“We never fought. Now we say we fought and that Palestine was lost because the Arab countries betrayed us. That’s not true. Palestine was lost because we didn’t fight. We were like idiots; we would take our rifles and wait for them in our villages, and when they came with their motorized units and their heavy machine guns and their airplanes, we were beaten without a fight.”
Later, he remarried in Lebanon and had seven children. He’d named the first three after his children who’d died there, but his first wife was still in his bones. “She was like fire,” he said. “She would ignite me whenever she came near me.”
She had been fourteen and he fifteen.
“Impossible! At that age!”
He started laughing, the tears pouring from his eyes from the cold. Then he told me about the cotton swab.
How to tell you the story, Father? Abu Ma’rouf said incredible things, but I believed them — perhaps because we were alone in that trench, perhaps because of the dawn, the changing colors of first light, perhaps because my bones were cold. I don’t know.
He said, “After the wedding party was over — and as you know, a wedding, my friend, is no joke — we went inside. You know, I swear I had no idea. Well, no, of course, I used to practice the secret habit and I’d played around with my buddies and everything, but getting married is different. As soon as I entered the bedroom, I saw her. She was young, seated on the edge of the bed all wrapped up in her clothes, and crying. I sat down beside her, my body feeling icy all over. She told me she liked sewing and embroidery and that she’d made all her wedding clothes. Then she started to yawn. She lay back on the bed, and I stretched out beside her. She didn’t take her clothes off, and I didn’t take mine off either. I went to sleep. Or no, before I dropped off I got on top of her, and as soon as I was on top of her it happened. I came and got it all over my trousers. Then I lay down next to her. I think we must have dropped off quickly because I woke up to a loud knocking on the door. I opened it and found my mother asking for the sheet. Then she rushed into the room, pulled out the sheet from under the girl and ran out. We heard the trills of joy. My mother told me later she’d wiped the sheet with chicken blood and that she’d wished the earth would have opened up and swallowed her.”
Abu Ma’rouf said that two days later he went into his bedroom and found the girl naked, and everything went fine.
“Do you know what my mother did, two days later? She took the poor girl into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and started inspecting her body minutely, touching her everywhere. The girl didn’t know what to do — laugh at the tickling or scream at the pain of my mother’s pinches. Then my mother scrubbed her with scented soap, poured water over her, and dried her off. She brought a cotton swab and asked her to open her thighs; then she placed the swab there and told her, ‘Tonight take off your clothes and wait for him in bed. Take hold of his member and insert it here where the cotton is. Put a pillow under your behind and lift up your legs.’
“When I got into bed and lifted the coverlet so I could lie down, I found her naked. She gestured to me to take off my robe, so I took it off, the sweat dripping off my face and eyes, and I stretched out beside her and did nothing. She stretched out her hand, took hold of my thing and pulled me toward her, and I found myself on top of her, with her holding onto it with both hands and tugging. I was bathed in sweat and fear. She stretched her hand to the place where the swab was and placed it there, and I found myself getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Then I was inside her, and I got bigger inside her and learned the secret of life. She put her hands on my shoulders and screamed. That was the night I really came for the first time. Before that it wasn’t the same. That night my whole being was there, inside her.
“When I rolled off of her, I saw that blood had stained the sheet, and that she was searching for something like a madwoman. She searched the whole bed, afraid the swab was lost. I looked with her for a bit, then dropped off, so exhausted I didn’t hear her questions. The next morning she said she’d found the swab but I don’t think she had. I think my mother had just reassured her it wouldn’t do her any harm.”
Abu Ma’rouf said he’d never forget the taste of her.
“And your second wife?” I asked him.
“At first I didn’t want to get married again; Umm Ma’rouf had been part of my flesh. But my mother, God rest her soul, knew better than I. She knew a man shouldn’t remain alone or he’d mate with the devil, so she convinced me to marry the second Umm Ma’rouf, a refugee girl from Sha’ab, like us. I married her in Ain al-Hilweh, and she bore me seven children.”
“And what happened,” I asked.
“Shame on you — you can’t ask things like that. With the second one, I knew what to do, and everything went fine from the first night.”
“Did you tell her about the piece of cotton?”
“Of course not. You don’t understand women. You must never tell a woman about the others. If a woman doesn’t think she’s the center of your life, she’ll become miserable and make your life miserable, too.”
Abu Ma’rouf’s story amazed me. I thought it wasn’t possible, and then forgot all about it.
But now I see it could be true. I see you before me, and I see Nahilah, I see everything. I can see you, a child, going into the bedroom, playing around with the young girl, then falling asleep beside her. I won’t say you were innocent, but you just didn’t know how. Your mother arrives. She takes the girl to the bathroom. She soaps her and pours water over her, then puts the cotton in her — and you discover the secret of life through a little piece of white cotton.
I know you won’t like this story, you’ll think it’s a slur on your manhood. You prefer to talk about grapes and tears of arak and the dance of a girl adorned in candles before her groom, and you’d rather not admit that you didn’t know what to do.
Would you like to deny the whole thing?
Fine. I’ll agree with you. I won’t say you lay down beside her in your clothes like Abu Ma’rouf did. Maybe you took off your clothes and made the poor girl take hers off, too, and you didn’t know how to do it and your mother had to make do with a little drop of blood from her finger on the sheet. Then she waited seven nights for you two and finally was forced to put the cotton swab inside the girl to guide you to the place.
“It’s not true,” you’ll say.
Okay. So where is the truth? Tell me, since I’m still confused about the dates. Did Ibrahim die in 1951 at three, meaning he was born in 1948? What was going on between 1943, when you got married, and 1948, the year your first child was born?
Didn’t your wife get pregnant?
Would you put up with a wife that couldn’t get pregnant? Why didn’t you divorce her? Your mother used to say she was still a child and would get pregnant when she matured. So Nahilah didn’t mature until 1948?