The Dark Side of Love (109 page)

Over the years, Rana had made the flat roof around her small studio into a flowering oasis. One morning early in September she heard someone calling out for water in her sleep. She woke up, and knew at once that her plants were thirsty.

She ran barefoot upstairs in her thin nightdress. The September sky was as clear as in summer, radiant with the most beautiful Damascene blue. The leaves and thin stems of the plants were drooping.

“Oh, God,” whispered Rana. She picked up the hose, turned the tap on, and began sprinkling the large containers. She heard the roots rousing themselves beneath the dry soil and whispering thanks. The plants seemed to raise their leaves and stems, gradually reaching towards the sky.

“That's better,” she told them encouragingly. They had almost all been presents from friends and relations. She thought she could hear a gurgle of laughter.

Suddenly she lost herself in thought. “Back then my decision to live as a cactus just came to me, but being a cactus isn't easy,” she said quietly, remember how she had been naïve enough to think that she had a right to love and happiness. A right to love, perhaps, but happiness? She smiled. “I even began furnishing a house in my head for Farid and me. I knew all about it, even the colour of the curtains,” she went on out loud, watering the oleander. She shook her head. “So stupid, planning a life that we'll never have, not a second of it. A virus, a car, a war, can end everything. And all the while we dream of our future, time is quietly running away like sand through our fingers.
The little heap of it left on the palm of the hand is only the memory of life.”

Now she heard the leaves of the little orange tree that Dunia had given her crying out for a shower. She let a curving jet of water fall on the tree and its few little fruits.

“Years ago, before she was entirely drained away inside, Dunia told me she had to be ready for her husband at any time, like his shoehorn, with the difference that he didn't take his shoehorn to bed with him. But that's just what he does with her, every evening. He wanted her to be always available to him, and after a year she was worn out. Today Dunia acts as if someone else had said that, not herself …”

She listened to the flowers.

“Oh, you want some too? I thought you were a sister of the desert,” she said, turning the jet of water on the fanned leaves of the palm tree that her cousin Marie had brought her from Iraq. Marie was married to a rich businessman who moved between Baghdad and Damascus. She would have liked to stay in Damascus, but she couldn't, and since then she had never felt at home anywhere. Her three children suffered from it, but she acted the part of a happy wife.

The palm made a rustling sound of pleasure.

“I'm related to you, not Marie. I bear no fruit either,” Rana went on. “I don't want to exert myself to pretend I'm happily married. Marie has denied all her dreams and plans, ideas and feelings for fear of her husband. She fills her inner void with submissive obedience. So now she's not afraid of him any more, quite the opposite, she enjoys her submissiveness on the evenings when he wants to take her to bed, because that's the only place where he's kind to her. She told me so herself. And then Marie is avenged on that despot. She makes him kiss her feet and her backside, she enjoys it when he goes on his knees and begs. At such moments she imagines that she's the one who gives orders.”

Rana watered all the flowers and little trees, and finally sat on a stool and decided to make a rainbow with the jet of water and the sunlight.

“Do you want to drink the rainbow?” she asked, and chuckled at her own idea. She saw the plants dancing happily by way of answer
in the light September breeze. After several attempts she managed to catch the light just as she was watering the little olive tree that her Aunt Soraya had brought her back from Jerusalem.

“When you've become as empty as Aunt Soraya,” she said, “when you have nothing more inside you to offer, you have to look after the outer husk. What else is there to do?”

“Nothing,” she heard her own answer. “Just look at Aunt Soraya,” she went on, examining a red rose. “She plucks some of her hair, colours the rest, wears seductive lingerie like a whore under the plain clothes her jealous husband insists on.” Aunt Soraya had married a pilot who travelled the world, getting more stupid all the time. He had been very outgoing and liberal as a young man, but now – although he was a Christian – he acted like a Muslim Brother.

“Roses love the rainbow,” said Rana, as she reached the large terracotta pot where a bushy Damascus rose grew. Her school friend Nadjla had given it to her two years ago. As the only girl among seven brothers, Nadjla had been lost in her family. No one took any notice of her, and at seventeen she was married off to her cousin. After that she had to serve his old parents and four brothers, who were all bachelors. She was docile, and followed her husband like a hound following its master. Nadjla read his wishes in his eyes and acted as if she had made the suggestion herself. Her husband rewarded her for it. “Good dog, that's right, good dog,” whispered Rana, laughing.

She sprayed a sparrow that was watching curiously from the fence around the roof. It quickly flew away.

“And then there's my mother. Only now,” she called after the sparrow, “does she discover that my father doesn't love her. And he's right. Who loves a shiny pot that clatters only because it's empty? Sometimes I don't even feel like an empty pot. I'm my husband's waste bin.”

She giggled, and tried to make the rainbow again. After several attempts, it arched above the jasmine at the edge of the roof garden. She didn't notice the water raining down on the street below.

“But at least I know that I don't love my husband. Dunia irritates me with her show of affection for hers. She said she sacrifices herself for him. And when I ask her what exactly she's sacrificing she sounds
vague, the only clear thing is that she's a mixture of good housewife and cheap whore.”

She shook her head, remembering their quarrel. It had been one Sunday four or five weeks ago. “So let's not call it love or affection, exploitation is more like it,” Rana had said. Dunia had been furious and shouted at her, “You're letting your lover's left-wing views send you crazy. Those and all your books about women who hate their husbands.”

Rana was as ungrateful and vindictive as a camel, said Dunia. Yes, so Rami had taken her by force, but he was a nice man all the same, an attractive man who lavished presents on her and even bore her rejection of him patiently. Any other woman would be happy to live with him. But Rana was living for an illusion – her love for an anarchist with a death-wish.

Angry words had been spoken that Sunday afternoon. She had retorted that Dunia didn't even look in the mirror any more, so as not to see what six or seven years had made of her: a fat, frustrated matron. Dunia shouted back that she'd rather be a matron than deranged, and Rana would soon end up in the al-Asfuriye mental hospital. She really said it: al-Asfuriye.

Dunia gave up arguing. She was a thinking woman now, she said, and she was free. You had to train men like wild animals. Then, as time went on, they learned to come home and be faithful.

Remembering this made Rana laugh. “A fine picture of wretchedness Dunia drew me. That's not love, that's animal-taming. When love is the real thing it asks no sacrifice and it doesn't exploit you.” She was sure she wouldn't for a moment sacrifice herself for Farid because she loved him. Her heart was a cactus. She was patient, she kept quiet. But she didn't confuse that with love, and she would leave Rami as soon as it was possible for Farid to live with her.

However, a cactus has a hard life. A week before her quarrel with Dunia she felt like exploding. Rami came home unexpectedly with two high-ranking officers, woke her and asked her to serve them some small nibbles. All three of them were drunk and noisy. She gave Rami everything she could find in the kitchen, putting it on two trays, and went back to bed. But she couldn't sleep.

It was late when he came to her, stinking of cigars and liquor. And when she refused to sleep with him he hit her. Rami raped her, and she cried. As he forced his way inside her he said he was ashamed of her. His colleagues' wives would make up their faces and entertain guests at any time, even late at night. She should be glad he was a good Christian, because a Muslim would have thrown a woman like her out long ago and married a second wife. After a while he stopped shouting and hitting her, and fell into a deep sleep.

Next day her family visited, and Rami repeated all his accusations. He told them about his superior officers' visit last night, called it “tedious but a duty”, and condemned Rana's behaviour. He didn't mention that he had hit her repeatedly. Her mother and brother thought he was quite right. Her father, distressed, said nothing, but his look spoke volumes.

Rana wondered what chance she had with a husband like that. There was only one solution: to play dead. It's difficult only at first. Then you learn to go far away in your mind, to some high and distant place, and from there you watch what your husband is doing in bed with a corpse and you feel nothing, no disgust, no anger, nothing.

With time she had learned not to feel anything in certain parts of her body. She felt neither pain nor pleasure in her lips, her breasts, her earlobes. She was like the Indian fakir she had seen on a newsreel in the cinema. He had walked, smiling, over broken glass and red-hot coals. But when Farid touched her she was all aflame.

Rana didn't notice how time was passing. Suddenly the rainbow was gone, and her husband, in his uniform, was there on the roof in front of her. Repelled, he cast a glance at her, turned, and went back into the apartment.

Quarter of an hour later her family were all there. Her brother Jack was looking at her angrily. Her mother was crying, and her father spent a long time on the telephone.

Rana was shivering with cold in her wet nightdress.

When she woke up again she was in a white bed. The walls and the ceiling were white too. She heard screams like the cries of a frightened animal, and there was a strong smell of camphor. Her back hurt, her tongue was dry. She was freezing. Her head felt heavy as lead, but gradually she managed to turn it to one side. There was another woman in the bare room with her, fastened down to her bed with three straps. She looked as thin and her skin as greyish brown and wrinkled as if she were the naked mummy Rana had once seen in the Egyptian Museum. The woman lay still. Rana thought she must be dead, and a strange anxiety took hold of her. Where was she? Why was she lying in this store-room with a dead woman? Did they think she was dead too? When the woman turned her head aside, Rana breathed a sigh of relief. The woman's thin, weathered face expressed suffering, like someone in a painting of the tormented souls lining Christ's path.

“They're trying to poison me,” said the woman hoarsely. “They've injected poison into me so that I'll die slowly and they can inherit my house.” The woman breathed in with a whistling sound and looked at the ceiling. “Who brought you here? Are they trying to poison you too?” Rana shook her head. She wanted to say she didn't know, but she was sure no one was trying to poison her.

Looking down at her body, Rana saw that she herself was not strapped down. She sat up, but the chill in the room threw her back on the white sheet.

She thought of the rainbow, and was surprised to find that she wasn't wet any more, nor was she wearing her own clothes, only this white garment.

“You have to trick them,” whispered the woman. “If you want to survive here you mustn't be honest with anyone. Be absent, play dead,” she added, barely audibly.

How had she come here? Rana wondered. Her parents had been holding on to her. Then what? Where had her husband been? What had he done?

“Fly through the air like me, sail through the storms, see beaches
and palaces, play with children and sleep with handsome men. I go walking through Damascus, I eat ices in the Suk al Hamidiye, while that fool of a doctor asks my dead body questions here in the madhouse, stuffs it with bitter pills, listens to it, measures it, takes photographs. But since I'm not answering his questions, no, I'm talking to the woman at my table in the ice cream parlour instead, he doesn't understand me, he thinks I'm crazy. I let him think so. Here in al-Asfuriye, the House of Sparrows, I'm safe from poisoning until my son comes from America to take me away.”

The woman was talking incoherently, and Rana cautiously returned to the point in time that was becoming clearer in her memory now. Her husband had gone to the door, and at that moment she realized that he had called a doctor. What for? She felt well. Rather sad, yes, but why would she need a doctor?