The Proof of the Honey

by Salwa Al Neimi

  The family (rich, traditional, and hailing from the countryside) covered the story up. Quite simply, they erased the existence of the lovesick runaway, and her very name was consigned to oblivion. The news was passed on, in whispers, among the neighbors. In our house, my father would shake his head and repeat: “Ibtisam. Who would have thought it?” My mother would glance in the direction of us little ones, so that he would understand and shut up. So he kept his thoughts to himself, but could not stop shaking his head.

  I was very young at the time. I confess I had forgotten all about her. Over the years she went right out of my head. I try to recall now what she looked like—dark, small, silky hair cut short, dressed simply. There was consensus among both sexes that she was sensible, skilful, intelligent, and a clever housekeeper, but she had been unlucky. They would crease their lips with pity at that last adjective. I remember her above all as kind. We younger children liked her because she would kiss us and give us a few coins whenever we saw her.

  How did her story end? I don’t know. Her elopement with her young sweetheart was not the end; that was the beginning.

  The next time I go to Damascus I’ll ask my sister for the details.

  On the garden steps at Rajaa’s house, in front of the Seville orange tree and the roses in bloom, we exchange stories, mixing up the eras and places and characters. Her husband is away on business for a week, the two boys are at summer camp, and she is on vacation. She’s all mine.

  Her husband was a colleague of ours at the University of Damascus. They fell in love and were married immediately after graduation. With Rajaa, everything is simple, and with me, it goes without saying, life is complicated. We were so different and others always marveled our friendship, and at how solid it was. I was the mischievous, cheeky one; she was sweet and obliging. She was at peace with the world, I was rebellious. We had always chatted a lot, but we had never traded secrets. We were content with allusions to our private lives; the rest we could only guess at. She knew only what I had openly declared about my life; I knew nothing about her secret life.

  The scent of jasmine and the rustling darkness. The black cat on the wall opposite listens to our hushed words and fixes us both with a steady stare.

  “And Maysaa? What’s her news?” I ask.

  “I saw her last summer when I was in Damascus. Her husband died some months ago and her two sons are studying in the United States. I think she’ll go and settle there.”

  “She’s living on her own?”

  “Her mother’s with her.”

  Maysaa’s mother was the tragedy in her life, or so I used to think. I remember how Maysaa’s tears mixed with mine on her wedding day. We were together in secondary school. Day by day I shared with her the story of her love for a relative of hers in Beirut, a boy about her age, of a modest background, and penniless, as her mother said. Her mother had an engineer in mind, scion of the family, who was more than twenty years her senior. Maysaa’s mother was a strong woman, and Maysaa was fragile and irresolute. She would whisper her refusal of the match in the morning and receive the would-be groom with a smile in the evening. We used to walk home from school together, each of us hugging her school bag, and she would tell me of her troubles. She told me how unpleasant her fiancé was: he hadn’t even tried to touch her hand, and he was miserly. She told me how she would sleep with her beloved but, she emphasized, she wasn’t crazy, she knew where to “draw the line.” Each new story increased my hatred of her mother. A few weeks after the results of the baccalauréat, Maysaa was married in the neighborhood church. I was there. She said goodbye to me and embraced me. We both wept and our tears mingled. Her mother’s smile trumpeted victory.

  I went to visit her not long after she came back from her honeymoon. She was expecting her first child. She rubbed her belly, which hadn’t grown big yet, with a contented circular movement as she talked about the new house, the sumptuous furniture, her husband’s family, and the costly presents. The tears of love had evaporated and the bride’s face was radiant with happiness.

  I said nothing. I was trying to understand how she had been able to betray her tears. I was trying to work out how not to betray my own. I was trying to forget her past words, her beloved, and her ambitions, and I made a pact with myself never to succumb like her.

  “Draw the line,” said Maysaa. I was to hear this from many women, first in Damascus, and then here in Paris. All of them were careful to “draw the line.” I didn’t understand were this line was located. Or, more truthfully, I refused to understand.

  I heard about it from a friend of my sister’s, Hyam. Tall, slim, with long naturally blond hair and large, round eyes, Hyam had a sweetheart who was at least ten years older than her. She’d tell her mother she was studying with my sister at our house. In actual fact she only stayed for less than a quarter of an hour. Then her sweetheart, Muhammad, would come by in his car to take her to his house. She’d do everything you could think of with him, then “draw the line.” The irony was that she was proud of her open relationship with her mother and would tell her everything. When I expressed my disbelief one day and said, “Everything?” she stammered and said, “Everything except Muhammad.” We used to read over his letters to her together and deconstruct them like a literary text. Muhammad was madly in love with her. The years passed and finally they got engaged and then married. Afterwards, neither my sister nor I heard any more about her.

  Here in Paris I heard about “the line” from one of my neighbors at the university dorms. She was a Lebanese who was doing her doctoral thesis on a Lebanese poet with one of the orientalists. When her lover, a well-known Egyptian artist, visited Paris, she’d pack up her things and go and stay with him in his hotel. Their story was known to one and all. Despite this, she’d held fast to that good old line because she didn’t want to sully her family’s reputation, above all that of her two young brothers.

  “Nobody knows what the future holds. You take a risk by living a relationship openly in front of everyone. What do you do if a relationship doesn’t end in marriage?” she would warn, and I would listen, looking all the while at the extraordinary painting that had pride of place in her neat room, a painting by her lover. Could he have depicted her like that if she hadn’t “drawn the line”? I wondered, believing that I knew the answer.

  I would come across this expression in most of the stories I heard. It was easy enough to set off down the path, but once you came to that line, which way would you go? Arab women speak bitterly of men’s double standards in their intimate relationships, and the men talk with resignation of women’s schizophrenia. Is there any way out? Will we forever be yoked to such a fate?

  I avoided seeing Maysaa again, pleading studies and exams as an excuse. Then I went abroad . . . I sometimes hear news of her from mutual friends. She had two boys and no girls, and lived happily ever after.

  “Isn’t her mother sick?” I asked.

  “Very. Maysaa is looking after her. I don’t think she’ll live long.”

  “She’ll be on her own?”

  Rajaa shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.

  Perhaps the next time I visit Damascus, I shall get in touch with Maysaa. I could even stop by and see her. I could try to understand her. Rajaa, trying to find mitigating circumstances for Maysaa, responds quietly that the explanation is obvious, while I insist that I cannot find any justification for her behavior, even after all these years. I know very well that humans are self-justifying creatures, but I know too that time changes nothing. On the contrary, it emphasizes and reinforces our characteristics and our choices.

  When I’m looking for stories I go to Rajaa’s girl friends. Every conversation we have eventually veers off in the direction that interests me. There’s no end of stories and I’m like the fires of Hell, insatiable.

  Yesterday with Rajaa, as we were walking on the beach, her friend Haniya, a professor of sociology, was telling us about a book she’s putting together about the letters exchanged between her parent
s. About the love story that only ended with the mother’s death; the father died soon thereafter. Thirty years of rare mutual understanding. We spoke of love, marriage, children, endurance, infidelity, and divorce. A typical intimate conversation.

  After a silence during which we couldn’t hear even our own footfalls, Haniya’s voice resumed: “Once I wanted to go abroad in connection with my work and my husband refused absolutely. I got angry. I decided to ask for a divorce, despite two children and ten years of shared life. I went to my aunt on my father’s side to tell her of my woes, and my determination. She gave me the following advice: ‘Listen, my dear. Spite the devil and don’t make a fuss about it. Go to the bathhouse and get pretty. Then go and meet your husband and make love with him as if it were the first time. The next day talk to him again about your trip . . .’”

  Haniya stopped talking.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “I went abroad.”

  Only a few words, and an indecipherable expression on her face.

  None of us said anything. What similar stories of our own were we recalling in silence? How many decisions, great and small, have we forged in bed? How many disputes had we resolved through such methods of persuasion?

  Our generation was doing nothing new. There were many situations of the sort in the books of my masters. Al-Qali, an eminent Arab encyclopedist, writes:

  Some ill will came between a man and his wife, and they shunned one another for a few days. Then he jumped on top of her and took her. And when he had emptied himself, she said: “Shame on you! Every time there is ill will between us, you bring me an intercessor whom I cannot refuse.” And in another tale a woman, mourning the passing of her days and particularly her nights with his “upright judge,” said to her aging husband: “The one who used to resolve our disputes has died.”

  Rajaa turned to me and said, “You want stories of love? I’ll take you to see my friend Nadia, she knows all the stories for miles around.”

  “I want stories about sex,” I said.

  “We use the word ‘love,’” said Rajaa, giving me a mischievous look. We rarely use the word ‘sex.’ But is there a difference?”

  Nadia was waiting for us at her house. Rajaa had told me a lot about her. She opened the door to us semi-naked. Just a short, diaphanous pareo knotted at her chest and falling to the tops of her legs. It was obvious that she didn’t feel any shame about her body, and there was nothing to feel ashamed about. With the red rose tied in her hair, like a girl of the islands, she was beautiful. She spoke and moved freely. And her freedom made her even more beautiful.

  As soon as we went inside, the telephone rang and she pounced on the receiver. Her lover was ringing from France. She gave us a wink before continuing the conversation, which sounded as if it were going to be very spicy.

  “He’s a lot older than she. His lamp’s running out of oil,” whispered Rajaa with a laugh.

  I liked Nadia. I liked her confident movements. She read us extracts from her diaries where she described their torrid trysts. Rajaa winked at me: “Don’t believe it. These are her fantasies. I’ve seen him. He’s very old and he can hardly move.”

  But I wanted to believe. Nadia was frank about her age and that of her lover, and burst out laughing, too. Could she not live a love story at her age, and after all her years as a widow? She left the room to fetch the tea and chocolates. I looked at her and it occurred to me that any man who crossed her path could not help but fall in love with her.

  “Any man? Or any man of her generation?” Rajaa asked, with irony.

  “Do you want to hear the latest?” asked Nadia.

  “Take care,” Rajaa warned her, laughing and pointing to me. “She knows all the stories of the town, even the rumors. Your story will have to be really fresh.”

  “I’m certain you won’t have heard it. This young actress went to study in Paris. She got to know a French producer as old as her father. Very rich and very influential. Married and with children older than she was. He fell in love with her. Her skin was brown and smooth and she was passionate. He went crazy over her. She drove him insane. He promised he would produce a blockbuster with her as the heroine, and he kept his word. You know what this generation’s like, everything all in a hurry. She wanted to be a famous actress, and he was obsessed with her youth. He would follow her to Tunis whenever she went there to visit her family. The last time he came here, he had a heart attack.”

  “And then what?” I prompted her.

  I knew the story couldn’t end there.

  “He died. They were together. He was making love to her. He died on top of her. Someone asked if he’d died before he’d come or after. No one knew the answer.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then what? And then what? You want more? It was a scandal. I told you, the whole town was talking about it.”

  I hadn’t heard about the scandal, but I’d seen the film. The poor young thing did indeed have the lead role, and the critics praised her promising talent and scintillating presence. She was a star. Who cared about the scandal? It would melt like a grain of salt and the film would remain, with the glory of the road that had opened up before her. A practical generation for a practical time. Then, too, the scandal had a spice about it that stimulated the imagination and, like a magnet, would draw people’s hearts to it. This was something I knew very well.

  “A scandal with bells on it,” as they say in Egypt. The bells are chiming from your buttocks, and the noise is deafening. I listened to Nadia and it occurred to me that the actress’s butt was cause for alarm, and that her bells would certainly catch the eye.

  I recalled this adamant assertion: “There is no sex in Egypt!”

  “There is no sex in Islamic society!” Words of a young French writer whose novel had been quite a success two years earlier; that had, indeed, won a literary prize. The words belong to the book’s narrator, who travels to Egypt to take part in the Cairo Book Fair, nourished by his orientalist delusions. He travels in the footsteps of Flaubert and his women . . . and fails to find what he’s looking for, of course. Gone are the Nubian maidens the writer had encountered in the nineteenth century, “adorned with necklaces of gold pieces that reached to their thighs and with belts of colored pearls over their black bellies.” In their place are women wearing hijabs. The cultured traveler is traumatized to find that Flaubert’s Levant, the Levant of 1847, has vanished. All that is left is September 11th and the days of Islamic jihad. The only woman to fulfill the hero’s expectations is an opportunistic Francophone Moroccan who works at the French embassy, of whom it is said that she is the most beautiful woman in Cairo. And yet he will reject her advances out of loyalty to his beloved who is waiting for him in Paris. After this pitiful adventure, long conversations with Francophile Egyptians and with travelers even more disappointed than he himself regarding Muslim men and women, the young novelist is forced to conclude: Islam and sex do not mix. A universal truth discovered by a French novelist in the matter of a few days. The earth is round, and there is no sex in Islamic society. This catchphrase echoes another: “There is no sex in the Soviet Union.” The first was proclaimed in nostalgic tones by a writer returning empty-handed from his travels, the second by a puritanical communist in a television interview. In either case, blind propaganda prospers in ignorance, whether real or feigned.

  “Why didn’t Sulayma come with you?” asked Nadia.

  “She has guests,” lied Rajaa, in a neutral tone that convinced no one.

  Nadia and Sulayma do not get along, but I love them both and their personal conflicts don’t concern me.

  I love Lebanese Sulayma, who married a Moroccan diplomat and now lives with him in Tunis. This is the virtue of Paris: it allows the Mashriq and the Maghreb to meet. If you make the acquaintance of such a couple, there’s a good chance that they’ll have gotten to know one another in Paris.

  I love Sulayma. I enjoy her company and love listening to her stories. Arab and French stories about he
r first lover, and her second, and her third, and . . . and . . . about her lovers whom she cannot count and half of whose names she cannot remember. Are these are stories from before her marriage—or after? Society demands that the page remain blank, to be marked only by the scribblings of the husband.

  “He came to see me at the student residence,” relates Sulayma. “He was Lebanese like me, tall and beautiful, fair-skinned with black hair. A playboy, every day a new girl. The men were jealous, and the women were mad about him. He was doing a doctorate at the Sorbonne, though he didn’t finish it, of course. In fact, he didn’t do a thing, except pursue his sexual conquests.

  “He lived at the student residence like me. I met him a couple of times with other people. The presence of my Palestinian lover did not stop him flirting with me openly. One day, he came to see me in my room. It was summer and Paris was at its hottest. He’d no sooner sat down than he declared, ‘It’s hot,’ and took off his shirt. Then he said, ‘It’s hot,’ and took off his trousers. He told stories about his Argentinean girlfriend who was jealous and watched him all the time and made his life miserable. I talked with him and responded verbally to his stories but kept my distance while I watched the striptease act that he was performing in front of me. I was curious as to what would follow. I kept talking to him as though he were wearing a tuxedo, when in fact all he had were his white boxers. He said, ‘It’s very hot,’ and took off even those, and stood there as naked as the day he came out of his mother’s belly. The difference was that he’d come out of there as a little child, and now he was a man with all his male attributes. Imagine!

  “He took hold of his member and said to me, ‘See? My girlfriend’s crazy. She’s so jealous of me she puts a mark on it with a pen and inspects it when I come home, to make sure it’s still there.’ I was on the point of telling him to give her an indelible marker next time but I didn’t. I shook my head in commiseration, looked at where the mark was, examined it, and made a show of surprise. He stayed naked as a worm for more than twenty minutes, strutting about in front of me in my room, standing at my window, and looking at the paintings on my wall, while I watched him with cool curiosity and kept up an ordinary chatter with him. In the end he said, ‘I feel ridiculous,’ and put on his clothes. I nearly agreed with him. He left me with two light pecks on the cheek, like an ordinary friend, and that was the last time he came to see me in my room.”