Doaa and Bassem’s engagement lifted a cloud from over the Al Zamel house. Hanaa’s health improved and the new couple became the talk of the neighborhood. Everyone knew that Romeo Bassem had finally won his Juliet. The engagement was a bright spot in the midst of the everyday struggles of life as a refugee.
The first step in the engagement was the signing ceremony, a formal event witnessed by a small group of family and friends in the Al Zamels’ home. Doaa, dressed in a black dress with a black-and-red veil, stood with the women on one side of a window, while Bassem and the men stood on the other side on a balcony. A sheikh, a local religious leader, laid out the contract—called the Katb el-Kitab—an Islamic prenuptial agreement that would sanction their relationship, and asked Doaa through the window three times if she took Bassem for her betrothed. Each time she replied resolutely, “I do.” These responses made them man and wife in the eyes of God, then they signed the Katb el-Kitab. Afterward, Doaa joined Bassem on the balcony, while the family cheered them on, and Hanaa and the girls served tea and cake to all the guests. Later, they would need to visit a courthouse to make their engagement official. But for now they were blessed as a couple with the intention to marry, giving them the freedom to walk in public hand in hand.
Two days later, Bassem picked up Doaa, her sisters, and Hanaa to go buy Doaa some jewelry in preparation for the engagement celebration party. Traditionally, a man buys a ring, bracelets, earrings, a watch, and a necklace for his betrothed. But Doaa and Hanaa tried to convince Bassem that one piece of jewelry was enough. They knew that his savings were running out and his earnings were small. But he insisted on one of each, asking for the most expensive kind of gold. Doaa chose a necklace, earrings, and double ring and skipped the watch. The label on the ring was Tag Elmalika, or “a queen’s crown.” “That is just how you treat her,” Hanaa said to Bassem, “like your queen.”
For the engagement party Doaa bought a dress of a shiny sky-blue material with a tight bodice and full skirt. It had taken her days to find it, going from shop to shop with her mother.
Now that they had taken their vows together, Bassem and Doaa were allowed to go out alone together holding hands. He took her to cafés and out shopping to spoil her. After living so simply for so long, Doaa enjoyed being indulged. “I love how you dress,” Bassem would tell her, joking that all the men were jealous of him to have such an elegant future wife. He also knew that she liked eating chips and sweets, so he would buy her little bags at kiosks for small picnics in the neighborhood garden. Bassem and Doaa would often go on strolls and visit a playground together where they would head for the swing set, like adolescents, giggling and whispering back and forth. “You are the best thing that ever happened to me, Dodo,” he said, using his new nickname for her. “You can’t know how much you made me suffer.”
The morning of the party, Hanaa escorted Doaa to a hairdresser. Doaa’s long hair went down to her waist, and the stylist spent well over an hour creating an intricate style that wrapped around her head, while a makeup artist transformed her face. Finally, with full makeup and hair, Doaa no longer looked like a downtrodden refugee or a factory girl. She looked and felt like a woman in love who could now look to a future that might not be so bleak.
Doaa was happy that she and Bassem had finally sanctioned their relationship and were now man and wife in the eyes of their religion, but in the taxi on the way home, she could not hold back her sadness at the thought that her older sisters could not be with her on her special day. Alaa, Ayat, and Asma were spread throughout the region: Alaa in Abu Dhabi, Ayat in Lebanon, and Asma in Jordan. As refugees, their Syrian passports were useless without visas. So they were stuck in the countries they had fled to and couldn’t come to celebrate Doaa’s engagement. Doaa wept at the unfairness of it, ruining her makeup.
When she emerged from a taxi at 4:00 p.m., after freshening up at home and fixing her mascara, over one hundred guests, both Syrians and Egyptians, were gathered to cheer for her. Bassem’s friends set off fireworks, and the guests entered Doaa’s aunt’s apartment, where an array of home-cooked dishes, sweets, and bottles of fruit juice covered the tables. Doaa had charged Saja with decorating the space, and she, Nawara, and Doaa’s aunts had built a small podium for the ceremony and bought streamers, balloons, and paper tablecloths. Flowers were everywhere, on tables, the podium, even the curtains, and every foot of the living room was decorated with celebratory color. The girls had cut out the initials D and B and pasted them on the wall for guests to see as they entered.