Over the years, Rana had made the flat roof around her small studio into a flowering oasis. One morning early in September she heard someone calling out for water in her sleep. She woke up, and knew at once that her plants were thirsty.
She ran barefoot upstairs in her thin nightdress. The September sky was as clear as in summer, radiant with the most beautiful Damascene blue. The leaves and thin stems of the plants were drooping.
“Oh, God,” whispered Rana. She picked up the hose, turned the tap on, and began sprinkling the large containers. She heard the roots rousing themselves beneath the dry soil and whispering thanks. The plants seemed to raise their leaves and stems, gradually reaching towards the sky.
“That’s better,” she told them encouragingly. They had almost all been presents from friends and relations. She thought she could hear a gurgle of laughter.
Suddenly she lost herself in thought. “Back then my decision to live as a cactus just came to me, but being a cactus isn’t easy,” she said quietly, remember how she had been naïve enough to think that she had a right to love and happiness. A right to love, perhaps, but happiness? She smiled. “I even began furnishing a house in my head for Farid and me. I knew all about it, even the colour of the curtains,” she went on out loud, watering the oleander. She shook her head. “So stupid, planning a life that we’ll never have, not a second of it. A virus, a car, a war, can end everything. And all the while we dream of our future, time is quietly running away like sand through our fingers. The little heap of it left on the palm of the hand is only the memory of life.”
Now she heard the leaves of the little orange tree that Dunia had given her crying out for a shower. She let a curving jet of water fall on the tree and its few little fruits.
“Years ago, before she was entirely drained away inside, Dunia told me she had to be ready for her husband at any time, like his shoehorn, with the difference that he didn’t take his shoehorn to bed with him. But that’s just what he does with her, every evening. He wanted her to be always available to him, and after a year she was worn out. Today Dunia acts as if someone else had said that, not herself …”
She listened to the flowers.
“Oh, you want some too? I thought you were a sister of the desert,” she said, turning the jet of water on the fanned leaves of the palm tree that her cousin Marie had brought her from Iraq. Marie was married to a rich businessman who moved between Baghdad and Damascus. She would have liked to stay in Damascus, but she couldn’t, and since then she had never felt at home anywhere. Her three children suffered from it, but she acted the part of a happy wife.
The palm made a rustling sound of pleasure.
“I’m related to you, not Marie. I bear no fruit either,” Rana went on. “I don’t want to exert myself to pretend I’m happily married. Marie has denied all her dreams and plans, ideas and feelings for fear of her husband. She fills her inner void with submissive obedience. So now she’s not afraid of him any more, quite the opposite, she enjoys her submissiveness on the evenings when he wants to take her to bed, because that’s the only place where he’s kind to her. She told me so herself. And then Marie is avenged on that despot. She makes him kiss her feet and her backside, she enjoys it when he goes on his knees and begs. At such moments she imagines that she’s the one who gives orders.”
Rana watered all the flowers and little trees, and finally sat on a stool and decided to make a rainbow with the jet of water and the sunlight.
“Do you want to drink the rainbow?” she asked, and chuckled at her own idea. She saw the plants dancing happily by way of answer in the light September breeze. After several attempts she managed to catch the light just as she was watering the little olive tree that her Aunt Soraya had brought her back from Jerusalem.
“When you’ve become as empty as Aunt Soraya,” she said, “when you have nothing more inside you to offer, you have to look after the outer husk. What else is there to do?”
“Nothing,” she heard her own answer. “Just look at Aunt Soraya,” she went on, examining a red rose. “She plucks some of her hair, colours the rest, wears seductive lingerie like a whore under the plain clothes her jealous husband insists on.” Aunt Soraya had married a pilot who travelled the world, getting more stupid all the time. He had been very outgoing and liberal as a young man, but now — although he was a Christian — he acted like a Muslim Brother.
“Roses love the rainbow,” said Rana, as she reached the large terracotta pot where a bushy Damascus rose grew. Her school friend Nadjla had given it to her two years ago. As the only girl among seven brothers, Nadjla had been lost in her family. No one took any notice of her, and at seventeen she was married off to her cousin. After that she had to serve his old parents and four brothers, who were all bachelors. She was docile, and followed her husband like a hound following its master. Nadjla read his wishes in his eyes and acted as if she had made the suggestion herself. Her husband rewarded her for it. “Good dog, that’s right, good dog,” whispered Rana, laughing.
She sprayed a sparrow that was watching curiously from the fence around the roof. It quickly flew away.
“And then there’s my mother. Only now,” she called after the sparrow, “does she discover that my father doesn’t love her. And he’s right. Who loves a shiny pot that clatters only because it’s empty? Sometimes I don’t even feel like an empty pot. I’m my husband’s waste bin.”
She giggled, and tried to make the rainbow again. After several attempts, it arched above the jasmine at the edge of the roof garden. She didn’t notice the water raining down on the street below.
“But at least I know that I don’t love my husband. Dunia irritates me with her show of affection for hers. She said she sacrifices herself for him. And when I ask her what exactly she’s sacrificing she sounds vague, the only clear thing is that she’s a mixture of good housewife and cheap whore.”
She shook her head, remembering their quarrel. It had been one Sunday four or five weeks ago. “So let’s not call it love or affection, exploitation is more like it,” Rana had said. Dunia had been furious and shouted at her, “You’re letting your lover’s left-wing views send you crazy. Those and all your books about women who hate their husbands.”
Rana was as ungrateful and vindictive as a camel, said Dunia. Yes, so Rami had taken her by force, but he was a nice man all the same, an attractive man who lavished presents on her and even bore her rejection of him patiently. Any other woman would be happy to live with him. But Rana was living for an illusion — her love for an anarchist with a death-wish.
Angry words had been spoken that Sunday afternoon. She had retorted that Dunia didn’t even look in the mirror any more, so as not to see what six or seven years had made of her: a fat, frustrated matron. Dunia shouted back that she’d rather be a matron than deranged, and Rana would soon end up in the al-Asfuriye mental hospital. She really said it: al-Asfuriye.
Dunia gave up arguing. She was a thinking woman now, she said, and she was free. You had to train men like wild animals. Then, as time went on, they learned to come home and be faithful.
Remembering this made Rana laugh. “A fine picture of wretchedness Dunia drew me. That’s not love, that’s animal-taming. When love is the real thing it asks no sacrifice and it doesn’t exploit you.” She was sure she wouldn’t for a moment sacrifice herself for Farid because she loved him. Her heart was a cactus. She was patient, she kept quiet. But she didn’t confuse that with love, and she would leave Rami as soon as it was possible for Farid to live with her.