“Since then I’ve lived sensibly with Rimon, who thinks himself lucky to have married a daughter of the distinguished leather exporter Antoine Ashi. He wants children, I give him children, and the rest of the time he leaves me alone.”
At this moment they reached the hammam. Madeleine was a frequent visitor, and knew not only the woman who owned it, the strong masseuse, the old lady who soaped customers and all the assistants, but many of the women who were bathing there too. They came to meet her now with open arms. And Claire was amazed to see how Madeleine changed as soon as she undressed. She shed her reserve along with her clothes, played around and joked with the women. Her laughter broke out in waves, echoing back from the walls and infecting other women sitting further off.
All of a sudden Claire was among strange women who smiled at her and immediately included her in their conversation, as if she had always been one of them. And soon she too was giving her opinion of some husband or other who was being picked to pieces in his absence. After an hour she was pleasantly tired, and went to sleep on the warm floor. When she woke up she was surprised to find how peaceful she felt. The room was almost empty, the women she had been with had moved on into the next room, where it was warmer. She lay where she was, looking up at the dome with the little stained glass windows that muted the sunlight. She felt safer than she had been for a long time. The world was far away, Elias and Alexandra were far away. Only Farid looked at her with his beautiful eyes that were so strangely like her father’s.
If it were possible to feel as secure as she did here, and live with no one but her son, life would be all right, she thought after a while, slowly sitting up. She heard Madeleine laugh again. The assistant — a dark-skinned woman with a friendly face and terribly bad teeth, mere stumps — appeared suddenly, as if she had been waiting for Claire to wake. She handed her dry, snow-white towels, and took away the wet and sweaty ones. Slowly, Claire went into the next room.
She talked for hours with Sarifa and Baraka, two women of wide experience. Sarifa was married for the second time, and very happy with her new husband, the way you can only be in movies. She was the more outspoken of the two, and advised Claire to leave her husband and throw everything into the lap of fate.
Baraka was almost sixty, and was quieter but also more inscrutable. The other women joked about her, calling her Mashnakt Rigal, “a gallows for husbands”. Her fourth husband had died a year ago of some strange stomach disease, and his family had accused Baraka of poisoning him. Baraka recommended her to fight back against her rival Alexandra; she mustn’t let the other woman off the hook for a moment.
Claire laughed a great deal, and she felt lighter at heart with Madeleine and the other women, as if she had washed off not only her dirt but her grief as well. She liked the company of Sarifa and Baraka, but her love for Elias was something different, so she couldn’t take their advice. But she did take something home with her that afternoon: she knew she wasn’t alone any more. Both women understood her, and Sarifa made it clear, as they said goodbye, that she would be happy to see Claire in the baths again next Wednesday. And Claire went there with Madeleine not only the following week but almost every Wednesday after that for years.
After the hammam Claire went home feeling relaxed, stepping lightly. But as soon as she was back, and had picked Farid up and said goodbye to her father, her dismal thoughts returned. All the lightness of heart she had felt with the women was gone.
How could Elias do this to her? Why did it have to happen to her? Wasn’t what she’d been through with three miscarriages enough? And why did he choose that cackling goose Alexandra who’d already been wiggling her bottom about like a whore at the age of thirteen, and always used to say she knew where a man’s brains were: in his balls, semen was his brain-juice and that was why it looked so milky?
How could Elias find happiness between the legs of a stranger, a stupid woman like that? Hadn’t she satisfied him? What all his protestations of faithfulness? Perhaps part of the trouble was those long periods of abstinence after her miscarriages. Elias needed sex every day; he had joked about it often enough, hinting at his appetite. She was always tired in the evenings now, after the boy’s birth, because she had to get up to feed him three or four times in the night. Elias sat alone, drinking his arrack in silence. Had that driven him into that woman Alexandra’s arms? Her head was buzzing with questions all afternoon. She couldn’t answer any of them.
She washed and made her face up, but when Elias came home she looked at him with grief in her eyes. He didn’t even try to lie to her when she asked, “Is it true about Alexandra?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have a relationship with Madame Makram Bey.”
In spite of his embarrassment, Elias felt relieved. He had wanted to tell Claire again and again over these last few months. But her silence had left him confused. It was a deep lake threatening to drown him bit by bit. Three times he had brought out Alexandra’s name, but Claire had stifled any other words by showing her undisguised contempt for the woman.
His silence had been a lie. How often had he lied? He thought back, remembering how he had sometimes felt he was standing outside himself, as if he were two men. One Elias was talking just to please people, the other Elias said nothing, but registered the lies. Had it happened once or a hundred times? How often had he agreed with Claire that Arab women needed freedom and equal rights? He had noticed that she liked to hear him say so. She had confused love with the attitudes he adopted.
Now he felt relief. “It’s not the way you think, though,” he said. Claire had promised herself all afternoon to keep calm, but when he said that and put out a hand to placate her she struck it away and wept. “You’ve deceived me, Elias. I never loved anyone in my life as I’ve loved you, and now you pay me back by deceiving me. Oh, Elias,” she cried, almost inaudibly, as if to say: help me, please, I’m dying. But it was a long time before she could get another word out.
“Elias,” she whispered at last, weeping as if for the death of someone she had loved dearly. He sat beside her, lost in thought, and dared not try to touch her again. And for a moment she hoped he would explain that it was all a mistake and put his arm around her shoulders, and then she wouldn’t shake it off. She felt he was about to do just that, but then he merely stood up and went to the window, and she knew that he belonged to Alexandra now.
She was intimidated, and said no more. It was more than ten years before she recovered from the shock.
61. Pangs of Conscience
No one was buying the idea that Elias had been very devout since he left the Jesuit school. Many regarded him as a hypocrite. He was on the committees of all the Catholic associations of the city of Damascus and the village of Mala, he dutifully went to church on Sunday, and then he slept around for the rest of the week.
He thought his first affair during his marriage stupid at both the beginning and the end of it, but Alexandra — or Madame Makram Bey, as she liked to be called — was hot as a wasp in full sunlight and smelled of unsatisfied lust for many metres around her. And since he could hardly make love to Claire at all at the time, he fell for the temptation.
It was at a party given by her husband for the deputies who had elected him their parliamentary president. Elias and three of his employees, clad in snow-white coats and caps, were to serve the delicious sweetmeats. Suddenly Alexandra came delicately tripping up to him and said it was she who had persuaded her husband to choose Elias’s shop to supply them. And that same evening, as the new parliamentary president was smoking his Cuban cigars, drinking French champagne and talking to the deputies, Alexandra was enjoying her first love-play with Elias in a small bedroom on the third floor of the big house.