The Occasional Virgin

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  ‘Are you trying to kill me, make me wear black for you?’ screamed her mother, but even so Yvonne didn’t think she really cared about her. That day, Yvonne saw her mother’s true colours: she only loved the boys. When one of Yvonne’s brothers was ill, her mother would put vinegar compresses on his forehead to draw out the fever, muttering, ‘May Jesus reach out his hands to heal you. May the Virgin Mary intercede for you. May I die if it will make you better.’ She sang the praises of their male members and her favourite anecdote was about planting a kiss on Tanius’s little willy, only to have the scallywag pee in her mouth.

  It would be one thing if she’d slapped Yvonne across the face in spontaneous anger, but her pinches were hard and deep, designed to get a good handful of flesh, to reach right down to the bone. She pinched her face, her arm, twisted her nose, but her fury and resentment remained unquenched, so she grabbed hold of Yvonne’s hand and pulled her along, and when Yvonne resisted and sank to her knees, she continued dragging her over the floor like a heavy rag. She shoved her into the bathroom, locked the door and sat outside, with her back against the door. This went on for hours, and Yvonne could hear her mother inhaling hard on the mouthpiece of the narghile. She could picture the water swirling in the glass base of the pipe, and waited in vain for the gurgling sound to soothe her. Finally her mother asked her, ‘So, have you learnt your lesson?’ as if hoping Yvonne would say no. ‘Don’t ever dive from the forbidden rocks again.’ ‘I swear by the Virgin, that’s the first and last time,’ replied Yvonne, bursting into tears. But her mother was in no hurry to open the door, and carried on accusing Yvonne of things she didn’t understand: ‘You’ve humiliated your eldest brother. Destroyed him. Castrated him. I pray to God you can never have children.’

  Everybody in the neighbourhood came to know of her dive from the forbidden rocks, and the children followed her around as if she was the Pied Piper of Hamelin, begging her to teach them how to dive. Her brothers, especially Tanius, were delighted when she began asking them technical questions, once she had decided she would search for jewellery when she dived, like Dumb Jibran who spent his life looking for a bracelet that had belonged to a relative of King Farouk of Egypt. She wanted to find something that would make her rich, so the family would raise her high on their shoulders in celebration. But all she found were the hiding places of silvery fish that rarely looked like jewels. She searched at length for oysters, opening dozens and never finding a pearl. She should take more time, Yvonne thought, and not open them for several weeks – be content with observing them from a distance, swimming as silently as the fish in case she disturbed the creature in the shell and prevented it from making a pearl.

  But she stopped examining oysters, stopped diving in the sea, when their house began to roar like the waves, even in calm weather; its walls crowded in on her, as the bombs of the civil war fell haphazardly and Dushkas rained fire on them. She and her family were finally forced to take shelter in the ice factory, where everyone cried and shivered in the frosty chill, trying to keep away from the walls that protected the ice from melting and absorbed its coldness. As she listened to the adults talking about wars and what was going to happen next, she wished they could be like the Vikings and hijack ships and roam the oceans. Ever since she had first seen pictures of the Vikings, she had been convinced that they and not the Phoenicians were her forefathers, and was enchanted with them. The men were like her father and the women like her mother: blonde hair, light eyes, pale pink skin, deep red lips that were soft and cracked like the ivory handle on the big spoon.

  She chose the Vikings as her special subject in history class, and when the teacher asked ‘Why? What about the Phoenicians? They were extremely advanced, and their name is mentioned in the Old Testament,’ she answered, ‘The Phoenicians had brown faces, and I’m blonde like the Viking women.’ She didn’t add that she was tough and hardy like them, or that she had a small nose unlike the Phoenicians, or that like the Vikings she loved travelling the wide ocean as if she was riding a horse, and loved their low ships with their dragon prows and ribbed bellies like skeletons, or dinosaurs lying on their backs. The Vikings took their women with them on their travels, especially when they settled in a country, while the Phoenicians crossed the seas without their women, trading cedar wood and pine, purple dye and blue glass for gold, musk and monkeys.

  She was sixteen years old when she first heard people screaming in fear at the destruction and savagery of war and she couldn’t believe how impervious the sea remained, ebbing and flowing as usual; how the birds alighted on it, taking off and vanishing high in the sky the moment they heard a shot. While old women beseeched the Messiah to come now, this minute, Yvonne prayed to the Vikings, wherever they were, to rush to their aid. But identifying with the Vikings turned out to be a disaster, for now the war came to confirm her conjectures about them in unexpected ways: their descendants practised savagery, killing, abduction, occupation of whole areas, while the Phoenicians’ interests had been confined to matching this colour with that and carrying exquisitely embroidered cloth to harbours all round the world.

  The sea had not left its traces on the people of her town, except on their arms and faces, tanned over many years by the sun’s salty rays, which provided them with warmth as they shivered with fear in the ice factory. She sat there cradling a cardboard box full of shells she had gathered and painted and everything else she had found while diving, including a broken piece of a dish, apparently from their area and not from China as Yvonne had believed. Her mother remembered the pattern and knew which family it came from – it was a fragment of a narghile, the part where the tobacco goes, maybe it’s called a tobacco dish, made of glass. Yvonne sat in the ice factory, watching her mother crying silently as she waited for one of her sons, who had disappeared two nights before to join the fighting, or so they said. If only my mother would rush to the sea like our neighbour, Yvonne thought, when her eight-year-old son disappeared and people said the sea had swallowed him. She plunged into the waves, unbuttoning her dress, taking out her enormous breast and trying to squeeze out a drop of milk, pressing on the nipple until she screamed in pain. And on the seventh day the sea spat out her son’s body for her.

  Being able to dive into the water, even while she was sitting in the ice factory, relieved Yvonne of the tedium of the long hours of waiting, fed her and kept her warm. As she brought her shells close to her ear, she dived into the sea and felt safe there. She heard a shell complaining that it missed its mother and sisters, while her mother wept silently for her three boys, even though two of them were right in front of her, which was a miracle, since all the other young men of the area had gone off to the war, just as if they were setting off for work or school. She wept silently, as she did whenever she washed their clothes and rubbed the stains off their underpants with pride. Yvonne dived down into the sea’s silent rooms with the keys to her larder, her school, her mind; then she returned to her seat, reassured, and looked round the faces of the local people, noticing Jamil, the boy she had allowed to kiss her two years before, after she had given up waiting for him to take her to the Afqa Cave, where Adonis kissed Aphrodite for the first time, and where the river flows red at the start of spring in memory of Adonis, killed by a wild boar’s tusks.

  Who’s going to kiss her now, out of these three Italian boys? Yvonne studies them one by one and settles on Lucio, the most talkative, and even though he is a bit plump, she is held captive by his gaze. It is as if there is some strange collusion between his eyes and lips. Each time he looks at her, his lips move closer to her. He is peeling an orange and eating it greedily. She pretends to be busy looking at the water, then persuades herself it’s best just to be the diving companion of all three. She asks them how high the rocks are, and if they always come to this particular spot. She doesn’t ask them what their jobs are, in case she is asked the same question and is forced to tell them she owns an advertising company. Whether this makes them run away or hang around, she’ll end up bein
g rejected. It’s happened so often before. She wonders if men sense she’s going to stick to them like glue, and that now more than ever she wants the heat of that contact to result in her stomach swelling like dough in the oven. All the ones she’s actually been in love with, she’s lost: they’ve escaped, disappeared, melted away. All of those who wanted to stay were married, or twenty years older than her.

  I’m going after this dive, so I’ll say goodbye. Does she say it out loud, or to herself? She doesn’t want to have expectations, realises she’s probably ten years older than them. The sight of their skinny chests, tanned by the sun, almost hairless, their thighs like the thighs of three statues of David, their wet hair chaotic, reckless, free, gives her goosepimples. To her delight they all start shouting, either objecting to her leaving or saying goodbye. How is she supposed to understand these Italian signals and gestures? She dives in before she can regret her decision and to her great joy they throw themselves in after her and chase her, joking, surrounding her. As if I’m a duck and they’re my chicks. But their boldness as they swim around her doesn’t suggest they think of her as a mother.

  Lucio accuses her of lying, and says there’s no friend waiting for her on the beach by the rock walk. She asks him to swim with her to see for himself, but he replies by asking her to go back up the rocks with him. She likes the idea, but the sight of Huda in the distance makes her change her mind. She begins swimming faster towards her, thinking, You don’t say goodbye in the sea, so she doesn’t, and they don’t.

  Huda isn’t reading a book, or swimming or sunbathing. She must be waiting for me. Yvonne feels a pang of guilt. She was the one who had convinced Huda that they should meet on the Italian Riviera instead of in Lebanon: ‘It’s hot and humid. And London’s dead. I can’t bear it in August.’

  They had met two years before in Lebanon as guests of an organisation that invited some Lebanese women who had been successful abroad to give lectures and exchange views with students. Huda was a theatre director, Yvonne the owner of an advertising company.

  Moments after they met, their friendship had taken root, and they became each other’s lifebelts in a country that was beginning to be unfamiliar to them. They no longer knew the right note to strike in order to feel in harmony with it again, for they had left twenty years before, Huda via Syria and Yvonne in a Greek ship from the port of Jounieh. The two friends had agreed to take a short break before Huda began to direct her new play in Toronto. This play, an adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights, had dominated her thoughts since the idea for it had flashed into her mind a year before, so when Yvonne suggested they meet in Italy, Huda clapped her hands for joy. Her mind was in urgent need of a rest.

  Yvonne throws herself down, panting, on the towel that Huda has rearranged. Everything in her is flushed except for her green eyes, which look almost blue, as if the sea has lent them its colour.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’ Huda senses Yvonne’s embarrassment at having abandoned her.

  ‘My mother wouldn’t let us drink straight after swimming. She used to say “The chest is dancing. When it calms down.”’

  ‘My mother always used to tell us the story of her relative, a traffic policeman, who dropped dead after he drank a pitcher of cold water straight after he came home “all hot and sweaty”. A heart attack. They said his heart couldn’t take the cold water in the height of summer.’

  They laugh together at the Lebanese mentality. Neither thinks of saying ‘Christian or Muslim, we all do the same things’.

  The breeze softens the ferocity of the sun. The smell of pine trees fills the air. They eat more fruit, drink from the Thermos.

  ‘You’re a champion swimmer! I don’t know many Lebanese women who swim like you!’

  ‘Really? I was raised by the sea. When I moved to London I was always looking to my left, expecting to see it! We left our town, the sea, our life there because of the fighting. The war was just like a nightmare, not real, as if the sea cancelled it out or made people forget and distracted them from what was happening on dry land. Even the boats that began carrying people to Cyprus looked like cruise ships. My departure for London was a tragicomedy. See, I’m using theatrical terms just for you! My middle brother hired a speedboat whose owner promised him he knew the Cyprus route like the back of his hand. After three hours sailing we were sure we’d reached Cyprus as we saw dry land and a man fishing. The speedboat owner talked to the fisherman in English and when he didn’t answer, my brother butted in, in Arabic: “Why isn’t the bastard saying anything?” So the man shouts in Arabic, in a Lebanese accent, “Why are you calling me a bastard? Just because I don’t know English?” Then it became obvious to us that we’d been sailing around in Lebanese waters for three hours. So a week later I left on a Greek liner.’

  ‘Well, I went from Beirut to Syria by car, then to Canada to join my brother who’d left Lebanon earlier in the war. I still remember the Syrian official who inspected my passport. He handed it back to me with a note inside it. It said “I’m throwing myself on your mercy and asking you to help me get a visa once you’re settled over there. I promise I won’t cause you any trouble. I want to leave this country. I’m desperate to emigrate. Please, I beg you.” As if he guessed what was going to happen in Syria. The poor man thought fleeing Syria was his ultimate solution, seemingly unaware that in leaving his country part of his soul, too, would be lost to him forever.’

  ‘Do you think we’re still unmarried because we live outside Lebanon? I mean because we’ve changed – because we aren’t completely at home either with foreigners or Lebanese?’

  ‘None of my female cousins are married and they’ve never left Beirut in their lives! There are no men there, the men are all working in the Gulf. By the way, I did find you a husband. He’s a landscape architect. He asked if I wanted to go swimming at the big villa and have a look at the gardens,’ Huda said.

  ‘Really? I hope he was handsome!’

  ‘Very, and he said I should bring you with me.’

  ‘Did he see me?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe.’

  ‘Well, I found three husbands. We can train them ourselves, they’re young and bad!’

  ‘The ones you were jumping and diving with?’

  ‘No. Different ones. I met them underwater. Like mermaids, but men.’

  They laugh, and Yvonne wonders to herself how it is that Huda isn’t married yet, even though Huda told her from the first day they met that she wasn’t interested in marriage or children, but somehow Yvonne never believed her. She is so beautiful and tall and shapely, with firm muscles and a flat stomach. Men must be afraid of her body, smooth under her tight clothes, with not a trace of cellulite.

  ‘Oh, Yvonne, I forgot to say that I told the landscape architect that I came here before with my boyfriend,’ says Huda, adding, ‘and it seems I believed my own lie, because the tears started pouring from my eyes.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t understand you, Huda. Why all this drama? There’s no need for it.’

  ‘Maybe I didn’t want to tell him that the sea had taken me back to the past. I really don’t know!’

  Of course I know, thinks Huda to herself. As far back as I can remember I’ve used lies and tricks as weapons. When I was fifteen I pretended to the son of the woman who owned the shop by the bus stop that Amal, the neighbours’ daughter, had fallen in love with him. I gave him a love letter that I’d written myself and he answered it straight away, asking Amal to meet him before his mother came to take over in the shop at ten. Then he began expressing his love to her, even though he didn’t know her, but said he’d fallen under the spell of her words and her beautiful handwriting. When I delivered her tenth letter, where I promised to meet him, as I’d done in every letter, ‘so that I could caress his blond hair and cover him with passionate kisses and cling to him like a magnet to metal’, the boy fell on me, holding me, kissing me, forcing his tongue between my teeth, squeezing my breasts and stroking my neck, till I freed myself, frightening hi
m with my screams and running off as he began undoing his flies. To this day I don’t know if he’d guessed all along that there was no Amal and I was the one who loved him.

  And what about the time I pretended to a guy in Toronto that I had poor eyesight just because of an impulse to be close to him, intimate. It was early on a beautiful evening, everyone was hurrying to their homes, clubs, lovers, while I was a lonely owl hooting for a companion, and then I saw this handsome guy whistling Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ as if he was telling the whole of Toronto, or whispering in my ear, that his melancholia was charming. I felt both cosy and excited, but instead of talking to him, I began feeling my way with my umbrella and only after a bit asked him to help me cross the road. When he took my elbow, I grabbed hold of his hand and didn’t give it back until he announced that we’d arrived.