The Wife of Noble Character

The scene opens at a church. Above, the sky is morose. Below, the streets bare. There is no breeze. Only a clammy fog crouches low over red-roofed houses, carrying with it the sour taste of loss.

Cut to a sweeping view of inside the church. Bars of tinted sunlight strike slantwise through windows, blurring gently blues and reds against marble floors. Among the first row of pews sits a little girl. One hand rests on her skirt, the other tracing trompe l’oeil angels painted on the ceiling. Tighten into close-up. Bored, the girl drops her hand to her knees. She watches a slow procession of mourning families swarm the church in black.

The scene draws back into a broad tableau. A voice reads out, “In honour of Adela. From the Book of Proverbs, The Wife of Noble Character, with your blessing.”

The girl turns to her aunty, and whispers, “What does noble mean?”

---

Memory is a fickle thing. The sequence of events drawn from the past by a person in the present can often be unclear. Curious minds, however, will question and infer and conclude to create a new narrative true within the mind but only partly in reality.

In my mindseye sits an image of my Great Grandmother Adela. In Arabic we call her Sitti. I can describe her as a daughter in Lebanon, a wife and a mother, an immigrant, a widow, an Australian. But I’ve never really known her.

From photographs and dialogue, I have grasped a character and a setting. A person and a life that I can see but I am unable to understand. It is here that the fabric of all I know of my Sitti mingles with the autonomous imagination, and I begin to fill in the gaps.

---

Her children arise and call her blessed;

‘Many women do noble things,

but you surpass them all,’

---

Just ahead, the girl could see her father leading a herd of goats through mountains and streams. Together, they ran, tens of hooves pounding into soil still damp from last night’s rain, a flurry of grey coats blurring into one. Her feet pounded, too, ground loosening beneath her step as she tried to catch up with all that was onward.

Adela thought of her aunt, who would spend hours before dawn preparing food for her family. She would dip calloused hands into warm water and dampen the edges of a vine leaf with the pads of her fingers. Adela would watch as her aunt rolled rice filling with thumb and forefinger into the leaf until it formed a long piece of warra-aneb.

“Tihbani,” Adela would out loud. Strained.

“Eh, tihbani,” she could imagine her aunt responding, nodding as another warra-aneb is wet, stuffed and folded.

A loose breeze stirred her village’s trees, brushing leaves over dried dirt walkways. Adela could hear her father’s words, urging her through the valleys, a breath of warning at her back. We spoke to Sahl, Adela. We made your cousin a promise, eh?

She was fatigued. The cedars seemed to be pointing her home.

---

I am thirteen, sitting at my Tayta’s dining table. She pours black coffee from a cloudy silver pot into small cups, and I wrinkle my nose.

“How is it possible to make a coffee so strong?”

“Your Sitti Adela taught me,” Tayta responds, pouring from high in the air now.

Mum laughs. “Sitti liked everything strong,”

“She was strong,” Tayta says. “One time, she spat at a Bishop!”

They go on to talk of my Sitti, and the conversation veers to her marriage. How she delayed it for as long as she could, following her father through Lebanon as he sold his goats. She needed to find a suitor in place of her cousin Sahl, to whom she was promised. And she was running out of time.

“Weren’t they related? And wasn’t he mean? A gambler?”

“She put it off for very long –” My Mum’s smile strains.

“But she married him?”

“Yes,”

“Oh.”

All the stories they have told me about Adela’s life in Lebanon play over in my head, a cacophony of voices giving way to only parts of sentences, snippets of memories.

As a young girl she had nimble hands, and in her adulthood, her shoulders grew broad. This bode well when full responsibility for the family land and vineyards fell to her. Some in the village wondered about her husband Sahl. Why he left for another country, and hadn’t returned for his wife.

Adela hadn’t heard from Sahl in eleven years.

He was in Australia, and never wrote to her. He drove a taxi too small to contain his frame, and gambled away any money made, leaving Adela with nothing.

“Was Sitti happy?” I ask.

“Your Sitti would have your Tayta check on Sahl. She would make him his favorite meals. But they never spoke.”

I sit for a moment, and I begin to question where the bloodline begins to diverge. When does Sahl’s blood stop being Adela’s, and when does it stop being ours?

“Sahl’s brother was worse,” Mum says.

He was a Judge in their mountain village. Greedy and manipulative, he falsified paperwork, placing Sahl and Adela’s land in his name while Sahl was in Australia. Adela, as a woman, was exempt from legal ownership of the land. She was also illiterate. There was no chance of her challenging her brother-in-law. So, after working and saving, she brought herself and her children to Australia alone and Sahl did nothing.

“Not many people know about what he did,” Mum tells me.

“Why?” I ask.

“It’s just not spoken about.”

---

Out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.

She sets about her work vigorously;

Her arms are strong for her tasks …

And her lamp does not go out at night.

---

The sun was beginning to rise over the village. Through narrow archways and into shaded pathways spilt dawn’s soft wash of light. From here, Adela could see her grove. The trees were tall and grew in rows, and their drooping branches were littered with thin leaves. I watched as Adela’s gaze faltered. Her grove stood unusually still. What month was it? August? The world came to a lull. Today was the day of harvest.

Adela ran into the grove. Where she should have seen cousins in long cotton skirts setting up baskets at each row of trees, there was no one. She drew the nearest branch down. The branch bore nothing but pale green leaves.

But today is the day of harvest.

The sun was high now, and a muggy heat blurred the morning into a haze of blue and brown and green. Adela had nowhere to go. So she stood, and in her mind she played over the claims of her brother in law to her husband ten years prior.

Why are you still here, Sahl? Look at what Australia has done for our cousins. Go, join them!

Then she heard her own voice, pleading.

Why would you leave? The ones that have left are the ones who have nothing – Sahl, we have more than most -

But Sahl did not listen. He left Adela to maintain their land alone.

She turned back to face each barren branch. Now, she had been robbed of her ownership of that land.

Briefly, memories hit, and she was truly a wife again, abandoned. A girl stuck in an ageing body that had given her only pain. She turned to run.

No. It was a body that had given her a family. One that had served her in the fields. And it would find her making a new home in a new country one day.

Months later, when her brother-in-law became sick and bedridden, he confessed of his thievery. He asked Adela for her forgiveness. She said nothing, and left him in his room.

Adela did not see him again until three days later, when she attended his funeral.

---

I am seventeen, sitting cross-legged with my Mum in Tayta’s living room. Old albums from the backs of closets now lie in piles on the floor. Among them is a little black book. I open it and read the first line aloud.

In Memory: The Home and Heart of A Man of Lebanon.

“The Man of Lebanon is my dad. Your grandfather, Jean-Marc,” Mum tells me.

He was Adela’s eldest child. The article was written after his death by his colleague in journalism, and the notes in this book were the draft.

“His mother Adela… was among the women who walked in his last days barefoot to St Charbel’s Church to pray for him. Oh, Adela, who knows the taste of destiny, who lost her own mother … when she herself was only one year old … She is a mother among mothers, resilient, yet loving and caring for all, but never more than for her son Jean-Marc.”

My eyes traverse the lines once more. Adela … a mother among mothers.

---

The scene opens at a church. Drawing back, pews ripple with a wave of lowered heads and black frocks, distorted faces and cries to God.

Focus in on a pair of girls, both with wet cheeks and reddened faces. The younger holds onto the skirt of her sister, whose hair is dark and cut short to the nape of her neck. I startle at her face. It looks like my own. The frame widens and freezes. My mother, sixteen, holds her six year old sister, Solange.

Then, pulling back in one long take, retreating from the two sisters and passing through pews, the Church’s sounds begin to swell. A baby whines and a priest chants and the organ’s moans grow deep.

Adela weeps, engulfed in the pain of a mother who has lost her firstborn. I can see one hand wringing the other, her fingers thing.

A repeat of the tableau, my mother stares at the portrait of her father, face ageing with grief. In this moment she does not know that she too will know the taste of destiny, and go on to lose her own firstborn.

To be a mother among mothers, I think. Tihbeni. Strained.

---

Honour her for all her hands have done,

And let her works be praised at the city gate.

---

Dusk came quickly tonight. I have taken home the little black book, reread the article inside it and claimed its characters as my own.

In almost complete darkness I imagine my Great Sitti Adela walking to Saint Charbel’s Church, barefoot on concrete pavement. I see her arriving at her empty olive grove on the mountain side. Moving her family to a new country alone. Shedding no tear when her husband is ploughed over by a car, making his way home from placing bets on the races in the rain. Asking her granddaughters to read to her the letter enclosing the prize money fallen into her name. $20,000 - the only return his bets ever made.

I imagine her sitting at the head of the dining table in Tayta’s kitchen, pouring black coffee for my aunties, great aunties, Tayta and mum.

And I imagine myself on the veranda outside, following their voices, watching sleepily as movements of the women from behind windows blur into a soft whir of grey. I watch silently their shadows laughing against the yellow kitchen light. They tell stories I know by heart.

Stories of a stubborn girl, a strong woman, a betrayal. A noble mother, a wife. We hear these stories passed through generations of women. Through Lebanon to Australia, and all the cliffs and fog lines in between, like a myth that rings with both what can be remembered and what is real.

I imagine Adela standing beside me now. Together, we step through the front door, Adela once more, and myself for the first time.