Tending to the seeds of love
A Review by Salah Huzayyen
Traces of a Tattoo starts with the principal character strolling
London's main streets and alleys, browsing through shops and stores
he knew by heart. In his downtown excursion, Hisham is flooded with
fresh memories, days recently gone by when he used to walk down
those same streets, passing the time until his now deceased wife
emerged from the underground station and accompanied her back home.
Suddenly, an incident evolves to carry Hisham to another time and
place. As he follows the movement of the crowd, he spots a
pickpocket in the act of snatching the handbag off the arm of a lady
and disappearing. Hisham approaches the scene and, to his surprise,
finds out that the victim, who happens to be with her daughter, is
no other than his old beloved, Alia. The lady is the very same girl
he had loved back in Damascus a quarter of a century earlier. Their
love was supposed to end in marriage but it did not. Instead, the
girl was snatched by their common friend, Khalil, who won her hand
in marriage in shady circumstances which we, as reader, are made to
uncover through a series of scenes, flash-backs and dialogues that
at times glow in dramatic intensity and, at others, flow placidly
and deliciously but remain sombre all the time.
Soon enough, the old love story begets a new one with a change in
players. The roles played formally by Hisham and Alia are now played
by their children- Wissam and Aroub. But both stories share a common
denominator in the spirit of prime youth with all its recklessness,
rashness and foolishness. They are tied together by the presence of
the youthful spirit of the old lovers who watch over and tend to the
seed of love that has grown in their offsprings, all the while
determined not to see the new love story end in failure in a
lamentable recurrence of history. The two love stories are also tied
together by the presence of Alia's husband, Khalil, whose suspicion
of his wife's old relationship with Hisham has not been healed by
the passage time. He is also a father to Aroub and is, as such,
capable of destroying the new love story of Wissam and Aroub, just
as he had done in the past in the case of Hisham and Alia.
Khalil does in fact discover that his wife had stayed at Hisham's
house in London. Blind suspicion and jealousy turn the man into a
vicious animal gripped by rage and a desire for vengeance. He starts
a campaign of humiliation and subjugation against his wife. He even
accuses his daughter of indecency when his mind fails to recognize
her right to fall in love with a stranger. He insists on having a
doctor examine his daughter's virginity thus violating her privacy
and character after having shredded her dignity. But things do not
stop there, he follows the psychological torture with a senseless
beating which goes on until the poor daughter collapses and almost
loses her eyesight.
As the novel nears
the end, it takes a conciliatory path unwarranted by a strong
technical justification taking into consideration the physical and
psychological cruelty that gripped Khalil and pushed him on the
verge of divorce from his wife Alia. This conciliatory path leads to
a previously undetected change in Khalil's character. He gets his
wife back, and he blesses the marriage of his daughter Aroub to
Wissam, the son of his old enemy. Hisham, who had lost Alia a
quarter of a century earlier, is left with the chronic sadness of
losing Alia yet again and only a few months after the death of his wife. The
new love story between Wissam and Aroob is crowned with success
leaving the old love story between Hisham and Alia like traces of a
tattoo.
Translated by Muhammad Khaled from he original text published by
the Jordanian Newspaper Al Rai Al Am on 7 August 1998. |
