Lalla Ghazal

When I met Lalla Ghazal, she was a belly dancer in Cairo, and a very successful one, making money like water. She was also a recording artist with some success throughout the Arab world; people even bought her CDs. Though Lalla Ghazal was sunburnt like the women of Egypt, with kohl-lined black-brown eyes and long, ashen hair that flowed like the Nile down her back, she was, in fact a French-Canadian who had converted to Islam while living in Morocco with her boyfriend. Therefore, she spoke and sang with a Moroccan accent, because she had lived in Morocco long enough to learn to speak Arabic. But it wasn't Lalla Ghazal's accent that enchanted me so much as her soft and low voice, as well as her ebony eyes lined with kohl, dimpled cheeks, and smile with white teeth. As well, I liked her glasses with the small black frames; they made her look smart, intellectual.

Of course, Lalla Ghazal's dance style wasn't pure shaqs raqi, the style of the Egyptian countryside, but what was considered a "gypsy" style. She could pirouette in high heels like a ballerina and kick her long legs high in the air like a Rockette. In her native Montreal, she admitted later, her experience had been limited to dancing around the pole at centre stage in gentlemen's clubs, but she had a natural aptitude for dance; there was no style of dance that she couldn't master from the time that she first took ballet lessons as a little girl, she believed. As well, she had a stage presence and a natural charisma off stage; that was why I fell in love with her.

When I saw her sit down to talk with a gentleman at a table in the front row at the night club, I couldn't resist the urge to go up and try to talk to her. I had to do it! When Lalla Ghazal first saw me approach from the corner of her eye, she stopped talking with the gentleman that she was talking to for a moment to acknowledge me, and then continued talking to the gentleman. However, she looked up at me again, smiled, and then bade the other gentleman salaam aleikum. She stood up, exchanged kisses on the cheek with the gentleman, and then turned her attention to me. "Salaam aleikum," the dancer said, smiling again. "You are?..."

She extended her hand as I stammered, "Dawud, Dawud al-Khuriyati."

It was by talking with her that I noticed her foreign accent. However, she told me that she was originally from Canada, from Montreal, not Morocco. "My boyfriend, John, and I converted to Islam while we were in living in Marrakech," she said, "but he's living in Canada with our daughter now. I doubt that he's a practising Muslim now..."

I found her to be very open, very frank, about her sexuality. Though she would have hotly denied that she was morally loose, she admitted later that she had been a prostitute in the past, and that her daughter was born out of wedlock. She believed that she understood the Middle East, she said. She understood that people in the Arab world considered dancers like her to be whores, prostitutes, but she said that she didn't care what people thought.

When she saw me looking at all the jewelry hanging from her costume, rings and pearls, diamonds and rubies, silver and gold, as well as the sequins hanging down from her top, she smiled at me and said in her soft, mezzo soprano voice: "These are all from men who would have liked to have been my lover. I adore sex, monsieur! However, it should be the expression of love and intimacy between two people who love each other. It's also how we bring babies into the world…"

Lalla Ghazal talked with me until it was time for her to go back on stage for the second half of her performance. When we stood up, we embraced and kissed each other on the cheeks. Before we let go of each other, however, she touched the tip of her tongue to the back of my neck. Then she smiled at me slyly and said, "I like your taste, monsieur…"

I would always remember her smile, I thought to myself. I would always remember her glasses, which she wore even on stage. I would always remember the dimples and her squared Gallic jaw that positively identified her as French. Her beauty was like that of Catherine Deneuve, the French actress of the 1970s, or Nefertiti, the ancient Egyptian queen. She was from that race of beautiful women that have walked the earth since the dawn of civilization, women who all probably have the same genome as Nefertiti.

However, it was some months before Lalla Ghazal and I became lovers. Like others before me, I tried to woo her with gifts: rings and pearls, diamonds and rubies, gold and silver. While she dutifully wore whatever I gave her on her body or on her costume whenever she performed, she wasn't willing to pay for these gifts with her body. However, she remained friendly, and we often talked between sets whenever she performed. "I want love and respect, monsieur," she warned me. "I am not for sale and I am not a prostitute…"

Later, when I asked her about the silver cross around her neck, one that had two horizontal bars instead of one, she said, "It's the Cross of Lorraine. This one was made in France about 1750. I got it from my boyfriend, the man that wanted to marry me. I could never give it up because he received it from his mother after she died. Because it belonged to his mother, it's sacred to me, though I'm a Muslim rather than a Christian."

After that, I gave up trying to lure her with jewelry. Each night, she wore a small fortune in jewelry on her costume, so what was another diamond ring or a pearl necklace to her? However, I did buy her a sapphire ring for her birthday, which was the 25th of September.

Then, she said, at a later date, in an offhand remark, that she had had problems with cocaine in the past. "I loved cocaine!" she exclaimed, rapturously. "There was a time when I would have done anything for it. Yes, I even dated a certain gentleman for cocaine. Therefore, I'm an addict. All things are good, monsieur, but not all things are good for me. However, there are still times when I think that sobriety is overrated…"

That was the angle that I was looking for. It was with cocaine that I lured her into my hotel room. The moment that I whispered into her ear that I had a few grams, her eyes lit up; she was immediately intrigued. Then I saw the look of dread on her face as her resistance rapidly crumbled, like she knew that she was standing at an abyss, like she was contemplating a pact with the devil. However, something told me that she was also ready to take the plunge. Since I had some on me, I whispered into her ear, "Let's go up to my room and party, my gazelle…"

This was the siren whisper that lured her up to my room: cocaine. For six glorious months— no, one year — she was mine. In bed, she blew hot and fiery like a fierce desert sirocco. Once she was under the influence of the demon white powder, there was nothing that she wouldn't do for it. No act was too disgusting or too degrading; nothing was beneath her. And when she cried out loud in ecstasy for the first time with me, clawing her breasts with her fingernails while on top of me, I understood why people in rural Egypt still practiced female circumcision: to prevent the sexual vagabondage of women like her.

Most definitely, my beautiful Lalla Ghazal was as experienced in her craft as any other woman of the night. Without a doubt, she was among the most damned of the damned, despite her beauty and elegance, because there was nothing that she wouldn't or couldn't do in bed. But alas, it wasn't me who was her master, but the cocaine: she was doing it for the cocaine.

However, I did try to help her musical career. Though she was a star of sorts, she was in need of constant reassurance. I constantly had to tell her that she was beautiful and that she was very talented. My compliments were sincere. Though I am only an amateur lute player, I accompanied her on my lute on a few of songs that we recorded up in our hotel room of a four-track tape machine. One of them, "Sabra," even became a minor hit in Egypt.

In this song, a woman called Sabra (which means "desert flower" in Arabic) is tempted by the devil to betray her betrothed, Jibral, just before their wedding night. However, Jibral stops them just in time and then forgives Sabra for her infidelity.

When I asked her how she came up with the idea for a song like that, she merely shrugged her shoulders and replied, "It's based on a campfire story that I heard as a child in Canada."

Though she spoke fluent Arabic, though she considered herself a Muslim, her native country was something that she always carried with her in her heart.

Let me say that it wasn't all sex and passion between us. Many times, we went on picnics in the Valley of the Pyramids. As well, we spent many nights walking hand in hand along the Nile. I think that she felt the same sense of magic and mystery that I felt when she looked out at this very artery that has made Egyptian civilization possible up to this very day.

However, we eventually began to fight. For instance, I was deeply offended when she suddenly jumped out of bed in the morning at the sound of the muezzin calling everybody to prayer to do her ablutions in the nude. I may not be a good Muslim, but it hardly seemed fitting for a woman to stand, bow, and prostrate herself while facing Mecca dressed like Eve. For one thing, she hardly had the innocence of Eve, being a dancer all her life. Though she called herself a Muslim, she was from that class of fallen women who entertained men on earth rather than a houri who fed men grapes (and their bodies) in paradise. However much she thought that she loved me, she was a prostitute; she was impure, fitna.

One thing that Lalla Ghazal didn't seem to understand about Islam, at least at the time, is that a man and woman must be clean before they present themselves to God for prayer. Before the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer early in the morning, believers must bathe and perform certain purification rituals if they have had sex the night before. As well, they should never make love with their heads facing Mecca, and it is better that they separate afterwards rather than sleep together. Love and intimacy between a man and a woman can distract them in their relationship with God.

Lalla Ghazal gave in to me that time. That's to say, she apologized and made sure that she was decent the next time that she heard the call of the muezzin in the morning, but it was the first of many fights.

We fought because of the cocaine. Over many months, I spent thousands of piasters trying to feed Lalla Ghazal's cravings and my own. Since I was a civil servant with the Ministry of Antiquities making good money, nearly always in line for a promotion, I thought that I could afford it, but the consequences were nearly catastrophic sometimes. There was the constant paranoia. Several times, Lalla Ghazal was convinced that there were Muslim clerics hiding in our room, or that the police were about to arrest us at any moment for possession of the powder that she loved so well. She once seized a knife brought up by room service and thrust it into the elastic band of her sheer dancing skirt because she thought that she heard a mob of angry Muslims marching down the street to stone us for adultery. It goes without saying that Lalla Ghazal liked to play with knives. On more than a few occasions, she threatened me and even tried to kill me once, only I was always able to disarm her.

Of course, I became addicted, too. That's to say, I started to behave strangely as well as Lalla Ghazal. In my drug-induced paranoia, I sometimes suspected her of cheating on me and became violent. On more than one occasion, I struck her, suspecting that she was hiding a lover in our hotel room. Once, after I searched everywhere, in the closets and in the shower stall and still couldn't find him, I tried to beat it out of her. That was when she picked up the knife and tried to stab me with it. Once I disarmed her, however, we made wild and passionate love underneath the mirror on the ceiling in the bedroom, even though her shoulder was badly dislocated. But the sex was always better under the influence of cocaine: it was our magic love dust.

Maybe it isn't strange to say that we got married. We spent the last few months of our relationship with my parents in an older section of Cairo, near Al-Zukariyah Street. Though Lalla Ghazal had spent some months in a harem in Morocco as a guest of a family there, she did not take to life in a harem in Cairo at all. The reason was quite simple: once she moved in with my family, she became the lowest-ranking female in the household, behind my mother, my father's two sisters, and each of my three sisters. She resented the fact that I had to kiss my mother goodbye first when I went to work, then my aunts and my sisters, and her last. She was hurt when I had to buy presents for all the women in the household on her birthday, and the red silk scarf that she wanted so much ended up going to my aunt Sayida. What's more, she believed, not without justification, that my mother deliberately tried to keep us apart as often as possible. My mother would have even liked for me to take a second wife, if it was within my means, in order to prevent any intimacy between me and Lalla Ghazal.

Relations between a man and his wife, in my mother's mind, were solely for reproduction, not an expression of love or intimacy like Lalla Ghazal had thought. Though I could only go upstairs to see my wife with my father's permission, in reality, that permission passed down to my mother. Sometimes, she wouldn't let me see my wife at all. "A wife is fitna, Dawud," my mother said to me. "She's a temptation, a distraction from your duties to God and to other believers."

Lalla Ghazal and I lived separate lives after we were married. Men and women in Egypt seldom even go out together. Every Friday, when I went to mosque with my father and my brothers, Lalla Ghazal desperately wanted to go out with me at first, but the women on Al-Zukariyah Street understood that they were expected to stay home even from the mosque, except on certain days of the year, like the eids at the end of Ramadan, and other feast days.

When women do go to mosque, it is usually with other women. That's because the umma, the community of believers, is really a community of men; the women have traditionally just stayed home, though more women in Egypt go to mosque now and even have prayer groups led by women.

Lalla Ghazal could never accept the fact that the most important woman in an Arab man's life was his mother, not his wife. That's because you only have one mother, while a Muslim man, according to the Qur'an, can have up to four wives at a time, and marry and divorce as often as he pleases (though the wise man has only one wife and refrains from divorce, except when it can't be avoided).

Eventually, Lalla Ghazal and my mother quarrelled openly. It is customary that none of the women leave the room at a family gathering until the oldest woman there is ready to leave. Because Lalla Ghazal was pregnant, but not yet visibly so, she retired to her room early because she wasn't feeling well, without asking permission from my mother or my father. We couldn’t believe it, because the whole family had gathered in the living room to listen to the great Um Khalthum perform on the radio, as was customary on Thursday nights in Cairo back then, when she was still alive. We all felt insulted.

The next morning, my mother demanded an apology. When Lalla Ghazal explained that she only left because she wasn't feeling well, not out of any disrespect, my mother refused to accept her apology. Then my mother thrust out her hand and ordered her to kiss it in front of all the other women, both front and back. When Lalla Ghazal refused, it was open warfare between them. Up until then, Lalla Ghazal had grudgingly kissed my mother's hand twice a day, on the front and back, once in the morning and once at night, like all the other women of the household, but now she wouldn't kiss my mother's hand at all.

Just to give you an idea of just how much power my mother had, it was up to my mother to decide how much everybody ate every day. Of course, the men got bigger portions of meat than the women, with the oldest male (my father) getting first choice and so on down the line. Among the women, the oldest female of the household (my mother) decided how much each woman and each child got to eat. In my father's household, Lalla Ghazal was the last to be considered. Once Lalla Ghazal and my mother were quarrelling, Lalla Ghazal barely received enough food to sustain her, even though it eventually became evident that she was pregnant. My mother might have dreaded being accused of starving a pregnant woman to death, but she probably wouldn't have minded if Lalla Ghazal had lost the baby. Therefore, she allotted to Lalla Ghazal what she thought was the bare minimum necessary to sustain her.

Most of the females in the household tried to stay out of the quarrel between Lalla Ghazal and my mother. My youngest sister, Amina, out of a sense of compassion, secretly saved some of her food to give to my wife, who was most grateful. However, Amina refused to oppose our mother openly, and my aunt Sayida, my father's oldest sister, took special delight in tormenting Lalla Ghazal. (Both of my aunts, Sayida and Malika, lived with my father because they were divorced.) Two or three times, Sayida spat in Lalla Ghazal's food in front of all the women before she served it to her. Lalla Ghazal refused to eat it the first couple of times, but after the third time, she pretended not to notice and ate what was given to her. That was when Amina started saving some of her food for Lalla Ghazal.

Please bear in mind: I never saw any of this myself, because the men and the women did nearly everything separately in our household, including eating separately. However, I had some understanding of what went on. Word got around even in our household, so I can't say that I didn't know. My father knew as well, but he left all matters concerning the women to my mother. "Your mother is the Grand-Vizier," he used to say. "I am merely the Sultan."

Though Lalla Ghazal loved cocaine more than life itself, she resolutely gave it up once she was aware that she was pregnant. Besides, she had few opportunities to indulge her passion anyway, once she was living in my father's house. However, I could not say the same thing about myself. As Lalla Ghazal grew heavy with child, I stewed my liver with alcohol and fed my nose with cocaine night after night. On a meagre civil servant's salary, I thought that I could afford it. The fact that I kept getting promotions only seemed to confirm my belief that I had my habit under control, but I soon went deeply into debt. I would come close to losing my job with the Ministry of Antiquities, which would have been a terrible disgrace before the entire family.

Then one morning, my older brother Ramzi woke me up out of a terrible hangover to hand me a letter; it was from Lalla Ghazal. It read:

"My dear former husband, by the time you read this letter, I will be out of the country, I promise you. That's because you beat me after you came home drunk last night. I spent much of last night in emergency because you gave me a concussion and caused me to lose the baby. That's right, I lost the baby. Between you beating me and your mother trying to starve me, what chance did the baby really have? You should try spending time in a Third World emergency room; it isn't a lot of fun. They were treating a man who had to have a tapeworm removed, but he was given priority over me. They only treated me at all because your brother pretended to be my husband and gave the doctor permission to treat me. In the West, it is considered natural for men to leave their mothers and cling to their wives, but you love your mother more than you love me. So cling to your mother then. Allah akbar. God is great. Lalla Ghazal."

However, I could remember nothing of the night before. It was as if the part of that day between dusk and dawn never existed. Then I looked at the four photographs underneath the letter. They were all photos of Lalla Ghazal with bruises on her face that hadn't been there before I went out that night and got drunk. The photo that still remains in my mind is the one of Lalla Ghazal with the white of her left eye all red from the broken capillaries, and the bruise under her eye. That image will be with me always, even when I appear before God on the Day of Judgment. While the Qur'an permits a man to chastise his wife with force, if necessary, he may not beat her in a drunken rage.

"I couldn't have done that!" I sobbed after I saw the photos. "I love her!"

Ramzi looked at me gravely and said, "For a brief moment, Dawud, you hated her, and that moment was all it took."

Even though I doubted that I would ever find her, I searched every hospital in Cairo, but to no avail. Then I searched the night clubs of Cairo, also to no avail. Eventually, I had to conclude that Lalla Ghazal had left the country for good. She had either returned to Canada, I thought, or she was dancing somewhere else in the Middle East, like in Morocco or somewhere on the Persian Gulf. Very likely, she no longer called herself Lalla Ghazal but went by her old name, which I didn't know, so that I couldn't find her. Quite possibly, she had even renounced Islam in her heart because of me.

Belly dancers can make lots of money doing bachelor parties, you know, particularly in the oil sheikdoms. Lalla Ghazal once confided in me that she often made as much as a hundred thousand dollars U.S. at bachelor parties. She also danced at hen parties for women about to be married, but she never made as much money and the women always expected a better performance. She seldom danced before both sexes, she said, because on the rare occasions where the sexes mingled, the dancers were usually transvestites. "Male dancers are almost always gay," she said to me knowingly.

Eventually, I had to divorce her when it became evident that she wasn't coming back. Then I received a letter from her some months later, postmarked Istanbul. "I'm doing well, thank you," it read. "But don't try to write back. I will be in Beirut or Sidon by the time you read this. Then I am returning to Canada to be with my daughter and her father. Allah akbar. God is great. Lalla Ghazal."

Then she added in a post script, "Everything happens for a reason, I suppose."

When I showed the post card to my mother, she merely said, "You're better off without her, Dawud. She was fitna, a distraction."

Maybe my mother was right.