Cinnamon (5 page)

In that very same moment, Aliyah looked up at the closed window for the last time, standing up from the marble wall as she slipped the photograph into her bag and vanished with the wind.

 

The images ended their dance around Hanan al-Hashimi's room – the room of the closed window – and she became certain that the streak of light had not been a dream. Hanan thought about phoning Nazek, but it was still very early, and she might cause a scandal. Besides, what would she say to her? Yet, she did want Nazek with her right then. Hanan snatched her mobile. She dialled. No response. Cursing Nazek silently, she threw herself onto the bed, feeling death on her trail once more. Completely alone in her room, it was just like all those years ago when her family had taken the hasty decision that she would marry her cousin. She was just like the girl she had been back then, Hanan thought.

Twenty years had passed, perhaps more? In those days she had looked for excuses to stay in her room, or to go to the university – anything but to sit with her mother and the rest of the family. She fled those dreary discussions of her beauty, of how unlucky she was to be marrying a sterile man, how she would work hard to complete her studies after their marriage. On and on they went...

Hanan wished for death to visit the house and take somebody away. Death was the only thing capable of making life less miserable. If her husband were to pass away, she would truly be indebted to God. But it wasn't to be. Instead, her father died and, after holding out for many long years, her mother too passed away one winter. Aliyah was the only person whose departure from the world Hanan never imagined, and now she had passed on.

Hanan al-Hashimi cried out. Looking towards the window, she contemplated getting up to pull back the curtains, but decided to remain still. She was dead now! The idea calmed her.

As she lay corpse-like on her bed, Hanan's body was as it had always been, like that of a nubile boy: a slight chest, slim waist, the buttocks of a ten-year old, without the least trace of a curve to them, and slender lips. Once, her husband had tried to kiss her and she had screamed in pain. After that, Hanan had stayed in her room for days, ashamed of her own lips. Later, she told her mother that her husband had wanted to swallow her up beginning with her lips.

Hanan would tell her mother the most intimate details of what went on in her husband's bedroom. If she did not, her mother would find out somehow. She regretted never having instructed her daughter in the bedroom arts, as
Shami
women normally did, for their girls to keep hold of their husbands and lure them into night-time's pleasures. But by the time Hanan's mother came to teach her the arts, the moment had already passed. Any new instruction made her all the more shy and frigid. Could she really drag her husband into bed? How? Hanan would burn with hatred as she stood before her mother. Why must she stay there being told what to do? To want it, not to hold back; to hold back, not to refuse; to flirt with him until he burns with desire; to tease him with his own servitude and make him feel like the crown on her head; to massage his feet and sprinkle his body with the oil her mother had brought her from the perfume market, then to feed him, morsel by morsel, though not always. It was a question of push and pull, a precarious balancing act. Both coquetry and prudence were required at the same time. A few moments were sufficient to make his heart pound, and a man's heart is found between two regions: the thighs, the zone where the blood pumps from before spreading to the rest of the man's body, her mother said. Hanan began to giggle uncontrollably, quite convinced that her mother had no understanding of science at all. Blood is pumped from the heart, she informed her mother, who turned to her daughter and muttered, ‘Silly girl... down below is where the stallion's tethered, you little know-it-all!'

Hanan's mother would continue talking until her daughter had fallen asleep. Then she would leave the room in defeat, giving up on the simple-minded girl who was not a bit like her mother.

‘Stupid girl, nothing like her mother.' On those words, Hanan closed her eyes.

Hanan waved her hands in front of her face, as though shaking away the dust. She jumped to her feet once more and opened the window, looking out at the horizon which seemed clearer with the approaching dawn. The faint outline of a slow-moving figure was just noticeable – a black speck of a creature.

‘Is that Aliyah?'

At the sound of her own voice, Hanan returned to the mirror, wanting to discover just how delirious she had become.

She walked slowly, not only because of the bag which weighed her down, but because that way, she might keep moving without coming to any destination. Aliyah was afraid that her family would have disappeared and she would have to confront fate itself.

Why hadn't she heard any news from them in all those years? What could possibly have happened? Out of nowhere, a terrible thought seized her: what if a fire had broken out and taken them all? Then, just as quickly, she felt euphoric, seduced by the hope that perhaps her father alone had met his death and neither her mother nor her brothers and sisters had known the way to Hanan and Anwar's villa. But the joy was destroyed as swiftly as it had arisen; it was impossible that death could have even come close to that tyrant. Perhaps he had disappeared with a woman and the way to the villa was not known, since it was the old house that he had taken her to, where he had counted the bundle of notes twice, and then left.

Her walk towards home brought back the feelings of that day – the day of the picture, which was stored safely in her bag.

 

After her fight with the boys, he was waiting for her at home. In the rain she had walked slowly – just like now – as though to delay confrontation. But time marched on and the way to the room was short. There was no escape; she had come to the place where she slept at night and there was nothing to do but enter.

When Aliyah arrived at the door to their room she found it banging against the frame and was surprised that her mother had left it so, allowing their body heat to escape. She did not know that those were the orders her father had given, as he lay in his usual position stretched out on his mat, exhaling the smoke of his cheap cigarette and waiting in fury for his devil of a daughter to arrive. He wore nothing but a thin shirt and a pair of coal-coloured jeans. It was around that time that he had adopted the habit of twirling his moustache pensively, before picking up a small mirror and gazing into it. ‘My youth all gone, wasted and lost,' he would mutter. Then he would curse his wife, the woman who had embroiled him in a life of difficulties the moment he had married her.

What would he look like now, she wondered. Had he changed much? Would he recognise her? What would she say to him? That her mistress had thrown her out? Why had she thrown her out?

Aliyah's father was a dark, strangely attractive man. His skin was a golden, coffee colour and his voice deep and gruff. All of the women in the neighbourhood envied his wife, even more so after one unfortunate night when he had come out of the house and displayed his equipment for all of them to see. ‘It's so big, it needs four women!' they teased Aliyah's mother after that.

The women would turn green with envy as they watched Aliyah's mother stagger towards them in the mornings while gathering around the bus, to set out for the homes all over Damascus where they worked. Aliyah's mother never paid their comments any attention. Fate had caught her in a trap between pleasing her husband, who spent most of the time unemployed, fulfilling her employers' wishes, and taking care of her nightmare children, who would have her running after them in the middle of the night to drag them from the streets.

Even though she had worked in other people's houses since she had married him, when she had first realised that there would be no peace with this man and no money from him, she still retained an inkling of pride in being his wife. Yes, he plucked his pubic hair with the tweezers she used for her eyebrows, and yes, he insisted on having sex several times a day. ‘He is never satisfied!' she would tell the women of the neighbourhood. Her complaints were genuine, yet tempered with pride.

He would wake her up in the middle of the night, when her strength was spent from the day's work, and pull her out of bed, anxious not to wake the children. In the beginning, he would screw her just next to the bed, but then his daughters – Aliyah the biggest gossip of them all – began telling the neighbourhood women about what their father got up to at night. After that he became more cautious, dragging his semi-conscious wife into the bathroom – the space which doubled as a kitchen and was barely wide enough for two to stand. He would make her kneel, then mount her for a few minutes, before withdrawing quickly. At first, Aliyah's mother would cry, but once she got used to his behaviour and her movements became automatic, he no longer had to ask. She would take off her clothes and lay still beneath him and when he had finished, she would wash quickly, without looking him in the face. Afterwards she would return hastily to bed where she plunged into a deep sleep.

In the morning, she would gesture that her back was hurting, in the hope of just a single day's peace. ‘A woman who doesn't follow her husband's orders in bed doesn't go to heaven,' he would say, without meeting her eyes. Aliyah's mother shook her head. ‘And where's the bed?' As he fell silent, she grew a little more courageous and raised her voice. ‘I can't, not every day. My back's killing me from working all the daylight hours.' But he avoided meeting her eyes and when evening came, he would do just the same as the previous night, telling her that if he didn't have sex with her every day, he would find a prostitute instead. The threat always made Aliyah's mother cry, not because she was jealous, but because she feared that he would take the money needed for the children's food and spend it on a prostitute. She kept quiet, then went out to work, while he stayed at home with the children, who would do all they could to please their father. Even though it was she who did the house work and put bread on the table, she left it to him to give orders, as a man and the true master of the household. And so, when he asked her to leave the door open, she didn't say a word, sensing the extent of his rage. She decided not to interfere in his manner of punishing his daughter. After all, he was the man of the house and the girl's father, and a girl had to learn to face her elders, or so she repeatedly told herself. She didn't want him to leave, not because she loved him – whatever love there was had departed in the early days – but because she lived life by the words her mother had taught her: ‘Any man's better than no man at all.'

 

Aliyah stumbled along the dusty track, struggling to drag her bag. She tried to see through the curtains covering Hanan al-Hashimi's closed window.

‘Any man's better than no man at all,' she called out sarcastically. Aliyah listened to her mother's words as they fell into the air and her anger intensified, her mind returning to al-Raml.

 

On entering the house, she had found the door open and her father still stretched out on the floor. Her clothes were in tatters. She licked away her snot and dried the tears from her face, which was stained with streaks of chocolate. Now that she had stopped moving, her body had started to turn blue with cold and her breathing was loud and rasping. Tears came and she gasped for air as if teetering on the edge of an abyss. Aliyah stared at her mother, who forced herself to appear not to care; were she to take her daughter in her arms as she wanted to, she knew that the girl's father would fly into a rage. He didn't wait long before grabbing Aliyah by the hair and pulling her into the room, where he started to kick her, screaming death to her whore of a mother for bearing him daughters. Her mother began to plead with him to let the girl be, biting her lip hard each time he called her the daughter of a whore. ‘But I'm the one who puts food on the table,' she muttered repeatedly, her voice barely audible.

Aliyah had never known her father to lose it like that. She couldn't understand what provoked him to want to kill his own children. The thought of the first punch, or the first strike of his giant foot against her body filled her with terror, but she soon lost consciousness, only to wake up a few hours later with every limb of her body in pain. Her mother's refusal to go to work so she could look after her daughter – her way of punishing him for the beating – exacerbated his frustration. She wept all day as he cursed and swore, having realised that his wife would not be returning with the necessary provisions to fill the hungry stomachs surrounding him.

 

It was the same image of him which seemed to be coming towards her now, drawing closer from the distant horizon as she stumbled along on her high-heels. Aliyah paused for a minute and turned her head. The window was still closed and from a distance it seemed a dark, black speck.

She had no other hope but to return to al-Raml. The district formed a partial wall around Damascus, like a viper encircling the city. On the inside of the wall, the city was cramped, standing motionless before the parade of concrete houses and the peculiar clans of people setting out in every direction, in search of a morsel of bread.