Writings / Fiction: Sonia Saikaley

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Jasmine Season on Hamra Street

(Novel excerpt)

Amal, Anzjabal, Lebanon 1965

I danced on Hamra Street. A white jasmine flower was in my right hand while I twirled around to the songs pouring out of the stereos from the outdoor cafés. When I danced like this, I took quick glances at my parents, making sure their backs were turned because I knew they’d frown and tell me to stop embarrassing them. It just wasn’t right for a girl to be acting so silly out in public. For my parents, image was everything. But I couldn’t resist dancing out in the open air, the sweeping street filled with trendy shops so different from Anzjabal, the village where I was born and raised. Jasmine bushes were everywhere. In front of sidewalk cafés. In front of pastel-coloured apartment houses. The powerful scent was so intoxicating that my limbs just started moving during jasmine season on Hamra Street.

It was a rare treat to visit Beirut. Hamra was my favourite area of that city just because it had a lot of action. It was very different from my mountain village where I mostly stayed. In Anzjabal, I sometimes slept outside with the goats as if I were their protector, the lonely goatherdess with a wooden staff and a stained white buttoned-up shirt tucked into baggy trousers that were held up by a worn leather belt. With the goats softly bleating, I’d close my eyes and drift to sleep, my body on the side, knees drawn close to my chest and other times, I’d stay wide awake, flat on my back, hands behind my head, eyes staring up at the red rooftops, which appeared a translucent pink under the moonlight, and I’d sing Sabah’s songs to the animals. Some of the goats bleated along, but mostly they stayed silent, only the crunching of weeds could be heard over my voice which was neither beautiful nor striking but I could carry a tune.

And I could dance. If I’d had proper voice training, I could’ve sung between the Corinthian columns of Baalbeck like Sabah in her apricot dress. When I was about ten, my parents had taken my sister Dunya and me to see the famous singer while she performed at the festival. I remember standing in the crowd, gazing at the magnificent ruins of the Temples of Bacchus and Jupiter, tracing the stones with my fingers and feeling carvings of poppies and grapes. Babba had put his hand on top of mine and explained that worshippers had placed grapes and poppies in the grooves of the stone. “Can you feel them?” he asked, his breath smelled of garlic. I wanted to reach up and rub my nose but didn’t because Babba was happy that day. He didn’t often smile and now his mouth was wide open, showing teeth half-black from lack of brushing. He often ate the thick molasses Mama would make during the summer and fall seasons and all those years of dipping bread into this sweetness had rotted his teeth. I let Babba guide my hand across the dusty orange stone and when I closed my eyes, as he instructed, I could feel the engravings and then with my eyes still closed, Sabah’s beautiful voice rose above the applause of the crowd and I no longer felt Babba’s hand on my own.

But now I was confined mostly to my bedroom, so I rarely sang to the goats or slept out in the fields. Dancing on Hamra Street was a distant memory. I found myself wishing I were in Beirut instead of here. Lying in my bed, I wore baggy trousers, my grandfather’s old grey sherwal; they were the only thing that felt comfortable lately. My grandfather had died several years ago and when Mama had gone through his belongings, she was about to throw out these trousers but I begged her to let me keep them, “Mama, please. I need something to remember Jido.” I thought of all the times I’d followed my grandfather to the olive groves and watched him harvest, hitting the trees, making the olives tumble to the ground where I knelt and picked up the green fruit before tossing it into a basket. We didn’t talk a lot but there was something comforting being in his presence. He never criticized my thick curly hair that would often fly wild and messy in the wind and he never said I looked like a boy because I hardly wore skirts and preferred exploring the village to learning how to cook.

I didn’t cook much these days either. From my bed, I sat up and watched the goats roaming the mountainside, my uncle walking alongside them. Babba and Uncle Samir were the masters of these goats and sometimes I was envious with the way Babba took better care of them than he did me. My uncle had never married because he was slow. That’s what the other villagers said over cups of ahweh. The strong scent of the Turkish coffee made me gag and I hated sipping it when I had to visit relatives. But the visits had stopped a while ago. I had been confined to my small bedroom for months. The fig and olive seasons had passed and I witnessed all these changes while I sat up in my bed and stared out my window. Through that window, I saw how the villagers went about their daily lives, planting seeds for the lubieh, koosa, eggplants and plucking figs from branches that were as old as the oldest living person of this place. His name was Issa and he was ninety-eight but the other evening I had heard a visitor say to my parents that the old man had died.

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