Sarmada Read online

  I didn’t want transmigration to be real and I didn’t want reality to start transmigrating. I knew full well that life constantly repeated itself, confined to its fixed orbit, impervious to any specific time, and that Sarmada—like all the other small towns of the East—was happy to look no further than itself and never changed much, no matter how much time passed.

  Azza Tawfiq’s story appeared and disappeared as I compared it to the different versions I heard from the townspeople; sometimes they corroborated her version and at other times they diverged from it. I decided I wouldn’t make any judgments. I knew my responsibility was to record it all with a documentarian’s professional fidelity, and yet some powerful intuition told me that something was out there waiting for me, far beyond the borders of my comprehension. After all, I thought I was at a safe remove, safe from the bad omen the story portended. What came next would prove me entirely wrong: my life left its customary course and set down a new, unmarked path deep into the treacherous thicket of past and future, as the boundary between different periods of time faded from view.

  To discover what had happened to Hela Mansour, I would have to throw open the doors of that locked room, as if to air it out, to dispel the damp and musty torpor Sarmada gave off. One question loomed above the rest: Had I really been born here? Had I actually lived here?

  All through the quarter century I had spent here, the overpowering urge to get away from that remote world had kept me from appreciating my reality in all its complexity. So I set about gathering up images I plucked carefully from the landscape to help me compose a story, and in the meantime other stories were preparing to rise up out of the gloom.

  When I compared the recollections I’d gathered in the village to what I’d heard from the physics professor, the first scene began to form before my eyes. If I were the type of person who insisted on captioning every last thing, I would have titled this chapter: “Winter 1968: After five years on the run, Hela Mansour returns to her village.”

  She walked along calmly, her hands wart-free, and passed by the old houses with her head held high in that supercilious way she’d inherited from her father, who’d fought in the Great Syrian Revolt and was one of the most esteemed men in the village. She walked down the narrow alleyways between the stone houses and caught snatches of what the people were whispering about her. Sarmada looked on, clammy with anticipation.

  “She’s fearless,” murmured some of the women.

  “She’s not being brave, she just wants to rub it in,” a neighbor retorted. “She should’ve come back quietly. There are still some young men in this village, you know.”

  “May God teach her shame,” said another.

  “Pray for us, Blessed Virgin.”

  “Lord help us,” said one, making the sign of the cross.

  “Praise the Lord for making her! She’s prettier than ever.”

  “Folks say he kicked her to the curb once he was through with her.”

  “Protect us, Lord.”

  “Shame on them.”

  “She deserves whatever she gets.”

  The scattered whispers ran down the village streets to the old family house, which her brothers had abandoned after she’d run off. They’d moved to the outskirts of the village, where they lived in exile with their shame, consigned to a world of wary looks and bated breath. The whispers of onlookers mixed with the fear in the air as everyone awaited the end of this woman, who'd shamed her family, besmirched her father's good name and proud legacy, insulted Sarmada and its ways, and evaded every lethal trap her brothers had set for her over the years. And now she'd decided to return simply to die.

  The story's getting a little confusing—I can tell—and if you're not familiar with the details, you're probably a little uncomfortable with where things are headed, so I'll let Azza Tawfiq take over. Let's return to her, sitting in Cafe le Depart on the day we met, and let's listen closely so that the music coming from the Latin Quarter begins to fade away. I studied her voice, her gestures, the way the words slipped out from between her full lips, her eyes as they overran with mystery and wonder, and then, all of a sudden, she stopped. She asked the waiter to bring us another round of coffee and some sparkling water. Then she turned to me once more, and with a mix of compassion and indifference, she said, “Tell me when you get hungry. Lunch is on me.”

  We had a few hours still before I had to leave. Thankfully, I'd thought to pay the hotel bill and leave my luggage at the desk. I nodded because I didn't want anything to interrupt the sound of her voice. My body absorbed every single word she said, and filed them in my memory for safekeeping, where I assigned each a shape, a person, a place, a reference until it formed a complete and parallel world. She went on calmly, even warmly, describing the murdered woman's route through the village, as if it were all just a picture she could see right in front of her.

  The house she described was one I knew very well. The mulberry tree that Nawwaf Mansour used to guard was one of the highlights of my illicit fruit filching escapades as a child, and it stood directly across from Farida's place. Oh, I should mention to you that Farida and her son Bulkhayr will be making an appearance in our story presently; it's a bit like a relay race, actually, with one runner passing the baton on to the next.

  Allow me to return to Azza as she tells us about Windhill, Hyena's Rise, Poppy Bridge, and how the village looks in winter. How this elegant Parisian, with her authentic Lebanese accent, knew the names of these different spots and byways in a neglected village overrun with oblivion, dust, and tedium, was beyond me, but it did tickle me! There was simply nothing as heart-rendingly delightful as hearing her say all those names that I'd locked up in my memory. Some had gone missing, some had mutated, but here they were; it was as if we shared the exact same childhood memories. Nevertheless, I'll let Azza tell the story so that I can try to put off my own memories, which had suddenly been brought back to life, and imagine a Sarmada I'd never known before. In that hypnotic voice she described her past life and how she arrived at her family home, which was near collapse since her brothers had abandoned it in shame. They had withdrawn to the outskirts of the village, leaving their old house at the mercy of armies of ants, roaches, spiders, and moths. The physics professor described her ar- rival—or Hela Mansour's—as follows:

  “I came to the ruins of the old house and walked through the gate made out of thin steel that rust had all but eaten away. I looked at the walls. I missed every stone in the place. I could smell the scents of my childhood locked away in each one. I prayed to God they wouldn't come just yet; that they'd give me some time. I didn't want to die there. I was worried that some of my blood would spill down to the mulberry tree, my old childhood friend, my dream companion. Me, my mother, and the tree, we were the only women in a house full of men, full of manliness. My mother had been buried beside the tree even though everyone was against the idea of her being so far away from the family plot up at the Khashkhasha cemetery. I couldn't stand the idea of my blood seeping down into the darkness for my mother to taste.

  “I was sad to see the decrepit old tree and her withered, leafless branches. She seemed smaller somehow, like a senile old woman. Can you imagine what it's like to know that you'll be dead in an hour?

  “What are you supposed to do in an hour?

  “But to tell you the truth, you can make an hour last a lifetime. And that's what I did. I dug a hole in the muddy earth around the massive tree trunk about a half-yard deep and buried a copy of my will. The will wasn't important—I don't even remember what I wrote—but I felt that I needed to leave something behind, some trace, whether on the earth or underneath it. I buried my mother's silver bracelets, too, and a little bell that had once hung around the neck of a cow that'd been my childhood friend and given me my first reason to grieve. I prayed to my parents' souls to forgive me and to forgive my brothers for what they were about to do.

  “The funny thing is that, to this day, when I remember going to the house, I get upset because I didn't
sweep up or water the plants. I didn't spare a thought for the camellias, the lilies or the tulips; I didn't prune the jasmine to bring it back to life.

  “Well, yes, I had run off with a stranger years before. I had abandoned my family because I loved him. But the day I did it, it was just an accident, a passing fear or a desire—I don't know. I can't really remember, and I probably won't ever be able to explain it.

  “My brother Nawwaf slapped me with that massive hand of his. The shepherds had already told them that I'd been meeting Azaday in the northern orchards. They'd found us embracing, sharing a kiss—my first. My first kiss became a scandal that swept through the entire village. It was also my first slap; no one had ever hit me before. My brother took a step back when he saw the blood pouring out of my nose and covering my face. He was furious, but he let me go and stormed off.

  “Mother had died by then, and I was left in their care. I was the youngest, I was the only girl and I was spoiled. Every pore of my skin gave off the scent of their mother and they’d been more liberal with me than any other brothers in Sarmada. The day I was caught kissing a stranger and the news of the scandal spread throughout the village was a disaster for them. In Sarmada, you can keep anything a secret for as long as you want, no matter what it is—except for love. Love is a disgrace. I’m not talking about sex or about a physical relationship; everyone has a physical relationship of some form or other. As long as it stays purely physical, then there’s no shame in it. But for whatever reason, when it comes to love and something brings it to the surface, inevitably it’s exposed. It shoots out from wherever it starts, meets with universal disapproval, and finds its way onto every tongue.

  “In the room looking out over the garden, I wept as the blood continued to flow from my nose, while they debated what they were going to do to him. They were threatening either to kill him or to beat him to within an inch of his life just so they could teach him a lesson he’d never forget. I couldn’t stand to see him tortured like that, so I knew I had to go and warn him. He was scared and confused, sure, but I knew he wouldn’t have run away. I walked calmly over to the water bucket by the front gate and washed and combed my hair, which was tangled and matted with blood. I put my hair up in a ponytail, grabbed a small bag and stuffed a few trivial things in it—I have no clue, for example, why I put the cowbell in—and then I slipped quietly away. They paid no attention to me, distracted as they were with their shouting and rage. It never occurred to them that I’d dare to leave the house after a scandal like that.

  “I listened to them improvising oaths, swearing on their honor, and I slipped out right behind them. All it would’ve taken was for one of them to turn his head to see me leaving, but they carried on bellowing. I walked unseen through Sarmada and I knew exactly where to find him. We'd gotten used to operating in secret and we'd figured out where we could go to be safe from prying eyes. It didn't take long to find him near the vineyard. We clung to each other. We were both terrified and I can remember seeing tears in his eyes. I begged him to leave the village right away. I told him my brothers were planning to kill him, or to make an example out of him, and there was no point in trying to fight them. I begged him to leave Sarmada and I promised to love him forever. He pushed me back violently and then grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘I'm not leaving you,’ he said. ‘Either I die here or you come with me. Only death can keep us apart.’ He was shouting and swearing that he wouldn't move an inch, that he wouldn't leave without me. He was deadly serious, resolute, insistent. And he had the most beautiful angry eyes in the world.

  “I embraced him and said yes. I melted into him. All I remember is giving myself to him body and soul, just as he'd given himself to me. All it took was a few drops of blood and my virginity was lost. I'd shed all my bonds now. It wasn't a whim or a moment of weakness, it was a reality I'd chosen for myself without knowing. I lay in his arms, half-naked, coated in dirt and dust and pleasure. ‘Fine. I'll come with you,’ I said.

  “We spent all those years in exile walking together. The road and the villages and towns we passed through ate away at our feet. We tried to flee the country and failed, but we never stopped walking, on and on. The loveliest memory, the thing I'll never forget, is that we walked together, side by side. After that day, I felt as if I'd been born to walk, but there was still a short distance I had to cross to reach my final—fated—destination. And so, after I buried my will, the cowbell and my mother's bracelets, I walked out of the house and headed towards them.”

  Everything I'd managed to learn confirmed the fact that the day after Hela ran away was a total nightmare for Hamad Mansour's five sons. The villagers had all gathered in the square, some to gloat at their misfortune, others offering to help, and the brothers stacked the Epistles of Wisdom, the Quran, and the Bible all on top of one another and swore a savage oath: they announced that their sister had run off with some hotshot—as they'd taken to calling him—and they swore that they wouldn't light a single fire, or receive a single guest, or pronounce a single word about village affairs, or even trim their beards until they'd slit her throat. Salama told me what it was like to watch the scandal unfold: “The brothers made that oath to hide their shame and to put an end to all the dirty gossip in the village. People are ruthless when it comes to those who violate the accepted customs, and to anyone associated with them.

  “Over the next five years, the brothers grew more and more isolated, and their beards grew longer so that you could barely tell them apart, and they themselves struggled to tell one day from the next. It was a strange sight to see them going around together dressed in the same clothes, the same faces hidden behind long beards, with the same gloomy look. They were serious about killing her. The only thing that mattered to them anymore was tracking her down and killing her.”

  Father Elias, the priest, who was not only caring but thoughtful, hugged me and asked me how I'd been. Had I missed him? He'd been a kind of godfather to everyone in my generation. He'd baptized all the children in Sarmada and ministered to them all—Christian, Druze, and Muslim—for they were all God's flock. Similarly, he insisted that the Christian boys in the village be circumcised like all the Druze and Muslim children. He was known for his easy-going sense of humor and his ability to find something to laugh about in any situation no matter how bitter it was.

  It had been customary in Sarmada for the villagers to have their children baptized ever since people had come and settled here from the Lebanon three hundred years ago. It was both a religious and a social rite for everyone in the village, regardless of confession or sect, although no one really understood how it managed to work. In civil war Lebanon, people were killed based on their sect, they were raped with whisky bottles, their corpses were mutilated, their skulls were gouged with power tools and their throats slit with razor blades. The people of Sarmada, on the other hand, lived together peacefully. I'll never forget how in 1983 two families, one Christian and one Druze, escaped over the mountains from Lebanon and took refuge with relatives in Sarmada. Lebanon's sectarian thinking could never understand how a majority Druze village would consent to be led by a Christian! Or why the Christians in Sarmada would donate money to help build a majlis, the Druze house of worship!

  They'd find it no less astonishing, of course, to know that after the village church was consecrated, the first wedding to be held there was for a Druze couple. You just can't understand the secret of a place like Sarmada and its special harmony unless you've lived there or in one of the other small towns in Syria. I mean, there was even a very brave Christian among the leaders of the Great Syrian Revolt. The colonial-minded French who'd tried to divide the country up into petty states and factions could never understand why Christian freedom fighters or revolutionaries would rebel against them, and they had to denounce the whole lot of them as traitors. Or how when they threatened to confiscate the secret Druze Epistles of Wisdom, the people simply hid them with Muslim and Christian families for safekeeping.

  Father Elias had grown ol
d quickly, for sure. I hadn't seen him in years, but that captivating benevolence still shone in his smiling eyes. When I asked him if he remembered Hela Mansour's murder, he became downcast. “Why do you want to go digging up the past?”

  “I need to hear the whole story so I can find out exactly what happened. We might make a film about it...” I said.

  “He that is without sin among you…” he repeated Christ’s famous words a few times. Then he took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “You know, Rafi, the cruelest death is a death for honor’s sake. Christ came and purified us of the sins of the body and the mundane pleasures of the flesh, but you still see things like this happening. What happened to Hela Mansour, though, that was something else. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  He looked distressed and took a few steps toward the rectory. “I can still remember how the air smelled that night. The whole place reeked of death. The brothers had heard that she’d come back, so me and a few others ran over to see them. At first, I figured it’d be better to take refuge in the church, to pray and spare myself the spectacle of a public death, but after I saw her with my own eyes, I felt I had to stop her brothers from behaving so stupidly. We went to their house—the one beside the flour mill—and we found Nawwaf, the eldest brother, there all by himself. He just stared at us indifferently until his other brothers all came running in and crowding around us. They were all on edge and smoking frantically. After they’d all arrived, one of them said, ‘She’s back.’”

  “‘Where is she?’ asked Nawwaf.

  “‘She’s at the house,’ answered the youngest brother and then in the blink of an eye they scattered—as if they’d practiced the ritual a thousand times before—and rooted out their rustiest weapons: razors, knives, and cleavers. They started scraping off the rust and sharpening the blades as we begged them to see reason and to let her go in peace. We said we'd find a way to get her to leave Sarmada, but Nawwaf just loaded his shotgun and shot a few rounds into the air.