Though this flower—i.e., Hala—really had begun to wilt, that doesn’t mean that no one has desired to breathe in her fragrant scent, for potential grooms have been flocking to her family’s house in droves from the time she reached a marriageable age—they sought her out as if they were flies and she the blue light that would zap them. But Hala’s response was always the same, even as time kept passing. To every single one of them, she would very simply say two words, never three:
“Ma baddi!” (meaning: No!)
She would pronounce these two words, lifting the palm of her right hand in the air and turning her face to the side to emphasize what she had just said, as though she were one of the princesses in the stories of 1001 Nights, who won’t consent to marry unless it is to a man who truly deserves her. Now the man who truly deserves her is the strongest in all the land: he’s always prepared to go to the ends of the earth for her sake, to launch wars against all the other kingdoms and make the grandest of their leaders bow down at his feet as confirmation of both his absolute power and his everlasting love for her.
<blockquote>She then explained that Faris wasn’t actually the knight in shining armor that she thought she had found. In fact, she had only found a poseur knight[…]</blockquote>But none of these potential bridegrooms con-firmed his everlasting love for Hala or launched a war, even a small one, for her sake, not one of them even protested against her rejecting him or got down on his knees to beg her to reconsider, as she would have liked in her dreams. And so she was left disappointed every time, but she wasn’t too sad about it; in her opinion these disappointing men weren’t worthy of her anyway, since they weren’t ever real men. For her, this was the root of the problem—she always used to claim that the reason she refused to get married was her search for this “real man” and her dissatisfaction with anything less!
Tracking him down is no simple matter. He’d be a rare find, because this is an endangered species! His kind is on the brink of extinction.
This is what Hala always used to tell me, without providing any detailed information about this breed, or the criteria that she used to distinguish “real” men from other men—the only thing that I knew about real men is that they didn’t cross her path.
But as circumstances would have it, when she was thirty years old, a man of this rare breed finally did cross her path and asked for her hand in marriage. And she refused. And he insisted, so she accepted. The wedding planning came on like a sudden torrential downpour in the most arid desert after a drought that has lasted for years, when everything that’s wilted suddenly comes alive. Hala herself came alive in the eyes of her aunts and uncles on both her mother’s and father’s sides, and to the rest of the extended family, too. To them she had become a flower blooming at the peak of its maturity, a prize blossom to be plucked, smelled, and enjoyed.
So this flower finally surrendered her hand in marriage to her knight in shining armor, who came to her riding atop a rented white 2007 Cadillac, in place of a white horse. According to Hala, this knight, whose name happens to be Faris (meaning knight in Arabic), he is everything that she had dreamed of and desired—and more.
“So what’s the problem, then?” I asked her.
“The problem…” Hala began, but was silenced just as quickly by my grandmother coming into the bedroom to do her noontime prayers.
My grandmother’s entrance at that moment was the commercial break that interrupts a film on television, giving the viewers a chance to move away from the screen for a moment without missing anything. Her intrusion let me escape from Hala and her story for a second and go to the bathroom to escape from my sweaty shirt.
After I had traded my shirt for house clothes and put on some perfume, I returned to the bedroom, where my grandmother had already finished her prayers. But she didn’t leave the room as I expected and instead started organizing one of her wardrobes, though all of them are always perfectly organized. Her sudden organizational frenzy prevented us from continuing our conversation, which annoyed Hala, who wanted to talk so much that she was on the verge of exploding. When she could repress this urge no longer, she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to one of the corners of the room, saying very loudly,
“How long have you gone without plucking your eyebrows? The hair on them is almost as thick as the shrubbery in Sanayeh Park!”
I was about to say that the shrubbery in that park could hardly be called thick and that the few shrubs growing there could be counted on one person’s fingers and toes. But I resisted because I noticed that Hala wasn’t listening to me and had started searching for the eyebrow tweezers. After she found them in a drawer, she came right up close to me and started plucking the grass growing in this “garden” out by its roots. She used this as a pretext to whisper into my ear the story of how her wedding plans were failing without arousing our grandmother’s suspicion— grandma would try to figure out what we were talking about straightaway if she realized that we were hiding something important from her.
This actually was something important, or the tone of Hala’s voice at least made it seem like it was. She brought her face so close to mine that our lips were almost touching and I could feel the warmth of her breath on me, as she whispered, “That low-life despicable man! Thank God I found out what he’s really like before the wedding!”
She then explained that Faris wasn’t actually the knight in shining armor that she thought she had found. In fact, she had only found a poseur knight and she had discovered this pose exactly two days before, when they were hanging out together in one of the bars in Gemmayzeh. Late that night, two men who were clearly drunk came over to their table. One of them started to curse at her fiancé for no reason. The other came up to Hala and tried to put his hand on her breasts. Instead of getting the man off her, as she expected him to do and he should have done, Faris bent his head so that it was almost hidden underneath the table and not a single sound crossed his lips except the chattering of his teeth.
“He was afraid!” Hala whispered to me, shaking her head. She added, in serious distress, “He turned out to be a tante in the end! A sissy! A fag!”
She then plucked a bunch of little hairs from my right eyebrow in one violent motion as though taking revenge on the universe that had sent her a fag fiancé, and I shouted out in pain.