Translated from the Arabic by Lena Jayyusi and Elizabeth Fernea
Samira ‘Azzam (1927–1967). Born in Mandatory Palestine, the daughter of a Christian Orthodox goldsmith, Samira ‘Azzam left her homeland during the Palestinian exodus in 1948. In Iraq, she worked as headmistress of an all-girls school. Her first collection of short stories, Small Things (1954), examines women’s role in Palestinian society. She published two further collections of short stories The Big Shadow and The Clock and the Man.
I never knew how Khazna could manage to be, at the same time, both a professional mourner for the dead and a professional beautician for brides. I had heard a lot about Khazna from my mother and her friends, but actually saw her for the first time when a neighbor of ours died. He was a man wasted by illness long before the age of fifty. So we were not surprised one day when a neighbor called out to my mother and announced without sadness,“Ah, Um Hassan! Around us and not upon us … so-and-so has passed away …”
The wake for this man was a chance for me to sneak off unobserved with the boys and girls of the neighborhood. I felt I was going to spend an exciting day. I was not against that at all. We would all be able to stare at the waxen face of the dead man, to watch how his wife and daughters wept for him, and to see how the hired mourners clapped rhythmically while they chanted their well-worn phrases of lamentations and mourning.
Hand in hand, my girlfriend and I were able to squeeze between the legs of the people crowding in front of the dead man’s house, to a place not far from the door. Here were numerous children who had come, like us, to taste the excitement that accompanies death. We did not move from our places until a big fist, Khazna’s fist, pushed us all aside as she stood, filling the door with her great, broad frame. In a matter of seconds she had assumed an emotional face, unraveled her two braids of hair, extracted from her pocket a black headband that she tied around her forehead, and let out a cry so terrible that I could feel my heart contract. Khazna pushed her way through the women crowded into the room to a corner where a jug of liquid indigo stood. She daubed her hands and face with the indigo till her face was so streaked with blue it looked like one of the masks salesmen hung up in their shops during feast days. Then she took her place at the dead man’s head, let out another piercing cry, and began to beat her breast violently. From her tongue rolled out rhythmic phrases that the women repeated after her, and tears began to flow from their eyes. It seemed as though Khazna was not just lamenting that one dead man, our neighbor, but, rather, was weeping for all of the town’s dead, arousing in one woman anguish over a lost husband and in another sorrow over a dead son or departed brother.
Soon one could no longer tell which of the women was the dead man’s wife or sister. If the keening women paused a moment in fatigue, Khazna would revive their sorrow with a special mournful chant, following it with another terrible cry. The tears would gush forth once more, the sobbing would become more intense, the sounds of anguish greater. And in this room of grief, Khazna was the center, with a tongue that did not tire and a voice like an owl, a large woman with an uncanny ability to affect sorrow. If one could say that reward is given in exchange for the amount of effort expended, then only a sum so large as to move in Khazna this seemingly inexhaustible store of anguish could compensate her for this tremendous performance of sorrow.
I still remember Khazna when the men came to carry the dead body to its wooden coffin. She stood beside the deceased, begging the pallbearers to be gentle with the dear one, to have mercy on him and not be too quick to cut his ties with this world. One of the men, fed up with Khazna’s chatter, finally pushed her away so that he and his companions could lift the body. Black scarves were waved in farewell, and the women’s exhortations poured forth, this one charging the dead man to greet her husband in the other world, that one asking him to speak to her mother there. Khazna proceeded to fill the neighborhood with shrieks so loud they could be heard above all the other cries.
Once the men had left the house, the procession of mourners made its way slowly down our street, bearing the coffin upon which the fez of the departed one bounced up and down. Then it was time for the women to rest a little from the grief they had imposed on themselves, and they were invited to eat at a table set in one of the inside rooms. Khazna was the first to wash her face, roll up her sleeves, and stuff her big mouth with as much food as her hand could reach. But I also noticed that she was careful to secrete some extra food in her bosom. If she felt that someone noticed her doing this, she would smile wearily and say, “It’s just a bit for my daughter, Mas‘ouda … I got the news of death before I had time to fix her something to eat. And, of course, eating the food of the wake is an act pleasing to God.”
That day I realized that Khazna was not a woman like other women and that she was almost more necessary for the ritual of death than the deceased. I never forgot her big mouth, her dreadful grip, her wild flowing hair. Whenever I heard of a death, I would head for the house of the deceased with my girlfriend, propelled by my curiosity, my desire for sensation, my search for something I could tell my mother about if she herself were not there. The sight of Khazna herself would divert me from the face of the deceased. I would find my eyes riveted on her person, watching her hands as they moved from her breast to her face to her head. Those blows, together with the dirges and chants, seemed to have a special rhythm, a rhythm designed to intensify the pain of the family’s loss and instill anguish in the visitors at the wake.
Some time passed before I had the opportunity to see the other face of Khazna—as she appeared in her role as mashta, or beautician for the brides. There at the wedding she was—the same black hair but now combed back and adorned with flowers, the same ugly face but made up so it scarcely resembled that mourning face streaked with indigo. Outlined with kohl, her eyes seemed much larger. Her wrists wore heavy bracelets (who said the trade of death was not profitable?), and her mouth would open in loud laughter and only half close again, while she chewed a huge piece of gum between her yellow teeth.
That day I began to understand that Khazna had as special a place with brides as she had with the dead. Her task began the morning of the wedding day when she would appear in order to remove the bride’s unwanted hair with a thick sugar syrup. She would pencil the bride’s eyebrows while conveying in whispers (or what she thought were whispers) the sexual obligations to come. If the girl’s face reddened in embarrassment, Khazna would first laugh mockingly and then reassure her that two or three nights would be enough to make an expert of any bride. She, Khazna, would guarantee this, she insisted, provided the bride used a perfumed soap and a cream hair lotion (which she could, of course, buy from Khazna herself).
In the evening the women would come dressed up and perfumed, wearing flowers in their hair or on their shoulders, to hover round the bride on her dais. Then Khazna’s ululations would rip the sky over our town.
Khazna performed memorably on the dance floor, circling constantly while she joked with the women, using words so rude they provoked laughter. And when, amidst the winks of the guests, the bridegroom would come to take his bride, Khazna would conduct the couple ceremoniously to the door of the bridal chamber, for she had the right to watch over them. At that time I did not really understand why Khazna took such care to stand at the door of the bridal chamber, waiting for something, in curiosity and nervousness. But as soon as a sign was given, a knock at the door and the showing of a bloodied handkerchief, would let out a memorable ululation for which the bridegroom’s family had apparently been waiting.
When the men heard that ululation of Khazna’s, they would twirl their moustaches. The women would rise together. In a single movement and from every direction or corner would emerge a ululation of pride and exultation. Khazna would then depart, content, her pocket full, followed by expressions of good wishes on all sides that she would see a happy wedding day for her daughter.
Mas‘ouda’s happy wedding day was something to which Khazna looked forward and for which she put away bracelets and other treasures. For she had no one else to inherit all she had collected from the town’s wakes and weddings.
But heaven decreed that Khazna should not have her happiness. That summer the germs of typhoid fever took it upon themselves to create a season of death for Khazna unlike any other season in memory. I will not forget that summer. The sun would not rise without another death in the town. It was said that in one day alone Khazna lamented three clients.
The typhoid fever did not miss Mas‘ouda, and death had no pity; it chose her despite Khazna’s pleas.
One morning the town woke up to the news of the death of Khazna’s little one, and people’s curiosity was aroused almost at the same moment the wretched child’s life ended.
How would Khazna grieve for her daughter … would it be in a manner unknown to ordinary mourning occasions? What chants and dirges would she recite in her own bereavement? Would it be a wake that would turn the whole neighborhood upside down?
I could not overcome my own curiosity and my pity for Khazna’s loss, so I went to her, I sought her, as did crowds of other women who went to repay some of their own debt to her over the years.
Her single room was small. About twenty people sat, and the rest hovered near the door. I did not hear Khazna’s voice and searched for her, looking across the tops of peoples’ heads. To my surprise, she was not crying. She sat on the floor in a corner of the room, grim and silent. She had not bound her head with a black scarf nor smeared her face with indigo. She did not beat her breast nor tear her dress. She sat there not moving, not making a sound.
For the first time I found myself seeing a Khazna who was not affecting emotion. I was looking at the face of a women in such pain she seemed about to die from that pain. Her sorrow was mute, her suffering that of those who feel deep loss, who experience total bereavement.
A few of the women tried to weep, to cry out, but she looked at them in such a stunned way, as though rejecting their demonstrations of grief, that they gradually fell silent, astonished and indignant.
When the men came to take away the only creature who had ever given her the opportunity to express her emotions honestly, Khazna did not cry out or tear her dress. She simply looked at the pallbearers with dazed eyes and, like one lost, followed them down the street toward the mosque. At the cemetery she laid her head down on the fresh earth that housed the little body of Mas‘ouda, and she rested on the grave for many hours. Only God knows exactly how long she stayed there.
People returned from the wake saying many things about Khazna. Some said she had become so mad she appeared to be rational; some said she had no tears left after a lifetime of wakes; and of course someone said that Khazna did not cry because she was not given any money.
A few, a very few chose to say nothing, letting Khazna in her silence say everything.