The Nur Ul Ain Tiara #4
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 to me 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.”
“What about Layal’s father?”
“What does it matter who he is? Only you would think of asking such a question.”
“It’s the missing piece.”
Zahra Bayda tilts her head and stares at me, amazed, the way dogs stare at small moving things.
“This is life, Bos Mutas,” she lectures. “Not stories for you to write in your notebook.”
I like Zahra Bayda, I really do, I recognize the warmth I feel for her.
But sometimes I find her frankly unpleasant.
Maybe that’s not the right adjective; perhaps, instead, barely pleasant.
Between one term and another, something, some description, escapes me.
So what I write is just stories? I keep quiet.
Maybe I deserve the snide remark; while others live and struggle, risk their necks, cure people, and make history, I’m the one straggling behind them, making notes on paper.
Me, Bos Mutas, the mute ox. I remember when my parents gave me my first puppy, a mutt they found on the street.
I became wildly attached to that dog and poured all the affection of my sad childhood into him.
I named him Mazinger Z, like the cartoon monkey superhero, the most inappropriate of names for a tiny, weak, woolly dog.
I was a lonely kid, Mazinger was a ball of joy, and we became inseparable friends.
One day I heard someone ask my father about me, and I was stunned by his response.
“The boy?” he said. “The boy spends all his time with that dog, like a moron with a stuffed animal.”
A moron with a stuffed animal. I, the poor moron, and Mazinger, a poor stuffed animal, that’s what my dog and I were to my father.
At times I love Zahra Bayda, and at other times I don’t.
I’m exhausted by the roller coaster of my uncertain passion.
A gesture, a word, a silence is enough to propel me to the skies; a word, a silence, a gesture is enough to smack me down to the ground.
I love her a lot, a little, not at all, that’s how it’s been for me lately, like petals pulled from a daisy.
I’ve burned too many neurons on this improbable math.
Luckily there are no daisies in this desert.
I seek out Zahra Bayda and stand in front of her. Although she’s very tall, I’m a head taller and can look her up and down.
“Listen,” I say, “you should know something: I’m no moron with a stuffed animal.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hanani’s son is growing up, soon he won’t be a boy at all but a man, he’ll want to know who his father is, and he’ll investigate. He’ll demand to be told that story. And I’m not some moron with a notebook.”
“You?” she says, and laughs. “You’re a good man, Bos, that’s why I love you.”
She’s just said that she loved me because I’m good. Kindness, that undervalued virtue. Good has become a sterile, asexual word. Me, a good man? Her comment makes me feel winged and dopey, like a rosy-cheeked cherub.
“You’re very good and you look good too,” she says, flirtatiously, coming up close to smooth my wrinkled shirt collar. Then she turns and leaves, singing to herself, “Yay le-le-le, yay le-le-le.”
“Yay le-le-le,” how sharp she is, that Zahra Bayda.