States of Passion
Page 22
Nafeh lived alone. There was no trace of the servant Khadijeh. Perhaps she had died as well. He never remarried. He travelled the world instead. His old passports contained an incredible number of entry stamps from many different countries, including India, China and Mexico. The real surprise came in 1950. In the briefcase I found a letter written on brown paper in a woman’s trembling hand, which I share with you here and now. I should say that I have taken some liberties in revising the structure. I brought it back to Aleppo with me because it is particularly significant:
My most highly respected Dear Mr Nafeh al-Aghyurli,
Greetings and good wishes from a faithful heart to an esteemed gentleman, etc…
My dear sir. You may wonder what has happened to me and where I now call home. I beg you to forgive me for all I have done, but your affection being ever in my heart, my desire for you to live your life drove me to depart Khojah Bahira’s house without leaving an address. Were it not for my profound affection for you I would have come back. That is the reason why I have remained silent all this time. Before you left with your virtuous wife Jalila Khanum, I felt I was carrying your child in my womb. I never had any intention of mucking things up in your life. First I left you, and then one day I ran away from the Khojah’s house to the village of Maydan Ekbas, which is the village where I was born and where I lived until my mother’s death. It was there that I lied to Shaykh Abd al-Sabbour, the imam of the village mosque, telling him I was married and that the French had imprisoned my husband in the Arwad Prison. The people of the village welcomed me with open arms, and I lived there under the guardianship of Bayonet Abduh until the baby was born. God granted me a son and Shaykh Abd al-Sabbour named him Ismail. I was pleased with such a beautiful name. You must know by now that Ismail is your son as much as he is mine. He was born on New Year’s Day, 1938. I then became acquainted with an Egyptian family travelling from Istanbul whose journey had been interrupted in Maydan Ekbas. I invited them to stay with me. Once their problems were resolved they invited me to accompany them to Egypt. I thought long and hard about it. They told me I could become a dancer in Cairo and earn a lot of money. I agreed to go with them. Cairo is such a massive city, with a wide river running through it. They helped take care of my son Ismail whenever I went to dance at weddings to earn a living. But God—blessings and praises be upon Him—punished me, and I became ill. I’m not going to tell you the name of the illness, but I would cough a lot and grow fatigued very easily and I could no longer continue to dance. After a few weeks I started coughing up blood. I feel as though I am going to die soon, my dearly beloved. That’s why I sat down to write you this letter. I’m going to write down your exact address and ask this Egyptian family, my only friends in the world, to send my son Ismail to Aleppo along with this letter and the address. If he makes it to you safely, this means that I am dead and may God bless me and may you have mercy on my soul by reciting the Fatiha for me, if only once. I loved you with all my heart and did this only so that you could live an honourable life.
P.S. I repeat that Ismail is your flesh and blood. I swear before Almighty God that he is your son. I pray that his arrival doesn’t cause you any trouble with your relatives and that you will take care of him, that you will be able to pretend that he is your servant. He’s a smart and sensitive boy. He always asks about his father. He’s constantly quarrelling with me and is embarrassed that I’m a dancer.
Cairo, February 1950
Sincerely yours, always,
Widad
The letter calmed me down. The story was complete. There were no more grey areas. I sat in my place, examining Widad’s handwriting. Her hand had trembled as she wrote. I tried to imagine the anguish that tormented her during her last few days. No doubt she had suffered a slow and painful death. I was struck with deep sadness for her. Through the story I had come to have great affection for her, through all the things that Shaykh Nafeh had held on to. His love for her was transmitted into my heart.
The idea of writing the story down first came to me as I sat there on the floor. But when I thought about how to actually go about doing it, I realised I had never written a story or even an essay longer than a single page. I hated myself for not being a good writer. I decided that as soon as I got back to Aleppo I would call up a writer and ask him to write it down exactly the way I described it at the beginning of this book. But first things first: I would have to figure out how to get out of there. Ismail was ready to kill me if he sensed that the story was going to make it back to the city, where he was most probably thinking about moving after his father Shaykh Nafeh died. He even threatened to follow me there, to hunt me down if I managed to sneak away. He clearly resented his mother for having been a dancer. He hated the fact that he was a bastard child, and had to pretend he was his father’s servant. He had forced his father to move out of the city and into the countryside in order to keep him away from other people, fearful that his secret would be revealed. Life is hard, Ismail. It led me out there to hear your story and to solve its riddles despite the death of the storyteller. But is it worthwhile to try and write it down, to use real names to describe everything and everyone? For example, out of respect for Ismail’s secret and my own fear of him, I could change the names of all the characters in the story. I could even change the names of the neighbourhoods and the streets, the village where Badia and Widad once lived. The story could still live on after its characters were gone. The one detail I insisted on retaining was Cairo, where Widad and her son wound up going. As for the rest, dear reader, I decided to dispense with their names. I changed what was manufactured at the workshop Shaykh Nafeh inherited, made it soap despite the fact that it produced something one hundred per cent opposed to soap. I chose soap because one of my childhood friends’ fathers used to own a soap workshop, where we spent good times learning how soap was made, wishing we could take part in the process of sliding rings around the individual bars. While sitting among Nafeh’s documents and photographs with his body on the bed right there in front of me, I decided what I had to do, and that is what I actually did, as you now know, dear reader. After all, people’s privacy and their secrets should be respected.
The chirping of wild birds outside jolted me out of my reverie. I looked out the window and noticed, somewhat embarrassedly, that dawn was breaking. I had to get out of there right away, or else I was sure to wind up a dead man. I wanted to live, so I could carry out my mission of writing down this story and publishing it for others to read. I stood up, gathered together the papers and photographs and scarves I had strewn all over the place, having decided to take them with me, and stuffed all of them inside the old leather briefcase. Everything else I put back in the armoire. I borrowed a jacket from the old man to shield me from the cold, took out a few bed sheets and firmly tied one to another to help me escape safely out the window and down to the garden below. I stood beside the bed and recited the Fatiha over the old man’s soul, kissing him and letting my tears flow. I said goodbye to him and threw one final glance around the room. Then I stealthily opened the window and the shutters and tossed down the rope made out of sheets. With the rifle slung over my shoulder and the briefcase hanging from my waist, I climbed down.
My feet safely touched ground in the garden. The sky was clear. The rain had finally let up around midnight. Everything was damp. I heard not a sound as I moved forward. Clutching the rifle, I left the garden, cautiously looking around before finally allowing my feet to run like the wind. I didn’t look back. I broke into a sprint and kept on going until I ran out of energy, at which point I stopped and turned around. The house had completely disappeared. I found it strange that it could vanish so quickly. I began walking at a normal pace, and three hours later I came across a shepherd tending a flock of sheep. I came nearer and asked him to show me how to find the main road. After he had pointed out the way I gave him the rifle in exchange for his help. Half an hour later I was able to flag down a passing car. By two p.m. I was knocking on my own front door
because I had forgotten my keys back at Shaykh Nafeh’s estate. The moment my wife Nadia laid eyes on me, she fainted. Everyone thought I must have got lost in the wilderness and had long since been eaten by wild animals.
NIHAD SIREES – ALEPPO, 1998
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Original text © Nihad Sirees 1998
English translation © Max Weiss 2018
States of Passion was first published as in Lebanon, 1998
First published by Pushkin Press in 2018
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org
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