Chicago, where Danana rented a new big off-campus apartment. Marwa started her new life enthusiastically and sincerely, hoping wholeheartedly to make her husband happy, to organize his life and support him until he made it to the top. But the sunny picture, from early on, had a few dark spots, and now, after a full year of marriage, Marwa was all alone at home, events running in her mind like a movie that she kept playing time after time, blaming herself harshly for missing signs in her husband’s behaviors from the beginning or perhaps noticing but ignoring them to preserve a rosy, unreal outlook. The dreams came crashing down, smashed against the rocks of reality, breaking into smithereens like pieces of glass.
The problems began with the suit incident. Danana had worn a very fancy and handsome white Versace suit for the wedding. Afterward, while organizing her husband’s clothes in the closet, Marwa couldn’t find the suit. She was extremely alarmed and it occurred to her that it had been stolen or lost on the plane. When he returned from school she asked him, but he remained silent, fixing her with a sly and hesitant glance, then said as if in jest, “The suit is American aid.”
She asked him to elaborate, so he said, feigning holding back laughter to hide his embarrassment, “In America you have the right to return any merchandise that you bought, if you also return the receipt, within a month of the purchase.”
“I still don’t understand. What happened to the wedding suit?”
“Nothing. I thought, I am only going to wear it one night in my life, even though it is prohibitively expensive. So I kept the receipt, returned it, and got my money back.”
“Isn’t that some kind of fraud? To buy the suit, wear it for your wedding, then return it to the store?”
“Apparel companies in America are colossal and their budgets are in the millions; they would not be affected by the price of a suit. Besides, we are not in a Muslim country. I’ve consulted several trusted religious scholars and they assured me that according to the canon law, America is considered an abode of infidels and not an abode of Islam. There is also a well-known principle in jurisprudence that says ‘necessity makes the forbidden permissible.’ Therefore, my need of the price of the suit permits me to return it to the store according to the shari‘a.”
Marwa thought his line of thinking preposterous and almost asked him, Who told you that Islam commands us to steal from non-Muslims? But she also tried to find an excuse for him. She said to herself, I have to remember that he’s not as rich as my father and he does need the price of the suit. That incident passed and she would have forgotten it had not a series of unfortunate events taken place.
Danana began to complain that the scholarship stipend was too low to cover their living expenses. He repeated his complaint several times, but Marwa ignored it (perhaps in response to a mysterious internal warning). But it didn’t take Danana long to move from innuendo to a more explicit question. He asked her directly, “Can I borrow from your father a sum of money every month and pay him back when we return to Egypt?”
She looked at him in silence and he continued, laughing insolently, “I can write him an IOU, if he wants me to, so he can be reassured about his money.”
Marwa felt shocked and she began to see more clearly what her husband was really like. In spite of that, she called her father and asked him for financial help. Why? Perhaps she was hanging on to a last, flimsy thread to save herself from disappointment. She tried to convince herself that he was going through hard times because he was studying in a foreign country, that it was natural for him to be in financial straits, and that asking her father for help should not be held against him. She was surprised that her father accepted the request calmly, as if he had expected it, and began to send her a thousand dollars on the first of every month, which Danana then took from her without any compunction, even expressing impatience if it was late. Money in itself was not what worried Marwa. She was willing to contribute to the household expenses even more than that because it had been instilled in her while growing up that the model of a good wife was one who stood by her husband to the best of her ability and resources. By sheer coincidence, however, she found in Danana’s pocket a bank transfer indicating that he was paid a large sum of money in addition to the amount of the stipend. At that point she could not control herself. She asked him as anger gathered on her face like clouds on an overcast day, “Why did you hide from me your extra salary? And why do you make us ask my father for help when we don’t need it?”
Danana was taken aback for a little while, and then he regained his brazenness. “I didn’t tell you about the extra salary because no occasion had arisen. Besides, as a wife you are not entitled, by religion, to know your husband’s salary. I can provide proof of that from jurisprudence. As for the small sum that your father helps us with, I think it is quite natural because God has given him a lot of money whereas we are beginning our own life and we must save. Saving is a great virtue to which we are enjoined by the noblest of creation, the chosen one, prayers and peace be upon him.”
Marwa was naturally not convinced this time. His miserliness revealed itself as clearly as the sun on a hot cloudless day. She began to notice how his face grew ashen if he had to pay anything whatsoever, and he displayed utmost care, to the point of panic, when he counted his money and put it very slowly in his wallet, which he then interred in his inside pocket, as if it were its final resting place. Little by little she was beset by disquieting apprehensions; she was very far from her family, separated from them by the Atlantic Ocean and several thousand miles. She was lonely and a complete stranger in Chicago. No one knew her and no one cared about her. Her poor English made it impossible for her to communicate with people on the street. In this place away from home, she had no one but Danana. Could she really rely on him? What would happen if she were to fall ill or be injured in an accident? This person that she had married would not take care of her at all but would throw her into the street if she were going to cost him ten dollars. That was the truth. He was a selfish miser who thought only of himself. Perhaps now, better than at any other time, she understood why he had chosen to marry her. He had already begun to nibble at her wealth and undoubtedly had plans, after her father’s death, to seize her inheritance; perhaps even now he was calculating precisely how much that would be.
The problem, however, was not confined to his miserliness and selfishness. There was another loathsome feeling that was weighing heavily on her and getting worse every day, a very private and embarrassing matter that Marwa could not confide even to those closest to her. She even blamed herself for merely thinking about it, and yet it was painful to her and caused her great discomfort. To put it bluntly, she hated the way her husband had intercourse with her. He would come at her in a strange manner, attacking her without any preliminaries. She would be sitting, watching television in the bedroom or coming out of the bathroom, when he would pounce on her, falling on her suddenly with his erection just as adolescents do with housemaids. His crude ways caused her panic and anxiety in addition to feelings of humiliation. It also led to painful lacerations in her body. One night she hinted to him what she was suffering, avoiding looking at his face for sheer shame. But he laughed sarcastically and said, somewhat boastfully, “Try and get used to that, because my nature is strong and violent. That’s how all men are in our family. My maternal uncle in the village got married and had children after the age of eighty.”
She felt frustrated because he didn’t understand her and she couldn’t make this any clearer to him. She wished she could ask him to read the eloquent Qur’anic expression enjoining Muslim husbands to approach their wives gently and gradually so he would understand what she wanted to say but was too shy to say it. She was surprised later to find that he was using an ointment with a pungent smell and she rejected him, pushing him away from her and jumping out of bed, now doubly angry at him. She began to avoid being with him, using all kinds of pretexts, until he attacked her one night. She repelled him hard and jumped away. He shouted angrily, panting with desire and from the effort, “Fear God, Marwa. I’m warning you; God’s punishment will be severe. What you are doing is forbidden in the canon law with the consensus of religious scholars. The Messenger of God, peace and prayer be upon him, has been quoted correctly saying that the woman who refuses her husband in bed shall spend the night cursed by the angels.”
He was stretched out on the bed in front of her as she stood in her nightclothes. She got very angry and fixed him with a hateful and contemptuous glance. She almost replied that Islam would never force a woman to be intimate with a man as disgusting as he was; that the Prophet, peace be upon him, ordered a woman to be divorced from her husband just because she wasn’t pleased with him. Marwa became so incensed that, for the first time, she thought of divorce. Let him divorce her and let her go back to Egypt. A divorce is a much more merciful fate than being violated every night in this disgusting manner. “Divorce me, now.” She became so obsessed with the sentence that she saw it written in her mind. But for one reason or another (she tried to figure that out later but was never able to), as soon as she was about to reply, as soon as she opened her lips to utter the fateful sentence, mysterious and contradictory feelings came over her, forcing her to be silent. Then she found herself approaching him slowly, as if hypnotized, and began to take off her clothes, coldly and neutrally, one piece at a time, until she stood in front of him totally naked. When he attacked her she did not resist.
That night a new phase started between them. She started to yield her body to him with the utmost
