The Proof of the Honey (4 page)

S
tories. And more stories. Stories of women. I had heard so many, and then forgotten them. Of love and jealousy. Of women clothed and unclothed. Of sleep and waking. Of divorce and marriage. Of those who fell in love and those who were unfaithful. Unspeakable chaos, and relationships so tangled that it would take an astrologer to unravel them. Women’s stories that resembled men’s stories—I was attracted to both. In every Arab city, the same stories. Stories of the kind you wouldn’t suspect in this world of
taqiyya
, of dissimulation, where people have learned to live their sexuality, as with other dangerous domains in their lives, with pious duplicity.

I am stretched on my back at the hammam in a working-class neighborhood of an Arab city. Men come here in the morning, women in the afternoon. Yesterday, I met Rajaa at the mixed-sex hammam of the Grand Hôtel. We were alone in the relaxing room following our treatment; there are few customers at that time of year. I was drowsing, insouciant and languid. Two men came in, and stretched out on the velvet cushions in the midst of the sumptuous Oriental décor. They were smoking and talking in loud voices. I glanced at Rajaa, who was quietly drinking tea and we understood one another. Our nap had been interrupted, so we fled together to the sands of the beach, far from the noise and smoke.

Our neighbor in Damascus used to take me with her to the cinema. I was the solution that she had arrived at with her husband to allow her to move with limited freedom in a city where she knew no one. In the darkness of the cinema I would see her head swaying rhythmically to the sound of the songs of Farid al-Atrash, whose face filled the screen, and it amazed me. I was too young to understand such stolen euphoria.

One day, I told Sulayma about these outings with our young neighbor. She concluded, categorically: “She must have been using you as a cover for her assignations.”

“No!” I yelled in protest. “No. She couldn’t have.”

She interrupted me: “In the darkness of the cinema, could you tell who was sitting on the other side of her?”

This time, I was the categorical one. “You don’t know what Damascus was like in those days. I used to go with her to the three o’clock showing. The only people you’d see there were groups of women with their small children. Your tendentious conclusions have no basis, can’t you see?”

She replied with a smile. “Why are you defending her, I’d like to know. Have you considered the usher, for example?”

I wasn’t defending my young neighbor. Vigilant, ever on the alert, I wanted to defend the images impressed upon my memory. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone chipping away pieces of my old stories and changing their meanings behind my back: I was defending my personal history.

At a later point in my childhood, one of our uncles, a ladies’ tailor, came from far away to sew clothes for all of us, our neighbors included. “He didn’t spare a single woman,” as my sister put it. That young neighbor with whom I went to the cinema was one of those he fondled. He spread the fabric over her, and then followed her curves of her figure with a sure hand. She blushed through the entire spectrum from pale pink to bright crimson; she wriggled, smiled in embarrassment, and said nothing. I watched the two of them while waiting impatiently for my turn to try on my new dress. I heard my adolescent sister yelling on behalf of our neighbor, “Uncle, that’s enough! Stop it! Uncle, enough!” Uncle never paused in his work.

I was young when this dressmaking relative came to visit. The stories would unfold in front of me but I wouldn’t understand much. All I know is that, after a long discussion with my mother behind the closed door of their bedroom, my father convinced his relative to curtail his visit and return to his wife and children in his distant city.

My adolescent sister was the instigator of this sentence. Years later I learnt that she had come to know of secret meetings that went much further than touching and hues of pink, a story of secret trysts. A story between the skilful tailor and a well-educated spinster neighbor of ours, who devoted herself to raising her nephews, as their own mother was ill. My sister feared that there would be a scandal and told my mother, who in turn also grew fearful. In order to get rid of the dangerous guest she invented an abridged version of the real story, one that was innocent but convincing, for my father. As usual, he believed her.

Some years later, when the neighbor in question was well over forty, she ended up grist for the gossip mill once more. She ran away with a taxi driver who worked the road from Damascus to Beirut and who was much younger than she. She had travelled with him a number of times accompanying the nephews on visits to the Lebanese branch of the family. She fell in love with him and he with her and they decided to get married. She knew full well that her brother would never agree and would consider the very idea an unforgivable crime: who would look after the children, with their mother sick in bed?

The family (rich, traditional, and hailing from the countryside) covered the story up. Quite simply, they erased the existence of the lovesick runaway, and her very name was consigned to oblivion. The news was passed on, in whispers, among the neighbors. In our house, my father would shake his head and repeat: “Ibtisam. Who would have thought it?” My mother would glance in the direction of us little ones, so that he would understand and shut up. So he kept his thoughts to himself, but could not stop shaking his head.

I was very young at the time. I confess I had forgotten all about her. Over the years she went right out of my head. I try to recall now what she looked like—dark, small, silky hair cut short, dressed simply. There was consensus among both sexes that she was sensible, skilful, intelligent, and a clever housekeeper, but she had been unlucky. They would crease their lips with pity at that last adjective. I remember her above all as kind. We younger children liked her because she would kiss us and give us a few coins whenever we saw her.

How did her story end? I don’t know. Her elopement with her young sweetheart was not the end; that was the beginning.

The next time I go to Damascus I’ll ask my sister for the details.

On the garden steps at Rajaa’s house, in front of the Seville orange tree and the roses in bloom, we exchange stories, mixing up the eras and places and characters. Her husband is away on business for a week, the two boys are at summer camp, and she is on vacation. She’s all mine.

Her husband was a colleague of ours at the University of Damascus. They fell in love and were married immediately after graduation. With Rajaa, everything is simple, and with me, it goes without saying, life is complicated. We were so different and others always marveled our friendship, and at how solid it was. I was the mischievous, cheeky one; she was sweet and obliging. She was at peace with the world, I was rebellious. We had always chatted a lot, but we had never traded secrets. We were content with allusions to our private lives; the rest we could only guess at. She knew only what I had openly declared about my life; I knew nothing about her secret life.

The scent of jasmine and the rustling darkness. The black cat on the wall opposite listens to our hushed words and fixes us both with a steady stare.

“And Maysaa? What’s her news?” I ask.

“I saw her last summer when I was in Damascus. Her husband died some months ago and her two sons are studying in the United States. I think she’ll go and settle there.”

“She’s living on her own?”

“Her mother’s with her.”

Maysaa’s mother was the tragedy in her life, or so I used to think. I remember how Maysaa’s tears mixed with mine on her wedding day. We were together in secondary school. Day by day I shared with her the story of her love for a relative of hers in Beirut, a boy about her age, of a modest background, and penniless, as her mother said. Her mother had an engineer in mind, scion of the family, who was more than twenty years her senior. Maysaa’s mother was a strong woman, and Maysaa was fragile and irresolute. She would whisper her refusal of the match in the morning and receive the would-be groom with a smile in the evening. We used to walk home from school together, each of us hugging her school bag, and she would tell me of her troubles. She told me how unpleasant her fiancé was: he hadn’t even tried to touch her hand, and he was miserly. She told me how she would sleep with her beloved but, she emphasized, she wasn’t crazy, she knew where to “draw the line.” Each new story increased my hatred of her mother. A few weeks after the results of the
baccalauréat
, Maysaa was married in the neighborhood church. I was there. She said goodbye to me and embraced me. We both wept and our tears mingled. Her mother’s smile trumpeted victory.

I went to visit her not long after she came back from her honeymoon. She was expecting her first child. She rubbed her belly, which hadn’t grown big yet, with a contented circular movement as she talked about the new house, the sumptuous furniture, her husband’s family, and the costly presents. The tears of love had evaporated and the bride’s face was radiant with happiness.

I said nothing. I was trying to understand how she had been able to betray her tears. I was trying to work out how not to betray my own. I was trying to forget her past words, her beloved, and her ambitions, and I made a pact with myself never to succumb like her.

“Draw the line,” said Maysaa. I was to hear this from many women, first in Damascus, and then here in Paris. All of them were careful to “draw the line.” I didn’t understand were this line was located. Or, more truthfully, I refused to understand.

I heard about it from a friend of my sister’s, Hyam. Tall, slim, with long naturally blond hair and large, round eyes, Hyam had a sweetheart who was at least ten years older than her. She’d tell her mother she was studying with my sister at our house. In actual fact she only stayed for less than a quarter of an hour. Then her sweetheart, Muhammad, would come by in his car to take her to his house. She’d do everything you could think of with him, then “draw the line.” The irony was that she was proud of her open relationship with her mother and would tell her everything. When I expressed my disbelief one day and said, “Everything?” she stammered and said, “Everything except Muhammad.” We used to read over his letters to her together and deconstruct them like a literary text. Muhammad was madly in love with her. The years passed and finally they got engaged and then married. Afterwards, neither my sister nor I heard any more about her.

Here in Paris I heard about “the line” from one of my neighbors at the university dorms. She was a Lebanese who was doing her doctoral thesis on a Lebanese poet with one of the orientalists. When her lover, a well-known Egyptian artist, visited Paris, she’d pack up her things and go and stay with him in his hotel. Their story was known to one and all. Despite this, she’d held fast to that good old line because she didn’t want to sully her family’s reputation, above all that of her two young brothers.

“Nobody knows what the future holds. You take a risk by living a relationship openly in front of everyone. What do you do if a relationship doesn’t end in marriage?” she would warn, and I would listen, looking all the while at the extraordinary painting that had pride of place in her neat room, a painting by her lover. Could he have depicted her like that if she hadn’t “drawn the line”? I wondered, believing that I knew the answer.

I would come across this expression in most of the stories I heard. It was easy enough to set off down the path, but once you came to that line, which way would you go? Arab women speak bitterly of men’s double standards in their intimate relationships, and the men talk with resignation of women’s schizophrenia. Is there any way out? Will we forever be yoked to such a fate?

I avoided seeing Maysaa again, pleading studies and exams as an excuse. Then I went abroad . . . I sometimes hear news of her from mutual friends. She had two boys and no girls, and lived happily ever after.

“Isn’t her mother sick?” I asked.

“Very. Maysaa is looking after her. I don’t think she’ll live long.”

“She’ll be on her own?”

Rajaa shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.

Perhaps the next time I visit Damascus, I shall get in touch with Maysaa. I could even stop by and see her. I could try to understand her. Rajaa, trying to find mitigating circumstances for Maysaa, responds quietly that the explanation is obvious, while I insist that I cannot find any justification for her behavior, even after all these years. I know very well that humans are self-justifying creatures, but I know too that time changes nothing. On the contrary, it emphasizes and reinforces our characteristics and our choices.

When I’m looking for stories I go to Rajaa’s girl friends. Every conversation we have eventually veers off in the direction that interests me. There’s no end of stories and I’m like the fires of Hell, insatiable.

Yesterday with Rajaa, as we were walking on the beach, her friend Haniya, a professor of sociology, was telling us about a book she’s putting together about the letters exchanged between her parents. About the love story that only ended with the mother’s death; the father died soon thereafter. Thirty years of rare mutual understanding. We spoke of love, marriage, children, endurance, infidelity, and divorce. A typical intimate conversation.

After a silence during which we couldn’t hear even our own footfalls, Haniya’s voice resumed: “Once I wanted to go abroad in connection with my work and my husband refused absolutely. I got angry. I decided to ask for a divorce, despite two children and ten years of shared life. I went to my aunt on my father’s side to tell her of my woes, and my determination. She gave me the following advice: ‘Listen, my dear. Spite the devil and don’t make a fuss about it. Go to the bathhouse and get pretty. Then go and meet your husband and make love with him as if it were the first time. The next day talk to him again about your trip . . .’”