The cat — or Pasha — was the final chapter in the life of Hasiba, who had met her end crouching in a white metal bed, sitting because she was afraid of sleep; waking startled, eluding death in terror.
The elderly woman lived her final days in utter silence undisturbed by anything more than indistinct phantoms that crept into her room through the window. She listened to strange voices and felt ringing in her ears. Ghosts assuming shapes like black smoke surrounded the woman in her bed and told her stories of a past that had not wholly disappeared but had turned into images coming in rapid sequence and all wrapped in a gray light, and into an interminable tolling of bells. Help, it’s the voices! she would cry out from time to time, but when Saadeh came running into the room the woman would have already returned to her desert of silence.
Habisa was the second daughter of Nasif Haddad, who had fled the killing fields of Mount Lebanon in 1860 with his wife, four daughters, and one son. He abandoned the house and the silk loom inherited from his father, as well as the small plot of land where he planted vegetables in the growing season, to escape with his skin and not much more from the village of Kfar Qatra in the Shouf. In those savage days when blood ran down the slopes of Mount Lebanon, Nasif did manage to save his family, though twelve-year-old Said, his only son, was lost on the way. Nasif lived his entire life waiting for the return of a son who would never return. The father sat in the garden of his home in the Mousaitbeh quarter of Beirut. He would never go out to visit anyone because he was waiting. Every morning he told of smelling his son’s fragrance in his dream. The son never returned, the three other girls married, and the only one left at home was Habisa, who refused all suitors. Then — to the bewilderment of her father — she agreed to marry Salim Shahin the carpenter, who was a kashtabanji — a cardplayer of the wiliest sort, spending most of his time in the courtyard of the Church of the Archangel Mikhail, a fierce shuffler of those crucial three cards. Or he was drinking arak in a tiny tavern adjacent to the church.
Habisa surprised not only her father but everyone else when she agreed. By the age of twenty she had endured her father’s and sisters’ incredulous gazes for some time, as she rejected one prospective bridegroom after another. In their eyes she saw mirrored the threatening idea that she was on the dangerous threshold of spinsterhood. But this young woman who never wore anything but a long black gown with seven buttons down the bodice had continued to refuse marriage stubbornly and persistently and she protected herself with a silence that became her guardian veil. It was said that Habisa wore black for her brother, whose unexplained disappearance she could not accept, nor could she acquiesce in her father’s wishful view that the son had fled in disgust as the troubles in Lebanon worsened. He must have found a French steamer to take him to the New World — as their father speculated endlessly — and eventually he would return, surely. The father composed an elaborate story about his son’s emigration, which he believed fully and fiercely. His patience, as he waited on and on for his son, became legendary, and was universally respected. His wife had died only seven months after their descent from the Mount to Beirut, a victim of the exile fever that decimated the populace of nineteenth-century Lebanon, attendant upon unabated emigrations, massacres, and a general state of disaster. For three days she lay prone in a tiny hut that her husband had erected hastily on land belonging to the church. With her death, her daughters worried themselves sick over the possibility of their father’s remarriage, but he did not seem interested. Women in Beirut who had migrated from elsewhere and were available, he remarked, draped themselves on the backs of whomever they could find to carry them.
In a silk-weaving shop belonging to Abdallah Abd el-Nour, Nasif found work, plying an ancient loom which the Beiruti merchant had moved to a narrow passage giving on to the shop. Nasif returned to the work he knew and his life returned to him. He erased his natal village from his memory.
Habisa stayed on alone at home with her father. He would come home late at night, drunk, eat a bite that his daughter had prepared for him, and bury himself in sleep. Habisa remained awake in the black gown she never took off.
No one knew what the story really was. Saadeh would say she heard the old woman, as she descended into senility, speaking French with an imaginary man whose name was Ferdinand. Saadeh fired up her imagination with a story of Habisa’s love for a French officer who promised her marriage and then disappeared as all soldiers do. Was she wearing mourning for her lost love and her wasted virginity? Had the young man bewitched her with the white color of his skin and his blue eyes, and carried her off to the kingdom of fantasy dreams before he moved on?
Saadeh consulted the nun but Sister Milana simply scolded her, telling her not to interfere with what did not concern her. God alone knows the unknowable; God alone holds the secrets of hearts.
What was the story, then?
When Saadeh broached the story of Ferdinand with her husband, Yusuf’s thick eyebrows came together and he called his wife a liar. Woman, that is not my mother! he barked. Would you want me to talk that way about your mother?
That evening, though, Yusuf spoke to his mother, trying to elicit a response. But the woman remained silent. Staring into the distance, she appeared not even to listen as her son asked questions. Then suddenly she began to blurt out foreign-sounding words — the name Ferdinand among them. Thus was revealed a fragment of the momentous secret concealed within the ribs of the elderly woman who had entered the desert of oblivion.
The story that Yusuf did know was the one about his parents’ nocturnal wedding. The girl had insisted on one thing only: that she would marry Salim Shahin after dark. She emerged from the house swathed in her long black gown, surrounded by her father, her three sisters, and their husbands. The nighttime gloom mantled the funereal bridal procession. At the church door Salim stood waiting, decked out in a gold-embroidered silk abaya and red tarbush. He waited alone as the bride had requested. They stood before the candle-lit altar and Father Andraos blessed their marriage. They went to his house on foot, although the groom had arranged for a carriage pulled by four horses. The bride refused and said she preferred to walk. Her arm tucked into her husband’s arm, they disappeared silent into the surrounding night.
Did Salim learn the story of Ferdinand and plot revenge on his wife? Or was what Yusuf believed to be revenge simply Salim’s response when it became clear that he would not beget more than one child, after he contracted the mumps that descended as far as his testicles?
How can this story be? Milia asked her mother. Someone dawdles away his life waiting to get married and then as soon as he’s married, he starts feeling he has to look for something else?
That’s men for you, my girl — when a man has nothing left, nothing to fill his life, this is what happens. You see, a man who isn’t capable of giving life feels empty. He starts talking bull and he’s full of ridiculous mischief. May God protect us all!
From his wife Salim learned to turn the darkness into a curtain veiling his life. That was Hasiba for you. She never really woke up or got up except at night. She cooked to the flame of the oil lantern and when her husband left for his shop in the morning she snuffed out the light and went to sleep.
It was Yusuf who convinced her finally about the new house. Mama, open your mind up a little — it’s just a house like any other. When Hasiba discovered that her husband had bought the house that Khawaja Sergios Efthymios had built for his Egyptian lover, who had then become Salim’s mistress — which everyone more or less knew about — she went out of her mind, screaming and raving at her husband.