However, a cactus has a hard life. A week before her quarrel with Dunia she felt like exploding. Rami came home unexpectedly with two high-ranking officers, woke her and asked her to serve them some small nibbles. All three of them were drunk and noisy. She gave Rami everything she could find in the kitchen, putting it on two trays, and went back to bed. But she couldn’t sleep.
It was late when he came to her, stinking of cigars and liquor. And when she refused to sleep with him he hit her. Rami raped her, and she cried. As he forced his way inside her he said he was ashamed of her. His colleagues’ wives would make up their faces and entertain guests at any time, even late at night. She should be glad he was a good Christian, because a Muslim would have thrown a woman like her out long ago and married a second wife. After a while he stopped shouting and hitting her, and fell into a deep sleep.
Next day her family visited, and Rami repeated all his accusations. He told them about his superior officers’ visit last night, called it “tedious but a duty”, and condemned Rana’s behaviour. He didn’t mention that he had hit her repeatedly. Her mother and brother thought he was quite right. Her father, distressed, said nothing, but his look spoke volumes.
Rana wondered what chance she had with a husband like that. There was only one solution: to play dead. It’s difficult only at first. Then you learn to go far away in your mind, to some high and distant place, and from there you watch what your husband is doing in bed with a corpse and you feel nothing, no disgust, no anger, nothing.
With time she had learned not to feel anything in certain parts of her body. She felt neither pain nor pleasure in her lips, her breasts, her earlobes. She was like the Indian fakir she had seen on a newsreel in the cinema. He had walked, smiling, over broken glass and red-hot coals. But when Farid touched her she was all aflame.
Rana didn’t notice how time was passing. Suddenly the rainbow was gone, and her husband, in his uniform, was there on the roof in front of her. Repelled, he cast a glance at her, turned, and went back into the apartment.
Quarter of an hour later her family were all there. Her brother Jack was looking at her angrily. Her mother was crying, and her father spent a long time on the telephone.
Rana was shivering with cold in her wet nightdress.
237. The Mental Hospital
When she woke up again she was in a white bed. The walls and the ceiling were white too. She heard screams like the cries of a frightened animal, and there was a strong smell of camphor. Her back hurt, her tongue was dry. She was freezing. Her head felt heavy as lead, but gradually she managed to turn it to one side. There was another woman in the bare room with her, fastened down to her bed with three straps. She looked as thin and her skin as greyish brown and wrinkled as if she were the naked mummy Rana had once seen in the Egyptian Museum. The woman lay still. Rana thought she must be dead, and a strange anxiety took hold of her. Where was she? Why was she lying in this store-room with a dead woman? Did they think she was dead too? When the woman turned her head aside, Rana breathed a sigh of relief. The woman’s thin, weathered face expressed suffering, like someone in a painting of the tormented souls lining Christ’s path.
“They’re trying to poison me,” said the woman hoarsely. “They’ve injected poison into me so that I’ll die slowly and they can inherit my house.” The woman breathed in with a whistling sound and looked at the ceiling. “Who brought you here? Are they trying to poison you too?” Rana shook her head. She wanted to say she didn’t know, but she was sure no one was trying to poison her.
Looking down at her body, Rana saw that she herself was not strapped down. She sat up, but the chill in the room threw her back on the white sheet.
She thought of the rainbow, and was surprised to find that she wasn’t wet any more, nor was she wearing her own clothes, only this white garment.
“You have to trick them,” whispered the woman. “If you want to survive here you mustn’t be honest with anyone. Be absent, play dead,” she added, barely audibly.
How had she come here? Rana wondered. Her parents had been holding on to her. Then what? Where had her husband been? What had he done?
“Fly through the air like me, sail through the storms, see beaches and palaces, play with children and sleep with handsome men. I go walking through Damascus, I eat ices in the Suk al Hamidiye, while that fool of a doctor asks my dead body questions here in the madhouse, stuffs it with bitter pills, listens to it, measures it, takes photographs. But since I’m not answering his questions, no, I’m talking to the woman at my table in the ice cream parlour instead, he doesn’t understand me, he thinks I’m crazy. I let him think so. Here in al-Asfuriye, the House of Sparrows, I’m safe from poisoning until my son comes from America to take me away.”
The woman was talking incoherently, and Rana cautiously returned to the point in time that was becoming clearer in her memory now. Her husband had gone to the door, and at that moment she realized that he had called a doctor. What for? She felt well. Rather sad, yes, but why would she need a doctor?
She had tried to get up from the couch and follow her husband to the door to tell him he could send the doctor away, she was perfectly all right again. Then her mother had taken her by the right arm, snapping at her father, who was hesitating, telling him not to stand around going to sleep on his feet but to help her. Rana had tried to tear herself free.
“Leave me alone and go home,” she had begged her parents, but they didn’t seem to understand what she was saying. They pushed her down on the couch again with iron force. She had screamed with fear because she thought they had gone out of their minds. Then she felt the needle go in.
Rana spent two weeks in the psychiatric hospital. Then, at her family’s wish, Dr. Huss the deputy medical director discharged her. Rana went home. She seemed to be better. On her first day back, she threw her pills in the waste bin.
238. Sabri and Rachel
“A woman once loved a man with a large wart on his nose,” said Gibran. “She thought him the most handsome man in the world. Years later, however, she noticed the wart one morning. ‘How long have you had that wart on your nose?’ she asked. ‘Ever since you stopped loving me,’ said the man sadly.”
Gibran slurped his tea noisily and nodded, as if he were thinking of Karime.
“Come along, old friend,” said Michel the joiner, rousing him from his thoughts. “Can’t you tell us a love story with a happy ending for a change?”
Gibran laughed. “Yes, indeed.” And he drank some more tea before he began his story. “Sabri was a handsome young man, brave and rather dashing. He was younger than me, but very tall and strong, so people took him for my elder brother. When I was out and about with him, no one dared to insult me — I’d always been small and emaciated.
“Well, one day Sabri fell in love with Rachel, a Jewish girl from nearby Jews’ Alley. It was all a little crazy. Sabri and Rachel were the talk of the Christian and Jewish quarters alike. The brothers of both lovers beat them, but they always found their way back together.
“Only Sabri’s parents were happy about Rachel, because in marrying her their son would be converting a Jew. His father was on the committee of the Catholic Church. He thought of Jews as poor blind folk who couldn’t see that the Son of God had come long ago. So he encouraged Sabri to open Rachel’s eyes.
“However, all that came to a sudden end when the state of Israel was proclaimed two months later. The Jews of Damascus were happy, but they couldn’t say so openly. People eyed them with suspicion wherever they went. Sabri’s father was the first to take fright. He was a minor civil servant in the Interior Ministry, where he had done well under the French and stayed on after Independence, simply changing the flag on the wall.