Story of the Month: The Fountain of Salvation

When the twentieth century reached its midpoint, "Salah" had lived forty years of his life, in the course of which his manhood had come to completion, his confidence in life had been shaken, and he had lost his faith in people. Yet three disappointments were, in his view, the most painful of the lessons he had received — with a fighter's patience and a thinker's stubbornness. Salah counts these disappointments off for me, saying:

— The first disappointment came some years ago, the day my family forced upon me marriage to... a girl I had not known before the week of the wedding... When I protested, they threatened to deprive me of my inheritance and of the paternal blessing, so I submitted. And I consoled myself, saying: "Marriage is fate's allotment! Perhaps this lot is one of God's gifts that come without glad tidings before them, as He deals with the saints and the holy ones!"

And it turned out that this girl who became my wife gathered together, on top of her ignorance, everything else I detest in women.

He rests a little, to recover his composure and the clearness of his voice. Then he says:

— As for the second disappointment, it is daughter to the first, for it is a branch of that same stock — I was blessed with children in an abundance I had no need of. Especially in the grim days the world passed through before the Second World War, and the crises that followed it, which in our country were harsher than the crisis of the war itself — not to mention the catastrophes we now await, if it is true that the theater of war this time will be the Middle East itself, rather than an exhausted Europe, poor in oil!

And more galling still, my daughters came out exact copies of their mother — except for intelligence, which they inherited from me, no doubt!!

And Salah laughs at his own joke, making a show of lightening things for himself and for me, as he recounts his confessions to me like a brother I have loved since we were companions in boyhood and partners in youth. Then he continues:

— And the third disappointment is... in what every human being can feel for himself, in the society created by the war... or rather by the successive wars our wretched generation has witnessed, from the Balkan War down to the last war. You will find among people no one faithful, and no faithfulness. Even the friend — whom we agreed to call by that beloved name — has become an ancient legend, now that self-interest has taken the place of every human feeling and every spiritual inclination!

With these words Salah closed his fortieth year; and the clock of "Big Ben" was striking twelve in "London" — we listened to it on the radio, and each of us set by its strokes the wristwatch that had accompanied him a full quarter of a century.

Then I rise and take leave of my friend, and he goes in alone to his bedchamber, where his wife lay surrendered to a deep sleep. The man casts upon her a glance into which he pours all the regrets in his soul. Then he advances with slow steps toward the electric switch to put out the light, veiling from his eyes what wounds them, and casting the whole of the past into the darkness of oblivion. Had not the clock struck, announcing the coming of the first year of the new half-century?.. Why, then, should Salah not nourish in himself the dreams of the hoped-for tomorrow, instead of chewing over the pains of a vanished yesterday?...

And the man murmurs, as though listening to a voice rising from the depths of his own soul:

— The crime is your mother's and your father's crime, Salah! It was they who drove you into this marriage... True! But your bowing to tradition without reflection makes you an accomplice in that crime!

And the night passes without his tasting sleep. He had hoped to spend this night at a merry evening party arranged by certain acquaintances and friends. But his wife refused to accompany him to it, and forbade him to go alone — for the simple reason that one of the young ladies invited to that party admired Salah, and the wife had one day seen her smile at him an innocent smile.

- 2 -

Morning breaks, and the never-ending story of life begins anew. Birds singing, light streaming, children laughing and clamoring, a street waking so that its dust rises and its curses ring out, mingled with the cries of the peddlers, the honking of motorcars, and the roar of trains. Only moments pass before a quarrel of a new kind begins between Salah and his wife. The wife says mockingly:

— You told me you are beloved of "the ladies." Fine! I renounce my right in you in their favor — go to them this minute!

And the husband answers, soothing the rancorous wife's temper:

— Woman, be guided by God! We are at the opening of the year! Be guided by God.

— But, but — I no longer believe a single word of yours, after what I saw with my own eyes.

— I have committed no offense, my dear! What is my fault if she smiled at me, by the rules of politeness, and I smiled at her, in observance of those same rules of politeness?

— A smile and politeness! You say this — you, the cultivated man? Have you not read Shawqi's verse: "A glance, then a smile..."

— I know that verse by heart, and all the other verses of the poem... But there are four steps after the smile... I have not climbed them, and I will not climb them!

— You won't climb them — and who guarantees me that your words are true?

— My honor!

— What honor have you men?

— And what do you know of men?

— And what do you know of women?

At that, Salah falls silent, embarrassed — how often has he put that question to himself and found no answer for it. But the wife does not retreat; she presses on: — Why don't you answer?

— My dear, we are at the opening of the new year, and I am not prepared to sour my first day, of the first year, of the new half-century.

— These are superstitions and delusions!

— And so is what you imagine every time I smile at a woman's face...

— I don't want you smiling at anyone but me.

— Very well, my lady — but what is my fault if a smile escapes me in spite of myself?

At this point the argument broke off — not because it had run long, but because one of the children came asking his mother to help him undo his belt... before going into the bathroom.

- 3 -

Salah noticed that the state of mind his wife displays, whenever she starts a new quarrel, had become a diseased state; but the specialists in psychological medicine have not yet reached this spot of the world, and he does not want to put her into a hospital for outright mental illness. Still, he once made bold, after seeing her pick a quarrel deliberately for the third time in a single month, to ask his wife:

— A small question, my dear: are you in... your special monthly condition?

The woman flares up violently at this question and answers:

— What are you saying? I am not mad! No — I will not have you go into this subject with me.

— And why do you get angry like this? I am asking a... medical, legitimate question.

— No medicine and no legitimacy! I am in full possession of my wits. Every time I ask you why you were late past six o'clock, you answer me with vague answers. I have come to suspect you!

— My dear, do not be angry and do not suspect. I am a respectable man, with honorable social relations, and it cannot be expected of me that I return from my work straight home "like a schoolboy" coming from school.

— Of course — you are a great "professor"!
— That is the very truth, and it is guarantee enough for you and restraint enough on me, standing between me and corruption, were I one of its devotees... And you know better than anyone how far I keep from vices, and from excess in anything harmful...

— I know you don't smoke — so why

do you go to the café, where the idlers sit smoking!

— The café is a club... in its origin, and there are persons I cannot meet except at the café. So I go to see them... I am a social man, and my very work obliges me to keep in touch with people.

— You go to feast your eyes... on the dancing-girls and the artistes!

— And what harm is there in that?

And here a new storm begins, declared by the jealous wife, and it does not die down until Salah says jokingly:

— To me you are sweeter... than the artistes — what have I to do with them?! You are a rich, hot dish... and they are insipid, cold fare....

And then the wife softens — she who resembles her mother, Indian in origin, in her vehemence, especially whenever jealousy blazes up within her, so that she foams and froths like... a military commander, or a police chief new to his post.

Perhaps it was the fatherly affection of which the wife had been deprived, because of the entrenched hatred between her mother and her father; and the mother's tenderness she never enjoyed, because of the weakness of that mother, who was in truth a "head servant," not a wife and mistress of a house...

And then the deprivation and repression that surrounded her childhood — all of this stamped the girl with a peculiar stamp, and robbed her of the elements of the feminine personality: graciousness, delicacy, modesty, and gentleness...

And Salah strikes his forehead with the flat of his palm, muttering between his teeth:

— Ah, would that I had died before this!

But then he catches himself, with the optimism of a man who does not resign himself to the fates nor bow to their contrariness, and says:

— If in all these years I have failed to reform my wife, then the least I can do is to work toward winning for woman... her rights, so that my daughter may live tomorrow a life better than her mother's!

And new horizons open before Salah whenever he thinks of these rights, which some men still begrudge woman. If they were wise, they would see that their own interest requires granting them, before there comes a time when they will be forced to surrender rights of their own.

And Salah says to his comrades, who share his view but favor waiting until woman's readiness to receive those rights is complete:

— The question is not a question of rights, and of perfecting the readiness to exercise them... The question is... bringing woman to feel responsibility. Yes, my brothers... woman must feel her responsibility as a human being, as a mother, and as a wife; and then the petty things will vanish which women usually cling to, to the ruin of men's lives... for their personalities will then be complete, and they will not attach themselves to husks and paints, nor will fashions enslave them, nor counterfeit sentiments lead them astray!

And Salah glances right and left as he speaks on the subject, as though inspecting the place to make sure it is empty of... his wife, whom he pictures as one of the millions of Eastern women who, on the whole, are fit to be neither wives nor mothers. They are prolific bearers of children — a thing which does not suffice, by itself, to set the Eastern society of tomorrow, in the second half of the twentieth century, upon sound foundations.

- 4 -

And on one of the nights of this past winter, in late January — through which the warmth of autumn lingered on, until one might have taken it for the warmth of spring — Salah's wife said to him:

— Tomorrow I am not prepared to cook for you. So arrange for your lunch at the restaurant!

— And you — won't you eat?

— No!

— And the children?

— They will eat dry scraps from what is on hand in the house!!

And the man wondered at this new step taken by his wife, who had grown up in a milieu that concedes to the husband superiority and precedence. But it only strengthened his belief that... a "psychological crisis" comes over his wife at the beginning of every month, or at its close; and that the thinness of her education, and the inferiority complexes within her, prevent that control of the nerves which is incumbent upon every civilized person — so that she breaks loose upon those around her with evils she creates out of nothing! And Salah says to me, closing his confessions:

— Woman... will not be set right until women enjoy their legitimate rights... those rights whose exercise will raise them to the level of men, who exercise rights and feel the responsibilities that follow. And there is no way but this road to salvation!!