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men don’t cry
increasingly frequent. Before
that, we’d never heard any
doors slam in the house. But
then came a period when they
slammed so often that my
father, fuming, took the door
to the girls’ bedroom off its
hinges and hung up a curtain
in its place.
“Now trying slamming the
curtain!”
Mymothereventhoughtabout
having Dounia exorcised. In
the end, she banned her from
wasting time with that Julie of
ill omen, who was the cause
of so much trouble.
“She’s cursed, that girl.
Cursed!”
After her parents’ divorce,
Jul ie tr ied to commi t
suicide, and everyone in the
neighbourhood felt sorry for
her. Everyone, that is, but
one.
My mother wore her sardonic
smile in full view of Dounia.
“Now do you see? If your
friend Julie’s life was as good
as you make it out to be, she
wouldn’t have wanted to die!”
Heavy silence, a hate-filled
stare. Dounia tossed her hair
and, for the finishing touch,
stormed off to the bedroom
with no door.
“You’ve got no heart, mum.
No heart.”
If there had been a door,
Dounia would have slammed it
again, for sure. It was a scene
worthy of the Mexican soaps
dubbed into Arabic that my
mother can’t get enough of. To
be honest, Dounia and mum
knocked spots off the drama
queens in the telenovelas…
In the years that followed,
the situation with Dounia
only grew worse. The outside