Clove Girl

HAMMAD PLANTED his right foot inside the dimly lit room where Fattouma sat waiting for him. Trembling, he leaned for support on his cousin, who, after giving him a pep talk that would have been enough to prepare for him for a hundred Fattoumas, nudged him the rest of the way in. Slightly bowlegged, Hammad was lanky, fair-skinned, and handsome, with a muscular physique that he’d acquired from years of working on the salt flats.

Fattouma, who had escaped having her hair done with ground cloves and distilled oil after having declared ferocious mutiny on the bomb and its contents, sat perched on a canopy bed, waiting for Hammad’s other foot to appear. Seeing how much her rebellion had upset her mother and her ladies-in-waiting, her father had carried out a behind-the-scenes intervention.

“Tell her to do her hair with those cloves,” he whispered sternly in her mother’s ear, “or I’ll come in and smack her. If it weren’t for cloves, she wouldn’t even be around!”

Maybe Fattouma wanted to forget what the scent of cloves did to people, and that if it weren’t for its magical effects, nothing would have happened between her father and mother and she would never have even existed! She wanted to forge a new path with a different fragrance, which was why she had rebelled against the clove treatment in the first place.

As for Hammad, he would have to undergo repeated tests of his strength and endurance over the course of his seven-day wedding festivities. The family had sent for a tighi, or professional wrestler, from the Matrouh borders, and Hammad had to meet him in hand-to-hand combat several nights in a row. After battling for some time with batons, they started to wrestle, each of them trying to bring the other down. As the first round progressed, Hammad’s cousin started to worry that the wrestler might come out the victor, so when nobody was looking, he bribed him by doubling his wages in return for letting Hammad win. When Hammad found out that his victory had been rigged, he was furious. But then one of his more level-headed cousins took him aside and said, “Calm down now. Do you think you’re the first one this has happened to—or the second, or the fourth, or the fourteenth, for that matter? It happens all the time!”

When at last it was time for him to be with his bride, Hammad took off his cloak to reveal a snow-white tunic. Over it he wore a jacket with silk-embroidered sleeves made in Damanhur. When Fattouma saw her man, she couldn’t believe her luck. Is this really all mine? she wondered. When he sat down beside her and took off his cap, she nearly fainted. Hammad had silky, blondish hair that couldn’t have been more different than hers!

Hammad consummated his marriage to Fattouma the Islamic way. That is to say, he didn’t use his forefinger to puncture her hymen as local custom dictated. Fattouma’s uncle and Hammad’s cousin were standing a short distance from the room where the couple’s awkward first encounter was taking place. Every now and then the uncle would furrow his brow and mutter, “The boy’s taking an awful long time in there. God have mercy . . . God have mercy!”

Wanting to calm the impatient uncle, the cousin complimented him on the rifle he had slung over his shoulder as he paced back and forth across the outdoor enclosure. When that brought no response, he asked him what he thought about the arms market, and the rising prices of contraband being smuggled across the border with Egypt. But Fattouma’s uncle was clearly in no mood to chat about the state of the arms market, or about anything else for that matter. He was too preoccupied to be distracted by such secondary matters.

So he closed the door to further conversation with a curt “the arms market’s no concern of mine. That’s God’s business!!”

All he could think about was his brother’s daughter, who was being touched by a strange man, now her husband, who bore the burden of testifying to whether she was a virgin or not.

After what felt like an eternity dotted with pleas for divine protection, the door to their room made a loud creak and out came a shell-shocked-looking Hammad. Without a word, he handed the bride’s uncle a blood-spattered white sheet. The uncle hastily hid the sheet in the folds of his flowing wrap and took it out to a group of men gathered in front of the house. This done, he gleefully set about emptying the contents of his shotgun into the air. This was his way of sharing the good news with his brothers and cousins and the bride’s maternal uncles, who sat waiting behind the house for the white sheet to emerge no longer white. The uncle hurriedly unfurled it like a victory banner, the battle of innocence now won, and the effectiveness of the tick-tock chest in protecting the family’s honor duly proven. Now that the bloodied sheet had appeared in the distance, they could hold their heads high in the knowledge that their honor was intact.

This precious piece of cloth would stand until Judgment Day as evidence that Hammad was the first male Fattouma had ever had contact with. As such, it would close the door to any lies that might circulate in the future if, God forbid, Hammad got it into his head to divorce her someday and rob her of her dowry by claiming that he hadn’t found her a virgin on their wedding night. This was the outcome of a mutual collective deception for which a woman’s virginity had been chosen as the playing field!

As the proof of Fattouma’s purity lay concealed once more in the folds of her uncle’s farmala, and as the smoke from the gunfire dissipated into the sky, the women’s trills rang out, and they sang the praises of Fattouma’s unsullied honor. Their crooning was true music to the ears of the men, who were intoxicated from this victory in the onerous test of honor:

Oh Fattouma, God preserved you,

and your uncle is proud as a pasha today!

Oh Maryouma, best of mothers,

your prudence and wisdom kept harm at bay!

I had a close-up view of the contest between Hammad and the tighi, and during the first night’s round, Hammad did his best to prove himself to Fattouma, although he didn’t quite manage. I’d attended other matches as well, and I’d only seen a few real cocks, whereas the rest had been nothing but hens in disguise strutting around the barnyard.

Nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with the custom of having the groom use his hand on the wedding night to determine whether his bride was a virgin. On the contrary, even the women thought it was perfectly normal. It had never occurred to them that it was just a way of covering up for a man’s possible impotence.

Women had been lulled to sleep for centuries before they learned to read and go in search of what they lacked in worlds not governed by the specifications of local male authority figures. Only then did they realize their own right to pleasure, and that what they had missed, they had missed due to nothing but a pack of lies.

As a child who served couples from the upper class, I witnessed a lot of things in the private world of men and women who were encountering each other for the first time for the simple reason that they had gotten married. Since, as far as they were concerned, I was nothing but a naïve little girl who couldn’t possibly understand what I was seeing, they had no reason to worry that I would spread their secrets. Besides, I was black, which meant I only had a quarter of a brain!

I would hear the women crying and the men beating them, calling them names, and threatening to divorce them or claim that they hadn’t been virgins on their wedding nights. In the end, the women would quiet down, resigned to their fates, and keep their pain bottled up inside. Then the children would come, love would fade—if there’d been any to start with—and the whole sky would cloud over with sorrows.