Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

live in so godless a nation?
    What weighed him down, and made him curse, and stamp, and pull on his mustache, and beat his wife (although only with a very small stick) was the two older children. Walid, his firstborn, was involved in some stupid political thing, running with a group of worthless hoodlums who fancied themselves fedayin. This had attracted the attention of the police, and Hassan was waiting for the inevitable visit demanding a bribe. The boy had been beaten, of course, and given extra work to keep him out of trouble, but a father’s eyes could not be everywhere. Still, politics, however stupid, was not disgraceful. Hassan could sit with the men and sip coffee and lament his worthless son. Many of the other men, of course, had worthless sons too, and it was pleasant to compete as to who had the hardest lot as a father, whose son was more ungrateful for the many benefits showered upon him. But of the other thing, the daughter, he could not speak. He could barely let it flow through his mind.
    The fact was that Fatyma, at fourteen, was already a whore, or the next thing to a whore. Her head was filled with thoughts of fornication. She listened to the music of fornication on her radio (before he had smashed it) and went to American films (that were all fornication and blasphemy) and would have gone out of the house dressed as a whore, with a painted face (and had he not found actual whore’s face paint where she had hidden it under her mattress?). He had stopped that for the time being by chaining her ankle to a radiator at night, on a long chain that enabled her to visit the toilet. This, however, was not a permanent solution. In the old country he would have paid a woman to slice out her sinful parts with a razor, as was done with uncontrollable girls, but the rules were different here. Hassan did not want to go to jail. Already he had a stack of letters from the truant officer, wanting to know why Fatyma was not in school. He did not think the truant officer would comprehend the problem. Americans had no idea of honor or of the responsibilities of a father. No, the solution was to marry her off while she was still marriageable, before she got with some boy and lost her honor, in which case he would have to kill her, jail or no jail.
    So he had written letters and had found the right man, a prosperous importer in Baalbek called Zaid al-Habashi, who was fifty and looking for a younger wife to add to his household. The match was made by post, contracts were signed, passport and ticket purchased. In two days she would leave, escorted by a family going back to Beirut on a visit.
    Naturally, when Hassan had announced this news, Fatyma had wailed, and cursed, and even an exceptionally severe beating had not stopped her noises. She was wailing still. He could hear her upstairs from the back room of the bakery where he worked, even over the rumble of the kneading machine. Eventually, he knew, she would stop crying and accept her fate, as all women did. But he was glad that it was only two more days.
    In the night, in the short time between the preparation of the dough and the time the baking must begin, while the family slept, Fatyma worked. The chain that bound her to the iron radiator leg was long enough to reach the bathroom in the hallway, but was also long enough to reach into the next bedroom, where her brothers slept. She knew where Walid kept his knife, a long, curved dagger, old but sharp. It had been in the family for years, always in the possession of the oldest son. Walid was snoring like a pig and did not stir as she removed it from his bureau drawer.
    Back in her room, she frantically scraped the soft, old wood upon which the radiator leg rested. It took her nearly two hours to chisel away a depression deep enough so that she could slip the loop of chain beneath it. Free now, she went to her closet and used the knife to pry up a floorboard. Beneath it, tightly rolled, were two pairs of jeans and four