A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(31)

Furious, she scolded him, “You can’t do this to yourself.” She waved the bottle in his face. “Men can’t be like this.”

He looked down at the ground, ashamed. He told her he didn’t want to live if he couldn’t be with Doaa. “I’m going back to Syria to fight if she does not accept my proposal. There’s nothing else here for me.”

From the quiet certainty about him when he told her this, Hanaa believed that he would actually do it. Bassem already felt like a son to her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of his dying in the war. She tried to encourage him to have faith: “Be patient! Maybe she’ll change her mind, but in the meantime you must be strong.”

Hanaa took the bottle of rat poison with her when she left, promising to check back in on him, then promptly threw the bottle away.

When Hanaa returned home that evening, she sat Doaa down in the common room and described to Doaa the lengths Bassem was prepared to go to convince her of his love, including taking his own life. She took Doaa’s cold hands in hers. Doaa’s hands were always icy when she felt exhausted or worked too hard. “When a man humiliates himself for a woman, it means he truly loves her,” Hanaa said. “Will you at least think about accepting his engagement?”

Hearing about Bassem’s desperation made Doaa feel guilty. She didn’t want him to be miserable, but she also didn’t like the pressure his actions put her under. “I don’t deserve this,” she told her mother, “and I don’t want his love.” Saja, overhearing, interjected, “I wish someone would do that for me. He must really love you.” But Doaa ignored her sister. She refused to be pressured or cajoled into accepting any man.

The following day, when Doaa left the apartment, she was surprised to see Bassem dressed in a new suit with his hair freshly groomed, smelling of aftershave. “Doaa,” he said, “I know what I did was wrong. You don’t deserve that kind of pressure. Please forgive me.”

At that moment Doaa finally began to soften toward Bassem, wondering if it was only her own stubbornness that kept her from liking him. As she accepted his apology, she found herself tongue-tied and as shy as she had been as a little girl. All she could bring herself to say was “Thank you for coming.”

A few days later, one sweltering July evening, Doaa suddenly felt faint. The next thing she knew her feet had left the ground and her head knocked against the floor. She didn’t know at first that when Hanaa found her unconscious at home alone, the first person she thought to call was Bassem. He instructed her to go to a private hospital. “Avoid a public hospital at all costs,” he warned. “I’ll cover any expenses.” The public hospitals were notorious for providing terrible care, and sometimes no care at all; patients could wait for hours without being seen. So Hanaa and her sister, Feryal, who was visiting at the time, carefully led a half-conscious Doaa to a taxi and gave the address for a private clinic. Bassem arrived shortly after. He bluffed his way inside, telling the hospital staff that he was family, and found his way into her room. He immediately took charge. He found a pharmacy and bought the medication that Doaa needed. The doctor told the family that Doaa’s health was precarious. She was too thin and frail, and in such a weakened state, she was vulnerable to any number of dangerous illnesses. When he told the family she would need to rest and be cared for, and that her health would need to be monitored carefully, Bassem insisted that he would do whatever was needed to take care of Doaa.

“I will pay for Doaa to see the best doctors in Alexandria, or even Cairo. I’ll use all my savings to make sure she’s well,” he told her mother.

Something inside Doaa shifted when she awoke and heard from her mother what Bassem had done for her. She heard from her sisters that he had been pacing nervously in the waiting room, asking a lot of concerned questions, while they waited for her diagnosis. Doaa lay in her hospital bed thinking about the young man who was willing to go to such lengths for her. His dedication convinced Doaa that his affection was genuine. She was used to being the one who took care of people, not the one being taken care of. A new feeling began to stir inside her, something she’d never felt before. For the first time since she’d been forced to flee her homeland, she felt her heart begin to open. What she was feeling though was more than compassion. Fondness, perhaps? Gratitude? It couldn’t be love. She was certain of that.

The day Doaa was released from the hospital, about an hour after she arrived home, Hanaa’s phone rang. It was Bassem. He asked to speak to Doaa. Doaa surprised herself by how eagerly she pulled the phone from her mother’s hand to her own ear. “I just want to say thank you,” she said shyly, then handed the phone back to her mother.

Not long afterward, Doaa returned to work, in spite of the doctor’s warning. She still felt responsible for taking care of her family and wanted to contribute. While she felt safe with her Syrian employer, the new anti-Syrian attitude in Egypt deeply affected her. Her father was losing clients at the barbershop he had begun working in, and with the added stress, she started feeling lethargic, sleeping a lot and, when awake, staring into space thinking of how their suffering had doubled: They had endured the war in Syria and now the Egyptian people were rejecting them. One night when she couldn’t sleep, she watched her sleeping family, all the while feeling crushed by anxiety and despair. There is no future for us, she thought. No matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t give her family a future. She felt the weight of the world on her thin shoulders and it kept her up all night.