Welcome to Hawa's

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!