Sarmada Read online

  “I slept for a long time, didn't I?” he asked her.

  “Not really. Only for four or five years,” she said, laughing gaily. “Come on, let's eat and then we can go register our marriage.”

  He thought for a moment. “Whatever you say.”

  She let out a deep sigh, from the worry and fear that had been plaguing her, as Hamoud ate silently. He caught sight of the compass leaning against the bolted door. That's strange, he thought. What's that doing here?

  3

  Buthayna

  Should I call it quits and go? It was the hope of escape that had me standing on the roof, surveying the whole of Sarmada. What was waiting there in that silent, stoic village? What was coalescing beneath its stones and bricks and in the torment of its people? Anyone who watched the sun set during that fiery summer would have felt a great womb contracting, getting ready to give birth to new creatures and lineages the earth had never seen before. You could tell it was on the verge of erupting. The Hauran Plain and its spirits were reflected in the remnants of dried-out plants and harvested fields, yellow as if sickly, stretching across the surface of this poor, confused, forgotten place in the south. Here, power lies exclusively in the dried-up brush and chaff and all it takes is one match to set everything alight. Fire consumes everything; it consumes every last stockpiled drop of water on this earth. And all it takes is one breeze to make dust the ruler of the place. Dust covers faces, despair shows in their eyes, and the people are slaves to the most acute thoughtlessness.

  One spark is enough to revive their desire for life. One clue from the place is all it would take to change things forever. Silent labor pains echo through the village, summoning up blood, and souls, and stones.

  I couldn't go back to the way I'd been, but I couldn't go forward either. I was stuck between two worlds, two moments, two histories. The East that had produced three faiths was getting ready to produce a fourth and this time it was going to be a different type of energy that would overwhelm the entire world. A world that would reflect only itself and wouldn't stem from any one person. After we'd convinced ourselves that the earth was round, it was inevitable that we'd put up with anything, and thus we could no longer pretend to kick the bad apples off into the abyss.

  Sarmada's the center of the world tonight, so, of course, I'm going to stay an extra day and listen.

  I wrote those words in my notebook and walked back down, having had my fill of the Hauran sunset.

  Sarmada had many names, “Mother of Trees,” “Windhill,” “God's Basin,” and all these names reflected the nature of the place and the character of its people: so modest they were naive, so excitable they were rash, so profound they knew all the different ways to be God-fearing.

  It was also the setting for many jokes and anecdotes, most of which stemmed from the village's ancient trade in cannabis before it was outlawed. They used to grow it in the fields, process it, and dry it in their houses. It made the best hashish in the East, which they used to export to Beirut and Jerusalem. During the hashish harvest, the village was drowned in good spirits and constant laughter, not scowling like all the villages around it. Men and women, the young and the elderly, everyone took part in the hashish harvest and it was like a festival. After the authorities cracked down, people lost the sense of humor they'd relied on to endure the passing of time.

  It was an ordinary mountain village in the Hauran and to excavate its memories meant looking for a gap in the layers of time. There was never any logical explanation for what happened, and everything that happened seemed illogical. But the truth, which the eye couldn't deny—and you'll see it if you have the chance to go visit—was that it was stunningly green, surrounded by olive groves on three sides, while the western flank was given over to a plain open to all possibilities.

  Growing hash and getting high was something the villagers had always done and there was nothing that could stamp it out. In Sarmada, history had always stayed at the margins. The people never got involved in it except when it was time for an armed revolution. They didn't have much patience for nonviolent resistance—no matter how celebrated—and they weren't good at inventing demands, or listening to reason, but when they rose up, when they felt their very existence was under threat, they were unstoppable; they tore down everything in sight. And yet they never learned how to preserve the achievements of the revolutions they'd launched throughout history. The thing they really excelled at was biding their time.

  They had the unshakable belief that their lives would be repeated, so there was no harm if one generation were lost. The thing about history, though, was that it usually took a place a very long time to know itself before it could submit, so time simply won through attrition.

  Sarmada was made of basalt, lately invaded by cement, and nestled in a valley, which stretched down from the mountain peaks and split into two branches, which encircled and embraced the village as they continued down toward the Yarmouk valley.

  Windhill was like a pillow the village rested against. The families who lived there were Christians and Druze who'd come to the mountains from the Lebanon more than three hundred years ago and the Bedouin were settled at the foot of it in an attempt to put an end to their nomadic lifestyles.

  The village was ringed by groves of olive and fig trees, and when all the opium poppies were ripped out of the fields after the revolution, the land was reclaimed for wheat, barley, grass peas, vetch and chickpeas, encroaching into the Hauran plain, and parts of the dark blue, rugged wasteland of basalt rock were also cultivated, so the village took on the appearance of a heap of life surrounded by a jungle of blue rock, tinged with black.

  The legendary Mother of Rams tree stood right in the center of the rocky wasteland, and there wasn't another green shoot among the silent stones in a radius of ten kilometers. The tree had become a place of pilgrimage for people longing to be fertile. They'd take the leaves and make a bitter tea out of them in the hope that it would bring their barren wombs to life. Sheep were slaughtered there and stories were woven around it, which all said that it was a blessed tree that fed on the blood of vigorous rams and would ensure the safety of a flock. The shepherds lavished the tree with their best rams whenever their flocks were attacked by wolves or other predators or if a deadly disease struck.

  The tree grew in a frightening and desolate rocky wasteland and it took its name from the offerings slaughtered over its roots. Over time it came to mark Sarmada's imaginary outer limits.

  The second famous tree was the pleasure-laced terebinth tree that stood on the edge of the valley. Stone-deaf Siman had looked after it for twenty-five years. It was an ancient tree that time had forgotten: it had survived the great volcano, three earthquakes, and more than thirty battles that had taken place nearby. The Turkish soldiers who'd been tasked with getting firewood for the Hejaz railway trains and had cut down and torn up a third of the forest on the mountain hadn't been able to cut it down. It was more than 4,000 years old, and owing to its great age, it grew new trunks, which then grew old and died and were replaced by others. But the mother tree remained there, fixed and towering, with sticky, moist clefts.

  The inside of the tree was moist and smooth and warm, and Stone-deaf Siman found it was a much nicer place to see to his needs than the usual taking of matters into one's own hands. Then it occurred to him that he might profit from the tree. He built a brick wall around the tree and hung up a curtain of hessian sacks, and he became the tree's official pimp! He was the one who found the customers, looked after it, and pruned it.

  The third famous tree in Sarmada stood in front of Mamdouh's shop. It was more than a hundred years old—a giant white poplar that stretched up far above the houses and became the preferred resting spot of all the migratory and local birds. On pleasant evenings, the bird chorus could be heard outside Sarmada, splitting apart, intertwining, a floating jungle expertly arranged by the birds themselves. Mamdouh the shopkeeper was worried that the tree's massive roots would destroy the foundation of his house
, so, three ruined chainsaws and four days of backbreaking labor later, he managed to cut it down. Every evening for weeks the sparrows of Sarmada would circle the void, their chirping choked, and many of them found they couldn't sleep in any other tree.

  As flocks of sparrows circled in the emptiness, frantically searching for their uprooted home and not comprehending how such a huge green tree could suddenly disappear, they began to spray their shit on the village below. They cheeped angrily in the sky above Sarmada for three whole days as Farida, stuck somewhere between alive and dead, gave birth to her child—her screams breaking through the lost sparrows' cries.

  Hamoud stood on the roof of the shed, performing the ancient custom: whenever there was a difficult birth, the husband would jump up and down on the roof over the room where his wife lay to help with the birth of the baby. For three days, Hamoud danced a manic Dabke on the roof, covered in bird-shit and people's scorn, but the child was finally born, and when he heard its cry and the midwife and neighbor women ululating in celebration, he came running down like a crazy man, jostling at the door, and then running over to the shop to buy walnuts and sweets for the happy occasion. The women inside the shed began muttering the name of God. The newborn boy had two pieces of flesh between his thighs. Umm Dhiyab washed the baby and swaddled him carefully before handing him to his mother. “Is it a boy or a girl?” asked an exhausted Farida.

  “A boy and more,” answered the midwife. “He's got two! Praise the Lord.”

  “I'm going to call him Bulkhayr,” said Farida. “His name's Bulkhayr.”

  Farida's shed saw two months of busy celebration and a pungent tea of boiled herbs was distributed to the people of Sarmada. The indomitably proud father carried his little boy against his chest and stayed up all night looking after him. He changed his diaper and cradled him. He told him stories about the great Arab explorers. He rubbed him down with olive oil and massaged his tender limbs. He did everything carefully and on time, and with a touching affection, as if he'd lost all hope of ever having a child and then suddenly been surprised by fatherhood.

  It was undeniable that ever since Farida and Hamoud had been married, she'd become a faithful wife and given her husband all her loyalty and love. Out of a combination of guilt and a longing for purification, she lavished on him the abundance of her body and womanliness, and shut and sealed once and for all the doors and windows of her past. But still she'd never expected that he'd treat her child with such love. When she finally decided to tell him the truth, that the child wasn't his, she found he already knew.

  On the day she'd decided to apologize and to thank him, the October War broke out and brought Hamoud's erstwhile happiness back with it, so she decided never to bring it up again, especially when she saw him climb up to the roof, watching ecstatically as the Israeli Phantom jets burned up near Sarmada. He enlisted in the army without a moment's thought and his enthusiasm took him all the way to the front line, where he joined the fighting over two days until the Syrian army reached Lake Tiberias. After the ceasefire came into effect on the Egyptian front, he returned with his division and took part in the war of attrition over eighty-one days, only to disappear again. He was most likely taken prisoner. After the war was over, he still hadn't returned. Some said he was dead for certain, while others who'd fought alongside him said that he was part of a group who'd all been captured.

  The people of Sarmada were busy mourning their martyr: Shahir Mansour was Sarmada's only fallen soldier. He was buried in an august ceremony that included a few eulogies, and the people of Sarmada donated money to build a memorial for him at the entrance to the town before Poppy Bridge. The flag of Sarmada flew for the martyr that day, for he was the son of the great revolutionary Hamad al-Mansour, one of the heroes of Syria's struggle against French occupation and the flag-bearer who'd distinguished himself for valor in the Battles at Kafr and Mazraa. The crowd was quiet and questioning—a certain lingering question made them uneasy. The Mansour family was the most freedom-loving and independent-minded family in the whole of the mountain region and they took pride in their long legacy of repelling anyone who came and tried to impose their will and laws on them. Their ancestor had refused every last Ottoman edict and his grandsons had fought against Ibrahim Pasha and twice decimated his army. The martyr's father had been a wanted fugitive until the French finally left Syria and his uncle had taken part in all the great uprisings. How could the heir of a family that considered freedom so sacred bring himself to kill his sister, who wanted only the same right to choose her own life partner, and as a result was slaughtered like a lamb?

  Two months had passed since the Mansour family's martyr was buried at Khashkhasha cemetery when Nawwaf went out of the parlor and let off a magazine of bullets to quiet the howling wolves. But when they went on howling even louder, he went up to the roof and started howling himself, imitating them, until the morning. After that he locked himself away at home, lost in other worlds, talking only to himself, and every time the moon was full and the sky was clear, he'd go up on the roof of the house and begin to howl.

  With the blooming of her motherhood and breast milk, Farida was struck by a creeping fear, a painful shame, which she quickly shook off. She'd made up her mind: she was going to purify herself of any remnants of her past life. She took her son to the village nurse, whom everyone called Doctor Salem, and he examined the two tender pieces of flesh between the little boy's thighs and discovered that they were connected at the base. After a few minutes, he turned to her and said, “This is a blessing, not some kind of punishment. Don't you ever think of having one of them removed.”

  She lived only for Bulkhayr and built her entire life around him. Her plants were no longer as lush as they'd once been, but the great joy she took in her baby caused her to withdraw from her cherished hobby. She decided it was enough just to have him circumcised like all the boys in Sarmada, whether Christian, Muslim, or Druze.

  One day when she went to get some of the grief-milk cheese out of the store, she saw it had been infiltrated by worms. She threw the whole lot out and stopped making and selling her life-changing cheese and drinks mixed with the strange-tasting milk.

  She went to the Hamza Majlis and asked the shaykhs to be inducted into her religion. She was refused time and time again and she couldn't find two shaykhs to support her initiation. To become a Druze initiate, there was a ritual: two shaykhs—two men or women—who were already initiates themselves had to sponsor her and take responsibility, in front of all the other shaykhs and God, that the inductee was pure of soul and had lived an unimpeachably moral life as required, and that they were confident that the inductee would abandon all traces of a worldly life. Unlike all the other religions in the world, there was no proselytizing. People decided for themselves when it was the right time to come into the fold because if they went back on their initiation, it was considered final and their requests for initiation would never be honored again. There was no set age for someone to be initiated into the religion and gain access to the six religious texts: as soon as a Druze man or woman had undergone puberty and was physi-cally mature, they were eligible—those who wished—to enter the religion. There's no rule that you have to be forty before you can become an initiated Druze, as the misinformed believe.

  As for the people who didn't want to enter, they were never compelled or chastised, and they weren't even required to live by the religious laws. They were simply left to fill their own spiritual voids however they pleased.

  After she'd tried and failed multiple times to be admitted to the religion, Farida headed to the church and met with Father Elias. She explained to him that she desperately needed God and that she was ready to accept her faith, but the shaykhs wouldn't let her. She asked him for a favor, and the graceful priest answered: “I'll do anything in my power to help you, my child.”

  “Do you think you could hear my confession? Maybe I can get God to forgive me with your help.”

  The priest laughed. “But, Farida, you belo
ng at the majlis. You're a Druze, my child.”

  “Yes, Father, I know, but what's the difference between a majlis or a church or a mosque? Aren't they all houses of God? God love you, hear my confession and let me repent.”

  Father Elias consented and took her over to the confessional. When they were finished, she asked him if he would baptize Bulkhayr, and he agreed.

  That evening, Father Elias went to see the head shaykh of Sarmada and broached the subject of Farida. “Who's the father of her child?” asked Shaykh Farouq.

  “He's from Sarmada, Shaykh,” said Father Elias. “It's better if we preserve her privacy and just help her. God's mercy knows no bounds.” Shaykh Shaheen agreed to initiate Farida in her faith, but on one condition: that she remain on the periphery, which meant that she'd only be allowed to read the commentaries on the Epistles of Wisdom, and not the Epistles themselves, until the fitness of her soul could be confirmed, and that when the shaykhs read from the essential texts of wisdom in the majlis, she would have to step outside.

  The sight of Bulkhayr's little moon-like face sent Farida into raptures of a mysterious, soul-tickling joy, and she wanted nothing more than to be the sort of mother he could be proud of. She wore black in mourning for Hamoud, who'd disappeared into the fog of captivity or into an unknown and unverifiable death. Her life changed completely and became an unending stream of helping others and joining in their occasions, both happy and sad. Her healing herbs and potions were accepted now with great gratitude. The total transformation in her life could hardly be related to regret, which the men of the cloth would have preferred. “She's still got that bold look in her eyes,” whispered Shaykh Farouq to Father Elias, meaning she hadn't been broken, hadn't been moved by the required apologies and self-reproach to plead intercession from God's vicars on earth.