How had it come to pass that he, who prepared himself for every scenario, had not even considered the possibility that his wife might cheat on him? He’d heard innumerable stories about infidelity but had always thought that such behavior was the domain of a certain kind of woman and that it could only happen to men who were nothing like him. How naive and idiotic. The lawyer was sorry he had not heeded the advice of his sister, who had actually introduced him to his future wife, though not intentionally. He recalled how his sister had then tried to do everything in her power to scare him off, but he, like a fool, cast it all aside. Not so much because he felt an unwavering love for the woman who was to be his wife but because he was committed to the idea of marrying a woman that in no way reminded him of his sister or his mother or the rest of his highly conservative family. The lawyer wanted something different, and he thought he was smarter than everyone else.
His parents would never have sent their daughter to study at the university in Jerusalem, to sleep in the dorms without the knowledge that he, her brother, who had just finished his internship at the time, was around and could be the muhram, the first-degree relative that could safeguard and vouch for her honor. “She’s studying along with her brother in Jerusalem,” his mother would always say to relatives and neighbors. The lawyer’s sister had been wearing the hijab since high school and she wore it all through her bachelor’s degree in education. It was patently clear that she would go back to the village as soon as she graduated, and try to secure a teaching position.
During those days the lawyer would visit his sister at least once a week but he never met her roommate because his sister believed that he, an unrelated male, should not be allowed to spend time in the company of her female roommate. The lawyer first met the roommate, the woman who would be his wife, on a night when she had gone to a student party and was not supposed to be back before midnight. The lawyer had accepted his sister’s invitation to come by the dorm room with two mixed-grill sandwiches, which she loved, but the roommate came home early, just before ten. He recalled the moment: a thin girl with curly hair and a sad look in her eyes. He recalled the elegant black dress, the way it accentuated her body. He got up to leave as soon as she came in but his sister was compelled to show that she was not spending time with random men, and so, with little enthusiasm, she introduced them. “This is my brother,” she had said, before he left the room.
The lawyer, a native of the Triangle, had always wanted to wed a girl from the Galilee. The Galileans tended to think of themselves as superior to the natives of the Triangle, and the lawyer tended to agree with them. He had been painfully aware of his crude country accent and upon arrival at the university in Jerusalem he adopted the more refined, less threatening accent of the Galileans. They seemed more enlightened, more educated, better dressed, better off, the products of superior schools.
The lawyer had known that it was high time he got married. He had just passed the bar and was working at the public defender’s office, where he had done his internship, and was planning his next move: the opening of his own practice in east Jerusalem. He knew that he should get married or at the very least engaged before starting out on his own. The east Jerusalemites did not trust bachelors. They were considered less serious, less trustworthy, and, more importantly, completely off-limits to any Arab woman. Even for the purposes of business, no Arab woman would step foot in a bachelor’s office. There’d be too much gossip. And women, he’d learned during his internship, were a slice of the market that he could not afford to lose — not so much as clients, but as the wives, mothers, and sisters of prisoners who sought his counsel. Palestinian families often sent a woman to Jerusalem to find a lawyer: they had a far better chance of getting through the checkpoints without the proper paperwork.
He liked her immediately. She was beautiful, he recalled, and now an unbidden thought set in: perhaps most people would still consider her to be so. The lawyer remembered how angry his sister had been when he called her the next day and asked whether her roommate had a boyfriend. She stammered and said, “Brother, she’s not for you. She’s not like us.” She had no idea that that was exactly what he was looking for, someone not like us. He learned from his sister that the roommate was not in a relationship, at least not one she knew of. No boys came to visit the roommate in the dorm, but his sister made clear that it was possible that none came because of the restrictions that she, his sister, imposed. She went on to say that this girl wore short sleeves and tight jeans, that she went to parties and cafés, and each word only spurred the lawyer on further.
The lawyer was bashful. He was nearly twenty-five at the time and had never had a girlfriend. He had been attracted to many of the Arab students while in school, but he never struck up a conversation, making due with heartache and wistful thoughts before bed. The lawyer had no sense of how he looked. No one had ever told him if he looked good or bad and he himself was not a good judge. He always felt that different mirrors, on different days, provided different perspectives. Photographs didn’t help, either. Like the mirrors, they showed something different each time. Sometimes he felt he looked good, but most of the time he was sure he looked bad. He was not too skinny or too fat. He felt his body was average, normal, not muscular — after all he never worked out — but not flabby, either. His height was average and he wished he was a bit taller, and his skin, like everyone in his family, was light, at least for an Arab. He liked being light-skinned but, much like with his height, he wished he was a bit lighter-skinned, and he would have been happy to have blond hair, or at least chestnut-colored.
Either way, he wasn’t very much preoccupied with his looks: the lawyer knew that his profession, and his success in that profession, would determine who he would marry. He did not have much money and he had bought a used Fiat Punto with the little money he did have, but having graduated at the top of his class, from the best law school in the land, his potential earning power was unquestioned.
One week after their chance encounter, the lawyer went back to the Mount Scopus dorms. It was the middle of the afternoon and the lawyer knew that his sister didn’t get out of class until six. He knocked on her door and no one answered. He decided to wait and walked around among the buildings. Within minutes he saw the roommate walking alone from the bus stop to the dorms. She was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt with some kind of flower design on the front. There was a bag slung over her shoulder and it hung down to her knees. Her hair was long and curly and she was small, about five foot four, which was exactly what he liked. In those clothes, as opposed to the semiformal dress, she looked boyish. He saw her go into the building and decided to smoke a cigarette before going up to knock on her door. While smoking, he rehearsed his lines and tried to imagine her responses. They started out as charming and then got increasingly more barbed. He almost called the whole thing off but in the end he ground out the cigarette and bounded up the stairs with his heart racing.