A Gate to Paradise: A True Experience... Made Sarah Touched the Gate to Paradise

By Suzan Fakhani

Little Sara couldnt understand death on that hot day, but since then she was scattered in the coldness of desolation and rarely afterward did her heart feel any warmth. A Gate to Paradise picks up Saras story twenty years after the death of her mother as she prepares to enter into an arranged marriage.

This memoir follows Sara and her thoughts and dreams as she is stuck in a web of complex relationships in her home of Damascus, Syria. She lives in a continuous conflict between madness, pain, and tenderness. An educated woman in the medical field, she tells her story against the backdrop of her mothers death and how her own surrender to motherhood led her to the front door of paradise.

A Gate to Paradise provides insight into the Arab world and its customs through Saras eyes. The traditions of the Middle Eastern community come to light as one woman comes to terms with her own life and her role in the world.

Praise for A Gate to Paradise How wonderful that woman have turned her weaknesses into strengths. Dr. Talal aJlane, Member of the Order of Pharmacists These novel Remembers me of lily which grows up from the edges of rocks Sara like it Dr Sallama alcharara, Dietitian It has touched on my feelings more than once. Dr Sadaa husunu

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491737736

Suzan Fakhani

Suzan Fakhani earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Damascus in 1992 and now manages her own pharmacy. Fakhani lives in Damascus, Syria, with her husband, three children, and a cat. She has previously published poetry at the university and in local newspapers. This is her first book.

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A Gate to Paradise

a True experience… made Sarah touched the gate to paradise

Copyright © 2014 Suzan Fakhani.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910904

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3774-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3773-6 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 06/28/2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Saying

Preface

Introduction

Novel (Twenty chapters)

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

A Summary Of Facts

Endnotes

DEDICATION

T o each child lived an orphan whether his parents are alive or dead

To every mom lost everything to win her children

To every person that ensure an orphan whether his parents are alive or dead

To my grandmother

I dedicate to all those my first novel

Suzan

………………………………………………………….

I Damascene if dissect my body

to flow from Grapes and apples

Nizar Qabbani

PREFACE

I am a woman, hence I’m not satis fied.

That’s how we can explain the philosophy of most women of all religions in this world.

I might be discontented with my husband or with my life. However, I should always look for reasons of my inconvenience – in case there weren’t any real ones.

Women’s moody nature puts them in an inconvenience frame, mostly for unreasonable accounts, as if she is seeking a reason for whining and complaining. While the dissatisfaction of the reasonable women are due to reasons that are generally related to man. The man, who treats her in an improper manner, exploits her or even controls her. And it is always the man, whether he was a husband, a father, a brother, or even a son.

I agree with all women that not all men are that bad; however, here when the well-known proverb vulnerable money induces anyone to steal it comes true. Women, with their unreasonable moodiness, irrational thoughts, and all the things that could be categorized in the frame of stupidity lead men, even the kind ones, to take advantage of them. So how bad the situation would be when the man is already bad-mannered in the core?

All the laws of the world couldn’t manage to give women their rights, or to relieve them of their moodiness. Women in the twenty-first century are so similar to those of the eighteenth century, they style their hair and dress differently, there are new and different legislations enacted for them, yet they are not satisfied in general.

In the oriental world, woman is discontented with her life because of a certain problem related to her husband, brother, son or father. Man could be opportunist, cowered, lazy, violent, stubborn, philanderer, or whatsoever; but in a personal perspective, I see that the real problem lies within her herself.

However, in the west, the free world, where woman supposedly got all the rights provided by law, they are as displeased as we are. Those laws couldn’t convince or force any man to bind himself with one woman if he doesn’t like to. Accordingly, marriage rates have dropped dramatically, and are still decreasing. Why would a man accept to bind himself with one woman if he can have more or even better? Why would he bind himself with a woman who would share him his own money, and even the air he breathes, and she might give birth to children he does not want to have?

That’s why woman remained captive under man’s wills, caprices, desires and pleasures. And she is unlikely to be satisfied, neither in the west nor in the east.. Shattered between his needs and her own needs.. between him and her motherhood.

From my perspective, I prefer our oriental life. This life obliges men to marry, and the oriental society looks at the unmarried men with suspicious eyes. And I also prefer my religion, Islam, which obligates men to marry and furthermore, it appoints him responsible for the cost of living, and raising children up, but unfortunately, this religion couldn’t teach him how to love, before anything else..

Even though a lot of people don’t behave according to the teachings of Islam, yet the minimum obedience to Islam puts us in a better position than that of our counterparts’ in the west, where most of them became, at best, mistresses. Whereas in our society, we still maintain a good balance between what we want as women and what men need, though it lacks the ideal fo

INTRODUCTION

D amascus in the year 1973… The last days of June are running in an attempt to escape the heat of these days. That very day, she opened her eyes, and she immediately realized the house was nothing like it used to be. The clock stroke eleven a while ago, but that was something of no concern to her. No one gave her a glance… They were all dressed in strange clothes and… they were cr ying.

No one had washed her face. No one had combed her fuzzy short hair. No one had fed her. Everyone was busy with something.. Some of them were bringing chairs from the neighbors’ houses. Her uncles were preparing that strange machine with the disc, which makes a funny sound, and the main door was wide opened. She walked around the house, stood by the wall, watched everything with her little eyes and didn’t say a word. She felt, at a time she knew nothing better than feeling, that talking in such a day was not a good idea. First, she had to know what was going on.

There were strange women wandering around the house, and their number was increasing as time passed. Ibtisam, her aunt, called her and gave her a cheese sandwich. Sara took the sandwich and went up to the balcony to play there, because the place here was crowded with questions.

After a short time, she came back to the hall looking for her sister, Nadia. She hasn’t seen her since the morning. In the hall, she saw the weeping women who were dressed in black, sitting on the chairs in a line. She could hear the voice of recited Koran that was coming from that machine which was borrowed from aunt Dalilah’s house. She didn’t know then that this machine was called ‘gramophone’.

Sara stood at the door of the hall, holding her old doll which her aunt Ibtisam washed yesterday as she was washing the dishes and crying. Sara stood there with her uncombed short hair looking at them with a childish smile of amazement on her face, which shows how limited a child’s mind is. Her two missing teeth of her milky ones made two little windows in her mouth that tell about her six years of age. From her position she could see only legs, and they all have something in common; they were all fat. She looked down her own legs for comparison!

What she saw was legs in black chiffon stockings and black pumps as polished as mirrors. She raised her head slightly, and she could see and feel that the atmosphere was charged with foggy melancholy.

-   Why are these women crying and wearing silky white scarves? She asked herself, and then she continued: their scarves are so beautiful, they can become a skirt that would fly around me as I rotate around myself. Then she asked herself again with urge, Why are they crying?

Just then, Umm-Fayez• looked at her with a lot of sympathy and tears, and then she said,

-   It tears my heart apart to see you like that. You need a lot of tender and loving care.

Sara couldn’t understand a single thing. She stepped back and stared at the amounts of fat on the legs of Umm-Fayez, trying to avoid that sympathetic crying look which she found in the eyes of everyone in here, and which she didn’t like at all. There was a lot of tears and moaning coming from the corner where Sara’s aunt, Ibtisam, was sitting. Even the chairs, on which they were sitting, were making a continuous squeaky sound. I don’t know if that sound was because of the great amount of grief in the atmosphere, or they were crying painfully under the masses of fats on them.

Nadia and Amina showed up behind Sara, they were crying too. Why are you all crying?

Sara asked with anxious thirst to get an answer.

-   Your mom is dead, you fool. Amina answered, sniffling.

-   What do you mean ‘she is dead’? She is sleeping in the next room.

-   No, she is dead. She would never wake up again, and you will never see her anymore. Amina replied.

Sara’s mind couldn’t comprehend these words. Her mind was still too small to contain the large notion of death. In her mind, she wondered again, how could Nadia understand the meaning of death while she wasn’t able to, she was only one year older. She pursed her lips, and then she continued talking to herself, "Amina can understand that because she is pretty much older… She is a whole nine years old.

-   We hit our heads in the water-tap out of our grief… You must feel sad Sara Said Amina. "You must cry over your mom, don’t stand and watch like a fool.

For the first time in her life, Sara felt guilty. And she would feel so much guilty in her life for faults she hasn’t done.

-   Why cannot I understand this matter like them? she asked herself. Why am I not crying like them?

Just then, her little brother Adnan came behind her in the middle of the crowded hall, dragging along a dress of his dead mother’s, alongside his fourteen months, holding the pacifier with his hand in his mouth. Seeing the unexpected crowd, he felt horrified, so he dropped the pacifier off his mouth and hand, and held his mother’s dress in both hands and said as if apologizing to everyone: Ma…Faf…

A simple word it was… it simply meant for my mama Afaf.

The whole room resounded with weeping, and the women cried louder and louder, the grief of that moment was about to tear apart the walls of the room. Nadia took him out of the room; she almost tripped over her little brother, who was also stumbling with his fresh-learned steps and his diapers. Sara was smiling as if she was watching a mysterious scene in a black comedy, then she followed her siblings. Women and crying was all that remained in the room, along with a dress for the late Afaf, a doll and a pacifier on the floor.

Sara entered the room where her mother was lying still on the bed; her body didn’t cool off yet.

-   Is she really not going to wake up anymore? Sara asked her aunt with her innocent childish words.

The tears in her aunt’s eyes answered the question, saying no, she won’t. She stared at her mother, then with a discovering hand she touched her, but the high bed made the discovery hard on her, so she left the room and went up the isolated big balcony to play alone.

She couldn’t understand death, but she understood that she has a problem in her understanding. She didn’t understand death on that hot day, but since then she was scattered in the coldness of desolation, and rarely afterwards did her heart feel any warmth.

That day was the day she was sent away off the natural worlds of childhood, so she resorted to another world; a world of her creation which was made especially for her, and she has always traveled into that world when she wanted to feel safe. Sometimes, she would feel like playing with other kids, but soon she would sit aside to go back into her own world, as if she was looking in it for something she couldn’t find in the real world, and unfortunately, she would never do.

After twenty years …

3

S he opened her eyes lazily. It was a cloudy morning. Winter was standing prestigiously to receive the new year of 1993.

She woke up warm and relaxed under her quilt. Beside her, a lot of hope, delight and questions were waking up too, all of which shared her bed last night. That might be the reason of the sudden warmth that slept beside her too. She had suffered so many nights when her feet couldn’t get warm, which meant that sleeplessness would come to her. Cold and sleeplessness, seldom had they ever separated, or even slept with anyone.

That’s why she was insomniac. She has always woken up on the noise of sneering that comes from her grandmother who used to sleep in the nearby room. Or she would wake up on the sound of the water-drops in the bathroom. Sara didn’t have a room of her own so she used to sleep in the hall which was in the middle of the small house. That house which held behind its doors many people, and a lot of tolerance.

On that very morning, grey clouds were gathering in the sky over Damascus. The cloud multitudes were waiting the sparkle of a lightning to attack the streets, the roofs, and the people of Damascus, after capturing the sun behind their density since the early morning and making darkness and shadows masters of the day.

In Sara’s heart a new sun was rising, indicating some kind of a settlement. So, joy has grown in her eyes, and her cheeks have blossomed with love and shyness. The aromatic winds of change were blowing around her, messing around with all the things that had been once organized and unnoticed. Love bloomed with Sara at last; after twenty-six years, in which she had frozen its buds, and refused to go through any love relation of any kind, with any man whomsoever. She had always told her colleagues in the college that she would love no one but her husband. Then she would add laughing… The one who would be my husband, of course.

With a faint smile, she rolled her eyes around the room. She was still lying on her small mattress, on the floor in the corner of the hall. She was arranging her thoughts along with the duties of this day. Everything must be well-organized for tonight’s ceremony. Tonight, she would be legally married, and, for the first time, her hand would touch the hand of a strange man, who would surround her finger with the engagement ring.*

The settled anxiety in her depths carelessly aroused, once again, on the surface of her thoughts, and the baffled questions came out with it..

Would everything be just okay?

Would I be able to please everyone?

Would my grandma be satisfied?

Would I get any smile or nod of approval, or would I commit some tiny mistake, as usual, which would bring their reproof or blaming glances? Those glances which had always surrounded her moves rebuked her moments and fixed the guilt complex in every living cell inside her.

So much was she surrounded with the question word Would I?. All other question articles didn’t trouble her, and she always found quick and ready answers to them. But that Would I? was different; it was insistent, terrified and dumb.

What Sara called mistakes weren’t really mistakes, because she used to avoid erring as much as possible. Actually, they were only natural deeds she would do when she would feel free of any restraints, but that spontaneity had always annoyed her grandmother. She wanted to see perfection in Sara’s personality. But perfection, as she saw it, was limited to sobriety. So Sara must pay heed to every word, move, glance, dance, or any improvisation. Although she had always tried to do so, her efforts used to appear useless at the end of every trial. So she chose to speak less and make fewer moves, especially when her grandma was around. She chose not to be herself; rather she chose to become someone else.

Being exiled from her spontaneity was the accompanying concern which shadowed her; it slept and studied with her, and it seemed that it would get into her marriage too, simply because Sara must be someone else. Sara even felt embarrassed about her spontaneity and tried to hide it even when she wasn’t with her grandmother.

Since the death of her mother, twenty years ago, Sara has been living a long and continuous winter and rarely did