An excerpt from “A Grave with Every Step”
By Suzanne Ibrahim
She is an utterly exhausting woman, and I am as weary as a city after a bombardment.
Julia has taken up residence in my soul, my heart, and my mind, yet she never settles, like a bird that cannot bear a cage, even one made of gold. Although years have passed since we first met, although we have shared so much love, she is still reluctant to take that conventional, serious step: marriage.
I have never known a woman in our part of the world-and I have known plenty of women-who runs from the prospect of marrying the man she loves as Julia does. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I am so deeply attached to her. Every other girl seems to pursue the ring as though it were the ultimate prize, rushing to trap a man in the cage of marriage. Julia alone flees whenever that cage comes near.
Her boldness unsettles me at times, and frightens me at others. She is a woman passionately in love with freedom, as though she had spent an entire lifetime in the depths of a prison and, upon emerging, clung to her liberty as if it were her last breath of oxygen.
Once, in a moment of anger, I accused her of having a phobia of freedom. She did not take offence. Instead, she replied with her characteristic cool sarcasm:
“Better that than a phobia of submission!”
Ours is a blazing passion. Her body has become my temple. I adore it; worship it, like a priest offering his own heart as a sacrifice before her statue. And whenever love overflowed between us, my longing to secure it with a ring and a marriage grew stronger, while her stubborn refusal only hardened.
“Julia, don’t you want to marry me?”
“But we’re already husband and wife, aren’t we?”
“Spiritually and physically, yes. But socially, religiously, morally…”
“Oh, spare me that same old refrain! If you’re looking for a wife to bear you children, go and find her somewhere else.”
At the height of her anger, she shouted:
“I don’t want a marriage contract that makes me your lawful property. I do not want a “mahr”, a bridal payment that gives you the right to sexual access to my body. I can make you a god and worship you in the hours of love, but outside those hours, you are neither a god nor a master. This marriage contract has all too often become a contract that sanctions rape.”
“But people need rules to govern their relationships, Julia. You can’t simply sweep aside customs and traditions that have endured for thousands of years.”
She answered with her usual stubbornness:
“I can make an exception of myself. I do not want children. I don’t dare bring another human being into this hideous age.”
I know how much she loves children, how her face lights up whenever she passes a child in the street. But her sense of responsibility weighs heavily upon her: to bring a new life into a world torn apart seems almost a crime.
She would say:
“As long as we’re not going to have children, there’s no need for courts or documents. Marriage is nothing more than an administrative contract.”
During another argument, she said:
“Whenever I see someone living in poverty, or someone with a mental or psychological illness, or a disability, I ask myself: what madness drives people in such circumstances to marry? If only they would set aside their selfishness. Humanity does not need more generations crushed beneath the weight of suffering. Yes, I may sound godless, cruel, or selfish, but my heart knows that every human being has the right to love, to touch, to pleasure. Only-why children?”
I listened, torn between my longing to keep her forever and my certainty that she was an exhausting woman.
Yet she was the exhaustion that had become my destiny, the hurricane whose eye I could not leave.