Sarmada Read online

  The party finally wound down. People were just too tired, too drunk, and too danced-out, and their clothes were suffused with the smoke from the big fire the children had lit; their every pore had breathed it in. The guests staggered homeward, drunk off a secret bliss. On the dusty trail leading to the graveyard, Sayil stopped and stepped off the road; he needed to relieve himself and simply couldn’t wait another moment. He listened to cicadas and crickets hissing in the night as he urinated, and with his last shakes, singeing tears began trickling out his eyes. Once he’d put himself back in order, he tried to carry on, but his eyes reddened and his tears began to stream as if he’d sniffed the most pungent onion. He couldn’t explain his sudden crying fit and for some reason he didn’t want it to end. He walked along the perimeter of the valley and then suddenly his stomach began to cramp and ache and his crying welled up from some unidentified pain, not because a mosquito had flown into his eye as he’d originally thought. He sat down, looking over the valley, and really began to wail.

  For more than half an hour, his hot tears flowed and the sound of his blubbering reached the house nearby. Ghazi, carrying his shotgun and a lantern, walked in the direction of the sound and shouted at the weeper: “Who’s there?” Sayil couldn’t stop crying and couldn’t sneak off, but sobbed even more violently than before. Ghazi shone the lantern in his face and was horrified at the sight. He dropped his pistol and set the lantern down. “Sayil, what's wrong?” he asked, although there was no point. Sayil could only answer with more tears and louder sobbing. Ghazi grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders. He asked him again and again what was wrong—he was getting angry now—but got nothing except choked tears from the burly man wailing like a woman at the edge of the valley. Ghazi dropped his dogged interrogation and sat down beside him; he touched his eyes and felt that they, too, were wet with tears. He didn't quite know how, or why, but he began sobbing silently as well, and then sucking back the snot and moaning loudly. Ghazi's wife trembled with fear as she watched the specters of two men in the distance, their heads between their knees, weeping, nearly howling. She couldn't decide whether to stay and comfort her horrified children or to creep cautiously down to the valley's edge and see what the hell was going on. She wiped the tears from her eyes and walked back into the house only to erupt—along with her little children—into a panic of scalding tears.

  Together the two men sat there, weeping, crying as they'd never cried before. When their eyes finally dried up, Ghazi was racked with nausea and could no longer hold back the urge to bring up everything in his stomach. He vomited, followed closely by Sayil, and then together they alternated between cycles of dry sobbing and disgorging that felt as if it might rip their innards apart.

  Behind them, there wasn't a soul in Sarmada who wasn't sobbing or throwing up; the whole village had been poisoned—though whether it was the fault of the rice pudding or the soothsayer's potion, no one would ever know. Young, old, those who'd attended the party, those who'd stayed at home, they all wept and vomited that night as the contagion spread from house to house. The only person who was spared both bawling and barfing that night was Buthayna. She knew that this latest disaster was all her fault and she sat up all night in her room, listening to the weeping village. She finally nodded off at dawn and when she woke up not an hour later, she felt her eyes brimming with arrested tears, swollen, looking like pools of blood. She ran into her mother's room and found her praying, lost in the world of mourning dead, so she let her be and hurried out. The sight of the guests who'd not even made it home the night before filled her with panic as she watched them waking up, covered in vomit, laid out along the side of the road, howling in spasms. It was as if a plague had overrun the village. People were exhausted; their faces were ashen. She helped those who needed escorting home and then returned to her bedroom, where she locked the door and tried, but failed, to cry until about midday, when she finally fell asleep.

  As Buthayna slept, mostly dreamlessly, disaster was sweeping the village. People stopped going to work they were so miserable. They sought out Shaykh Shaheen only to find him in a wretched state, squalid in his own vomit. The church door was locked and Father Elias was trying to settle his own sorrows with a mixture of herbal and chamomile tea.

  The village reeked. For the first time since the locals got together and built a mosque, the imam failed to perform the call to prayer because he, too, was laid low with a sour stomach and sobbing. Every time he took a sip of water, it flowed out his eyes in tears of sin. Was this heavenly rage or earthly enmity? No one really cared. All they cared about anymore was putting an end to the tears. The cramps and vomiting they'd managed to ameliorate by not eating and only drinking water and anise tea, although the liquid instantly came back out their eyes and provoked feelings of yearning and loss that none of them had ever experienced. The village animals were also seized by anxious-making premonitions like those that occur before an earthquake or natural disaster. The cows broke out of their sheds and ran off mooing wildly, followed by the village donkeys. Meowing strays broke the Sarmadans' hearts, and if they hadn’t been so preoccupied with their own suffering, they’d have laughed at the dogs, who were going around as if blind drunk and howling as if they were really their cousins, the wolves. In the rocky wasteland, a pack of hyenas, comrades in misfortune, wrawled. Even the hens and cocks crowed at the afternoon sky and were silent at dawn. Animals foamed at the mouth and groaned, strangely, unlike anything anyone had ever heard before except out of a she-camel in heat.

  Farida’s prize trees and plants shared in Sarmada’s uncanny descent into public lamentation: rose petals dissolved into drops of exquisite nectar that flowed like tears, and tree trunks burst open to ooze salty sap. Farida, who hadn’t eaten any rice pudding herself, wiped at the hushed tears running down her cheeks out of guilt and horror at what was happening around her. She didn’t know what to do: run away or stand her ground? She pulled herself together and tried to think of a solution. She made an herbal preparation, which helped calm her down, and began experimenting with a nettle and grief-milk infusion.

  The village lay under an inexhaustible gloom that bubbled up out of the heart of the earth itself, out of the soil. The mania even reached the two lovebirds nesting on Farida’s roof, who warbled a heartrending song that sent anyone who heard them into a new fit of crying. Sarmada mourned. It writhed and beat its chest. The village, hollow and alone, was abandoned to its fate, left to contend with its rancor, acrimony, and distress. The village was cursed, but it didn’t understand why. It was being punished for some mysterious crime, and there was no hope—not even the slightest shred—of being saved from its trial. The village wasn’t in the least bit special; it was just an ordinary village in the east that had tried to carry on with as little change, hardship, and grief as possible; without ambitions or horizons, it was content to live with as few big ideas, wants, and visions as it could. The villagers did what their intuition told them to, never getting involved in questions of fate, not once understanding why God would want to make them suffer this affliction that was more than they could bear.

  On the second day of tears, groans, and vomit, news of Sarmada reached the capital via three pulse traders from Deraa who'd come to buy chickpeas and lentils. They were terrified by what looked like a whole village of mourners. None of the lifeless, weeping, sighing Sarmadans would speak to them; after all, the only two people in Sarmada who could still speak were Buthayna and Farida, and they were both holed up in their bedrooms. The three traders got out of there as fast as they could and they told everyone about the unbelievable sights they'd seen. When the government heard that something serious had happened to the village, they sent forces to impose a quarantine and keep everyone out until the medical taskforce could investigate. The people of the mountains spread stories about Sarmada in fearful whispers and heaped curses on the place; they waited desperately for news.

  A week later the medical taskforce arrived: an ambulance that broke down every few m
iles, three doctors and a handful of nurses, who all wore gas masks, which made them look like grasshoppers or locusts and did more to constrict their breathing than to protect them from the purported contamination. They entered the village anxiously and wandered around for hours, but then quickly wrote up their report and left. Their report was no more than a couple of sentences, quoted here in full:

  This is the most beautiful settlement we have ever visited in the South. The inhabitants are strikingly healthy and hale unlike any other population we have previously examined. All the rumors we received about Sarmada were total nonsense; the village [they wouldn't even bump the village up to a “town” in the official report] is tranquil and safe. The residents must be some of the happiest and healthiest in the entire country. No further action required.

  What had happened was that on the third day of the outbreak, Farida took drops of the antidote she'd prepared to every house in the village. All of Sarmada fell asleep at the same time and when they woke up they were cured. The plague was lifted as if it had never been, and so they rather shamefacedly set about cleaning and hosing down the absolute chaos they'd created. They were smiling again, but their faces were still a bit ashen. By the time the medical taskforce arrived, Sarmada had been up on her feet and buzzing around for days, and the visitors noticed the cheerful mood of the place as they entered over Poppy Bridge. The chief physician spoke to the villagers, who denied there'd ever been a problem in the first place, and upon finding no evidence, he determined there really wasn't any reason the taskforce should stay. They decided they might as well perform a routine inspection to make sure all the children in the village had been given the polio vaccine, since they were already there.

  Some of the villagers just couldn't keep themselves from laughing at the taskforce, who soon realized it was because of their gas masks, and took them off. They went for lunch at the village elder's and they left the village touched by the serene, and vague, joy of the people and by their generosity and hospitality. A few weeks later, Buthayna went back to see the soothsayer of Kanakir and was shocked to see the woman had wasted away. The soothsayer wept constantly, collecting her glass-bead tears in several plastic bags, and she threw up every single thing she ate. She flew into a hysterical panic when she saw Buthayna, but eventually calmed down long enough to explain what had happened. She gave Buthayna a chest with the seven quires of al-Hazred's book and told her to keep it in a safe place until she could find a descendant of Dahiya bint Lahiya the Amazigh to pass it on to—and if she couldn't find anyone, to burn the book on a Friday under a full moon. “Watch out for that devil-spawn Farida! Look at what she's done to me. Now go, and don't ever come back.”

  The soothsayer sat there waiting for her excruciating end—which came soon enough—and her village of Kanakir woke on a day in early December to find that the most talented soothsayer in all of the Hauran had had her limbs chewed off, her eyes gouged out, her chest torn open, and her heart ripped out. They burned her house down with everything inside to try to wipe out the terror that had seized them. And the crystal tears in the plastic bags sounded as if they were screeching in horror as they exploded in the fire that consumed everything it could.

  Buthayna was too young to understand; she was only twenty-one and too young to cope, but all the same she scribbled down the name of the Amazigh sorceress so she wouldn't forget it and hid the chest away in the wheat cellar without even daring to open it. She bathed herself in cold water and went into her mother's room. She threw herself on her mother's chest and pleaded for help, but her mother was in another world, wandering through shadows of meaning, and didn't move a muscle. She had been transported to the realm of hushed consolation with her departed loved ones, where she knitted them woolen pullovers to keep them warm in the tundra of death. Buthayna wrenched the knitting from her mother's hands and pulled her arms around her, burying her head in her mother's chest. She tried to cry, but it was no use.

  Riyad al-Fayez found me taking photos of Farida's decaying house. He worked as a taxi driver with his brand-new 2011 Mitsubishi Lancer; his graying hair and the etched wrinkles around his eyes couldn't diminish his good looks. “Get in. I need to talk to you.”

  I desperately wanted to make up some excuse but he opened the passenger-side door insistently. “I want to tell you the truth about Farida.” I got in beside him. He told me what life in Syria was like, how unbearable it’d become, and he carried on telling me about all the latest news in the world of taxi drivers until I began to regret getting into the car with him. Suddenly he pulled over to the side of the road. “I was the first boy in Sarmada to go see Farida,” he said, and then he told me a story that confused sex with love and lies with truth. The only way I could shut him up was to turn on my mobile and go through the flood of texts I’d gotten. There was a text from Azza Tawfiq saying she was sorry we’d ever met and that she’d been trying to call me. I turned my mobile back off as Riyad drove and called up a bunch of his friends, telling them to come round to his house straightaway. “You’re going to get the whole story about Farida today,” he said, using his cigarette to light the next one, before tossing the butt out the window. He sped off to introduce me to the friends he’d made as an adolescent, who were going to help me understand the strange life of that enigmatic woman.

  As Farida gradually settled into her seclusion, her body settled into something between a whisper of unknown desire and the fury of dangerous cravings, which gave her cheeks a mesmerizing blush. She was marked out by the secret envy of most of the other women in the village and people sensed an unusual danger coming from the greenhouse and its widow of misfortune. After the rice pudding party and everything else that had happened since she’d come to Sarmada, a suppressed disquiet bubbled up. People realized it was wise to keep their distance.

  “Beware the flower that buds in rubbish,” exhorted Shaykh Farouq constantly.

  The men of the village openly joined in with the women's condemnation, but out of sight and in whispers, their suspicious favors continued. She was assaulted by gossip and sharp tongues from every corner, but she simply defended her reputation with that rare smile of hers and her uncommonly sweet and inspiring demeanor.

  And yet her blossoming body was of a different opinion. At night she was tormented by the feverish flames that lashed at her body, whose lifetime had been marked only by a few innocent, stolen kisses from a boy who'd rocked her fourteen-year-old world, and her wedding night, during which—you might say—she'd only had the tiniest taste of the feast of the body she'd been promised and never received, her dreams of a glorious life with Salman al-Khattar shattered by a single stray bullet. The whole thing was like some revelation that had come to her in a strange waking dream and completely taken over her life. She didn't want to be just some hormone-soaked teenager's easy lay, but some unidentifiable impulse drove her forward, toward those who still bore the last dusting of child-hood, as they stood on the precipice, ready to graduate to another realm, falling into a crushing abyss of fervid desire. No one tried to understand what they were going through, they just cursed and preached.

  She decided to make her body the bridge to the other side, the crossing they were so looking forward to. She gave herself over to navigating the rugged tracks of silvery-white sexual desire, and, as if by instinct, she tracked down those outcast teenagers who'd never known a woman's body. She was fueled by her mysterious sweets, spiced with grief-milk now that she'd made certain that it wasn't the culprit behind the tragedy of the Feast of the Cross. She wound the first threads of her web around her first visitor, who was always passing by her shed whether or not he had a good reason. She called him over to help water the plants in her garden. She watched him: an early sprinkling of manhood above his upper lip, lust flooding his eyes every time she walked past. She gave him a sweet flavored with mint and sesame, and thanked him breathily for his help, her gaze burning him up inside.

  He never left the roof opposite her house and she expertly absorbed every
sign of his agitation. She filled every one of his fifteen-year-old fantasies. Riyad al-Fayez was that first adolescent; he was her first experience, through which she'd mastered everything she needed to ensure her unseen, unspoken role—although all of Sarmada would soon come to know of it, regardless of whether she'd tried to keep it secret.

  She gave him no shortage of wet dreams and he found himself masturbating whenever he had any privacy, to the point that he began to look pale and drained, like a skinny, bigheaded sumac plant. She let him watch through the window of the shed, framed by flowerpots and foliage as she squatted in front of the washbasin, intentionally wetting her clothes and undoing the buttons. She'd undo a button for a moment and then button it back up, and then she rolled up her skirt, exposing her smooth thighs, white and faintly red, which then spread to his ears and pimples and beat at his dismal defenses.

  Then she'd slam the window shut, crushing his desire and setting him pacing, carving grooves of turmoil into the mud roof. He was lost in a whirlwind of fear and angst, but he gathered all his strength, and the lover-boy finally decided that all those weeks of excruciating torment were enough to make him knock at her door that evening.

  He looked pitiful: he'd squeezed himself into his younger brother's blue trousers and was wearing the shirt his cousin had bought at the secondhand clothes' market, reeking of half a bottle's worth of cheap aftershave, his Brilliantine-drenched hair looking shiny and comical, and his pimples all the more hideous for his pathetic attempts to pop them and then being smothered with Ideal acne cream. She towered over him lithely, casting an ethereal glow all around him. Everything he’d practiced before coming over evaporated in an instant, and all he could say was, “Can I have some water?” It took a superhuman effort for him to add, “cold water.”