The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor

by Rana Haddad

  “I study the properties of moonlight and how it might help us discover hidden objects in the sky and make the invisible visible,” he said.

  “But this sounds far too poetic to be scientific,” Dunya said.

  “Science and poetry are one and the same; they should’ve never been separated. I’m a scientist of the old school, I still believe in miracles, and that life has a meaning and a purpose. I look for it in the stars, while poets look for it in their hearts.”

  “So in other words you’re more of a Moonologist?” Dunya smiled at Hilal.

  “A Moon-ologist? Well, yes, I suppose you could call me that,” Hilal smiled back.

  What a girl, this Dunya was. She truly was the sort of girl he’d never imagined he’d meet. So unlike any other.

  When Hilal first discovered Dunya he felt as if he’d discovered a new and unexpected star in the sky while gazing through his telescope. He wanted to jump up and down and proclaim to the world: “I have found her! I have discovered her! She whom they told me did not exist.”

  It only took him two more minutes to realize that he had fallen head over heels in love with Dunya, and he could not quite explain how and why it happened. No scientist, no poet, no policeman, nor detective, would have the wherewithal necessary to pinpoint exactly why, out of all the girls in the world that he’d met so far, his heart so unexpectedly and so unpredictably and so impulsively chose Dunya. Yes, she was pretty; yes, she seemed like an original, a one-off. But he had hardly spoken to her, he knew nothing about her; to all intents and purposes she was a complete stranger. Despite this, he could not stop that flood, that overwhelming, blinding feeling that took his heart and soul and his entire body prisoner.

  By the time Hilal grasped the full implications of his terrible predicament—it was too late.

  What if she didn’t love him back? What if she brushed him off like a mosquito or a fly? What if she laughed in his face, what if, worse than all of the above, she pitied him? How dangerous it was to lose one’s heart like this, not step by step, but instantly and not by choice. Perhaps the sensible thing to do, he decided, was to hide his feelings from her. Many girls were scared of love, as were most men. A love like this he’d heard took courage. And now for the first time in his life, Hilal understood why. He must look at her sideways, not directly, he must not look her in the eyes, he must put on a show of indifference, keep his cards close to his chest—that was the clever thing to do, in circumstances like these.

  Dunya stood up and went to her darkroom and came back with a large envelope, which she handed to Hilal.

  When he opened it he found a hand-printed, black-and-white photograph of his face. Not even his hair was visible, only his face and everything in it. And a light. Yes, there was a clear light that made visible the thing in him that he most wanted to hide—not only from Dunya, but also mostly from himself.

  Oh no! He couldn’t keep looking at it; it was the terrifying light of love in his eyes, irrevocable proof and evidence—strong enough to be accepted in a court of law—that he had fallen in love with the girl who had taken that photograph of him. How could she not guess it? How could she not see it? What she had done to him?

  Hilal felt completely exposed.

  He had noticed that Dunya looked at him with a certain kind of wonder too, but might it not be that this is how she looked at everyone? Was this not how a professional artist looked at anything and everything? And so it was very possible, and more than likely, that when she looked at him, what seemed to him like a look of love was nothing more than a look that a photographer would use to examine and assess and frame the object of his photograph. To all intents and purposes, he was nothing more to Dunya than a new and unique symmetry of light and darkness.

  But instead of confessing to Dunya the truth about how he felt, or saying anything about the photograph she gave him (which already provided her with far too much incriminating evidence), Hilal slowly sipped from his yellow porcelain cup of tea.

  “Did you really want to know the time yesterday?” Dunya asked him.

  “No.”

  Dunya blushed and, without looking at him, added, “Because, you were wearing a watch.”

  Hilal wondered whether to run away, there and then. This was his one chance, his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She had taken hold of his heart without asking for permission, she had the power of life or death over it, she could hold it gently in her hands or toss it carelessly into a bin. Perhaps the wisest thing to do in the circumstances was to run, run, run. But instead he said to her, “If I try to kiss you will you slap me?”

  “No,” she said.

  So this is how it happened. And most of it neither of them could remember clearly, nor understand. It was neither like this nor like that.

  Love came to them like lightning, the way they’d both heard that it sometimes did.

  Apart from his love for her (which was written all over his face), Dunya noticed something else in the first and second and all subsequent photographs she took of Hilal. It was clear and striking, like a line that divided his face in two parts. One part was light and full of love and wonder and the other part was dark and full of something hidden. What was it, or who was it? What pain, what secret was Hilal hiding from her?

  And as she thought about the mystery of Hilal, Dunya realized that it could only be one thing—a girl.

  “Did a girl ever break your heart, Hilal?” she asked him.

  “No. Never,” he said.

  “But I can see it in all the photographs I’ve taken of you, I can see clear signs of a heart that has been broken in two. Are you sure that a girl didn’t do that to you? Are you sure there was never a girl you once loved in Aleppo and who did not love you back? I can almost see her; she’s beautiful and bold. And if she were here she would cruelly take you away from me.”

  “No one can take me away from you. And least of all a girl who doesn’t exist.”

  “Nor a boy?”

  “A boy? Of course not a boy. No, I’ve never fallen in love with a girl, nor did a boy break my heart with his little hammer,” Hilal said.

  “But why this look in your eyes, and in your face?”

  “What look?”

  “A broken look . . . a lost look, it is as if you lost something and you haven’t been able to forget it.”

  “I promise you Dunya, I have never had the honor before of having my heart broken by anyone, and neither have I suffered any great loss. I promise you, that you are imagining it. Only you can break my heart. My heart is in your hands,” Hilal smiled.

  “Then what is it, who is it?”

  “It isn’t anyone,” Hilal said.

  She could see the thing in him that he was hiding even from himself. And this was why he loved her.

  Dunya focused her camera on Hilal’s face and began to frame his profile against the horizon in the distance. Was he the boy she’d dreamed about all those years ago after she had discovered that love existed and begun to look for it in everyone’s eyes?

  Yes, it was him! Of course it was him and it could never be anyone except for him.

  When she looked at him through her lens, she noticed that he was looking elsewhere. That was how it was, being with him. Sometimes even while he was sitting right next to her in the same room, on the same table, lying in the same bed, holding her in his arms, he would disappear, pieces of him would go missing, for hours and sometimes for days. And when she asked him where he had disappeared to he would never be able tell to her, because he didn’t know.

  Dunya had read that the moon had fourteen lunations, which is how she described the dance of light and darkness on Hilal’s face.

  10

  Can Photography Tell the Truth?

  In the spring of 1994, two years after Hilal started secretly living with Dunya without the knowledge of his or her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Shihab received a parcel from their son. Inside it they found a photograph of him in which he looked happier than they had ever seen him. But there was
something much deeper than happiness in his eyes and in his expression; their son now looked like a man who had finally found what he had been looking for. This was the look Suad had seen in her husband’s eyes when he met her and had not left him since. It was then that Suad became sure that her son had fallen in love. Of course, she also knew that he would never tell her and that she would not dare to ask him, but the photograph said everything to her that she needed to know.

  Together with the beautiful black-and-white photograph Hilal had sent to his parents as a gift, he had also packed a Polaroid camera with handwritten instructions on how to use it and a note asking them to take photos of themselves and send them back to him. He had realized that letters and telephone calls were not enough to communicate with people who were afraid of words.

  Photographs began to arrive in small dusty envelopes plastered with President Hafez al-Assad stamps.

  The first envelope that arrived contained a photograph of Suad and Said pretending to be happy, both dressed in black, she in a conservative high-necked dress and he in a suit. They’d obviously dressed up and put on artificially happy faces just for the photograph.

  Hilal’s father Said was a handsome, sensitive-looking man. He was too busy sewing to write long letters to his son, but he tried to write at least one short letter a month. Suad had never learned to read or write because her parents thought that these skills would not be needed in the kitchen or in the bedroom.

  Sometimes Said and Suad went to the post office together and rang their son for only a minute or two, because a minute on the phone to England cost twenty-five lira, which was the price of twenty-five kilograms of bread. And so Hilal would call them back and they’d continue to talk, or mumble, about nothing in particular. “Do you have warm socks, darling? Does the bread taste good in England? Do you want us to send you food? Can you really speak English, like the English do? Oh, how clever you are.”

  The next month a photograph arrived of Hilal’s bed and of his desk and favorite armchair. His father wrote underneath it, “When will you come to see us?” Then a photograph arrived of a cherry tree that grew in the courtyard. “Look how much Suha has grown.”

  “Who is Suha?” Dunya looked at the photograph closely. “I can’t see anyone in this photograph.”

  “Suha is our cherry tree. My mother has a shrub in the kitchen that she calls Mahmoud and a cactus in the lounge that she calls Majid. Those are the names of her brothers whom she hasn’t seen in years. I don’t know who Suha is. It’s the name of a beautiful faraway star that can’t be seen with human eyes.”

  Dunya and Hilal’s flat (not far from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich) filled with Polaroid photographs of Hilal’s house in Syria, until Dunya began to imagine that she had been there many times. She saw his old-fashioned wooden bed, the round dining-room table, the kitchen, and the ancient-

  looking front door. Each photograph was posted separately with a letter written by his father telling him of things that were happening in the city: “The supply of butter is erratic. Toilet roll queues are getting longer. Thank God you are our only son and you don’t have to serve in the army. Brothers are forced to kill brothers. I will say no more. Stay true to yourself, my son. Don’t copy others and lose your true self. Remember each self is distinct and different.”

  Dunya and Hilal’s flat was also filled with large photographs that Dunya had taken over the years. There was one of Hilal sitting on a chair looking out of the window, his face bright, while everything around him was hidden under a blanket of dark. In this photograph Hilal looked as if he were trying to say something really loudly but couldn’t. What was he trying to say? Even he didn’t seem to know.

  One day the letters and photographs that Mr. and Mrs Shihab often sent in brown envelopes stopped coming. Their phone calls also came to an abrupt end and there were no replies to any of Hilal’s letters.

  After the fourth month of silence Hilal stopped counting, because he was buried in solving the most complex equation he had ever worked on and had almost reached the final stages of proving his theory of moonlight. Soon he would be ready to publish his first book: Theories of the Effect of Moonlight on the Earth.

  “As soon as I send the manuscript off I’m going to Syria. Will you come with me, Dunya?” Hilal stood under some photographs that were drying on a line. “I want you to meet my parents.”

  “But I can’t ever set foot in Syria again,” Dunya said.

  “Of course you can. It’s been ten years since what happened with your teacher Miss Huda. You were a little girl then, now things are different. No one will remember what you did and what you said, and you have learned your lesson.”

  “What lesson is that, Hilal—to keep my mouth shut and do what I’m told or else go to prison or disappear? I don’t know if I can ever learn a lesson like that.”

  “But this is the country you love, Dunya, you can’t stay away for ever.”

  “Is it?” Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “You need to go back, even if it’s only once.”

  “Do I?”

  “Only for two weeks. You will feel much better after that. You need to go back to feel complete.” Hilal smiled. “And you must meet my parents.”

  “But you haven’t even told them about me,” Dunya said.

  “I don’t need to tell them anything, all they need is to see you with me, and me with you—and they’ll understand everything. That’s how we do things in our family.”

  “This wouldn’t work with my father. If I turn up with you in Syria, he will go bananas. And I don’t think I could take that, could you?”

  “Are you sure?” Hilal said. “Why don’t we try it? When your father sees how much I love you, I promise you he might even feel happy for us. In the abstract, on paper, yes, he will think this and that of me and you, but when he sees me with you and you with me, when he sees our love, he won’t be able to argue with it. He won’t have the heart to break something so perfect, so right, so meant to be.”

  “My father’s not like yours. And I don’t know if you’re strong enough to handle him.”

  “I’m not strong enough? Is that so, Dunya? So why do you love me, then? I thought women only loved strong and powerful men?”

  Dunya sat on Hilal’s lap and began to inspect him as if to look for reasons, or excuses, which might justify her love for him. She cupped his face with both of her hands and examined different parts of it: “I love you because you’re so handsome, perhaps that is the reason. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man as beautiful as you. I love you, not just because you are handsome, but perhaps because I simply cannot stop looking at you, a light seems to shine constantly in your face, which I cannot keep my eyes away from. I think that is why I love you. Or maybe it is because you’re like the moon, and who can resist the moon? Every time I look at you I see something new, a different aspect, a previously hidden part. Maybe that’s why. I was always told that I was far too curious and that this was going to lead me to much trouble. Maybe I love you because you’re hidden. I love you because parts of you appear gradually and then they disappear. You’re like a story I can never finish reading.”

  “Hmmm.” Hilal looked at Dunya with concentration. He took two of her curls and rolled them around his fingers and began to study her closely. “Well, I love you for the opposite reasons that you love me. I love you because you see and you let yourself be seen. Nothing in you is hidden. This is the most powerful and beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed. You don’t hide and you have nothing to hide. You’re fearless. I love that. And I love your beautiful curls and your mouth and your eyes and your cheeks and your . . . your body, your body.” He lifted her up in the air. “I love your beautiful, graceful body. Is that a crime? I love you because I want you. It has to be you. It can’t be any other.”

  Hilal placed Dunya on the floor and put his arms around her waist. “The only thing you hide from others, however, is me. Why can’t you tell your father that you love me?”


  Two days later a letter arrived from Syria, typed by a professional letter-typist. Some of the typewriter ink was diluted. Perhaps a glass of water had been spilled on the letter or maybe it had been raining while the letter-writer was typing it outside in the square. It was impossible to read many words or sentences in it, except for the following ones: “Six months ago . . . I could not tell you . . . Your father . . .”

  And a line at the end: “Your father went to heaven, my son.”

  11

  The Men Who Wear the Trousers

  Dunya held her camera close to her chest while a man with a pointed gray and black mustache and stripy trousers interrogated her. “Why do you have such a big camera? It doesn’t look like a tourist’s camera. Are you a spy?”

  “Of course I’m not a spy. I’m a photographer,” she answered.

  “A what?”

  “A photographer.”

  “Is that a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you intend to photograph in the Democratic Republic of Syria?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You don’t know yet? But your job is to take photographs, isn’t it? And you get paid to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Photographs of things you don’t know yet?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And who tells you what photographs to take and why do they pay you for taking them? Were you given a list by the British Intelligence Services? You are a spy!”

  “I promise you, Sir, that I am not. I take photographs of interesting-looking people mostly, doing interesting things and then I submit them to art competitions or galleries. Perhaps I can take a photograph of you?” Dunya took her camera lens cover off. “Spies don’t use these types of cameras, look. This is too old-fashioned and only used for art photography. Spies hide their cameras in fountain pens and umbrellas, didn’t you know? They don’t work in the open like me. Do you mind if I take a photo of you?” she smiled at him.