Burned alive: a victim of the law of men

by Souad; Marie-Thérèse Cuny

  And the next day, it’s the same thing, I strike my stomach with anything I can find, and at every opportunity. My mother is waiting for me. She has given me a month from the day when she made me show her my breasts. I know she’s counting in her head, and while she waits I’m not allowed to go out. I have to remain confined to the house and keep to household chores. My mother has said to me: “You don’t go out that door again! You’re not to watch the sheep, you’re not to go out to fetch the hay.” I can escape through the courtyard and the gardens but to go where? I have never taken the bus alone, I don’t have any money, and anyway the driver wouldn’t let me on. I must be in the fifth month. I’ve felt movement in my belly. Like a crazy person, I press my stomach against the wall. But I can’t get away with lying anymore or trying to conceal my stomach and my breasts. There is no way out.

  The only idea that occurs to me, the only possible one, is to flee from the house and ask my mother’s sister to take me in. She lives in the village, I know her house. So one morning, while my parents are out at the market, I cross the garden, I pass by the well, I jump over the embankment, and I make my way to her house. I don’t have much hope because she is mean, jealous of my mother for reasons I don’t know about. But just maybe she’ll keep me and find a solution. Seeing me arrive alone, she expresses concern about my parents. Why haven’t they come with me?

  “You have to help me, Aunt.”

  And I tell her everything, the hoped-for marriage that hasn’t happened, the wheat field.

  “Who is it?”

  “His name is Faiez, but he’s not here anymore, he promised . . .”

  “All right. I’m going to help you.”

  She dresses, puts on her scarf, and takes me by the hand.

  “Come, we’re going to take a walk together.”

  “But where? What are you going to do?”

  “Come, give me your hand, you can’t be seen walking alone.”

  I suppose she’s going to take me to another woman, a neighbor who has secrets for making a girl’s period start or keeping the child from continuing to grow in my belly. Or she’s going to hide me someplace until I’m freed.

  But she takes me home. She pulls me like a donkey who doesn’t want to move.

  “Why are you taking me home? Help me, I beg you!”

  “Because that’s your place, it’s for them to take care of you, not me.”

  “I beg you, stay with me! You know what’s going to happen to me!”

  “This is where you belong! You understand? And don’t go out again!”

  She forces me to go through the door, calls to my parents, turns around and leaves. I saw the meanness, the scorn in her expression. She must have thought: My sister has a serpent in her house, this girl has dishonored her family.

  My father closes the door and my mother glowers at me and makes a gesture with her chin and hand that means: Charmuta . . . slut . . . you dared to go to my sister! They despise each other. A misfortune happens to one and the other is gleeful.

  “Yes, I went to her, I thought she could help me, hide me . . .”

  “Go upstairs!”

  My whole body is trembling, my legs won’t support me. I don’t know what will happen to me once I’m locked up in the room. I can’t make myself move.

  “Souad! Get up there!”

  My sister has stopped speaking to me. She is as ashamed as I am and she doesn’t leave the house anymore. My mother works as usual, my other sisters take care of the animals, and they leave me locked up like someone with a contagious disease. I hear them talking together now and then. They’re afraid that someone may have seen me in the village, that people have started talking. In trying to save myself by going to my aunt, I have especially shamed my mother. The neighbors will know, the tongues will be wagging, the ears will be listening.

  From that day on, I can’t put my nose outside. My father has installed a new lock on the door of the room where I sleep and it makes a sound like a gunshot every night when he secures it. The garden door makes the same sound. Sometimes when I’m doing the washing in the courtyard, I feel suffocated when I look at that door. I’ll never leave here. I don’t even realize that this door is stupid because the garden and the embankment of stones that protects it are not objects that can’t be crossed or climbed over. I’ve gone out that way more than once. But the prison is secure for any girl in my situation. It would be worse outside. Outside there is shame, scorn, stones thrown, neighbors who would spit in my face or drag me home by my hair. I don’t even dream about the outside. And the weeks pass. No one questions me, no one wants to know who did this to me, how and why. Even if I accuse Faiez, my father won’t go looking for him to make him marry me. It’s my fault, not his. A man who has taken a girl’s virginity is not guilty, she was willing. And even worse she’s the one who asked for it, who provoked the man because she is a whore without honor. I have no defense. My naïveté, my love for him, his promise of marriage, even his first request to my father, nothing of all that counts for anything. In our culture, a man who has self-respect doesn’t marry the girl he has deflowered.

  Did he love me? No. And if I committed a fault, it was believing that I would hold on to him by doing what he wanted. Was I in love? Was I afraid he would find somebody else? That is not a defense, and even to me it had stopped making sense.

  One evening, another family meeting: my parents, my older sister, and her husband, Hussein. My brother isn’t there because his wife is about to give birth and he’s gone to be with her and her family. I listen behind the wall, terrified.

  My mother speaks to Hussein: “We can’t ask our son, he won’t be able to do it, he’s too young.”

  “I can take care of her.”

  Then my father speaks: “If you’re going to do it, it must be done right. What do you have in mind?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find a way.”

  My mother again: “You’ll have to take care of her, but you’ll have to do it quickly.”

  I hear my sister crying, saying she doesn’t want to hear this and that she wants to go home. Hussein tells her to wait and adds, for my parents: “You’ll go out. Leave the house, you can’t be there. When you come back, it will be done.”

  I had heard my death sentence with my own ears and I slipped back up the stairs because my sister was about to leave. I didn’t hear the rest of it. A little later my father made the tour of the house and the door of the girls’ room clanged shut. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t comprehend what I had heard. I wondered if it could have been a dream, a nightmare? Are they really going to do it? Is it just to frighten me? And if they do it, when will it be? How? By cutting off my head? Maybe they’re going to let me have this child and then kill me after? Will they keep the child if it’s a boy? Will my mother suffocate it if it’s a girl? Are they going to kill me first?

  The next day, I act as though I’ve heard nothing. I am on my guard but I don’t really believe it. And then I start trembling again, and I do believe it. The only questions are when and where. It can’t happen immediately because Hussein has left. And then I can’t imagine Hussein wanting to kill me!

  My mother says to me that day, with the same tone as always: “It’s time for you to do the washing, your father and I are going to the city.”

  I know what is going to happen. They are leaving the house just as they’d told Hussein.

  Recently, when I remembered the disappearance of my sister Hanan, I realized that it happened the same way. The parents were out, the girls were alone in the house with their brother. The only difference in my case is that Hussein was not there yet. I looked at the courtyard: It was a big space, part of it was tiled, the rest covered in sand. It was encircled by a wall, and all around on top of the wall were iron spikes. And in one corner, the gray metallic door, smooth on the courtyard side, without a lock or key, with a handle only on the outside.

  My sister Kainat never does the laundry with me, it doesn’t take two of us. I don’t
know what work they’ve told her to do, or where she is with the little ones. She’s stopped speaking to me. She sleeps with her back to me ever since I tried to escape to my aunt. My mother is waiting for me to gather the laundry. There is a lot of it because we usually do the laundry only once a week. If I begin around two or three o’clock in the afternoon, I won’t be finished before six o’clock in the evening.

  I first go for water from the well, at the back of the garden. I arrange the wood for the fire, I place the big laundry tub on it, and I half fill it. I sit down on a stone while I wait for the water to heat. My parents leave by the main door of the house, which they always lock on their way out.

  I’m on the other side, in this courtyard. I keep the coals going all the time. The fire should not be allowed to burn down because the water has to be very hot before the laundry is put in. Then I’ll rub the stains with olive oil soap, and I’ll go back to the well for the rinse water. It is long and tiring work that I’ve been doing for years, but at this moment it’s particularly painful.

  I’m sitting on a rock, barefoot, in a dress of gray cloth, tired of being afraid. I don’t even know anymore how long I’ve been pregnant with this fear in my belly. More than six months in any case. From time to time, I look over at the door in the back of the courtyard. It fascinates me. If he comes, he can only enter by that door.

  The Fire

  Suddenly I hear the door clang. He’s there, he’s coming toward me.

  I see these images again twenty-five years later as if time had stopped. They are the last images of my existence in that place, in my village of the Palestinian Territory. They play out in slow motion like films on television. They come back before my eyes constantly. I’d like to erase them as soon as the first one appears but I can’t stop the film from playing. When the door clangs, it’s too late to stop it, I need to see it all again, these images, because I’m always trying to understand what I did not understand then. How did he do it? Could I have gotten away from him if I had understood?

  He comes toward me. It’s my brother-in-law Hussein in his work clothes, old pants and a T-shirt. He stands in front of me now and says, with a smile: “Hi. How goes it?” He’s chewing on a blade of grass, smiling: “I’m going to take care of you.”

  That smile, and he says he’s going to take care of me, I wasn’t expecting that. I smile a little myself, to thank him, not daring to speak.

  “You’ve got a big belly, huh?”

  I lower my head, I’m ashamed to look at him. I lower my head even farther, my forehead on my knees.

  “You’ve got a spot there. Did you put some henna there on purpose?”

  “No, I put the henna on my hair, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “You did it on purpose to hide it.”

  I look at the laundry that I was rinsing in my trembling hands. This is the last fixed and lucid image that I have: this laundry and my two trembling hands. The last words that I heard from him are: You did it on purpose to hide it.

  He didn’t say anything more. I kept my head down in shame, a little relieved that he didn’t ask me other questions.

  I suddenly felt a cold liquid running over my head and instantly I was on fire. It is like a movie that has been speeded up, images racing past. I start to run in the garden, barefoot. I slap my hair, I scream. I feel my dress billow out behind me. Was my dress on fire, too?

  I smell the gasoline and I run, the hem of my long dress getting in the way. My terror leads me instinctively away from the courtyard. I run toward the garden as the only way out. I know I’m running and I’m on fire and I’m screaming. But I remember almost nothing after that. How did I get away? Did he run after me? Was he waiting for me to fall so he could watch me go up in flames?

  I must have climbed onto the garden wall to end up then in the neighbor’s garden or in the street. There were women, it seems to me two of them, so it must have been in the street, and they beat on me, I suppose with their scarves. They dragged me to the village fountain and the water hit me suddenly and I screamed in fear. I hear these women shouting but I see nothing more. My head is down against my chest. I feel the cold water running on me and I cry with pain because the water burns me. I am curled up, I smell the odor of grilled meat, the smoke. I must have fainted. I don’t see much of anything after that. There are a few other vague images, sounds, as if I were in my father’s van. But it’s not my father. I hear the voices of women wailing over me. “The poor thing . . . The poor thing . . .” They console me. I am lying in a car. I feel the jolts of the car on the road. I hear myself moan.

  And then nothing, and then again this noise of the car and the women’s voices. I’m burning as if I am still on fire. I can’t raise my head, I can’t move my body or my arms, I am on fire, still on fire. I stink of gasoline, I don’t understand anything about this sound of the car engine, the women’s lamentations, I don’t know where they’re taking me. If I open my eyes a little, I see only a piece of my dress or my skin. It’s dark, it smells. I’m still burning but the fire is out. But I’m burning all the same. In my mind I’m still running with fire all over me.

  I’m going to die. That’s good. Maybe I’m already dead. It’s over, finally.

  Dying

  I am on a hospital bed, curled up in a ball under a sheet. A nurse has come to tear off my dress. She pulls roughly on the fabric, and the pain jolts me. I can see almost nothing, my chin is stuck to my chest, I can’t raise it. I can’t move my arms, either. The pain is in my head, on my shoulders, in my back, on my chest. I feel sick. This nurse is so mean that she frightens me when I see her come in. She doesn’t speak to me. She comes to tear off pieces of me, she puts on a compress, and she goes away. If she could make me die, she would do it, I’m sure. I’m a dirty girl, if I was burned it’s because I deserved it since I’m not married and I’m pregnant. I know very well what she’s thinking.

  Blackness. Coma. How much time passes, days or nights? No one comes to touch me, they don’t look after me, they give me nothing to eat or drink, they are waiting for me to die. And I would like to die, I am so ashamed of being still alive. I’m suffering so much. I can’t move. This mean woman turns me over to tear off pieces of skin. Nothing more. I would like some oil on my skin to calm the burning, I would like them to raise the sheet so the air would cool me a little. A doctor is there. I saw pant legs and a white shirt. He spoke but I didn’t understand. It’s always the mean woman who comes and goes. I can move my legs and I use them to raise the sheet from time to time. I’m in pain on my back, on my side. I sleep, my head still stuck to my chest, down the way it was when the fire was on me. My arms are strange, extended out away from my body and both of them paralyzed. My hands are still there, but I can’t use them. I would so much like to scratch myself, to rip my skin to stop the pain.

  They make me get up. I walk with this nurse. My eyes hurt. I see my legs, my hands hanging on either side of me, the tiled floor. I hate this woman. She brings me into a room and takes a shower spray to wash me. She says I smell so bad it makes her want to vomit. I stink, I weep, I am there like some dirty rotting refuse on which you’d throw a bucket of water. Like the turd in the toilet, you flush and it’s gone. Die. The water tears off my skin, I scream, I weep, I beg, the blood runs down my fingers. She makes me remain standing. Under the stream of cold water she pulls off pieces of blackened skin, the shreds of my burned dress, stinking filth, which form a little pile in the bottom of the shower. I smell so strongly of rotting burned flesh and smoke that she has put on a mask and from time to time leaves the washing room, coughing and cursing me. I disgust her, I ought to die like a dog, but far away from her. Why doesn’t she just finish me off? I return to my bed, burning and icy at the same time, and she throws the sheet over me so she doesn’t have to look at me. Die, her expression says to me. Die and let them come and pitch you somewhere else.

  My father is there with his cane. He is furious, he raps on the ground, he wants to know who made me pregnant, who
brought me here, how it happened. His eyes are red. The old man is crying, but he still frightens me with that cane and I’m not even able to answer him. I’m going to go to sleep, or die, or wake up, my father was there, he isn’t there anymore. But I haven’t been dreaming. His voice is still ringing in my head: “Speak!”

  My head is supported by a pillow and I succeed in sitting up a little so as not to feel my arms stuck to the sheet. Nothing gives me any relief but I can at least see who passes by in the corridor, since the door is half open. I hear someone, I see two bare feet, a long black dress, a small form like mine, thin, almost skinny. It’s not the nurse. It’s my mother.

  Her two braids smoothed with olive oil, her black scarf, that strange forehead, a bulge between her eyebrows over the nose, a profile like a bird of prey. She frightens me. She sits down on a stool with her black market bag and she starts to weep, to snuffle, wiping her tears with a handkerchief, her head rocking back and forth. She weeps with unhappiness and shame. She weeps for herself and the whole family. And I see the hatred in her eyes.

  She questions me, her bag clutched against her. I know this bag, it’s familiar to me. She always carries it with her when she goes to the market or to the fields. She carries bread in it, a plastic bottle of water, sometimes milk. I’m afraid, but less than in my father’s presence. My father can kill me, but not her. She moans her words, and I whisper.

  “Look at me, my daughter. I could never bring you home like that, you can’t live in the house anymore. Have you seen yourself?”

  “I haven’t been able to look.”

  “You are burned. The shame is on the whole family. I can’t bring you back. Tell me how you got pregnant? Who with?”

  “Faiez. I don’t know his father’s name.”