The Barren Woman (Story of the Month)

"The Barren Woman"... Twenty-six years ago and more, the Lebanese thinker of world stature, Mikhail Naimy, wrote the story of this Lebanese woman... the woman crushed in soul and body... the woman whom man regards as a machine for breeding children, and with whom he is not content for her own sake, as a creature that loves and feels and knows happiness.

And The Woman's Voice, in presenting this story — which it counts among the most brilliant and most profound things written in Arabic fiction to this day — presents an imperishable piece of literature, a strain of storytelling than which fiction has known none more beautiful; and it presents at the same time a generation of people who, to this very day, still hold woman to be the one first responsible.

"The Barren Woman" is the cry of the suffering woman, resounding in the depths of the selfish man.

For this reason The Woman's Voice presents this story...

"The Editors"

— 2 —

Umm Aziz insisted on having her way this time, and won. Aziz did not oppose her, and Jamila's demurrals were not such as could stand in her path. And so one day she ordered her daughter-in-law to prepare all the necessities of travel, and on the morrow she "went down" with her to Beirut, after announcing to the neighbors that she was going "to let her daughter-in-law take the air," because her daughter-in-law — poor soul! — was "cooped up!"

After an absence of a week the two returned from their excursion, and Jamila went back to watching the gradual death of her love, feeling that she was dying with it a slow death — a death of the spirit.

Beirut did not lighten her pains of body and soul. And Aziz's treatment of her grew ever harsher, above all after a year had passed since her visit to Beirut. If before that visit Aziz would kiss her dry kisses and call her "my Qarqura," if only rarely, now he no longer kissed her at all; he went back to calling her "Jamila," and seldom addressed her even by name. He suddenly took up smoking the narghile, so that when he came home he would sit through his evening with his narghile instead of his "qarqura," speaking to no one — nor did anyone dare speak to him — unless guests came, whom he would receive with his usual courtesy, as though no change at all had come over him. At about nine o'clock he would go to his bedroom and shut the door behind him.

Jamila began to melt away like a candle. She had no one in the whole world before whom to lay her soul bare except her mother. But what did her mother understand? If she spoke to her of the tragedy the days were playing out in her heart, she would sigh and weep and not understand what her daughter was saying.

Her mother, like Umm Aziz, looked upon her daughter's barrenness as a stern chastisement from heaven, a crushing calamity, a great disgrace never to be wiped away among people. She would look at Jamila's companions and see them nursing boys and girls at their breasts, and a lump would choke her at the thought that her daughter, once the "ornament" of the town's girls — her daughter of whose beauty and good breeding stranger and kinsman alike used to talk, her daughter for whose hand young men had come streaming from every corner of Lebanon — now walked with no milk in her breast and no child on her arms.

And so, instead of finding consolation with her mother, Jamila had to console her.

Umm Aziz was not content with her excursion to Beirut; after a year had passed she compelled her daughter-in-law to accompany her to Damascus. This time too the woman announced that she was going "to let her daughter-in-law take the air," because her daughter-in-law — poor soul! — was "cooped up." But the doctors of Damascus and the doctors of Zahle could not do what the doctors of Beirut had failed to do. Then Umm Aziz cursed medicine and doctors in her heart and resolved to seek the help of "the Moroccans." She no longer heard of a Moroccan visiting the town but she invited him to her house and laid before him the story of her daughter-in-law, until the Kirbaj house turned into an inn frequented by everyone who lifted up his voice in that town crying: "A healer, a good one! Medicine for love, medicine for the eye!" And it was not long before Umm Aziz made certain that the skill of the Moroccans likewise availed her nothing. What, then, was to be done?

There remained one door Umm Aziz had not knocked at, which she had kept as a last resort should every other means fail her: visiting the monasteries — "peace be upon them!" So she began moving with her daughter-in-law from monastery to monastery... Jamila in her hand like a dumb machine to be turned whichever way she pleased.

At first Jamila resisted these visits, but she learned by trial that her resistance was of no use. So she surrendered to her mother-in-law's will, having lost her own will entirely with the loss of her husband's love. Life had become a heavy futility to her, and she could find no way to be rid of it.

Some ten years had passed since her marriage, and she understood that the happiness which had intoxicated her in the first months was gone, with no hope of its return. Aziz hardly spoke to her at all — hardly even looked at her. He spent most of his nights in the marketplace, coming back now and again with reddened eyes ringed with blue beneath. From his mouth rose the smells of arak and wine and beer. His teeth were coated with a thick yellow crust. The color of his face had turned from rosy to ashen. The ends of his mustache drooped downward. His beard sometimes went a week without seeing the razor.

When he came home, the house turned into a graveyard without motion or life. No one dared breathe a word. And if it happened that someone said or did something not to his liking — were it his father or his mother — he would break out into blasphemies and smash whatever bedding and vessels his hand could reach. Once he beat his wife because she refused to go to church wearing all her jewels.

Jamila watched all this with a breaking heart. And Abu Aziz and Umm Aziz looked at her as though she were the cause of their only son's misery. So they came to loathe her. How often she overheard them talking thus:

"My boy," Umm Aziz would say, "has wasted away with grieving. God will not grant her a child, and Azrael will not carry her off from him. If she died, he could marry some decent man's daughter in her stead, who would bring him a boy to comfort our last days and his!"

Of the tenderness Jamila had once met with from her mother-in-law, no trace remained. Seeing her now sweep and wash and cook, she no longer cried out as before: "Wa balli, wa balli! May you live to bury your father-in-law, God willing!"

The maid who had been hired to wait on Jamila had long since gone back to her own house. Jamila now worked like an ox, in the house and out of it. And if she sat down to rest she would instantly hear her mother-in-law's voice: "Sitting down again, are we? This is no time for sitting!"

Everyone shared with Aziz in his affliction and his trial. Few were those with any pity in their hearts for Jamila. If she left her house, every mother in the town would come out carrying an infant, and drawing near Jamila would address her child thus: "Fuad!" — or Boutros, or Hanna — "clap for your auntie Jamila, my boy, clap! May these two sweet hands lay me in my grave, by the glory of the Lord of Heaven!"

All this that Jamila might hear it and her wounded heart bleed. And Jamila would listen in silence and weep in silence, and in silence her soul grew bitter against life and the world. When she walked she felt as though she were walking over the corpses of her hopes, cut down around her by the days. When she slept she felt she was lying on the ruins of her demolished happiness. What was left to her in this world, and why should she go on living?

But had all her hopes withered away utterly?

Why, then, did she still say: "Perhaps? Perhaps God will yet be gracious to me!.." And if God were gracious to her — would that lost happiness come back? In vain did Jamila try to answer these questions, for she had become a stranger to herself. The darkness that had closed around her soul left her no opening through which to study its recesses and secrets. So it was beyond her to render herself an account of herself, and she found surrender to the days the easiest road to take. For this reason she did not oppose her mother-in-law's will when the latter announced to her one day that she had resolved to take her to visit an old monastery dedicated to the Virgin, with whose miracles women's hearts are gladdened.

Whoever says the age of miracles is past, let him go to the town of "A—" in the districts of Lebanon and ask what happened in the year 1910. A woman had remained barren ten years; the science of doctors availed her nothing, the drugs of the Moroccans did not help her, and many monasteries brought her no cure. But Our Lady — glory to her name! — heard the fervent prayer of Umm Aziz al-Kirbaj.

Yes, Umm Aziz's petitions were not disappointed: Jamila conceived that year. And how swift was the change that came over the house at once — nay, over the whole town! Aziz went back to calling her "my Qarqura," though Jamila no longer loved to hear that name, which tore her heart like a sharp dagger, and she no longer called her husband "my Qarqur."

And Aziz began coming home in the evening with every kind of foodstuff and gift in his hands and his pockets. The maid, too, came back to the Kirbaj house. And Umm Aziz once more exclaimed, whenever she saw her daughter-in-law wiping the dust from a chair or stirring the food in a pot: "Wa balli! Wa balli! May you live to bury your mother-in-law, God willing!" The angel of peace returned to the Kirbaj house. Aziz gave up drink and contented himself with the narghile alone; the smile came back to his face and the light of happiness to his eyes. And his mother received the congratulations of the townsfolk with a heart brimming over with joy, reminding each one of them that no credit for what had happened was hers, saying:

"Our Lady — glory to her name!"

In the fullness of his joy Aziz did not notice the strange change that had come over his wife. He did not notice that the angelic smile which once glittered on her rosy face had now vanished forever, leaving in its place an obscure question mark. He did not see that the electric current which used to steal from her laughing eyes into the depths of his heart, filling it with heavenly gladness, had now disappeared behind those long lashes that seemed at every minute to be making ready to weep and mourn. He did not sense the new note in her voice — a note of deep sorrow without beginning or end. He did not see the pallor of her face, nor the constant knitting of her brows that told of her inward pain. And if he did see something of all this, he counted it natural to the condition of pregnancy.

As for Jamila, it was as though she had withdrawn from the outer world into her own inner self, as the snail withdraws into its shell. There her soul was alone with itself for the first time in her life, and dread came over her as she began to analyze her own being, lifting the curtain little by little from inward things she had always felt without knowing their meaning. For the first time in her life she asked herself what all of it might mean: her girlhood, and her youth, and her marriage, and the everlasting thirst of her soul, and a happiness she had scarcely touched before it shrank from between her hands and vanished forever? And the unceasing moan of her heart, as though a serpent were gnawing at its cords; and her journeyings to Beirut and Damascus and Zahle; and the visits to monasteries, the vows to the saints, the offering up of prayers? What might all that mean? Was this life? And if that was life, what did it want of her? That she should conceive and bear a "bridegroom" to please her husband and her husband's people? She was with child now — why then was she not content? But how had she conceived?..

Jamila would carry her thoughts to this point, then return to where she had begun. However she turned, she felt as if she were walking in an enchanted circle of thoughts that pursued her like the ghosts of dead hopes. How often she tried to break out of that circle, and could not! How often she tried to escape from herself and plunge headlong once more into the wide sea of life — into love of her husband and her mother, into the fond attentions of her mother-in-law and her father-in-law — but to no avail. Her husband's kisses had become a poison seeping through her whole body, and her mother-in-law's endearments a lance severing the arteries of her heart.

She understood that she had become like a leaf the winds had torn from its tree and carried off to strange, far places. She understood that she was a stranger in her husband's house and in her mother's house and in all her town — nay, in the whole world. And this estrangement of the spirit pressed upon her consciousness every minute and every second, until life was poisoned for her, and the world was poisoned.

The tenth of May, 1911, was one of those spring days in Lebanon known to whoever has lived in the high places of that mountain — days to which no pen has yet appeared that could do justice in description.

The sun was sinking at its leisure toward the Mediterranean when Aziz al-Kirbaj came home from his work and did not find his wife sitting on the steps as was her habit. He asked his mother about her, and she answered that she had gone out for a stroll an hour before and had not come back!.. Then she added that she might have looked in on some of the neighbors on her way.

Aziz was not satisfied with this explanation, for he knew that of late his wife had been shunning people and their company as one shuns vipers and scorpions. So he went straight into her chamber to see whether she had put on one of her visiting dresses, and satisfied himself that she was in her house clothes. But this time he did not find in her room the order and exactness he was used to. And while he was asking himself where his "qarqura" could be, his eye fell on a folded paper lying on the marble slab before the mirror. He took it up, and in it was written: "You will find me under the oak. — Jamila."

Aziz read those words and flew with the speed of lightning to the oak. He knew every branch of that tree as he knew the ten fingers of his hands. It was the selfsame oak under which he used to sit with Jamila in days gone by — the days of their intoxication with first love and the happiness of married life. An age-old oak standing on the crest of a knoll, at whose foot ran a spring of pure sweet water; around it many trees of differing ages, but it the oldest tree in that neighborhood — nay, in the whole town and its environs.

Aziz reached the oak and stood rooted like a man struck out of his senses, not knowing whether to weep or to laugh.

"Qarqura! Qarqura!" Before him lay his wife on the ground, stretched on her right side, wearing her wedding dress — the very dress in which she had stood at his side eleven years before, in front of Father Boulos. On her head was a wreath of flowers. Her hair, dark as agate, was loosed over her left shoulder, one braid of it circling her neck, and her fingers propped her right cheek.

"Jamila! Jamila!" Jamila did not answer.

He bent over her, a faint hope still fluttering in his heart that she might perhaps be asleep. He took her head between his hands, and instantly drew back and screamed in terror, for he found the "qarqura" a lifeless corpse.

When his senses returned and he drew near her again, he glimpsed among the folds of her dress, upon her breast, his picture and hers in their wedding clothes. And he found close by her a paper flung down on the grass, as though she had tried to tear it up but death had come between her and the deed. He opened that paper with a trembling hand, and this is what he read in it:

"To my beloved Qarquri, who is beyond all price!

"On a day like this, Father Boulos bound us with the bonds of wedlock. And today — eleven years having passed — death parts us. Shall we meet again, if what they say of the life to come is true? Then you will find me waiting for you on the threshold of that world, my arms open to receive you and my lips made ready for your kiss. And you will hear my question once more: How are you, ya Qarqur? Ah, Aziz! If only you were beside me now! Now, standing in the presence of death, I want to thank you for every kiss you gave me with love and longing. I want to thank you for every word and every gesture and every moment by which you made life dear to me. Minutes passed over me that made me forget there were pains and sorrows in the world; those minutes were among the gifts of your love, and I thank you for them, O Aziz! I dreamed dreams that made me think myself in heaven and not on earth; those dreams were among the breezes of your love, and I thank you for them, O Aziz! I tasted the taste of the happiness of paradise; that happiness was among the fruits of your love, and I thank you for it, O Aziz! And I — what did I offer you in return? I offered you a body clean, beautiful, and pure; in a word, I consecrated my very self to you. And what fault is it of mine if my offering did not match your gifts? You would not be satisfied with me alone; you were not content with Jamila 'by herself' — while I accepted you alone, and none other in all the world. You were to me the all in all. My happiness was made complete by you and by your love; but your happiness was not made complete by my love. You did not show me your true self at the first, but the days uncovered for me what had been hidden from my eyes. I thought you happy in my love, as I was happy to the end in your love alone. And how bitter was the hour in which I discovered my error! Do you remember our talk about 'the bridegroom'? Do you remember when I asked you whether your happiness was incomplete without children? Do you remember your answer? Even so, I tried to deceive myself. I tried to persuade myself that your love of children was like other men's love of them, and that your love for me would stay as it was, whether God granted us a 'bridegroom' or granted us none. And how bitter the truth which the happenings of the years that followed laid bare to me!

"When you had made certain there was no hope of my bearing you children, you cast me out of your life like a date-stone. Nor were you content with that: you loathed me and hated me as though I were a viper's venom. You began with smoking, then with drink, then with cursing me and beating me. Do you remember when you struck me because I refused to go to church wearing all my jewelry? Ah! How sweet were those blows from your hand! Tell me, in truth: did pity never enter your heart as you watched me move about the house like a deaf and dumb ghost, watching the edifice of my happiness sink down before my eyes, and finding myself a stranger whichever way I turned? Had you forgotten that I was still flesh and blood like you, and that I had not lost the tender feeling of women? Had you hardened until no room at all was left in your heart for tenderness? Ah, how many times in those minutes did I wish you would look into the depths of my soul, as you used once to look into its hidden places with your burning eyes, and see what was stirring there!

"You do not know the pains of a wound in the heart. And the first wound in my heart I took from your hand. It was my discovery that your love for me, from beginning to end, was never a love for my own person — was never a love for me as a human being independent in her existence and her own being in this world. You loved me as the mother of your children to come. You loved me as one who would leave you offspring before you died. To you that is natural; to me it was bitterer than death. When I reflected that I had no worth in your eyes for my own sake — that my body and my soul had no value in your hands save as a machine for breeding — I would beg death for myself. You do not understand that. To this day you do not grasp that woman is a human being, and that she has a worth contained in herself, independent of her children. I found in you the completion of my life; but the completion of your life was not bounded by me — it passed beyond me. And that is what pained me and wounded my heart. I loved you before the marriage, I loved you after it, and I love you still. Only for one single minute did I hate you: when you raised your hand and struck me — though I remember that incident now with ease, even with pleasure, and I wish you were with me to do it again.

"Did you think me an anomaly against nature's law? Did you suppose that I, a woman, hated children and the rearing of children? Ah, if you knew how many nights I dreamed a baby lay on my arm! I would see him even in my waking hours, sucking at my breast. I would hear the beating of his little heart, and see his little hands playing in the air. How many times I saw him toddling before me in the courtyard! How many times I heard him calling me: Mama!

"How many times I sat beside his little bed and sang him to sleep, gazing into his angelic face and his heavenly eyes!.. But you were blind to all that. How can you not understand that if I refused to sacrifice my happiness — a thing real and existing — for the sake of children still in the womb of the future, that is, for the sake of what did not exist, I was not thereby declaring any hatred of children? Does not the proverb say: a bird in the hand is better than ten on the tree? Even so, I gave myself over to your will like a slave. You denied me the pleasure of working in the house for fear of people's talk, and I submitted. You hated me because I had borne you no bridegroom, and I loaded upon myself more than it could bear of visits to doctors and saints and monasteries. You do not know how many tears I shed in my solitudes and on my journeys! You do not know how my heart dripped blood when I saw you flee from me and turn your eyes away from me, as though I were a yellow wind! Your mother and your father longed for Azrael to snatch me away from you, that you might take yourself a 'child-bearing' wife. And here I am, striking myself out of your life; perhaps you will find a better and more fruitful one than I. I was clinging to the glimmer of a faint hope, as a drowning man clings to a straw. I bore anguish and pain and abasement and insult, saying to myself: Perhaps... I might yet bear you a bridegroom by a miracle from heaven. I thought that if I obtained that, I should win back the shadow of your former love and our first happiness. And the very strength of my desire to please you and win back your love drove me to commit a sin which, though you might forgive it me, I shall never forgive myself. Death will part us soon — why then should I fear to let you know of it?

"I carry now in my womb a little soul and a little body. It is the babe that brought the smile back to your face and the light back to your eyes. But it is not of your flesh and your blood...

"I sacrificed my pride and the purity of my body to obtain him, to content you; but I have understood now that what I did is a sin past forgiving. I do not want to buy your love with deceit and adultery... yet when I sinned, I sinned for your sake alone...

"I feel the movements of this unhappy child between my ribs now. But they will soon be stilled. The beating of his little heart will stop when the heartbeats of his adulterous mother stop. Who is his father? Does it matter to you to know? Would it lighten my sin?

"It is enough for you to know that he is not your son; perhaps it will please you, then, that I die and take him to death with me. But know, Aziz, that the whore is you, not I. And yet I am a criminal in your eyes and the eyes of the world — is my killing of myself a crime as well? Or had I not died before now? Was I not dead all these years in which you left me alone, a stranger, broken in soul and heart? And who is my killer — is it not you? Now there is no calling back what is past. The Aziz whom my soul loved at the first is gone, never to return. What purpose is left me, then, in living?

"Why do I talk of all these things? In a minute this hand will stiffen, these thoughts will melt away, and the beating of this heart will fall silent forever. See — the sun is leaning toward its setting. And I long for life to leave me before the light leaves the branches of the oak. In the oak above my head there is a choir of goldfinches. How sweet their warbling! How pleasant the murmur of the brook and the rustling of the oak leaves!

"Do you remember how we used to come and sit here when first we knew love?

"Ah, if you were beside me now, that I might press you to my breast if only once before I take leave of this world! Here our love was born, and here I bury it with me.

"In my hand now is our picture in the wedding clothes. How stately you were, and how gracious, O Aziz, on that day! How handsome your mustache, how deep the magic of your eyes, how sweet the freshness of your face! Ah, if only he might come back — the Aziz of my girlhood, the Aziz of my love, the Aziz of my life and my happiness!..

"How sweet life was with you, O Aziz! I thank you, I thank you, I thank you for every drop of the happiness I sipped from the spring of your love, and I beg your pardon for every wrong that ever came from me toward you, whether in word or in deed or in thought. I die with your name between my lips... Can you bury this picture with me?.. I want to sleep my last sleep with the picture of my beloved Aziz, to whom my soul has been bound since the day I first understood the meaning of love... I have nothing to ask of you but that you pardon my failings... and I have no bequest to leave with you except my mother. My mother. My mother... my darling mother! What will you do, I wonder, when your Jamila is hidden from you forever?..

"If you shed upon my grave one tear only... a single tear... I shall be grateful to you even beyond the resurrection... Farewell, my beloved Qarquri!. Farewell, my Qarquri who is beyond all price.

"Your qarqura: Jamila."

A friend from the village of Aziz al-Kirbaj told me that he had seen him not long ago in New York, and asked him whether he had married again. He answered with a sigh, and a catch in his voice: "There is no Jamila after Jamila!"