Farewell, Damascus by Ghada Samman & Ghada Samman

Author:Ghada Samman & Ghada Samman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781850773023
Publisher: Darf Publishers
Published: 2017-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Zain stood on the porch of her father’s house in Sahat Al Midfaa, gazing out at Abu Rummana Street and the trees in the yard. The voice inside leads me to write about freedom, but what kind of sense does that make if I don’t even support myself? I preach freedom, I demand equality, and I claim in newspaper columns to be the spokesperson for liberated girls, yet the whole time I’m being supported financially either by my father or my husband. Oh, and I think of myself as “famous,” too. Well, as long as I’m dependent on a man for my support, I’m a pitiful mess!

The voice of the woman who’d taken up residence in Zain’s mind, and who wielded a pen as though it were a rifle, had started to become part of her now. The voice had grown louder and louder since Zain had gone alone to get an abortion, alone to her divorce hearing, and alone to sit for the university exams that she’d barely had time to study for. She adored the books she was reading for her English and World Literature classes, and she adored her professors too—Dr. Varma from India, Dr. Mayan, also from India but less literarily radical than his Indian colleague, Dr. Gilders from the US, and Dr. Musa from Palestine. But her personal life had been wearing her down.

One morning she took out the raincoat her father had given her. It was reversible—black if you wore it one way, and pink if you wore it the other way. Turning the coat pink-side-out, Zain announced to the woman who lived inside her, “I’m going to look for a second job, and I’m going to help my dad pay the household expenses!”

* * *

She started her search at the school where her mother had taught, and which was bound to her family by ties of friendship. The people who ran the school had an uncle who had volunteered in the Rescue Army that had fought for Palestine in 1948 under the command of Fawzi Al Qawuqji. He had died in the arms of Zain’s maternal uncle, who, as she learned from her father when she told him she wanted to apply for a job at the school, had worked as a volunteer physician for the Rescue Army.

She was received at the school by Irfan, the young new principal who had returned from France with a Ph.D. in Engineering. She remembered Irfan’s father who, when she had walked one day with her father from Bloudan to Zabadani, had scolded her for wanting to marry somebody she was in love with. He had said to her, “If you go on trying things that haven’t worked for other people, you’re not thinking right!” He’d been right, as had her father. But that was in the past now. It was over and done with. Besides, she’d been a hard-headed teenager at the time, and as far as she was concerned, she was right and the

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