat in order to read the titles on a lower shelf. It seemed that he wanted those books always to be within reach. Most of them were about the arts: The Egyptian Singer, published in 1912 by the Gramophone Limited Company in Egypt, Diwan al-Ataba al-Sharqiyyah, and My Life by the American dancer Isadora Duncan. There was one book that particularly resonated with me: Voyage to Egypt and the Land of the Nubians. The book is a travel narrative set between 1805 and 1828 in Egypt and the Nubian region, and it was dedicated to the Russian tsar. Flipping through it, I discovered drawings of a number of dancers from the region as well as a number of images depicting the lives of the inhabitants.
I had to think through several things right away, the most important being what connected Egypt, dance and Ismail. Did it have something to do with his slightly Egyptian accent? I’d have to postpone my questions until later. Time was short, and Ismail could come back any minute and find me in his room. He would kill me for sure. Walking away from the bookcase, I opened his wardrobe, its chaos in total contrast to the neatness I’d found in the kitchen and his bedroom. There were all sorts of clothes: a Bedouin robe, Arab dishdashas and keffiyehs and other things. As I pushed away a higgledy-piggledy stack of clothes, my hand touched cold metal. Tossing the clothes aside, I saw the barrel of a hunting rifle. It was unloaded. I pulled it out, held it in my hands, and moved to the window to get a closer look. A French model. The two barrels didn’t smell of burnt powder, suggesting that it hadn’t been fired for some time. I noticed a Latin inscription on the wooden butt. I shivered as I brought it into the light: Dr Waleed Fares. Just then I was overcome with incapacitating terror. Fear made me consider getting out of that room immediately, but it also drove me to search among the piles of clothes for rifle cartridges. Maybe he had stashed them here as well. Rummagi
ng around in a hurry, I found a cartridge full of red plastic-tipped bullets. I made sure everything appeared to be back to normal, at least the way I remembered it, and then left the room. I went back to my room, hid the rifle and the cartridges under my bed, and sat down to take a few laboured breaths, nervous about what Ismail would do if he caught me poking around in his room. Some time later I heard the front door close. He had returned.
I sat by the fireplace in the living room, waiting for the old man to come down from his nap. He was taking a long time, so Ismail went up to look for him. I stood up to watch the rain. Where could Ismail have gone in this weather? Where was he hiding out? Maybe there was a shack nearby, or a secret entrance to another room where he was plotting to kill me.
I was confused by everything I had found in his room off the kitchen. But what really disturbed me was the fact that I’d found Dr Waleed Fares’s hunting rifle. The old man had told me that his one-time guest had disappeared after three days without saying goodbye to him or hearing the end of the story. I doubted that Ismail had forced him to leave. It seemed much more likely that he had murdered him and disposed of the body. Today I confirmed that he had been killed. If he had left, he would have taken his rifle with him, since he would have needed it out in the wilderness. The most likely scenario was that Ismail had killed the doctor with his own hunting rifle and then buried him in the garden.
