It is unusual for Samira to have a late start to her day. Normally by this time she would have been finishing her housework. She makes her bed, then straightens out Muna’s, dreaming of the perfect afternoon. Ideally she would like to slip away to the capital, but under the circumstances that’s impossible. Her mother said they are expecting company. Samira thinks Fadhma’s plans border on the fanciful. After all, the townspeople have been staying away. Surely the arrival of a cousin from America is not enough to lure them back.
Yesterday evening Samira peered over her oversize bifocals at Muna and felt that apart from their blood connection the two of them had little in common. She expected her to make a mistake. In the morning she didn’t have to wait long. Muna’s outfit, a pair of above-the-knee culottes and an identical sleeveless blouse—a different color from the one that she brought Samira from a stylish New York boutique—shows Samira that there’s no way of ignoring it now.
“That’s okay for inside the house, if we’re alone,” she begins slowly, “but you won’t be able to go outside or meet company dressed like that.”
“There’s a problem?”
Samira had assumed Muna would have figured it out by herself; after all, she is the one who’s college educated. Last night when everyone opened their gifts, Samira held up her present of the blouse, and both her mother and Laila looked askance. It was obvious that something was wrong, but no one passed comment and Muna appeared clueless. The awkwardness was finally dispelled when Samira’s girlfriends came over. Yvette and Gigi, a pair of cheerful fraternal twins whose names were inspired by their parents’ honeymoon in Paris, worked in Amman as secretaries. Their good humor was infectious.
“Come to Samira’s room.” Gigi winked conspiratorially as she led Muna by the hand. “We have lots to talk about.”
After the four of them were alone, the twins quizzed Muna about New York and boyfriends.
Once Hussein arrived home from work and Laila retrieved their guest, Samira noiselessly shut the bedroom door and showed Muna’s gift to her friends. She admitted somewhat sheepishly that she preferred to let Muna find out about the inappropriateness of the blouse by herself. Samira had, to her mind, a perfectly good excuse: her older sisters always resented being told what to do whenever they came home to visit. She cocked her head in the direction of the living room. “Why should Muna be different?”
Yvette was the first to disagree. Of late she had been arguing with Samira. Earlier that week she accused her of putting politics before her family and friends, because Samira supported the rebel opposition in Syria, even if it meant the destruction of the Christian minority there. “You no longer know when to act in your own best interests,” Yvette told her.
Yesterday evening the twin was again unimpressed. “If your American cousin finds out from a sharp stone in the back, what does that say about women’s solidarity and standing up for what’s right?”
Her question has been haunting Samira this morning.
She breaks the news gently to Muna but is fully prepared for a fight. “There is a problem. I couldn’t go out dressed like that. That blouse you gave me is really lovely. But it would have to be worn hidden underneath a sweater or a jacket but never by itself. Now the shorts…”
Muna looks down. “These aren’t really shorts. Short shorts are in fashion but I never wear them. This is more like a skirt—”
“That’s what it is to me and you, but for some people the idea that women have legs and show them off cause problems.” The inflection in her voice is rising; it is not something she agrees with.
“It’s not legs,” Muna mutters under her breath. “It’s kuss.”
Samira is not sure that she heard her cousin correctly.
Muna is the picture of innocence as her mouth fills with filth: “Kuss umek! Kuss ukht elee nafadak aars! Who would have guessed you could learn to say ‘Fuck your mother’s vagina’ and ‘Your aunt’s vagina is a slut’ from the Internet?” she observes. “Come to think of it, a lot of Arabic cursing—and thinking—seems to focus on that one word: kuss.”
Samira laughs out loud; her American relations don’t usually behave like this. Al Jid and Fadhma had their last child in the old world shortly before Muna was born in the new. Muna strictly speaking isn’t a cousin. A year older than her, Samira is in fact her aunt. Timing had made Samira the brunt of her siblings’ jokes—“Look at the old goat!” they scoffed among themselves. Still the closeness in the young women’s ages makes “aunt” inapproprately old, so both of them unthinkingly adopted “cousin.” Samira giggles again.
“What?” Muna, annoyed, sits down on a single bed. “I guess I was being foolish,” she continues more seriously. “After Tahrir Square I thought women’s clothing wouldn’t be such an issue anymore—all those girls there in skimpy T-shirts and tight jeans. Teenage boys from the Muslim Brotherhood said that the women were owed an apology; no matter how they dressed they cared about Egypt. I was hoping there were more important issues at stake than a blouse.”
Disappointed, she turns to the opened suitcase on the floor. “Is there anything you’d prefer instead?”
Samira, not as clothes obsessed as Yvette and Gigi, shakes her head. Because Muna has been honest with her, she returns the favor. What is it that Zeinab from the women’s committee told her? The goal isn’t to end a disagreement nicely. A clear, well-reasoned argument will have a longer-lasting effect and might actually end in mutual friendship and respect.
“There has been a change but not like you think. There are still too many ‘red lines,’” Samira explains, also frustrated.
After a pause Muna confesses, “In 2011, Dad stopped me from coming to Jordan. For this trip I didn’t bother to ask his permission, I just booked my ticket. I don’t care about Daesh. Auntie Magda and Hind believe the region is doomed, but they’ve been saying that for years. Watching the Arab Awakening from afar made me feel ashamed I didn’t have more faith.”
“When the first demonstrations broke out it was exciting,” agrees Samira, “but with wholesale slaughter going on next door in Syria, no one in Jordan talks about the need for a democratic government. I saw Facebook posts of demonstrators being beaten up by the police in Amman. And Jordanians—you could tell by their names—were clicking ‘like.’ They believed the protestors should be arrested and tortured. And there’s something else.” Samira isn’t sure how far to go. “Daesh, Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, and Hamas are all in competition with each other. Who is more Islamic? Who’s more in charge? And so a revolution about freedom and dignity has been hijacked by armed men. Arabs never learn. ‘Disagree with me or look at my sister, I’ll kill you.’”
Samira usually doesn’t get a chance to talk about such matters inside the family, she presses on. “So what is the difference between a ‘secular’ state and a Muslim one? Both use violence against the political opposition. Both torture in prison. They are as incompetent and corrupt as each other. The only real difference is the extent to which they control women and their bodies.”
The reason Samira doesn’t want to tell Muna what to wear is because it makes her sound like an advocate of the conservative religious forces she despises. Covering up is loathsome to her. However, since becoming politically active, she has started to appreciate—albeit grudgingly—the value of a good disguise. Yvette is right: better safe than sorry—or at least under the radar. Samira’s approach softens. “Nowadays it’s important to blend in and not call too much attention to yourself.”
While the situation in Jordan is not as bad as the neighboring countries, caution is still advisable. In isolation, the preaching of the town’s new sheikh would be ignored; he is a blowhard. However, with Daesh gaining ground beyond the border and an upsurge in local militancy, Samira and her friends were among the first to notice the differences. In a town previously characterized by a degree of tolerance, 1970s posters of belly-dancing singers, which adorned the walls of the music store, were torn down overnight. Nasty stone-throwing teenagers chased a friend of the twins’ who had been wearing a T-shirt, vest, and baggy jeans. Suddenly the right clothes seem important. Young women out of step with the increasingly strident social order are only bound to suffer.
Samira adds as an afterthought, “On my better days, I like to consider it a question of fashion. Remember, in Egypt in the sixties, women wore miniskirts.” She doesn’t want their lives to sound all doom and gloom, although she knows that her political mentor, Zeinab, who escaped the ongoing “starve or kneel” siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in Damascus, would have scolded her for reverting to type: good Arab girl trying to make everyone feel a little bit better. She corrects herself: “Even in miniskirts, the women in Egypt were not as sexually harassed as the women wearing veils and robes today. So what’s going on?”
Muna doesn’t have an answer. “I just don’t believe the lives of women or families should be controlled and programmed by mullahs, priests, or rabbis.”
During their conversation, she holds up a skirt or a top, and her cousin either nods or points to the pile of haram clothes multiplying in the suitcase.
Samira charts Muna’s progress with growing admiration. “My brothers and sisters believe the old country has stayed exactly how they left it when the opposite is true. Wars and revolutions have altered everything. This broken promise of the Arab Awakening will only leave another deep scar on a people who have a long history of self-harm.” She reveals, “People like me long for something different, but until that happens, the men are firmly in control.” There is something brittle and apologetic in her manner, as though she is not entirely convinced by what she’s saying.
“That’s what the aunties have always told me,” Muna admits. “I just didn’t expect it to be confirmed so soon after my arrival.”
Over her bifocals, Samira takes a closer look at her cousin as though seeing her for the first time. She might have been too hasty in her assessment. In an effort to make amends she confides, “It’s something I’ve always been aware of but never discussed until I started working with a group of Syrian women activists.”
Muna is genuinely surprised. “What kind of work?”
“Pickup and delivery; I help out.”
Samira doesn’t add anything more than that, and Muna, she notices, has the good manners not to pry. Instead her cousin returns to the clothing and says distractedly, “Honestly, Samira, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
By the time the unsuitable items are sorted, Samira actually likes her American relation. She does not have to be in competition with her, and they could even become friends.
“This afternoon we’ll be entertaining old people, but if no one shows up we’ll escape. With the wedding feast tonight at least we’re going out,” Samira says. She buttons the back of a dress Muna has borrowed from her. With its high neck and three-quarter-length sleeves, her cousin finally looks respectable, although Samira prefers the culottes and the beautiful blouse from New York.
Alone afterward in the kitchen, Samira steps through the heavy curtains onto the back terrace. The view, which once induced such emotional turmoil in her, seems ugly and ordinary in daylight. There is no romance in the rough concrete walls and spare struggling trees. Fifty yards away stands the flat-topped house that belongs to the family of Walid, the boy who broke Samira’s heart. Their meetings were brief stolen moments, intensified by the fear of discovery. It was a clandestine courtship, filled with intrigue and concealment, but for Samira it had been true love. Because she believed Walid felt the same way, she agreed to meet him on the back terrace late one night regardless of the risk.
When Mother Fadhma discovered them among the cushions, Walid jumped over the ledge into the darkness and fled out of Samira’s life forever. She waited for him but he never contacted her again. Then she heard he had taken a job in Dubai, and the long, painful process of accepting her loss began. As the aching, raw sore of rejection healed, another worry festered. A disastrous scandal could erupt if any of Walid’s family or friends found out. Her guilt expanded until she imagined that people were talking about her indiscretions even when they were not. Without a word of explanation to her family, she quit teacher training college, avoided contact with anyone who might know about her relationship, and stayed at home. However, it was stifling to remain in the new house with her mother. So despite their arguments about what she was doing with her life, she began to take trips to Amman by minibus. There, wandering the wide boulevards, utterly dejected and alone, she at least felt free from scrutiny.
Samira smiles to herself when she considers how mistaken identity and a glass of sweet tea began a new important chapter in her life. On one of her excursions to the capital, she had been in one of the alleyways and saw a small teahouse that went against all she knew. Instead of being filled with only men or hipsters, it had been taken over entirely by women. Curious, she stepped inside, found an empty seat, and ordered a refreshment. As she was about to leave, a slim girl with a moon face and big dark eyes, wearing a hijab, rose from a nearby table, sat down without being invited, and immediately inquired why Samira looked sad. Samira didn’t mean to tell the story of her broken romance, the abandonment of her studies, and, worst of all, the loss of her mother’s respect, but like a torrent everything poured out of her.
The young woman was Zeinab. “You feel as if you don’t belong,” she told Samira. “Fate brought you here.”
She placed a warm, soft hand on Samira’s arm and motioned to the women at the other tables, who rearranged their chairs loosely around the two of them. Samira was at first intimidated by the commotion but also intrigued. Some of the women reminded Samira of herself and the twins—with or without headscarves. Others were obviously working mothers Laila’s age and elderly grandmothers who, upon reflection, should have been watching the door more closely and stopped Samira from entering in the first place. Once the women realized she didn’t pose a threat, they continued where they left off. It was a meeting of Syrian refugee women, including Palestinians and Kurds, now living in Amman and the surrounding towns and villages. Before Samira’s arrival they had been listening to a report on the conditions in al-Zaatari refugee camp, which was growing at an unprecedented rate.
“Sometimes two thousand or more men, women, and children arrive daily and after being admitted to the camp they are not allowed out.”
Afterwards another woman stood and read from her notes. “‘Life in the camps,’” she said, “‘is brutal. In the heat or extreme cold, the UNRWA tents are unbearable. Large extended families survive on a minimum of necessities and the children, the majority less than eleven years old, are not going to school. Instead some are working to support their families. The camp is rife with criminal gangs.
“‘Nearly everyone there,’” the woman continued reading, “‘has lost someone near to them. The threat of rape by both the regime and opposition fighters made many women flee; and just when they feel a degree of safety for themselves and their daughters, the girls are being married off by their fathers or uncles to wealthy Arabs who come to the camp, looking for a beautiful and young third or fourth wife.’” She sat down.
A heated discussion followed. The women wanted to do as much as they could for the people inside the camp, but as refugees themselves, their lives were also constricted. Another woman raised her hand and started complaining how difficult it was for her to get away because her relatives were always questioning her. “One of my brothers has even started following me,” she admitted. “He hasn’t confronted me because he’s only seen me in the company of women, never men.”
From the other murmurs of assent, apparently it was increasingly hard for young and old women to get away. Preparing for all eventualities, the leader of the women’s committee had already formulated a plan.
Raising her voice to reestablish order, Zeinab explained, “Suspicious parents, husbands, and brothers should be visited by Umm Ghaliyah. She’s our cover.”
The moonfaced Zeinab in her hijab held one hand over her mouth like a niqab and with the other pointed to a heavyset, sturdy woman in her late sixties standing by the door. Umm Ghaliyah’s floor-length dress and shawl were obviously homemade. With a twinkle in her eye and big, rough hands accustomed to manual labor, she was larger than life—beguiling and indomitable at the same time.
“Any trouble, yani, let me talk to your menfolk.” Her voice was shrill and forthright. “Times like these require extraordinary measures. I’ll explain about our meetings and study sessions. It is a chance for Syrian women to remember who they are and where they come from.” Umm Ghaliyah moved her large shoulders with pride and added, “My sisters and I convince even the most suspicious. Few say no to witches like us.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd. Her generous hands opened to include two elderly women seated beside her. Protected by their guardian angels, the activists forgot the dangers lurking beyond the teahouse door.
“Consider my situation,” offered Zeinab. “As a Palestinian and a Syrian, I lost my home twice. Because of the Israelis, my family fled the catastrophe of 1967, and now only a few of us have escaped the violence by the regime and its supporters. Our first home is under occupation; our second one has not been given much of a choice, join Assad or burn. In Syria, there have been 400,000 people murdered, half the population of a country of 22 million displaced, and 117,000 detained and tortured in jail—and still there are those among us who believe women are not responsible adults able to decide or fend for ourselves!”
Sensing the restive mood of her listeners, she became conciliatory. “Of course I understand. You are not fanatics. You are God-fearing women who pray, work hard, and raise families, but where are the people who will wrench the Syrian and the Palestinian nations from their collective tragedies? I’ll tell you where! Locked inside the refugee camps of our minds. We are not fighting for the future of one or two countries. We are fighting for the survival of us all.”
Throughout Samira’s lifetime, regional war and politics were a natural phenomenon, like a rock or a tree. In the past they were seemingly as unconnected to her life as a desert to a department store. Yet even then she wasn’t entirely immune. Like many others of her generation, she was observant and critical, although without an outlet it was an anger that often turned against oneself or, if private finances allowed, found expression in unbridled consumerism. Under the spell of her new activist friends, Samira was beginning to see that everyone met on a common ground of unhappiness, bitterness, and betrayal. All of them had been forgotten: the refugees by an apathetic world, Arabs by their own corrupt governments, Muslims by jihadists, and, at the end of a very long funnel of diminishing proportions, Samira by Walid. Each and every one of them had been spurned, and the result was a world filled with anguish and pain.
Samira never worried that some members of the women’s committee professed a different religion from her own. She felt that, at last, she was among people who understood and did not judge her. Her father would have been pleased that his daughter displayed such tolerance. Whereas Al Jid hoped that integration would promote understanding, for Samira it provided an opportunity for rebellion and conflict.
As her preoccupation with the group grew, she began to borrow reading material, much of which she didn’t understand. Later when she admitted her shortcomings in understanding the assigned postcolonial readings, Zeinab said, “All you need to know is that there are many refugees in the world, people used as cheap labor, living in unimaginable conditions of poverty and oppression. Their lives will never change except through revolution, and sometimes that requires violence.”
During meetings the women voiced their resentment about how their uprising had been hijacked by Daesh. Through their relations, some still inside ar-Raqqa, they heard about foreign fighters who had come from as far as Chechnya and Malaysia to join the jihadi free-for-all. And in the brutal caliphate that had been established, they took out their insecurities against the modern world on women, who were expected to marry between the ages of nine and seventeen, tend homes for their fighter-husbands, and be ready to marry a second, third, or fourth time once those men took their own lives as suicide bombers. People of the Book, like the Christians, endured sexual and menial enslavement, meaning they served as concubines to the man of the house and maids to his many wives. Women not of the Book, followers of so-called pagan religions like the Yazidis, were condemned to sexual servitude by men who believed intercourse with virgins an ecstatic religious experience and raped girls as young as twelve.
Still, existence continued in rebel-controlled areas. With the men away fighting or killed, it fell to the women to hunt for food, firewood, and water, as they cared for the young. Despite the conditions, that wasn’t all that they did. Those women caught inside communicated with the refugee activists in Jordan, who followed their reports on Internet radio and raised funds to support local initiatives, like a new generator for a newspaper.
Among the activists, inside and outside, there were disagreements. Some desperately argued for surrender to the regime and a return to the life that had been destroyed. Others, like Zeinab, felt that the growing savagery on the part of both the jihadists and the government must be met with brute force as a form of self-defense. She made little distinction between the two, calling them “a snake with two heads.”
She reminded the women of the first year of the Syrian uprising: “You remember when everything changed. Everyone wanted a nonviolent revolution and people were starting to wake up after forty years of fear. New civil society groups were forming and there were workshops on nonviolence and citizen journalism. This stopped once the government erected checkpoints and we could no longer move freely inside Syria. By December 2011, soldiers entering towns and villages raped women as a matter of government policy, in front of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. If there is a sniper on your street, or the house where you live is constantly shelled, or pro-regime shabeeha militias slaughter your children, can you really stand idly by? No one is such a saint! Anger is natural; revenge is not. The real question is: How do we stop ourselves from becoming as bloodthirsty as they are?”
These talks had a tendency to become heated. During one meeting Zeinab made an impassioned plea: “Women are a bridge to the future. Women are the donkeys of tradition. Women are caregivers and self-obsessed. They suffocate and love. They abuse and they suffer. The killer or the victim, which one are you?”
Samira wrote her words down in a notebook she started keeping.
Zeinab’s cry for action caused such consternation that even proud Umm Ghaliyah shouted out: “It’s not this or that; it’s this and more.” In the excitement, someone ululated as the women’s protector and guardian angel sounded her own call to arms: “Drip by drip, like water, we melt stone!”
Phrases like this also appeared in Samira’s notebook, which she scrupulously hid under her mattress at home. Other reading material, like the book of Iraqi antiwar poems, was left out in the open. She expected her mother to ask where it came from, but Fadhma made no comment. Samira knew that her mother was in some ways relieved that she was no longer moping around the house.
Zeinab’s tutorials, combined with a late-night regimen of secret reading and studying, had the desired effect. Samira slowly became conversant with the theorists of the Syrian nonviolent uprising, like Gene Sharp, as well as Palestinian and Kurdish history. But her favorite times were when she and Zeinab stole a moment together and her friend took out her phone and scrolled through her personal photographs, telling Samira about her family and friends in the Yarmouk refugee camp and their lives during better days. Over time Samira learned what happened to every one of them: Zeinab’s boyfriend had been imprisoned and died under torture; her uncle was shot leaving a bread shop. And then there was her first cousin. A mother of three darling little girls, she fled Syria on one of the boats bound for Egypt and her daughters, all under eight, drowned when the boat capsized. Zeinab had the good fortune to be smuggled out of the camp. Those of her extended family who remained during the ongoing siege were being picked off one by one—by hunger, barrel bombs, or snipers. Samira came to the conclusion that the Arab regimes and Daesh both considered all life cheap.
It was the photo of the three little girls with their big brown eyes that followed Samira as she did her political work. Identically dressed in their mother’s hand-knitted sweaters and leggings, they stood shyly together, proud of getting their picture taken. They could have been any of the children from the town or her brother Boutros’s daughters when they were small. The demise of Zeinab’s little cousins was terribly cruel. But realpolitik was indifferent to death, injury, or injustice. Samira felt an urgency to pick sides. She thought she had a better chance of helping the activists and other children than arguing for herself or her neighbors. She was disappointed that the Arab Awakening faltered in the other countries before it had a chance to take root in her own.
Although she yearned to take a more active role, she was unsure how to do it. Then after one meeting, Zeinab asked her to remain behind. She had a request to make of Samira. A comrade’s mother needed to go to the medical clinic, and Zeinab wondered if the newcomer to the women’s committee would accompany her. A Jordanian national might come in handy. The committee was becoming more active among the wider Syrian refugee population, and Samira was in a position to help them. Eager to please, she agreed to go.
After that Samira was regularly called upon. Traveling alone by bus or shared taxi, she ferried money, messages, or reading material among the various Syrian political groups. The opposition movement was fractured, and it seemed groups were unnecessarily isolated or in disagreement. Sometimes, because she was an outsider, she moved easier between them as she picked up and delivered envelopes and packages unaware of their contents. All she did know was that her actions were a tiny link in a long chain that extended both ways: across Jordan’s border toward Damascus, Homs, Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo, through to Lebanon and the Syrian activists working there, and back again. It was a trail that was becoming increasingly fraught—and not only because of the enemy but also because of so-called friends. The Arab governments wanted to corral the refugees in the camps, which were tinderboxes waiting to be ignited.
On one trip, the thin brown paper over the parcel split ever so slightly and Samira saw she was carrying opposition newspapers. If she was caught, it could mean trouble or, worse, a jail sentence. While the Jordanian government didn’t prevent hotheaded Sunnis from crossing the frontier and fighting for Syria, upon their return they were arrested and charged. Periodically a father made a public appeal, in the hopes that his son fighting a few hundred miles away was watching the news and would come home. However, the Jordanians weren’t going to tolerate cross-border traffic of any kind, including incendiary political material. On one bus she had a close call: two policemen came on board and began searching refugees. She slipped off before her stop. When she voiced her fears to the man she handed the parcel to, he informed her, “Don’t worry. Tell the policeman your brother is a retired army lieutenant; he won’t bother you.”
She was surprised that an absolute stranger knew about Hussein, and her first thought was to sever her associations with Revolutionary Change in Syria, the umbrella group that included the women’s committee and other small initiatives. However, the political officer, who identified himself as Mr. Ammar, patently ignored the alarm on Samira’s face and ushered her into an office filled with old computers, typewriters, books, and papers. Paint was peeling off the walls, and in the middle a cluster of twenty or more wooden chairs encircled a battered table. Samira took a far seat, but it didn’t matter where she sat. Mr. Ammar towered over her. It seemed unlikely that this balding, mustached man was one of the handsome Free Syrian fighters whom Zeinab talked about. She promised Samira that there were many and suggested that the two of them take a trip to northern Syria—only four or five hours away by car from Amman—for a visit. Needless to say the overweight Mr. Ammar in his checkered shirt and frayed sweater vest wasn’t one of them.
He explained to Samira that the office, which produced nature magazines for children, was a cover for group activities. He was impressed by the work of Zeinab and the women’s committee, and had become their most vocal supporter inside the group, which had many small units and cells spread across Syria and in the countries hosting the refugees. Mr. Ammar, pleased with himself, explained that for strategic purposes, the left side didn’t know what those on the right were doing. This prompt delivery of Samira’s parcel gained her entry close to those operating at the top.
“Don’t be surprised if we are familiar with you and your family,” he added, “including your brother’s, let us say, unconventional business. From our perspective we need to take precautions and know our friends and enemies alike.”
He went on to discuss the decision-making process at the beginning of the uprising, when everyone in the front had a say. If one person disagreed, the group was paralyzed. “This changed once the fighting became more intense and we were forced to respond more quickly. When you live for so long under a dictatorship you become suspicious of anyone making a decision for you, no matter how pure his or her motives might first appear.”
Unsure of how to respond, Samira surveyed the view from a grubby window: parched urban grayness interrupted by shiny glass-and-steel skyscrapers. In times of wars, preferably those taking place in other countries, Jordan always enjoyed a building boom. As quickly and politely as she arrived, she took her leave. The next time she and Zeinab were alone by themselves, Samira broached the subject of Mr. Ammar. If she was expecting an explanation, she was disappointed. All Zeinab said was “He has a tendency to crop up unexpectedly. You never know where he’ll be. I rely on him, and you should too.”
So Samira suppressed her misgivings and continued her involvement. Over the course of the last several weeks, she came to realize that Zeinab was busy with assignments more advanced than her own. She once gave Samira a clue when she explained that the modest scarf was the best form of camouflage: “Everyone thinks I’m quiet and submissive—nicely nicely Muslim girl.” Samira knew that they made an odd couple, herself always heavily made up and the intense barefaced Zeinab in somber black. Through her, Samira learned to appreciate the deceptive nature of first impressions.
The most difficult part of the enterprise was not being able to confide in someone. Her family was out of the question, and although she loved the twins like sisters and from time to time discussed politics with them, she could only go so far. She never told them or anyone else about the women’s committee or her work. When Samira first heard about Muna’s trip, she considered her cousin as solely a means to an end, a new way of getting out of the house. After so many months, she was running out of excuses. Her family, while not as strict as many others, was starting to press her about where she was going and whom she was spending time with. Surely her mother or Laila wouldn’t object to her showing Muna various historical sites, and on the way Samira could easily run her political errands as well.
She surveys the view from the terrace once more. In the past the sight of Walid’s house would have caused her pain; now her mind glances over it as though it doesn’t exist.
Last night’s storm gathered sand and grit in the desert, fields, rough tracks, and town streets, depositing a fine film of dust over the furniture and floors, even in the rooms where the windows and doors were shut. Whether visitors are coming or not, Samira has to clean. Before she began working politically, she tended to start her housework slowly, lose interest in the middle, and finish only before Laila scolded her. These days she cleans energetically; her services may be required later on. Although the women’s committee views domestic work as another form of enslavement, Zeinab’s observations are never far from Samira’s mind: “A maid is as important as a politician. In most countries, they get more work done.”
Humming distractedly, Samira fetches a broom and duster from the cupboard in the hallway. Laila and her mother are both naturally fastidious and tidy up after themselves, so their rooms are the easiest to do. Her nephews’ shared bedroom is not so neat. She collects the dirty socks and arranges the toys on top of the chest of drawers, out of the way of her dust cloth and broom. She decides to leave her own room. It seems somehow discourteous to disturb Muna’s things since Samira feels she has interfered enough. After clearing away the previous evening’s wrapping paper and the bows from the living room, the floors are ready to be washed.
No matter how much water remains in the house, this is something Laila always insists on and can become particularly nasty if it isn’t done thoroughly. Samira has become adept at carrying out the task with minimum wastage. She fetches about a pint of water from a container in the bathroom, goes to Laila’s room, sprinkles a small amount on the floor, and then spreads it around with a squeegee-mop, picking up any of the grimy excess with an old towel. When she finishes the other bedrooms, she steals more water from the supply under the bathtub and starts on the living room.
She has just finished wetting the floor when a loud crunching of gears and the rattling of an impossibly antiquated engine resound through an open window. The noise brings baby Fuad crawling excitedly into the room, closely followed by Muna, who doesn’t realize that the floor is damp until it’s too late. She stops midstep as Samira scoops the toddler into her arms, removes his sticky hands from her hair, and gives him to Muna, calling out, “Ta’ale, Mamma, come quickly!”
Pushing back her glasses, Samira goes to the window, throws open the shutters, and leans all the way out. “Where have you been all these weeks? What did you expect us to do, drink dirt?”
The driver climbs out of the water tanker and shrugs apathetically, which only exasperates her more. Before she has a chance to cuss him out, Mother Fadhma appears at her shoulder and pulls her inside.
Roughly handled and trussed up, the tiniest exertion on her part—even a breath—nearly suffocates. Flat on her back, she’s engulfed again, her engorged belly moving, as she relives trauma: the searing and bruising of delicate skin, her imprisonment and fear. It is not loss of control but none whatsoever: soiling herself in the heat and a deep, abiding shame as diarrhea swills between her legs, rises beneath her belly, and fills a crate she’s been stuffed into. Filthy, twisted rags have been pulled tight over her head. Impossible to move, bloated, disgusting—all she can do is hate, hate, hate herself.
Umm al-Khanaazeer remembers everything: her kidnapping and containment; each quivering turn in the road; the jolt of the rickety pickup truck grinding to a halt, followed by the wheezing inky exhaust of an uncooperative engine.
Erratic stops make up the first leg of the journey, as larger pieces of recyclable electrical waste are summarily dispatched before the truck moves on. As the stench of her beloved Zabbaleen recedes, she leaves behind an extended family fattened by Cairo’s mega-waste, from the raw—the skins and seeds of tropical fruits—to cooked leftovers of grains and pastas made with the baharat medley of cloves and cardamom pods, coriander seeds, cinnamon, black pepper, smoked paprika, nutmeg and cumin. The lack of smell tells her of lessening human habitation as she and the truck trundle southward. She is utterly alone, the only one of her kind for miles around, a novel experience for a young sow who has spent every waking moment running in a pack of inquisitive pigs.
Without warning, another stop in a way station reeking of diesel, rancid old falafel, and human piss. A rapid changeover of vehicles takes place. Squeezed this time on the floor of a speeding station wagon, hidden beneath heavy boxes and overfilled bags, she feels the ground taking off all around her like sickening g-force. Half curses and unfinished sentences uttered by the man who stole her drift toward the back and get lost in the road’s thunder—sounds that might as well be coming from the moon.
She loses track of time. After hours of forever, and stationary again at last, she is extracted from the crate. Her hood is wrenched free and an entire bottle of water is shoved down her throat. Coughing, choking, and dry heaving, she nearly drowns. Shitting herself, she manages to break free and crawls as far as her shackles allow before passing out. When she comes to, she is starving, unable to move inside the crate.
At another rest stop, guttural Arabic bursts in through an open window like a knife, a reminder of a bad end drawing near. No matter her agony, bribes are taken, a forward route planned. There’ll be no going back.
Ear-splitting music from Radio Tel Aviv beats in her brain until a dial is flicked and classical quarter notes of infinite sadness fill the air. The prisoner is transported to a kinder, gentler time, when a woman singing melancholy love songs fed food sifted from trash to the beasts in her care.
On one occasion she’s left behind—there’s business that doesn’t involve her—and is tied to a pen of camels, cousins of sorts due to an evolutionary glitch. Both are even-toed ungulates, but here the similarity between them ends. Pigs are naturally empathetic, while camels, resentful of their long-standing servitude to man, barely acknowledge each other, let alone a poor relation in their midst. Their disdain only confirms her own feelings of inferiority, enforced by a watery gruel left beyond her reach no matter how hard she strains at her ropes.
Sweltering sun barbecues tender flesh behind her ears. Dehydration makes the steps she is still able to take slow and deathlike. When the driver returns and finds her gasping, he scolds the camel keepers for their ineptitude. With bottled water, he pours a puddle so she can wash herself, and when she doesn’t move to do so he wets a rag and pats the blisters on her skin. Afterward he applies sunblock to the most affected parts. After being mistreated for so long, she can no longer tell if the hand of the abuser offers salvation or is just pretending to. Either way, they have reached an understanding. She struggles no longer when rags are secured around her head and she is folded like a pillow back inside the crate.
In the dark, beyond the watchtowers, a floating bridge has been surreptitiously erected, one from a raft and ropes that will be dismantled before first light. Money always exchanges hands. Crossing of the Jordan River, her handler has been informed, should never be hurried—noise travels far in the dead of night. After the cargo is secured, her crate is separated from the rest, its top prized off. Head freed, she is encouraged to look around.
“It won’t be long now,” her torturer promises.
As the raft pulled by the ropes glides across water, she nearly starts to cry. The ordeals of travel and changes to her body have taken their toil. Along the way she doubted whether she and her children would ever find a home, yet despite all that has been done to her and to them, inexplicably she feels they may be getting closer to one.
She can almost taste it in the sweet grasses along the banks and in the swell of the current, the man by her side as quiet and watchful as she is. Together they share a moment of the essential timelessness under the stars. She had forgotten of their existence. When she wakes, she feels rested and at peace.