“Why are you behaving this way, Hend?” he asked. “All women dance for their husbands. What sin have I committed? I just want us to be happy.”
Hend pulled herself together, picked up the dancer’s costume, and threw it in his face. “Get out of here, you and your fucking prostitutes! You want to turn me into a prostitute like them?” It was the only time in her entire life that Hend had used bad language: never before had this shy brown-skinned woman used a vulgar expression; now she found herself with no choice and the abuse poured out of her. “God forgive me!” she said, and went to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
The night of his birthday Nasim slept on the couch in the living room. He turned off the tape recorder, emptied the bottle of champagne into his guts, and went to sleep. Nasim had committed no mistake requiring an apology but the following evening he apologized all the same. He said he was sorry but Hend refused to forgive him. Later, when he announced his final turning over of a new leaf, she told him she forgave him everything except that one stupidity.
“I just want to know, what did you think I was?”
“Honestly, love, I meant no harm. All my friends’ women have dance costumes and dance for their men. I thought, why not, maybe our sex life will improve but ‘instead of setting the leg I broke it.’ I apologize a second time.”
He’d wanted to tell her that it was Ahmad Dakiz who had given him the idea but he didn’t so as not to complicate matters further, especially as Hend despised Muna and believed the woman could think of nothing but how to show off her sensuality, as though her whole body were one large multipurpose sex organ. Ahmad had told Nasim that the only way to overcome the tedium of married sex life was with games; he found Oriental dancing at home to be the best stimulus. Nasim was attracted to the idea but failed to interpret it correctly: Dakiz had been talking about stimuli for him, not for his wife. Nasim on the other hand suffered from frigidity in his wife, which was not about to be cured by making her dance.
“Is that how your friends are? They treat their women as though they were prostitutes?”
“Oriental dancing is a refined art, not something for prostitutes,” he said. “Do you know how belly dancing began? It began in Egypt in the days of the pharaohs and took place in temples as a rite of worship. The dancer used to arch her back to present her navel as a gift to the gods.”
“You’re trying to tell me that when you brought the dance costume and made me drink champagne you wanted me to pray? What do you take me for? An idiot?”
Hend didn’t like her husband’s turning over a new leaf, which had grown into a religious obsession, because she had no interest whatsoever in religion. She had never posed herself philosophical questions regarding the existence of God and didn’t think the issue concerned her. She’d grudgingly agreed to let her children be baptized in church, “because it can’t be any other way,” as Nasri had said, but she kept religious rites and traditions out of her house. Likewise, the boys were totally shielded from such things, as she’d put them into the Lycée Français, a secular school.
Nasim was bowled over by his father’s death. He stopped spending his evenings outside the apartment and took to attending mass every Sunday. Then he began taking the boys to church with him and discovered that a lay organization existed to offer religion classes to children after mass. He enrolled the boys in Sunday school and things got to the point of his volunteering to teach in it himself. He started reading religious books and invited his wife to go to church with him and the boys. She refused and said that his religious mania was part of a general despair resulting from the long civil war.
She couldn’t explain how she’d agreed to go with him to one of those evening meetings called “vigils,” where a group of men and women met around a monk who looked as though he lived in a cave in the wilderness and whose flowing black robes spread out around him making him seem bodiless, or as though his body were made of some ethereal matter. His eyes were large but vacant and dead, in a face consumed by a long untrimmed beard. This monk had returned from Mount Athos in Greece, where he’d spent twenty years, to found a monastery in a distant village in Akkar. Hend had no idea what had brought him to Beirut or why this particular group of people gathered around him. She thought she’d hear about his experiences of “the mountain of the monks” in Greece. But the monk, whom they addressed as Father Fadi, disappointed her and uttered not a word. The vigil, when it began, consisted of the recitation by candlelight of endless prayers and hymns, in an atmosphere reminiscent of the summoning of spirits. The participants in the celebration appeared to be almost unconscious; from time to time the lady of the house would appear carrying a brass brazier from which incense poured and give it to the monk, who would wave it right and left over the heads of the seated. Hend felt dizzy and drowsy and her eyelids began to droop, while the eyes of the monk, in contrast, would flash and gaze into hers before the light in them once more died out. She stayed about three hours, resisting sleep and fighting off the monk’s eyes, and at around one in the morning, when he raised his hand to announce a short break and cups of sage tea circulated, she turned to her husband and said they had to go home.
On that night, redolent of the scent of incense and the flavor of sage, Hend had a strange dream that came from she knew not where. She saw herself dressed in an Oriental dancer’s costume, surrounded by a circle of people praying. She was dancing like a professional, shaking her buttocks, going down on her knees, arching her belly, and then letting her head fall back and raising her navel toward the greedily waiting eyes of the monk.
11
SHE SAID HER name was Ghazala. She said she was from a village called Shuhba in Jabal el-Arab, or Jabal el-Durouz, in Syria. She said she was the mother of two small children and didn’t do houses but had said yes for Khawaja Nasim’s sake. “Nasim and Matrouk are like brothers. Matrouk hasn’t worked with anyone else in Lebanon. To tell you the truth, doctor, if it hadn’t been for your brother, we wouldn’t have stayed a moment in Beirut. Who can live in this city? When I married Matrouk all I wanted to do was go to Beirut and when I got to Beirut I wanted to go back to the village. I was so scared and — how can I put it? — it’s like the night we arrived the whole place was lit up with the shelling and I was trembling and all I wanted to do was hide.”
She said she’d agreed to work for Madam Hend “to help her — I’m not a maid, doctor, and Matrouk doesn’t allow me to work as a maid in people’s houses but Madam Hend is different. I couldn’t disappoint Khawaja Nasim. I was with her for several months. What a woman! A gem! When she saw me at work cleaning the apartment she’d jump up and lend a hand, like we were friends. Then she told me I wouldn’t be coming to do work anymore but that I was to visit her once a week. Every time I go to her she sits with me and won’t let me do a thing. We drink coffee and talk and she starts asking me about the village. She likes me to tell her stories and the one she likes best is the one about my grandmother. She keeps asking me to tell her the same story and then gives me presents for the children and she never gives me secondhand things. Now that’s what I call a lady! She’s got a heart of gold and I feel like she’s my friend and a sister to me.”
She said she’d agreed to her husband’s request that she work at the doctor’s apartment because he was Khawaja Nasim’s partner in the hospital project and she considered her work a service to a friend. “Don’t get me wrong, doctor. All I want is for the hospital to do well and then we’ll all get a break. Matrouk can stop working as a laborer and a driver and take over the supervision of cleaning operations at the hospital and that way we’ll all get a break.”