Hikayat

Short Stories by Lebanese Women

Roseanne Saad Khalaf

• Publisher: Telegram Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781846591686
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

From Lebanon's golden age, through years of civil conflict and its aftermath, these women offer a captivating portrait of a country in flux. Well-known authors such as Emily Nasarallah, Hanan al-Shaykh and Alawiya Sobh, alongside newer voices, share he desire to push boundaries, tackling subjects from the crippling effects of war in past decades, through longing for romantic adventures in a conservative society, to the functioning of families across the divides of emigration and generational conflict. The characters in these stories are on the brink of something - whether it be religious or social divides, or sexual awakening. The language reflects the great tension, and the great beauty in their transformation. And the collection as a whole reveals the rich diversity of the complex multi-cultural society out of which these stories have emerged. 'In turn lyrical, sensuous, comic and ironic... rare and fascinating...' Independent 'Some truly insightful, engaging work...' New Statesman

PATRICIA SARRAFIAN WARD

Voice

She was standing in the kitchen when he came home.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, not yet concerned. Sometimes his wife hired a village girl to help the new maid with extra cleaning.

‘Well?’ he demanded, placing his briefcase on the table. ‘What’s your name?’

She merely looked at him with her frightened green eyes. They were huge in her pinched face. Her narrow shoulders slumped. She was so slight she might have been blown in through the doorway by a breeze. She had no hair to speak of, just a badly shaven mat, her scalp showing in some places.

‘Don’t you speak?’ the man said. He was growing impatient. The maid’s absence annoyed him. The vision of his return home had altered. He had wanted his Pepsi brought to him while he watched television, and he would put his feet on the ottoman and change the channels when he felt like it. He had installed a new satellite system that, as he liked to joke to his business friends, defeated all fronts in the war.

‘Has my wife taken you on?’

After a moment, the girl shook her head.

‘Where d’you come from?’

She looked bewildered. She had bruises on her arms and legs. Maybe she had been lost.

‘You don’t know where you come from?’ he rephrased.

She shook her head.

‘You don’t speak?’

She did not respond.

The man had an idea. This would teach his wife for not adequately instructing the new maid. ‘Do you cook and clean?’

She nodded uncertainly.

‘Are you available to work?’

She made no sign that she was not.

‘Then I’ll take you on. Bring me a Pepsi when I’ve settled in the television room. They’re in the refrigerator.’

He changed into loose trousers and a T-shirt and went to the television room. First, however, he stepped onto the veranda and examined his satellite dish, which towered over his opulent house and could be seen from any part of the village. It appeared flawless. It was perfectly round and shiny as when it had been installed two weeks before. Satisfied, he went inside. He settled on his easychair and placed his feet on the ottoman. He clicked the television on with the remote control and sighed. He had a good life. Despite these past difficult years of civil war, he had achieved a contentedness that few could boast. He had three handsome boys, a big house, cars, more money than he knew how to handle.

The girl came in with a Pepsi balanced on a tray.

‘Ah, you’re used to this,’ he remarked happily, not thinking that most girls are taught to use trays, while boys are taught nothing about delivering food and drink to guests. ‘My wife will be happy with you.’

The girl stood there. Her cheap trousers were torn and her short-sleeved blouse was grimy. She wore plastic sandals.

‘My wife will give you clothing when she returns,’ he said, feeling beneficent and enjoying his intrusion into household affairs, about which he knew nothing and which now seemed a mildly challenging game. ‘And you can sleep in the shed outside. There’s a pallet there. Let’s see, what else?’ he mused. ‘Ah, you may eat meals in the kitchen. What, I don’t know. And I’m sure you will have a day off now and then, but otherwise you should be here at all times.’

The girl remained where she was, hands behind her back and chin lowered. Her green eyes were fixed on the television screen.

‘What else do you need?’ he said, growing impatient. ‘Is it your pay? My wife will decide that. I can’t go that far!’ he laughed.

Still she stood there.

‘Go!’ he barked, and she fled.

‘What do you mean, you took her on?’ his wife hissed. She was a slender woman who wore Armani outfits and heavy gold bracelets. She had been more beautiful when they married.

‘I saw fit,’ he said.

‘You have no knowledge of these things!’

‘She’s our new maid!’ he insisted. ‘Don’t argue with me!’

‘We don’t need one. And where’s she from? What’s her name?’ his wife battered him with questions. ‘Why does she have those marks on her? Who shaved her head? Why won’t she speak?’

The man stamped his foot. She glared at him with her red lips clenched. He glared back.

‘She’ll probably never leave,’ the wife said cautiously. ‘Then she’ll get pregnant with one of the village boys. Do you want a scandal on your hands?’ she asked, gaining new momentum. ‘What will people say about the little bald girl in our house, pregnant, unmarried? How will we get rid of her then? You want to cast out a pregnant girl?’

He stamped his foot and her mouth closed abruptly.

After a moment she said: ‘But I’ll have to dismiss the other maid.’

He glared at her so fiercely that she did not speak again, but left his television room, her high heels clacking on the marble floors.

The girl washed his feet with warm soapy water, softening the skin so she could pick out the corns that made him ache so. She had been with them a week.

‘I like you, No-name,’ he said. ‘You do your work, you don’t complain, you listen. My heart is heavy today. My children are unhappy. They’re in school in Paris. Do you know where Paris is?’

The girl did not respond. Of course she did not know, the man thought, and this made him feel piteous.

‘They are behaving badly in their school and the school wants to expel them. Expel them, I said? I was on the telephone with the headmaster, you see. Expel them? Don’t you know there is a war on and they need to be away? How can you send them back into this danger?’

The girl patted one of his feet dry, then settled it on her lap and began picking at the corn with scissors. She frowned as she did this, as if concentrating very hard not to harm him, and he was moved. She looked better now, at least physically, and this was because of his thoughtfulness at taking her in.

‘Look at you. You see? Had I not sent my children away they could very well have ended up where you are, depending on luck and the generosity of strangers. Few people are generous. You were fortunate when you walked into this house.’ He smiled at her, but she was occupied with his corn and did not interrupt her work to show she had heard.

He fell silent for a while, his thoughts drifting during the not unpleasant sensation of having his feet handled by her small fingers. The new notion of his children having escaped the fate of the girl became more and more interesting to him. ‘It is remarkable,’ he said at last, ‘how people can go from one place to another in their lives. The proverbial rich man suddenly loses all his fortunes and becomes a beggar on the street. Or the common whore gets lucky with a lottery ticket and becomes the toast of the town. Life,’ he said philosophically, ‘is unpredictable.’

The girl put his foot into his slipper and placed it on the floor. She gathered the napkin with the corn clippings by closing it one corner at a time and then deftly rolling it into a tight little ball. She threw the towel over her shoulder, picked up the scissors and the tub of soapy water, and left.

The girl’s hair was slightly longer and the bald patches were gone, and they had discovered that its colour was a rich brown. Because her face was filling out and she now moved with more ease and grace, her appearance became important where it had gone unnoticed before.

‘Are you Muslim or Christian?’ the wife said. ‘Maybe you are Druze.’

‘She must be Christian,’ the man countered. ‘Look at those green eyes. No Muslim has such green eyes.’

‘If you’d ever gone south, you would see that the Shi’a children have eyes like emeralds,’ his wife said triumphantly.

She had only been to the south once, as part of a day trip to visit the United Nations posts, but the man was too tired to point this out. He worked hard all day.

‘It doesn’t matter what she is,’ he said. ‘She’s still a fine maid. Better than the Sri Lankans.’

‘If she’s Muslim we could have problems.’

‘How will anyone find out? She doesn’t even speak to us.’

The wife admitted that the likelihood of the girl talking was slim, and so she gave up this concern. But she kept a secret eye on her. The girl had been so starved and shivering when she arrived that they had imagined her age to be younger than it was. She was prettier now, even though her expression hardly ever changed. Her bosom moved beneath her shirt when she walked, and her cheeks were plump.

The man looked for the maid because his siesta had been interrupted by the heat and he wanted the cool grenadine she made so well. She was not in the kitchen corner on her stool, nor could she be anywhere else in the house since those areas were forbidden to her except on cleaning day.

He stepped outside the kitchen onto the vine-shaded patio where they dined in the evening. Her shed stood behind this enclosure. He heard a sound and went to the shed and opened the door.

The girl was curled on her pallet with her knees to her chin, sobbing quietly. The man, disconcerted, put his head in to make sure he had seen correctly.

Her eyes met his and she leaped to her feet like a grasshopper. She wiped her nose.

‘It’s all right,’ he said nicely. ‘You can sit down.’

She hesitated, her fear evident.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

She sat with her legs together and her hands on her knees. He settled beside her and smelled the olive oil soap on her skin.

‘Why were you crying? Is it to do with whatever happened to you?’

Mucus was running from her nose and she ever so slowly raised her hand to wipe it away, as if trying to conceal this movement. Her fear induced in him a wave of need to give, and so he handed her his striped handkerchief.

‘Go on, take it,’ he said.

She took the handkerchief but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Glossary
• Layla Baalbaki, A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon
• Rima Alamuddin, The Cellist
• Emily Nasrallah, The Green Bird
• Hoda Barakat, Chat
• Nazik Saba Yared, Improvisations on a Missing String
• Najwa Barakat, The Language of the Secret
• Hanan al-Shaykh, The Hot Seat
• Etel Adnan, The Power of Death
• Alawiya Sobh, Stories by Mariam
• Iman Humaydan Younes, The Story of Warda
• Mishka Moujabbar Mourani, The Fragrant Garden
• Renée Hayek, The Phone Call
• Merriam Haffar, Pieces of a Past Life
• Jana Faour, Not Today
• Mai Ghoussoub, Red Lips
• Nadine Rachid Laure Touma, Red Car
• Zeina B Ghandour, Omega: Definitions
• Houda Karim, A Slice of Beach
• May Menassa, A Pomegranate Notebook
• Jocelyn Awad, Khamsin
• Zalfa Feghali, Wild Child
• Nada Ramadan, Trapped
• Evelyn Shakir, Name-calling
• Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Voice
• Hala Alyan, Painted Reflections
• Lina Mounzer, The One-eyed Man
• Biographical Notes
• Copyright