Guest House for Young Widows Read online

  A few months into her existence as a specter at school, Nour told her parents she’d had enough. “At least finish and get your certificate,” her mother said. But Nour could not see how it was possible to learn anything when she felt herself reviled by the teachers. Nothing entered her head anyway, not how to graph an atom or the qualities of a hypotenuse. What was the point?

  She quit school in 2009. Now, instead, she spent her mornings at home helping her mother clean and cook. After lunch she read the Quran. The neighborhood mosque had a prayer room where girls could meet to talk and discuss religion, and it was here that the imam’s wife befriended her.

  Nour liked the imam’s wife’s spirited laugh and genuine conversation, the small lessons she gave that illuminated aspects of the religion—lessons about the mindset to bring to prayer and the importance of charity, and how it would ennoble a person. She told Nour stories about the prophets, about Moses and Jesus, and most of all, stories about the Prophet Muhammad’s qualities. The Prophet said: “Guard yourself from the Hellfire even with half a date in charity. If he cannot find it, then with a kind word.” Nour could manage half a date, and feeling like she could help others, even when she herself had so little, was heartening. She wasn’t as powerless as she thought. When the imam’s wife invited other women over for a circle of discussion, Nour was often too shy to say very much herself. But she listened avidly and took it all in.

  ASMA

  Summer 2009, Raqqa, Syria

  It was one of those perfect, sun-kissed days when the sky above Raqqa was the color of Herati turquoise, the baklava at the sweet shop tasted like brittle layers of heaven, and Asma almost thought she could be happy in this provincial city, if she had Hisham at her side and all their days passed like this one.

  They started with coffee in the morning at Negative Café, where Hisham had been trying to take her for weeks, after she’d complained Raqqa had no modern coffee shops. It was all right—white leather chairs, walls collaged with black-and-white photos, as if someone had been told to imagine 1950s Paris—but she smiled prettily to show she appreciated his effort. She felt the eyes of the other women survey her as they walked out. She would have liked it if the others had been dressed more fashionably; it would have given her something to look at and think about. To Asma, it wasn’t especially satisfying to be the best-dressed woman in the room; it just meant you were in the wrong room.

  They walked around the ruins of Qasr al-Banat, the Castle of the Ladies, the structures that the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid built when he moved his capital from Baghdad to Raqqa in the twelfth century. They smoked on the steps and swatted away flies as the midday heat grew stifling. Hisham suggested swimming by the Old Bridge, but really the suggestion was that he could swim, because she wasn’t about to wade into the Euphrates with all her clothes on.

  Asma was trying to be enthusiastic about Raqqa, her new city, because she loved Hisham and also desired him. He was slender, with black hair that curled, honey-colored eyes, and an appealingly hooked nose. His parents were well off, by Raqqa standards, and he had a privileged-boy personality: prankish, easily bored, fluidly moving between decorous and louche. But Raqqa itself she found disappointingly dull. Asma had grown up in Damascus and had only moved to the city (was it even a city, she thought, or a town?) in her late teens, when her parents decided to return to her mother’s hometown. She missed the buzz and glamour of the capital: the pool parties, the five-star hotels, the tourists and language students from across the world, the modern restaurants, the sheer cosmopolitanism of the place. Damascus felt connected to the pulse of the twenty-first century, while Raqqa, for all that it was a religiously mixed, easygoing enough, river town, felt exactly no more than that.

  Asma was studying marketing at al-Hasakah University, a forty-five-minute bus ride to the northeast of Raqqa. She spent most of her free hours reading and online, watching, learning, yearning to be part of the outside world. She wanted to know what everyone in the West was reading, eating, wearing, listening to, thinking. Marketing, she’d felt, would be a good path to lead her outward, hopefully far out of Raqqa, out of Syria, into the broader world. She wanted to interact with foreigners, maybe even work in tourism, or tourism marketing, anything global. Her shelves were lined with books—by Dan Brown, Victor Hugo, Hemingway, the Egyptian writer-philosopher Taha Hussein. She was on Facebook and Instagram, listened to Coldplay, and, like women the world over, felt there was something ineffably unappealing about Angelina Jolie. She read in English as much as she could, and began using English for certain terms that seemed to demand it: relaxation, money, power. They just had a different ring in English. She felt herself to be a modern young woman with aspirations, and that’s why Hisham’s suggestion that she start wearing the hijab rankled so bitterly.

  It was one evening after they’d had burgers for dinner and were sitting in the car, talking, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in an affluent neighborhood with villas that Asma liked gazing into. Hisham laced his fingers through hers and said, “A man has different expectations from a wife than a girlfriend. Why should your beauty be available to everyone?” He spoke about how precious she was to him, how he wanted to possess some part of her others did not.

  This was the first time he’d mentioned it, and she couldn’t believe he was saying these things. They had spent time at the beach together, her in a yellow bikini, in short skirts, tank tops, everything easy and relaxed. Her brothers didn’t care, her father didn’t care, and she thought her boyfriend hadn’t either.

  “You do have special access to a special part of me,” she replied. “My heart.”

  He said he wanted some visible part of her all to himself.

  Was it because he doubted her chasteness? Was it his parents?

  “If you want to marry me, you have to cover,” he said flatly.

  “Hisham, faith is here,” she said, tapping her fingers against her heart. “It’s not here”—she ran her hands through her hair, then down her body. “You loved me first without hijab. Why, now, do you say I have to put it on?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t change that part of me that wants that. It’s fixed.”

  LINA

  Summer 2000, Weinheim, Germany

  “So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he’s first and foremost a man and I’m a woman. He’s good to me, kind, attentive….That’s good enough for me. I’m not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that’s important. I couldn’t care less if the man I fancy is English or black—I’d still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity.”

  —IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY, Suite Française, 1942

  Lina sometimes wept so copiously into the rice she stuffed into the vine leaves that she wondered whether they didn’t grow salty or bitter from her tears, and whether the customers who ate them weren’t made ill by her sorrow. Life in Weinheim, a small town near Heidelberg, had always been difficult. Then her Lebanese in-laws had moved to the city from Beirut, and their presence was so tormenting that she found herself wistful for the old times. At least then she’d not been so physically exhausted.

  Lina had three young children and was married to a man she abhorred; he had small eyes, a snouty nose, and a bloated face. He had a girlfriend and frequented discos; he did not pray or read the Quran or acknowledge God in the slightest. The long German winters—the season of low, pale gray skies that often stretched from September all the way to June—sharpened Lina’s depression. Lina and her husband had moved from Beirut to Weinheim in the early 1990s. The first year after their arrival, when she went for long walks around the town, growing familiar with its winding streets and crooked, gabled old buildings, she came across a Lebanese cedar planted in the gardens of an old palace. Its trunk stretched at least two meters wide and it had towering limbs and roots that, she imagined, pushed deep into the earth. Lina loo
ked at it admiringly, accepting she was a less successful transplant.

  Lina’s in-laws, in the spirit of Lebanese entrepreneurs the world over, followed the couple to Weinheim a few years later, confident in their ability to identify what sort of business their new locale lacked, and to launch that business themselves with verve and competence. There were no Lebanese restaurants in the area, and setting up a restaurant seemed the obvious choice. Her father-in-law prepared the shawarma meat—this was the task of a man—but it fell upon Lina to help her mother-in-law cook the rest of the fare. Often she woke before dawn to ready the dishes expected of her: stuffed vine leaves, roasted eggplant dip, thyme pastries. She cooked these things so often that she grew to hate eating them. They tasted like labor.

  Lina’s husband worked at the restaurant, and he usually took the food she had prepared with him when he left in the mornings. But her shift didn’t end then. Her mother-in-law expected her to help with the cleaning and housework at her apartment. In Beirut, where the in-laws had lived previously, household help was readily affordable. For the price of a fancy sandwich, one could hire a local Lebanese or a South Asian woman to do the cleaning. Much of middle-class Beirut was composed of women whose manicured hands hadn’t touched a toilet brush in decades.

  But in Weinheim, there was no such supply of cheap labor. Or there was, and it was called Lina. On days she didn’t go over right away, when her own housework and cooking piled up, or her shoulders and fingers clenched up from fatigue, or she simply wanted to spend an hour watching television, the phone call always came after lunch. Her mother-in-law’s withering, sing-songy voice, “Shou, Lina? Where were you today?”

  Lina knew she was a faint-mannered woman; her milky-blue eyes and barely audible voice meant that people were perpetually asking her to speak up. But despite her own softness, she felt like the man in her marriage. Her husband couldn’t (wouldn’t?) stand up to his parents; he couldn’t get them to stop summoning Lina to clean, to give her one less dish to cook for the restaurant; he couldn’t ask for time off for himself. It was only after the birth of their third child that Lina told him enough was enough, he could ask for one day. When he was home, he did the bare minimum, and then spent all his time and money going out. She washed his discarded shirts that smelled of other women’s perfume; she economized so that they could get by with what he shared with her each month, after he’d subtracted the sizable amount he needed for his extracurricular life. The hours he spent at home steadily decreased until eventually he only came back to sleep. The only signs of him were the boxers he left in the bathroom, and the stub of the cigarette he smoked with his morning Nescafé. Sometimes, when she was on one of her now infrequent walks through the small town, she thought perhaps there was nothing greater to expect from a marriage born of desperation.

  When Lina was six years old, her German mother and Lebanese father parted acrimoniously. Her father kidnapped her and took her from her native Germany back to Lebanon, not because he especially wanted her, but because he wanted to punish his German ex-wife. The six-year-old girl was suddenly motherless and plunged into Arabic, a new language she barely knew. Her father remarried quickly.

  It was clear to Lina that her stepmother was jealous of any claim on her new husband’s attention. When her father read her German stories at bedtime or they sang German songs together, her stepmother banged doors or blared the television. In Lebanon they moved house so many times that Lina had to keep repeating the same grade, because they never stayed in one place long enough for her to take the final exam. When her father was at work, her stepmother was frosty and sometimes shouted at her, heaping the young girl with chores. Most nights Lina fell asleep crying, listening to the lives of other people in the building. In the sticky summer heat, everyone kept their windows open for the breeze, and the neighbors’ voices wafted up and down. She knew that the couple upstairs quarreled over their wastrel son; that the family downstairs was pooling money to send their daughter to art school. She sometimes wished she were that girl’s sister and belonged to that family, so tender were they with one another, coming home with little surprises, inventing pet names.

  When she was fourteen, her father announced that Lina would be marrying her cousin. Nobody asked her whether she liked his snout-nosed face or unhurried gait, or whether she even wanted to get married. But her father wasn’t marrying her off because he thought it would fulfill any special dreams or help her ascend to a better station. He simply wanted to be rid of her. And Lina saw no other prospect of leaving that house, where the air was heavy with her stepmother’s displeasure and her father’s resigned sighs.

  They married, and moved to Weinheim almost immediately after. Lina was fifteen and enrolled in the seventh grade. Her German slowly started coming back. She looked forward to the hours in the schoolroom—so orderly and clean, the teachers’ behavior so soothingly reliable. But after a couple of weeks, after she missed a period and felt her stomach churning in the mornings, she realized she was pregnant. Too ashamed to show up at school with a swelling stomach, she stayed at home instead, watching hours of German television. Her mind was nimble with languages. She had learned some English in Lebanon, in those on-again, off-again spells at various schools. She felt some satisfaction when her ears discerned English words from the torrent of language on the television. It was like some kind of private puzzle she was actually good at.

  Islam had always been Lina’s sustenance. When she was ten, she saw the Prophet Muhammad in a dream. She kept the memory of that encounter like a talisman, something to reach for when she felt especially alone. The dream made her pull the Quran off the shelf and try to decipher its passages; its plot, the path it set out for God’s creations, became her plot. In her early twenties, as she contemplated leaving the husband with whom she had three children but not an actual relationship, Lina grew more religious. She found herself praying and reaching for the Quran even more during those bleak winter days, when the sky was a steel dome. The Germans passing her on the sidewalk looked straight through her, as though her hijab did not simply cover her hair but cloaked her in invisibility.

  She felt as though she were playacting, detachedly going through the motions of her tasks as a homemaker, mother, restaurant worker. She raised the subject of divorce with her husband five or six times. He reacted so violently—calling her an animal, a disgrace—that she locked herself in the bedroom afterward and waited months before broaching it again. She discussed her unhappiness with her family and in-laws, who were inconveniently tangled together; her husband was her first cousin, which made her mother-in-law also her aunt. No one was willing to acknowledge the abuse she faced, and they all dismissed her idea. “Are you crazy? You have kids, you can’t get divorced,” her mother-in-law said with finality.

  One night late in 2009, after her three children were in bed, Lina sat by the telephone with a pad of paper. She had scrawled the numbers of three imams she found online, who were available for phone consultations. She said the same thing to each one: “My life is a farce. My husband doesn’t pray or respect Islam. He drinks alcohol. He goes with other women.”

  In response, they uniformly said the same thing. According to the principles of Islamic law, her husband was committing zina, adultery, the most grave of sins. Not only did she have the right to ask for divorce, she shouldn’t even be living with him in the interim. The voices of these imams, saying words that were correct and firm, confirmed her belief that only religious men had decency and backbone. She attributed her husband’s fecklessness and abuse to his lack of faith.

  She packed her bag silently. She knew she couldn’t take her children. Where would she take them? Who would support them? Their father found it easy to mistreat her, but he was decent enough to the children; she had no genuine fear of leaving them in his care.

  She had lived her whole life dedicated to the service of others. It was time to save herself.

  Spring 2010, Be
irut, Lebanon

  In the years since she had left the city, her father and stepmother had moved into an upscale building near the Martyrs’ Cemetery off Tariq al-Jadideh, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood named for the long overpass road that led to the airport. During the ride in from the airport, Lina saw that Beirut had been transformed.

  The downtown that she remembered as gutted by the civil war of the 1980s—its graceful, arched buildings had been empty shells, streets strewn with bombed-out rubble, empty lots like gaping teeth—was now a knife-edged, glittery re-creation of its former self. The old buildings were now the golden color of spun sugar and housed Prada, Dior, and other boutiques. There were restaurants with tanned young men in white slacks waiting outside to valet-park cars. Lina gaped at every street they passed, at the city that looked familiar and utterly alien at once. She thought she recognized the juice stand near their old street, the one her father would sometimes take her to in the evenings when she was a little girl, for a fruit cocktail topped with clotted cream and honey. Despite the infusions of glamour and wealth, Beirut was still one of those cities where the streets permanently bore the flags and billboards of an unresolved political story: the same old images of warlords from rival religious clans, militias, or power dynasties vying for control of the statelet, each beholden to some greater regional power with its own agenda.

  The apartment building was imposing. She felt nervous as she walked through the lobby, lined with exotic potted ferns that reflected infinitely in the mirrored walls. The elevator glided up silently. When her father opened the apartment door and saw her standing there, he froze, a look of dismay flashing across his face.

  “Have you lost your mind?” He gestured at her all-enveloping black robe and headscarf. Few women dressed that way in this neighborhood, which was inhabited by people, Lina assumed, who aspired to bank jobs for their children and weddings in prominent hotels rather than investing in the spiritual labor that might guarantee a better hereafter. But whatever she thought of his godlessness, he was still her father, and still capable of hurting her. She dug her teeth into her tongue to hold back tears. He stood there, one arm holding the door, as if reluctant to admit her. He didn’t reach to hug her, or ask how she was. It was his wife’s voice from inside that recalled them both. “Come in,” he said at last, standing aside and patting her awkwardly on the back a few times.