No Knives in the Kitchens of This City: A Novel (Hoopoe Fiction) by Khaled Khalifa

Author:Khaled Khalifa [Khalifa, Khaled]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2016-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

Our voices were still raised in the living room, when Sawsan heard my mother laughing. She realized that she was laughing too, with her; she asked God to forgive her hatred for her mother, who had never hidden her from anyone. She heard Nizar’s music, which hadn’t stopped.

Sawsan closely reviewed each of her thirty years. She now considered herself the daughter of a poor family living in a slum settled by impoverished soldiers, mukhabarat, Kurdish fellaheen, and day laborers in the textile factories. It was ruled over by Comrade Fawaz, whom she saw on television speaking about the state of the nation, and his family who shot their guns in the air in delight at his success in the elections for the People’s Council on the Party’s ballot. They now lived in well-heeled districts of the city and used their old houses as warehouses for iron and other goods brought by trucks which crossed the Lebanese border without enquiry as to their cargo. The noise from these trucks and the voices of the men carrying their contents kept us awake for days at a time.

She reconciled with herself and admitted that the operation to repair her virginity had not given her the certainty she was looking for. It wasn’t right that her lot would be to look for a man who would buy a small house in installments and furnish it with a fridge and a small oven from cooperatives and an iron given as a gift by impecunious friends and family. She took off all her clothes and lit her candle. She stood in front of her mirror for the first time in a long time and discovered that the mirror had rusted, like her body. She touched the small amount of flabbiness between her legs, alarmed by the thought of the rusty mirror. She ran her fingers through her hair, which had coarsened since she started neglecting it. In recent years she bathed hastily without any additional creams or conditioners to soften the hair she had never neglected when she was Munzir’s lover. She used to celebrate her body with long baths fragranced with perfumes and soaps and concoctions of fresh herbs. She would linger when putting on her bra, imagining his delicate fingers unhooking the clasp. She thought now that the acid in her throat was the same she used to feel from her mother when she would look with hatred at her slender body and swelling chest.

She thought that we created fear to make others afraid of us, only to discover that it clung to us as well and made us equally afraid. It was like the delusions of glory Sawsan had dreamed of when she was arm in arm with Munzir on the streets of Aleppo. Then, she saw people’s fear when they met them and she shivered. She would feel her body heat rising, as they transferred their fear to her. She had tried to rid herself of this idea, and believed that she would be the mistress of Munzir’s large house in Damascus.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.