And that dwarf wants me as his fifth wife, thought Laila, fretting. “But I want to be the first,” she said, and didn’t understand why her mother was horrified.
“For God’s sake, my child!” replied that gentle and devout woman.
Laila hardly knew her father. She addressed him as “sir”, and knew that his name was Muhammad Khairi. He was hardly ever there, and when he did come home he didn’t want to see his children. He ate alone, slept alone, and talked to no one. Laila’s mother, on the other hand, slept in a small room with the children. Sometimes she slipped into her husband’s room in the night, and then her daughter heard the wooden bedstead creaking while her mother groaned in pain. Laila had hated her father for that.
He dealt in spices and dried fruits, and often had to make long journeys to see his suppliers. Their large orchard and vegetable patch, however, was left to the care of Laila’s mother and the children. Although Laila had never known the real hunger that plagued many families, they had sometimes been forced to live on meagre rations.
When she told her father that she wanted to be a first wife he didn’t answer at all. But her mother told her that he had already given Hassan Kashat his word. That night Laila was so scared that, for the first time, she found it difficult to breathe. You’re going to die, an inner voice had whispered to her. I must run away, Laila told herself. At that moment her mother came over to her to pick bloodsucking bugs out of the bed. She was holding a small oil lamp in one hand, and she plunged the plump bugs in a bowl of water.
“Oh, child, you’re awake,” she had said in surprise. In the darkness Laila’s eyes looked to her larger, unfathomable.
“Tell me, Mother, how many hearts does Kashat have?”
Her mother did not reply.
Laila could no longer remember when she had first seen Nassif Jasegi, but oddly enough, on the day he spoke to her she immediately saw that this was the only man who could save her. He was the son of a rich Christian who was not particularly good at managing his fortune. The peasants cracked jokes about the “unbeliever” who had served the Sultan so long, and in return was given landed property but didn’t know what to do with it. His farm lay only a few hundred paces from Laila’s home, but her family kept its distance from the “impure” Christians.
Laila heard that these Christians prayed to blocks of wood, ate pigs and drank wine. Their shameless women sat unveiled in the company of men, and they never let their husbands take a second wife.
“Mother,” Laila had said, “those unbelieving men have only one heart, just like Muslim women.”
Her mother was scared almost to death. Her husband was asleep in the next room. She took the girl by the ear and hauled her outside. “Child, you’re out of your mind. It’s better if you marry soon. I’m dying of fear for you,” she whispered.
When Laila, undeterred, told her father for the second time that she wanted to be a first wife, he slapped her face. After that her brothers Mustafa and Yunus beat her, although they were younger than she was. Their blows came thick and fast as mosquitoes on the humid summer nights of Damascus, and as they increased and multiplied so did Laila’s questions. Her mother wept. “Child, you’re playing games with your life. We can’t break the word your father has given.”
And the midwife, seductively, told her, “Once you have a husband, you know, you’ll have his fortune, and you can send your mother lovely things every day.”
Ganging up together, they told Laila that what little prosperity her grandfather Mustafa Khairi had achieved came only because he kept his word and gave the governor of Damascus the hand in marriage of Laila’s beautiful Aunt Balkis, her father’s sister. She was the governor’s twelfth wife, but then she had turned the old man’s head with her charms and her skill in the art of love, and in less than a year he had promoted her to be his first wife.
A voice inside Laila, cold as night, told her that this story was a lie. If Balkis had been the governor’s first wife, then why did she kill herself at the age of twenty-five? Laila’s cousin Fatmeh didn’t believe Balkis had been happy either. Her grave was quite close, and Fatmeh’s family often made a pilgrimage to her resting place.
I want to come first and I want to be happy, Laila kept telling herself, and she swore not to marry Hassan Kashat.
18. Laila and the Madman
“What’s your name, lovely one?” were the first words she had heard Nassif Jasegi say. He came riding along beside the stream. She hadn’t noticed him at all, being far away in her thoughts again while her hands pulled weeds out of the radish bed. She started, and turned around. A window opened in her heart. She took a deep breath, and felt the relief of fresh air blowing in.
“Laila,” she replied. “And yours? What do they call you?”
“They call me Nassif, the Righteous Man, but I’m not righteous at all,” he replied, smiling.
“What are you, then?” she asked.
“I,” said the man, “am Madjnun Laila.”
Like all Arabs, she knew the legend of the unrequited love of her namesake Laila and the poet who went mad for love of her, singing his beloved’s praise until the day he died. His poems made the woman immortal. Very few knew his real name, and he was known simply as Laila’s madman, Madjnun Laila.
“And are you really mad?” she asked.
“Only for you,” said the man.
“You don’t look like a lunatic,” she said, examining him from his shining shoes to his clean white headcloth. Hamdi, her crazy cousin, screamed like an animal in his room with its barred window, threw his filth at everyone, and kept banging his head against the wall.
What happened next opened three more windows in her heart. Nassif Jasegi, so elegantly mounted on a noble Arab horse, said softly, “I’d run mad three hundred times over to hear you laugh.” And he jumped off his horse, stood on his head in the brook, leaped to his feet again, made faces like a monkey, climbed a tree like a cat, and from there jumped back on to his horse which, apparently used to such extraordinary behaviour, hadn’t moved from the spot.
Laila laughed out loud, and when Nassif stood on his saddle, flapped his arms and cried, “Look, I’m a little sparrow,” she could no longer keep on her feet. With a single leap he was down beside her. He squatted on the ground and looked into her eyes. He was a playmate, even though he looked like a man of mature years.
“And how many hearts do you have?” she asked quietly, and he touched her lips.
“Only one, and you have filled it entirely,” he replied.
“Nassif,” said Laila, in an almost pleading tone, and he immediately understood everything.
Years later the wild joy of those days was still fresh in her mind. Even when her brain was almost entirely eaten away she remembered the happiness of that time, an eternity ago. But when Laila met her madman and the world seemed to shake beneath her feet, what she didn’t know is that joy is very treacherous.
Her brother Mustafa was the first to see her happiness in her face. Clumsily, like a careless puppy, it gave everything away. He faced Laila, and his knife flashed. But although death was staring at her from that knife she wouldn’t deign to give it so much as a glance. Nassif alone lived in her eyes.