UM NUWAYYIR: God have mercy on the old days! The days when you used to fall all over yourself when it came to good-looking men. Even Waleed, how your eyes were full of him!
SADEEM: True, but after Waleed I got Firas, the untidy devil who filled my eyes with nothing in the world but him.
GAMRAH: Basically I’d take any guy, whoever he is, clean or filthy, tidy or messy. Who cares? As long as he’s there. I’m ready to be happy with any man. I’m so bored, girls! I’m fed up and I can’t stand it. A little more of this and I’ll go insane.
When it was time for the bouquet toss, the young single ladies lined up behind the bride, eager to find out who would get to board the sparkling marriage train next. Lamees’s and Nizar’s relatives crowded in, mixing with the rest of her friends. After her mother insisted, Tamadur sulkily joined them. Sadeem and Michelle stood front and center, and were hurriedly joined by Gamrah, who was quick to comply with Um Nuwayyir’s encouragement to stand among the young bachelorettes; even if she was married before, she was technically single at the moment of the bouquet toss and more than ready to remarry again.
Lamees turned her back to the girls, having earlier agreed with her three friends that she would try to throw the bouquet in their direction. She tossed it high in the air and the crowd of girls surged to grab it. After a lot of pushing and shoving and kicking and hitting, Gamrah got hold of what was left of Lamees’s bouquet, a few green leaves tied with a strip of white lace. She raised it high, giggling ecstatically. “I caught the bouquet! I caught the bouquet!”
43.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: December 31, 2004
Subject: Today He’s Back
Today he’s back
as if nothing happened
and with an artless child’s eyes
he’s come back to tell me
I’m his life companion,
his one and only love
He came bearing flowers,
how can I say no,
my youth sketched on his lips
I remember still, flames through my blood,
taking refuge in his arms
I hid my head within his chest
like a child returned to his parents…—Nizar Qabbani
Happy New Year! I don’t feel like writing any little introduction this week. I’m going to let events speak for themselves.
Firas came back!
When Sadeem heard from Firas again, she tore out that day’s page from her little daily diary and enclosed it gently in her sky-blue scrapbook, where it nestled among the pages so full of his photos and interviews.
Firas came back to her, only two days after she had longed for him at the wedding. He came back, a few days after his marriage contract was signed and a few weeks before his wedding was to take place.
Sadeem was in Khobar. After spending the evening at a relative’s wedding, she had returned to her room at Aunt Badriyyah’s, and was unable to sleep. The air of Firas’s city polluted her lungs and the glaring streetlamps that lit the road blinded her eyes, and it seemed as if Firas was everywhere—as if he had spread out his black bisht, the cloak he wore on top of his thobe, in most of the official photographs, over the entire city, so that everything underneath it was cast in his shadow.
Sadeem had been lying in bed awake, sighing deeply, at four A.M when a text message appeared on her cell phone, which had all but died since Firas had gone away:
I am suffering enormously, and have been ever since you went out of my life. I see now that I will suffer for a long time. A very long time. I deleted all your pictures, e-mails and text messages and burned all your letters so that you wouldn’t have to worry that they were around. I was in pain as I hit the delete button and as I watched the fire eat my treasure, but your face and your voice and the memories are engraved in my heart and can never be wiped out. With this message I’m not trying to get back together. I’m not even asking you to write back. I just want you to know how it is with me. I’m in bad shape without you, Sadeem. Really bad…
Sadeem couldn’t even read it clearly. Tears had filled her eyes, blurring her vision, the minute she read the sender’s nickname, which she had been too weak to delete from her phone: Firasi Taj Rasi. My Firas, my Crown.
She barely knew what she was doing as she pressed the button to call the sender’s number. Her Firas answered! Firas, her darling and brother and father and friend. He didn’t say anything, but just hearing his breathing on the other end of the connection was enough to make her weep.
He stayed silent, not knowing what to say. The sound of his car motor partly concealed the tightness in his breathing, as Sadeem went on sobbing in wordless rebuke of what he had done, releasing all that had been packed inside of her, waiting to be unloaded, swelling and growing until it filled her completely. He listened and listened to her painful gasps for breath as he murmured into his cell phone for her to imagine his planting one kiss after another on her forehead.
In one fell swoop he destroyed all the fortifications the resistance forces possessed.
He couldn’t believe it when she told him she was living with her aunt in Khobar, just a few kilometers away from his home! He kept her talking on the phone as he made his way toward her neighborhood. He didn’t know the house she was in, and he didn’t ask her. He told her that he was getting closer to her than she could imagine.
That was a dawn never to be forgotten! Birds cheerfully engaged in their early morning flutter, and a lone car roaming one of the quarters of the city of Khobar, driven by a man worn down by desire and longing for his sweetheart’s eyes. The two lovers lost the last of their reservations after what had seemed a lifetime of denial. Now fate, with the tender love of a father who cannot bear to see his children in torment, gripped their hands and led each to the other.
Sadeem went over to her window and looked out onto the street. She began describing the houses nearby to Firas, since she didn’t know the number of her aunt’s house or its exact location. All she knew was that it had a huge glass front door and on either side of the large door were a few untrimmed trees.
She caught sight of the lights of his car in the distance and felt as though she were floating in a warm ocean of bliss. He saw her at the window, her ash-brown hair tumbling across her shoulders and the creamy skin that he dreamed of kissing. “You’re cream and honey!” he would say to her whenever he stared at her pictures.
He shut off the car engine in front of the house, not far from Sadeem’s window on the second floor. She begged him to move farther off before one of the neighbors coming back from the nearby mosque after Fajr prayer saw him by her window at this early time of the day! He couldn’t care less. He started teasing and flirting with her, singing to her:
Be patient a moment, let my eyes feast!
I’m thirsty for you—melting of desire
Oh you little devil, you are prettier than you ever were then!
But your eyes remained the way I love them.*
44.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”