Semia Harbawi
My shoulder blades bunched with effort. All my
concentration was funnelled into the task at hand. I glanced at my
nails. They turned white with the sheer effort of squeezing.
Squeezing seemed all I was doing these days. My eyes crinkled and I
gritted my teeth as the squirming yellowish, grub-like matter
squirted between the crescents of my nails. That stubborn blackhead
finally gave in and the client, Mrs. Berrish, emitted a strangled
squeal, followed by a whoosh of relief. Her cratered face was twisted
with pain. Her eyes watered and she sniffled several times before
telling me off with that whimpering voice of hers that always got
under my skin: "Could you be more careful, Amina? You're hurting
me! And what's taking you so long to finish the job?" I stood at
the head of the couch on which she was reclining for her bi-monthly
facial. As a beautician in Hawa's, one of the poshest beauty parlors
in Tunis, I could not possibly tell her that she had the oiliest,
most disgusting skin I had seen in all my life.
Mrs. Berrish was the wife of one of those
high-flying nouveaux riches who seemed to pop up and prosper like
parasitical fungi in Tunis these days. Mrs. Lakhal, el maâl'ma,
the owner of the salon and our nemesis, so shamelessly and utterly
fawned on Mrs. Berrish that the latter had only to wag her fat pinkie
to get any of us small fry axed on the spot. Mrs. Berrish fretted
over her complexion as if it were her most precious asset, and it was
perhaps just that, since the rest of her ranged from coarse to
downright revolting, a stump of a body that she deported with the
utmost arrogance. She was not an exception, but a run-of-the mill
sample of the clientele that constituted our maâl'ma's
business. My days were spent at the beck and call of such captious
women who had so much leisure time on their manicured hands and so
much money poured by guilty husbands into their grabbing palms that
they expended it on entertaining the preposterous illusion they still
had a beauty to entertain. I was called upon to squeeze their
blackheads, pluck their mutinous eyebrows, fasten acrylic fingernails
to their talons, lighten their complexions with creams that cost more
than I could earn in a week, unkink the hair on their heads and wax
the superfluous patches of hair on cacti-like legs or in those places
their husbands no longer deigned to explore. I stoically endured
their moans and tantrums and mean streaks that were accompanied by
even meaner tips. For I had the girls, Hawa's girls, the other
beauticians of the salon, who inspired me with enough resilience to
withstand Mrs. Lakhal's scathing snarls and the general pettiness of
life.
After only two years in this place, we came to form
a formidable sorority. Our bonding was so solid and concrete that it
cut through individual miseries and allayed what at first seemed like
insuperable pains. Bonding was all we had in the face of caddish
boyfriends or husbands who had the infuriating tendency to play nasty
tricks on us, with lies as the staple fodder, a practice apparently
sanctified by a macho tradition. We formed a sort of emotional
catapult that helped each one of us to rebound back into the orbit of
her own life, galvanized to fend for herself.
There were seven of us. Like those seven mercenaries
in an old Western movie, with Mrs. Lakhal in the role of buzzard
wheeling over our heads in ominous circles, ever watchful and alert,
ready to swoop down and pick our bones clean. Monia was the
butter-fingers of the group and the prime target of Mrs. Lakhal's
harassment. Aziza collected men as one might collect stamps, which
was no small feat given the difficulty of doing so without being
branded a slut of the blackest dye. In a place like Tunis, merely
speaking with a man on a street corner could unleash a whole barrage
of speculations that would ultimately leave the girl's reputation
(but never the man's) reeling to never regain its balance again.
Neyla pined for her fiancé who was serving time in an Italian prison
for being a ghabbar, a drug dealer. For my part, I was
hooked on a married man who, true to the cliché, always promised to
get a divorce from his wife, but somehow never could bring himself
(in other words, did not have the guts) to as much as air his
discontent to her about her harping and carping. Neziha was our
ringleader, our mother and our sister all rolled into one. She was
the one who covered up for us and took the brunt of Mrs. Lakhal's
attacks when the latter's peptic ulcer made her ooze acid all over
the place. Neziha was the one to whom we turned when Leyla's period
failed her after her stupid boyfriend's sheath had split in the
middle of the business. We always referred to it as the business, by
the way. Perhaps that was because men made us think of it in those
terms. Neziha took the matter of Leyla's dilemma in her hands and
convinced the gynaecologist to get paid in monthly instalments for
the abortion, while the rest of us were willing to chip in a chunk of
our salaries to pay them. It was also Neziha who injected Samira , a
young divorcée with a son in custody, with the grim stamina to dun
her ex-husband until he 'belched' nafka, child support. It
was an obsession of ours to make men 'belch:' eithe the money, or the
truth about their marital status and/or projects. This was an arduous
struggle.
We prided ourselves on being hard-bitten vixens
despite the deceptive amiability of our miens and the sleek kowtowing
ceremonial we performed around clients. But Afeefa, the youngest
recruit, was not as tough as the rest. She carried herself as if she
were a fragile stem destined to snap, though I always marvelled at
her capacity to work six-hour shifts and massage women who were
sometimes twice her size. Her clients spoke fondly about her calamine
touch that worked wonders on their knotted muscles and aching joints.
The most disgruntled old dragon could turn into a purring kitten
after half an hour under Afeefa's hands. While the rest of us were
inured earthen pots simmering with rage, laughter and pain, Afeefa
was a delicate vase. We acted as padding between her and the
unpalatable facts of life in locum of her doddering mother. She was
our mascot, our baby, the little sister we wanted to protect. She
also provided a sort of foil for Neziha, and together they acted as
what the Chinese call the yin and the yang, a balancing axle that
ensured the cohesion of our group even when the arguments got heated
and out of hand.
Sometimes we did not need words to express our
misery amidst the stench of singed hair under the assault of
hair-dryers or the effluvia of incalculable tinctures and dyes that
permeated the air till our noses became dull. A quick look sufficed
to guess at each girl's mood of the day. We would exchange glances
and comforting smiles to carry us till the midday pause when we could
swap stories and seek salves to dress our wounds. We lived for that
hiatus in the day when we would sample the smorgasbord of our
grievances and seek one another's advice between hurriedly smoked
cigarettes and cold meals gulped in hassled precipitation, with Mrs.
Lakhal's arctic breath coming down on our necks.
Mrs. Lakhal was the carrion eater, the dung roller,
the tick who fattened herself on fellow women's illusions. But she
proved a security valve, bless her mean wisp of a soul! The laughs we
used to have at her expense: her sachet-smelling clothes and the
saccharin smiles she reserved for the wealthiest clients. We also
envisioned her with her uxorious husband and took turns mimicking her
boastful reminiscences about the glorious days of her youth when she
penetrated the peak of the beauty world in Italy, and was penetrated
by it as dead-pan Aziza would quip. This never failed to send us into
fits of insuppressable giggles. We fantasized about slipping a
laxative into Mrs. Lakhal's herbal tea to see how much venom would
seep out of her. But we would dilute the substance of our bawdy jokes
and innuendoes whenever Afeefa was within earshot. We also took turns
to alleviate the worries of virginal, wide-eyed brides, most of them
from good families, who came to the parlour to have their hair done
and faces painted in those garish, ritual tints that signalled their
passage into a worthier plateau of existence. We would try to
embellish the perspective of the sacrosanct nuptial bed, while we
secretly empathized with the impending throes of abrupt, thrusting
realization. You see, each one of us, save for Afeefa of course, had
come upon that disappointing realization a long time ago, whether
'legitimately' or not.
We allowed little to impinge on our happy routine.
We closed ranks and grappled with our predictable lot, content to
plough ahead with no major problems to dim our collective
cheerfulness, until the day Afeefa's dotty mother took it into her
head to marry her daughter to her sister's son, Hafedh. He had a mild
look about him; he did not seem the assertive type. At least, not in
the beginning. He had a soft voice and guarded manners when he
started turning up each day to escort Afeefa home at closing time. He
would mutter his greetings without meeting the gaze of any one of us
and we had ascribed this at first to his apparent shyness. He had a
sparrow-like quality in the way he carried his slight frame. His
epicene face flaunted a weak mouth to which he tried to give a
certain leverage by growing a moustache that looked more like a
pathetic strip of down shadowing his upper lip. There was a darkish
smudge, a sulking moon, high in the centre of his brows: it was the
stamp that is usually rubbed off by the praying rug; the meretricious
evidence that he was one of the faithful with a guaranteed niche in
God's paradise. He also wore sandals with socks. "Poor Afeefa!
How tacky is that?" Monia would exclaim. "Mark my words!
You can never trust a man who wears socks with sandals!"
As days went by, we remarked perceptible alterations
in Afeefa's clothes and demeanour. The hems on her skirts were let
out. She started scrunching up her hair in a strict bun that did not
suit her in the least. At first, she refused to tell us what irked
her. But then one day, at Samira's house, as we were chattering away
about samosa recipes and Aziza's latest escapade, Afeefa broke down
without warning. She cried softly, burying her face in Neziha's ample
bosom. And then it all came out in a torrent of pent-up rage: "He
wants me to quit, to get out of this 'hotbed of vanity and vice' as
he always refers to the parlour! He wants me to stay home after we
get married. He says no wife of his is expected to work and that
he'll provide for me. He says that I must start wearing hijab as soon
as possible. He forbids me putting on make-up, wearing my hair loose,
chewing gum, and watching movies, especially the Western ones; he
says they are the work of the Devil. I'm not even allowed to listen
to songs he deems too scandalous and not fit for a chaste girl's
ears!" In a sluice of righteous uproar, we all started speaking
at the same time. Afeefa told us that Hafedh's family was a bunch of
bigots who pressurized him to impose on her their life-style. It was
Hafedh who enjoined her to put on longer dresses and wear her
lustrous hair in that austere, obnoxious way: "I told him that a
woman's hair is God's creation, so why hide it? And you know what?
He's stalking me! Wherever I go, he'd be there! And Mother says he's
right and that it's my duty to do the biddings of my would-be
husband!" She was at her wits' end, so we tried to raise her
spirits and encouraged her to disregard her mother's directives and
do what she deemed best for herself. A few days later, Afeefa
announced to us that it was over. She could take it no more and had
confronted him with her weariness at the stifling hold he acquired
over her life. He had slapped her hard. So she had flung his
engagement ring in his face and ditched him. "Good riddance,"
we exclaimed in an exultant chorus and resumed our contented routine.
A week later, a busy day mercifully came to its end.
Rain came down in solid sheets that lashed at our faces the moment we
emerged from the parlour's outer door onto the deserted street. We
were hunched over on our way to the nearest bus stop, as a gruff wind
blew in glacial gusts. All of a sudden, he was there at the turn of
the street, a shadowy presence that had been lurking in wait. Hafedh
addressed Afeefa in a reedy voice, while his inscrutable eyes stonily
ignored our presence. "I want to speak to you. Alone. Just a few
moments. Please." He was shivering under the onslaught of the
spiteful rain. His voice had an urgent quality and his eyes a fixed
glaze. His hair was plastered to his skull and his Adam's apple
bobbed up and down in his agitation. A stubble of beard darkened the
hollows of his cheekbones. Samira and Leyla nudged Afeefa to move
along, but she relented and asked us to go ahead: "I won't be
long, promise!" We stood on the other side of the street waiting
for her. We looked on at his gesticulating hands and the adamant way
in which she shook her head. They were standing under her umbrella
and, to a passer-by, they would have looked just like a flirting
couple who took advantage of the downpour to edge closer to each
other. And then it happened in a flutter of movements that left us
transfixed. The lamplight glinted off the shiny surface of a long
metallic object. It was a switchblade. Hafedh's arm moved with
incredible speed, a blur to my eyes. An arc of blood appeared on
Afeefa's cheek.
His mouth lolled open. He stood panting, staring as
she lifted her hand to the gash oozing dark blood that drenched the
front of her dress. Her umbrella lay upturned at her feet and she
crumpled on the sidewalk like a paper figurine that grew soggy and
lost its crispness. Her cries came in a keening crescendo that had
her rocking to and fro in a trance of staggered pain. It was Neziha
who shattered the spell that seemed to have frozen our limbs. She
lurched forward in a frantic run like a woman possessed. Her massive
frame moved with brutal purpose and a blood-curdling howl. We
followed suit. The man's head swivelled. He was startled out of his
inertia. His switchblade clattered onto the pavement as it slid out
of his hand. He turned his body and ran away, pumping with all his
might as Neziha stooped to collect stones from the gutter to pelt his
receding figure, catching him between his shoulder blades and on his
scraggy buttocks. Spittle dribbled down her chin as she let out a
flow of invectives that not even the rain or the wind could mute.
We hunkered down on the sidewalk surrounding Afeefa
like praetorian guards, cradling her head and dabbing at the neat,
yawning gash. She thrashed in a flailing frenzy, then slumped and
subsided into moans: "It burns – God, how it burns!"
Queasiness wrenched my insides and bilious acid surged up my throat.
Squinching her eyes shut, she looked like an disarticulate doll whose
face got disfigured by a playful child. We waited while Monia flagged
down a passing cab. The driver reluctantly agreed to take Afeefa and
three of us to the nearest hospital. The rest joined afterwards to
find her prone on a hospital bed in a sedated daze. "They are
going to suture her face, her beautiful face!" Neyla howled,
then started sobbing. We restlessly lingered in the reception area.
When Afeefa's mother came, she was accompanied by two women who
flanked her, each clutching her by one arm. She hurled insults at us
and blamed us for what happened to her little girl. She said that we
were sluts who had set a bad example to her innocent child and had
waylaid her into breaking up with her fiancé. Things started
smelling nasty and we felt we had to leave.
The following day, we went to work like automatons.
Neziha told Mrs. Lakhal what happened. The latter only rolled her
reptilian eyes and said the timing could not have been worse, as
Afeefa's massages were regularly solicited by many of the clients and
that she would have to reschedule all those appointments. The roar of
hair-dryers superimposed itself on our inner tumult, the stunned
distress trapped inside our throats. The smell of seared hair
substituted itself for the acrid smell of bitterness and the
aftertaste of bile. Discarded fragments of clipped nails mocked the
futility of our sorrow. During the midday break, we rushed three at a
time to the payphone on the street behind the parlour to enquire
about Afeefa. A woman's voice answered in curt, dismissive tones that
she was home, but not in a condition to speak to anybody. We didn't
get Afeefa on the phone until a few days later. She told us she was a
little better and intended to go back to work.
Despite our joined supplication, Mrs. Lakhal refused
to take Afeefa back. It would not be good for the reputation of her
place, she haughtily informed us, to have an employee who got herself
involved in such a vile business. In addition, she had her clients to
think of. They would not be keen on having a disfigured aesthetician
tend to their well-being. A few weeks later, we met Afeefa at
Samira's house. She had agreed to come because she missed us. Her
mother was driving her crazy. To our bewilderment, Afeefa was wearing
hijab. She said she had to, not out of a newly-found religious zeal,
but to hide the puckered slash. "Now this thing at least serves
a purpose!" snorted Neziha, gesturing to Afeefa's scarf. "But
that son of a dog who did this to you has got what he wanted in the
first place! You're out of work and you're wearing hijab! There's no
damn justice in this world!" Afeefa's nougat eyes, which used to
sparkle, were desolate. She resigned herself to her new life of eking
out a living by making home calls in the popular neighbourhood where
she lived, helping women with their hairdos and make-up on big
occasions. No man in his right mind, as her mother repeated to her
often enough, would have her now, since she was merchandise that had
been tampered with. Too many people believed that to not make it come
true. We all knew that. Afeefa said, "It's mektoob, my
fate, and I have to make do with it."
But, we, the rest of Hawa's girls, could not. We
learned that Hafedh was shortly to get married. The wretch had got
away with a ridiculous sentence and was about to start a new life
oblivious of the one he had wrecked. On the afternoon of the wedding
day, we slapped make-up on our faces like combatants preparing for
war; a death squad moving in for the kill. We cinched our bodies in
the tawdriest outfits we could lay our hands upon. Bosoms were
hoisted up and allowed to overflow outrageously slinky bustiers. We
teetered on high heels, garbed in slut paraphernalia. There was a
bounce to our steps and a provocative twitch to our behinds as we
sashayed into the large, full-to-bursting banquet hall. The wedding
ceremony was in full swing. The audience was almost exclusively
composed of hijab-clad women who craned their necks and stared in
outrage at our spectacular entry. Our smouldering charcoal eyes
blazed in unabashed defiance and challenged any one of them to block
our progress. Hafedh was sitting in an ornate chair on a raised
platform by his bride's side. We parted the sea of white and pink and
yellow hijabs and positioned ourselves in front of the platform like
a firing squad. He regarded us uncomprehendingly until Leyla started
screaming at the top of her voice: "Did you think you could get
away this easy? Did you think I wouldn't find you and expose your
duplicity? You bastard! You used me. You toyed with my feelings and I
trusted you! Trusted him, you hear?" She turned to the
incredulous audience. "He did to me whatever he wanted, the
jerk, and I let him because he promised he'd marry me! And by the
way, has he told you that he cut a girl and served time in prison? I
bet he hasn't!" Horrified gasps met her thundering words. The
bride in her pristine-white hijab was sobbing. A woman came forward
and helped her step off the dais. There was a mighty uproar. Hafedh
seemed paralyzed. Finally he managed to splutter: "It's all a
pack of lies! She's a slut trying to set me up!"
"So you admit that you know her?"
interjected an old man, clearly the bride's father, who looked like
he was on the verge of a coronary.
"Yes, but . . ."
"What shame you brought on our heads! That's
enough! I won't live to see my daughter married to a godless
scoundrel!" With those words, he turned on his heels and herded
his daughter and family women away. People started milling around and
filing out of the hall. The ceremony was over and we marched out of
the place with slow deliberation, basking in the glow of our
vengeance.
We were Hawa's daughters and woe to anyone who
messed with us. It was a vow we made to ourselves and to one another
that day. In our ears the whispered echo of Afeefa's words. Mektoob.
Kismet. Nobody could possibly evade destiny. Not in this world, not
in the other.
It was all part and parcel of Hawa's lot. Welcome to
Hawa's!
