Here at the head of the street was the house inhabited by the Palestinian men—the zalamat, as we used to call them as kids. It’s almost normal not to see the house there anymore. Its inhabitants were the first to disappear during the Iraqi occupation—a time of disappointment. A sad house that, once upon a time, the two brothers Abu Taha and Abu Naiel used to live in with their wives and brood of children. A household with enough people to form an entire soccer team. They used to play with us in the dusty plots of Surra. Sometimes they’d have the upper hand, and sometimes we’d beat them. They had been around just as long as we had—a Palestinian family that had come over from Jenin. Later on we witnessed their departure—or deportation—from Kuwait. But where is the rest of the mishmash that once colored our old street? How could Fahd and his family possibly tolerate staying on this street, when its soul had been stripped bare? I stop at Fahd’s door; it’s not how I once knew it. I wouldn’t have known to stop here if it hadn’t been for the three palm trees that caught my eye: Ikhlasa, Sa’marana, and Barhiya, or “the Kayfan girls” as they were affectionately named by their elderly owner, who, upon moving away from Kayfan, couldn’t bear to leave her palm trees behind. The Kayfan girls stand by a wall outside of the house, in a small space, planted back when couch grass covered the entire area. Two of the palms died: Sa’marana in the middle, and Barhiya to her left, nearest Sadiq’s house. Like many other victims, the drought caught hold of them, drying out their fronds, and their trunks bent from neglect. Ikhlasa appears dead, but I catch a glimpse of green at her crown, a new sprouting frond. The green at Ikhlasa’s head is a tender cacophony against the backdrop of yellow clinging to the rest of the fronds, which droop down. Behind Sa’marana, where the black iron door is, I see the antique metal placard affixed to the wall, paint peeling off. Some of its letters are visible despite the rust and dust: HOUSE OF SALEH AL BIN YA’QUB. Fahd and his family are the only ones who haven’t left their house; it is still standing. The adjoining house on the left also hasn’t changed: dust-colored ancient limestone bricks and the leaning Christ’s thorn jujube tree—home to the supernatural spirits, the jinn—that pierced through the shared boundary wall. This sidra’s roots plunge deep down into the earth; the jujube tree bends over, casting a bit of shade on Fahd’s house and another bit on Sadiq’s, which is deserted.
The two houses are an untouched slice of the past, a silent panorama splicing together different eras. Nothing much has changed except for the windows on Fahd’s house, which have surrendered to metal bars, and the wall is higher. I used to live here, in a house next to these two, the house of the Al Bin Ya’qub family lying to its left, with the palm tree Ikhlasa nearby. The house is no longer here. By that I mean it is no longer what it used to be. Many years ago, I kicked in the door of this house. I slammed it shut and leaned my back into it, fearing that the boys pursuing us would push against it. I freed my shoulders from the weight of my backpack. I started shouting as loudly as I could: “Mom! Mom!” She had just come back from work. She gawked at what she saw: my dust-encrusted body, my open shirt, my bloody mouth. I wiped my lips with the back of my palm, panting, “Mom, are we Shia or Sunni?”
I park my car next to Fahd’s house. I get out, barefoot, and make for his rusty door. A corroded door the same age as me. Am I like this decayed door? Here I am now in front of the house. Time deceives me. It’s a strange thing—how we stand in the present in a place we left behind long ago, years disappearing between the then and the now, and we are instantly as young as we were then. It’s the smell. The past has a scent! On their own, scents are faithful to a place that time itself has forgotten. I wonder if Fahd’s mother, Khala Aisha, has washed the courtyard of her house this morning like her mother-in-law used to do. She didn’t do anything the way Mama Hissa did. Not a thing. I wonder if she is still combating forgetfulness with her now-outmoded Polaroid camera. She would use it to fend off death. Death stole her father in a car accident in Basra before she was born. There were no pictures left behind except for one in the evidence box, his ID, which depicted a young man she didn’t recognize and who would never grow older. I wonder if she still sings that traditional song: “Where has my daddy gone, where has my daddy gone? To Basra he’s gone . . . In Basra he was gone!” Is she still bitter, resentful of everything, or has she gotten rid of that prickly attitude after getting what she had been waiting for all those years—the house for her and her alone? Here is that very house, now all hers after Mama Hissa’s passing. No smell of the old chicken coop. I remember Khala Aisha saying, “How can I have people over in a house with chickens running around?” I bet that she’s not embarrassed anymore, now that the owner and her chickens have disappeared. It’s good that she didn’t uproot the aged sidra; maybe she believed, just as Mama Hissa did, that “the jinn guard their home.” Maybe God heard Mama Hissa’s prayer every time she passed the tree. “May they be happy in their home,” she would intone. The jinn are more loyal to a place than we are, that’s for sure. The smell here is of water choking on dust, damp soil, and ripe buckthorn fruit even though it’s five months past its season. How can these smells still be here? I wish I could go past this wall that’s blocking what’s hidden behind. I take a deep breath. Old beloved smells clash with the resident stench, a thick cloud refusing to leave the place. I can’t distinguish between the real smells and those leaked by my memory. I’m almost certain there’s fish being fried in the Al Bin Ya’qub family kitchen. That raw fish smell and the herd of cats around the house remind me of Fahd’s phone call to his mom just before daybreak today. “Mom, I’m craving your mutabbaq samak!”
Behind this wall we had a life full of vim and vigor. Sigh. My childhood is tattooed on the innermost part of me while all other memories are fleeting. In front of the house wall, I feel like a ten-year-old. The wall used to be so much lower; it’s more than doubled in height. The top part is a different color, a symbol of how the passing of time changes things. Friday mornings, winter ones specifically, were the best we three could wish for—Sadiq, Fahd, and I. This house and its courtyard belonged to ’Am Saleh, Fahd’s dad, and it was our little Eden. I want to push the door, but the dread . . . how I wish I could overcome it. Years ago, I used to crouch down each time, stretch my two small palms inside the horizontal slot below the door, and maneuver the fixed iron bolt cut into the ground out of its place. I would then straighten up and push the door wide open with great ease. Today, I wonder how many bolts, padlocks, and chains are behind this door. With a trembling finger I press the doorbell. I hear an inner door creaking, followed by the sound of footfalls akin to the dragging of a broom across the floor. If Mama Hissa, Fahd’s grandma from his dad’s side, weren’t dead, I would say they were her dragging footsteps behind the wall, but she’s passed on, leaving behind her timeworn house, her beloved sidra tree, and . . . us. The footsteps halt. In the horizontal opening below the door is a restless shadow, betraying someone’s presence. With my palm, I bang on the iron door.
“Who’s there?” Auntie Aisha’s voice travels to me through the door, fearful and confused by my banging.
I say, in a voice that doesn’t sound like the ten-year-old I feel I am again, “Khala? It’s me . . .” It’s as if I’ve opened up the jaws of hell by the near-mention of my name.
“You? May your bones become brittle, you spawn of the devil. You’ve only brought misery and pain to this family.” Her hail of curses ends with a question, very much like the one that drove me to her house. “Where’s Fahd? Where’s my son gone?”
I swallow my question, searching for the very answer that I was expecting from her. She says he was on his way home at four this morning, but he never made it back. “Where’s Uncle Saleh?” I ask her. I hear her heavy steps sweep the marble courtyard as they withdraw.
“’Am Saleh? May God never give you good health or increase your wealth.” She continues with the string of maledictions. “May He never bless you with children, you sower of evil, blackest of omens.” Her voice is raised.
There has been no one to rein her in since Mama Hissa’s death. Mama Hissa would have said, “Keep it down, Aisha! You’re at home, leave your yelling for the girls in school!” Her curses fade out, and her voice disappears with the slamming of the inner door. Silence returns, the old smells and sounds remain. I turn my back to the house, intending to go somewhere else, but I’m not sure where. The inner door screeches again. I listen closely. I can no longer distinguish between the screeching of the door and the shrill wailing of my khala Aisha. An octave higher, she yelps, “Saleh, my heart aches!” The sadness in this woman’s voice worries me, and here I am standing, idly listening to her wailing. What does time have in store for Fahd? What has pushed his mother to keen like an animal? I remember her in the old days, when, if anything alarmed her, she would tell me that her heart ached, and no matter what was causing it, the next hour a greater calamity would be upon her. Mama Hissa, who always spoke her truth, was invariably taken aback by her daughter-in-law’s words. Mama Hissa nicknamed her “the soothsayer” because whenever Aisha said these words, a catastrophe would surely happen.
The iron door opens and reveals ’Am Saleh, gaunt, barely recognizable. His plump double chin has deflated, now a leather sack of sorts. With the emaciation of his face, his crooked nose looms larger. He’s grown old. He looks older than his seventy years. He has become a spitting image of his Mama Hissa, may God rest her soul. Time has left him no black tufts on his bald head or small beard to remind him of his youth. He stands in front of me, his withered frame clothed in a wide, striped house dishdasha. He doesn’t meet my eyes, his gaze fixed on my naked feet. I rush toward him to kiss his forehead. He thrusts out his open palm against my chest. “Stay where you are!” he bellows. He scrutinizes my features. Maybe the sight of my bruises is a harbinger of what fate holds in store for his son. He points his finger at my face, shaking his head and saying, “This is your fruit, you sower of fruitless land. This is all your doing, you and that group of yours, Fuada’s Kids.” I keep silent. “If Fahd is gone, his blood and his children’s loss are on your hands!” he adds, before shutting the door.
THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE
THE NOVEL
(Chapters 1 and 2 removed by the publisher)
Chapter 3
At times, ignorance can be a blessing. In our dialect, a child is jahil, ignorant, and jahhal like us were living in bliss, the sweet bliss of not knowing. Once I had grown up a little, I became preoccupied with forbidden questions. Perhaps it wasn’t so much about the answers as much as the need to pronounce the questions and be free of them, or free of the inane feelings when someone finally answered them. When I was in elementary school, I would ask about anything and everything. I annoyed my mother with my barrage of questions: how, why, where, when, and so on. I remember my Syrian teacher Mr. Murhif with his bulging eyes. At Al Najah, my middle school, he advised me not to overdo the questions, especially ones about religion. Irritated with my constant questioning, he said I was like someone who liked to play around with Pandora’s box—a box that, once opened, would spare no one from what was inside.
“Son, think of the question like a box. Some boxes just swallow up others. Why are you asking such questions?” His harams and shame-on-yous cut off my questions. When I persist, mustering up the courage because he called me “son,” he interrupts, “Every box has its time.” But I don’t stop there. I keep on asking.
“Unbelievable!” he shouts. I raise my hand, promising that it is my very last question. He then launches a piece of chalk at me. “Enough! We have work to do!” I wipe the traces of his white bullet off my forehead. He then gives in a little. Patience exhausted, he lets me ask my “final” question. I ask him if humans were originally monkeys or if it was the other way around. Mr. Murhif’s eyes pop out even farther than I thought possible.
I try to absolve myself. “Our neighbor Mama Hissa says that the monkey was actually first a man!”
On cue, Fahd gets ticked off because I mention his grandma’s name in public.
My teacher pauses uncomfortably, chewing his tongue before roaring in his Syrian drawl, “That’s between you and the Islamic education teacher. Damn you, you rotten frog!” The episode ends with me at the back of the classroom, face to the wall, arms outstretched high above my head. I turn to Sadiq, who is busy doodling on his desk in the last row. “Press the button,” I urgently whisper, referring to the circle penciled in on his desk. He presses the button, but Mr. Murhif stays put.
In elementary school, I was fixated on obscure matters. Having seen sanitary pad ads on TV and in the magazines, I’d run to my mother. “Why do women wear diapers?” I asked, confused. I didn’t get a straight answer out of her. The issue didn’t bother me much once I’d been liberated, set free, by saying the question aloud. Mom, though, dillydallied in her response, her face reddening. She wouldn’t reprimand me the way Mr. Murhif would in the coming years. His doing so only heightened my curiosity about the enormity of the question and the gravity of asking it. I had to get some sort of understanding of at least why it was so dangerous to ask. Soon, all questions pertaining to female matters, especially physical and sexual, died right after I uttered them because of Mom’s embarrassment in answering them. How does a woman get pregnant? Why after marriage and not before? What’s a uterus? I heard about it next door. And why didn’t Khala Aisha get pregnant after having hers removed? I saw Mama Hissa’s rooster doing it with one of the chickens. Where do eggs come out?
It was only that one question, the one after my schoolyard scuffle, that was impossible to get out of my head, because of the way Mom had quaked, hissing, “By God who raised the heavens, if you weren’t already bleeding from your mouth, I would slap you right there.” She had let loose as she handed me a glass of salty water to rinse out my mouth and stop the bleeding from the gap where my tooth used to be. We had been in the living room; I was still in my school uniform. I leaned back against the door, my heart still racing after my encounter at school. She went on, this time also wagging her finger at me, “You’re Muslim and that’s it . . . Isn’t that enough?”
She complained about me to Dad. He scolded me and threatened to stop my allowance; all the while I still didn’t know why that particular question of mine was so taboo. My father didn’t have any hold over me other than threatening to scrap my allowance and not take me to Walid’s Toys or Kids and Us at the end of each month. Their bedroom door clicked shut. Burning up with curiosity, I eavesdropped on them. They were having a serious heart-to-heart; from what I could make out, what I thought I had understood grew murky. “You didn’t have to react . . . Ignorant people . . . Kuwait was . . . No longer . . . before . . . after . . . since the Iranian thawra . . . then the Iraq war . . .” I backed up to my room, failing to pinpoint an explanation for the intensity of their conversation, unclear on the meanings of their words that sounded like those on the news. What was a thawra? I knew thawr was a bull, and adding an a usually makes things female, so I guessed it must be a female bull. Since that day the whole matter was shrouded in mystery. Only much later on did I find out about the Iranian revolution, their thawra. I didn’t dare mention the name of any sect again, scared stiff of the swift slap awaiting me. At that age, I concluded that both sects weren’t considered a part of Islam. After maturing a bit, I settled on the complete opposite. Fast-forward a few years, with extremists popping up all over the place, I even began to question what I should believe anymore.
Thursday morning, two days after having my tooth knocked out, I went early to ’Am Saleh’s house. I saw an Iranian boy—Haydar the grocer’s son—in his striped pants, counting cash out by the front door. I greeted him as he assessed the profits from his contraband chocolate sales. Loosening the iron bolt from outside of the door, I barged inside, galloping to the living room. The booming sound from the television clashed with the stolid silence of the courtyard, which could have only meant that ’Am Saleh wasn’t at home and that Fawzia, Fahd’s aunt, was alone in the
living room. I stopped short at the threshold. Shoes and sandals, some of them overturned, were proof that Mama Hissa was also not at home. Though she found it difficult to move, she never stopped bending down, resting her palms on her knees and heaving a sigh whenever she saw overturned sandals in the courtyard or on the doorstep. She would always flip them back over to their natural position.
“Why, Mama Hissa?” I’d ask her.
She’d point to the sky, without actually looking up at it out of reverence. “Heavens above, I ask for God’s forgiveness,” she’d respond.
Without tilting my head upward, I’d imagine God, on a throne up above. I would bow my head and repeat after her, “Astaghfurillah.”
“May He forgive you,” she would intone as she patted my head.
I began flipping shoes and sandals the right way up. I’d turn the soles to face the devil’s abode down below. Though I was scared of him, I insulted him; Mama Hissa’s actions made me plucky. Satan’s only job was to chase me. “Wicked and crooked,” she used to say. If I neglected to cut my nails, there he’d be under them. He’d eat from my plate if I didn’t thank God at the table. Al Shaytan would walk in step with me if I entered any place with my left foot. He’d steal into my mouth along with the very air I breathed if I yawned without covering it. He’d pee in my ear if I slept through the dawn prayer. I was on guard against him in everything, except the last thing. He must have urinated in my ear countless times! Whenever the sun would wake me, I’d get up and rush to the bathroom disgusted, fingers in my ears, maniacally scrubbing them clean with soap. I’d spend my mornings pleading for forgiveness.
I cross the threshold. There to welcome me as usual in the entryway is the Iraqi president, the hero of Al Qadisiya, Abu Uday, or the “Big Man,” as ’Am Saleh likes to call him. He dons a black suit in the gilded frame hanging on the wall, right between two large vases of peacock feathers, with creeping plants curling around the four corners. Beneath the frame are newspaper clippings with statements from the ministers of defense and foreign affairs stuck up by the man in charge. An absolute fanatic. I know them inside out, too.
Mama Hissa's Mice Page 3
