At first Claire felt relieved. She knew now that her son was not dead. She phoned Elias at once, and on hearing her news he looked around for help all the more urgently. Late that afternoon he came home as pale as a dying man.
“What are friends for?” he asked bitterly, and didn’t wait for her to answer. “To tell you how sorry they are. And is that all? What cowardly times we live in! The boy’s taken a wrong turning and they inflate it into an affair of state. As if my son Farid were any danger to President Satlan!”
At that moment Claire felt boundless love for her husband Elias, whose concern for his only son had suddenly made him forget everything else. She embraced him and kissed him on the lips.
“That’s how it is,” said Elias. “Anyone would think he’d been smuggling the year’s entire harvest abroad, or stealing cars and jewellery in broad daylight, or dumping tons of hashish in police headquarters on the sly. If there’s one thing I wish on those who govern us, it’s for this filthy union to break up, and on the day it does I’ll light thirty candles to Our Lady.”
Claire was laughing and crying at the same time. She kept hugging him. Suddenly he was the young Elias again, the man she had loved so much over twenty years ago. “Hush, or they’ll take you away too, and I’ll be left all alone. And who will I have to hug then?”
Elias kissed her. “I’ll never forgive Satlan and his henchmen, if only for making you sad,” he replied, holding Claire close, for he sensed her despair.
The neighbours visited. They sat with Farid’s parents, all of them downcast, praising the boy who had always been so charming and helpful. The house was full of guests. Even two of Farid’s teachers were brave enough to come; the rest feared that Elias and Claire were under observation, and they would lose their jobs.
Late that afternoon Josef arrived. He whispered to Claire that she must come with him at once. Claire excused herself to her other guests and followed him. “It’s something I promised Farid,” he explained as they came out into the street, and he went ahead of her. She didn’t understand. Josef went upstairs to the flat roof of his house, which had a fence around it. The sun was just sinking, turning large and red.
Two chairs stood in one corner. Josef pulled one out for her. “You sit here,” he told her, and sat opposite her on the other chair himself.
“I promised Farid,” he said at last in a low, husky voice, “that if anything happened to him I’d go to you and bring you here, where he always liked to sit with me. And then we’d both think hard about him, and that would help him.”
Claire sat with her face to the sun. She closed her eyes, and wished she were dead, but a voice inside her said, “Think of the happy times with him. He needs you.” Then she smiled through her tears, and for the first time that day she felt something like hope revive.
207. Dunia and the Bedroom Woman
Rana came to see Claire and told her the whole story of Rami. But Claire was so full of grief herself that she had no room for more sorrow. She soothed Rana, and said Farid wouldn’t love her any the less because she’d been forced into marriage. But first he must survive the prison camp, and apparently President Satlan had said that as long as he was in power, his enemies would stay in jail.
Unlike Claire, Laila had changed towards Rana. She spoke without reserve, criticizing her severely. In her place, said Laila, she would never have married Rami, not even after a rape. It was like a slap in the face to Rana.
A few days later, however, Laila phoned, apologized for her fierce accusations, and invited Rana for a coffee. Rana hoped they could come together again. She had plenty of time on her hands, for Rami was more than occupied with his work. So she went to see Laila, and was surprised to find her house full of women visiting her. At least a dozen of them, all laughing and talking together, had assembled. Farid’s cousin walked around like a queen, with everyone adoring her. One of those present gave a short talk about Arab women in the pre-Islamic period. The speaker’s voice was indistinct, and much of what she said was very disconnected, but Rana at least caught the gist of it: women in the desert before the coming of Islam had chosen their own partners. And they had sat with men, it was the natural thing to do, they joined in conversations with them, and wore no veils. Names were determined by the mother, not the father. The Prophet Muhammad himself was usually addressed by reference to his mother’s name, not his father’s, and was known as Muhammad bin Amina. The man always moved in with his woman partner, not vice versa. The woman could separate from him at any time. It was quite simple, being achieved just by changing the alignment of the tent entrance. And another thing: a woman could marry up to ten husbands. It was known as communal marriage.
A discussion followed the talk, and seemed likely to go on for ever. Rana was bored. After a while she rose to her feet and left. Three weeks later, when Laila asked her to come again, she declined, saying she couldn’t concentrate enough at the moment. She didn’t like to tell the truth, which was that she didn’t think much of these women’s daydreams.
Dunia, on the other hand, was refreshing. Her friend liked to laugh and seemed to rise above everything. She had done as her mother wished and married a rich carpet dealer. Not that she had loved the man; Dunia loved no one but her little dog Fifi, but she knew how to adapt to her husband, and there was a sober and expedient kind of affection in their marriage.
But at Dunia’s wedding everything nearly went wrong. When she talked about that disaster, she made her audience laugh. Two weeks before her wedding, Dunia had suffered an accident while she was exercising. She bled heavily, and the doctor said she had torn her hymen. Her father, who was just back from Saudi Arabia, was horrified when the doctor told him. “If only she’d broken an arm or a leg! But she has to go and break her own hymen! I’m ruined,” wailed the Saudi king’s adviser. He was at a loss. “What will happen now?” he asked the doctor, who was an old family friend.
“Better ask her fiancé to come and see me. I’ll explain for you,” said the doctor.
“You don’t know him. He’s conservative and suspicious. He’ll accuse you of being in league with us,” replied Dunia’s father, and he left the consulting rooms with his daughter. For the first time, Dunia noticed that her father stooped as he walked.
He knew that at the time, and for large sums of money, you could have a girl’s hymen repaired in Paris. Many daughters of the nouveaux riches Gulf families flew to France, pretending that the trip was a vacation, stayed for a couple of weeks and came back virgins, rather like the houris, the eternal virgins of Paradise whose hymens are renewed after every act of love. But there wasn’t time for that. Dunia’s fiancé would have seen through the reason for her sudden visit to Paris. Looking decades older, her father sat in the drawing room of his house, waiting for the return of his wife, who had just gone away for a couple of days to visit relations in the country and invite them all to the wedding.
Although it was summer, he was freezing cold. For years he had been kowtowing in the Saudi royal palace, grimly fighting to defend his position against all who envied him, in the middle of the desert and far from his beloved Damascus — and now this had to happen. If he lost face now, he might as well blow his brains out at once.
“Dear God, I’m finished. Help me, and I’ll sacrifice forty sheep to you in Mecca,” Dunia heard her father whisper to himself. Not until her mother came home and took matters in hand did he calm down a little.