Джоха Альхарти - Celestial Bodies

Look here, Hanan said. This romance thing. With all due respect for love wherever it is, to lovers, songs, Nizar Qabbani’s poetry, flowers, the moon, nights of conversation, stars, and every poet who has ever existed — this isn’t big on rationality. No listening, no looking, no thinking or real planning. A guy you saw a few times in lecture halls and at poetry evenings and you talked to him in the hall for a few minutes and then on the phone a few nights. You split a sandwich in the hospital cafeteria on your break and you drank a Pepsi together in the med college parking lot. And then you say, I’m crazy about him? I can’t live without him? He is my air and water, my sun and moon? What’s this nonsense? And it turns out his grandfather was a shepherd for your grandmother’s father fifty years ago and your grandmother swears she’ll slit your throat if you marry him? They hit you and break your phone and forbid you going to classes for several days, and why? For some guy who is no different than thousands of other men in this world? He’s not even as tall as you are. And you say to me ‘love’ and patience and sacrifice and if I don’t marry him I will kill myself? If I can’t talk to him I can’t breathe and if I don’t see him I can’t live? What love, London? Did you, like, walk into him deliberately so you could fall in love, in the first place? You’re always saying to me, it’s the phone calls, the emails... well, this is exactly your mistake, London. When you are not truly with someone, and you only hear his voice, and then all he talks about is himself, you form the image that you’re already hoping for. You don’t exactly get a true picture. See, you don’t know him at all. Poetry and dreamy phone conversations wa salam! That’s all you’ve got! And then — either I marry him or I kill myself? And I’m so great because I’m rejecting the hateful class system? You don’t need his slogans in order to trust your own principles, London. What has he done for your sake anyway? He lets your mother torture you and your grandmother threaten you, and all he does is just sit there watching, waiting to see what the outcome will be. This is a man? This guy? As far as I’m concerned what marriage is doesn’t have a lot to do with love. Love is dreams, marriage is for real: life, responsibility, child-ren. No illusions. The right person is the one who respects and honours you, and you feel totally comfortable with, the one who will be a father you can be proud of, for your children’s sake. Not someone with a stupid inferiority complex who makes you feel jealous. Love, he said. Hah! I swear I thought you had some brains, London. I thought your mind was on graduating, and on Canada, your specialization — until all of this happened. What are you going to do now, if your mother keeps on slapping you, if they don’t marry you to him?

I will kill myself.

Hanan left. She was assigned to a school in Dhofar. Refusing was out of the question. If she turned this job down she’d lose her chances, probably forever. Where would she find a fixer who could get her appointed in Muscat so that she could stay with her family? She didn’t know anyone with any influence, and if she said no and the job flew out of her hands all the dreams of her family would go up in smoke — her father, retired now, her mother, who was ill, her brother who had gotten engaged seven years before but on his miserable salary had still not been able to pay the dowry. She packed her cases and travelled south, dreaming of her first salary and her brother’s wedding.

London began phoning her every other day, in tears.

Hanan, I hate the words freedom and culture and classism. I’ve started doubting myself completely. Can you imagine, he searches my phone every time we meet, he goes through all the numbers on it to make sure there is no new one that he doesn’t know.

Hanan sighed. I don’t know what to say to you, love. This man doesn’t deserve you.

I don’t understand anything any more. It’s as if I’m living inside a tornado. Suddenly he started noticing how dark and thin I am, as if he never saw me before.

I swear that guy has no shame. Why don’t you stand up to him? Talk to him about all of this.

I’ve tried, and every time I start, he says to me, Don’t think you are better than me. I’m the man here, and your family and all the real estate your father owns and his business don’t concern me a bit. Even though, Hanan, I never said anything about my family to him. Not even once, not at all.

Allah Allah! This man is sick, sweetheart. Give it some thought before you get any deeper into it... you’re still just in the contract period, meaning, it’s just an engagement, really.

You want us to break up, Hanan? Ahmad is my darling, the dream of my life. We have to solve our problems, I don’t want my first love to fail. I don’t want the way I’ve resisted my family to go in vain. I want to prove our success to the world, to my mother and father and grandmother and our classmates, the whole world. I don’t want to be a divorced woman.

But her first love did fail. It had failed long before she could admit it, and after a lot of insults and pains. Finally she demanded an annulment and refused to see him. He stood at her car door in the College parking lot and begged her to speak to him. He blocked the car door with his body to prevent her from getting in. London, my London, don’t leave me... you are mine. You are the girl of my dreams. I swear to God I am sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you. I was just angry, I swear to God, I’m so sorry, forgive me. I kiss your feet. I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t want to lose you, and anyway, you are my property, my London. You are my victory and my inspiration. You are mine. You would leave me and belong to someone else? wAllahi it won’t happen, you belong to me. You are my girl, my wife. I kiss your hands, don’t leave me. We’ll get married, the date’s been set and we’ll go on honeymoon to Europe. We’ll open the clinic together. Have you forgotten our dreams, London? You’re mine, my London, my muse. My love, mine. You belong to me.

London left the parking lot and went back into the College. It wasn’t enough to keep on saying to herself, I am not your possession, and I do not belong to anyone. It wasn’t enough, any of this, to heal her. She knew you couldn’t treat a wound just by cleansing it with an antiseptic or pretending it was only a scratch.

The desperate longing in his face and voice as they’d been before was a weapon her heart waved in her face. I hate you, I hate your voice, I hate the look of you. She tore up all the pictures of him she could find. But she couldn’t feel the kind of hatred that might pull her out of this. She just felt the sharpest, most violent bitterness and pain.

After Nasir had truly settled down in Oman, and once Khawla’s two last children had arrived, and now that Nasir was hardly ever leaving the house except when he had to go to work, she decided. She wanted a divorce.

Everyone thought she had gone insane. Or perhaps she was concealing some terrible set of secrets that had pushed her to this crazy decision.

But Khawla wasn’t hiding anything.

It was just that she couldn’t bear the past. Everything was calm and well-ordered now. Fayiz, the youngest of her five children, was in high school. Mona was engaged to a respectable engineer, and the others were all doing well. Everything in her life was so calm, in fact, that it was like existing in a still and soundless landscape. All of it: her married life, her motherhood, her friendships.

She was at peace, so her heart stopped forgiving. She couldn’t bear the past any longer. All of it seemed now to have grown to an enormous size inside her, and it choked her. Every night, the portrait of the Canadian girl on the key ring got bigger, and went to sleep on Khawla’s pillow. Every day, all of those hours she had spent alone in maternity wards marched out in force to pounce on her. Every day, she could see the clothes her children never wore because their father didn’t even know how old they were. Every day, she saw the years that had passed with her bed cold, her beauty wrecked, the neighbours taking her children to the hospital if they fell ill, her sisters loaning her money when she needed it, her mother scolding her, and neighbours’ eyes full of pity. The past came back every single day, a warrior’s lance that stabbed her through. Oh, Khawla! That wild forest inside of you, full of rough underbrush. Had it been asleep all these years, and was it you who closed its eyes? Who covered over its poisoned plants? You can see it now, though, as it rips through the old sheets with which you tried to cover it and choke off all those thorns. What does it want? You don’t know, of course. How would you know? As you take a step on the staircase that leads down into it, the step before it splinters and the way back is gone. The white sheets that covered it are gone.