This process was now reaching its climax: my mother Hiba and my grandmother Naziha were preparing balls of kibbeh, and my father’s sister Nahid and her three daughters were chopping tomatoes and parsley, and my father’s other, recently engaged, sister Nuha was peeling onions and crying because they were so strong, and my father’s third sister Niemat and her two daughters Zaynab and Hala were peeling potatoes, which my father’s brother’s wife Hanadi cut up to fry in oil later. As for Dareen, the wife of my father’s other brother, and her daughter Ulaa, the two of them were drinking coffee with Ru’aa, the fiancée of my father’s third brother, and also with my grandmother’s neighbor Siham, and her son’s wife, whose name I tried to remember but couldn’t.
These women had brought their children along to my grandmother’s house, just as they do every Friday, and the number of kids in the apartment was approximately the same as the number of inhabitants in a small village.
Today this village was packed into a three-room apartment—it has an entry hall, a living room, and a bedroom. The population density had reached a level that would shock the United Nations bureau responsible for the world’s overpopulation problem. But the overcrowded numbers of children wasn’t the worst of it—the worst was the roar emanating from them, loud enough to wake the Companions of the Cave from their deep slumber. Despite their desperate mothers’ attempts to calm them, the children were jumping and screaming and running through the house without stopping or tiring. It was as though inside them they had limitless energy, exactly like the Duracell battery that keeps on going and going and going...
This roar had gone on for much longer than the mothers could stand, their anger toward their children exploded and was incarnated in my uncle’s wife Hanadi, who got up from the floor where she was sitting to impose some order. She found that she could only conquer by dividing and so she split the kids into two groups. She sent the first to the shop on the ground floor of the building owned by my grandmother’s elderly neighbor, telling her oldest son, whom she appointed as the group’s leader, to buy her sanitary pads, “Buy some Always!”
“Always?” I asked her curiously, after the first detachment of children had marched off to execute her order.
She replied that she’s embarrassed to buy them herself from the mini-market near her house because she’s too shy to speak of such intimate things in front of the three young men who work there. So she prefers to buy them from an old man, like the one who owns the shop on the ground floor of my grandmother’s building. I reminded her that it’s not she who’ll feel embarrassed in either place anyway, because her son’s the one who’s buying the pads for her. But Hanadi didn’t hear me because she was busy with the second group of children; she had ordered them to sit in a row on the sofa and keep silent—under threat of getting smacked with a slipper that she had taken off and waved right in their faces to assure them that she wasn’t joking.
And just like that, the noise died down; I could no longer hear anything but the women’s chatting, the loudspeaker on the minaret of the nearby mosque and the sound of the television, which was broadcasting a song called “Tannoura” (Oh, Why Does She Shorten her Skirt?). But my grandmother wasted no time in turning off the song after the azaan started, causing a group mobilization of the women sitting in the living room, who instantly suspended their activities and headed all together to the apartment’s one sink to do their wudu’.
Now I myself had intended to head toward the very same sink just seconds before the azaan started so that I could wash my armpits and get rid of the smell of rotting fish radiating from them. But I didn’t get there in time for two reasons: firstly, as soon as the women heard the azaan they rushed to the sink like cars speeding down the highway, cutting me off with blows from their hips and elbows, practically crushing me; secondly, at that moment, my cousin Hala grabbed my right arm and dragged me away into the bedroom.
In the bedroom, she told me in a whisper, “Abeer, I don’t want to get married!”
Stupefied, I asked her, “What did you say?” For it had really shocked me—in fact it shocked me a great deal more than it should have—I felt as if she was saying to me, “Abeer, I’m actually a man!”
Even though she hadn’t given her reasons for her lack of desire to marry, I immediately connected her statement to a possible confusion about her sexual orientation—something that I had wondered about for a long time, without ever openly saying anything to her. My evidence for this was her long-standing refusal to get married.
This refusal has really infuriated her family, but for a different reason—Hala had already reached thirty years of age and thus was only a few steps away from the point of no return from the hell they call spinsterhood. This caused her mother acute pain and embarrassment and everyone took part in adding to this pain and this embarrassment, first and foremost my aunt Nahid, who had married off all her daughters a long time ago and who always says to Hala’s mother, “Isn’t it a shame that this flower will wilt before anyone’s inhaled its fragrance?”
Though this flower—i.e., Hala—really had begun to wilt, that doesn’t mean that no one has desired to breathe in her fragrant scent, for potential grooms have been flocking to her family’s house in droves from the time she reached a marriageable age—they sought her out as if they were flies and she the blue light that would zap them. But Hala’s response was always the same, even as time kept passing. To every single one of them, she would very simply say two words, never three:
“Ma baddi!” (meaning: No!)
She would pronounce these two words, lifting the palm of her right hand in the air and turning her face to the side to emphasize what she had just said, as though she were one of the princesses in the stories of 1001 Nights, who won’t consent to marry unless it is to a man who truly deserves her. Now the man who truly deserves her is the strongest in all the land: he’s always prepared to go to the ends of the earth for her sake, to launch wars against all the other kingdoms and make the grandest of their leaders bow down at his feet as confirmation of both his absolute power and his everlasting love for her.
But none of these potential bridegrooms confirmed his everlasting love for Hala or launched a war, even a small one, for her sake, not one of them even protested against her rejecting him or got down on his knees to beg her to reconsider, as she would have liked in her dreams. And so she was left disappointed every time, but she wasn’t too sad about it; in her opinion these disappointing men weren’t worthy of her anyway, since they weren’t ever real men. For her, this was the root of the problem—she always used to claim that the reason she refused to get married was her search for this “real man” and her dissatisfaction with anything less!
Tracking him down is no simple matter. He’d be a rare find, because this is an endangered species! His kind is on the brink of extinction.
This is what Hala always used to tell me, without providing any detailed information about this breed, or the criteria that she used to distinguish “real” men from other men—the only thing that I knew about real men is that they didn’t cross her path.
But as circumstances would have it, when she was thirty years old, a man of this rare breed finally did cross her path and asked for her hand in marriage. And she refused. And he insisted, so she accepted. The wedding planning came on like a sudden torrential downpour in the most arid desert after a drought that has lasted for years, when everything that’s wilted suddenly comes alive. Hala herself came alive in the eyes of her aunts and uncles on both her mother’s and father’s sides, and to the rest of the extended family, too. To them she had become a flower blooming at the peak of its maturity, a prize blossom to be plucked, smelled, and enjoyed.
So this flower finally surrendered her hand in marriage to her knight in shining armor, who came to her riding atop a rented white 2007 Cadillac, in place of a white horse. According to Hala, this knight, whose name happens to be Faris (meaning knight in Arabic), he is everything that she had dreamed of and desired—and
more.
“So what’s the problem, then?” I asked her.
“The problem...” Hala began, but was silenced just as quickly by my grandmother coming into the bedroom to do her noontime prayers.
My grandmother’s entrance at that moment was the commercial break that interrupts a film on television, giving the viewers a chance to move away from the screen for a moment without missing anything. Her intrusion let me escape from Hala and her story for a second and go to the bathroom to escape from my sweaty shirt.
After I had traded my shirt for house clothes and put on some perfume, I returned to the bedroom, where my grandmother had already finished her prayers. But she didn’t leave the room as I expected and instead started organizing one of her wardrobes, though all of them are always perfectly organized. Her sudden organizational frenzy prevented us from continuing our conversation, which annoyed Hala, who wanted to talk so much that she was on the verge of exploding. When she could repress this urge no longer, she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to one of the corners of the room, saying very loudly, “How long have you gone without plucking your eyebrows? The hair on them is almost as thick as the shrubbery in Sanayeh Park!”
I was about to say that the shrubbery in that park could hardly be called thick and that the few shrubs growing there could be counted on one person’s fingers and toes. But I resisted because I noticed that Hala wasn’t listening to me and had started searching for the eyebrow tweezers. After she found them in a drawer, she came right up close to me and started plucking the grass growing in this “garden” out by its roots. She used this as a pretext to whisper into my ear the story of how her wedding plans were failing without arousing our grandmother’s suspicion—grandma would try to figure out what we were talking about straightaway if she realized that we were hiding something important from her.
This actually was something important, or the tone of Hala’s voice at least made it seem like it was. She brought her face so close to mine that our lips were almost touching and I could feel the warmth of her breath on me, as she whispered, “That low-life despicable man! Thank God I found out what he’s really like before the wedding!”
She then explained that Faris wasn’t actually the knight in shining armor that she thought she had found. In fact, she had only found a poseur knight and she had discovered this pose exactly two days before, when they were hanging out together in one of the bars in Gemmayzeh. Late that night, two men who were clearly drunk came over to their table. One of them started to curse at her fiancé for no reason. The other came up to Hala and tried to put his hand on her breasts. Instead of getting the man off her, as she expected him to do and he should have done, Faris bent his head so that it was almost hidden underneath the table and not a single sound crossed his lips except the chattering of his teeth.
“He was afraid!” Hala whispered to me, shaking her head. She added, in serious distress, “He turned out to be a tante in the end! A sissy! A fag!”
She then plucked a bunch of little hairs from my right eyebrow in one violent motion as though taking revenge on the universe that had sent her a fag fiancé, and I shouted out in pain.
At that moment, my mother came into the bedroom to tell us that she had seen the men returning from the mosque and that we should prepare some coffee for them. Hala took on this task and so I went to open the door for my father, brothers, Uncle Khalid, Uncle Ahmad, and his son, who had not yet entered the house but were standing outside waiting for the end of the hijab-putting-on-process in the living room. This hijab-putting-on-process at first glance seems simple and easy, but it actually involves a complicated computational process: every woman must calculate her relative relationship with each one of the men, and as quickly as possible, to deduce whether she must put on a hijab to hide her charms from him, even if she has no charms.
The women used their tried and true expertise to finish these calculations with the speed of a new computer. As they covered their hair, they looked to me like women warriors putting on their helmets to prepare for a battle that they might have to rush into at any second. When they were at last ready for this battle, the men came into the living room, greeted the women and then evicted the children from the sofas, occupying them themselves.
These sofas, however, didn’t have enough room for all of them and my cousin Muhammad was left standing because he hadn’t entered the living room with the first wave. When I walked over to say hello and shake his hand as I usually do, he took a quick step backwards and put his hand on his heart, preventing me from shaking it. This really surprised me—he’d shaken my hand no problem only one week before. Could such a change happen in just one week?
In accordance with this sudden, peculiar change, my cousin maintained, at minimum, an arm’s length distance from me, until the whole family gathered around the lunch table. This table was barely big enough for all of us, in our large numbers, so we were jammed in around it like bodies on Judgment Day. It was so tight around the table that my cousin was obliged to get very close to me and his thigh touched mine under the table; our thighs remained stuck together throughout the whole lunch. He didn’t try to move away and neither did I—on purpose.
After everyone had finished their food, my Uncle Khalid asked me, while pouring himself a glass of Coca-Cola, “How’s your friend Yana? Is she still sick?”
I knew instantly that the news of Yana’s alleged illness had reached him by way of Hala’s long, wagging tongue, and thus that everyone at the table had also received it. Now they all insisted on knowing what was afflicting Yana, because they all were eagerly anticipating her presence at the wedding, and mercilessly they pressed me with the same question, over and over, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing!” I answered after a few moments of confusion, in a tone that was more a call for help than anything else.
I was actually calling for help, but to a divine power, to intervene at that moment and help me face them. But my family kept on insisting and I felt betrayed! Betrayed by this power that I had called upon but that didn’t respond. I felt the kibbeh that I had eaten suddenly turn into a pile of rocks sitting heavily in my stomach, making me feel as though I had to vomit. How could I not vomit: the mere thought of them knowing about Yana’s pregnancy gave me stomach cramps! If they knew, it would mean only shame and disgrace!
Yes, shame and disgrace! What would they think of me, since I’m her friend? What would my father think, for example? He’s the one who always repeats that Arabic proverb, “If you grow close to a group of people, after 40 days you become one of them!” He would definitely think that I had become exactly like Yana in every way and that because Yana is having extramarital relations with some man, I must be as well, after all, am I not someone who’s grown close to her? And my closeness to her has lasted far longer than 40 days!
So as not to transform into the living embodiment of this proverb in everyone’s eyes, I decided to protect myself and make them believe that my relationship with Yana was over.
“It’s over,” I said in English. “I ended my relationship with her,” I added with feigned severity, hoping that they wouldn’t notice my lack of acting ability and would totally believe that what I was saying was the truth.
So that no one would discover that I had lied, I called Yana as soon as I got back home and asked her not to say anything about her pregnancy to Hala. I also asked her never to call me on my home phone, on the pretext that the telephone in my bedroom was broken and so there was only one phone left in the house, which was in the living room, where my family always sits and listens when anyone talks on the telephone—especially when the electricity’s been cut and they can’t watch television.
Yana believed what I told her and assured me that she would only call me on my mobile. Then she added, “In any case, I won’t be calling you much in the coming two days, because I want to go into seclusion and think for a long time!”
“Think about what? About existence?” I said to her. She replied, “
Yes! Existence!” I wanted to ask her if she thought that becoming an ascetic in an apartment above Starbucks would allow her to encounter the truth more directly, but I demurred. Yana said that she’d call me once a day the following week, after I had started working at the Coca-Cola Company, so that I could supply her with daily strength by giving her news of her boyfriend.
“I’m assigning you to spy on him!” she told me jokingly.
But to Yana’s bad luck, spying was not one of my better skills: I returned to her empty-handed after finishing my first day of work at the company. My aptitude for spying did not improve even after five days of trying, and her boyfriend’s way of dealing with me contributed to my failure. He kept every conversation with me short and limited to work-related things: he would ask and I would execute—without additions, amendments, or any extra commentary.
Despite this, Yana insisted on asking me every day if I could figure anything out about him or their relationship from his behavior, looks, or words. Every day I would answer her, with increasing irritation:
“No!”
When she called me one morning about a week after I’d started the job, she surprised me by not mentioning her boyfriend and saying, “I’ve thought a lot about my pregnancy and I’ve arrived at the right decision!”
Always Coca-Cola Page 5
