Burned alive: a victim of the law of men

by Souad; Marie-Thérèse Cuny

  It really is my fault about the sheep. I had fallen asleep with my sister because it was so hot, and I let the sheep go off on their own. He hits so hard with his cane that sometimes I can’t lie down on either my left or my right side because I am in so much pain. With the belt or the cane, I think we were beaten every day. A day without a beating was unusual.

  I think maybe it was this time that he tied us up, Kainat and me, our hands behind our backs, our legs bound, and a scarf over our mouths to keep us from screaming. We stayed like that all night, tied to a gate in the big stable. We were with the animals, but were worse off than they were.

  This is what it was like in our village. It was the law of men. The girls and the women were certainly beaten every day in the other houses, too. You could hear the crying. It was not unusual to be beaten, to have your hair shaved off and be tied to a stable gate. There was no other way of living.

  My father, the all-powerful man, the king of the household, who owns, who decides, who strikes and tortures us! And he sits there calmly smoking his pipe in front of his house with his women, whom he treats worse than his livestock, locked up. A man takes a woman in order to have sons, to have her serve him as a slave like the daughters who will come, if she has the misfortune to produce any.

  I often thought when I looked at my brother, who was adored by the whole family including me: What more does he have? What makes him so special? He came out of the same belly as I did. And I had no answer. That was just the way it was. We girls had to serve him as we did my father, groveling and with head lowered. I can also picture the tea tray. You had to bring even this tea tray to the men of the family with your head down, looking only at your feet, with back bent, and in silence. You don’t speak. You only speak in answer to a question.

  At noon, it’s sugared rice, vegetables with chicken or mutton, and always bread. In my father’s house, the garden gives us almost everything we need for food. And we do everything ourselves. My father buys only sugar, salt, and tea. There is always food to eat; the family lacks nothing for meals. In the morning I make tea for the girls, I pour a little olive oil onto a plate, with olives on the side, and I heat the water in a basin on the coals of the bread oven. The dried green tea is in a sack of tan cloth on the floor in a corner of the kitchen. I plunge my hand into the sack, I take a handful and put it into the teapot, I add sugar, and I return to the garden for the hot basin. It’s heavy and I have trouble carrying it by its two handles, my back arched, so as not to burn myself. I come back into the kitchen and I pour the water into the teapot, slowly, over the tea and the sugar. I know that if I drop any on the floor, I’ll be beaten. So I pay attention. If I’m clumsy, I shouldn’t sweep it up, but rather collect it and put it back in the teapot. Then my sisters come to eat, but my father, mother, and brother are never with us. In this picture of tea drunk in the morning, sitting on the floor in the kitchen, I always see only sisters. I try to situate my age but it’s difficult. I do know that the eldest, Noura, isn’t married yet.

  As for outside work, there is a lot of fruit. Grapes grow along the terrace, where I pick them. There are oranges, bananas, and mainly the black and green figs. And a memory that I’ll never lose is of going out early in the mornings to pick the figs. They have opened a little with the evening coolness and they run like honey, the purest of sweets.

  The sheep are the really heavy work. Take them out, lead them to the fields, watch over them, bring them back, cut the wool that my father is going to take to the market to sell. I take a sheep by its hooves and get it to lie down on the ground so I can tie it up and I clip the wool with the big shears. They are so big for my small hands that I have trouble using my hands after only a few minutes. And I milk the ewes while sitting on the ground. I squeeze their hooves between my legs and I pull the milk, which is used to make cheese. When the milk cools off you drink it just like that, fat and nourishing.

  In general, I am incapable of organizing my memories by my age at the time, but I think my memory is about right, give or take one or two years. I am more certain of events around the time of Noura’s marriage when I was about fifteen.

  My sister Kainat is still at home, older by a year and not married. And then there is another sister after me whose name escapes me. I try to remember her name, but it doesn’t come to me. I have to call her something in order to talk about her, so I’ll call her Hanan, but may she forgive me because it surely isn’t her name. I know she took care of the two little half sisters my father brought home after he abandoned his second wife, Aicha. I have seen this woman and I did not have ill feelings toward her. It was considered acceptable for my father to have taken her. He always wanted to have sons, but it didn’t work out with Aicha, either. She gave him only two more girls, still more girls! So he dropped her and brought the two new little sisters home. That was considered the normal thing to do. Everything the men wanted to do was considered normal in this village, including my father’s striking us with the cane, and all the rest. I couldn’t imagine any other kind of life. Besides, I didn’t really imagine anything at all. There were no precise thoughts in my head. In our childhood, we knew no play or toys, no games, only obedience and submission.

  In any case, these two little girls live with us now and Hanan stays at home to take care of them, of that I’m sure. But their names, too, are unhappily forgotten. I just refer to them as “the little sisters.” In my first memories of them, they are about five or six years old and they don’t work yet. They are in Hanan’s care and she very rarely leaves the house, except when it is necessary for picking vegetables in season.

  In our family, the children are about a year apart. My mother was married at fourteen, my father much older than her. She has had many children, fourteen in all, she says. Only five are still living. For a long time I didn’t realize what giving birth to fourteen children meant. One day my mother’s father was talking about it while I served the tea. I can still hear his words in my ears: “It’s good that you married young, you were able to have fourteen children . . . and a son, it’s very good.”

  Even if I didn’t go to school, I knew how to count the sheep. So I could count on my hands that there were only five of us, Noura, Kainat, me Souad, Assad, and Hanan, not fourteen. Where were the others? My mother never said that they had died but it was acknowledged in her usual comment: “I have fourteen children, seven of them are living.” She included the half sisters with us five, since we never said “half sisters,” always “sisters.” It would seem that there were then seven others missing. But really nine were missing, if the half sisters weren’t counted. Either way, many of the children she had borne were not still alive.

  But one day I learned why there were only seven of us in the house. I can’t say how old I was, but I wasn’t yet at puberty, so I was less than ten years old. Noura the oldest is with me. I have forgotten many things, but not what I saw with my own eyes, terrorized, but not really aware that it was a crime.

  I see my mother lying on the floor on a sheepskin. She is giving birth, and my aunt Salima is with her sitting on a cushion. There are cries from my mother and then from the baby, and very quickly my mother takes the sheepskin and she smothers the baby. She is on her knees. I see the baby move under the blanket and then it’s over. I don’t remember what happened after that, I just know that the baby isn’t there anymore. That’s all, and a terrible fear grips me.

  So it was a girl that my mother suffocated at her birth. I saw her do it this first time, then a second time. I’m not sure I was present for the third one, but I knew about it. And I hear my sister Noura say to my mother: “If I have girls, I’ll do what you have done.”

  This is how my mother got rid of the seven girls that she had after Hanan, the last survivor. This was accepted as normal. I accepted it, too, but I was also terrified. These little girls my mother was killing were a little of me. I started to hide and cry every time my father would kill a sheep or a chicken, because I was trembling for my life. The death of an
animal, like that of a baby, was so simple and so ordinary a thing for my parents, but it set off in me a fear of disappearing as simply and as quickly as these babies had. I would tell myself that it’s going to be my turn one of these days, or my sister’s. They can kill us whenever they want. Big or small, there’s no difference. Since they’ve given us life, they have the right to take it.

  As long as you live with your parents in my village, the fear of death is there. I’m afraid of going up on a ladder when my father is down below. I’m afraid of the hatchet that is used for chopping the wood, afraid of the well when I go for water. Afraid when my father watches the sheep returning to the stable with us. Afraid of the noise of a door at night, of being suffocated in the sheepskin that is my bed.

  Sometimes, coming back from the fields with the animals, Kainat and I talk about it a little: “And supposing everybody’s dead when we get home . . . And if our father killed our mother? A blow with a stone is all it would take! What would we do?”

  “Me, I pray every time I go to the well because it’s so deep. I tell myself that if somebody pushed me in, no one would know where I was. You could die down there, nobody will come looking for you.”

  That well was my great terror, and my mother’s, too. I could feel it. And I was afraid in the ravines when I led the goats and the sheep back. The idea would loom up in me that my father could be hiding somewhere and that he was going to push me into the void. It would be easy for him to do, and I would be dead at the bottom of the ravine. They could even pile up a few stones on top of me and I would be in the ground and I’d be left there to rot.

  The possibility of our mother dying preoccupied us more than the death of a sister because there were always other sisters. Our mother was often beaten just as we were. Sometimes she tried to intervene when my father beat us really viciously, and then he’d turn the blows on her, knocking her down and pulling her by her hair. We lived every day with the possibility of death, day after day. It could come for no reason, take you by surprise, simply because the father had decided it. Just as my mother had decided to smother the baby girls. She would be pregnant, then she wasn’t, and nobody asked any questions.

  We didn’t have any real contact with other girls in the village except to say hello and good-bye. We were never together, except for weddings. And the conversations were banal, about the food, about the bride, about other girls who we thought were pretty or ugly, or maybe about a woman we thought was lucky because she was wearing makeup.

  “Look at that one, she’s plucked her eyebrows . . .”

  “She has a nice haircut.”

  “Oh, look at that one, she’s wearing shoes!”

  This would be the richest girl in the village, she wore embroidered slippers. The rest of us went into the fields barefoot, where we got thorns in our feet and would have to sit on the ground to take them out. My mother didn’t have any shoes, either, and my sister Noura was married barefoot. The wedding ceremony consisted of only a few sentences exchanged. I was present at only two or three of these ceremonies.

  It was unthinkable to complain about being beaten because that was just the way it was. There was no question about a baby being alive or dead, unless a woman had just given birth to a son. If this son was alive, then glory to her and to the family. If he was dead, they wept over him and the misfortune that had befallen her and her family. The males counted, not the females.

  When I disappeared from my village later, my mother must not have been forty years old. She had given birth to fourteen children and only five were living. Had she smothered all the others? Nobody really cared because it was customary. I never knew what became of the baby girls after my mother smothered them. Did they bury them somewhere? Did they become food for the dogs? My mother would dress in black, my father also. Every birth of a girl was like a burial in the family. It was always considered the mother’s fault if she produced only girls. My father thought so and so did the whole village.

  In my village, if the men had to choose between a girl and a cow, they would choose the cow. My father repeated endlessly how we girls were not good for anything: A cow gives milk and produces calves. What do you do with milk and calves? You sell them and bring the money home, which means a cow does something for the family. But a girl? What does the family get from her? Nothing. What do sheep bring to us? Wool. You sell the wool and you get money. The lamb grows up, it makes other lambs, still more milk, you make cheese, you sell it and you bring home money. A cow and a sheep are more valuable than a girl. And we girls knew this very well because the cow, the sheep, and the goat were treated much better than we were and they were never beaten!

  And we also knew that a girl is a problem for her father because he is always afraid of not being able to marry her off. And once she’s married it is a cause for misery and shame if she leaves her husband, who’s mistreating her, and dares come back to her parents’ house. But as long as she is not married, the father is afraid that she’ll stay an old maid and the village will gossip. For the whole family that is a terrible embarrassment because if an unmarried girl walks in the street with her father and mother, everyone looks at her and makes fun of her. If she’s more than twenty years old and still in her parents’ house, it is not normal. Everyone observes the rule of marrying the eldest daughter first and the rest in the order of their ages. But after the age of twenty, nobody makes allowances. A girl is expected to be married. I don’t know how this worked in the big cities of my country but that’s the way it was in my village.

  Hanan?

  There was an abiding fear of death and of the iron door. It was the fear of the submissive surviving girls. My brother, Assad, on the other hand, would leave for school with a satchel. He also went horseback riding and went walking. He did not eat with us. He grew up as a man should grow up, free and proud, and was served like a prince by the girls of the house. Assad was handsome and I adored him like a prince. I heated the water for his bath when he was still small and I washed his hair. I took care of him as you would a priceless treasure. I knew nothing of his life outside the house and I was ignorant of what he learned in that school, and of what he saw and did in town. We waited for him to come of age and marry because marriage is the only thing that has any real importance in a family, that and the birth of a son!

  There was only a year between us, which gave me the opportunity to be close to him while he was still a child. In my family we were as close to each other in age as it was possible to be. I don’t have any memory of playing with him as children of that age do in Europe, and by the age of fourteen or fifteen he was already a man and he drifted away from me.

  I think he married very early, probably at about the age of seventeen. He had also become violent. My father hated him but I did not know the reason. Perhaps he was too much like him. He was afraid of losing his power to a son who had become an adult. I don’t know the origin of the anger between them, but one day I saw my father take a basket and fill it with stones, and then go up on the terrace and hurl them at Assad’s head, as if he wanted to kill him.

  When he married, Assad lived with his wife in a part of our house. He pushed an armoire against the connecting door to keep my father from coming in. I quickly understood that the violence of the men of my village comes from way back in our history. The father passes it to the son who transmits it in his turn, over and over.

  I haven’t seen my family in twenty-five years, but if by some chance I were to come across my brother, I would like to ask him just one question: Where is the sister, the one I call Hanan, who disappeared? Hanan—I can see her—a beautiful girl, very dark and prettier than me, with thick hair and heavy eyebrows that joined above her eyes, and who was more mature physically. I remember that Kainat is sweet and good, but a little too heavy, and that Hanan has a different personality, is a little abrupt in her manner but yet submissive like the rest of us. Hanan’s not fat but you sensed she could become strong and perhaps a little chubby. She’s not a thin girl like me.
When she comes to help us pick olives, she works and moves slowly. This wasn’t usual in the family; you walked fast, you worked fast, you ran to obey to bring out the animals and bring them back. Rather than being active, she was dreamy and never very attentive to what was being said to her. When we’d be picking olives, for example, my fingers would already be sore from collecting a whole bowlful but she wouldn’t have even filled the bottom of hers. I would go back to help her because if she was always behind everybody else she was going to get into trouble with my father. I see us all in a row in the olive grove. We move forward in a line, stooped over and moving with the rhythm of the picking. The movement has to be quick. As soon as the hand is full, you throw the olives into the basin and you keep going like that until the olives are almost overflowing the basin. Then you put them into the big cloth sacks. Each time I come back to my place, I see Hanan is still behind, as if moving in slow motion. She is really very different from the others. I have no recollection of speaking with her or of being especially involved with her, except for helping her with the olive picking when it was needed. Or twisting her thick hair into a big braid, as she was supposed to do for me. I don’t see her with us in the stable or leading the cows, or shearing the sheep’s wool. She spent most of her time in the kitchen helping my mother, which may be why she has disappeared somewhat from my memory.

  But I have counted and recounted, forcing myself to get us in the right birth order: Noura, Kainat, Souad, Assad, and . . . ? My fourth sister is not there; I have lost even her first name. Eventually it would happen that I didn’t even know anymore who was born before whom. I was sure about Noura, sure about Assad, but then I’d get the rest of us mixed up. As for the one I call Hanan, the worst thought for me is that for years I didn’t even ask myself anymore about her disappearance. I forgot her profoundly, as if a door had closed on this sister of my blood, making her completely invisible to my memory, which was already jumbled.