Sarmada Page 6

  The men got drunk. They danced the Dabke and emptied whole clips into the air. Endless bursts from automatic rifles, 7.5mm, and Baker and Makarov pistols peppered the sky. In a country that'd been defeated before the war had even begun, their repressed, unavenged manhood was on display for history's sake. They still had their self-respect, you know, the people of the village, even after the Six-Day “Setback,” even after they'd watched a young woman be slaughtered. After the pseudo-gun salute, the feast began.

  Five separate fights were stamped out, and they would've ruined the party had it not been for Umm Salman, her relatives' steel nerves and her advance planning. She'd taken eleven young men aside and gave them each five lire to stay sober—no drink, no hash—for the whole party. She gave them strict instructions, which can be easily summarized: If anyone makes trouble, throw them the hell out—but don't make a scene. If necessary, take them into the barn where we feed the cattle, tie them up and let them sleep it off.

  The party went off without a hitch, and the marriage, too, was consummated without complication. A white banner dappled with nine drops of blood flapped in the breeze, announcing a deflowering that had been some time coming. The final harvest produced eleven drunk and stoned men locked up in Fadila al-Khattar's hay store. They were set free the next morning.

  Farida's family missed the party. Not a single relative turned up, even though the al-Khattars had sent an invitation. To tell the truth, there wasn't anyone in al-Manabi to send: her father had been killed in a fight with a Bedouin, her mother had remarried and moved with her new husband to Brazil, and her uncle, in whose house she'd been brought up, harbored all sorts of resentment, as her father had left him with debts that he was still paying off. As far as he was concerned, the girl’s mother was a whore who’d slept with every man in the mountains until she finally got a blind man to marry her and left the country.

  Farida had returned the favor, though, repaying the family all she’d cost them in an instant. She’d given them back everything they’d lost with a noble gesture that they just didn’t understand at the time. She’d been raised in that house, but they’d always treated her like a servant. After the disaster of their loss to Salman, her uncle Muaz and his relatives were ready to forget all about those three nights and they hoped desperately that the Land Rover driver would keep all that had happened a secret. They didn’t come to the party. Rather they disappeared from her life altogether.

  On the second night of the wedding, she swam in a magical halo. Her eyes rang with mystery, passion, and an intoxicating coquetry. Salman had been good to her. He let her taste the body’s splendors slowly at first, counting on many repeats. He let it happen gently and only after he’d first celebrated with her, lavished her with gifts and irresistible affection.

  Sarmada was overwhelmed by the al-Khattar family’s generous hospitality and decided to pay it back the next night. Families of well-wishers came from all the neighboring villages and contributed to an astounding feast studded with huge trays of croquettes and tender sheep’s heads. Ghee flowed without end and magazine after magazine of bullets flashed in the sky. As the party raged, a 1947 SIG pistol was loaded and fired into the air, but then it suddenly jammed in the hands of one of the guests, a member of the al-Qazzaz family. The young men of Sarmada sniggered at the pistol no one had ever heard of and at the stranger whose embarrassment was more than he could bear. His manhood was on the line! He couldn’t manage to fix the jam that had stalled the final bullet, and rather than take care of it later, he started trying to yank the bullet out of the blasted chamber frantically—with the barrel pointed at the crowd. Fadila had the presence of mind to walk up and point the barrel toward the ground, but before she could reach it, the bullet shot out, straight through her right hand, whizzing over the head of one of the children who was busy collecting empty cartridges, singeing Umm Numan's headscarf and Buthayna the groom's sister's shawl, and ending up in Salman al-Khattar's chest; he'd only just returned to his seat beside the bride after leading a whirlwind round of happy Dabke dancing. He died on the spot.

  The boisterous wedding party turned into a blood-soaked funeral, and Farida had to live with the mark of ill omen from that day forth. The great dread that would envelop Sarmada in the coming days had begun.

  The villagers took turns inviting me over; each had something to add and something to cover up. Some of the local dignitaries were getting on in years and I seemed to make them feel young again. I listened closely and put the story together the way the village told it to me. It beggared belief: Farida's death hadn't actually buried Sarmada's secrets, on the contrary, everybody wanted to come clean all of a sudden. For the first time ever, I'd come upon a story that everybody agreed on. Let me paint the picture for you now. I promise not to butt in.

  I turned on my mobile and found a text from work and another from a friend of mine in Damascus who said he'd been expecting me for several days now. There was a message from Azza Tawfiq, too. She teased me affectionately and said she'd been dreaming about Sarmada every night since we'd met. She was dying to come see the place for herself, she said, and she begged me to hurry up as her curiosity was killing her. I replied, telling her that my own curiosity was about to cost me my job and that Hela Mansour was still in Sarmada's heart, still alive in shattered memories. I turned off the phone as I walked up to Raifeh's house. A few old women who claimed they'd been friends with Hela and Farida had got together there and they took turns telling me the story of the mythic torment that plagued the village in the days following the wedding.

  After the forty days of mourning were up, Farida found she didn't have a lot of options: she could either stay in Sarmada and face her fate or she could go back to nowhere. The al-Khattar family just watched her spitefully, and as their feelings of hurt and loss grew, she began to hear muttered suggestions that she ought to leave and return to her own family. Shaykh Farouq came to see her and asked her gruffly about her “plans,” but the message was clear. She wasn't welcome in that house any longer and it was time to get going.

  The following morning she began to pack up her things. She was getting ready to leave Sarmada, but she didn't know where for; she just knew she had to get out of that awful place. And then something happened to put her departure on hold. The cemetery opened its devilish maw and began receiving corpses. At Salman's funeral, the throng, who were pushing and shoving in their agitation, caused the coffin to teeter twice on the pallbearers' shoulders. Some of the women screamed wildly and burst into tears at the ill omen. “Steady the coffin! Steady the coffin!”

  When they brought the coffin out of the women's majlis, they danced the groom's dance as he was carried on their shoulders, and the mourners all threw handfuls of rice and rose petals into the air. They broke out in wedding songs and well wishes and forgot all about his death, cheering him on like a groom come to fetch his bride. Sarmada and half the mountain bewailed the groom who hadn’t got to enjoy his wedding day. In the days that followed, the al-Khattar family was visited by the worst spate of bad luck imaginable; it was as if some blind power had descended on Sarmada and transformed the quiet village into a senseless nightmare. The family had no end of disasters. A week after the forty-day period of mourning was over, they received news that Salman’s younger brother, Saji, had been shot by a gang trying to rob his shop in Caracas. Once again, the suffering home seemed enshrouded in grief, and only a few days later, Umm Salman al-Khattar’s half-sister, Samiha, was caught by a flaring bread oven fire that charred her face and left her with third-degree burns all over her body. They all hoped that she’d just die as it would’ve been more merciful than the excruciating pain she had to endure.

  Death stalked the house and wove its sticky web about the unhappy family. In a moment, it could strike or just skirt past. In another, its sickle would cut down young men in the prime of their lives, just because they were connected to the family in some way. Slowly but surely, death made its presence felt, and even began to round up those who�
��d taken the al-Khattar’s side and paid them a visit. As one group of mourners was leaving the house, a tornado blew in from the north, scattering plastic bags and dust, obscuring sight and knocking down Abu Muhammad Qasim’s barn. The tornado then lifted a zinc panel off the roof of the village patrol and sliced Samih al-Ali’s neck with it. The offering of condolences became a funeral in its own right. Salih Korkmaz, Khazim Wahhab, Murad Qamar al-Din, and Radwan Massa were all killed in horrific accidents after going to the doomed al-Khattars to pay their respects. Suspicions were also raised about Juwayda al-Jarazi: she choked to death on her own tongue not long after she’d sent some food over to the al-Khattar house to help feed their condoling guests; and so she too was added to the list of fatalities.

  “You centipede! You scorpion! You crow! You owl!” Umm Salman and her daughter Buthayna hurled all those slurs at Farida, along with many more, exhausting every entry in the dictionary of ill omens. The friends who'd come to commiserate all agreed, though there were fewer of them now. When faced with the tyrannical force of death, people find that assigning blame helps them accept the apparent caprice. A simple—or simplified—cause helped them accept the greater wisdom that cut lives short and how strange its choices seemed. Eventually, Umm Salman ran out of tears: she'd cried so much and for so long without any interruption. As her tears dried up, her breasts began to swell with every new calamity until she needed two men to help her carry them when she went to the bathroom. They grew so large she couldn't get through the door anymore and Saeed the blacksmith brought her a wheel-barrow to help her move around. The various remedies the herbalists prescribed failed to halt their inexplicable growth and the village's resident nurse, whom everyone called Doctor Salem regardless, said she needed to go to the hospital in Damascus. It was a condition that neither modern nor ancient medicine had ever encountered before.

  Raifeh told me that she'd felt the breasts with her own two hands. They were filled with liquid, she said. The milk sloshing around inside sounded like a waterwheel. Poor Umm Salman was consumed with the hardships the Lord had sent to test her and she stubbornly refused to go to any hospital and let some stranger put his hands on her body, not even if her breasts got as big as hot-air balloons!

  “It's a punishment for something she did in a past life that she must have been pretty damned proud of.” That was how Shaykh Farouq began and then he asked the other shaykhs to pray for Umm Salman al-Khattar and to ask God to release her from the bonds of her affliction. They recited passages from the Holy Epistles of Wisdom; the shaykh had chosen “Crushing the Heretic” and “Bearing the Truth” and they read them with profound humility and chanted. Late Thursday night, two of the shaykhs brought her a bowl of water, over which they'd read the necessary prayers and asked Umm Salman to reaffirm her faith. She repeated the Covenant of the Faithful over and over and declared that as a Druze woman of pure blood she'd submit to her destiny no matter what form it took.

  As she drifted off, somewhere between asleep and awake, five horsemen appeared before her eyes. They were each a different color, lined up before a gate and shielding her from fate's whims. She had a sudden epiphany: these were the five cosmic principles who'd taken human form and established the Druze doctrine. They represented Reason, Soul, Utterance, Precedent, and Consequent. According to Druze teachings, they would appear from behind a great wall on the Day of Resurrection and free the earth from the False Messiah and bring all humankind to Egypt to be judged. Then she watched as they galloped toward the distant horizon and faded away. But her anguish returned the next morning, sharper than ever, culminating in a ceaseless, tearless scream.

  As Death came and went, along with a steady stream of tears and prayers from the church and the majlis, Farida could only hide in silence from the dry-eyed crying and a painful grief that wouldn't let up. She had a vision in her sleep, or she dreamt something that startled her awake in the morning. She went into the bathroom and saw the late Salman's razor lying in front of the mirror. She took it and steeled her nerves. She entered Umm Salman's bedroom and walked straight up to those barrel-sized breasts. She undid the woman's nightgown as Umm Salman merely watched with reddened eyes and a knotted tongue, imploring the crazy bitch to get the hell away. She summoned all her strength and lashed out at Farida: “Get the hell away from me! Leave me alone!” She shouted: “Where the hell is everybody?”

  Farida glared at her and held the blade against her throat. “Shut up. Not another word... I’m warning you.”

  Umm Salman was paralyzed with fright as she watched Farida take a nipple in her hands and make two perpendicular cuts with the razor like a plus sign. Poor swollen-breasted Umm Salman started to scream as if she were possessed, but Farida’s cruel hands paid her no attention. She waited and when nothing came out, she bent down and began to suck on the nipple as hard as she could. She could taste the milky grief as it spurted into her mouth and on her face. The peculiar sweetness caused her to shiver. Then she did the same thing to the other breast.

  She left Umm Salman whimpering, her grief flowing out in the milk, and ran to get as many containers from the kitchen as she could. She collected twenty bottles and half a bucket’s worth of the blue-tinged liquid over the next two hours. By midday, the people of Sarmada—Druze, Christian, and Muslim—had all gathered to see the miracle. The massive swelling had come down and her breasts were back to normal; by sunset, Umm Salman was on her feet to greet the guests who’d come to congratulate her on beating the curse. Everyone had been affected by the mysterious burden that had struck Umm Salman and her family. It had taken her sister, her only two sons, cousins, and a whole host of guests; it paralyzed two of the neighbors, gouged out the eye of another, and caused no end of trouble for the people of Sarmada, who were too afraid to speak out in the midst of invisible, unpredictable Death. But now, it seemed, the curse had begun to lift. The villagers greeted one another the next morning with the knowledge that better days—happier, less painful days—were in store for them. They’d waited the whole night for any sign of continued foreboding from out of the rocky wasteland and the surrounding wilderness, but nothing came—nothing but a resounding silence with occasional cricket chirps. The jackals that had hounded Sarmada with portents of impending evil had fallen silent at last.

  The neighbors didn't have to stuff their ears with tree sap and cotton wool when they went to bed to block out the mixed cacophony of Umm Salman's wailing and the menacing jackal howls. Umm Salman hugged Farida tightly the next morning. “God bless you, my daughter. How can I ever repay you?”

  “For what, mother?” Farida asked, all the love in the world radiating from her face. “I don't want anything except to see you well,” she said, and then softly added: “Just let me go live in the shed.”

  “What shed are you talking about, Farida?”

  “Princess's shed next door.”

  “As you wish. You're family now, my daughter,” she said, submitting to a gentle sob embroidered with a clear thread of salty, colorless tears.

  Farida set about moving her things into the shed straightway. The shed belonged to Salman al-Khattar's family and it was really just a small barn where they kept the cattle. Its last resident had been Princess, the daring cow who met her demise at the bottom of the cliff not far from the Salt Spring. Umm Salman had given her her blessing, but Buthayna, Farida's sister-in-law until a stray bullet had killed her husband, had only curses for her. Buthayna felt she had to go see the men of the family to get them to do something about this madness. When they came to object, Umm Salman just stood her ground. “What I do with my inheritance is my business.”

  She got the village elder to come witness the sale contract; she sold the shed to Farida for one Syrian lira—that was all. Farida wandered around her new home, carefully checking it out: there were two rooms under a mud ceiling propped up by seven beams stolen off the Hejaz railway line. The roof was made out of sugar cane stalks and planks of wood resting on stone arches, and the walls desperately needed to be
whitewashed again. There was a place to store straw out the front and enough room for a veranda or a sizable garden. She rolled up her sleeves and started cleaning the place up tirelessly. Only a few weeks later, the rank old barn surged with life and, for some reason, many of the neighbors had lent a hand; the place was as good as new. Once it was fit to live in, Farida went to thank Umm Salman for her generosity.

  “You've got to take all of my dear departed son's furniture. It's yours by right.”

  “God bless you,” Farida said, kissing her mother-in-law's brow and hands. Now she had a home.

  Umm Salman turned and went into her room, where the walls were covered with the pictures of the dead and there was one of Shaykh Jalil standing in front of five horses, each a different color. She remained there for many years, cut off from society, free to worship God and mourn her departed children and relations, until she became divorced from reality and moved into a permanent limbo that she only ever left once: on her way to the Khashkhasha cemetery in a solemn funeral procession.

  Farida followed her visions and vague intuition. She wanted to be independent but also to belong, and it seemed she'd finally got what she'd wanted. She took the bottles she'd filled with the grief-milk that had poured out of Umm Salman's breasts and found a place for them in the shed. She wrapped them in hessian and buried them among the damp and brittle straw husks. She realized it was best to keep them out of the sun and reasonably cool. She turned half of the milk into cheese that she soaked in brine, and the other half she distilled as you would wine. She used the skills she'd learned distilling grapes in her village of al-Manabi and patiently performed what time had shown was best: to keep it in a cool, dark place until she could figure out what the essence of the substance was: blessing or curse?