Mama Hissa's Mice

by Saud Alsanousi

  Al Watan: Minister of Foreign Affairs: Kuwait publicly supports Iraq.

  Al Rai al Aam: Kuwait refuses foreign military bases.

  Al Khaleej: Minister of Defense: To the Americans in Washington: Stay clear of our skies and seas.

  Minister of Defense, confirming all Arab nations’ support for Kuwait: We won’t sign any agreement to allow foreign bases or military facilities.

  I move down the hallway to the living room, leaving behind ’Am Saleh’s makeshift shrine. I find Fawzia propped up on a bolster cushion, watching herself as a child on the TV screen, singing along to a song she performed in an operetta during the Ministry of Education celebrations in February 1981. “Listen here, we’re telling you, what a story we’ve got for you . . . ,” she croons softly along with the dancing girls on-screen. As she reclines in front of me, it becomes clear that Fawzia’s beauty as depicted on-screen hasn’t waned a bit in real life. I’ll never admit that to her, though—it’s not like she needs any more compliments. In my mind she is a pink butterfly, enchantingly fluttering around in her gardens of songs and happiness. Without even turning in my direction, she knows I am there. She plucks a piece of chocolate, originally hidden under her pillow, from her lap. I’ve always been surprised by her secret chocolate compulsion; she is clearly at risk of dying from too much sugar. If only Mama Hissa knew the pivotal role that the grocer’s son played in fueling Fawzia’s addiction.

  I approach the wooden TV console. A sturdy one adorned with photographs. Every time I visit ’Am Saleh’s, I come across a new photo of Fahd stuck on the console’s door, next to his old shots. I cast a glance at the new photo before sitting down next to Fawzia. Because she’s only six years older than me, I address her by her first name, “Assalamu alaikum, Fawzia.” She doesn’t acknowledge my greeting, as if I’m not even there. She keeps on singing, with her fingers pointed at her ears, “Come on you all, come listen to it and you’ll never forget it.” That’s how she was, pretending I didn’t exist unless I put a khala in front of her name. Even if Fahd had duped her into thinking that she was an auntie, because she was actually his khala, I couldn’t wrap my head around having a sixteen-year-old aunt! I stretch my palm in front of her face, coming between her and the TV. She doesn’t bat an eyelash. I change tack, pacing in front of her, back and forth, deliberately trying to be a pest. Her eyes remain glued to the screen, as if I am transparent. I cross my eyes, plaster on a goofy, gap-toothed smile, and then shove my face into hers. She tightens her lips, fighting off a smile in spite of herself. Hitching my dishdasha above my knees, I bob my head right and left, imitating the dancing girls on TV. I repeat loudly the song’s message about how Kuwait is a small sidra tree, called the mother of goodness and recipient of all God’s blessings. She leans back onto the couch, laughing at me as I mirror her dance along with the girls during the National Day celebrations. She pats the sofa, motioning me to sit down so she can talk to me about the operetta. I flop down next to her and, gesturing toward the TV, mock her: “This time, let me tell you about me in the operetta!” She beams, watching herself among the twenty girls in fluffy bubblegum dresses. On each of their heads are two roses and ribbons to match their outfits.

  “You were nine years old, Fawzia . . .”

  “Katkout!” she rebukes me in a loud voice, using her nickname for me, not giving me a chance to finish. She says it without even shifting her eyes from the screen. “I’m not some little girl, you know,” she carries on.

  “Khala Fawzia,” I concede.

  She nods her head, confirming her victory.

  I continue showing off what she had coached me on time and again: “On the twentieth anniversary of our independence, you were nine years old, you were chosen from—”

  “Bas! You’ve memorized the lesson well enough, boy.”

  I stick out my tongue and resume my ludicrous dance moves.

  She looks at me intensely. “All Kuwaitis know who I am, the sweet girl on-screen. But you? Who knows about you, Katkout?”

  “You’re only considered sweet because your blood is hopped up on sugar,” I shoot back while dancing.

  She doesn’t answer. Seeing the impact of my callous joke on her face, I stop abruptly and sit down beside her, staring into her face, regret washing over me. This face of hers looks just like it did the day she was on television as a kid—except that now she is a woman with a childlike way of being that has never left her.

  I remember her wide eyes, brown skin, and jet-black hair covering her entire back—“reaching past her butt” as Mama Hissa would put it, which irritated Fawzia. “Say down past my back, Mom!” she’d retort. I remember her sharp nose, which her mother used to describe as a fencing foil. I never passed up the chance, a plastic sword in hand, to sidle up to her and say, “Wanna parry?”

  The only thing Fawzia would talk about was her being on TV, dancing with other girls who’d been chosen from Ishbiliya Elementary School, on the street of the same name. It happened at the time when the Al Bin Ya’qub family lived in an old house facing the mosque, which became widely known as the Bin Abidan Mosque after its imam. This was before her family had moved from Kayfan to Surra. In the words of the pink butterfly, as I had secretly named her—Seville Street cut through verdant lawns in bloom, fruit-laden trees, and ponds floating on green carpets. “Kayfan is definitely more beautiful than Surra!” Fawzia would always insist. She would get lost in her words as she retrieved the memories of her old hometown: Andalus Park, Ishbiliya School, Al Mas’ud Theater, and opposite it, Bin Abidan the imam reciting the Quran. Not a day of her chatter passed without me seeing how our areas were reflections of each other in everything, except in name. Whenever Fawzia waxed a bit too lyrical about Kayfan, Mama Hissa would respond with the well-known saying, “Everyone thinks his own country is an Egypt!”

  Despite Fawzia’s good fortune of having appeared on famous TV shows such as Mama Anisa and Kids, The Young Artist, and With the Students, her appearance on the national operetta, representing her old school, was a world apart. She was proud of it in a different way, because the emir of the nation had been in attendance, seated in the front row. She would become even more tied to these memories of hers when her brother Saleh, years later, opposed her enrollment in college after she had finished high school. He did not want her to mix with men at college. We all knew that he bore an intense sense of honor for the women in his household. His sister’s dream was to graduate from college with a praiseworthy GPA so that she could one day shake the emir’s hand at the annual graduation ceremony organized under his auspices. Her dreams went up in smoke because of ’Am Saleh’s stubbornness about what he deemed to be permissible for her, and because of what would happen to her later. Mama Hissa couldn’t get on board with her son’s decisive stance that Fawzia’s place was in the home, even though ’Am Saleh didn’t stop his wife, Khala Aisha, from teaching—justifying it to himself that her work was in a girls-only school. In her brother’s absence, Fawzia would say, “Always a lion with me and a chicken with his wife.” Mama Hissa would in turn fawn over Fawzia to others: “Oh, she’s unlucky . . . fatherless . . . pulled down by her illness.”

  Right after the song on the TV finishes, I ask Fawzia about Fahd’s whereabouts. “The ever-faithful guard is still fast asleep.” ’Am Saleh; his wife, Aisha; and Mama Hissa are all on their farm in Wafra. Fawzia doesn’t like going to the farm; there is nothing there except cucumbers, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. “There’s no pool, no pets . . . It’s a vegetable market, not a farm,” she whines. She goes on, grumbling about the time wasted on the farm instead of just buying produce from the market in Al Shuwaikh.

  Her nephew, under strict orders from his father, has to keep an eye on her while the rest are away so that Fawzia won’t be alone. She goes back to being distracted by the TV. With my postponed question still stuck in my head, I jolt her from her reverie.

  “Fawzia.” She looks at me sharply. I slap my palm against my forehead, correcting myself.

&n
bsp; “I mean, Khala Fawzia.”

  “Yes?”

  I feel my lips mouthing the words of my mother’s threat. What if I ask Fawzia which sect she belongs to? Would she also slap my big trap shut? I cloak my question in such a way that it spares me from getting into trouble. “The zoo . . . which area is it in?”

  “Omariya, why are you asking?”

  Aha! I’ve cunningly discovered which sect ’Am Saleh’s household belongs to.

  “Omariya or Umairiya?”

  “What’s the difference?” she snaps.

  “I’m asking you what the difference is.”

  She thinks aloud, “Maybe on the billboards it’s written as Omariya in formal Arabic, but in everyday language it’s Umairiya.” She says that she isn’t sure but that, in any case, it is said both ways.

  I feel her answer is unsatisfactory. I wait for Fahd for a long time in the living room, but he doesn’t wake up. Fawzia fidgets in her seat after the national songs end on TV. She starts singing, “Shalluh Mallouh, illi dil baiteh yaruh.” He who knows the way home, off he goes. Of course, she’s trying to get rid of me, but I ignore her. She asks me outright if I am going to stay much longer. She seems disconcerted. I tell her I’m not going anywhere until Fahd wakes up. She lets out a sigh, scarcely masking her impatience. She then pulls a pillow out from under her elbow, beneath which she has concealed the contraband that Haydar’s son had delivered. Looking at me, she smiles tenderly. She fishes out a book along with two chocolate bars: an Aero and a Nestlé Lion. “You’re not going to tell my mother anything,” she orders as she offers me a piece. Insistently, she waves the piece of chocolate at me, but still I don’t bite. Finally, she pointedly looks at me. I nod my head in acquiescence. She splits her bar with me as I glance at the book in her hands.

  I don’t even have to guess. “Ihsan Daqqus, right?”

  “Abdel Quddous,” she corrects me. “Don’t mention his name to Saleh.”

  I nod once more, completely understanding the gravity of the matter, namely her brother’s opinion about romance novels—they corrupt the mind and morals, and encourage forbidden acts. Fawzia leaves me, as she climbs the stairs to her room, singing absentmindedly, “And we’re the children of this pioneering Kuwait . . . onward and upward, onward and upward on our way to glory.”

  12:36 p.m.

  Present Day

  “If Fahd is gone, his blood and his children’s loss are on your hands!” ’Am Saleh’s words still echo in my head. I shut the car door. I don’t turn on the engine. I lean back against the seat. I try again to call Sadiq and Fahd; Sadiq’s phone is still off and Fahd’s has a demanding automated voice that orders me to leave a message. It’s too late now to leave a message, and what would I say anyway? My vision wanders, and I survey our old street. Sadiq’s house is pretty much a relic. Deserted for sixteen years since its inhabitants left for a new house in Rumaithiya. A mixture of dust and rainfall has coated the ground, the wall, and the three steps in front of the door with a film of clayish mud. Below the carport are rusty chains and the words PRIVATE PARKING that I can still make out on the wall. It’s said that Uncle Abbas wrote it on the wall of his house during the second day of the funeral, which took place in the Al Bin Ya’qub household when the elderly master of the house died during the café bombings. ’Am Abbas had been fed up with the hordes of mourners at his neighbor’s. He cordoned off the area in front of his house with chains and wrote: PRIVATE PARKING.

  I stay in my car in the middle of our old block. I nudge the radio dial. Maybe something about what happened today will be mentioned. The state radio station broadcasts the song “O God, Where Have the Days Gone?” by Abdulkareem. I remember Fahd being enamored of the singer as a child and then being obsessed with him as a teen. “Why him out of all singers?” I’d ask my friend. He’d answer that he felt Abdulkareem sang for him alone. Fahd would describe each song in a way I couldn’t understand. He’d see in each song its own color, season, smell, and taste. He’d ask me what I saw when we listened. I never saw anything. “This one’s a cerulean blue; that’s cotton white, and another is the color of a sandy sky, or crimson like Sadiq’s ears. This is the color of wintertime and that one is springtime, or another is scorching like July . . . salty, sweet, bitter, sour like my grandma’s achar, or aromatic like Arabic coffee,” he’d say. I’d bait him. If he didn’t end his chatter once and for all, I’d insult his idol.

  “You animal!” he’d grunt, ending our conversation and shaking his head at me.

  Today, I recall Fahd’s words in front of his old house. I find they sit with me even better than before, even though I still can’t find the colors in the music, not with this ashen scenery around me, a misshapen and ambiguous season, a vile taste, and an unbearable smell.

  Abdulkareem sings to me now, just me: “The house . . . that house . . . and its easy road . . . I’d die if I pass by . . . from my longing for its people inside.” As usual, the media doesn’t report the reality of what we are living through; it’s as if we are in a different country altogether. But I must admit this time the broadcast is a welcome distraction. It takes me far away from myself. It takes me to a place far from my memory. I’m overcome by a sudden yearning. We’re not in a time that allows us the luxury of reminiscing over our long-gone childhoods, but it is nostalgia for an era, in spite of its flaws, in which we lived life to the fullest. I take in the surrounding area. I remember the children’s rhymes, poetic songs, jubilant ululation, flags and decorations.

  I look at ’Am Saleh’s house and its now-run-down appearance. The radio snaps the final thread that was holding me together; Abdulkareem’s voice lashes me and stirs up more memories that are best forgotten. I find myself as absentminded as Fawzia was, watching herself all those years ago. Abdulkareem is lovingly disciplining me: “This house, how beautiful it is. What years of wonder we had here. We were under its roof . . . staying up late and not falling asleep. Our spirits are pure and our hearts are even more so.”

  What if the children buried within us awoke once more, and if their past was all simply a hoax, vanished with a magician’s flick of the wrist? What if I were to draw back the curtain to reveal the truth today? Were our spirits really pure? Our hearts? How do I stop these questions, which have never been of any use? My phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Where’s Sadiq?”

  “’Am Abbas?”

  “Damn you! I hope you go blind. I’m not your uncle!” he roars. “Damn your fathers and your stupid Fuada’s Kids group, you sons of bitches.”

  He hangs up. Khala Aisha was more forgiving in her litany of curses.

  That phone call spares me the danger of the road I am planning on crossing to the Rumaithiya area. So Sadiq isn’t at home, then. In the car, I open the compartment below my elbow. I take out a cologne bottle and dab some onto my palm. With a deep breath, I inhale the scent to clear my nose and lungs of the putrid air. I turn the radio dial to another station, a Shia one this time: “In an unannounced move, the forces known as the Infidel Peninsula Shield have pulled out the last of their troops from Kuwait on this blessed day, early this morning, as an immediate response to a new revolution that our brothers are reviving in our neighbor’s backyard, to complete the Muharram Intifada of 1979.” I try a Sunni station. “This is what the source responsible for stabilizing internal security has confirmed, contrary to what the Iranian supporters are spreading abroad . . .” I surf between stations, unsure of whom to trust. What I do know is that I miss Mama Hissa talking back to her transistor radio. “Don’t look for truth on the lips of liars!” she’d declare.

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE

  THE NOVEL

  Chapter 4

  Like any other Friday, I set off early for the courtyard at ’Am Saleh’s with the hope of having enough time to go to the mosque afterward. Once at the mosque, I would sit in my favorite spot, leaning against a column while listening to the khutbah or reading the Quran before the sermon got unde
rway. When I returned to the house that day, ’Am Saleh’s car stood in the shade of the three Kayfan girls. The car was laden with different types of vegetables, meaning they had just come back from Wafra. Yesterday morning, I had waited for what seemed a lifetime for Fahd to get up after Fawzia retired to her room, but I ended up going home without getting to see him.

  I crouched down by the door. Inside the courtyard, a hose extended from the spigot and slithered under the door as a python would, gushing water into the bed that held the three trees. After having freed the bolt at the bottom, I pushed open the iron door. As usual, Mama Hissa was seated on a wooden chair below a roofed shelter made of palm branches stripped of their fronds, its canopy pierced by the sidra’s trunk. To my right there were some plants in a rectangular terra-cotta basin, the size of a medium swimming pool. Some blades of grass were also spread here and there throughout the basin. The courtyard was a collection of white tiles inlaid with chunks of stone: black, brown, gray, all different shapes and sizes. On the left side of the courtyard was an annex where the kitchen, diwaniya, and a bathroom for the lounge were. Usually on Fridays the diwaniya would be concealed behind sheets and white pillowcases flapping on the drying line. The sheets sweated out a comforting fragrance that consoled me as the dread of going back to school sank in.

  That day, I saw Mama Hissa, in her black thawb and thick wool stockings, sitting beneath the sidra tree on her short-legged wooden chair; her black milfah thrown across her shoulders, revealing her graying henna-dyed hair. She had her round brass dish balanced on her knees, her eyes narrowed, sifting through the rice grains and picking out insects. In her run-down voice she sang along with the starlings, chirping, “O sidra tree of lovers, O magnificent leaves . . .” Winter and spring were the only seasons she’d go out into the courtyard below the palm shelter; both short-lived before the arrival of drawn-out summer. In the summer, she rarely went out, except to water her beloved tree now and again. She wouldn’t stay for long under the palm shelter; she was content, as she would say, with a few minutes leaning over the soil instead of the lifeless, tiresome cold concrete of the house.