She had her first problem on November 21, 1944, a day she would consider the happiest of her life, the most felicitous.
God does provide.
It was the day before the country was to celebrate its first year of independence. Everyone seemed to be preparing for this joyous occasion. From their various inessential assignments around the country, soldiers poured into the city to prepare for a parade of grand pretensions.
Hannah had finished serving lunch and was returning home. The jitney that slowed down for her had two passengers in front and none in the back. Before entering the car, she made sure to tell the driver, a man advanced in age, with carefully trimmed white hair and mustache, that she was buying two seats. Not twenty meters ahead, my ex-husband’s eldest brother, the lieutenant himself, joined her in the backseat, delivered to her by the iron chains of circumstance.
Providence! Destiny!
A man, just the right age, with carefully trimmed black hair and mustache; a handsome man wearing the national gray uniform — a uniform radiant with a supernatural cleanliness mirroring hers, a cap atop his head — sat next to her, less than a meter away. A man right out of her journals, out of her fantasies, a tenant of her dreams, shared the same car, shared her world.
The driver, impressed by having a Lebanese soldier in his car and by his own percolating patriotism, tried to chat up the newcomer, but received little in response. Hannah’s lieutenant was just as shy as she was.
She blushed, as if she had just dipped into a tub of hot water, her skin turning tingly and red, the color of her hair. She couldn’t help herself. She stared out her window but looked awry through the corner of her eye, trying to examine her possible future husband. She was sure he could hear the clamor of her insatiable heart. She tried to slow her breathing.
He was ever so quiet.
They’d been in the car together for only eight minutes when her panic erupted.
The car slowed for another soldier standing on the curb. She heard herself utter the word no, quite loudly. The service had four passengers already. This soldier would force her lieutenant next to her, into the seat she had paid for. “No,” she said, before the driver could pick up the extra passenger.
The driver was genuinely polite at first, but sitting behind him, Hannah noticed that his hair wasn’t carefully trimmed at all. A confetti of dandruff and a sprinkling of macassar oil held it together. “That won’t be a problem, madam,” he said, “I’ll return the price of one fare.”
“No,” she said. “No.” Her voice was louder and shriller than she would have wished. She wanted to insist that she had paid for two, insist once more and again. She wanted to explain that she had no wish to be squeezed next to a man, particularly this most endearing lieutenant, but her heart beat loudly, her lungs shrank like a deflated balloon, and she experienced verbal paralysis. The only word she could say was no.
“He’s a soldier,” the driver insisted. “We can’t leave him standing on the side of the road. He’s a Lebanese soldier.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
The passengers in front glared at her with infinite disapproval. Incensed, the driver huffed like a fish out of water, lips pursed, cheeks puffed. “We must honor our soldiers,” he said.
It was at this point that her knight came to the rescue and picked up her white handkerchief. “He can take another car,” the lieutenant said, “since this one is obviously full.”
Like most of us on many an occasion, he had vastly overestimated the power of reason. That sentence was the only one the chivalrous lieutenant was allowed to speak. The seething driver — the hottest smoke of Hell leaked out of his ears, the vilest words exploded out of his mouth — kicked both Hannah and the lieutenant out of his car, although he returned her double fare.
The princess and her knight, slightly shell-shocked, watched as their carriage sped away with the other soldier, leaving them behind in a fog of gray exhaust.
“I am sorry,” said the lieutenant. “I probably made a minor matter worse.”
“No,” replied the princess, neither loud nor shrill, thankfully.
She wished to explain how much she appreciated his standing up for her, how helpless she’d felt before he intervened, how grateful she was, how long she’d waited for a man to come into her life, how happy she could make him and, most important, what a good wife she’d be.
“We can take another car,” he said.
It was the use of that pronoun that sealed his fate. I can tell you that from the day she met him until the day he died, Hannah, in her journal entries, used the first person plural about five times as much as the singular.
Hannah was too overwhelmed to ride in another car. She couldn’t. He asked if she wished to rest before they took another. She shook her head. He asked if she could walk home. That she could do. He walked her home. It was on his way. A Proustian promenade.
The comfortable autumnal temperatures still prevailed, the air crisp but not dry. A leisurely walk. She carried her handbag, while he carried a gun in his holster and a rifle strapped about his shoulder. She knew he noticed her minor limp with the first step because he slowed down to make her feel more at ease. He was almost as uncomfortable with the spoken word as she was. For the first twenty steps or so, each stuttered, trying to initiate a polite chat, a considerate conversation. Finally, Hannah was able to form a full, coherent, and grammatically correct sentence.
“Thank you for saving me,” she said.
He begged her to think nothing of it.
“I am grateful,” she said.
“I could do nothing else,” he said, in a voice that cracked at the first syllable. “I was only doing my duty. No honest man could have lived with himself had he allowed that inconsiderate animal to treat a lady as he did.”
In the journal, she underlined the word lady three times.
“You are from a good family, the driver isn’t,” he said. “He should know how to behave toward his betters.”
She underlined the phrase “good family” only once.
“You bought that seat and he agreed to it,” he said. “Only a scoundrel reneges on his agreements. A man’s word is the only thing that separates him from beasts.” The lovely lieutenant then looked into her eyes and finished the thought with, “I always keep my word.”
If using the pronoun we had sealed his fate, that last sentence poured hot red wax over it and stamped it with his family insignia.
He may have been trying to be kind. He may have thought this was what a gentleman did. He may have thought that wearing the uniform, he was duty bound to present the national army in good light. No matter.
In Hannah’s eyes, the gentleman lieutenant had proposed.
She wrote it down in her journal.
Her neighbors saw him accompany her. She walked with head held high, a proud woman, the tip of her nose pointing upward. She was certain everyone could tell that she had transformed into a woman betrothed; she undoubtedly walked like one.
Her neighbors saw him deliver her to her door, saw him take her hands in parting. They heard her say, “Please extend our invitation to your family for a visit.” They saw Hannah’s brother open the door, an expression of shock painted on his face, saw the men shake hands in greeting as Hannah demurely withdrew into her home. They saw the lieutenant leave the neighborhood, oblivious to the fact that he was being observed and measured.
Her family was stunned, of course. How unusual a proposal!
Her mother declaimed that she had never heard of such a thing. One of Hannah’s brothers said that the lieutenant must have been smitten on the spot. Another brother thought God must have intervened and guided the lieutenant’s will. How fortunate, her sister-in-law Maryam exclaimed, how propitious!