Season of Martyrdom

by Jamal Naji

  Rasha told me that her husband worked at an insurance agency but had been let go for refusing to change testimony he made under oath in a case that was tried in court. The case ended up costing the firm 300,000 dinars.

  She said Sari had a Bachelor’s degree in public administration and had graduated with very good grades. He was a highly capable manager and had a lot of experience, but unfortunately luck had not been on his side.

  “You can put him to the test in any manner you wish,” she said. “He can do any job you deem suitable for him. He can adapt himself to whatever is asked of him. His language skills are excellent and he has an amiable personality – and I’m not just saying that because he’s my husband. That’s just how he is.”

  I wanted to help Rasha, this woman I admired for her light spirit and ease of conversation. I gave her my card and I told Fawaz about Sari.

  A few days later Sari had two interviews with directors of a credit management and securities company that we own more than fifty percent of. Their positive recommendations caught Fawaz’s attention, so he scheduled an interview with him at his home office.

  Sari was around thirty-five years old at the time. Fawaz came to me after the interview and said, “He is smart and has a lot of know-how. You know, I posed a random question to him about how many steps he climbed to get to my office and he immediately answered, ‘Five.’ I asked him about how many houris there are on the water fountain in the garden. ‘There are nine,’ he said. And about the distance between Swayleh and our house and he answered, ‘approximately 18 kilometers.’ I asked him about the current national budget and he answered me with precision. I asked about the types of businesses in the country, about various sectors of the economy, about social institutions and their divisions, and so on and so forth, and every time his answers were nearly exact. I asked him to prepare a 250-word report on the status of insurance companies and he completed it in twenty minutes. It was focused and precise. And when I asked him to describe the state of the nation in three words he said, ‘That is impossible.’”

  Fawaz grabbed hold of Sari after that long interview and offered him a job. Then three years later he promoted him to director of public relations and other duties.

  Sari became one of us. He would come to the house, keep the Basha company, and sometimes accompany him on business trips. He was worthy of the trust put in him by Fawaz, who spent three hours of his time every morning at his home office, managing his affairs before heading to work.

  I made a point of calling Rasha and thanking her for introducing Sari to us.

  My opinion of Sari never wavered. Throughout his fifteen years of service he remained trustworthy and loyal and stayed away from the trivialities and insanities that distract some men.

  But now, for the first time since he started working for us, Sari was about to become the focus of my investigation.

  Muntaha al-Rayyeh

  I feel a mixture of remorse and regret when I think back on those days.

  It turned out my plane ticket to Paris was in first class. I didn’t know anything about the difference in seating classes on airplanes, and I preferred to limit my questions so as not to look ignorant in front of everyone.

  The smell of the airplane was a combination of suitcases and air freshener.

  A blonde hostess ushered me to my seat next to the window. I took off my white jacket and placed it on my lap. She asked me if I needed anything. This was new to me – a pretty, well-dressed young woman catering to my every need. I smiled at her and thanked her and before she left me Fawaz arrived and sat down in the seat beside me. He extended his hand politely, so I shook it cheerfully and then busied myself with the contents of my handbag.

  When he shook hands with me I noticed his face was almost square and I also noticed the shadow of a heavy beard, despite his having shaved.

  “Is this your first trip to Paris?” he asked.

  “My first trip on an airplane,” I answered, looking directly into his face.

  He looked surprised and played with his mustache with his index finger. Then he threw a quick glance at me and said, “Are you afraid of flying?”

  He seemed to want to distract me, and a distraction was just what I needed anyway.

  But despite the warm tone of his voice, some pauses in our conversation cropped up from time to time. I figured the best way to overcome my discomfort and doubts would be to keep talking and listening.

  I told him I didn’t know Paris at all and was going to feel out of place there, to which he responded, “I’ll be with you. I won’t leave you by yourself.”

  During the flight to Paris he managed to calm me down with his words and his actions, which were not forward or reckless in any way.

  When the plane landed at Charles De Gaulle Airport, he reached over and picked up my jacket. “Paris is cold,” he said. “You need to put this on.”

  The way he said “need to” was kind but authoritative, too.

  Then he stood up, ducking down, and held the jacket in a manner indicating I should get up and turn around so he could put it on for me, and so I did. He put the jacket over my shoulders and allowed me to do the rest.

  At the airport – where a person can easily get lost with all the corridors and gates and escalators – there was a short, blond driver waiting for us wearing a black hat. He picked up our suitcases with enthusiasm and took them to an older model shiny black car. We followed him and sat together in the back seat.

  On the way Fawaz said to me, “The hotel we are staying in is near the famous Eiffel Tower.”

  “I have seen lots of pictures of it. This will be a chance to see it up close.”

  He looked encouragingly into my eyes. “You can climb the steps, too, if you like.”

  At the hotel they took me to room 901. He told me he was in room 803.

  We parted ways in the elevator. As he was leaving to go to his room he said, “Take a shower and rest up from traveling. We’ll join up this evening.”

  “Take a shower.” He said that without the least bit of hesitation. I, on the other hand, was taken aback, as it conjured the image of me standing in the shower naked and wet.

  I locked the door behind me and started taking mental inventory of the contents of the room: the comfortable brass bed, the luxurious bathroom with the magnifying mirrors, the two secluded sofas over in the corner, the bowl of fresh fruit on the center table, the yellow flowers in blue vases, the white robe, the towels, the little bottles of shampoo and perfume . . .

  I flopped down on the bed and let out a sigh of joy and liberation. I felt life was not without a certain degree of happiness and relaxation. I thrust my hand into the air and got up to get a look at the balcony. I saw women and men swimming freely in a pool of sky-blue water, and lounging on long white chairs.

  I thought to myself: I have a hidden and uncharted body. I have never shown it in public before. No man has ever seen it. Why don’t I take advantage of my presence here in this foreign country, at this huge swimming pool, and show my body off in front of these people?

  I thought: I am not a good swimmer, true, but I could just dip in the water and then lie down on one of the lounge chairs beside the pool. But I have to do it at a time when Fawaz is away from the hotel, so he won’t see my body.

  In those days, my thought process was more like a jumble of noise in my head accompanied by ready-made decisions that welled up from some obscure place in my brain, unannounced to me and indistinct.

  In the evening, my hotel phone rang, startling me. Phones had very loud metallic bells in those days. I picked up the receiver and heard Fawaz’s voice. “Good evening, Muntaha. We will go have dinner together. Are you ready?” He said it very politely.

  We left the hotel. The driver took us to a restaurant with an ornate entrance gate and stone benches surrounded by decorative plants and statues.

  We sa
t at a round table. He ordered some kind of drink for himself and told me about a women’s drink, but I told him I didn’t partake of such things. He smiled and said, “I’m talking about a kind of drink that makes women feel happy but won’t affect your faculties at all. Give it a try. I take full responsibility.”

  Then he asked the waiter who was wearing a jacket with coattails to bring me a glass.

  If my memory serves me, the drink was red, the color of jujube.

  He made a point not to eat or drink before I did. He kept encouraging me to eat. From time to time he would reach over and pick up one of the plates of appetizers, explain to me a little what it was, and then offer it to me, suggesting I try it. As for the drink, he didn’t push me to drink too much of it.

  He enveloped me with all his attention and attempts to feed me. It wasn’t the food itself, but rather the way he was feeding me according to a kind of ritual that consisted of little advances and light touches that appeared to be unintentional.

  “When we get back to Amman,” he said, “we will stay in touch. I am going to transfer you to a better job. Your current position is no longer suitable for you. You deserve much better.”

  Fidgeting a bit, I said to him, “That is not important. What matters is that we stay in touch.”

  The taste of that drink was like a mixture of fruit and some strange flavor that sent me off into the distance.

  I don’t know what happened that night. I didn’t lose my focus one bit, but I felt the world was not a serious place, or at least didn’t deserve all the seriousness people attributed to it. I stopped being so cautious with my actions, doing things like crossing my left leg over my right, letting my thigh show from under my green skirt, and responding to his nice stories and jokes. I sensed the foolishness of modesty and social conventions and anything else designed to impede my happiness at that moment.

  The gaps in our conversation vanished and I felt as though life was beautiful and damned at the same time.

  The waiter came and brought Fawaz a second drink. When he turned to me to ask if I wanted another, Fawaz spoke for me, shaking his head in refusal.

  That gesture made me feel his guardianship over me in that foreign land, which was very reassuring.

  After dinner he suggested we walk along the streets of Paris, and put my jacket on for me. He was brimming with affection and intimacy as he put my jacket on.

  We strolled along streets and through squares. The Paris air was pleasant and refreshing. I saw men and women unabashedly kissing each other in public, and some of the men were fondling their girlfriends’ breasts and thighs against walls or lampposts. I felt aroused.

  We laughed a lot and put our arms around each other. I felt his warmth and the sweetness of being so close to him. I thanked God I was on a different continent from the one where I lived and where all my relatives and acquaintances lived.

  I caught him looking down my jacket and my yellow blouse to get a peek at my cleavage. I had noticed men looking at that intimate part of my chest before, to the point that I had come to the conclusion that these types of glances were an innate reflex of men’s eyes. However, Fawaz’s look was suggestive of something further.

  We got back to the hotel and he walked me to my room. I was in a highly stimulated state and was feeling receptive to life, to people, to everything.

  I remember I went inside my room and left the door ajar; then I settled into an upholstered chair beside the bed.

  He locked the door behind him and I felt an itch on the bottom of my foot.

  He came toward me, his eyes at my knees. He removed his jacket and hung it on a hanger in the closet. His white shirt had a yellow tint from the lamp beside the bed.

  Samah Shahadeh

  My curiosity was aroused once again.

  I had always been capable of quieting my soul whenever fear and apprehension rifled through it, but this time I couldn’t stop it from rebelling in the face of a vague and undefined danger.

  If the danger had been clear and well defined, finding a way to deal with it or overcome it would have been easy. That was what I thought about in response to knowing something was being hidden from me.

  Anyway, I waited a few more days and then decided to get some information out of Uroub. I used the international phone number I had gotten from her when we met.

  She picked up the phone and before I had a chance to say anything, her voice came through, in that Moroccan accent of hers, “Hello, Mrs Samah. So nice to hear from you.”

  How did she know it was me? I never gave her my phone number that night when we met.

  At any rate, nothing was far-fetched when it came to fortune-tellers.

  I asked her what she had said to the Basha when she read his palms, and she surprised me by saying, “In my profession, Mrs Samah, there are secrets I never divulge, and that applies to your secrets as well.”

  Despite being mad at her for not answering my question, I respected that practice of hers, which puzzled me even more, not because she didn’t tell me the details of Fawaz’s palm reading,

  but because she actually kept secrets. That was the last thing I expected from a fortune-teller.

  But it also meant that what she had told Fawaz was something that had to be kept secret. If it had been just some ordinary thing, she would have told me.

  Sari was my only chance now. He had to tell me something.

  I hesitated a while, but then I picked up the phone and called Sari’s wife. “How has Sari been since getting back from India?” I asked her.

  She answered in her usual entertaining manner, “Like someone who’s lost a million dinars! Busy, busy all the time. I swear. I tried to find out why, but didn’t get anywhere.

  “I started wondering if maybe they gave him some kind of secret-keeping herbs over in India. Everything is possible over there. Sari told me that when he went with the Basha to visit an Indian sage there, he saw a man bathing a snake in fire, and the fire was green and didn’t burn. What did the Basha tell you about it?”

  I was still stuck on the information that Fawaz and Sari had gone to see a sage in India. I asked her what the reason was for going to see him and she said, “God knows. I told you, the Indians flipped Sari upside down.”

  Annoyed, I said, “Something has gotten into Sari that I don’t like.”

  I loved Sari and Rasha. I loved all my acquaintances. The advice my father had given me – may God give him long life – was still stuck in my memory. “People know who loves them and who hates them from their eyes, their lips, their faces, from what they say and the way they smile and laugh. Love and hate cannot be concealed.”

  My father’s words made me feel I was exposed to others, like I had no way to hide my feelings towards them. So I decided it was safer to show love.

  I think people who have gotten to know me know I love them.

  But what prompted this anecdote now?

  What brought it up was when Rasha said, “It seems like you hate Sari now.”

  Muntaha al-Rayyeh

  I was willing to go on that adventure with Fawaz. Something was pushing me to stay the course with him, to the very end. Until that moment, no man had ever touched me or gotten me alone. So often had I gazed at my body in the mirror, wondering if it would appeal to men up close, or whether I had been fooling myself thinking it was beautiful and exciting. I even heard myself one time saying out loud while looking in the mirror, “Take care of your body before it spoils.”

  The sounds came out of my mouth without any thought or planning. That same thing happened again in the hotel room. I found myself clinging to myself, then distancing myself from myself, then clinging again.

  He sat down beside me and put his hand on my arm and then my chest, so I pushed it back in protest as I looked straight into his face. His forehead was glistening, and his cheeks too, and I could smell the masculine scent of
his body so close up. It was a mixture of smells – cologne and skin and alcohol and sweat.

  He continued stroking my arm and brought his face close to my neck, so I resisted and refused, not because I didn’t want him, but because something inside me kept urging me to refuse. It seemed my resistance made him more and more excited. He put his mouth on my neck and licked it with his tongue. A delightful shiver rushed through my body, and then he picked me up. I felt I wasn’t concerned about anything anymore. Someone other than myself had taken over my body, picked it up and laid it down on the bed. He began touching me all over with the palms of his hands and kissing my neck, tickling me with his mustache.

  “But you are married!” I said to him, to which he answered, with a voice that seemed to come out from his belly, “Everyone is married. What’s the problem?”

  I allowed his fingers to ravish my body, now that I was overcome with a desire to have my entire body squeezed.

  Yes, I wanted him to squeeze me in his hands like a lemon. I had spent my entire life up to that point without reaping a thing, and now my femininity was insisting that this was the night.

  The hair on his chest was very thick and his breath was fiery hot. The throbbing masculinity of his body was transmitted to every bit of my body.