Sarmada Read online

  It was only when she arrived at the gate of her new house and Izz Allah helped her down from the horse that she realized exactly what she'd gotten herself into. She wasn't on her way to a palace of airy pleasures, but rather to a den of acts antithetical to her innocence. She missed her friends and her games. She wanted to turn back, to put an end to the exhausting hubbub, to run away from all those celebrating guests, to take refuge in the nearest wheat field and outlast whoever came looking for her. But Izz Allah had already walked over to help her down.

  She pushed his hand away and said as loudly as she could, “Move your hand, you piece of shit. I can get down myself!” The sentence froze the young, seventeen-year-old groom, who’d been afflicted with this truculent girl, to the spot. He was paralyzed with embarrassment and found he couldn’t retreat from the guests’ eyes.

  Then Khayzuran shouted, “Slap her toothless, the little bitch!”

  Futoun gripped the horse’s halter tightly in preparation for setting off far away and answered her, “You! Why don’t you eat shit, you whore?”

  Those were the last two insults she ever said in public.

  Izz Allah failed his exams for the third time because he discovered that the topography of Futoun’s body was more deserving of his attention than the geography of the Arab world in his textbook and that her dizzy-making singing was easier to memorize than the rules of Arabic poetry.

  Saliha al-Kanj imposed a tough regime on the new family. She was anxious for an heir and wanted Futoun to get pregnant straightaway, so she set down a strict diet and subjected her daughter-in-law to monthly examinations. She was constantly asking about her periods and making certain for herself that they were, in fact, doing “it” on fertile days. At the end of every monthly cycle, she waited with bated breath for the girl to be late, but she was always disappointed.

  She forced Izz Allah to eat honey mixed with asafetida and nuts and she prepared him special dishes that were supposed to boost fertility. She held the headstrong girl to a military schedule of eating, drinking, sleeping, laundry, and bathing, until the young couple got totally fed up and decided they’d confront her together. Futoun was the catalyst, of course.

  When they went into Saliha’s bedroom, Izz Allah began stuttering and stammering, but she just gave him an icy look that froze his hands: “After you have a son, you can do whatever you want. Until then, not another word. Now go to your bedroom, you two.” They withdrew, holding onto each other for support and fighting back their disappointment, al-most breaking out in laughter.

  It took three years of carrots, sticks, abnegation, and chafing under the strictures of Saliha's regime for the first signs of pregnancy to appear. Saliha was fed up with this girl, who needed re-raising from the start, and had begun to worry she'd made a bad choice, but her patience finally paid off, and then she even let up a little bit and on her insomniac nights recalled the story of al-Bunni and the bird curse. Futoun's motherly instincts caused her to give into Saliha's indomitable strength. She kept to her south-facing bedroom, prevented from receiving friends. The tyrannical woman's rules were clear and they applied equally to her husband, the descendant of al-Bunni, who was confined to the parlor; he was more like a figment of the imagination and no one paid much attention to him. He was only allowed to attend to the fig orchard, to harvest, and to make prognostications about the intentions of the clouds: would they rain heavily this year or would they head westward to the Mountain of the Bearded Shaykh?

  Saliha, who'd crushed her own husband under her thumb, understood that if he didn't have a system and priorities and a job to do, the family would fall apart, which was why she'd imposed her tough regime on everyone. Even her poor daughter Rahma, who'd been taken out of the second grade to look after her brother, when her job was over, when Izz Allah had finally escaped death, was surprised to find herself consigned to the ranks of the celibate. She ascended to the first echelons when her mother turned away the only suitor who'd ever dared to ask to marry her:

  “We don't have any daughters for marrying.”

  The excuse given was that the boy's father had collaborated with the French. Anyone who even considered Rahma had to make allowances for her fearsome mother, with her uncanny memory of all the mountain region's lineages and ancestral foibles. None of the potential daredevil suitors could pretend to be free of any of the disgraces committed by their forefathers and preserved in her unholy memory.

  It was true that the other three daughters had miraculously managed to escape spinsterhood, but Saliha gave her sons-in-law more than enough grief and humiliation as she revealed to them every false step on their family trees. When Saliha finally realized that things could never move forward this way, she loosened her prohibitive conditions, but Rahma had already been to the mountaintop of her solitude and decided to carry out the mission that had been chosen for her: she vowed to look after her brother and his family. “I don't want to get married,” she told her mother. “I want to help raise my brother's children.”

  Thus Rahma exited the domain of categories. She lived on as little as possible. She made her living from her Singer sewing machine, gave her love to the animals and hens, and shared her capacity to rear with everyone in a ritual that bordered on the sacred. Rahma never changed. She stayed in the same clothes for decades, kept to her old familiar routine to this very day, her same gentle spirit, rather like a saint. She never left the environs of Sarmada, an area of twenty square kilometers, except for twice in her entire life. Once to work as a maid in Beirut like a lot of other girls from the mountains during the unification with Egypt, when the country was plagued by drought, locusts, and the secret police, and the population was subject to poverty and hard times, worse than anything the mountains had ever seen before in their entire history.

  She went to Beirut, but she couldn't remember anything about it except for how she'd broken the china. She cried for hours and told the Beiruti lady of the house, “I wish it was my hand that broke, ma'am, and not your china!” The woman didn't say anything, she just turned and walked away. Not three seconds had passed before the flutter of pity felt for teary-eyed Rahma had worn off; this girl had come from the south of Syria, along with dozens of other girls under the age of seventeen from the Druze and Alawite Mountains to work as servants in Beirut’s mansions and villas. To help their folks, tormented by drought and Nasser’s informants; domestic spying was the only idea that took root in Syria after the catastrophe of unification was over.

  These were the people who’d become famous for their boundless generosity in the days when Ottoman tyranny drafted the people either into the military or hard labor and they were besieged by Janissaries and locusts. God was angry at the Levant. The mountains remained, thriving and fawned over by the Turks. They continued to enjoy the freedom to shelter those who asked for protection from Ottoman tyranny, and thus the mountains turned into a thorn in the side of the Sublime Porte and the focus of constant and merciless handwringing. They spread rumors about the people who lived there—what godless heretics they were. And their enemies even got bribe-inclined shaykhs to issue fatwas excluding the Druze from the communities of protected minorities and making it a sin to eat or drink with the Druze. They wanted to tie the area up in a sectarian conflict to disturb the cozy hospitality afforded to refugees and fugitives from the rotten justice of the Turks.

  When famine struck the Levant, the parlors of the mountain houses welcomed people fleeing from Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, the Hejaz, and other parts of Syria. They fed and clothed them, and shared all that they had with those who’d come to the mountains seeking help. They opened their doors to people regardless of sect and offered safety, food, and solace. The mountain region saved more than 50,000 refugees from famine, disease, and Janissary corps impressments. But eventually those memories were squeezed out because Sarmada, like the rest of the mountain villages, only ever talked about the tragedies that befell them. They never bragged or patted themselves on the back, and everything was forgotten a
fter independence.

  The mountains gave up 2,231 martyrs, many of whom were killed defending Damascus, Hama, Idlib, Talkalakh, the Beqaa, the Hauran, Marjayoun, and Rashaya al-Wadi, while the rest of Syria combined only gave up 1,800 martyrs in the struggle for independence. After independence was won, the leader of the revolution, who was a son of the mountains, simply returned to his fields to eat from his own harvest and to wear what he wove himself. He returned home, renouncing power and politics, and opened his parlor up to anyone in need.

  So why then did someone who'd helped to write the history of his country with his own blood and toil have to watch as some of his daughters found nothing for their futures except to go to Beirut and work as maids? When they asked Sultan Pasha al-Atrash what he thought about the government of independence, he had only one thing to say: “It makes you long for the days of the French occupation.”

  Rahma had shouted with the crowd of villagers on the border of Sarmada for hours when Nasser came to visit the mountain region in 1960:

  Hey Gamal,

  look, we said,

  you can take our men,

  but give us bread.

  She'd expected the inspiring leader to do more for the people who believed so earnestly in him and his vision.

  Nasser waved to the crowds, and he did actually take the men, but to prison. And his corrupt regime managed to leverage the isolation and poverty of the sons of the revolution so they had no choice but to send their daughters to Beirut to work as maids, and the government brought them drought and snitches, but you know, the bread, it never came.

  Saliha, who'd only very reluctantly agreed to let Rahma go work in the mansion of a well-off relative, didn't sleep for an entire week, and then she made up her mind. She went there herself, broke into the mansion—not giving a damn who was home—and dragged Rahma back to Sarmada. It was the first time in her life that she had allowed her affection to show in public, and she squeezed her daughter tightly against her chest. She brought out a few gold lire she'd been saving up for times like this and supported the family until the drought passed.

  The second time Rahma left Sarmada, she disappeared for twenty days and no one had a clue where she'd gone to, but then she just turned up again with a self-assured smile and a vague caginess about where she'd been, which she never disclosed. The thing no one knew was that she'd gone to return something to Hamza's family that her father had entrusted to her; it was something he'd been given on the day of the famous battle of Musayfara. Hamza al-Yusuf and five of his sons were flag-bearers that day and they were all martyred in battle. Before Muhanna breathed his last in the arms of his friend Shaheen, Rahma's father, he gave him a rosary and a silver ring with a precious stone, and asked him to give them to his wife. Shaheen was wounded in the battle and fled from the mountains to Wadi Sirhan with a group of fighters who rejected any talk of amnesty and remained there for ten years until the national government took power. Only then did he return, and with his companions searched everywhere for his comrade's widow, but he failed to find any trace of her, so he held onto the rosary and ring and charged Rahma with returning them to their rightful owner. And that's exactly what she did, although she kept the secret to herself. She traveled to the Eastern District and found his wife Mudallala and her son Hamza, whom she'd named after his martyred grandfather.

  Rahma gave her what she’d come to give her and returned home.

  Rahma’s twenty-day disappearance gripped Sarmada and a whole saga’s worth of stories were woven around her absence. No one could even bring themselves to think that Rahma had gone to meet a man, and so Sarmada greeted her absence with consternation and it kicked their imagination into overdrive. The disappearance of a woman with such a great, though unnoticed, presence, unless caused by her death, is bound to cause a disturbance in the lives of her fellow humans, and the animals and even the plants around her. But the last person to see her could tell that she’d followed al-Bunni’s old trail and disappeared.

  When she returned, life filled the house and questions filled their eyes. The smell of manure wafted off the burning cow chips. The troughs of the bay cow and the donkey were filled with moist grass and brittle straw, and the boughs were trimmed on the giant mulberry tree, which had been planted back in 1927 when the foundation of the house was laid by Abu Aboud al-Dhib, the most famous builder in the whole of the western district and the father of Aboud Scatterbrains, who would die of a heart attack caused by intense joy when Farida agreed to marry him.

  The floor of the house was made from salvaged Roman bricks that dated back two millennia. Some of them still bore the markings of the ancient temples and the figure of an ancient Roman deity looked out from the mortar where they made their kibbeh. Out in front of the house was a vegetable patch, in the center of which stood the young mulberry tree. They used to raise silkworm larvae on its leaves in the first half of the century before synthetic silk infiltrated the market and wiped out the venerable trade. Her every morning began with the call to the dawn prayer coming from the direction of the Muslim village of Busur al-Hareer and then she’d put on her gauzy headscarf, repeat the name of God a few times, mutter some prayers, and get up to attend to her chores. She let the lambs out and fed the cow. A lamb would butt her playfully and she'd slap his face in jest: “Just wait for the Feast of the Sacrifice, my little kebab. Please God make its tail big and fat for our sake!”

  She picked up the pace and lit a fire in the stove: “Dear Lord, the dough snuck up on me! It's already risen.” And then she began to bake her delicious rounds of bread on those dewy mornings.

  Singing, bleating, and the music of life filled the air as the day broke and the bread browned. She went over to the cow and washed its udders, and then the sound of milk crashing in the pan could be heard along with her mumbled blessings and “in the name of God”s. She swept the floors of the house, let the grazing animals out to graze, and all the while kept up her constant conversation with the many animals.

  The wait for rain had gathered all the children together to begin the rites of rain-summoning. They carried ceramic dishes from house to house and were joined only by widows, whose prayers were heard more loudly in the highest heaven than the prayers of married women, and they repeated:

  O mother of torrents, inundate us!

  At the shaykh's house, accommodate us!

  If it weren't for him, you'd still await us!

  He's always happy and willing to fete us!

  And they followed that with another poem:

  O mother of torrents, O Salman,

  Water our thirsty plants!

  O mother of torrents, O Shibli,

  Water the plants till they're dribbly.

  O mother of torrents, O Dayim,

  Water our plants till they're slimed.

  Only a few days later, the downpour arrived.

  When the rain came, out came the wild radish and gundelia and cockscombs and mushrooms and chamomile and mallow and chicory. And the harmony of the modest, not very green, but very rich place was recalibrated, for no man wronged nature and nature was never stingy toward man. Rahma herself was part of this symbiotic system, of the trace of goodness running through the place, because her unique smile was key to getting the rams ready for slaughter. It almost made her smile to watch the cycle of nature unfold, to see the old Torah rituals repeated on the day of the sacrifice of Abraham's son. The ram bleated with extraordinary resignation as she went up to it and wiped its face, looking deep into its eyes, confirming the firm bond between the two despite their contradictory fates: the gleaming calm in the eye of the sheep and Rahma, who could see straight through into the heart of things and understood in her expansive soul the forces of nature and its awesome cycles. The only time she found she couldn't look into an animal's eyes was the day Princess fell to the ground after the men of the village had failed to lure her down from the edge of the cliff, and yet still she sharpened the cleavers and handed them to the men and watched as the beloved cow fell to i
ts death.

  “Izz Allah's my father and Futoun bint Jabir's my mother. I was raised by my aunt Rahma and I'm the last in the al-Rayyash family line.”

  Saloum looked into her eyes and continued: “Buthayna, I know a lot of what I'm saying sounds like mumbo jumbo, but I wanted you to hear it all before we get married.”

  Evening had settled over Sarmada and an agreeable silence washed over them as they sat on the roof of the house. She looked at him through a veil of darkness pierced by the rays of the setting sun as he squirmed ever so slightly. She had only one thing to say: “When are we leaving?” He couldn't believe what he’d heard! He was so happy and all he wanted was to hug her and carry her and fly away with her. She stopped him, gently: “There’ll be time for that soon enough.”

  Two weeks later, in the summer of 1979, they were married and they left in September for the Emirates, where he was to begin work as a teacher on assignment. They had a small party with some relatives, and Buthayna told Farida she wanted her to hold on to the house keys for her: “If I don’t come back in fifteen years, sell the house and donate the money in the memory of my mother and brothers.” She left her a declaration of power of attorney and the deed to the house to see to things. She wanted to leave and she didn’t want to take any desire to return with her, so she scrubbed Sarmada clean of any trace of herself, or in her own words: she did all that so she could try to bury her memories, as if this were some kind of funeral that would help her prepare for her new life. The night before they left, a flustered Farida paid her a visit. “Beware of al-Rayyash’s son. He might not be able to produce an heir.”

  “If it’s my fate, I’ll have a boy,” said Buthayna as teary-eyed Bulkhayr stood by the door, his heart experiencing its first ever loss, and the one it would never get over.