Farewell, Damascus

Chapter One-2

As Zain stood there agonizing over what to do, a voice inside her said: You’ve got to get on with the amputation, then cauterize the wound! It was a voice she’d started hearing when she began writing her first stories and poems. She’d written in secret, like somebody committing sin—fornicating with language. And isn’t it a sin for me to write? Maybe this was the offense my mother paid for with her life. She’d fallen out of favor with my father’s family, and as she lay dying in labor with her second child, my father’s brother refused to bring a doctor for her. Since she was a woman, no man (and every doctor is a man, right?) could be allowed to see her body even for purposes of medical treatment. The so-called “family honor” was more important than her life. When our cat had a litter once, it was this same uncle who threw the females against the Damascus wall and let the males live.

The voice inside her said: Knock! No door is going to open unless you knock on it! If you don’t take life by the horns, nobody else is going to do it for you! The voice deep down—the voice of the rebellious woman inside her—was getting louder and louder. She claims to speak for me, but without caring what happens to me or to her after that! She had once started dictating what sounded like part of an article in Zain’s head. She said: We have to go through a painful second birth. But as painful as it is, this is what will heal our wounds, past and future. It’s the new birth that comes with the taste of freedom.

As Zain wrote more “nonsense” in her head about the thrill of freedom, she felt pained and happy at the same time. She knew all she had to do now was knock on the door in front of her. But instead she kept writing inside her head: I’ve been a silkworm that produces its precious, traditional treasure, and I was about to die of suffocation for the sake of someone who wasn’t worth the price. But now I’m going to sprout wings and break out of my cocoon. Or maybe I’ll fly away on the wings of an owl that floats about effortlessly like a ghost, or on the wings of an eagle, or on a glider like the one I used to go up on before I got married. Her husband had told her to stop riding the glider, and she’d surrendered to his tyranny in the name of love. But now she was rebelling in the name of honesty and freedom.

But she hadn’t told anybody. Her grandmother might have kept her secret. Then again, she might not have. The same was true of Zain’s girl friends. We don’t know who other people are on the inside—in fact, we hardly know ourselves. All she knew for sure was that her own voice had started to merge with the voice of the mad writer inside her. She had to start standing on her own two feet. She had to stop writing in her head like Hamlet, quit her useless chatter, and ring that doorbell!

Why didn’t I tell anybody what I was planning to do? Well, whatever the reason was, I didn’t, and that’s that. Maybe it was because I knew nobody would be able to keep my secret. There’s a story about a king who used to tell his secrets to the river frogs for fear that if he confided in anyone else, his confidence would be followed by a dagger in his back. I guess I want to be like him.

For the third time Zain made up her mind to ring the doorbell. But while she was still deliberating, the door was opened by the doctor’s wife, who worked as his assistant. Zain suspected that the woman had seen her through the peephole and knew how long she’d been standing there since, as she opened the door, she said irritably in broken Arabic mixed with French, “We’ve been waiting for you. Come in.” As if in hopes of winning her approval, Zain stepped inside with a cheery “Bonjour” instead of the more common sabah al-khayr.

The doctor’s wife pointed to a chair near the waiting room entrance and, speaking to Zain in French, said, “Sit here. I don’t know what made you stand outside our door that way without ringing the doorbell. Or is it not working?” Zain sat down, but pretended not to have understood what she said. When making the appointment, she’d posed as the semi-illiterate daughter of a dancer at the Siryana Nightclub. She’d told the doctor she’d been r***d by her mother’s lover and that although her mother didn’t know she was coming to see him, it was through her mother that she’d learned about him since she had a record of previous abortions. Will Baba be mad at me if he finds out what I’ve done? I’ve already caused him more than enough misery.

As she sat down, wild stallions went galloping through her head. As if she were recalling the past in preparation to die— or maybe, in preparation to survive—her memory went on a free-for-all. She thought back on how, when she’d insisted on marrying somebody she was madly in love with, her father had been furious. He’d said she was just a teenager who didn’t know what she was doing. It looks like he was right.

But actually, he’d been more sad than angry. He’d been sure the marriage would be a failure, but, starry-eyed lover that she was at the time, Zain hadn’t understood why. She’d honestly thought she knew better than her forty year old father, and better than everybody else, for that matter. When he reminded Zain that she was just seventeen years old, she informed him that she’d grown up and understood the world now. He hit himself in the face, and it pained her. Then her beloved groom’s upper crust family had intervened in support of the marriage, though all they really wanted was for him to settle down and stop giving them trouble.

I really put my father in an awkward position. Socially speaking, he couldn’t refuse the family. At the same time, he couldn’t say he approved of the family but didn’t approve of the suitor because of what he knew about him. After all, there was bound to be a ready reply: Don’t worry. Once he’s married, he’ll straighten himself out! So my hard-working dad spent a fortune on my trousseau, including a top-of-the-line wardrobe. It was so top-of-the-line, in fact, that the cheapest items came from the ritzy Hayek’s Department Store, which had opened recently in the building that overlooks the Barada River downstairs from the Akhbar al Yawm newspaper. The trousseau also featured embroidered nightgowns from Rahibat Tailor Shop, and a Christian Dior wedding dress like the one Cinderella wore in the fairy tales I’d studied at the Lycée Francais on Baghdad Street.

When the women from the groom’s family, who wore the highest heels on the social ladder, came to look at the trousseau in keeping with tradition, they oohed and aahed over my luxurious stash, since it was synonymous with my value to my father and, more importantly, the value of the groom’s family. After all, the groom’s father was a pillar of the famed Quartet Company.

My dad was a little boy when he lost his father, the owner of a corner store behind the Umayyad Mosque near our house in Ziqaq Al Yasmin. He’d spent his youth in poverty because some of his uncles had commandeered his share of the corner store in their capacity as his guardians. My grandmother had to work as a seamstress in order to provide him with an education. He worked hard too, and ended up studying medicine in Paris. It pained my dad to have high-class folks look down on us. Or, to be more precise, it pained him for me to be looked down on by my in-laws. So he tried to outdo them, and he would have managed if it weren’t for the fact that the house they bought and furnished for us was in the upscale Hayy al-Ra’is, or President’s Quarter, so named because, as my fiancé’s mother informed me smugly, it was where then President Shukri Quwatli lived.

This string of events passed before Zain’s eyes like a flash of lightning. But no, she wasn’t going to back down. She had to go through with the abortion no matter what physical or psychological misery might follow it. She was terrified, of course. She imagined herself running scared toward the operating table through a jungle filled with crocodiles, snakes and huge tarantulas. But as scared as she was, she knew she had to erase this man from her life. She didn’t want to give birth to a child who’d have to grow up without a mother the way she had. She knew only too well what that was like. She didn’t want him to be the father of her child. She never even wanted to see him again, and if she did see him, she hoped she wouldn’t recognize him.

Where is that doctor, anyway? Why does he keep me waiting like this, at the mercy of my fears and thoughts?

She knew she had to find her “second engine,” the one her dad had told her about years earlier.

I was ten years old, and my dad and I had gone on a “farewell to summer” walk that took us from Bloudan, to Baqin, to Zabadani. As we hiked down dusty side paths on our way back, I started to give out. Even though I wanted to please my father, I collapsed beside a spring, exhausted and thirsty.

“Get up now,” he said.

“I can’t,” I whimpered.

“Come on,” he urged. “Start up that second engine of yours. It’s something you do with will power. I know you’ve got it. For all we know, you might have a third one, a fourth one, or even more than that! Get up and run this time instead of just walking. Remember how strong you are.”

I didn’t understand a word my dad had said apart from the fact that I had to get up. So I did. I learned how to get up again. But later, when I made up my mind to marry Waseem, I used my second engine against him.

Zain had met Waseem for the first time three months before her seventeenth birthday at the Arnous Library, next to the clinic, and it had been love at first sight. Fueled by a million engines, her infatuation with him was fiery, fierce, and wild. Nothing could have stood in its way. On account of it she waged all-out war on her family. And her decision to leave him now was just as fierce and unstoppable as her determination to marry him had been before. When she realized she had to leave him, they’d been together a little less than a year. Some of that time had been spent in a dreamy courtship between Mount Qasioun and the romantic Candles Restaurant, and some of it in the throes of bitter matrimony. Once their week-long honeymoon was over, her days were spent rushing back and forth between the library, the university, and the house, where she’d head straight for the kitchen to cook, only to end up dozing off at the table from sheer exhaustion. I thought to myself: Is this daily and nightly frenzy what they call marriage? If it is, then I don’t want it, and I can’t take it. What I’d wanted was a home of my own where I wouldn’t be bothered by aunts, neighbor ladies, and the ideas they stuff into your head in Ziqaq Al Yasmin. But all I’d done by getting married was trade one form of oppression for another.