Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

Gamrah kept cataloging instances of Rashid’s difficult personality and they began to grow and mass like a snowball rolling down a mountain, swelling to more and more gigantic proportions. Gamrah kept up her investigation, turning over in her mind every little detail, trying to unearth the real reason why he was hostile to her—even, it seemed clear, repulsed by her. What, Gamrah puzzled, was the truth behind his contempt? What was it that had driven him, through all of these months, to positively insist that she take birth-control pills, even though she was dying to have a baby with him?

Real, serious doubts began to sink into Gamrah’s heart and soul after she had been married for a few months. The way Rashid treated her was not a whole lot different from the way her father treated her mother. But it was different from the way Mohammed treated her sister Naflah, and even from the way Khalid was with Hessah, at least when they had first been married. And it was thoroughly unlike the way their Emirati neighbor behaved toward his wife, whom he had married just six months before Rashid and Gamrah’s wedding.

Although her husband was rough and rude to her sometimes, Gamrah loved him. She was even devoted to him, in spite of everything, for he was the first man she had ever spent time with outside of the company of her brothers, father and uncles. He was the first man who had come forward to ask for her hand, and by doing so he had made her feel as though there were someone in this world who knew—maybe even appreciated—that she was alive. Gamrah did not know if she had come to love Rashid because he was worthy of being loved, or if she simply felt it was her duty as his wife to love him. Now, though, the doubts that began to overtake her were troubling her sleep and darkening her days.

One day as she was shopping in the Al-Khayyam Arab Grocery on Kedzie Avenue, she heard the owner singing along with the famous Egyptian singer Um Kulthum. He was obviously enjoying himself and was completely immersed in a trance brought on by the music. Gamrah listened to the melancholy tune and the words that pressed hard against a wound that sat deep inside of her. Her eyes filled with tears as the idea hit her: Can Rashid possibly be in love with someone else?

When Gamrah visited Riyadh during the New Year’s break, Rashid did not go with her. She spent nearly two months with her family, hoping that Rashid would ask her to come back once he had had enough of being alone. But he never did ask her to return. In fact, her feelings told her that he was hoping she would stay in Riyadh and never come back. How many hundreds of times each day he stabbed her to death with his icy coldness! She had tried everything to win him over, but it was no use. Rashid was the epitome of the Leo man, in his innate stubbornness and his elusiveness.

Lamees had always served as astrological consultant for their little shillah . From Beirut she would bring books on the signs of the zodiac. For each of the girls, Lamees would read out the personality traits for her sign and the degrees of compatibility between that sign and all the others. It was a given that the girls would consult with Lamees before launching into any relationship of any sort, and so during the engagement Gamrah had gotten in touch to ask her how much compatibility there was between her sign, Gemini, and Rashid’s, Leo. Sadeem, too, went to Lamees for advice when Waleed the Aries guy asked for her hand. Even Michelle, who had never shown much enthusiasm for such things, contacted Lamees as soon as she discovered that Faisal was a Cancer. She wanted to hear from the experts how successful their relationship would be.

Before Gamrah got married and went to Chicago, Lamees gave her a photocopy of one of her priceless zodiac manuals. Gamrah would reread it regularly, underlining whatever applied to her:

The Gemini female is attractive and alluring and her beauty turns people’s heads. Energetic and lively, she lets her small reservoir of patience rule even in matters of love. She is the truest type of the capricious whimsical fancy-free woman who won’t settle on anything, or on any one person. She’s an emotional one—indeed, her emotions blaze if she meets the right man who is capable of satisfying her heart, mind and body all together. In spite of herself, the Gemini woman is a complex person. She is high-strung and has many fears. But she is always stimulating and entertaining, and those who know her don’t know what it means to be bored…

The Leo male is a practical guy, clever and careful with his money, who doesn’t like to waste his time with unprofitable games. He is nervous and quick to react, egotistical and stubborn and he roars when angry. When Leo loves, he is jealous and possessive of his beloved. Expect him to be dominating in his love, but he is also exuberant and impetuous, like a volcano pouring forth the lava of passion. The woman he loves must close her eyes; she must not be upset when he interferes in her personal business and she must not magnify things out of proportion. The Leo man does not hesitate to show his violent side if the slightest doubt assails him about her obedience and loyalty to him…

The worst sentence of all that Gamrah read before her marriage spelled out the degree of compatibility between a Gemini woman and a Leo man: “No more than fifteen percent!”

It’s difficult to find agreement and harmony between the Gemini woman and the Leo man. They can work together for a fixed period of time, for the sake of achieving a practical success. As for emotional relationships, however, they are likely to be lukewarm at best, to stagnate, resulting in mutual dislike and liable to end in undeniable failure.

Before her marriage, reading these lines Gamrah would mutter, “These things are a bunch of lies, even if some of them turn out to be true.” But now she read the same lines with more conviction as she remembered their North African cook in Riyadh, who used to read the inside of the coffee cup for her, finding meaning in the patterns of the thick and black Turkish coffee grounds. The cook also read her palm and said it was as clear as day that her marriage to Rashid would be one of the most successful marriages the family had ever known and that she would be blessed with many children. She even described them to her as if she could see their features in the splotches of coffee across the hollow of the cup or inside the folds of her palms.

She thought about the Ouija board, which she had played as a teenager with her three friends after Michelle brought it back from one of her trips to America. The board told her that she would marry a young man whose name began with the letter R, and that she would travel abroad with him. She would have three sons and two daughters. The little glass piece, which she touched lightly with her fingers, moved over the letter-filled game board in the darkness of the room that night, guiding her to the names of her children, one by one.

Gamrah tried to rid herself of the wicked thoughts that were growing like a tumor inside her head. To calm herself, she called her mother in Riyadh and asked her how to prepare jireesh, a traditional Saudi dish. She stayed on the phone the whole time it took to cook, listening to the latest news of her relatives and her neighbors. There were a few new stories about Naflah’s clever naughty little boys, and the usual commentary about Hessah’s patience with her husband Khalid.

9.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 9, 2004

Subject: Treasure in a Poem

A lot of angry e-mails came my way last week. Some were angry at Rashid for his cruelty. Others were angry at Gamrah for being so passive. And the rest—and that was most of them—were angry at me for talking about the sun signs and the Ouija board and reading coffee cups which not so many believe in.