Sarmada Read online

  Her shed, shrouded and burdened with all those secret teenage rendezvous, threw open its doors to a new life. It had lost its former luster, but cloaked itself in something new. Sarmada was, after all, open to certain changes: young people in the peaceful village who longed for change and were affected by everything that was happening in Syria and the Middle East began to form cells. The farmers were surprised to find a bunch of communist youths volunteering to help them with the reaping and harvest. Those youths, with endless energy and enthusiasm for change, managed to win many farmers' hearts before the government set the Baathists on them and ruined their reputation by claiming that they were all godless infidels calling for sin and anarchy.

  Farida was amazed at how her powerful desires had transformed, as though a cold cloak had fallen over her warm body, sending her into a kind of hibernation. The insuppressible desires lay dormant, and little by little she was transformed into an incomparably loving and gentle mother, even imprudently so. Had her desires disappeared or merely paused? She didn't want to know. She was too busy celebrating her motherhood and she left life to take whatever path it chose.

  She didn't know that lust was like light, that it never vanished and could never end—or that it could even be inherited and passed on to that angel-faced boy. She'd deposited five years of delirious passion into his tiny body, where it grew, serene and untamed, and would soon break out.

  Umm Salman al-Khattar died peacefully, leaving a nearly twenty-five-year-old Buthayna all alone in the big house. She'd grown up suddenly and the people who knew her could see how she'd matured. Her almond eyes grew seductive; her wheat complexion had given way to a bright and faintly ruddy whiteness; her body matured and filled out. She was engaged to marry her cousin Hussein, who'd immigrated to Venezuela. Once the October War was over and the soldier-sons of Sarmada had returned, in the company of one martyr and five casualties, one of which was Hussein, but without the captured or vanished Hamoud, Buthayna and Hussein al-Nimr got engaged. He left for Venezuela eighteen months later with the expectation that Buthayna would join him in the very near future.

  One day he came and sat beside her as she was peeling and eating prickly pears and asked her to follow him somewhere more private so they could talk freely. “Buthayna, have you ever been in love?”

  She answered with a virgin's bluster, “You think you're the only man who loves me?” Then, “So do you love me?”

  Hussein laughed so hard she had to shield her ears from his famous guffawing.

  “I fell in love with you just right now.”

  He'd noticed the dimples appearing and disappearing on her glorious, smooth cheeks, and her slightly sad, but thoroughly bold face. He moved closer to plant a kiss on her cheek, longing to feel those alluring dimples, and she let him, but only for a moment, and then she pushed him away, the unmovable coquette: “Now have some prickly pear and behave yourself.”

  She was deeply in love with Hussein and his departure broke her heart. She was infatuated with his smell, his sense of humor, his looks, his irresistible charm, the spark of lightning in his downcast eyes and the thunder in his laugh. The day he showed her where the bullet had destroyed half of his left hand, she took the initiative, for the first time, and kissed the old scar. She overwhelmed him after having starved his heart with repeated rejection. She smelled his sweet, permeating scent, she tasted his cruel, astonishingly soft lips, and when she slid her hand through the thick forest covering his chest, she felt the embrace of absolute security and she knew that she wanted to be with this man forever and ever.

  His absence caused her days to lengthen and time to slow. She did everything she could to hide the void and blunt the edge of waiting. Although she waited for Hussein, after two years' separation, she'd forgotten what he looked like. And yet she had memorized that wild desperate look in his eyes and tried to embroider his features onto the faces of her pillows. But her most treasured bliss came when she saw the postman Nasser zipping along on his creaky motorcycle from Poppy Bridge to bring the village news of the half of their sons who'd left in recent years for Venezuela, Latin America, Libya, and the Gulf.

  Nasser the postman would park his motorcycle, take out his famous chair, and plant himself down. He'd begin passing out the letters and most of the time ended up reading them aloud to the recipients in exchange for food or clothes or whatever the people had to give. He usually came to Sarmada, where half the houses waited in suspense, twice a month. With every letter, Buthayna lit a candle at the Mother of Rams tree and left a few coins, muttering: “May your blessings grow, Mother of Rams. Keep him and help him in God's name. I'll bring you a big ram, just let me get word that I'm going to join him.”

  She lived for Hussein's passion-and-longing-scented letters. She watched over his absence by candlelight, and fought back dejection by making blankets and embroidering. And when on lonely nights she longed for him, she took the pillow embroidered with his sweet face into her arms and drifted off to sleep, remembering his silk-woven laugh, only to see him in her dreams and wake up in a sweat.

  She learned to spin wool and knit winter sweaters with clever designs. She made baskets out of straw. She decorated the boxes in her house with muslin flowers. She embroidered her family's faces onto her white sheets, and she embroidered Hussein's face dozens of times: smiling Hussein, gruff Hussein, pensive Hussein. She fought against erasure and absence with her embroidery needle, but her hate for Farida remained, clear and distinct. She hated her in the very depths of her soul.

  Farida, who'd tried in every way imaginable to make gestures of friendship toward the young woman, had given up and let her be, but she always kept her door open in case the angry young woman eventually settled down.

  Farida could see that Buthayna was searching for something, anything at all, to settle her mind, like all those who claim to believe in God's will but deep down are fatalists and expect to understand death's tricks with nothing more than their cool reason. They search for an explanation, for reasons behind death's randomness and the mysterious policy by which it selects its victims. They want to understand its sickle, how it's able to cut down souls and conquer life.

  It's an important and peculiar controversy, with shades of splendor and resentment. Death reaps and life sows. Death is real and life is but a passing moment. In Farida, Buthayna found both the cause and the causer and so drowned out the questions raised by death in the roar of hate for its cause.

  At Umm Salman's funeral, Buthayna sat by her mother's head as the other women, relatives and non-relatives, wailed and mourned and eulogized the deceased. When they took the body to the men's section for them to pray over, Buthayna didn't scream or tear out her hair, she simply laid a kiss upon her mother's cheek and calmly said farewell. Farida was the closest to her out of all the guests and she held her tightly like a sister and walked her back to the al-Khattar family home.

  The forty days of mourning passed uneventfully. Every evening without fail, Farida came to condole with Buthayna, to prepare food for those who came to pay their respects, and to help her with the housework. Six months after Umm Salman had passed and eight months after she'd last received a letter from Hussein, loneliness shrouded Buthayna's heart and she was exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot, her body sapped, and her mind cautioned that the worst was yet to come. Her troubled soul gave up on the solace of embroidering absent faces and clutching pillows stuffed with emptiness. The faces she'd created with her adroit needle had become sad and gloomy and began to disappear behind elliptical threads in which the images recurred infinitely.

  Farida came to her and took her by the hand and led her back to the shed. She brought her an infusion of anise, chamomile, and thyme to which she'd added a few other herbs, and this put Buthayna into a deep slumber for a whole day and a half. When she eventually woke up, she saw Farida in a different light and when she saw Bulkhayr skipping across the floor of the shed, she was suddenly giddy and guilty. At four and a half, Bulkhayr was an unbelievably cheerful b
oy. Farida had let his hair grow out and it would stay long like that until he went to school as a vow she'd made at the Shrine of Shihan. That was the saint Farida had chosen out of a great many shrines to become the boy's protector and shield him from all harm.

  “Beware the evil eye, Farida. Keep an eye on him and may God protect him for you.”

  Buthayna was worried that her envious eye would curse him. He was a charmingly rambunctious boy and he had the kind of brilliant laugh that would scratch your heart. Between the delight of playing with Bulkhayr and waiting for the postman to come, the time passed in trepidation, over an undercurrent of sharp and stinging worry, her left ear constantly telling her that bad news was waiting for her.

  The postman got to the big house in the evening. He was so experienced that all he had to do was feel a package to know what was inside. In all honesty, he used to open up the letters masterfully, read them and then seal them back up before he delivered them so he would know how much his tip should be, based on what the message contained. He handed her the letter and quickly left, and as she watched him disappear in the distance, she knew that bad news awaited her. When the postman ran off without even waiting for a tip, you could be sure that the news wasn't just bad, it was catastrophic.

  She read the letter through once, and she needed all the strength in the world to go over it again. It was only a few lines long and began, “Dearest Buthayna”:

  “By the time you get this letter, I'll be in America. The situation here isn't like you think. Everybody who said that Venezuela was a land of dreams was lying. I don't even know what dreams they were talking about. I'm exhausted, Buthayna, I'm completely worn out. After all these years, I still don't have anything to show for it. I'm going to go try my luck in America. I swear by God and the soil of Sarmada, that you won't leave my thoughts—not even for a moment—but I don't want you to wait for me hopelessly. You're free, Buthayna. Free from the moment this letter reaches you. I hope you find a good man that deserves you and that you forgive me. Please forgive me, Buthayna.”

  She read the letter over and over again. Two burning teardrops welled up and slid down her flushed cheeks and she calmly wiped them away, hiding them with the rest of the letter, and from that day forward, her nights stretched mercilessly on without end. She took refuge in her mutilated solitude, rent by the mania of longing, desire, and frustration. She spread his letters out around her, stripped off all her clothes, and put his shirt on over her bare skin. She summoned the photos in her mind, rubbed bare by her imagination's thumbing, and placed a soft pillow between her thighs and sat there, bucking against it. She ran her hands over her body and let out a moan that broke through the stifling stoppage of loneliness and longing. She woke up the next morning and began to collect all the things that had anything to do with him: his letters, his gifts, the sweet photos he'd sent her, and then she lit a fire in the oven and threw in some husks. She made some dough and kneaded it and then she fed the fire with the souvenirs and sat there making loaves of bread from the memories that only days ago had stubbornly refused to be dislodged.

  When she was finished burning everything connected to him, she was left with a stack of pitas, delicious flatbread, and manaqeesh with zaatar, kishk, and thick yoghurt. After she was finally done cooking him, or burning him, she took a few bites of those years of renunciation and shared the rest with the neighbors. She wasn't surprised to hear some of them say, “Thank you so much, Buthayna. Your bread's the most delicious of all.” One of her neighbors told her it felt as if a mysterious burden had been lifted off her chest.

  She tried to remember his face, but she couldn't. She was slightly disconcerted to find that her memory held no duplicate image. “How could I have forgotten his scent? He's vanished as if he was never there to begin with.” She discovered that the way to heal the devastation of distance was to gather everything, chew it up, and give it all away. She exiled him from her heart, although in truth, she'd only disguised him. For a moment, she felt she'd been emptied of everything that had to do with him, blank just as she ought to be, renewed and awaiting the blooming days that she knew would come, now that the traces of that bitter separation had all been wiped away and the colorful trunk of her fennel tree-beloved had burned up in the oven's fire.

  Her body was vigorous once more and the pores that had stifled her and drowned her body in an ocean of longing reopened. She wrapped herself in yearning's silk and took comfort in the vague hope that one day in the warm Caribbean sun, her body would uncover itself for her departed lover and thaw out from the torpor of frozen passion. But he was squirreled away inside of her, deeply rooted, and every time she destroyed him, he was born again. She was forced to ask herself a painful question: what did she want from him, a story or a child? If what she wanted was a love story, then, by all means, give it balance, give it color. Let the picture be distorted, let the joy sit uneasily; that, after all, is the circumstance of a woman in love, that's the inevitable result of his great absence and there was no reason why she couldn't shift her affection toward someone else. But if it was a child she wanted, then why not simply get pregnant by someone else? Why not simply marry whatever man would give her a child?

  She arrived at a peculiar conclusion: a child is an ending, and every story begins with a potential child. She found her own wisdom compelling, and it seemed to relieve her of her anxious burden. She'd never once dreamed of being a mere womb for his child, but rather the heroine of his romance, and that realization took the faintest edge off the pain. She packed up some of her things and went over to Farida's shed. She didn't say a word about it; they just exchanged the latest village gossip as Farida lit the stove and made a pot of yerba mate, and then they sat there, drinking green cupful after green cupful of yerba mate flavored with lemon and cardamom.

  With her veteran woman's eye, Farida could see how Buthayna had matured even as she tried to evade her glance, chipping in eagerly and washing down the floor of the shed as she sang, or to put it more precisely, keened funereally. Farida prepared her a herbal mixture to cure heartache and threw in a few special ingredients that she kept around for special moments like this. She wished she still had some grief-milk left. After the mixture had steeped for two and a half hours, she strained it and added a pinch of wormwood to heal the spasms of loss. She brought her concoction over on a wicker tray and poured it into a ceramic cup. She gave Buthayna a motherly, or big-sisterly, look.

  “I'm not feeling well, Farida,” said Buthayna. “I don't feel at all well.”

  “I know, my dear. I know. You'll feel better very soon.”

  With her own hands Farida fed her a sandwich of thick yogurt and mint leaves and then told her to drink the drink down in one go. Although Farida had gotten rid of all her grief-milk, she still knew which herbs could cure a broken heart. In only a few minutes, Buthayna's tears began pouring freely. She let out all the anticipation, everything it had brought with it and everything surrounding it. She flushed it out of her heart's womb with those tears she'd locked away ever since the sobbing plague had struck Sarmada.

  She cried until her eyes were parched. Her soul was bathed and stretched wide open to force out all those pillow-embroidered faces and to announce a new beginning. She ran home and rummaged through the granary. She pulled out the box that contained al-Hazred's book on the secrets of the dead and then she told Farida all the secrets that were hidden in the depths of her soul and how she'd almost killed everyone in Sarmada with the soothsayer of Kanakir's arsenic. Farida took the box of manuscripts and hid it in the chaff store to look through later; for now she turned all her attention to Buthayna, who took great comfort in her presence. Those were days of confession, sobbing, and purification for them both.

  At the end of the week, the two women sat together in the evening after Bulkhayr had settled into bed and decided to have a sugaring party to get rid of their unwanted hair; a parallel means of washing themselves free of love's burnt-up gunk and being purified in the depilatory pain. Far
ida had suggested the idea in order to get Buthayna out of her bereavement once and for all, and also to make sure that the slate was wiped clean; she knew instinctively that two women could never make up and clear the air of the hatred between them unless and until they were naked together.

  Farida heated up three potfuls of water to which she added lemon peel, quinine leaves, and mint as the bathroom filled with steam. Buthayna was making up sticky strips of beeswax, rose water, and lemon juice. “Do you have any ginger?” she called to Farida.

  “Look up on the shelf.” Buthayna radiated joy as she ran her eyes over the stopped-up, long-necked bottles of spices arranged on the shelves, so she didn't even notice the suspicious looks she was getting as she ran her hands over the curves of her body.

  Farida was watching Buthayna stealthily from the corner of the bathroom. She looked exhausted from making the depilatory, and you could clearly see her vigorously rising and falling breasts and protruding nipples under her yellow blouse. Farida felt a sudden frisson in her blood, and when Buthayna turned around, her eyes fixed on her full and supple bottom as it swayed. “Lord help me,” she muttered pleadingly. “What's wrong with you, Farida?” she snapped at herself, rebuking her mind for the surprise of her body's summons. Desire is blind and its true motives unknowable. She did a quick accounting and found she'd never—not once—longed for another woman before. So how come she'd suddenly fallen into this notion's grasp? How had it infiltrated a soul made pure by repentance and motherhood? She cursed herself, cursed the curse of the body until she finally let out something almost audible, warning herself: “Don't, Farida. Don't you dare. Don't even think about it.” She sat down and began to recite some supplications and verses that were supposed to drive away a husbandless woman's demons, although only she and her worried soul could hear her.