But Nahil didn’t listen to any one of their opinions, that is to say she didn’t listen at all. Instead, she put the couple in the bedroom and locked the door. Not one of the men of the family dared hold Nahil accountable for what she’d done, fearing that she’d use her curses — which always come true — against them.
In the bedroom, Salama didn’t know what to do when this woman took off her clothes, pushed him onto the bed and rode him, saying, “Your mother wants a son and that’s what I’m here for. Let’s go!” The woman stayed with my father in the bedroom and no one saw them for three days, except in the minutes when they each used the bathroom.
Nahil sent Olga in with a tray of aphrodisiac foods: little dishes of mezzeh, raw meat and sweets. All the while she sat in the living room near the balcony and prayed, muttering words without a book.
Sometimes she prayed for Salama so that he’d be healed and get his right mind back. She prayed for Baha’’s soul, Baha’ whom she forcefully believes was born again in another place not far from her.
Sometimes she would open the Hikmeh and ask for God’s forgiveness, saying that her many sins were the cause of Salama’s misfortunes.
Nahil believes that her curses influence the destinies of people around her. That’s what everyone around her believes, too. She prayed for Salama to conceive again, even though she believed that the curses she unleashed on Hamza in the past have done their job.
“May God deprive you of continuing your family name!” she told Hamza after learning that he’d betrayed her. She learned of his betrayal from his changed smell.
“What’s her story? She curses your grandfather to deprive him of his family name, and then when it happens like she wanted it to — then she wants to marry your father off so he can have another son?” Olga said to me in a soft voice. She objected to Nahil’s behavior, but her objections remained confined to whispers and head shaking, in disbelief.
Neither Nahil’s prayers nor Salama’s seclusion with the woman resulted in anything. It was no use. The woman didn’t get pregnant and Nahil waited for a whole year, sighing continually and repeating to everyone who could hear the proverb that she’s famous for, “Blessings on the family that produces sons to secure the future of their family home.” It’s as if it took Baha’’s death to make her suddenly realize that he was the sole heir and that his death meant the end of the family home forever.
Nahil isn’t convinced that our family home doesn’t have a male heir; she won’t accept the fact that in the end I alone will inherit everything. Of course she knows that I haven’t been blessed with a son from my marriage to Chris, and she doesn’t know anything about the baby that was pulled out from inside me in Doctor Adam’s clinic and thrown away before I left the country.
“My daughter, do you want the English to take our inheritance?” she asks me after I come back, when I’m trying to help Olga to get out of bed and walk a little, over to her wardrobe. By this, she means Chris and his children from his two previous marriages.
She says this while advising me to register the house in the name of male relatives on my father’s side. This is the very same predicament Nahil found herself in. The fact that the male heir she desires does not exist means that nothing prevents me from inheriting what’s mine.
She opens the drawers of her wardrobe and takes out a bronze key ring with five keys on it. She also takes out documents and property deeds. She gives them to me, saying with great sadness that the Zuqaq al-Blat house has become my property now, after Salama’s madness and the death of Baha’, the only male heir. She’s still waiting for Salama to come back, when I tell her about his situation in Australia she says that I’m complicating matters and exaggerating his mental state. No doubt he’ll be cured when he returns. Doctors here are better, she says, as soon as his feet touch the ground in the airport he’ll feel better.
Nahil doesn’t ask me what I’ll do — if I even want this inheritance or if it means anything to me. Of course it doesn’t cross her mind to bring me a man, as she did with my father, to marry him to me so that I could be blessed with a son to carry on the family name and family home. But this wouldn’t happen even if I produced one thousand sons. My son won’t carry my name. Indeed, my name will be lost to him from the very beginning, as I lost it myself after I married. Many years separate me from Nahil, of course, but in our two different times the issue of the name and the inheritance remains the same. A young woman still leaves her family home to go to her husband’s home and family all alone, denuded of everything, even her name. Thus, you must pass on an inheritance to a male heir. The child must be a boy. A girl is useless, even one hundred girls. This is not only true today, but throughout time. Why is Nahil so concerned about a male heir? Isn’t she a woman? How could a woman agree to her own burial when she’s still alive?
Nahil’s contradictory qualities perplex me, though I guard a giant love for her deep in my heart. Wasn’t it she who taught all the girls in the village how to read and write, when she was a young woman teaching in the French girls’ school? To achieve all her aims in this closed society, she came up with a clever strategy, in which it was easier for a father to say his daughter was dead than that she was learning how to read and write.
She opened a sewing school, though she’d never held a needle and thread in her life. She said that she wanted to teach the girls in the village about housekeeping and the domestic arts. At the time, being able to sew was one of the qualities that made a girl a sought-after bride. Nahil committed herself to sewing, convinced this was her calling, and asked to teach the girls for two hours a day in her parents’ house. She devoted the big salon with its view of the main road to her sewing lessons.
The families went crazy when one day she asked the girls to bring chalkboards to write on. They visited Nahil’s father in protest and asked him if she was teaching their daughters to read and write. Her father called her in to ask her and she entered the room and greeted the girls’ families, inquiring after their crops and their relatives. She invited them to stay a little longer and offered them sweets she had prepared herself.
She told them that she was teaching their daughters the letters related to sewing, cutting garments, and housekeeping, only because these were necessary. As for the letters related to love and to rejecting customs and traditions, “That’s monstrous — of course not!” She told them that she was like them and that, like them, she would never sanction educating their daughters!
She’s a strong woman. Despite this strength, her husband Hamza managed to keep his relationship with a woman from Zahleh secret from her for more than thirty years. When Hamza died, Nahil forgot everything bad about him. She mourned him, cried over his corpse, and asked for forgiveness for him. The truth disappeared at the moment of his death. It’s as if the truth had been erased; at that moment it became absent, as if it had never been. When I try to remind her of aspects of Hamza and his love stories that she did and didn’t know, she starts repeating, “Oh, Abu Ibrahim… Oh, Abu Ibrahim, what’s all this talk?” trying to get up from her chair, which each year seems bigger and bigger compared to her emaciated body.
That she has magic powers doesn’t mean that she knew about Hamza’s movements. He would tell her that he went to Soufar to store up ice to sell in the summer to merchants and passengers on the train between Beirut and Damascus who stop in the ‘Ayn Soufar station. After refrigerators became widespread, there was no more selling ice in Soufar; soon the train stopped running and the station disappeared. But Hamza kept on saying that he worked there and Nahil kept up the appearance of believing him. After his death, she found many letters among his papers, as well as verses and love poems that perhaps he had intended to send to the woman he loved. But this all remains in his leather suitcase, preserved with care in the wooden cupboard above the door. This life of his didn’t prevent Nahil from going, after his death, to a photography studio to have color added to his photo before she hung it on the wall.