Bitter Oranges

Part One-2

Dangling from his waist were the birds he killed twice—once with the buckshot and once by cutting their throats—something I could never appreciate. He put the quail shot rifle down on the patched-up sofa.

My sisters rushed to prepare his lunch while he washed the bird blood and feathers off his hands. He ate in silence without commenting on my condition. When he’d eaten his fill and burped, he pulled out a lottery ticket from the place where he hid those tickets he got from Beirut. Before leaving, he asked me with a calm exterior, “What did you do to yourself?”

“Mother cut her hair because she had lice,” Saada answered.

“No, not because of lice,” Manal corrected. “She cut it because it was a knotted mess.”

“Well, okay! She wished so hard for a boy, God finally sent her one, but without the right body parts!” he said, without emotion, and then took off with the lottery ticket and his birds.

The term “Sahbeh—Lottery” was never far from him. It was his trade, his nickname, and the story of his life…and his death, too.

He would enter the “coffee house” or sit at the door, and men would approach or call to him. They’d give him a little bit of money in return for one of the possible names written on the “lottery ticket.” Once all the names were bought, it was time for the draw. He would tear the stub off the ticket to see which name was on it, and that person would win the birds.

It was not an insignificant prize. Birds were a delicacy that most of the coffee house regulars devoured with delight, as did the transient customers and strangers who sought us out to buy olive oil, soap, or orange blossom water…

He never tried to rid himself of the “Sahbeh,” label because he knew the nickname would stick to him forever. He had inherited it from his father, and I inherited it from both of them.

Everywhere, everyone introduced me as “Bint Sahbeh—Sahbeh’s daughter”. And Aisha was called “Sahbeh’s wife,” and my five sisters were “Sahbeh’s little girls.”

I am Bint Sahbeh in name and in likeness. They know it from my face and from my thick eyebrows. And with that haircut, I became his son, not just his daughter.

When my grandmother saw me with that horrifying appearance, she felt sorry for me. She backed away from the hot laundry cauldron and with her blackened fingers—from the burnt firewood—she pulled out her little worn-out and peeling purse from her bosom and gave me a quarter lira coin.

That was the biggest opportunity in my five years of life.

I was not enticed by candy, chocolates or salted nuts. My dreams lay elsewhere.

The bookstore.

I held the quarter up in clear view as I entered the bookstore, so he wouldn’t kick me out the front door as he usually did.

Every day, I would stop in front of the bookstore and peer through the window at the colored pencils and exciting storybooks—the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty—and he would yell at me and shoo me away for standing there too long, blocking the view of potential customers.

Unable to read, I didn’t care much for the titles, but the covers were guaranteed to enchant me—drawings of pretty girls in captivating dresses with long, wide petticoats, their soft blond hair so long, it flowed down their slender back. There was always a handsome prince too, and the palaces and the green meadows. My dream was to buy those storybooks, or one of them at least.

I chose one with a picture on its cover of a blonde girl in a beautiful pearly dress. Standing over her head was a fairy with a magic wand showering her with flowers and stars!

I held up the quarter lira and asked about the price of the book, but that didn’t do me any good.

Without a word, he came over and slapped me, and the quarter fell from my hand. The bookstore turned dark and gloomy, and so did the princess’s face. Her shiny dress was snuffed out. I couldn’t locate the quarter anywhere despite my attempts to find it.

I ran off, falling down too many times to count. Something dark and unknown was hurting me and continues to hurt me even to this day. It was my unforgivable ugliness.

If only I had a tiny trace of her beauty! I felt such distress whenever I saw her swaying in front of the mirror, convinced for the millionth time that she looked like Hind Rustom, as so many people told her. When my grandmother would tell stories about the gorgeous houri, I could never imagine her as anything but a copy of my aunt, Fatima. I had my own theory about Fatima’s beauty. My grandmother must have had “cravings” during pregnancy for the houris in the stories that her father, the hakawati with the wild imagination, used to tell.

Fatima was not satisfied knowing how beautiful she was. She believed in her beauty with conviction and thought of it as her salvation.

That radiant beauty of hers emanated from and reached its zenith on one spring day, and we would never experience such joy again.

Aisha and my sisters had preferred to shear off my hair because it made it easier to comb. I was on my way to my grandmother’s house to help her pick some bitter orange blossoms in return for a few piasters. Halfway down the lane I heard women’s voices, and the trill-like sounds of their joyful ululations. I approached the door, and the first thing I saw was the dazzling, rosy face of my Aunt Fatima. She appeared behind the shoulders of a man wearing a blue shirt who had taken hold of her hand to place a ring on her finger. Her magnetic eyes were even more beautiful than on any other day. They widened and flickered, almost devouring both the ring and the hands of the man in the blue shirt.

The blue of her eyes radiated more brightly perhaps because the color of the man’s shirt was reflected in them. It was such a blue hue that would never be repeated again, and which I never saw except in the color of the sea on rare days at the end of April. Until this day, that beautiful portrait has never dimmed in my memory, despite all the pain and tears that ensued.

The women of the quarter suddenly appeared wearing their house clothes and untidy headscarves.

“Mabrouk…Congratulations, Hakim…Mabrouk to Fatima…to Imm Shibl…Allah, Allah. Dear Fatima, may you never suffer any bad thing…”

They surrounded my grandmother who, after letting out a lone ululation, stood there silently, as if her life’s dream had come true. Fatima fell speechless, too. She cast quivering smiles around the room and repeatedly stroked the fabric of her bell-shaped “cloche” gown.

I was not so much interested in her dress, which appeared to have fallen from some other sky, as I was in the man in the shirt the same color as the “Nile cubes” my grandmother put in with the laundry. It was a color that resembled the end of the sea—the farthest ends my vision and my yearning could ever reach.

I moved closer and, through the legs of the guests present, watched him—his face, his eyes and his thin and neatly trimmed moustache. I smelled his familiar cologne—a mix of sandalwood and ood. He looked over at me despite my tininess. That glance was the most splendid thing that ever happened to me.

He let go of the hand of his charming bride whose hair was rippled with streaks of gold and copper, and lowered himself, bending his knees, to an ugly little girl with short hair…

“Is that you, little troublemaker? Have you been falling off the tercina in my absence?”

He searched for the scar to see his own creation. He smiled with satisfaction and went back to his fiancée.

It was him. No one was called “Hakim”—Doctor—but him. No one possessed such kindness, but him. And no one deserved my beautiful aunt but him.

He was the most handsome young man in the village and the most educated. He would become a “big time” doctor in just a few years, as his mother—the “daughter of wealth and fame”—would say, and about whom it was said, she used what she inherited from her father years earlier to buy her own handsome husband. The women whispered amongst themselves about her absence that day, but I didn’t understand. And nor did I care.

I sat mesmerized on the cement floor of the room watching the young couple. My grandmother served the guests the candy-coated almonds and baklava that the groom’s father had brought with him.

I was tasting baklava for the first time and witnessing my first engagement ceremony. I was also seeing clearly, for the first time, the man who had sewn up my wound and saved me from death—the beguiling man who had left his scent between the stitches on my neck.

Throughout the time when the Hakim would come from Russia for summer vacations and long holidays, my aunt would head to her friend Tahani’s grim house daily. This was because Tahani’s balcony overlooked the entrance to the Hakim’s house, as opposed to our balcony which overlooked the sea.

The young girls didn’t like to congregate facing the sea despite the breezes being gentle and the views captivating. Instead, they were fond of Tahani’s balcony. And despite her wrath and her envy, Tahani would welcome their visits and exploit the opportunity to stay out on the balcony without raising her parents’ suspicions.

Tahani would turn the cassette tape over to hear Abd el-Halim repeat his crooning over some sweetheart or other, while the young women swayed, moved by every “Ah” he uttered or kept to himself.

Fatima started telling them about how the Hakim had helped her niece, and how he had started ordering her to bring him this or that, and to sterilize her hands, and to calm the little girl down. They were listening and agonizing over not having been there with her, or instead of her, so much so that one of them smacked her little brother—who had followed her like a chaperone as per her parents’ goading. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you took a fall and broke your neck,” she berated him, “so we could bring the Hakim for you!!”

They burst out laughing, with envy of Fatima burning in their hearts, for they knew that the most beautiful one among them had no competition. They hoped, whenever a suitor came for Fatima, that she would accept, so they could be rid of the one big obstacle on own their path to marriage.

Abu Mahmoud—the Hakim’s father—held the same opinion. He was the one who had sent a telegram to his son telling him to interrupt his studies and to come and ensnare Fatima with a ring and a gold pound.

Abu Mahmoud had been setting up a trap for the moles in his garden, midway down the lane leading to my grandmother’s house. It was then that he saw Abu Kamel leading a throng of his relatives on his way to ask for Fatima’s hand for his eldest son, Kamel.

Not only was Kamel an engineer, but he was handsome, owned his own house, and his father was in commerce, too. Abu Mahmoud considered him a strong rival. He rushed to his wife, who had always opposed her husband’s wishes to become related by marriage to my grandmother the “bedsheet launderer,” as she called her. He told her that, if they didn’t find him a girl to marry who is more beautiful than all the Russian girls, has a good character, and is someone we’ve known since she was a child, their son might end up marrying some Russian girl “whose father we have no clue about or where he came from”.