Bitter Oranges

Part One-3

That description fit my aunt to a T.

The Hakim’s mother gave in but on condition she would never step foot in the bride’s house.

Until today, no-one can be sure if the Hakim was in love with Fatima as much as his father was infatuated with her.

“You only have to look at the engagement dress that Abu Mahmoud bought for her to see that” I kept saying to the neighbor women in subsequent years. My grandmother rejected my insinuations and would say, “He adored Hind Rustom, God rest his soul. Why do you think he named his daughter Hind?”

What man did not adore Hind Rustom! Practically all of them did. But the Hakim’s father probably wished to have a bride for himself like the one he had gotten for his son. The ugliness of his wealthy wife was clear proof of my suspicions.

Likewise, the whole secret behind the “cloche” gown was how it suited Fatima’s figure so well that it seemed to have been designed especially for her. How could Abu Mahmoud have guessed Fatima’s measurements with such precision!

When he left with the groom-to-be, I saw them out myself, not just with my eyes as my aunt did, exerting great effort to contain her excitement and great joy, and to maintain the haughty image she had built of herself in front of everyone.

I walked with some other children who had been bickering over the candy-coated almonds, following the groom in hope of being treated to some more candy. But no-one in the groom’s household handed out any candy. My eyes stayed glued to the blue shirt until he was swallowed up by the gate and the plump loquat fruits.

The Hakim went inside with his father and brother and shut the door. Then came the sounds of shouting and an argument of some sort before my grandmother passed by. She was on her way to the market to buy supplies for the next day’s lunch—to which she had invited her daughter’s fiancé.

She called me to accompany her and help carry the groceries.

It was a sudden engagement, so Aisha did not attend and neither did any of our relatives. But news of the engagement had gotten to the village ahead of my grandmother, and not just at the marketplace. She received dozens of congratulatory greetings and told anyone who asked the story of how the engagement had to be rushed because the groom needed to travel. There was something chirping in her throat as she spoke.

We bought meat and vegetables, spices and roasted nuts. Then, to make the Shish Barak, we approached the woman who sells goat milk yogurt. Fortunately, goat yogurt was in season as it was spring—the season for all delicious things, for tasty fruits and others that are sour. The bitter orange tree my grandmother planted in front of the house was ablaze in its brilliant whiteness and, as its fragrance meandered through the whole quarter, it seemed as though all the trees were brides dressed in white in the midst of their own annual wedding celebration, just like my aunt who never once renewed her own celebrations and who, for a reason that still confounds the entire village, never got married to the Hakim.

***

I stand before the mirror, my skin now dry and my hair, too, for the most part. It is not easy for me to feel connected to the image reflected in the mirror. It is not a familiar face I see. While Suha was plucking my eyebrows with a set of fine tweezers and a thread, it became clear she disapproved of my ignorance of my wide eyes! For her, the matter was simple. “We’ll raise the eyebrows higher so the eyes will look bigger and wider.”

I wipe the steam from the bathroom mirror to see I no longer resemble my father so much. So hard had I wished for that in previous periods of my life only to have it cause me pain now because no one would remember my father if they didn’t see him in my face.

They would always say, “God rest his soul,” whenever they noticed the resemblance between us. They would say kind words that broke Aisha’s silence. But I don’t blame her. Rather, I feel it was intentional he had not left a trace of himself behind. Despite my numerous attempts, I never found anything but a worn-out photograph of him which I keep in a notebook somewhere. At least I have something concrete to remember him by, while Aisha keeps only the abstract features of a man running from himself.

I remember the live birds he used to bring, to cheer me up and revive my poor health, though I would find most of them dead in the morning. I used to blame Aisha without any proof. My heart was my guide, exactly as Layla Murad used to say, whose songs blared from a small television in Aisha’s shop where I was forced to stay on winter days.

The rain was waltzing around outside and, like a mirage, it was as if Layla was dancing with a man made of rain. I used to think that the person behind the mask dancing with her was my father. The shop didn’t have a window or even a small skylight like most of the older buildings. Aisha couldn’t have known that the cause of my illness was that shop. None of it was my fault. The kind of hair I had was not my fault—my hoarse voice was not my fault, nor my thick eyebrows. It wasn’t my fault I had a sickly constitution or that I resembled my father who she hated to see or remember. Or perhaps for some reason she’d simply forgotten, because no one ever asked her about it, as if they all concurred with her hatred of him and encouraged her to it.

On days when it wasn’t raining, I collected unique pebbles from the area surrounding the shop. My passion for them would be driven by a flash of their shiny marble in the distance. Pebbles that made a resonant clicking sound gave me a brief feeling of pleasure. And there, I experienced the gratuitous evil of humankind for the first time when a boy who was three years older than me approached me and said, “Poor girl, you don’t have a brother or a father. It’s okay. Look. I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.” He pulled down his baggy shorts, and I was struck by the smell that overpowered me. Before any image came into view, and before I could react to it, I saw a large hand grab the pebbles there beside me and start pelting the boy with them.

It was some passerby who took me by the hand and frogmarched me to my mother. He didn’t give her the details of what happened, but he did chide her and warned her not to leave me alone.

How I wished there was a small amount of goodwill between Aisha and me, so I could ask her about that man. To this day, I still don’t know. Even when she got sick and grew weak, I didn’t ask her.

Later on, I would sense when evil people came near. I feel I can smell them the way a cat can smell sardines. That smell which my nose was never wrong about exuded from them. The smell from between the legs of that boy with the baggy shorts.

***

I rub almond oil over my body, knowing it will make me sweat even more.

I try to turn the air conditioner on, praying that it will work if only for half an hour, until the repairman comes. But just pleading with it doesn’t make it work. I settle for the fan and plop down on the bed, hugging my pillow. Feelings of estrangement and homesickness wash over me. A single teardrop is absorbed into the cotton of my familiar pillow which I brought with me, fully convinced that my sleepless hours were going to be especially long in Beirut. When I take comfort from its feel and its smell, I curl up, foetal, like an infant, and I say the sentence I’ve grown accustomed to saying before going to sleep.

“Sittee…Grandma…. Tell me a story.”

Her voice comes to me from behind the walls baking under a hostile sun.

“Kaan ya ma kaan…Once upon a time, my dear listeners, we’ll talk a little bit more and then we’ll go to sleep. Once there was, in a house faaar far away, at the faaar end of the village over there, was a woman who could not have any children. She lived all alone, with no children and no riches. And on the night of Laylat al-Qadr (The Night of Destiny) she prayed, saying:

“Lord send me a child to raise that will fill me with joy. Send me anything, even if it’s a chicken!”

God heard her prayers, and the next morning she found a little red hen at her door! Every day, the woman would watch the young girls heading out to pick wild dandelions and greens from the fields, and she would sigh with grief because her daughter was a chicken, not a girl like them. And one day, the chicken picked up a knife and a sack and followed after the girls to harvest greens with them. And when she returned, she was carrying the fullest sack of all, filled with swiss chard, purslane, wild thyme and mallow—more than all the girls!! She started going out every day to pick wild greens and would come back happy as could be. But one day, the little hen reached the king’s garden and there she removed the chicken cloak and appeared out from under it as a houri whose beauty and loveliness no eyes had ever seen before. The chicken had been hiding in her clothing, as they say. Could she be a jinni princess—Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim—one of the King of the Jinn’s daughters? Her face was like a slice of the moon, her hair like gold and jasmine, and her fingers like malban candy. And she wore ten rings, on each finger, a ring of a different size with a different jewel. She took them all off, placed them on the edge of the pool, and dove in. About an hour later, she came back up and started putting the rings on, but she discovered one ring was missing. She started counting her fingers: “This finger has a ring, and this finger has one, and this finger has one…but this finger, why doesn’t it have one?” She started counting again, but again, one finger remained without a ring. Hearing some movement, she put on the chicken cloak, picked up her sack and her knife and went back to her mother. There was someone who had seen her at the pool and had been watching her. He was the one who took the ring. But who was he?”

I would beat my grandmother to the answer, peering at her in the dark. “The prince.”

Eventually, the prince burns the chicken cloak so she will stay in her human form and he can marry her. Exactly like the tomcat who kills the mama cat’s kittens so she will marry him.

My grandmother continues the story and then finishes it with a sad ending.

“She sat on the edge of the pool, put her children in her lap and said to her husband, the prince, “Bye-bye now,” and dove into the water.” And because the story doesn’t have a happy and peaceful ending, I ask for another story. She scolds me and orders me to repeat after her. “Naam ya ‘abdu Allah, il-ittikaalu ‘a Allah” (Sleep now, servant of Allah, Trust belongs in the hands of Allah). And so, I repeat, “Naam yaa Abdallah, ittikaalu ‘a Allah,” (Sleep, O Abdullah, Whose trust is in Allah).