Burned alive (8 page)

“I love you, too. Now go back, change your clothes, and act like nothing happened. Especially don’t cry in the house.”

He left ahead of me. I’d stopped crying but I felt a little sick. This blood was disgusting. Making love with a man wasn’t a celebration. I felt bad, I felt dirty, I had no water to wash myself, nothing but the grass to wipe myself with. I still felt the burning in my belly, and I had to collect the sheep, and return home, with my dirty pants. I’d have to do the washing in secret. As I hurried back, I thought I probably wouldn’t bleed anymore but wondered if I would always feel so bad with my husband. Would it always be so disgusting?

Is my expression normal when I reach the house? I’m not crying anymore but I hurt inside and I’m afraid. I realize what I have done. I’m not a virgin anymore. I’m no longer safe as long as I’m not married. I won’t be a virgin on my wedding night. But that’s not important because he knows I was a virgin with him. I’ll arrange it somehow, I’ll cut myself with a knife, I’ll stain the marriage linen with my blood. I will be like all the other women.

I wait for three days. I watch from the terrace for Faiez to give me a signal for a meeting. This time, he leads me into a little shelter of stones, at the other end of the field. It’s a place where we’d be out of the rain. This time I don’t bleed. I still have discomfort but much less fear. All I care about is that he come back. He is there and I love him even more. What he does with my body isn’t important, it’s in my head that I love him. He is my whole life, all my hope of leaving my parents’ house, of being a woman who walks with a man in the street, who gets into a car with him to do the shopping and goes to stores to buy dresses and shoes. I am happy to be with him, to belong to him. He’s a man, a real one, a capable man. I am confident about the marriage. He doesn’t know when, and neither do I, but I don’t ask any questions. In my mind, it is certain.

Until it happens, I must be watchful that I’m not denounced by someone. For the next meeting, I’ll change my route. I figure the extra time I’ll need, and in the meantime I don’t dare leave the house by myself by the iron door. I wait to be with my mother or my sister. I watch for Faiez to leave every morning. As soon as I hear his steps on the gravel, I go quickly to the cement wall. If someone else is outside I turn my back; if there is no one I wait for the signal. Two more rendezvous since the first one when I lost my virginity. We can’t see each other every day, it wouldn’t be wise. It’s another six days before he gives the signal for the third meeting. I’m still afraid, and still confident. I pay attention to the slightest noise in the countryside. I avoid waiting at the side of the road. I wait in the grass in a ditch, with my stick. I watch the bees in the wildflowers, and I dream about the day soon to come when I won’t be guarding sheep and goats anymore, when I won’t be cleaning out the manure in the stable. He is going to come, he loves me, and when he leaves again I will say to him, like the first and the second times:
Don’t abandon me.

We make love for the third time. The sun is yellow, I must milk the sheep and the cows. I say: “I love you, don’t abandon me. When will you come back?”

“We can’t see each other right away. We’ll wait a little. We have to be careful.”

“For how long?”

“Until I give you a sign.”

My love affair had gone on for two weeks, three meetings in the field with the sheep. Faiez is right to be careful, and I must be patient, wait for my parents to speak to me, as they spoke to my sister Noura. My father can’t still be waiting to marry Kainat before me! Since Faiez has asked for me and she is still unmarried at twenty, he can get me off his hands. He still has two more daughters! Khadija and Salima, the little ones, will be put to work in their turn with my mother and will take over the flocks and the harvesting. Fatma, my brother’s wife, is pregnant again, she’s supposed to give birth soon. She can work, too. I await my destiny. Always with a little fear. The days pass and Faiez gives me no sign. I’m hopeful all the same, every evening, of seeing him appear out of nowhere, as he can do, to the left or right of the ravine where I hide.

One morning in the stable I suddenly feel very strange. The odor of the manure makes me dizzy. And later as I prepare the meal, the mutton makes me feel ill. I’m nervous, I want to go to sleep or cry for no reason. Every time Faiez comes out of his house he looks somewhere else, makes no sign to me. It’s been a long time, too long, and I don’t know when I last had my period, or when it should arrive. I often heard my mother ask my sister Noura: “You have your periods?”

“Yes, Mama.”

And, too: “You haven’t had your period? That’s good, it means you’re pregnant!”

I don’t see mine coming. I check several times a day. Every time I go to the bathroom, I look to see if there’s any blood. Sometimes I feel so strange that I think it must have come. But there’s still no blood. And I’m so afraid that the fear grips my throat as if I were going to vomit. I don’t feel the way I did before, I don’t want to work, to get up. My nature has changed. I try to find a reason that isn’t the worst one. I ask myself if the shock of not being a virgin anymore can change a girl this way. Maybe the periods don’t come back right away. I can’t of course get any information about this naive explanation. The least question on this subject would cause thunderbolts to come down on me. I think about it constantly, every moment of the day and especially at night when I fall asleep near my sisters. If I’m pregnant my father is going to smother me in the sheepskin blanket. In the morning when I get up I’m happy just to be alive.

I’m afraid someone in the family is going to notice that I’m not normal. I want to vomit in front of the plate of sugared rice, I want to go to sleep in the stable. I feel tired, my cheeks are pale, my mother is certainly going to notice this and ask me if I’m sick. So I hide, I pretend to be fine, but it becomes more and more difficult. And still Faiez doesn’t appear. He gets into his car wearing his beautiful suit, with his briefcase and his fine shoes, and he takes off so fast that his car makes a cloud of dust. Summer begins. It gets very hot in the morning. I am supposed to take the animals out at dawn and bring them back before the sun is too strong. I can’t be on the terrace anymore watching for him, although I absolutely must speak to him about the marriage. Because a strange spot has appeared on my nose. A small brown spot that I try to hide because I know what it means. Noura had the same thing when she was pregnant. My mother looked at me with surprise: “What did you do to yourself?”

“It’s henna, it was on my hands and I rubbed my nose, I wasn’t paying attention.”

I really did put on henna and purposely smudged my nose. But this lie can’t go on for long. I am pregnant and it’s been a month since the last time I saw Faiez.

I must speak to him. One evening, when the sun is not yet down, I boil water in the garden to do the wash so that I can go up onto the terrace with my laundry at about the time when I know he’s going to come home. This time, I give him a signal with my head and I keep gesturing to make him understand:
I want to see you, I’m going down there, you must follow me . . .

He has seen me and I run off to wait for him, pretending to go watch over a sick sheep in the stable. The sheep is really sick, we’re waiting for her to give birth, and it’s not the first time I’ve stayed near her. I’ve even slept on the straw a whole night for fear of not hearing her.

He arrives at our rendezvous spot a little after me, and he immediately tries to make love, convinced that’s why I called him. I draw back.

“No, that’s not why I wanted to see you.”

“Well, why then?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“We’ll talk after. Come on!”

“You don’t love me. Can’t we meet just to talk?”

“Yes, but I love you, I love you so much that every time I see you I want you.”

“Faiez, the first time I wanted nothing, then you kissed me, and I accepted three times, now I haven’t had my period.”

“Maybe it’s just late?”

“No, I’ve never been late and I feel strange.”

He doesn’t want to make love anymore. His face has gone blank.

“What are we going to do?”

“We have to get married, now! We can’t wait, you have to go see my father, even if there isn’t any wedding, I don’t care!”

“They’ll talk in the village, it’s not done! What would we do about putting out the sheet on the balcony?”

“Don’t worry about that, I’ll take care of it.”

“But we can’t have a small ceremony, we said a big wedding, we’ll have a big wedding. I’ll go talk to your father. Wait for me here tomorrow at the same time.”

“But it’s not always possible for me. You’re a man, you do what you want. Wait for me to give you a sign. If I can, you’ll see me braiding my hair. If I don’t take off my scarf, don’t come.”

The next day, I take a chance saying I’m going to gather some grass for the sick sheep. I give the signal and I run to the meeting place, trembling. My father has said nothing, I’ve heard nothing. I’m so afraid that I can’t get my breath. Faiez arrives a good half hour after me. I attack him.

“Why haven’t you gone to see my father?”

“I don’t dare look your father in the face. I’m afraid.”

“But you have to hurry, it’s been almost two months now. My stomach is going to start getting big. What am I going to do?” And I start to cry.

“Stop it, don’t be crying when you go home. I’m going to see your father tomorrow.”

I believed him, I wanted so much to believe him. Because I loved him and I had good reason to hope, because he had already asked my father for me once. I understood that he was afraid to face him. It wasn’t easy to explain why he wanted the marriage to take place so soon. What reason could he find in the face of my father’s mistrust and meanness, without revealing the secret and destroying my honor and his own before the family?

I prayed to God that night, as usual. My parents were very religious, my mother went often to the mosque. The girls were supposed to say their prayers twice a day in the house. The next day when I woke up I thanked Allah that I was alive.

The car had already left when I went out to the terrace. Then I did my work as usual, I cared for the sheep, cleaned the stable, I brought out the flock, picked the tomatoes. I waited for evening. I was so afraid that I picked up a big stone and struck my stomach with it hoping to make myself bleed and put things right.

The Last Meeting

Evening has come. I am desperate for Faiez to arrive, alone or with his parents, but I know very well that he won’t. It’s too late for today. And the car isn’t parked in front of his house, the shutters have remained closed. This is dreadful for me. I spend the night awake, trying to make myself believe that he went to see his family somewhere; that if the shutters are closed it’s because of the heat.

It is extraordinary how these few weeks of my life have stayed imprinted on my memory. I who have so much difficulty reconstructing my childhood, except for the images of cruelty, the absence of happiness and peace, I have never forgotten these moments of stolen freedom, of fear and hope. I can see myself so clearly that night under my sheepskin cover, my knees up under my chin, holding my stomach with my two hands, listening for the least sound in the dark.
Tomorrow he’ll be there . . . Tomorrow he won’t be there . . . He’s going to rescue me, he’s going to abandon me . . .
It was like music playing in my head that wouldn’t stop.

The next morning, I see the car in front of the house. I say to myself:
He’s alive!
There is hope. I can’t go to watch for him to leave, but in the evening when he returns I’m out on the terrace. I signal for a meeting the next day before sunset. And at the end of the afternoon, just before sunset, I go to fetch hay for the sheep. I wait ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, hoping that perhaps he’s hidden a little farther off. The harvest is over but in certain places of the field I can collect some good sheaves, which I tie up with straw. I line them up near the path and knot them first. I work quickly but I am careful to leave three sheaves untied in case somebody passes by because I’m very visible in this spot. I’d only have to bend over my sheaves and look very busy at my work, which I’ve already finished. That gives me a quarter of an hour extra before I have to go back to the house. I told my mother I’d return with the hay in a half hour. At this time of day, the sheep have already been brought in, the goats and the cows, too, and I still have to milk them for the next day’s cheeses. I’ve employed almost every pretext for this rendezvous. I went to the well to draw water for the animals, which requires three short trips with a big bucket balanced on my head. The rabbits needed tender grass, the chickens needed grain that I went to collect. I wanted to see if the figs were beginning to ripen, I needed lemon for the cooking, I had to relight the fire in the bread oven.

I must always be mistrustful of my parents, who are mistrustful of their daughter. A daughter may do many things. Is she going into the courtyard? What is she doing there? She hasn’t by chance arranged a tryst behind the bread oven? She’s going to the well? Did she take the bucket with her? Haven’t the animals already been watered? She’s going for hay? How many sheaves does she bring back?

That evening, I drag my cloth sack from sheaf to sheaf. I fill it quickly and I wait, and wait. I know that my father is sitting as usual under the lamp in front of the house, smoking his pipe like a pasha and waiting with his belt for the daughter to return at the time she’s supposed to return. He’s counting the minutes. He has a watch. If I’ve said a half hour, that’s a half hour minus one minute if I don’t want to get a whipping with the belt.

I have just three sheaves to tie up. The sky is turning gray, the yellow of the sun is growing paler. I don’t have a watch but I know I have only a few minutes left before night falls, which happens suddenly in my country. It’s as though the sun is so tired of giving us light that it falls like a stone, leaving us abruptly in the dark.

I have lost hope. It’s over. He’s dropped me. I arrive home. His car isn’t there. I get up the next morning, his car is still not there. It’s really the end. There’s no more hope of going on living. And I have understood. He took advantage of me, it was a fine time for him. Not for me. I tear at my hair but it’s too late. I’ll never see him again. At the end of the week, I’ve even stopped watching for him from the terrace. The shutters of the pink house are closed, he has fled in his car like a coward. I can’t ask anyone for help.

At three or four months, my stomach begins to get larger. I can still conceal it pretty well under my dress but as soon as I carry a bucket or any load on my head, with my back arched and arms raised, I have to make a considerable effort to hide it. And the spot on my nose, I try to rub it off, but it doesn’t go away. I can’t try the henna again, my mother wouldn’t believe me.

My anguish is strongest at night. I often go out to sleep with the sheep. The pretext is ready-made: When a sheep is about to give birth, she calls out like a human, and if help isn’t at hand the little one can suffocate in the mother’s womb. I sometimes think about this particular sheep, whose baby was having trouble getting out. I had to put my arm all the way into her, very gently, to turn the lamb’s head in a better direction and pull it toward me. I was afraid of hurting it, and I struggled a long time to retrieve this little lamb. The mother wasn’t able to push, the poor thing, and I had to give her a lot of help. And an hour later she died.

The lamb was a little female. She would follow me about like a child. As soon as she would see me leave, she would call to me. I would milk the other sheep first and then feed her with a bottle. I helped many sheep give birth but this is the only one I remember. The little one followed me in the garden, she went up the stairs of the house. She was behind me everywhere I went. The mother was dead and the lamb was alive . . .

It’s strange to think that we would make such an effort helping a sheep give birth when my mother was suffocating her children. At the time I certainly didn’t think about it. It was a custom that you had to accept. In letting these images play out in my memory today, I am revolted. If I’d had the awareness that I have today, I would have strangled my mother to save even one of those little girls.

What can my father do to me if he finds out that I’m pregnant? My sister Kainat and I thought that being tied up in the stable was the worst thing that could happen to us, our hands tied behind our backs, a scarf stuffed into our mouths so we wouldn’t yell, and our feet bound with the rope he used for beating us. Mute, awake all night, we would just look at each other, thinking the same thing:
As long as we’re tied up we’re still alive.

And so it’s my father who comes toward me, on a washing day. I hear him coming up behind me, his cane striking the ground of the courtyard. He stops behind me. I don’t dare get up.

“I’m sure you’re pregnant.”

I drop the laundry into the basin, I haven’t the strength to look up at him. I can’t let myself appear surprised or humiliated. And I won’t be able to lie if I look at him.

“No, Papa.”

“Oh yes! Look at yourself! You’ve gotten big. And that spot there, you say it’s from the sun, then you say it’s henna? Your mother has to see your breasts.”

So it’s my mother who suspected. And he’s the one who gives the order.

“You have to show them.”

And my father goes off with his cane without another word. He hasn’t struck me. I didn’t protest, my mouth is paralyzed. I think this time this is it, I’m dead. It’s now my mother’s turn. She is calm but rough.

“Now leave the laundry alone! Show me your breasts!”

“No, please Mama, that bothers me.”

“You show them to me or I’ll rip your dress!”

So I undo the buttons of my collar down to my chest and move the cloth apart.

“You’re pregnant?”

“No!”

“You’ve had your period?”

“Yes!”

“The next time you have your period you’ll show me!”

I said yes, to remain calm, to calm her down, and for my safety. I know I’m going to have to cut myself and smear the blood on a piece of paper and show it to her at the next full moon.

I leave off the washing and go out of the house without permission and I climb up and hide in the branches of an old lemon tree. It’s stupid to seek out this shelter, the lemon tree isn’t going to save me, but I’m so afraid I don’t know what I’m doing. Very soon my father comes to look for me and he finds me there, in the branches. He only has to tug on my legs to make me fall. One of my knees is bleeding. He leads me back to the house, and he takes some sage leaves and chews them and applies this pulp to the wound to stop the bleeding. This is strange. I don’t understand why after making me fall so roughly, now he goes to the trouble of taking care of me, which he has never done. I thought maybe he isn’t really mean after all, he believed what I told him. With the distance of time, I think it was just to prevent me from using this blood to make them believe that I’d had my period. I had a pain in my stomach when I fell and I hope the fall will make it come.

A little later, there is a family meeting, which I’m not allowed to attend. My parents have had Noura and Hussein come. I’m listening behind the wall. They’re all talking and I hear my father say: “I’m sure she’s pregnant. She doesn’t want to tell us. We’re waiting for her to show us her period . . .”

As soon as they stop talking, I go upstairs and pretend to be sleeping. The next day my parents go to the city. I’m forbidden to go out. The courtyard door is closed but I go through the garden and I run and hide in the fields. I start to hit my stomach with a big stone, through my dress, to make the blood come. No one ever explained to me how a baby grows in its mother’s stomach. I know that at a certain moment the baby moves. I have seen my mother pregnant, I know how much time it takes for the baby to come into the world, but I’m ignorant of all the rest. From what moment is the baby alive? For me, it’s at the moment of birth, since that’s when I saw my mother make the choice of letting them live or die. What I ardently hope for, although I’ve been pregnant for three or four months, is that the blood will come back. That’s all I think about. I don’t even imagine that this child in my belly is already a human being. And I weep with rage and fear because the stone I’m hitting myself with doesn’t make the blood come. Because my parents are going to return and I must get back to the house ahead of them.

This memory is so painful now, I feel so guilty. It’s no good telling myself that I was ignorant, terrified of what awaited me. It is a nightmare to think that I hammered like this on my stomach for this child not to exist.

And the next day, it’s the same thing, I strike my stomach with anything I can find, and at every opportunity. My mother is waiting for me. She has given me a month from the day when she made me show her my breasts. I know she’s counting in her head, and while she waits I’m not allowed to go out. I have to remain confined to the house and keep to household chores. My mother has said to me: “You don’t go out that door again! You’re not to watch the sheep, you’re not to go out to fetch the hay.” I can escape through the courtyard and the gardens but to go where? I have never taken the bus alone, I don’t have any money, and anyway the driver wouldn’t let me on. I must be in the fifth month. I’ve felt movement in my belly. Like a crazy person, I press my stomach against the wall. But I can’t get away with lying anymore or trying to conceal my stomach and my breasts. There is no way out.

The only idea that occurs to me, the only possible one, is to flee from the house and ask my mother’s sister to take me in. She lives in the village, I know her house. So one morning, while my parents are out at the market, I cross the garden, I pass by the well, I jump over the embankment, and I make my way to her house. I don’t have much hope because she is mean, jealous of my mother for reasons I don’t know about. But just maybe she’ll keep me and find a solution. Seeing me arrive alone, she expresses concern about my parents. Why haven’t they come with me?

“You have to help me, Aunt.”

And I tell her everything, the hoped-for marriage that hasn’t happened, the wheat field.

“Who is it?”

“His name is Faiez, but he’s not here anymore, he promised . . .”

“All right. I’m going to help you.”

She dresses, puts on her scarf, and takes me by the hand.

“Come, we’re going to take a walk together.”

“But where? What are you going to do?”

“Come, give me your hand, you can’t be seen walking alone.”

I suppose she’s going to take me to another woman, a neighbor who has secrets for making a girl’s period start or keeping the child from continuing to grow in my belly. Or she’s going to hide me someplace until I’m freed.

But she takes me home. She pulls me like a donkey who doesn’t want to move.

“Why are you taking me home? Help me, I beg you!”

“Because that’s your place, it’s for them to take care of you, not me.”

“I beg you, stay with me! You know what’s going to happen to me!”

“This is where you belong! You understand? And don’t go out again!”

She forces me to go through the door, calls to my parents, turns around and leaves. I saw the meanness, the scorn in her expression. She must have thought:
My sister has a serpent in her house, this girl has dishonored her family.

My father closes the door and my mother glowers at me and makes a gesture with her chin and hand that means:
Charmuta . . . slut . . . you dared to go to my sister!
They despise each other. A misfortune happens to one and the other is gleeful.