Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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

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