Days of Ignorance (11 page)

A few days later, she adamantly refused to see him. She knew now that she was angry, but she didn’t know how to get rid of the anger, which had turned her into what he described as ‘a poisoned blade thrust into my heart’. She didn’t deny this, but she also didn’t tell him that he was the one who had thrust the blade when he chose to relate to her as though they were starring in some sappy Arab film: the star conceals his big secret from his sweetheart in the belief that he’s doing the right thing, which leads her to think badly of him. He revels in the role of victim until suddenly all the facts come out and she cries giddily, ‘Do you really love me that much, Sharif?!’ in response to which he nods his head with a smile before the words ‘The End’ descend on the screen over their heads. And, as the fairy tale goes, ‘They lived happily ever after.’ But life isn’t like films, and that’s part of the tragedy, since the other part is that in the rough-and-tumble of our everyday lives we forget all about films, and we don’t forgive ourselves when we try to turn our long, tumultuous lives into quick flicks with happy endings.

She’d decided not to blame him and had struggled mightily not to do so. She might have succeeded in keeping herself from blaming him. However, she wasn’t what she had been before. She couldn’t fight off the wave of grief that had flooded over her heart and spirit. And Malek couldn’t see any justification for that grief. Consequently, he was filled with a bitterness and resentment that he didn’t understand. He thought the source of her grief was that she was resisting her desire to run away from him. He voiced this thought directly at times and alluded to it at others. But she said nothing. She didn’t know how to make him understand that of all the feelings that had churned deep inside her – rage, resentment, confusion, amazement, and grief – grief was all that remained. All the other feelings were gone, and nothing was left but her old heartache. She didn’t know how to make him understand how painful it was for her to watch her lifetime – which she’d wanted to spend with him – slip through her fingers like cold water. Her days were devoid of even the shadows of the gaiety whose time she had thought had come, only to see it dissipate like a fleeting summer cloud. Out of the blue she’d discovered something else that also prevented them from committing themselves to each other. Besides color, there were other, unyielding restrictions. There was another barrier they would have to breach in order to reach each other. She’d thought for a moment that everything was about to fall into place. However, a blind force had suddenly pulled her back without giving her a chance to realize what was happening to her. Nothing on earth pained her the way it did for things to come too late. This was a part of her that Malek hadn’t understood. He’d tried, but he hadn’t been able to comprehend the pain that wrung her heart. How could she rejoice in something whose presence would only remind her of the long, painful time she’d spent waiting for him? And how could he understand her spirit’s anguish?

She was about to turn thirty – her old dream. She’d begun to explore whether it was possible for a woman to reach the age of thirty without a husband or young children in a country where a woman’s existence was only validated by having a husband or a son. She’d been waiting anxiously for her thirtieth birthday. Never once had she met a woman in these desert sands who was waiting for her thirtieth birthday or even thinking about waiting for it. But turning thirty was her unique obsession. During her teen years she’d thought it must be a magical event for somebody – anybody – to become thirty years old. So she’d started waiting for it, and what a long wait it had seemed to be.

At fifteen, people waited to become twenty so that they could seem grown-up in the eyes of those around them. She thought back on the dreams suspended there in the lavender sky of twenty, the expanse that opened onto infinity, the rashness, the sweet frivolity, the forgivable imprudence, the naïve ideas that made people think life could never betray them, and the heart that never tired of searching for a special sorrow, since sorrow is maturity, and happy people and those who laugh a lot are gullible folks who don’t know what life is about. As for the sorrowful, they’re the mature ones. The sorrowful are the children of life. She’d thought about all this. Still, all she’d been waiting for was her thirtieth birthday. She had believed – though she didn’t know why – that by the time she turned thirty she would have surmounted the obstacles in her life. And she thought she would reach that age with a heart that was still tender and glowing, a spirit that hadn’t been broken, and wisdom that was still intact.

God, Leen! Where were you going to get wisdom thinking like that?

She scoffed at herself as she remembered how she had imagined that once she turned thirty, she would experience profound happiness: a staid, thoughtful happiness, not a frivolous, light-headed happiness. But does happiness wait a lifetime before it comes? And is it possible for someone to describe happiness as being ‘staid and thoughtful’ or ‘frivolous and light-headed’ without being scoffed at?

Ha, ha, ha! Laugh, Leen. Have a long laugh over your naïve ideas. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Have a good long laugh that puts a miserable lump in your throat at the end of every ‘ha’ while the tears pour endlessly down. Ha, ha, ha. A person only turns thirty once. Ha, ha, ha. You’ve left thirty behind forever. You reached it once, Leen. Then you left it with a wizened heart, a tattered spirit, and no wisdom. Ha, ha, ha. Malek says, ‘You’re a flawless woman.’ No, you’re a woman who’s nothing but flaws, nothing but flaws, nothing but fl-a-a-a-a-a-ws. Ha, ha, ha.

Thirty!

What she had done was far less than she’d always thought she would. By the time her mother turned thirty, she’d given birth to her daughter, and to her sacred male Hashem. And now, her mother would look at her with a sigh – sometimes – surrounded by her stacks of books and papers. For all she knew, her mother might be wondering what she’d done wrong to make her daughter turn out this way, and whether she would forever be stuck with books and words she didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. She might be wondering what her daughter found in a world in which there was nothing but books stacked in neat rows atop the shelves or piled near her bed: a world of paper. Leen had never expected her mother to understand the secret that lay behind her attachment to a world that seemed suited not to a woman but to a man. When a man wastes his life on books, no one blames him. And the moment he comes to his senses (since books, like drugs, rob a person of his senses), life is there waiting for him. Life will always be waiting for the man, since he makes his life. As for the woman, she waits for hers. No matter how old he gets, a man can always start all over again. He’s bound to find a woman and have children. And he’ll find a woman and have children even if he remains attached to his books. As for the woman, well . . .

Oh, how a woman suffers!

And she had suffered. She’d suffered for a long time, certain that she had never been close to him in the past, and that she would never be close to him in the days to come. Depression hadn’t been her preferred choice. She’d striven mightily to recover the spirit that had once been hers, but she found herself alone, with no one to support her. And Malek? It pained her to realize that his love was no longer a haven where she could find refuge when life took her by surprise. It pained her even more to think – if even for a moment – that most of her suffering now came from this very love. As she spread out its large fabric in front of her every night, trying to mend its holes, she wondered if he was there on the other end doing the same thing. It agonized her to see herself having turned into a cold, hopeless machine. She would wake up tired after a fitful sleep, read a little and work a lot. She would eat and drink because she had to. She’d grown thin, very thin, as she waited to recover from the loss of her first hope. And when she didn’t recover, she promised herself not to let life torment her with hope ever again for fear that the wait might reveal something else she wouldn’t be able to bear. The moments pierced her heart as she thought about the fact that they – that is, all the moments that were passing with Malek far away – would have been more pleasant if he were near. But nothing had ever brought him near: not the letters, not the phone calls, not the furtive trysts. Nothing had brought him near, and nothing ever would. At least not now, or tomorrow, or the day after that. It would be a long time before he was near, if it ever happened at all. She would always think this way. It might not be to his liking, but it was the only way she knew how to think, and after all her years of living, it wouldn’t be possible for her to learn some other way. So, was she supposed to apologize for this? Should he blame her for shuttering hope’s windows as she fled from any glimmer of hope – as she fled even from seeing him?

For months he’d pressed her to let him see her. After despairing of the idea, he’d stopped insisting. Then, a few days earlier, he’d called. A long year had nearly passed since she’d learned of the ‘absolution’. It was mid-Sha’ban.

When he called her he said, ‘I’m in the mood for a pre-Ramadan picnic. I’m in the mood for
mushabbak
,
hamam al-barr
, and you.’

She remained silent. Any word she might think of saying would open up like a fresh wound. When she finally gathered the courage to speak, she said in a tone that she hoped wouldn’t betray her agitation, ‘You don’t get it.’

‘I want to get it. But I’ll never get it until I see you and we can talk. There isn’t a single part of me that hasn’t suffered, Leen. You think you’re the only one who’s suffering. Pain has torn me to pieces, but I still have hope.’

‘Hope!’

‘That’s right, even if it doesn’t sit well with you. Maybe I don’t understand why you don’t want to let yourself hope, as you put it. But you also don’t understand what it means to me to have hope where you’re concerned. I gave up on hope once before I knew you, and I don’t want to give up on it again. We should get together and talk so that we can know if we should swear off hope or hold onto it. Give it a try. You won’t lose anything. We met often before, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing for us to meet again.’

They were enveloped in a heavy silence. Then at last she said, ‘I’ll think about it.’

He smiled. She didn’t see him smile, but she knew he had. The fact that she knew it amazed her. She didn’t know if she would go to see him or not. However, she did know that if she went, she wouldn’t be the Leen he’d known before, the Leen he was expecting. Maybe she was a bit afraid of what he would find. She wondered if he would love her with this sick, troubled spirit of hers. However, she didn’t pause for long over the question. She was already thinking about their meeting: what would it be like after all this time? She was thinking about it as her cell phone flashed in the darkness of her room: Malek is calling, Malek is calling, Malek is calling. But she didn’t answer. She didn’t want to give in to the pressure he was putting on her. She wanted to go because she wanted to go, not because he wanted to see her.

In a cool room on the seventh floor of the Dar Al Iman InterContinental, they met for the first time in long months. When she looked into his face, she felt as though he’d suddenly grown old. He’d let his sideburns grow out, which made his face look a bit different, and handsome in a sorrowful sort of way. She went over to a window and looked out at the neon sign advertising the Al Ghazali Trading Company. It blinked on and off with agonizing monotony. Then she turned to him. He shot her a smile so sad it brought tears to her eyes. Anything at that moment could have brought tears to her eyes – even the doodles she noticed on a piece of paper he’d placed on a table.

When he reached out to touch her cheek, she instinctively pulled back. He knit his brow for a moment, but smiled forgivingly, since he understood that she hadn’t meant to hurt him. She was in pain. He was in pain, too. And here they were meeting after all these months like a couple of old friends who’d run into each other at a station, unsuspecting and unprepared. They both had things to say, but they didn’t know how to begin saying them or put their thoughts into words. They were traveling a secret, shared path in each other’s direction, but they’d lost their way. For a moment she wished she could cry. He brought out a pack of Marlboro Lights, then lit a cigarette and began puffing away.

‘O woman of the futile silence, is it not time for thy silence to be broken?’

She looked at him in some amazement, perhaps at his eloquence and the dramatic tone in which he had addressed her. Fiddling with her fingers, she said, ‘I didn’t come here to talk. I came to hear what you have to say.’

‘You’ve changed.’

‘I don’t deny it. Is that what you wanted to say?’

He put out his cigarette and drew up close to her. Her body went tense, and she prayed to God that he wouldn’t come any closer. He reached out and laid his hand on her left shoulder. He didn’t seem to understand that she didn’t want him to touch her – at least, not at that moment. She removed his hand quietly from her shoulder, then got up hurriedly and went to the bathroom. She shut the door behind her. Then, leaning against the door, she sat down on the cold floor and wept. The hum of the air coming out of the air-conditioning vent in the bathroom ceiling, the deadly silence concealed in everything, the smell of his cigarette smoke clinging to her clothes, and her certainty that he knew she was crying at that moment without knocking on the door to ask her what was wrong – all these things stood over her like terrifying mythical creatures. She saw the oyster shell closing around her and wished she could scream, ‘Hurry! Catch me before it’s too late!’ She washed her face. The water was cold and her face was hot. Then she came out of the bathroom, got out her
abaya
which was hanging in a cupboard near the door, and put it on. When she turned to look at him, she found him sitting where he had been before, puffing away on his cigarette.