Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  I was a natural flirt and got a lot of attention from boys, but I never had a real boyfriend like some of my friends. They would meet their boyfriends in secret, just to hold hands in the park. We thought we were bold and daring, but the most any of us did was kiss a boy. I believed what my world taught—that God intended one man for me, and my life would begin when I found him. My body would turn to fire at the thought of being married and making babies, just like the actors in the porn film.

  I was seventeen when I first met Mhammad. He was twenty-five. He lived in the homeland but was in Kuwait visiting his aunt, Um Naseem, our neighbor one floor up. We had all seen him on the news when he was released from an Israeli prison a month earlier, and my friends were envious that he was now living in our building.

  “Is he as handsome as he looks on TV?” one asked. I hadn’t seen him in person yet, but I thought he looked ordinary and old on TV.

  “I hear he’s looking for a wife after being in prison for seven years,” another said.

  “Nahr, can we hang out at your house?” asked a third.

  “What’s wrong with you? Did the world run out of boys our own age?” I shooed them away.

  They looked at me as if I were crazy.

  Mhammad Jalal AbuJabal was a bona fide hero, a guerrilla fighter responsible for resistance operations. My friends said he was captured after killing two Zionist soldiers single-handedly after they killed two of his friends, martyrs, God rest their souls.

  “He killed one of them with a knife, then took his gun and shot the other one,” they explained.

  “So?”

  “He’s not a boy. He’s a man. A famous freedom fighter,” Sabah said, sucking through her teeth, mocking my ignorance. I hated when she did that, especially in front of the other girls.

  Sabah lived in the building next to ours, and we had known each other as long as I could remember. Ours was a friendship forged from rivalry and jealousy as much as from love and familiarity. We knew each other’s secrets, had history, and stuck up for each other against outsiders, but we consistently tried to outdo each other and sometimes competed for the attention of the same boys.

  “He did some badass stuff. Since you don’t care about what happens to Palestine, I guess it doesn’t matter to you. But most of us appreciate what he sacrificed for the struggle,” Sabah continued.

  Sabah didn’t know shit about Palestine. None of us did, except sound bites from the news and conversations of adults who used to live there. Truth be told, we didn’t care either. We were daughters of Kuwait, even though we could never be citizens.

  “Eat shit, Sabah. Maybe he’ll marry you. Give it a try!” I said.

  Once I realized that Sabah was interested in this new man, I wanted him too. I was prettier and a better dancer, even though she wasn’t bad looking and was smarter than me. She played the guitar, which annoyed me because she could captivate anyone when she’d start on it. Luckily, she was insecure and shy and mostly played in private or just around our close friends.

  Over the next few days, I pieced together Mhammad’s story from a conversation among Sitti Wasfiyeh, Mama, and the neighbors. Mhammad came from a well-known family with vast land holdings, though most of it had already been confiscated by the Zionist entity—that’s how people referred to Israel, like it’ll go away if we don’t say the name. They had captured and tortured him for eight days before he finally signed a confession, typed up in Hebrew, which he couldn’t read, stating that he had been one of three men who attacked three soldiers, killing two of them. The surviving soldier hadn’t seen him during the attack, but there were other witnesses who, also under torture, confessed to seeing him near the site of the assault. He was tried in a military court and sentenced to life in prison. They said he could get a reduced sentence if he gave up his younger brother, Bilal, who had escaped to Jordan. But he maintained that his brother had nothing to do with the killings; that Bilal’s departure had been mere coincidence. In the end, he had confessed to the murder of two Israeli soldiers, blowing up a military supply warehouse a month earlier, and plotting to carry out attacks on civilians. Seven years later, they released him in a strange prisoner swap brokered by Israel’s recent darling, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. That’s when he turned up in Kuwait.

  No one believed Bilal had nothing to do with that fateful day. He had been imprisoned already at fifteen for protesting a Jewish-only settlement and was gaining a reputation as a natural leader. In exile, while attending university, Bilal agitated for resistance. Israel wanted him badly. They tried and failed to assassinate or capture him. Ultimately, it was Bilal himself who offered a deal for his surrender—Mhammad’s freedom in exchange for his. To everyone’s surprise, Israel agreed. It became clear that Bilal was a bigger prize to them than most had realized. I suppose Israel knew what I would learn years later—that nothing in Mhammad’s confession was actually true.

  To ensure that Israel would not rearrest his brother, Bilal demanded that Mhammad be released to the Red Cross and transferred to Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia, or any Arab nation that would have him, except Egypt, because Egypt might hand him back to Israel.

  Mhammad went through several countries before landing at his aunt’s home in Kuwait. We didn’t know why. Some said it was the best place not to be rearrested after Israel got Bilal, because Kuwait was a real haven for Palestinians. Some claimed the deal meant he could never return to Palestine, and no other place would have him. Others said he was in Kuwait for a job offer. Sabah was sure he came to find a wife. “I heard his mama in Palestine is anxious to see him married,” she said.

  But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.

  I flirted shamelessly with Mhammad that spring of 1985. It was a game at first, an unspoken competition between Sabah and me. When he showed no interest, I obsessed and stalked him long enough to engineer repeated “chance” encounters in the stairwell of our building. He was handsome indeed, and I found myself constantly thinking about him despite our age difference.

  “Congratulations, Nahr.” Sabah rolled her eyes. “You said hi to him in the stairwell. That’s groundbreaking.” I enjoyed what I thought was Sabah’s envy. “More than just hi,” I said, and added that he was planning to attend an upcoming wedding party in our neighborhood. “He said he wanted to see me dance,” I lied.

  Our friends squealed, but Sabah said nothing.

  My plan worked. Even though my mother made me stop dancing at the wedding after a few songs—“It’s too much, Nahr!” she said—I knew I had caught his attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off me that night. I don’t remember much else from that summer, except that I told my friends I had found the man God intended for me.

  Mhammad and I met regularly, at the beach, parks, and malls. My friends, even Sabah, covered for me with Mama. He told me stories about Palestine much different from my grandmother’s and parents’. In his version, there was a nightlife for young people, where they danced and partied, went to cafés, parks, and clubs. Palestinians were still allowed to access the Mediterranean beach back then, and we talked about our shared love of the ocean. He wanted to know about my life. He was not fond of the desert heat and was struggling to adjust in Kuwait. He said he would have left weeks ago had he not met me. “Your friendship means the world to me,” he said. He seemed vulnerable, and his need for me made me believe that I loved him. I told him so. Months later, he and his aunt’s family were in our home, asking for my hand.

  I fantasized about fairy-tale love and sex, about having my own house, children, and a job like modern women—maybe as a smartly dressed secretary like the ones on the covers of women’s magazines. I was preoccupied with finding the latest appliances to suit the life I imagined. The kind of semimanual washer at our house—where we fed each item through rollers to squeeze out the water—would not do. Some people even had dishwashers that cleaned, rinsed, and dried their dishes. I wanted
one, and Mhammad promised I’d get it. I imagined being the envy of all my friends.

  Sitti Wasfiyeh was delighted, although suspicious about the appliances. “I don’t trust a machine to clean dishes. It won’t scrub things clean. You’ll get bugs in your house. I’ll never visit you,” she warned.

  Mama counseled me not to rush into making such a big decision. She thought Mhammad too old for me, and admitted, years later, that she almost forbade the marriage, but the force of my enthusiasm and joy made her doubt her instincts. “You had the biggest personality in the family, and without realizing it, we all deferred to you,” she told me. I thought Mama’s reservations were the misplaced concern of a woman whose marriage hadn’t worked out, and I rationalized that my story was beginning differently from hers.

  My brother, Jehad, was uncomfortable in the role of man of the house, which tradition obliged him to accept, even though he was only eleven. “Whatever. I don’t care, Nanu. Just get it over with one way or another. I don’t think I can stand another one of these courtship formalities!” he said at first. Later, when he realized I would be moving out of our apartment, he tried to assert himself.

  “As the man in this family, I insist that Nanu continue to live here. She can visit her husband, but she cannot live with him,” he declared on the eve of our engagement. Our guests were amused. “How sweet,” someone said. He had an asthma attack that evening and I slept in his bed through the night, letting him cry on my chest, promising I would never be far, and would always be there when he needed me.

  Jehad wasn’t really the only man in the family. My mother’s brothers showed up to fulfill their social duties to represent me in the formal conversations about my dowry and other practicalities of marriage. My family didn’t believe in the excesses some people demanded, but they couldn’t just give me away for nothing. They didn’t want to break my young suitor, but I wasn’t some nobody who wasn’t worth a decent dowry. Mama said we had to consider what the young man could afford. “But we need to make sure you will be cared for. So his family must show us they’re serious,” she said.

  Before the negotiations were settled, Mhammad’s aunt dropped a bombshell that almost unraveled everything. “We expect the wedding will cost at least eight thousand dinars, and we’re prepared to pay ten thousand. But we have to wait for a while.”

  “A while?” Mama asked.

  “His brother, Bilal, was just imprisoned, and his mother cannot travel to Kuwait for a wedding, because Israel might confiscate her home if she leaves. It would be wrong and disrespectful for the eldest son to hold a wedding celebration under these circumstances,” Mhammad’s aunt said.

  It was hard to argue with her logic, but they also understood the humiliation I could suffer getting legally married but forgoing a wedding party. Mama suggested we postpone the marriage, but the ultimate decision was mine. In the end, I went for one thousand dinars, a gold shabka worth two thousand dinars, and a two-thousand-dinar mo’akhar. Mhammad’s family also rented and furnished the marital apartment, and set up a joint account with ten thousand dinars, to be spent on our wedding in a few months, when Hajjeh Um Mhammad, my mother-in-law, could travel to Kuwait, enshallah.

  I was satisfied. He loved me. Forgoing an immediate wedding party was the price of marrying a national hero. Our job as women was to sacrifice, and I was a woman now. I imagined a beautiful life for us in Kuwait. We would make memories on the beaches and in the desert, on vacations in Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. I would take our children to Palestine to visit our families there. “It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the man I love,” I declared, and refused to let Mama talk me out of the marriage. Then I listened impatiently as she instructed me to call her if Mhammad was too rough on our first night together.

  “It’s normal for it to hurt the first time,” she said, as I rummaged through the new clothes from my dowry. I didn’t dare tell her that I already knew about sex from the porn video.

  “Should I wear the black one or the white one?” I asked her, holding up two negligees.

  Her face reddened. “Whichever one you like most,” she said, and left the room.

  We were married by an imam, our marriage certificate witnessed by my uncle and by Jamil, Mhammad’s dearest friend in Kuwait. Mhammad smiled and squeezed my hand.

  It’s hard to remember suppressed disappointment, especially when I didn’t acknowledge it at the time, not even to myself. I had always dreamed of a wedding, hundreds of eyes upon me with love or envy, or maybe lust. But there was none of that. Just a muted celebration, a small gathering, some cake, and a cute dress—this event a placeholder for the grand wedding I believed was still to come. Or maybe I just pretended I did.

  In hindsight I see that Tamara’s ghost was there all along. The first time I heard the name was on our wedding night. Our families delivered us to the threshold of our new apartment, their faces fixed in the kind of nervous happiness that comes with anticipating some profound transformation of one’s child. His aunt and family and my family showered us with hugs and congratulations. Before they left, Mama hugged me one more time, whispering in my ear,

  “A thousand congratulations, my love. May God protect and guide you always. And remember what I said.”

  Alone in our beautifully furnished new apartment, I had expected—hoped—he would push me against the wall with passionate kisses, his hands hungrily finding their way up my thighs, the way I’d seen in the illicit movie. Instead, we turned to each other, smiling awkwardly. I asked if he’d like me to make us a drink, and he nodded. As we sipped tea on our new sofa, he pulled me to him.

  “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to,” he said.

  It startled me that he would say such a thing. I immediately blamed myself for being too demure. I look back now on so many moments in my life when I instinctively took responsibility for the actions and feelings of those around me.

  “Oh, but I want to,” I said. “Wait one moment.” I got up and went into the bedroom, where I had already unpacked my clothes days before, opened my special drawer of “marital wear,” and chose the white negligee, because I had read in a magazine that men preferred women who were both pure and sexy. I freshened my makeup, admired the full glory of my womanhood in the mirror, and was ready. Fire ignited my body as I ran my hands along the curves from my breasts to my hips. A sinful smile crossed my face as I emerged to stand before him, ready to be devoured by my husband, who would surely be overcome by his great fortune to have such a beautiful bride.

  He smiled, turning his eyes away, as if embarrassed for me. My smile, curves, fire, beauty, and sexiness melted into a naked blob of shame. Tears filled my eyes. I held them back as best as I could, but he must have noticed. When he finally approached me, it was with sympathy.

  So it was that the first time I was touched sexually was with hands of pity. He wiped my tears away and kissed my cheeks. He said I was beautiful. I kissed him back, but I could not recapture the heat of moments past. He led me into the bedroom, turned out the lights, and laid me gently on the bed before he went into the bathroom. I waited, a confused spectator to my own life, until he returned, slipping next to me in the darkness. His erection and nakedness awakened my body to move in complement to his. He stopped to reposition himself a couple of times, clumsily, as if executing a chore. Whatever had stirred in me was gone, and I resolved to do the best I could to get through the night, sure that I had done something wrong. Finally he slid inside of me, and I began a performance, determined to overcome his disappointment and make him love and want me.

  Moaning the way I had seen actors do in that old porn tape, I faked pleasure through the discomfort of being penetrated for the first time. I was waiting for it to feel good, hoping nothing was wrong with me, wanting it to be over, wondering if this was what it would always be like. Thinking about having a baby. Whether my body was beautiful. And if I was doing it right. Mama had said it might hurt, and she was right. But I thought it would
feel special and sweet too. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists. He was mostly quiet, sometimes instructing me to relax. He struggled, unable to keep an erection until he turned me on my stomach and entered me from behind. I had seen this in the porn video too, and tried to mimic what the actress had done. I was in pain as he began to breathe harder and moved faster inside of me. Finally he whispered, “Tamara!” and collapsed and rolled off.

  I woke up a few hours later to find him naked on the balcony, crying softly to an indifferent moon, a cigarette burning between his fingers. I went back to bed quietly, knowing his tears had something to do with the name he had uttered tenderly into the air above my back. Alone in our bed, with my head under the sheets, I whispered the name to myself: “Tamara.” But sound lodged in my throat, and I swallowed it back whole, so now Tamara lived in me too.

  Mhammad and I both worked. He managed a local restaurant, and I did light bookkeeping for a hair salon where I also threaded eyebrows and did manicures. I’ve always been good at stuff like that, and having a job made me feel like a modern woman. But in truth, marriage was not what I’d imagined. I’m sure Mhammad and I shared many tender times. But I can only remember one. We had gone to the beach together and lain in the sun, then gone to the home of some friends to drink alcohol they made. Jugs and jugs of horrible-tasting dark liquid. They thought my aversion was cute and encouraged me to give it a chance. I couldn’t get used to the taste, but I went along, wanting to feel as sophisticated as the other wives appeared to be, and eventually I liked the way it made me feel sexy and worldly. Mhammad said he was happy that I wasn’t up-tight about drinking. He said modern women smoked and drank. But I still refused to smoke and repeated what I had read in the comic book years ago about a Western conspiracy to kill us with cigarettes. They laughed the way adults do when a small child says something silly. Marriage had made me smaller.