Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks Page B

film he was watching. And he didn’t like the fact that I didn’t drink. He said when he came home at the end of the day he’d like to share a beer. I said, ‘I’ll have a Coke and you have a beer; we’ll still be sharing the moment.’ He said, ‘Yes, but we won’t be sharing the beer.’ It was too ridiculous.”
    At the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, one would-be spouse, a young diplomat, was preparing for his first posting abroad. “He would have been perfect,” Rose sighed wistfully after her brief appointment. “He was witty, cosmopolitan. But he had dirty fingernails.”
    “Rose,” I said, incredulous, “are you telling me you’ve ruled him out because he had dirty fingernails? For goodness’ sake! You can always clean his fingernails.” She raised her head and gazed at me sadly with her huge dark eyes. “Geraldine, you don’t understand. You married for love. What’s a dirty fingernail on someone you love? But if you are going to marry somebody you don’t love, everything, everything, has to be perfect.”

    I wondered if my Palestinian friend Rehab had expected perfection from her arranged marriage. If so, I could only guess at the depth of her disappointment.
    Rehab lived on a hilltop west of Jerusalem, in an ancient stone village that seemed pinned to the earth by the spindly minaret of its mosque. To get there, it was necessary to drive past the cranes and bulldozers of half a dozen new Jewish settlements. The closest, a kibbutz, was just across the valley, its modern vegetable trellises lacing through the Arabs’ ancient orchards like fingers locked in an arm wrestle.
    Every time I arrived in the village I looked for Rehab and Mohamed. Rehab was a diminutive, feisty young women who worked as a hairdresser, going from house to house beautifying the village women for weddings and feast days. She kept track of every shred of women’s news in town. Her husband Mohamed was an ebullient shopkeeper, strongly built, with muscular forearms, a tangle of thick dark curls and laughing brown eyes. He loved attempting jokes in his colorful, fractured English. I’d often been at their home, a couple of times with Tony along. We shared meals, played with their four-year-old daughter, admired the new coops they’d built for the “Palestine Liberation Chickens” that would free them from dependence on Israeli produce.
    Tony and I loved hanging out with Palestinians. They were humorous, outspoken people who seemed to lack Egyptians’ class consciousness and Gulf Arabs’ reserve. What struck us most was the easy interaction of men and women. Women were in the demonstrations against Israeli occupation, in the hospitals treating the wounded, and at home, around the table, arguing politics with the foreigners as loudly as the men. Mohamed and Rehab’s house always seemed full of friends of both sexes, and Tony and I were both equally welcomed.
    One beautiful late summer day I arrived in the village alone, and met Mohamed at his shop in the tiny main street. He seemed distracted and upset. He had been impatient since my last visit, he said, because he wanted to ask me something important.
    He needed a second wife. He couldn’t mention his plans to anyone in the village because his neighbors, like most Palestinians these days, considered polygamy backward. Besides, if Rehab heard about his intention she’d go into a frenzy. Did I know any foreign woman who would secretly marry him? Could he get a visa to go abroad and find someone?
    No, I said, stunned by his questions. I didn’t know anyone, and visas were difficult to arrange without relatives abroad. Mohamed seemed angered by my answers. “You think I am a poor man? I am not!” he exclaimed, jumping up and dragging me by the arm behind the counter of his shop. Pulling down several boxes of goods, he reached back into the darkness and came out with his fists full of gold. I recognized the jewelry: gaudy bangles and necklaces made by the Indian goldsmiths