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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.

Okay. I accept your anger. And I also don’t. As you can see, and as you will see, I am an ordinary girl (Okay maybe a little nutty, just a little!). I don’t analyze every move I make, and I don’t worry about every act possibly being taboo and against social or religious laws. All I can say is that I do not claim to be perfect (as some people do).

My friends are standard examples, and they are pretty good ones, of who we all are. Some might purposely ignore what their stories show us about ourselves, while others are just blind to it. I am forever hearing people say to me: “You will not reform the world and you will not change people.” They have a point, a very good point, but what I WON’T do is to give up the attempt, like everyone else does. There is the difference between me and other people. As the hadith,* the words of Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, says, “Deeds are measured by the intentions behind them.” May God consider my writings as good deeds, as I only have good intentions. Let me say it again in case someone didn’t get it the first time around: “I do not claim perfection!” I confess to my ignorance and flaws, but “Every child of Adam commits errors, and the best of those who commit errors are those who repent.” I work hard to correct my errors and to cultivate myself. If only those who find fault with me would turn around and straighten themselves out before they start agitating to straighten me out.

May all repent for their sins after reading about them on the Internet. May all discover some hidden tumors and extract them after having been shown some ugly examples under a microscope. I see nothing wrong in setting down my friends’ problems in my e-mails so that others will benefit—others who have not had the opportunity to learn in the school of life, the school that my friends entered from the widest of gates—the gate of Love. The true and shameful wrong, the way I see things, would be for any of us to stand in each other’s way, disparaging each other, even though we all admit the unity of our goal, which is reforming our society and making every one of us a better person.

On Valentine’s Day, Michelle put on a red shirt and carried a matching handbag. A large number of the other female students did the same, enough of them so that the whole campus looked bright red, by means of clothes and flowers and stuffed animals. In those days, the holiday was still a really new fad and the guys liked it; they cruised the streets stopping every girl they saw to give her a red rose with their phone numbers wrapped around the stem. The girls liked it, too, since now they had finally found someone to give them red roses the way they always saw it done in films. That was before the Religious Police banned anything that might remotely suggest a celebration of the holiday of love, Saint Valentine’s Day, as in Islam there are only two holidays, or Eids: one is Eid Al-Fitr, the day following the month of Ramadan, and the other one is Eid Al-Adha, after the days of pilgrimage to Mecca. Saudis started celebrating Valentine’s Day in the late nineties after they heard about it through satellite TV channels broadcast from Lebanon and Egypt. It was before punishments and fines were instituted for owners of flower shops who gave out red roses to their VIP customers by the most intricate and convoluted ways as if they were smuggled goods. Although celebrating this holiday in Saudi Arabia was prohibited, the celebration of Mother’s or Father’s Day was not, even though the principle behind both ideas is one and the same. Love was treated like an unwelcome visitor in our region.

Faisal’s chauffeur was waiting for Michelle at the university entrance to give her Faisal’s Valentine’s Day gift. It was an enormous basket filled with dried red roses and red heart-shaped candles. Nestled in the middle sat a little black bear holding a crimson velvet heart. When you pressed on the heart, the tune of Barry Manilow’s song “Can’t Smile Without You” came floating out.

Michelle sauntered toward the lecture hall, feeling really special. She looked benevolently down at her girlfriends, whose hearts were slowly disintegrating from total jealousy as she read to them the poem Faisal had written on the card accompanying the gift. They were so jealous, in fact, that quite a few of them brought in dolls or stuffed bears and flowers the next day, just to prove that they had been surprised with gifts like hers after returning home from school.