Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  The next morning, Bilal pushed one of his daily newspapers toward me as we sipped our coffee.

  “What’s this? Did you mean to show me the Hebrew paper?”

  “I know you can’t read it, but you might want to keep it as a souvenir,” he said.

  “Really? It’s in their newspapers?” I said, leafing through the pages.

  “Yeah.” Bilal chuckled. “The article is about an Arab woman who assaulted a Jew in her garden. It quotes neighbors and the police saying more should be done to protect Jews who can’t even feel safe in their own homes from the Arabs.”

  “Ugh. There aren’t any pictures. I’d like to see what she looks like now.” I put the paper down.

  “I had no idea you were so scrappy.” Bilal smiled at me. “Bakir already got rid of the car. He keeps telling me how insanely fast and powerfully you laid that woman out.”

  “So long as he’s telling just you.”

  “Don’t worry. Bakir is no fool,” he said.

  Most days were spent at the bakery. Bilal and I would arrive in the mornings to find Ghassan and his sister already baking bread for the line of customers. I helped out—cleaning, organizing, serving, and getting to know customers, but Ghassan and his sister remained remote, overly polite to me. I reciprocated their coolness, adding a little sarcasm whenever the spirit moved me.

  On one occasion, I noticed two customers disappear into the back room of the shop, as if going to the washroom, only they didn’t come back. It had happened once before, and both times the customers exchanged nearly imperceptible nods or glances with Bilal or Ghassan. I instinctively knew not to follow or investigate. Bilal and I closed up the store that evening and delivered a batch of bread to the mosque. The sky was still dusted in twilight as we drove home. Electric lights dotted the illegal colony on the adjacent hilltop.

  “Looks like the settlers have electricity now,” Bilal remarked.

  A small fire flickered outside Bilal’s home. “My mother is probably roasting chestnuts with my aunties. Let’s go.” He locked the car and we walked toward the house.

  I awoke late the next morning to find Bilal looking out the window through binoculars. Hajjeh Um Mhammad was tending to the vegetable garden.

  “Morning of goodness,” I whispered.

  “Morning of roses and jasmine,” Bilal responded.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Come see. The sons of bitches are extending the water pipe,” he said, handing me the binoculars.

  The work was low in the valley, but I could see the pipe, propped up on cement footings every few meters.

  “It’s so close,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s actually on our property.”

  “What will we do?”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” he said.

  “Is this the reason for the subversive meetings in the back of the store?”

  He hesitated. “I noticed you noticing. I’ll explain later.”

  I wondered if Bilal wasn’t still part of the resistance, but he ignored my question about the mysterious meetings. I didn’t ask again, disappointed that he didn’t trust me, and sulked for the rest of the evening, skipping dinner for an early bed. Hajjeh Um Mhammad thought I wasn’t feeling well and made me chamomile tea. “This will settle your body, my daughter,” she said.

  When I didn’t get up with them in the morning, Hajjeh Um Mhammad came into my room, but I feigned sleep. She felt my forehead and walked out quietly. I heard Bilal’s voice outside but couldn’t make out what he said. A while later, he knocked at my door.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  I opened the door. “Yes, I am.” I put one arm akimbo. “I’ve been here for more than a month, sharing and helping and living as family. You’ve made me feel more comfortable and welcome than my own kin in Ein el-Sultan. Why don’t you trust me?”

  “Let’s get going. I’ll explain everything. I want to be out of our mother’s earshot, because I fear you’re going to be even angrier with me when you hear what I tell you.”

  We agreed to talk in the evening after closing the shop.

  It turned out that for a month, Bilal had been spying on me. He’d had me followed and knew where I was at all times. If I took a day off to go to town, he had a spy reporting back my every move as I got my hair fixed, eyebrows threaded, and body waxed. The shady meetings in the back room were for show. To test me. They were actually playing backgammon, night after night, waiting to see if soldiers would raid the pastry shop after a tip-off from me. He’d set traps and left clues, and I had recognized none of it. He’d pretended to speak in code on calls with his friends, then waited to catch me making a call or sending a message on my mobile phone.

  “A call or text to whom?” I stuttered. It was growing dark as we walked home after parking the car, small lights dotting the new settlement on the hilltop.

  “Your handler,” he said.

  “What the hell is a handler?” I was stunned. “You think I would work with them?” I pointed toward the lights.

  “You have to understand, Nahr, we didn’t know you. You showed up with a mobile phone,” Bilal said, his right hand quivering. “Suddenly el khaneeth calls to give me power of attorney to process your divorce, after we’ve barely heard from either of you in all this time. Neither of you called my mother first. Someone in my position cannot take chances.”

  I didn’t notice in the moment that he said khaneeth. Fag. I was too consumed by anger and humiliation. I had been in contact with one of the girls in Kuwait recently, and she’d sent a text asking if I was still working, because one of my old customers was coming to Amman. Had Bilal seen that? How had I responded to her? Did Bilal know what I was talking about? Surely he did. My face flushed with shame and panic. He had gone through all my communications. Nothing had been private.

  “How could you?” I lunged at him. “You and your friends must have had a good laugh! You shit! You fucker!”

  He came closer, trying to embrace me. “It wasn’t like that. No one talked about you. I wouldn’t allow anyone to speak badly of you.”

  “Fuck you!” I pushed him away. “Fuck your brother. Fuck the divorce. I’m leaving.” I sped ahead of him toward the house, but stopped in my tracks and whipped around.

  “What about Hajjeh Um Mhammad? Does she know?”

  “No. She has no idea, and I must ask that you please do not speak of this in the house. It would devastate her. Her health is too fragile. Please, Nahr. Can we just talk here for a bit? You have every right to be angry. But please, let me speak.”

  There was a loud thud from the valley. It made me jump, and now I was shaking. I felt weakened by the deceit, but I was relieved to know that at least the love that had formed between my mother-in-law and me was real.

  “I know I hurt you. And I know an apology is insufficient, but I am truly sorry, Nahr.” He tried again to put his arms around me, and I pushed him away, trying to pull myself together. I wiped my face with trembling hands and ran them through my hair, pushing it back.

  “You flatter yourself to think you’ve hurt me. I’d have to give a shit about you for that to happen,” I said, my heart pumping ice.

  I stared into the valley. He thought I was colluding with those monsters. All our time together had been a lie. The thought weighed me down, and I lowered myself onto a boulder. He sat next to me.

  “Here, put this on.” He draped his jacket over my shoulders. “I deserve everything you want to throw at me, Nahr. Your coming here is the best thing that has happened in my life in years. My mother’s too. But I had to be sure because lives are at stake and none of us can be sloppy.”

  We sat in silence for a while, staring at the moving lights in the valley. Despite the emotional trauma of his revelation, I understood why he’d done it. And I believed him when he said he took no pleasure in spying on me.

  “Everything that came my way made me admire you all the more,” he said, “especially when I heard what you did to that woman occupy
ing your family’s home, and when you ‘accidentally’ exploded a bottle of soda in a soldier’s face at a checkpoint.”

  Eventually we made our way home, and I slept the sleep of depletion. It was only the next morning, when I lay in bed replaying the conversation of the night before, that I remembered the word he’d said. Khaneeth.

  Bilal made a large breakfast of shakshouka, mhammara, labneh, and cucumber along with other mezze that morning. “May God bless you for all your days, my son, and may He send you a kind and beautiful bride,” Hajjeh Um Mhammad said. I had to pretend everything was normal in front of her, but I didn’t speak much to Bilal.

  I packed. Then unpacked. Packed again and kept a few things in the suitcase. But I stayed and went through our routines together. Going to the store, working, cooking, cleaning, driving, walking in the countryside. At night I read through my texts. There was little there, actually. I had responded to the girl that I was not in Amman, nothing more. If Bilal knew about my past, he did not let on. To the contrary, he was especially attentive and contrite.

  Wednesday rolled around, the day Bilal typically spent with Jandal and his flock. “What are your plans today?” he asked as we left the house.

  “I’m going to get my hair blown out at the salon, then heading back to roll dawali with your mother and some of your cousins. I also have that ridiculous appointment with the marriage counselor at the courthouse.” Not looking at him, I complained angrily: “I haven’t seen my husband in years. I don’t know where he is. I want to divorce the shit. He agrees and has given his brother power of attorney. But I still have to sit through counseling to save my marriage! By myself!”

  “It’s definitely ridiculous. But I’m glad it takes so long, because it means we get to have you with us longer,” Bilal said.

  Bilal the Charmer.

  “By the way, Mhammad sent word asking about the divorce. It was a few days ago. He called again yesterday. I forgot to tell you.”

  “He called you?”

  “No. We don’t speak, as you know. A mutual acquaintance.”

  “My brother?” I asked.

  He turned to me slowly, stared into my eyes, then looked away.

  “Yes,” he said. “What should I tell him?”

  “Well, divorce is the reason I came,” I said.

  He hesitated and with some difficulty said, “Please wait a little longer… . I would just like you to stay.”

  I wanted to leave, and I wanted to stay. “We can talk later. I’m late for my hair appointment,” I said, walking away.

  Bilal had described the woman who had spied on me, and she was at the hair salon when I arrived. I immediately turned to walk out as she approached me.

  “Wait! Please. Can we talk? I’m sorry.”

  Her name was Jumana. I remembered her. She had seemed smart to me, speaking about Arab feminists and such topics I could not converse in, which, of course, made me dislike her. I’d thought she was another customer, but it turned out she was the owner of the salon. And she was, she said, “with Bilal.”

  I didn’t respond, but she must have seen something in my face that made her add, “No, I mean … I’m not with him. Not like that.”

  There was only one other customer, reading a magazine as her hair marinated in foil wraps. Jumana craned her head toward her. “Your hair has to sit twenty more minutes. I’m going to get this lady washed.”

  She put her hand on my arm, gently trying to nudge me to the back of the salon, but I didn’t move. “Look. Bilal trusts you, and I trust Bilal. He asked me to show you something,” she said.

  Jumana was slender and angular, with a bold face, generous eyes, full brown lips, and a prominent Semitic nose. I had thought her pretty the first time I saw her weeks before. She came from one of the wealthy Palestinian families who had been humbled by the occupation, though she still smelled of money.

  “I don’t really give a damn what Bilal thinks right now,” I said, rolling my eyes dramatically toward my arm. “And you need to remove your hand.”

  “Sorry.” She withdrew it. “But please, can I show you something?”

  Conquered by curiosity, I followed her into the bathroom. She closed the door, drew out a key, and pulled away a shelving unit by the toilet, revealing a hollow space behind, then nodded toward the void. I craned my neck and saw a knotted rope hanging from the floor into a darkness below. I understood and started to leave.

  “Wait!”

  She touched my arm again.

  “What’d I say about touching me?” My eyes were mean and my fists clenched.

  She stepped back, apologizing, and said, “Bilal would like you to join us on Saturday.”

  “‘Us’?”

  “A small group,” she said, paused, then added, “Down there.”

  I studied her face, reminding myself that this woman had spied on me, that she was much smarter than me. I turned around and left.

  I confronted Bilal that evening. “You can’t ask me yourself?” I was still wallowing in the moral superiority of the spied-upon.

  “Enough, Nahr! This is not a game.” Bilal looked at me with steely eyes. There was more than one Bilal. There was the Bilal of the hills, who would sit alone or lie in the grass for hours with a book, with God, a tree, silence. The Bilal who was a baker, toiling by a hot stone oven. Bilal the Pastry Maker. Bilal the Chemist and Quiet Intellectual. Bilal the Prisoner and National Hero, son of his mother and his country. Bilal the Charmer. This Bilal was a Hard Fighter. A commander who spoke with a deep, meditative resolve.

  I felt petty, small in his presence. As I have always done in such moments of hurt or insecurity, I relied on my instinct to be cold, hostile, or sarcastic. I moved closer to Bilal’s face and said with what measured indignation I could muster, “You don’t ever get to yell at me or tell me how to feel.”

  I backed away, still holding his gaze. “But I’ll come to your hide-out on Saturday with your friends, if that’s what Jumana really is.”

  A WORLD BENEATH & “OUR SPOT” ABOVE

  THERE WAS A city under a city, and maybe another one under that. Maybe more layers still. It had been here for centuries, perhaps millennia. When I descended the rope behind the toilet closet in the salon, I thought I would be entering a carved-out passage, like the drug-smuggling tunnels in America I had seen on television. But this was something else.

  I went down first, my path lit by Jumana’s flashlight above, and landed a few meters below, shivering in a dank, dark void. It was a corridor as wide as the span of one arm. A small light flickered at the far end.

  I became aware of the air, as one does when air is in short supply. “What is this?” I whispered to Jumana, who was now descending the rope.

  Jumana reached the bottom and stepped in front of me to lead the way. “You’ll see,” she said.

  Bilal appeared from the shadows. “Salaam, ladies,” he said, stepping past us. Jumana held the flashlight for him as he climbed the rope we had just descended, and quickly returned. “I closed the floor behind the toilet,” he explained.

  “The salon is closed,” I reminded them. “No one is there.”

  “You never know,” Jumana said.

  I followed Jumana and Bilal about six meters toward the flickering light, where the corridor opened into a room with three arches and two solid columns holding up stone walls around a small pool of stagnant black water. The entire space was only about six by five meters. Two battery flashlights flung a faint light across ancient stairs in a corner that led farther into the earth, not yet excavated. Life had once bustled here. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. These had been homes, stalls, and public spaces. This chamber was another world, a room made of time and mud.

  “Salaam. I’m Samer,” said a disembodied voice in a dark corner. I turned and saw a twentysomething student wearing a Birzeit University T-shirt emerge, extending his hand.

  I shook it but did not offer my name. I continued to look around, seeing as much with my hands as with my e
yes. Surfaces felt clammy, but solid. I crouched by the pool. “Is this oil?” I asked.

  Jumana chuckled, but Samer was kind enough to offer an answer, as if I hadn’t asked a stupid question.

  “No. It’s just very old water that hasn’t seen daylight in over a thousand years. But who knows? It could be oil and the joke is on us,” Samer said.

  I was already contemplating revenge on Jumana for laughing at me when two more men materialized. They introduced themselves as Wadee and Faisal, Jumana’s brothers. They emerged with food bags from what I’d assumed was a hollow crevice in the wall. It was, in fact, a passage from yet another building. Samer assumed the tone of a tour guide, showing me around the room, which was no more than a few paces in each direction. It seemed a bit ridiculous then, but now, in the Cube, I understand how much space and story one can fit into the smallest footprints.

  “We only excavated what we needed,” Samer said. “Someday we’ll turn it over to archaeologists … enshallah.” He swept his arm through the airless air. “I am sure this room opens to more and more chambers. It might just be an elaborate cistern. I’m not sure. But we have to be careful not to excavate anything more so we don’t unintentionally alter a scene of history or destabilize the structures above.”

  Samer went on talking, but my attention was on Jumana’s brothers. It was easy to see, even in the dimness, that Wadee and Faisal were twins, not merely by their looks but from the way they moved, like two waves of the same ocean. They were setting up the food, each grabbing two corners of a plastic sheet, which they laid on the ground by squatting with outstretched arms like mirror images. One began removing plates of mezze from the bags, the other arranging them on the plastic sheet, lining up hummus, fuul, labneh, fattoush, and mhammara in two even rows punctuated by plastic bowls with various kinds of pickled vegetables and stacks of bread.

  “Tfadaloo,” the brothers said in unison. Welcome.

  I wasn’t hungry and couldn’t muster an appetite for a picnic in that stifling space. But I joined them on the floor around the food, because I understood that the meal was there for me, a kind of welcoming, apology, and seal of friendship or a shared secret.