by Rana Haddad
Early the next morning a boy who was no taller than 136 centimeters knocked on Mrs Shihab’s door and delivered to her the following letter which was folded inside a dirty brown envelope:
SYRIAN ARMY CENTRAL CONSCRIPTION UNIT
LONG LIVE THE HOMELAND
8-6-1996. Ref. HC001
Dear Mrs. Suad Shihab,
I am writing on behalf of your son, Hilal Said Shihab, who has requested that we inform you of his decision to join our noble National Army in order to defend the homeland.
Your son will contact you once he has successfully completed our four-year world-famous Elite Brigade induction program.
Meanwhile, any attempts by you or your family to contact him will be deemed highly unpatriotic and will incur grave consequences.
Yours Truly,
Lieutenant-in-Chief QASEM BAKR AL-SHUGHOUR
Central Army Conscription Unit
The Democratic Republic of Syria.
BOOK FOUR
The Lessons of Love
If 1 + 1 = True Love, what is 1 + 2 equal to?
18
A Father’s Advice
A photograph of Dunya as a little girl standing in front of her father took pride of place on the Noors’ mantelpiece. Joseph had one of his hands playfully in her curls. He looked so big in his stripy suit and she so small. Her curly hair reached up to his heart, even though she was only as high as his belly.
“You must help him, Dad, please?” Dunya said to Joseph. “I’m just a young woman who nobody knows and Hilal’s mother’s a simple seamstress and a widow, if we go to the army asking for an explanation they’ll jeer at us and shoo us out of their offices. But they can’t do that to you.”
“There’s no difference in our country between a doctor and a seamstress, or a young girl like you. We’re all equal in the eyes of the revolution.” Joseph flicked a stray hair off his forehead and looked sternly at Dunya. “If it’s true he’s in the army, all I can say is the army could yet make a man of him,” he continued in a steady voice and took a sip of water from a glass nearby. “But I don’t believe it,” he stated in an imperious tone. “This letter, let’s face it, is nonsense. I bet you Hilal paid someone to type it for him and get it promptly delivered, and now he’s off somewhere proposing marriage to another girl. What tricks these boys get up to satisfy their endless pride! The army doesn’t write letters like that and neither do they need mummy’s boys like Hilal.”
“Hilal would never play such tricks, Dad, never. Can’t you ask one of your friends at the Baath Party to contact the lieutenant who wrote that letter and ask him about it?”
“What?” Joseph laughed. “Do you think we’re in Surrey or in Hampshire, my dear Dunya, and that the army and the Baath party are the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau? Wake up from your afternoon snooze, darling. I told you I’m an expert judge of character. And a man like that Hilal boy, who dedicates his scientific career to the study of moonlight, is perfectly capable of a cowardly disappearing act. A boy of that sort is nothing but starry-eyed moonshine, a master of fairy-tales and airy nonsense. His feelings are like soap bubbles,” Joseph said. “As you know, my darling, I’m a very busy man. How would the Joseph Noor Heart Foundation run if I spent my time running around on wild goosechases? I need to draw the line somewhere.”
Dunya could see it very clearly: Joseph was positively delighted now that Hilal was out of the picture and he wasn’t going to lift a finger to help her find him. If only he knew that it was not Hilal who was fickle, feckless, insincere, and a hypocrite and whose feelings were like soap bubbles. It was she, his daughter, who was like that. It was not Hilal whose love couldn’t be counted on or trusted, it was her love. Dunya looked down at the floor in shame, giving Joseph completely the wrong impression. He now imagined that he had won his battle.
Patricia held Dunya in her arms and whispered in her ears, “Stop insisting, darling, it’ll only make him more stubborn. Go and see Mr. Ghazi, I’m sure he has contacts, too. Your father’s not the only well-connected man in Latakia, even though he thinks he is.” She looked at Joseph with heavy-lidded eyes. “You’re a cruel man,” her eyes seemed to say. “You’re a cold-hearted father.”
“You need so much guidance and protection, my little curly haired sparrow. I just wish you knew how much,” Joseph said to Dunya in a gentle voice, when he saw how her tears fell, how she sat on a little armchair alone with her curls between her palms, hiding her face in what he did not know was shame. He tried not to feel a little pang of guilt and a little sorrow for her. She was his only daughter, his only child, she was his small and rather tragic sparrow, the only human being who was his—well, except for Patricia.
Mr. Ghazi had often thought to himself that the ownership of an entire hospital and a summer home could not override the damage done to poor Joseph’s social standing by fathering a daughter like Dunya. But then again, in the flesh she was so charming, almost disarming.
Mrs. Ghazi was wearing a black and white polka-dot dress and was looking at Dunya with x-ray eyes. She had her hair in rollers and a long cigarette hung from her plum-
colored mouth. A large, framed, fake Mona Lisa, smiling her usual unnerving smile, hung on the wall opposite, and next to it there was a large photograph of a young man in a
suit with a rather smug look on his face and a couple of glassy skyscrapers behind him. “This must be George,” Dunya said.
“He’s handsome, isn’t he?” Mrs Ghazi said to Dunya with a clear undertone of “You can look but you can’t touch.”
“He’s not only handsome, he’s so much more than that. In fact, he’s a prize to be won and every single young woman who meets him dreams he might one day be her husband. Duels are expected in his honor when he returns to Latakia next week,” Mr. Ghazi bragged.
“You could have him if you want to, Dunya. . . .” he added casually.
“She could have him?” Mrs Ghazi said with alarm. “Says who?” She glared at her husband Salman.
But he continued to look at Dunya with a gentle expectation in his eyes.
Dunya stared at Mr. Ghazi and his wife and wondered what the most polite thing to say would be. How to refuse without causing mortal offense? For the consequences of displeasing the Ghazis could not be foretold.
“George is coming to Latakia next week and he specifically asked to see you, Dunya. When he heard you were back in town he was beside himself with joy,” Mr. Ghazi said. “Didn’t Maria tell you?”
“No,” Dunya said.
“He always had a soft spot for you and when you left to England so suddenly, he was heartbroken,” he claimed.
“That’s very touching, Mr. Ghazi, but I’m already in love with someone else. Love is not a matter of choice don’t you agree?” Dunya said.
“Says who?” Mr. Ghazi said suspiciously. “You girls have strange ideas about love, frankly rather out-of-date ideas, most unfashionable.”
“In any case, I’ve already promised George’s hand to my niece. Dunya is too modern for our George,” Mrs. Ghazi said defensively. “George needs an old-fashioned wife who can cook him all the dishes I make and who does as she’s told. Can you say you could be such a wife, Dunya?”
“No,” Dunya said.
“Well, I didn’t think so,” Mrs. Ghazi said as if this had settled the matter.
Clearly Mr. Ghazi had not yet updated his wife about his little chat with Joseph. If George married Dunya, the mother of their grandchildren would not be a virgin, admittedly. Ghazi gritted his teeth. It would be a huge sacrifice of course. But as a Christian, he was familiar with the concept of sacrifice. Everyone knew that the minute Dunya left Syria unchaperoned by a Syrian adult, albeit at the tender age of thirteen, her moral status and therefore marriageability had become suspect. Everyone in Latakia was convinced she must have lost her morals minutes after landing in London and that every moment of her life there was spent in a further state of moral decrepitude and physical undress. In London the temptations were too stro
ng and the restrictions nonexistent and so who in their right mind would be able to resist them? That was what people reasoned in Lattakia. And they had also heard from various trusted sources that in the western world being a virgin was not regarded as a source of social status, as in Syria, but the very opposite. It was a stigma that every teenager was encouraged to get rid of as soon as they possibly could. Rumors circulating about her spending her first night back in Latakia in a cheap two-star hotel with a long-haired stranger only proved that rather sore point. But if George married Dunya, Mr. Ghazi reasoned, he would inherit the Joseph Noor Heart Foundation, which was worth at least ten million dollars. Future profits were sure to be phenomenal, what with the rate of heart attacks that were sweeping the country, thanks to the economy doing so badly and the dodgy political situation, not to mention the escalating number of scandals and elopements (the rate of daughters eloping with unwanted men had quadrupled in the last five years alone). It was a traumatic time for many fathers, Mr. Ghazi thought to himself. In the same breath, he praised the Lord that Maria was such a good girl.
“All girls are the same, none of them are different. Not even Dunya,” Mr. Ghazi lectured. “No girl can have a destiny without the right man by her side. This is nature’s law, my darling, and you must accept your place in it. Dunya’s problem is that she thinks she can change the world, and people like that always end up unhappy. You know the type, the bitter spinsters who live with their cats or in lonely contemplation of their collection of hats. Nothing is sadder than a woman who’s lost her way. This is where a father’s role comes in and why his guidance is indispensable. Girls follow their hearts, the most deceiving instrument that God has given womankind.”
“I smell a rat,” Maria said later when they were alone in her room, where the French doors were open onto a balcony with views of the sea. She’d reread the Syrian Army letter for the third time. “This clearly isn’t a normal conscription unit, it sounds more like a citizens’ kidnapping unit. My advice to you, Dunya, is to skilfully pretend to your father and mine that you’ve given up looking for Hilal and that you’re considering George as an alternative spouse.”
“No way!”
“Of course you won’t give up on Hilal, you’ll simply pretend. It’s not as difficult to do as you think. I can teach you. Meanwhile, I know the man who can help you, Dunya, if I ask him to,” Maria said in a proud tone. “I too have contacts, you know.”
“Do you mean your fiancé Shadi?” Dunya said.
“Of course not Shadi. We must keep this a secret, especially from Shadi,” Maria said under her breath. “I don’t even like Shadi.”
“You don’t like Shadi?” Dunya looked surprised.
“Shadi has a major flaw,” Maria said calmly. “He’s too perfect, you see. My mother is in love with him and my father is too. He flirts more with them than with me and he often acts as if he’s about to marry them. In return, I’m also expected to flirt with his parents, and I’m already thoroughly bored of it, but I have no choice except to marry him. I must marry Shadi,” Maria said as if she was trying to convince herself of the inevitability of having a wisdom tooth extracted or a similarly unpleasant but necessary operation.
“But why must you marry Shadi?” Dunya asked her. “Why not wait until you fall in love with someone and then marry that person? What’s the hurry?”
Maria stood up and looked out of her window onto the street below. She hid her face between her hands and said, “I’m already in love, Dunya, desperately in love with a man I cannot have.” Tears began to slide down Maria’s cheeks. “So I might as well marry Shadi and be done with it.”
“You are already in love?” Dunya said. “But with a man you cannot have?”
“Hush! Keep your voice down.” Maria put her hand over Dunya’s mouth. “His name is Mr. Saddiq,” she whispered. “He’s twenty-eight years older than me, two inches shorter than me when I’m not wearing any heels, and . . . he has a large rotund belly any belly dancer would be proud of. So there, I said it.”
“Oh,” Dunya said. “Well, so what? If you love him so much why care about his big belly and his being so much older and shorter, that’s no reason not to marry him Maria, is it?”
“Well, there’s more bad news Dunya. First of all he’s also a senior Baath party official and an Alawite from the village of Kurdaha, as well as being a father of six and husband to one.”
“Oh,” Dunya now understood. Falling in love with a Baath party official, now that was the limit. And a married one at that.
“He just fell into his job,” Maria said, shamefaced. “Family connections. He doesn’t take any of it seriously.”
Everything about Mr. Saddiq was wrong, each one of his qualities and each of his circumstances was utterly, utterly wrong. Even a girl as rebellious as Dunya disapproved. Maria is in love with a senior Baath Party official? “How could you?” she wanted to say, “How could you fall in love with one of them, a criminal and a crook?” But she didn’t. What moral authority did she have when her own heart had led her astray too, and only yesterday? Perhaps Mr. Ghazi was right after all, perhaps the heart is a dangerous instrument and one should not always blindly listen to it, or follow its dangerous dictates.
“Anyway,” Maria said. “So even though Saddiq was put on this earth to break my heart, and I his, he’s the man who’ll get Hilal back for you. I promise you he can do it without even breaking into a sweat.”
“You think so?” Dunya said. “It does seem lucky for Hilal and I that you fell in love with one of them—in the circumstances. But are you sure he is not corrupt?” Dunya couldn’t resist asking.
“He’s not corrupt, no, no, I promise you.” Maria put her arms around Dunya.
Love is blind, Dunya thought to herself, but what is most important now is for her to get Hilal out of the Syrian Army’s clutches and then promptly fall back in love with him—and only him.
That evening Dunya stood alone on her bedroom balcony and vowed to herself and to the sky and to the night that she would put a veil over her love for Suha, and that she would never mention her name, nor ever think of her, that she would only think of Hilal, and slowly, slowly Suha would disappear back to where she’d always been—the world of shadows and of dreams.
19
The Baker’s Unreal Daughter
Suha Habibi had always believed that she was the only, and rather spoiled, daughter of Basma Habibi, a former mawaal singer who lived in the northern suburbs of Aleppo, and Bassam Habibi, a reputable baker who died a couple of years ago under a collapsed building, which fell on him like a pack of cards after a Turkish earthquake sent a few of its terrible tremors all the way to Aleppo.
But even as a child it was difficult for her to ignore the fact that she didn’t seem to have inherited any of the physical or psychological characteristics of either of her two doting parents. She looked very hard and often but she could not find an eyelash, a finger, an ankle, a smile, let alone a nose in common with either of them. Even though she had always been told that Basma, ‘the Rose of Aleppo,’ was her mother, Suha often looked at Basma and irrationally thought, This is not how I’d imagine my mother to be. What a strange thought that was, and that is why she hid it well. And though she had a continuous itchy feeling of undaughterliness toward them, she never suspected what the real reason was. Neither did she understand why she felt puzzled most of the time. And then one day, perhaps when she was twelve, she overheard someone say that Basma was, “more famous for being barren than for her singing.” As soon as she heard this, she wiped it out of her consciousness, and refused to contemplate it. Instead, she intensified her efforts to appear daughterly.
From the moment she was born and all throughout her childhood and youth, everyone around Suha intended to keep her in the dark. She had never lacked for anything except for truth. Was this perhaps why her hair was so dark? But then again, so many women’s hair around there was darker than the darkest night.
Suha had learned early on how
to be secretive. Everything in her life with Bassam and Basma often took on the air of pretense and of make-believe. Basma had lied to her and to the world so much that in the end Suha didn’t have a clue any more what was what, who was who and what to do. Basma lied purely because she didn’t want the truth to be true. And so, although Suha was an actress by temperament, it was also forced on her through upbringing; it was a conspiracy of both nature and time. Very early on in her life she wanted to find a story or a song that might explain the world to her. She had always suspected that words might be like keys and sentences like doorways.
The first time Suha heard Basma singing she thought it was the radio. The song was so beautiful that it made her heart beat faster than it had ever done before. As she followed the song to its source she realized that it wasn’t coming out of the radio, but that it was her mother who was singing it. She saw her in their living room holding an oud in her hands. She could not at first understand why her mother had never sung in front of her before, but she didn’t ask her why then, and instead she took her mother’s oud into her hands and tried to play it. The sound that came out was most unpleasant and jarring on the ears. Then, when Suha tried to copy her mother’s singing, Basma looked at her with wide-open eyes:
Oh night, oh night,
Light of my eyes,
