Forbidden Love (10 page)

“Where’s he been?”

“He went to school in London, and travelled to Greece, France, and Italy while he was there. He’s fluent in French and even speaks a little Greek and Italian. He’s told me about all the different things he’s seen and he says that he’d love to show them to me. Apparently we’d be free in those countries and wouldn’t have to sneak around to see each other. I would be able to do what I want. Doesn’t that sound like heaven?”

“Yes, it does. This whole thing is incredible. I mean, I never thought either one of us would feel like this. Would you marry him if you could?”

“Well, he’s everything I could ever want in a man. I like him a lot, but it’s still too soon to say that I love him. I mean, I’ve never been in love before. I know that I have very strong feelings for him and I think we’d be happy together. He actually cares about my opinions, and treats me like an equal.”

“That’s something he must have learned abroad. They definitely don’t teach men that here,” I said. “What does caring about him feel like?” I asked, entering territory neither of us had ever explored.

Even as best friends, we had never talked directly about

love felt like, and never about sexual feelings because we didn’t know what they were. Sex is not something that is talked about in any context with a single woman in Jordan; we were never taught specifics about sex. For many years Dalia and I thought that if you kissed a man on the lips you would get pregnant. Sex, or the possibility of it happening to a single woman, was thought to be so evil, so horrid, that we were afraid of it. It must seem so strange to a sexually liberated culture; here we were in our twenties, but we didn’t feel sexual frustrations, or have sexual fantasies because we were too afraid and didn’t really know enough about sex to be able to fantasize about it. In the salon, our married girlfriends would talk to us about it, but what we learned from them was that it was painful, and that you bleed on your first time, things that just scared us more. I had female cousins and aunts older than me who have never married, and are still virgins. That’s just the way it is. I was as curious and innocent as a child.

“Well, it’s hard to describe. I get butterflies in my stomach when I think about him. I’m nervous, excited, and happy every time I know I’m going to see him. When I don’t see him, I miss him and he’s constantly in my thoughts. Even on my bad days, all I have to do is think of him and I start to smile. I can’t imagine my life without him.”

“You sound as if you’re in love. Why do you say you aren’t?” “Because love is something very serious. There’s love and then there’s being in love, you know. I love you and right now I think that I love him the way I love you. But to be in love with him is a totally different thing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that before I could say that I’m in love with him, I’d have to feel sure that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him and have his children.”

“Oh Dalia, I think you’re over-analysing again. You sound confused. You love him in your heart, but your mind is still trying to evaluate what you’re feeling. If I ever fall in love, I want it to be something that I can’t analyse but something I just know.”

“Norma, you can’t decide something this important and serious based on a passing feeling. It’s much more complicated than that. You’ll know what I mean when you experience it. I could be feeling this way now because I’ve never disobeyed my parents before. Maybe I have to make him a super hero to justify what I’ve done. Who knows, maybe I won’t feel like this several months from now. All I know is that at this moment he’s very, very important to me. he makes me feel things I’ve never felt before, good things, and I don’t want to give that up.”

“What do you mean, feel things? What good things?”

Dalia was opening up with a rush of words that reminded me of my first phone call with Michael. The dam was bursting. “He makes me feel special, beautiful, and smart. He respects me, and cares about my wants, needs, and thoughts. He’s not like my brothers or my father. I’ve never seen my father ask my mother for her opinion. He just orders her around and treats her as if she doesn’t matter, as if she’s just there to serve him. My father treats me the same way. Michael’s different, he always asks me things and he listens to what I have to say. My opinion matters to him. Last time we met, he asked me to pick where I want to go the next time. My brothers have never asked me to pick anything. It feels good to be treated as if I’m important.”

“My father and brothers are just like yours. As far as they’re concerned, women don’t have brains and we’re certainly not allowed to have opinions. I hope someday I can find someone

who treats me the way Michael treats you. It sounds wonderful. I can’t imagine it.”

“Oh, Normie, you will. You will find someone like him. You just have to make sure that he’s spent a lot of time outside a Muslim country. Try to find someone from one of the countries Michael’s been to. He

obviously learned those things there.” \020”Oh, that’ll be easy. I’m sure men like Michael are just running up and down the streets of Amman. All I have to do is pick one. Come on, Dalia! You could probably count the number of men in Jordan who think like Michael on the fingers of one hand. If only he was Muslim, you two could get married.”

Then it suddenly hit home, and the euphoria subsided a bit. This was deadly serious. The way this was heading they would have to leave Jordan. I took Dalia’s hand.

“If you ever decide that he’s the one you want to have children with, maybe we can find a way for the two of you to be together. I mean, we’ve been pretty successful so far. We make a great team. Nothing’s impossible.”

We survived that holiday season, but we barely had time to see or talk to Michael and Jehan. By now it had been almost one year since Michael and Dalia had met; yet they had really only known each other for five months. We’d spent most of our time figuring out ways for them to communicate. It had been a consuming and exhausting process, but we hoped that as time went on it would become much easier.

Now it was nearing March, and as the last of the Muslim holidays passed, the football season went with them. Things were about to get more complicated, not easier. Mohammed would start spending more time at the salon and our brothers wouldn’t be watching games on Fridays; they’d be out in the neighbourhood. The risk of one of them spotting us getting in or out of a taxi was much greater. Michael and Dalia were desperate to spend more time together and had no interest in discussing the growing risks. But even they couldn’t ignore them, since they controlled the frequency of their dates.

And even if Michael’s soldierly confidence led him to feel immune to defeat or damage, surely he loved Dalia enough to keep the terrible risks to her at the back of his mind. But

Michael’s confidence and worldliness were infectious. We handled the details at this stage with a growing sense of invincibility, and I think we both felt that Michael was capable of making the big things happen including marriage, and leaving Jordan.

Our objective was clear, and our mission defined: invent and implement a series of covert operations to make it possible for Michael and Dalia to date. We began to feel like military strategists. We started charting, on a neighbourhood street map, exactly where we thought our brothers and fathers would be during the crucial hours of the lovers’ meetings. Several weeks after the football season ended, we were nervous wrecks. After achieving every illicit Friday night date, we were a bundle of raw nerves. For the rest of the weekend and the following week, we’d hold our breath, expecting to hear some comment from one of our brothers that he’d seen us the previous Friday. The joy was turning to despair. We were going crazy and realized that we had to search for alternatives.

“I can’t sleep for two night after every meeting. I keep thinking one of my brothers is going to say something like, “Hey, I thought I saw you and Norma yesterday afternoon.” I can’t take it any more. But I can’t stop seeing Michael,” Dalia said.

“I know what you mean, I feel the same way. I was thinking that maybe we should have one of them drive us to the school and drop us off. At least that way we wouldn’t have to worry about being seen in a taxi,” I said.

“That would help, but they could still spot us going to the restaurant.”

“I know, but at least it would be one less thing to worry about. I’m sure if we put our heads together we can think of a way to reduce the other risks as well.”

Exasperated after another endless round of examining the

pros and cons, I suggested, “We should forget the whole Friday classes thing, and try to get Mohammed to take us to places with Jehan and leave us there for a couple of hours. Now that the football season is over we should be able to get him to do that.”

But in the end we decided to keep to our original plan, as nothing else seemed to work as well. For months now we’d been careful to stick to our Thursday schedule in order to avoid making our families suspicious. Each week, we spent hours in my room or hers, thrashing out ideas and strategies. All this worry and planning was draining. In the beginning, it had brought its own excitement even when we’d doubted that we would succeed; now it had become an obsession to keep the successes going.

Our work at the salon began to suffer as we spent more time on planning and started seeing fewer customers. Not that our families would have disapproved; as far as our fathers and brothers were concerned, the salon was just a way for us to fritter away our time and be together. It wasn’t a bona fide business. They never cared about how many clients we had, or how much money we earned. Any cash we made was to be our pocket money, to waste on books and pictures and women’s things. Since we weren’t married, our fathers and brothers were responsible for all of our basic needs. We quickly discovered, however, that leading a secret life required money to buy our brothers gifts to keep them sweet or pay for their activities to get them out of the way. It was a small price to pay for peace of mind. But we’d have to increase our appointments again.

The money, though, was only a tiny part of the real cost of our activities. We spent hours studying and synchronizing our actions. Since our independence depended on our brothers’

schedules, we were forced to quietly alter their activities, all the time convincing them that each new idea came from them and not us. As we became masters of manipulation, as we grew better and better at subtly organizing their lives, we felt as if we knew them better than they knew themselves. With most extracurricular activities in Jordan taking place on Fridays and Saturdays, mapping their events to coincide with our trysts was not very difficult. But it drained time. In the end, each glorious afternoon cost hours, and sometimes days, of effort. Dalia was in paradise, often absent-minded, so it was my responsibility to check and re-check all the details so that both of us were protected.

It was amazing to see how Michael had changed her. For as long as I could remember, Dalia had always had a rebellious spirit. As a child, the more she was forbidden to do something, the more she was determined to do it. As we matured and our restrictions grew, the nonconformist within her became deeply resentful of the rules governing her life, and angry with the men who enforced them. But now, her feelings for Michael began to transform her pessimism into optimism. She’d found a man who encouraged and treasured her free spirit. This adventure had reawakened that lively rebellious child, and she revelled in the excitement. In fact, we inadvertently reverted to the roles we’d had in adolescence. Dalia invented the idea, and I found a way to make it happen.

It was clear that Dalia was in love with Michael, although she still refused to admit it. They had so much in common. Their ideas, political principles and religious views were identical. As a third party looking in, I could see clearly that her fears refused to allow her to acknowledge her passion fully. Although Dalia repeatedly talked about the depth of her feelings for Michael, I realized that she was still trying to

understand her emotions. Knowing Dalia and our culture, this wasn’t surprising; it was expected. I loved watching her twist out of admitting that she was in love. I always knew that Dalia would only use the word ‘love’ when and if she became convinced that it was the only word that could explain what she was feeling. She was too analytical to do anything else; it was one of the things I cherished about her.

But if she ever used the word, there would be no turning back from the inevitable next step. I didn’t dare think about it. How remarkable romance is in an Islamic country, it occurred to me. All this endless analysis of the depth and destiny of the relationship, and they’d never kissed. Never even held hands.

The name “Aqaba’ rings with the romance of Lawrence of Arabia, as he sweeps into Jordan’s strategic (and only) port and, in flowing desert robes, riding his camel, seizes it from the Turks, winning the day for the British and their Arab allies, and writing legends for himself.

For Dalia and me Aqaba rang with very different meaning. For us, it was the symbol of the battle we lost for our childhoods, a battle that was all over by the time we were nine or ten. Too young to know what was happening, we’d been passive observers to the capture of the free-running freedom we’d known. The victors were our fathers and brothers, and the ancient codes.

It was now May in Amman. The mildest, and often most beautiful, month in Jordan. And Aqaba beckoned as it had every spring since I was a child-the place where my and Dalia’s families had always gone, and still went, to enjoy Jordan’s only seaside resort. Oh, how Dalia and I had loved Aqaba. We believed that the sea held mystical powers and,

each year, we’d beg our families to take us there. This year, as Dalia and I searched for a way to avoid joining them, I felt, for a moment, a flash of memory for the freedoms we’d known there when we were small, when we were still little princesses That was the brief snatch of time when everything we did was sweet and everyone wanted to play with us. How idyllic it looked from the distance of twenty years the time when my father was affectionate, when we rough-and-tumbled with our brothers, when we splashed and laughed in the waves at Aqaba, wore a swimsuit or whatever we wished and felt the sun on our sandy young bodies.