Farewell, Damascus

Chapter One-1

Chapter OneI’ll have to slip out of bed without his noticing, get dressed in a flash, and leave the house before he wakes up and either interrogates me or follows me. He mustn’t know where I’m going—nobody can. If I’m going to take hold of my life again and escape the murder in disguise that’s in store for crazy, disillusioned lovers like me, I’ve got to keep my secret all to myself.

Once I’m there, I’ll have to strip down completely. I can’t even have polish on my nails. I’ve already been stripped of everything else, including moral support from family or friends. I haven’t told my female cousins or Grandma Hayat, or the classmates I feel comfortable talking to. I haven’t told Nabila, or Muntaha, or Afaf, or any of my other close friends. Confiding in others is a luxury reserved for people who are in physical pain. It’s not something you do when you’re agonizing over whether to commit a murder. Besides, we’re born alone and we die alone, so I’ve got to face these things without help from anybody else. For weeks I’ve felt barren and dry on the inside, and there’s a kind of red line between me and other people that I can’t cross.

In order to survive, I’ve got to do this alone.

The only one in on Zain’s plan was her owl, who’d been with her through thick and thin. She sat perched at the foot of the bed with her wide, mysterious eyes, making noises Zain didn’t know how to interpret. Was she warning her, or encouraging her? She couldn’t tell. For some reason the little bird’s cries and chirps had never wakened Zain’s husband. In fact, he’d never seen her.

Zain stole quietly out of bed to the steady rhythm of her husband’s faint snoring. He’d never know about what she was going to do that day.

She tiptoed out of the bedroom, which was shrouded in semi-darkness by the drawn curtains. Her heart was pounding like a bongo drum, but nobody but she could hear it.

She headed for the kitchen to make the morning cup of coffee she couldn’t do without. Then suddenly she remembered she was supposed to have been fasting since midnight. Farewell then, coffee, and good morning, living death. The night before she’d hidden some clothes under a stack of clean sheets so her husband wouldn’t see them if he woke before she did. She threw them on. She’d chosen them with no thought for style. They only needed to be light enough for a balmy, early Fall day, and easy to take off.

Before leaving she crept up to the bedroom door to make sure her husband was still asleep. The owl’s mysterious, penetrating gaze at Zain made her wonder whether she was egging her on, or warning her. Meanwhile, her husband’s snoring got ominously louder.

The last thing Zain needed would have been for her husband to get up, brandishing the fancy diamond necklace his mother had told her he wanted to give her for her birthday. Since their wedding a year earlier on her seventeenth birthday, she’d endured a thousand and one years of sorrow and disappointment. She knew, of course, that if he did wake up, she wouldn’t tell him what she was thinking. She would just make her getaway as fast as she could. After a week of indecision, fear, worry, silence and nightly crying sessions on the back porch, she knew she had to take charge of her life. Zain’s elderly neighbor, a widow by the name of Mrs. Kotalli, would try to console her. For all Zain knew, Mrs. Kotalli had heard her whole story just the way all the other neighbor ladies had. Grandma Hayat—who’d always seemed as old as the stones in her brother’s house, which had been built into the Damascus wall—had told Zain one time, “There’s no such thing as a well-kept secret in Damascus. The houses would never keep a secret, since the people who live in them are like talking windows. Wherever you go, the walls might have ears. But in Damascus, they have lips too!”

Zain didn’t plan to take any identification with her, but she put on her diamond necklace. Assuming she made it back alive, she wouldn’t be bringing it home with her, since it was the price she’d have to pay for what she’d decided to do.

Before lying down the night before and pretending to sleep, she’d oiled the door hinges on the sly so they wouldn’t creak the way they usually did. On her way out, her hands were trembling. Even so, she managed to turn the key in the lock without a sound. Then she took off running down the stairs.

As I was on my way down the stairs, a grouchy neighbor opened his door, shot me a dirty look and then slammed it shut again without a word of greeting. He didn’t like me because he thought I was a bad influence on his sister Najiya. Najiya was a shy, docile girl, and the only time she ever perked up was when the two of us would mop down the stairs together. The place would be filled with the smell of the detergent we sprinkled on the stairs to make them spick and span. Sometimes we’d slip and fall on the suds and get the giggles, and I’d start talking to her about freedom. When her brother heard me say the word—which was an obscenity in his book—he said he wished he could burn my tongue with a hot coal. That was what a neighbor lady in Ziqaq Al Yasmin had done to her daughter one day because the poor girl had dared to use the word “love.” “Love”? “Freedom”? “Rebellion”? They’re all dirty words!

Once she was out in the street, Zain could run without worrying about her shoes clattering against the morning pavement. The exhilarating fragrance of a warm fall Damascus day wafted through the air. As usual, the baker next door had his radio on full blast, and she heard pop singer Fayza Ahmad crooning, ana ‘albi ilayk mayyal, wa ma fish ghayrak ‘al-bal! (“You’ve got my heart on a string, and I’ve got you on my mind!”) As for Zain, the only thing on her mind was to get away from the person she’d once been crazy in love with.

The nostalgic fragrance of the Damascus autumn mingled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. People were on their way to work, and I was on my way to my own private ordeal. A guy that glanced at me as we passed each other on the sidewalk might have thought that, like him, I was almost late for work. If he’d passed me on some other day, when I was in my usual employee/student mode, he would have been right, since I would have been rushing to the library. But today was different. Nobody would ever have imagined what I was about to do. It was against everything I’d been taught all my life. It was even against the law, and if I were found out, I could be arrested. In fact, it went against most of the voices in my head and heart. But I didn’t want that husband of mine to be the father of my son or daughter.

I didn’t want any child of mine to be born into a broken home the way I had been. I wanted to place a full stop at the end of the sentence and start fresh on a new line. Is such a thing really possible? Whatever the case, I was as determined to separate from him now as I’d once been to marry him. I’d made a mistake, and I wasn’t going to go back on my decision to take hold of my life no matter what it took. I’d let my life slip out of my hands, and had nearly been carried away by the current of the familiar and routine.

Voices in the street overlapped with the voices in Zain’s head. As Abdel Halim Hafez sang, ahwāka wa atamanna law ansāk (“I’m in love with you, wishing I could forget you!”), she could hear her aunt shriek, “Love?! Heaven forbid! You’re not allowed to get to know somebody before you marry him. You’ve got to sign the marriage contract first!” And that’s what she’d done. If they’d allowed me to get to know him first, what happened wouldn’t have happened. Got a lousy marriage? Well, forget divorce! The only option for a respectable girl is to get pregnant and have a baby to distract herself from her misery. My husband had done his best to make that happen, and unfortunately, he’d succeeded.

Does a girl want to marry a man she’s in love with? That’s a sin. Instead she has to marry someone the clan picks out for her and who would be a “suitable match.” I’d committed the sin of marrying somebody I was in love with over my father’s objections. It just so happened that the person I’d fallen in love fit my family’s specifications. Yet even then they’d gone berserk. What?! Let a girl choose her own husband? Perish the thought!

The only family member who’d stood up for me was my dad, since he couldn’t bear to kill my mother twice. And now I was about to commit a second sin, socially speaking. I’d decided that on my eighteenth birthday I was going to announce that I wanted a divorce. I’d made a mistake, and I wanted to correct it. When men correct their mistakes, the clan applauds. But when a neighbor lady in Ziqaq Al Yasmin dared to do the same, she’d gotten her throat slit. Males have a monopoly on the right to make mistakes. So since I’m a woman, I have to pay for my mistake for the rest of my life. My mistake is an unforgivable sin. As for a man’s mistakes, they’re negotiable. But ever since I was a little girl my father had told me, “Admit your mistakes, and correct them!” And that’s what I was going to do.

Of course, her father might have been talking about something like breaking a water glass, something that could be fixed or replaced. But could she fix a mistaken marriage by getting a divorce? Could she correct one big mistake with another? After all, the people around her considered divorce a sin. So was she about to correct a mistake with a scandal that might scar her for life? I’m not going to punish myself for wanting an abortion, damn it!

She passed through the Arnous neighborhood. It was in the Arnous Library that she saw her husband for the first time, and she’d been smitten from the first glance. And here she was on her way to forgetting him in the building right next to it. The grocer’s radio blasted out the words, “I once pledged you my love till death do us part. We had beautiful dreams, but they’ve fallen apart.” She nearly teared up. Hesitating in front of the building, she stopped. Nobody knows where I am or where I’m about to go. And nobody knows whether I’ll come out alive. Maybe I should at least have told Grandma Hayat what I was planning to do. After all, she’s good at keeping secrets. From the radio in the butcher shop wafted the voice of Farid Atrash: “No matter how much you cry, don’t cry to anybody else. No matter how much you complain, don’t complain to anybody else. Whether people are true to you or not, keep your sorrows to yourself.”

Her grandma was good at keeping little secrets—like not snitching on her grandchildren when they jumped on the bed, or the time when Zain broke the water jug. But could she handle a secret like this? Her father loved her dearly, and openly disliked her husband. But would he condone what she was about to do? And would Nabila, Afaf, Muntaha, or any of her cousins or her other friends be able to keep a secret like this one?

A beggar came up and started badgering her, saying, “May God protect your children—now give me some charity for God!” “Listen, lady!” Zain nearly screamed, “I’m on my way to kill one of my children—the first of them! But here—take some charity anyway!”

But instead she just went on her way.

Zain walked into the building and up to the office door. She reached out and touched the doorbell. Shall I ring it, or not? Maybe I should have left a note for Baba so he’d know where I went in case… She stood with her hand on the doorbell. There are certain decisions we have to make without leaning on anybody else, and we have to take responsibility for them on our own. I’d decided to marry my husband on my seventeenth birthday, and now I had to divorce him and get rid of his child. And on my eighteenth birthday, of all days. So was it a birth day, or a death day? In any case, it was the date the doctor had decided on, and I’d agreed to it. My birthday didn’t mean anything to me or my family anyway, since it had always just been the day when we remembered my mother’s first death. She’d been having a difficult delivery, as though I didn’t want to come out and face the world, and I nearly killed her by forcing her to have a caesarean section. So am I crazy to be coming for an abortion all by myself? Well, who of us isn’t crazy in one way or another?