Khadija al-Mahhar left no one she knew without swearing to them that as long as she had even one breath left her son Ismail would never marry Nawal al-Rata. It wasn’t becoming for someone like her son to marry someone without brilliant family connections, one who moreover was kind to everyone and who charmed young people and corrupted them. Nawal’s mother was a half-wit, and her father was hired out to a carpenter. Khadija believed that her son hated what she hated, liked what she liked, and would not go against her wishes. She did not believe it when he left the home in which he was indulged and honored and provided with every comfort, and married Nawal and lived with her in a house smaller than a tin of sardines. Khadija put on the darkest clothes in her wardrobe and asked all her acquaintances to commiserate with her for the loss of her son, whom death had snatched away while still in the prime of youth. What she said turned out to be a forewarning of what actually happened, for Ismail did not finish his honeymoon. He was hit by a drunken driver, and his mother never had a chance to see him again except as a lifeless corpse who could not respond to her scolding and reproach. And there, in a bleak corridor in the hospital, the mother came face to face with the weeping Nawal, and she glowered at her with harsh and threatening looks. But she was surprised to discover that the tears flowing from Nawal’s eyes were genuine tears that came from a wounded heart which could not be healed. Nawal appeared to her at that moment to be a small, weak creature that kept shaking and couldn’t stand firmly on its feet; she was like someone about to die but was condemned to suffer without finding release in death. She rushed toward her and embraced her as though she were embracing Ismail, and allowed her to cry herself out on her breast. She swore that Nawal must come home with her after the funeral and sleep in Ismail’s bed, which Nawal had never seen before. That night was followed by others, and Nawal lived with her mother-in-law, who never stopped exclaiming in a voice full of piety, “How generous is the Lord! With one hand He takes away, and with the other He provides.”
Nothing annoyed Nawal in her new life save her mother-in-law’s insistence that she marry again. The mother described the character of those whom she had picked out for Nawal, and at the end of the evening would ask her to talk about Ismail. She listened in amazement, as if she had known nothing about him.