One day, after returning home from work, my landline rang with a call from an unknown number. It was K. He begged me to look out of the window. His car was parked in front of our building. “Why are you here?” I asked.
“I’m coming up to your apartment now,” he said. “Please open the door.”
“Why should I open the door for you? When will you understand that it’s over? I cannot continue like this. To be alone and happy is better for me than to be with someone and miserable.”
I heard him crying on the other end of the line. “I still love you madly,” he said weakly. “I can’t imagine my life without you.”
I felt myself wavering. Behind all the do’s and don’ts and domination, was there really a heart tender enough to cry? There was nothing but my silence and the sound of his tears.
I put on my abaya, went down to the car, and got into the passenger seat beside him. As I watched his tears, all I wanted was to wipe them away. Instead, I took his hand and squeezed it tightly between mine.
I went back to him once more, full of hope that this incident would be enough to change everything.
The wedding party took place, and we returned from the honeymoon. I went back to my old office, and I didn’t wear the niqab, though I was under oath to put it on the moment I left the building. My problems at work were resolved. But no one knew what happened when our door closed each night.
After the wedding, I had to get used to leading a double life. I hid that I worked in Aramco from his extended family and friends, and I wore the niqab when I was with him so that his acquaintances wouldn’t see my face. To silence a few gossiping mouths, I had sacrificed everything.
Our marriage was a continuation of the same tiresome fights of our courtship. All that changed were the insults I was subjected to. Whereas his slurs had previously been directed at me alone, now they extended to my family. I learned to respond to the insults against me and even to forgive them, but what he said about my family was impossible to forgive or forget. He knew exactly how deeply he hurt me. He scoffed at me because my mother was Libyan and my father was a taxi driver. He told me repeatedly of the concessions he had made in becoming associated with me, a girl of lower social standing than himself. (It was only much later that one of my friends said in surprise, “But Manal, your tribe is one of the most highly respected in all of Saudi Arabia. It was he who improved his social standing by marrying you.”)
Sometimes I would challenge him. “Have you ever once tried asking without yelling to see the result?” I would say. “Whenever you ask something from me by commanding or prohibiting, I feel less and less well disposed toward you and I become more and more stubborn.”
His response was always the same: “My friends always tell me that you are Hejazi [referring to the region where I’m from, the Hejaz, literally the ‘barrier’ region], and if I don’t treat a Hejazi woman in a degrading way, then she will take advantage of me.”
His older religious sister was forever reminding me that I was the woman and he the man, and that it was my duty to tolerate everything for the sake of obedience and comfort and his satisfaction. His satisfaction was God’s satisfaction, she would remind me, and his wrath God’s wrath.
The only thing that made life easier was that after our wedding celebration, I moved to his family house, where we lived with his mother and sisters. I loved them very much, and they loved me. His mother had the tenderness and affection of my late aunt Zein. She never interfered, but I knew she was upset. I asked her to pray to God that our souls would be calmed. I still loved her son. And I was pregnant.
At dawn on October 30, 2005, our son Abdalla (Aboudi, I called him) was born in Jeddah. K. named him after his father, who had passed away years ago. I had not planned to give birth in Jeddah, on the other side of the country, but on October 29, nine months pregnant, I left our house in Dammam after another big fight. I had a small belly and so I managed to be allowed to board a plane. I gave birth the next morning.
I was scared, knowing that I was giving birth to a baby who would have to endure unhappy parents, to hear shouting and screaming as his first words. I even wondered if I could love this baby in the midst of so much pain. I berated myself for listening to my husband’s demands that we have a baby at the start of our marriage. “All my friends who are married had their babies in their first year of marriage, you make me feel like a failure,” he would scream at me. But when the nurses laid Aboudi’s tiny body down on my belly, he looked at me with his puffy eyes, matted hair, and wrinkled skin as if he knew that I was his mother. At that moment, I fell in love. His life was what mattered most to me from that day on.
It was the twenty-seventh day of the holy month of Ramadan, the busiest time of the year to find any flights to Jeddah. When my mother gave my in-laws the happy news, they couldn’t find a flight to come to see the baby. My husband, who could now call himself Abu Abdalla (father of Abdalla), drove eighteen hours from Dammam to Jeddah to see his son. Hearing that he was driving all that way was enough to make me forget the fight we had had.
When Aboudi was born, I hoped things would change, that our relationship would mature, that the baby would unite our hearts. But that did not happen. Instead, once more the pressure mounted on me to leave my job.
One day, about two years later, as my husband unleashed a string of curses upon my father and mother, I decided that he would also taste the bitterness of an insult to his family. I began to heap slurs on his parents. It was the first time since the beginning of our marriage that I had responded to these sorts of insults in kind.
I don’t recall the details of what happened next; I only know that I was severely beaten in front of my child. Aboudi was almost two, and both he and I were screaming in horror. It was not the first time I’d been beaten by my husband, but it was the first time Aboudi had watched it. I begged my husband not to hit me in front of our son: “Hit me in our room,” I cried. “I don’t want Aboudi to see this.” I remembered the time I watched my father hitting Mama in front of us, and continuing to hit her despite our pleas. I had cried hysterically as I watched her being beaten.
In that moment, I knew one thing: I could not allow my husband to hurt me in front of my son.