a month already, taking up strategic positions, renting apartments, disguising themselves as beggars or young lovers). And for one day, or, rather, two hours, we partied. I’ll never forget the look of envy in our friends’ eyes, and the excitement of having our photo taken alongside the most powerful man on the planet.
We had it all, apart from the one thing we wanted most – a child. And so we had nothing.
We tried everything: we made vows and promises, went to places where miracles were guaranteed, we consulted doctors, witchdoctors, took remedies and drank elixirs and magic potions. I had artificial insemination twice and lost the baby both times. On the second occasion, I also lost my left ovary, and after that no doctor was prepared to risk such a venture again.
That was when one of the many friends who knew of our plight suggested the one possible solution: adoption. He said he had contacts in Romania, and that the process wouldn’t take long.
A month later, we got on a plane. Our friend had important business dealings with the dictator who ruled the country at the time, and whose name I now forget (Editor’s note: Nicolae Ceaușescu), and so we managed to avoid the bureaucratic red tape and went straight to an adoption centre in Sibiu, in Transylvania. There we were greeted with coffee, cigarettes, mineral water, and with the paperwork signed and sealed, all we had to do was choose a child.
They took us to a very cold nursery, and I couldn’t imagine how they could leave those poor children in such a place. My first instinct was to adopt them all, to carry them off to Lebanon where there was sun and freedom, but obviously that was a crazy idea. We walked up and down between the cots, listening to the children crying, terrified by the magnitude of the decision we were about to take.
For more than an hour, neither I nor my husband spoke a word. We went out, drank coffee, smoked and then went back in again – and this happened several times. I noticed that the woman in charge of adoptions was growing impatient; she wanted an immediate decision. At that moment, following an instinct I would dare to describe as maternal – as if I’d found a child who should have been mine in this incarnation, but who had come into the world in another woman’s womb – I pointed to one particular baby girl.
The woman advised us to think again. And she’d been so impatient for us to make a decision! But I was sure.
Nevertheless – trying not to hurt my feelings (she thought we had contacts in the upper echelons of the Romanian government) – she whispered to me, so that my husband wouldn’t hear: ‘I know it won’t work out. She’s the daughter of a gipsy.’
I retorted that culture isn’t something that’s transmitted through the genes. The child, who was barely three months old, would be our daughter, brought up according to our customs. She would go to our church, visit our beaches, read books in French, study at the American School in Beirut. Besides, I knew nothing about gipsy culture – and I still know nothing. I only know that they travel a lot, don’t wash very often, aren’t to be trusted, and wear earrings. Legend has it that they kidnap children and carry them off in their caravans, but here, exactly the opposite was happening; they had left a child behind for me to take care of.
The woman tried again to dissuade me, but I was already signing the papers and asking my husband to do the same. On the flight back to Beirut, the world seemed different: God had given me a reason for living, working and fighting in this vale of tears. We now had a child to justify all our efforts.
Sherine grew in wisdom and beauty – I expect all parents say that, but I really do think she was an exceptional child. One afternoon, when she was five, one of my brothers said that, if, in the future, she wanted to work abroad, her name would always betray her origins, and he suggested changing it to one that gave nothing away, like Athena, for example. Now, of course, I know that Athena refers not only to the capital of Greece, but that it is also the name of the Greek goddess of wisdom, intelligence and war.
Perhaps my brother knew not only that, but was aware, too, of the problems an Arab name might bring in the future, for he was very involved in politics, as were all our family, and wanted to protect his niece from the black clouds which he, and only he, could see on the horizon. Most surprising of all was that Sherine liked the sound of the word. That same afternoon, she began referring to herself as Athena and no one could persuade her to do otherwise. To please her, we adopted the nickname too, thinking that it would be a passing fancy.
Can a name affect a person’s life? Time passed, and the name stuck.
From very early on we discovered that she had a strong religious vocation – she spent all her time in the church and knew the gospels by heart; this was at once a blessing and a curse. In a world that was starting to be divided more and more along religious lines, I feared for my daughter’s safety. It was then that Sherine began telling us, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that she had a series of invisible friends – angels and saints whose images she was accustomed to seeing in the church we attended. All children everywhere have visions, but they usually forget about them after a certain age. They also treat inanimate objects, such as dolls or fluffy tigers, as if they were real. However, I really did feel she was going too far when I picked her up from school one day, and she told me that she’d seen ‘a woman dressed in white, like the Virgin Mary’.
Naturally, I believe in angels. I even believe that the angels speak to little children, but when a child starts seeing visions of grown-ups, that’s another matter. I’ve read about various shepherds and country people who claimed to have seen a woman in white, and how this eventually destroyed their lives, because others sought them out, expecting miracles; then the priests took over, their village became a centre of pilgrimage, and the poor children ended their lives in a convent or a monastery. I was, therefore, very concerned about this story. Sherine was at an age when she should be more concerned with make-up kits, painting her nails, watching soppy TV soaps and children’s programmes. There was something wrong with my daughter, and I consulted an expert.
‘Relax,’ he said.
According to this paediatrician specialising in child psychology – and according to most other doctors in the field – invisible friends are a projection of a child’s dreams and a safe way of helping the child to discover her desires and express her feelings.
‘Yes, but a vision of a woman in white?’
He replied that perhaps Sherine didn’t understand our way of seeing or explaining the world. He suggested that we should gradually begin preparing the ground to tell her that she was adopted. In the paediatrician’s words, the worst thing that could happen would be for her to find out by herself. Then she would begin to doubt everyone, and her behaviour might become unpredictable.
From then on, we changed the way we talked to her. I don’t know how much children remember of what happens to them, but we started trying to show her just how much we loved her and that there was no need for her to take refuge in an imaginary world. She needed to see that her visible universe was as beautiful as it could possibly be, that her parents would protect her from any danger, that Beirut was a lovely city and its beaches full of sun and people. Without ever mentioning ‘the woman in white’, I began spending more time with my daughter; I invited her schoolfriends to come to our house; I seized every opportunity to shower her with affection.
The strategy worked. My husband used to travel a lot, and Sherine always missed him. In the name of love, he resolved to change his way of life a little. Her solitary conversations began to be replaced by games shared by father, mother and daughter.
Everything was going well. Then, one night, she came into our room in tears, saying that she was frightened and that hell was close at hand.
I was alone at home. My
