An Unsafe Haven. Nada Jarrar Awar
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heat, Maysoun would run out to the back garden, her feet kicking dust in the yellowing grass, and play in the shade of her mother’s beloved naranj trees, fragrant and laden with fruit. The exact nature of the games she played now eludes her but she recalls their joys with unwavering clarity: the embrace of silence in those seemingly undying hours and a conviction in her young heart that life was unchanging, that love would always be to hand.
She remembers other moments too: her father’s voice calling to her to come in out of the sun; the welcome feel of cold water splashing on to her burning face; and, early in the evening, climbing up to the roof with her mother to unfurl the mattresses on which the family would sleep to escape the stifling heat trapped indoors, the marvel of darkness descending, the anticipation.
Later, lying with the dark sky above and familiar, still bodies breathing beside her, Maysoun would listen again for confirmation of that earlier happiness and receive it in the clamouring abundance of stars or in the whispers of neighbours carried across rooftops by the night breeze: memories of Baghdad that would last forever.
An only child, she was born to older parents who had until then settled themselves into the relative comfort of childlessness but who nonetheless welcomed the disruption to their lives that followed her coming. They had loved her with something like indecisiveness at first, but with time and growing confidence in their own roles their affection for her had become more sure so that instead of freeing her as she grew, they tethered her further to the notions of childhood and dependence that she had hoped to leave behind, the idea that in the realization of need is borne the willingness to love and to give.
In adolescence, at a private school for girls, Maysoun discovered the kind of freedom others enjoyed, classmates with European mothers from countries of which she had never heard and which she imagined more exotic than her own – Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, Norway and Denmark – tall, attractive girls who dressed daringly and expressed contempt for their elders with ease. In admiring and eventually emulating them, she was nonetheless aware of the necessary impermanence of these friendships, for she was conscious of her differentness, of the essential truth that while these young women rebelled with a view to their futures outside Iraq, she would forever remain rooted to the country of her birth and tied to the notion that whatever had come before was preferable to an uncertain present.
The First Gulf War and her father’s death soon after she left school brought profound changes to Maysoun’s life in Baghdad, bestowing on her the role of her mother’s companion and widening her horizons to the many ways in which things could suddenly go wrong, not only for herself but for an entire country and its people. After the allied campaign led to the killing of thousands of retreating Iraqi troops and as many innocent civilians, the crippling effects of international sanctions introduced by the West began to make themselves felt. Maysoun saw herself carried along by a wave of events that she could neither control nor avoid: the first inkling of the harsh lessons that lay ahead. When she thinks now of what was to follow, of her own feeble attempts at struggle against an inexorable deluge, she feels a certain regret; she wishes that things could have turned out differently although she harbours a strong belief that God’s will always prevails, that she might have grown stronger for the experience, might have been something other than this undefined, absent self.
She has the colouring of her father’s Kurdish ancestry somewhere in the family’s still unknown past, a great-grandfather, perhaps, or one even further back – no one has ever managed to find out. Her fair hair and hazel eyes and skin that is clear and smooth afford her a fragile loveliness uncommon in this part of the world, though it is beauty that with age has softened, become less startling, less of an encumbrance to her daily life. Thinking of her one great love, she is satisfied with the recollection of the myriad ways in which he had looked at her, the wonder and mystery in his eyes and the desire that died with him all those years ago, youth and vision left behind.
In Beirut, getting up and dressing for work in the morning, Maysoun hesitates for a moment before reluctantly opening the bedroom shutters to the noises of the street below. Her second-floor apartment in a popular Ras Beirut neighbourhood makes lasting isolation difficult; it lets in the good and the bad, the brilliant sunlight and the hum of people, the dust and diesel fuel that cause her debilitating allergies, and an inkling that she is part of something animate, breathing, even if she does not wish to be. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when she miraculously wakes to acceptance, the certainty that she is enveloped by God’s grace and is worn and defenceless no longer propels her into action.
Since settling here some years ago, she has fashioned for herself an existence that infuses her dreams with calmness but which, in the stark light of day, gives her only reluctant refuge. Often, awakened by the reality of her situation, she cringes at this bustling brawling city and sinks into forgetfulness, imagining the world that might have been, a history uninterrupted by violence and circumstance.
She tells herself that staying on in Baghdad would have been impossible after all that had happened to her there, that despite her attachment to her mother and to memories of home, she had done well to seek a life elsewhere, in a city that, though not ideal, was still in the region and did not have hell and torment in it.
Insidiously, the present always manages to cut short her reveries. In her work in Beirut with refugees from Iraq and now Syria also, in her efforts to survive the ignominy of being and feeling herself displaced, in the relationships she has formed with people, sometimes despite herself, and everywhere her body takes her, through motions and ministrations, the weight of misgivings exhaust her physically as well as in spirit.
And yet, and yet, there are small pleasures that greet her at the beginning of each day. The rhythm of her walk to the office, up a gentle hill and then down again, and the gratifying familiarity of it; the first cup of coffee of the day which she buys from a place near work, milky and sweet just as she’s always liked it; the quiet, reciprocated greetings she receives from her colleagues when she arrives at the office; and that moment when, finally sitting at her desk to deal with the tasks at hand one by one, she is aware of a beginning and an end to things and is inordinately comforted by that thought.
Maysoun is still at work when Peter drops by to see her on his way home.
—I thought I would be too late to catch you, he tells her as they embrace.
—You would have been in another ten minutes. She smiles. It’s good to see you, Peter. How are you? How is Hannah? It’s been too long since we last saw one another.
—All is well, alhamdulillah, he replies. And you?
She smiles.
—I like it when you speak Arabic. It becomes you.
—Even though I’ve got a long way to go before I begin to speak like a native? He laughs.
—Sit down, Peter. She gestures towards a chair opposite her desk.
—I won’t keep you too long. I just wondered if you could do me a favour.
—Yes, of course. Tell me what you need.
Peter had liked Maysoun from their first meeting at a conference on Iraqi refugees who were being processed through Lebanon and on to destinations further away. There was a simplicity, an honesty about her, that immediately attracted him, as did her gentle beauty. He had introduced himself and invited her to dinner at home with Hannah. He had sensed, also, the solitude that surrounded her, though she clearly did not suffer from loneliness, her reserve lending her an air of self-sufficiency that was strangely calming to him. Hannah had also liked her, for the same reasons he had, and it was not long before the friendship was perceived, on both sides, as a particular privilege.
Maysoun’s story moved them once they heard it, though after its disclosure and the initial impact it made, it was not referred to among them again. This was less a function of his and Hannah’s discretion, than because, Peter thought, Maysoun herself had employed no drama in the telling of it so that the greatest impression left on them was