Free Burned alive by Souad Page B

wasn’t present, of course, at the family meetings, and there is nothing in my memory to justify what I’m saying today, but I remember perfectly my father on the terrace with the basket of stones, throwing them one after the other at Assad’s head. And that armoire that Assad had wedged against the door of his room to keep my father from entering. Assad perhaps wanted the whole house to himself. He behaved then as if it belonged to him. I think my father didn’t want him to have any authority in our house; he felt Assad was taking over his place and his money. My father would often tell my brother that he was still a child. In our culture, it’s a serious humiliation to tell a man he is still a child.
    Assad rebelled all the more because he was very sure of himself and much too spoiled by us. He was the prince of the house. Assad would shout: “This is my house!” My father wouldn’t put up with that. People in the village were asking what foolish thing Fatma might have done, why she went back so often to her father’s house. Perhaps she’d been seen with another man? Gossip spreads fast. They said bad things about her but it wasn’t true at all, she was a good girl. Unfortunately, if someone says just once that a woman is bad, then the whole village takes it up and it’s over for her, she has brought the evil eye on herself.
    My mother was unhappy about all of this. Sometimes she would try to calm my father down when he would go after Assad: “Why are you doing this? Let him be!”
    “I want to kill him! If you try to protect him, you’ll get the same!”
    I saw Fatma lying on the ground and my brother kicking her in the back. One day her eye was red and her face all blue. But you couldn’t say or do anything. Between the father’s violence and the son’s, there was nothing for the rest of us to do but hide to avoid being beaten ourselves. Did my brother love his wife? For me love was a mystery. In our culture, you talk of marriage, not of love. Of obedience and total submission, not of a loving relationship between a man and a woman. Only of the obligatory sexual relations with a virgin girl who had been bought for her husband. Where is love?
    But I do remember one woman of our village, who lived in the nicest house with her husband and her children. They were known for being rich and having a luxurious house. Their children went to the school. It was a big family because they always married between cousins. They had tiling everywhere; even the path to the outside was tiled. In the other houses, the path was just pebbles or sand, or sometimes it was tarred. In front of their house was a beautiful path, with trees on either side. There was a man who looked after the garden and the courtyard, which was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence that shone like gold. You could see this house from a distance. In our culture, we love everything that shines and shimmers.
    If a man has a gold tooth, he must be rich! And if you’re rich, everyone must see it. This house was modern and quite new, magnificent from the outside. There were always two or three cars parked in front. I never went inside, of course, but when I passed with my sheep, it made me dream. The owner’s name was Hassan. He was a tall gentleman, very tan, and elegant. They were very close, he and his wife, you always saw them together. She was pregnant with twins and was going to give birth. Unfortunately, the birth went badly, the twins lived, but the lady died. Peace to her soul because she was very young. That is the only burial that I ever saw in the village. What struck and moved me was that her whole family was crying behind the stretcher where the body rested, and her husband more than anyone. In his grief he was tearing his long white traditional shirt as he walked behind his wife’s body. And her mother-in-law, too, was tearing her dress. I saw the naked breasts of this elderly woman who fell facedown on the torn pieces of cloth. I had never