In the end, she can bear all of that, making a monstrous sacrifice for the sake of her family’s peace and happiness. But this marriage means giving up something else, a much greater loss, impossible to accept,which will tear her soul to shreds and plunge her into wrenching sorrow. And not just her, also Layal, her son, because she’ll have to give him up. She won’t be able to take him with her to her husband, to that rich northern landowner. Layal won’t even be spoken of; it has to be as if he did not exist.
In that attic, friends have gathered in honor of Hanani, but she’s not the center of attention. She’s sitting toward the back, withdrawn and slightly apart from the others, gaze turned inward, unable to focus on anyone or anything that isn’t herself and the turbulent waters inside. She tries to pretend, to keep up appearances, but her fake smile betrays bitterness, rage, and secret rebellion.
“Come on, Hanani!” Her friends try to cheer her up, knowing her dilemma. “Come on, lift those spirits up, this is like a wake.”
She pulls Zahra Bayda aside. The two shut themselves into a bathroom, and Hanani comes undone. She trembles, starts having a panic attack.
“I see death in that man’s eyes,” she says.
Zahra Bayda makes a thousand arguments to convince her not to marry. She brainstorms options, describes how life could be different. She begs her not to give up her son, her freedom, her intelligence; she offers to help her escape. Hanani only trembles. And weeps. And trembles.
I ask Zahra Bayda to describe her to me. I want to know what she’s like, physically; I’m captivated by her even though I don’t know her, I can’t wait to write her story down, from this moment on I’m turning her into a Queen of Sheba who trembles at the premonition of death in the eyes of the faraway king who courts her. Zahra Bayda tells me that Hanani is very beautiful, but that I already knew. I need details, the descriptions are still vague and Zahra Bayda is of no help, she doesn’t put a lot of effort into studying faces, I have to pull each detail out of her, every trait. What she doesn’t say, I make up, building an image little by little out of loose pieces. Eyes like water; a gaze lost in vile premonitions; a narrow forehead, or narrow-seeming due to being partly covered by her hair. An otherworldly pallor. A sharp nose and a mouth like ripe fruit, perhaps too ripe, that is, sensual and juicy but with a bitter aftertaste. As expected, her most notorious feature is her hair. Definitely her hair. I know, I feel this way about all Arab women, the niqab that shields them from my eyes makes me imagine bodies in the style of Giacometti topped with lush hair, as if they were young trees. In this case, the association with Giacometti doesn’t seem arbitrary, Zahra Bayda says Hanani is tall and bony, even more so these days, because she’s barely eating and has lost twenty pounds in two months, and while she was already slender, now she’s extremely thin. Although, according to Zahra Bayda’s exact words, despite her undernourishment, Hanani still has an enviable body. That’s how she puts it: “enviable body.” Then comes her crowning glory, her hair. My informant tells me that Hanani’s is spectacular, truly splendid, of astonishing volume, a dark brown color, wavy and lustrous, parted in the middle and cascading down either side of her face. Incredible.
I picture Hanani as the tormented Persephone as rendered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in that painting that’s always fascinated me. The parallel comes to me out of the blue, but there’s logic to it. A lot of logic, in fact: In classical mythology, Persephone was raped by Pluto, king of Hades, who dragged her to the inferno and married her. Something similar has happened to our Hanani. Pulling the thread further, as I like to do, gives rise to striking analogies, namely, that the bachelorette party with Hanani’s friends holds resonance with the Eleusinian Mysteries, those secret celebrations charged with the echoes of death in which the Greeks bid farewell from the bright world to a Persephone who had to leave, to join her husband in the shadows underground.
“But what the hell is going on with this Hanani?” I say, all riled up. “I mean, she’s a psychologist, right? Can’t she refer to her Freud to take apart all those grinding mechanics of guilt and shame? Why doesn’t she just throw it all to the wind and say no? Just like that:no. No to getting married, she should flee somewhere with her son, disappear, ghost them all.”
Zahra Bayda calms me down; she tells me to try putting myself in other people’s shoes. “All that absurd, twisted theater,” she says, “is explained by the weight of shame in Yemeni tradition. The pressure on dishonored women can be so great that they sometimes take their own lives by lighting themselves on fire. She brings shame, they say. Men point at them and stroke their beards.”
“So first they grind the girl down, then they stroke their beard, like the patriarchs in the Old Testament?”
“Here people live in biblical times.”
She brought shame and disgrace to us. An unforgivable sin. An irreversible sentence.
The sun is about to sink behind the cupolas, and in the mafraj the guests seem to wake from daydreams. Did they already savor the pastries, and are they now licking their honeyed fingers? Who knows. In any case, they tuck the little flasks of perfume and other gifts into their purses, and stretch like cats to wake their legs. As if a voice had called them, they all rise together, and in a matter of minutes they’ve covered themselves back up head to toe in their black garments and are descending the stairs like a procession of shadows, invisible again. Out on the street, they scatter in different directions, vanishing before night falls. Apparitions that disappear.
A few months later, I’m working in the garden when I hear Zahra Bayda shouting for me, “Bos Muuutaaas!” and see her running toward me, waving her cell phone in the air. What could be going on? Must be bad news—
“Remember Hanani?” she asks when she arrives, panting. “Hanani, from the bachelorette party.”
“Of course I remember her, you mean Persephone.”
“No, you fool. Hanani, the one from the tafrita in the mafraj...”
“I know, yes, the fourth wife of the northern rich guy.”
“Fourth wife to no one. She just emailed me. Look. She wrote tome from Amman. In the end, she didn’t marry! She fled to Jordan with her son just a few days before the wedding. She says she’s doing well. She’s working on her thesis over there, and has found a practicum. Can you believe it?”
“How did she escape?”
“She says she cornered her mother in a place where they could talk alone.”
After two hours she’d finally moved her mother, who then asked, for the first time in her daughter’s life, the question she herself longed to have heard decades before: What do you want to do? What do you want? Astonishing, centuries of silence and subjugation that suddenly collapse, at the speaking of just one sentence, as simple as that one: What do you want to do?
Hanani replied: I want to get out of here, I want to graduate and work, forgive me, Mother, but I’m not getting married. I’m going to Jordan and I’m taking Layal with me.
Her mother asked her to wait, then returned after a while with an ebony chest. She gave it to her. For you to sell wherever you go, she said, with that you should be able to support yourself and the boy until you both find work. In the chest, on a wine-colored velvet cushion, lay the Nur Ul Ain tiara.
Hannah supported her daughter on two conditions: that her father not find out about the escape plan until they were far away, and that it never be known that she, the mother, had helped her go.
“And the rich landowner? Did he fly into a rage and demand the dowry he’d paid be returned?”
“No way. The rich landowner hadn’t paid a thing, he wasn’t the type to cough up money until he had the merchandise in hand.”
“And the shame? What did the family do with the shame?”
“Swallowed it whole, I guess. In these times of disaster, shame becomes a secondary concern.”
