The very moment that she said this, a car with the word “taxi” in Arabic letters on an illuminated sign on its roof stopped in front of us; two women were already sitting in it. A bald, dark-skinned young man was driving it and asked us where we wanted to go, so Yana answered him in Arabic, “Khamra!” with her ha’ sounding really more like a kha’ as usual.
The young man burst out laughing and then said with obvious malice, “Sorry, I don’t know any place in all of Lebanon called Khamra!”
Then he drove on without saying anything else.
What a jerk, I said to myself!
There’s no doubt that Yana understood he was making fun of her, because under her breath, with the usual mispronounced “kh,” she called him an ass, “khimar!”
She then announced that she wouldn’t ride in shared taxis anymore; I pointed out that this would be really hard on her because these vehicles are her preferred method of transportation in Beirut. She doesn’t have a car and hates waiting for the public buses, which don’t keep to their schedules. Furthermore, these taxis are indispensable, especially in the summer when walking in the sun is a kind of masochism.
Yana wanted to respond to my little speech but my mobile phone rang, preventing her. My phone’s screen showed that the caller was my boss, so before answering I moved a little away from my friend for fear that she would hear his voice. But his voice reached Yana despite the distance between us, because he started shouting the moment that I answered the phone. From the look on Yana’s face, it was obvious that she had heard the shouting but had no idea who was calling. She started moving toward me to try to hear the voice coming out of the phone better, but she didn’t reach me in time because the call was very short.
Her (ex-) boyfriend limited what he had to say to exactly two sentences: he told me that he had just spent an entire half hour searching for papers related to a very important business deal and couldn’t find them, accusing me personally of losing them. And then he ordered me to come to the office right away and find these papers at once, or else...
Or else what? I wanted to ask him, but I couldn’t because he hung up on me.
At first, I was upset, but I realized that I should react immediately, and asked Yana to go back to Hamra alone, convincing her to ride in a shared servees taxi that had a man and woman already in it. Then I stood waiting for another servees to take me to Hazmiyeh, where the Coca-Cola Company is located, but none of the drivers who passed by agreed to take me there unless I paid the full private taxi fare because it was so far away.
I had expected this to happen because Hazmiyeh is located at a fair distance from where I was, but I hadn’t taken enough money with me that day to pay the full fare for a private taxi. So there was really nothing I could do but wait—I had to convince a driver to agree to take me for the little money that I had on me. But after waiting for a full quarter of an hour with no relief from my suffering, and without any relief announcing its imminent arrival, I started to lose hope and wished that some kind of divine intervention would deliver me from this situation.
This intervention came—in the form of a young man riding on a scooter, who stopped in front of me and offered to drop me off wherever I wanted. I knew that this young man was a student at LAU because I’d often seen him there, though we’d never exchanged a word. I accepted his proposal on the condition that I could wear the helmet that was on his head. I didn’t so much want to protect my head from accidents as to hide my face behind it for fear that some family member or acquaintance might see me riding on a motorbike, and with a young man they didn’t know, at that!
Though he was a stranger, I accepted the ride on this young man’s motorbike because firstly, he seemed trustworthy and also because it was my only way to reach the office. (And where’s the shame in that?)
After I put on the helmet and made sure that it covered my face well, I tucked up the hem of my dress, sat behind him on the motorbike’s leather seat and suddenly felt its heat between my open legs. I tried to sit on the edge of it to be as far as possible from the young man and not touch him, but I found this impossible, especially after we got going, as I was forced to wrap my arms around his waist, with my chest touching his back, to keep from falling off. I clutched him even tighter when we entered a traffic-filled street because our route was blocked; my fingernails almost ripped his clothes when the motorbike leaned to the right or left in narrow, twisting passageways. When we got out of the traffic and set off on the open road, I relaxed my grip on him and put my hand on my thigh to fix my dress back into place because the wind had made it flap so violently that it had almost completely ridden up my legs. I was bothered while riding because it had been extremely difficult for me to keep my balance and my legs covered at the same time.
Even though I was bothered by my skirt, I felt a surprising freedom the whole time I was on the road and I also suddenly felt energized, full of life!
This sensation had made me forget my confrontation with my boss until we arrived at the company door. The young man offered to wait for me. I thanked him, but refused, afraid I might keep him waiting for a really long time. Even though he insisted, I refused a second time—his eagerness frightened me. I turned my back and walked toward my boss’s office, where he was still waiting for me.
He was still extremely angry, so much so that he started shouting right in my face the moment he saw me, but I ignored his shouting and began searching for the lost papers right away. But the fact that I ignored his shouting didn’t allay his anger as I had hoped and even expected it would, in fact it did the opposite. This actually increased his anger; a few minutes later he walked over to me, ripped some papers out of my hand and threw them onto the floor. His hand touched my shoulder when he did this and I felt a slight shiver—at that moment I wished that I had listened to Yana and plucked my mustache earlier that day. I covered my upper lip with my hand to hide the protruding hairs but he came up right beside me, so close that our bodies were almost touching, and suddenly tore my hand away and kissed me violently on the mouth. I immediately pulled myself away from him, but he came toward me a second time, grabbing me by the shoulder and pushing me to the ground. He opened my legs with his knees and threw himself down on top of me. I tried to fight him off but he was really heavy, and I wished that the young man with the motorbike would come and save me. But of course he didn’t come. When he entered me between my legs I didn’t see anything except the edge of his shoulder and the Coca-Cola advertisement, the one Yana appeared in, hanging on the wall behind him.
After I got home, I saw the very same advertisement again out my open bedroom window and I angrily closed my curtains. I threw myself down on my bed without taking off my clothes and changing into pajamas, without even taking off my shoes. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. What surprised me was that I was thinking about Yana more than I was thinking about what had happened to me...
Only a few minutes after I got home, Yana called me on my mobile phone. The moment that I saw her name flashing on my phone’s screen, I made two quick decisions: first, I wouldn’t answer her call and second, I would cut off all relations with her completely and decisively. At that very moment, the moment when I made these two decisions, I felt a kind of pain between my thighs, which got increasingly severe until I couldn’t bear it any longer and had to take a painkiller.
It took me a while to come to terms with this, despite its profound significance—if it weren’t for the pain, I wouldn’t even have noticed that I had been deflowered or that something inside me had completely changed! This surprised me; it surprised me that I didn’t feel any change, I had always thought that the moment you lose your virginity is a turning point in life and that for me, of all people, everything would change at that moment... I would surely transform into another woman, in all the different meanings the word implies—in the blink of an eye, I would change from a small, closed-up bud into a blossoming flower, from a tightly spun cocoon into a brilliant butterfly!
But today I realized that flowers and butterflies or any other plants and insects have nothing to do with this, because I’m just exactly who I am—and who I was an hour or a day or two days or a month or three months before. There was no outward sign to suggest that I had been “deflowered” except the blood stains in my underwear, which really looked a lot like menstrual blood, actually exactly the same! This also surprised me because these two things are contradictory! The blood of virginity is the purest thing in my existence and is indeed the very reason for my entire existence, whereas the blood of menstruation is impurity, unclean blood that my body must rid itself of once a month. There can be no doubt or suspicion whatsoever at all about the truth of this!
But the blood in my underwear looks a lot like menstrual blood.
Thinking about menstruation reminded me that my own period has to come and that it has to come exactly when it’s due without being even one day late, because I—as a result of the day’s events—could be pregnant. I was really shaken up by this possibility— even if I could hide that I’d lost my virginity, I wouldn’t be able to hide a swelling belly that kept getting bigger and bigger! Everyone knows that pregnancy isn’t something to take lightly, especially if that pregnancy is the fruit of a relationship conducted outside of the purview of marriage. (I say the “fruit of” even though I’m not a tree.)
But Yana’s pregnancy is also the fruit of an extramarital relationship (even though Yana isn’t a tree either), her relationship with her boyfriend, who wasn’t married to her and didn’t even plan to marry her. Despite all this, it was a simple matter for Yana: her foreign citizenship empowers her. Yana can get pregnant and give birth without thinking of getting married—not for a second or even a fraction of a second—and without thinking of honor. As for me, honor has to be of the utmost importance: I am an authentic Lebanese woman in every sense.
Just as I was thinking about honor, my oldest brother suddenly entered my unlit room. I imagined that he was carrying a submachine gun in his hand, aiming it at my head and shooting me with one round after another, piercing my skull, exploding and splattering my brains on the wall behind me. The strange thing is that this scene was very familiar to me; I felt that I had witnessed it somewhere previously, and not only once but many times.
My brother wasn’t carrying a machine gun, but instead some bootleg DVDs of Egyptian films, and he had come to ask me if I wanted to watch them with him. I declined, asking him to leave my room right away and not to bother me; he did as I asked, without protest, though he was clearly irritated.
After he left, I tried to sleep once again, but imagining the possibility that I could be pregnant stopped me. I decided to buy a pregnancy test the next day, though I wasn’t brave enough to buy one myself. I called Yasmine to ask her to bring me one, but her mobile phone was switched off.
I thought about calling Yana, but I changed my mind right away.
I realized at that moment that I wouldn’t be able to sleep unless I stopped thinking and I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking unless I slept, so I put an end to this situation by taking a sleeping pill. While I was waiting for the pill to start working, I thought really hard about Yana. And Yana was the first thing on my mind when I woke up the following morning and stood in front of the mirror as usual.
Just then I noticed that the Coca-Cola advertisement had completely disappeared from the billboard planted in the ground right in front of my window. For the first time in six months the advertisement wasn’t reflected behind my own image. Instead the shiny metal that the billboard was made of was reflected in its place, and I felt a strange sense of relief! Indeed I felt as though I had spread my wings to soar high in the blue sky! But just as quickly I bumped into the buildings that obstructed this great expanse of blueness and I got caught on the electrical cables that stretched between the buildings. Yasmine put an end to my flight by entering my bedroom without knocking on the door and saying, “What happened?”
I asked myself, “How did she know?”
But I thought about it and realized that there’s no way that she could know because there’s no way that she could see something invisible, and what had happened at the Coca-Cola offices is something that no one would dream of happening. No doubt she’s asking me, “What happened?” because she found me looking strange—the kohl around my eyes had run all the way down to my neck, leaving traces of tears on my face.
When Yasmine repeated her question, I decided not to tell her about what had happened, and answered her by saying, “What do you mean?”
But I realized that I had made a mistake in my choice of answer because my appearance gave me away and lacked the nonchalance that I was trying to affect. I immediately regretted it—disavowing that anything had happened only confirmed to Yasmine that something momentous had occurred. She walked over to me, held my face between her palms, bringing it right up close to hers, and whispered, “Abeer, tell me what happened!”
After she promised me that she wouldn’t tell Yana, I told her everything, bursting into tears that overflowed right out of me, my snot and saliva both streaming onto her clothes. Once the tears had relented a little, she took me to the bathroom, washed my face, rubbed the kohl from my eyes, combed my hair, changed my clothes, and then said, “You have to tell her!”
I responded, “Are you crazy?”
But Yasmine said that she wasn’t crazy and that she was sure that Yana wouldn’t be angry with me if she knew about this, instead she would come to understand my situation, especially if I told her that what happened in the Coca-Cola Company was against my will and wasn’t my fault. I interrupted her, saying angrily, “I might be pregnant by him!”
I asked her to go to the pharmacy and buy a pregnancy test for me. She asked me first thing when my period was due and I told her that it wouldn’t come for another two full weeks. She said that a pregnancy test can only be used after your period is late, not before it’s due, and so I had to wait until the day my period was due before I could use such a test to know if I was pregnant! I told her that I wanted to get one in any case and keep it with me, and I repeated my request that she go alone and buy me one, for fear that someone who knows me would see me in the pharmacy and tell my father about it. But she insisted that I come with her, telling me that she would take me to a faraway place where no one would know me and no one would know my parents. The faraway place was Jal al-Deeb. When we arrived at one of the pharmacies located on the main street, Yasmine got out of the car and I stayed in my seat to wait while she went and bought the test. But she came over to my side and opened the car door to let me know that I should get out. So I followed her. As I was walking the distance between the car and the pharmacy, I wished that I had put on a wedding ring before leaving the house. I said this to Yasmine but she ignored me, opened the pharmacy door and said firmly, “Go on, go ahead in.”
I wanted to protest but the voice of the pharmacist sitting inside prevented me, asking us to close the door so that the air conditioning wouldn’t escape. We entered the pharmacy quickly and closed the door behind us, keeping the cold air inside.
I hid behind a shelf with beauty preparations lined up on it so that the pharmacist wouldn’t notice me. I asked Yasmine to go over and ask him for a test, but she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me behind her so that we came right up to where he was sitting behind his desk in the back of the pharmacy. He asked us what we wanted. What we wanted, as Yasmine said in English, was: “A pregnancy test, please.” The strange thing was that she said this with genuine nonchalance, as though she were buying a kilo of cucumbers from the little shop owned by her neighbor Abu Said, for example, and not a pregnancy test! Then she specified for the pharmacist the brand of the test that she wanted and I asked myself, “How does she know that?” I waited silently until she paid for it and then I followed her outside.
In the car, Yasmine grabbed the box with the test and waved it in my face, saying: “What? Did somebody murder you?” And I responded, “If I had
bought a pregnancy test from the pharmacy across from my house somebody would’ve murdered me for sure!”
Yasmine laughed but I scowled at her and put the box with the pregnancy test in my purse so that no one would see it. I kept the scowl on my face the entire way to her place in the Snoubra area. And when we entered her building, I was aware that her neighbor Waleed wasn’t standing in my way this time.
After Yasmine opened the door to her place and we went in, she got ready to lock it right away as I took the box out of my purse. I found that it consisted of two tests and I decided to use one of them immediately to set my mind at rest. When I told Yasmine I was going to do this, she seemed irritated and replied, “Do what you want!”
I headed for the bathroom, pulled down my underwear and sat on the toilet. After a few seconds, Yasmine came in and kissed me on my forehead and then she left, shutting the door behind her. I shouted out all of a sudden, “Wait!”
She came back to the bathroom right then. I asked her not to leave me alone, so she stayed with me and without hesitating watched how I peed on the pregnancy test. The test showed that I wasn’t pregnant, and I would have jumped for joy had I not noticed at that very second how dangerous this would be. My underwear was down around my ankles—something that could have made jumping fatal if I had stumbled, fallen, and bumped my head on the edge of the toilet tank or the tub. I had to put my underwear back on before I could jump to express my joy, but after I had gotten dressed, I changed my mind and was content just to smile.
But Yasmine didn’t smile; she frowned and reminded me that this result was meaningless—I could still be pregnant. Then she offered to take me to the gynecologist and get me an ultrasound of my uterus, which would instantly reveal with total accuracy whether I was pregnant or not. I told her that going to the doctor was out of the question because there was a huge risk that this could lead to even more shame and disgrace. Yes, it could lead to a giant disgrace in the fullest sense of the word! Could Yasmine even conceive of what would happen to me if my family found out about this? No doubt they would chop me into pieces—they would chop me up in the very same Moulinex mixer that I had once given to my mother for Mother’s Day!
Always Coca-Cola Page 7
