The Occasional Virgin

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  When he mounted her and she screamed in pain, the professor continued to move up and down on top of her, only stopping when she shouted, ‘Please, you’re hurting me, and I’m a virgin.’

  At this, he jumped like a mouse caught in a trap, and when he saw the blood on himself and on the sofa, he yelled, ‘What’s this? A bloodbath?’

  Inwardly dancing for joy because she had got rid of her virginity, she answered silently, ‘Yes, Macbeth for ever!’

  ‘So what have you decided? Will you come to the wedding reception with me after all?’

  ‘And lose my big chance to have my revenge on Ta’abbata Sharran?’ answers Huda, patting the strawberry in its packet in her handbag.

  They leave the house at the same time, Yvonne in her car and Huda hurrying on foot in the direction of the American Embassy, a tremendous enthusiasm to have her revenge on Ta’abbata Sharran making her heart beat faster.

  But she begins to walk more hesitantly, her feet reluctant to obey her. She urges herself on in an audible voice, ‘Come on, Huda, come on,’ reminding herself of what he’d said to her: ‘A hen – if she makes a noise like a male bird, she must be killed,’ recalling his frowning face as he threatened her: ‘Do you understand now?’

  Instead of rekindling the fires of revenge, these thoughts make her shudder. He’s vicious, frightening, like a pre-programmed robot. But she doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn back, and hurries on her way, her phone in her hand guiding her to the American Embassy.

  The commotion of the demonstrators in front of the American Embassy, their shouting drowning out the roar of the traffic. Police everywhere. Women with and without veils. Women wearing headscarves, with and without children. Men with beards and men without beards. Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar. Their voices echoing round the square make the pigeons fly here and there, and like the pigeons she is uncertain what she should do.

  But who are these protestors? The original opposition or other extremist groups?

  She feels like an impostor among them. She is supposed to blend in with them or pretend to be sympathetic to the slogans they are chanting. Should she shout with those calling for Asad to be punished, or with those crying ‘Allahu akbar’? She tries to find Ta’abbata Sharran without success and walks away across Grosvenor Square. From there she can see the Canadian flag flapping above a white old-style building. Her heart flutters at the sight of it, for these days it has taken the place of the Lebanese flag, which used to make her want to cry when she first lived abroad.

  She returns to the demonstration, indifferent to the fact that she might arouse suspicion. She tries to lose herself among the crowds as she searches for the tallest figure there, for Hisham, and actually catches sight of him beating his hand in the air as if wishing he had magic powers and could smash the embassy windows and wreak havoc on the records and documents inside.

  Huda waits for the protests to end and the demonstrators to leave. A girl wearing a headscarf smiles at her and she wonders whether to ask her when the event will be over, but decides against it. The time passes quickly, consumed mainly by people shouting, while others eat the sweets and sandwiches they’ve brought with them, or exchange mobile numbers and take selfies. She keeps her eyes on the beautiful brown face that picked a fight with her that morning, and as soon as she sees him leaving the demonstration she follows him, walking fast at times, slowly at others, crossing the street to the opposite pavement, jostling people, dawdling, trying to keep out of sight. Then she sees him standing at a bus stop in Oxford Street and waits five minutes before approaching it. She tries to read the notice to find out where the buses are bound. Suddenly she clutches the bus stop with one hand and her head with the other, pretending to feel dizzy and weak all of a sudden, then clinging to an Englishwoman in the queue. Hands reach out to catch her. She begins to talk incoherently in Arabic: ‘Oh God, I’m going to die, oh God.’

  ‘We can’t understand what you’re saying! Sorry, can you talk to us in English? We want to help you,’ says the Englishwoman. Huda opens her eyes as if semi-conscious, and when she notices that among those trying to help her is the dark-skinned youth, she stares at him in mock surprise and terror.

  ‘Please can one of you call an ambulance?’ requests the woman and Ta’abbata Sharran volunteers: ‘I will.’ Then he says to Huda in Arabic, ‘I’m going to call an ambulance for you.’

  ‘No, no, please, there’s no need. I feel better. I don’t want them to take me to hospital.’

  As soon as he translates Huda’s words to those gathered around her, they disperse, realising that the two of them speak the same language. Huda neither expresses her gratitude to him nor rebuffs him, for she is still supposedly only half conscious.

  ‘I almost fainted, I don’t know why. I must contact my friend.’

  With some trouble she takes out her phone and struggles even more to find the number, before leaving a message in a soft, weak voice: ‘This is Huda. I’ve forgotten the key. I don’t feel well. Please call me as soon as you get this.’ Then she says, ‘My friend’s not at home. I need to sit down for a bit. Could you help me get to a café?’

  ‘Shall I take you to a doctor?’

  ‘I feel better. I just want to drink some water and rest a little.’

  ‘Come with me.’ He doesn’t hail a taxi, although he asks her if she is all right to walk. They walk along together quite naturally, almost as if they hadn’t detested each other not long before.

  They arrive at a Starbucks at the beginning of Oxford Street and as soon as he finds an empty table, Huda promptly sits down while he remains standing without uttering a word, as if suddenly remembering that he hates her.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble. I’m sorry!’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Goodbye. Thanks again.’

  She lets him take a few steps then calls out: ‘Brother, excuse me! Can I buy you a coffee or a tea?’

  ‘No, thank you, there’s no need for that.’

  ‘I know, but please.’

  ‘I have to get back to work.’

  ‘OK, sorry. I thought you wouldn’t be working on a Sunday. I … I feel so tired.’ Her voice trembles as if she is on the point of tears. ‘I want to lie down and my friend hasn’t called me back yet.’ And she begins to cry.

  ‘Why don’t you call another friend?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone here. I live in Canada. Will you do me a favour and get me a cup of tea?’ She hands him a five pound note and asks him to get himself something to drink too, so he takes the money and goes over to the counter. She follows him with her eyes and observes him as he stands in the queue waiting his turn. Where can we be alone together? she says to herself. Does he live on his own? I wonder what he does for a living and why he works on Sundays. Who is he? He returns almost at once with one tea and gives her the change. ‘I’m late for work.’

  When she puts a hand to her head and sighs profoundly, he says, ‘Shall I take you to the house of a friend of mine? His wife is very nice.’

  ‘Does she have children?’

  ‘Yes. They’re very well-behaved and they won’t bother you.’

  ‘No, I’m not bothered for myself, but I’m afraid they might catch something. Maybe I’m getting flu.’ She feels her forehead.

  He looks at his watch. ‘Sorry, I’m late. I have to go.’

  ‘Thank you so much. Goodbye.’ She bows her head and starts crying again.

  Ignoring her tears, he takes a couple of steps away from the table. Out of the corner of her eye she sees him looking at her, so she cries more energetically, until he comes back towards her.

  ‘Come with me. Don’t worry, you can trust me, sister. You’ll be fine.’

  Crying more violently than ever, she mutters, ‘You’re so decent, brother, so decent.’

  She gets to her feet with his help and they walk along together and take the bus. She doesn’t ask him where he’s taking her. He m
ust have been lying when he said he worked on a Sunday. He lets her pay her own fare. When she gets off the bus, she catches herself walking more briskly and slackens her pace, stops briefly and then sets off again, breathing heavily. He leads the way to a block of flats whose cast-iron front door has glass inlaid with gold filigree. She is impressed, even if this is a friend’s flat, but just as she is telling herself that unemployment certainly wasn’t the reason for his emigrating here, nor poverty the cause of his fanaticism, he opens the door and says, ‘I’m a porter in this building.’ She’s not that bothered by this revelation, remembering her relationship with a musician in Canada who worked as a porter in an apartment block from time to time and used to raid the bottles of wine stored in the basement by one of the building’s inhabitants.

  It is a noble old building: lights sparkling from a crystal chandelier, a gilded mirror and two chairs round a beautiful fireplace. They approach the other porter who is sitting in a small room next to the lift, and Hisham addresses him: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve kept you waiting, but this sister was a little unwell and she was alone and couldn’t find her friend. She’s a stranger in London, visiting from Canada. I’ll put her in our sitting room for a while.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ answers the porter in an Irish accent.

  Hisham takes her to the floor below where the carpet is grey, mouse-coloured, in contrast to the luxurious, green and rose-coloured carpet in the entrance hall. Everything is grey, including the walls and the plastic tiles. They come to a large room containing a couch the colour of a rat that has never seen the light of day, a small television, a kettle and a microwave.

  ‘You can rest on the couch here, sister. Nobody will bother you. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘If you don’t mind!’

  She closes her eyes, listening intently to every sound he makes. He is the soul of piety and seriousness, rigid as a steel box. She doesn’t stand the slightest chance of piercing his armour. I must leave once I’ve drunk the tea, she thinks to herself.

  ‘Here’s the tea. You can stay here as long as you like. Nobody will bother you.’

  The cup of tea whispers to her that she should get up and leave at once, not because it’s cheap, nasty tea, but because Hisham has surprised her with his compassion, his humanity, his sense of duty towards her as a Muslim woman. In a roundabout way, he has apologised to her for his behaviour towards her that morning.

  What, him, compassionate and humane? No, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s because he’s seeing me in a weak state, thinks I’ve come down off my high horse. This honourable behaviour is just him getting tougher so that he can punish me more severely, to prove to me what an infidel I am, and how tolerance is a big deal in his religion.

  She stretches out on the couch. The sounds of feet passing by on the pavement above reverberate in the room. The noise inside the building and outside in the street is never-ending. Toilets flushing, baths being run, water tanks gurgling, ventilation systems humming, as if all the floors in the building are bombarding the basement with their troubles. She hears people going up and down the stairs and even a cook complaining about having to prepare the same meal every day for the old lady who employs him.

  An hour passes, in the course of which a maid comes in and makes herself a cup of coffee, sits on a chair to drink it, then leaves the room as if Huda isn’t there. When Hisham doesn’t return, she is convinced that it won’t occur to him to check up on her. She gets up and ascends the few stairs to the porters’ office and sees him sitting alone in the little room reading an engineering textbook in English. Could he be manufacturing a bomb?

  ‘Are you leaving?’

  ‘My friend called to say she wouldn’t be home before midnight. I’m still not well actually. Do you know a small hotel that would let me have a room for a few hours, and also do you know a private doctor you could take me to?’

  ‘I recommend cupping. There’s someone who does it and I have the address. You can take the bus there. Or if you wish, I can order you a minicab. They’re cheaper than black cabs.’

  ‘What did you say? What’s cupping?’

  He looks online and tells her to read the page, so she bends her head, deliberately bringing it close to his, and he jumps up and moves away from her. She reads a couple of sentences and can’t understand what they say until she sees a picture of ‘air cups’.

  ‘Ah, I know them, they’re air cups. My mother used to put them on my back when I had a cold or bronchitis. I was scared of them.’ She clasps her arms to her chest like a little girl. ‘My mother would set fire to a cotton rag and put it directly inside the cup, then put it on my back.’ She moves closer to the computer and reads, ‘It is an authentic practice of the Prophet and even the angels recommend it.’

  She doesn’t say that she finds the contradiction between the technology of the computer and the description of cupping on its screen quite incredible.

  ‘I can’t believe they’re still doing it. No, no, I’m not going to try it. I’m terrified to death of it.’

  ‘If you put your trust in God, you won’t be afraid of anything in this world and nothing bad will happen to you. Say, nothing will affect us except what God has decreed for us.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened to me. This morning I was very healthy and energetic. Now all I want to do is lie down and sleep. Please take me to a cheap hotel where I can get a room and wait for my friend to come home.’

  ‘Come along, sister. I’ll take you to my own room. I won’t need it for a few hours, after my shift ends.’

  Fantastic. Visible progress. She’s moving in on him, even if it’s through the eye of a needle.

  ‘Thanks, brother. Are you sure? I don’t want to bother you. God has sent you to rescue me. It must be in response to my mother’s prayers. Shall we take a taxi?’

  ‘God the Almighty, the Most High,’ he corrects her, then continues, ‘I live here. Wait while I lock the door of the building.’

  He takes her down to the basement again and leads her along another corridor to his room. He opens the door and she smells a musty odour mixed with insecticide and cleaning products. In the room are a chair, a bed and a table piled with Arabic books, and on a low shelf packets of pasta and rice and tins of tomato puree. He opens a cupboard and takes out a blanket, old but clean, that he spreads on the bed.

  ‘God willing you’ll feel better here, sister. There is no god but God.’

  She doesn’t respond as she should: ‘And Muhammad is His messenger.’

  She lies down. She wants him to see her lying on his bed in her top with the birds on it, a pattern that brings joy to the severe room, and her tight jeans that help her bottom look higher. She’s taken off her shoes and socks, revealing deep red toenails. She puts a hand on her head, displaying an armpit, knowing that armpits can be provocative, reminiscent of the pubes, even when they’re shaved. But he doesn’t look at her, and goes out, closing the door behind him. She puts her tired feet on the pillow, for they need rest more than her head. After a while she gets up and begins inspecting his things, in case she comes across some alcohol or anything inconsistent with his rigid fanaticism, anything to expose him.

  His room reminds her of some of her relatives’ rooms, even her father’s room when she sees the Quran and books of the prophetic traditions arranged on the table. There’s a poster for an exhibition of the hajj where the Kaaba appears like a square black pupil in the white of the eye, and people praying or walking around it are like the veins in the eye. She reads ‘Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam’ and there is a comment, perhaps written by him, ‘An exhibition on the hajj in the heart of the British Museum. How I wish the exhibition extended throughout the museum.’

  The Holy Quran and a photo of the Kaaba still dominated the living room in their house in Beirut. During her last visit to Lebanon two years ago, she had noticed, under the glass of the tabletop, the graduation photo that she had sent to her mother from Toronto, alongside a ph
oto of her father in his abaya and turban, and her brother holding a big fish that he had just caught. She remembers how her photo had urged her to be patient, reassuring her that she would be returning to Canada in a few days, and that there was no chance her childhood home would risk kidnapping her and imprisoning her against her will. She couldn’t take her mother constantly asking her why she wasn’t married yet. Now, in this religious man’s room, she finds herself answering her mother: Perhaps I shall never marry at all. And for your information I’m living next door to the Devil now. Her mother used to mutter ‘In the Name of God the Compassionate the Merciful’ whenever she saw workers digging deep beneath the roads of Beirut. ‘Aren’t they scared that they’ll dig right down to the Devil?’

  Huda remembers the time she said to her religious studies teacher at school in Lebanon, ‘I don’t understand, sir. Why do we actually let the Devil threaten us and get into our minds and tempt us to do bad things? Why are we scared of him from the day we are born till the day we die? Why didn’t our Lord wipe him off the face of the earth from the beginning, the moment he rebelled?’

  The teacher answered: ‘Of course, my child, the Creator could have destroyed Satan in a moment, but God wants to test us to find out whose faith is strong.’

  She replied, ‘But I don’t understand, sir, why there are all these complications. God doesn’t need the approval and love of His creatures. They are the ones who need His approval and affection and we know that God and not Satan created heaven and earth, so the rivalry between God and Satan isn’t logical.’

  With the passing of time, the Devil took on a different aspect in Huda’s mind. He no longer had an actual face or fiery eyes that emitted sparks. He became a phenomenon, or rather a manifestation of a state of indecision, like looking at the sky and wondering whether or not to take an umbrella.

  But don’t be afraid, mother. The Devil has run off to escape the prayers of the devout young man in whose room I am at this moment, by the way. And I can imagine that if you knew this young man, you would think he’d make a suitable husband for me. You’d say ‘He is God-fearing and upright.’ I want to tell you why I’m not married yet. I’m a seagull, alighting for a moment then flying off, fishing in one stretch of water after another. My independence scares them. I always take the initiative. I’m the one in the driving seat. Of course, you won’t understand what I mean by that. I’m going to tell you a story and I really hope you’ll be able to understand. When a man took hold of me by the neck, trying to make me go down on him, down there, I head-butted him like a billy goat. And I’m pointing the finger of blame at you. I accuse you and my father of trying to suck the life out of me, and you especially.