Mama Hissa's Mice

by Saud Alsanousi

  Uthman is in heaven, and ‘Ali is in heaven

  Talha is . . .”

  I turn my radio dial to the Lions of Truth station. It’s the only way I can avoid getting into trouble given the neutrality of my name, which is difficult to pin to the sect that I should belong to. I roll down the car window, handing my ID over to a mask-less man holding a rifle. “Good afternoon.”

  He examines my details. “May the peace, mercy, and blessings of God be upon you,” he responds.

  He examines my features as he strokes his thick beard with a frown. He gestures with his weapon to my hand, asking why I am covering up my nose and mouth. I explain that the stench is overwhelming. He turns away as if looking for something. He looks at the burning tires. He points to my missing windshield and asks what happened. I shake my head, feigning disgust. “Those good-for-nothing Shias.” His interest aroused by what I just said, he proceeds to search the inside of my car. His eyes fall on the bundle of papers. He asks whom I work for. I wish I could answer that I’m part of Fuada’s Kids . . . but instead I look toward the sunroof. I gesture toward the heavens. He nods his head, pleased by my answer. He struts around my car, examining it. I seize this moment of his temporary absence and pump up the radio volume. He comes back and hands me my license, smiling a smile that doesn’t shift an inch of his features. “I don’t recommend that you enter Jabriya at this time,” he warns. I look back at him questioningly.

  “Rafida are lying in wait for us.”

  That’s one of the monikers they use to describe their enemies, Rafida, the refuseniks, those who refuse to invoke God’s blessings on the Prophet’s companions—Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman—and his wife, Aisha, because they see ‘Ali as the only rightful caliph. Their opponents see things differently.

  I tip my head in the man’s direction and point to the sky. “God doesn’t forget His creatures.” To myself I say, looking at him all the while, If only you were Mama Hissa and I one of those measly rice bugs!

  “You armed?”

  I shake my head. “Alhafiz Allah.” God is the almighty protector.

  He pulls at his lips before he turns around and bellows to one of his comrades, “Open, open it up!” I make my way across the bridge until I reach midway. I like this middle ground despite the putrescent smells wafting up from the rancid water below. A barzakh, a no-man’s-land between two hells, the lonely place I find myself after Surra and Jabriya have declared each other enemy territory. I slow down my car again. I turn to the left, toward the pedestrian lane on the side of the bridge. I remember being here as a child, basking in the sun, spending time with Fahd while crossing over to Jabriya on an exhausting trip, all for the sake of the Al Hashash video store. Right over there used to be large billboards reading, SO WE NEVER FORGET. They became widespread in 1991, twenty-nine years ago, and stayed on for some years afterward. It seems that there are quite a few things that weren’t forgotten, so many of the memories that we produce today, we create for tomorrow—if there is a tomorrow—and we don’t think that we’ll forget them. My catchall memory is wearing me out. I turn the steering wheel, running away from the inside of my head. I look to the right. I park my car just as I hear a young girl shouting below the bridge. She kneels on the bank of the Bayn River, staring intently into it. She clasps her palms together. “Dad! Dad, for God’s sake, I beg you, please answer me . . . Dad, can you hear me?” Gunshots ring out. The girl sprints away, tripping over her black thawb, her unruly hair and backpack trailing her as she goes.

  From the middle of the bridge, I see a second security checkpoint before the end of the bridge, green flags billowing in the wind this time. I stash my bundle of papers under the seat. I squeeze my finger through a Shia-approved agate ring that I always keep in the glove compartment and turn the radio dial to another station. Voices burst forth on a rhythm regulated by the beating of chests, songs for Imam Hussein, the son of ‘Ali. I step on the gas pedal, pushing it as far as it will go before I intentionally slam on the brakes, my tires screeching on the asphalt. Three young men hem me in. Ghutras wrapped around their faces leave only their eyes showing; they aim their weapons at me. “Get out! Get out!” they shout. I oblige hastily, looking behind me in fake panic. “Those rogues almost caught me on the other side of the bridge!” They lower their weapons. Their leader is the first to talk. “God damn those filthy Nawasib; it’s okay now, you can calm down.” He turns to his comrade. “Get him some water!” he orders. He tells me to get back in the driver’s seat. I am struck by the word he used: Nawasib, those who cheated ‘Ali of his rightful caliphate. I recall the radio station repeating the word in reference to those who are hostile to the Prophet’s cousin, Ali Bin Abi Talib. He hands me a bottle of water. I tilt my head back, guzzling greedily without faking the dizziness that seizes me. I feel the cold water go deep down into my belly. I tilt my head down. Everything is spinning. The young man asks me if everything is okay. I blame my condition on the noxious stench of this place. He removes his mask and sniffs the air. Surprised, he asks, “What smell?” I ignore his question and make up an excuse about needing to see a sick relative at Mubarak Hospital in Jabriya. I request that he let me pass. He makes way for me on the side. He waves goodbye. “Allah and Muhammad and ‘Ali be with you.”

  I cross the rest of the bridge alone.

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE

  THE NOVEL

  Chapter 5

  I trailed Mama Hissa into the house; she was still tittering at me and my alleged wish to visit the monkeys. I should have chosen a different animal. Mama Hissa didn’t like monkeys at all. She saw them as deformed humans cursed by God. She once told me a story about a woman who wiped her son’s butt with a loaf of bread after he had done his business. God then punished the woman by turning her into a monkey. In Mama Hissa’s eyes, all monkeys were actually humans who’d fallen from grace. Because she so blindly believed this, I remember always having my heart in my mouth, whereas it only made Mama Hissa more humble in her daily life.

  I went through the small hallway facing the front door, passing by the “Big Man” on the wall. Fawzia was preoccupied with her mother. She kissed Mama Hissa’s forehead, then hugged her tight, closing her eyes and drawing in a deep breath to take in her mother’s heady, woody scent of oud.

  “Have you taken your meds?” Fawzia asked.

  Mama Hissa smiled, nodding her head. “And you?”

  “Me too,” Fawzia reassured her.

  Mama Hissa didn’t seem at ease with Fawzia’s answer. “All that chocolate . . . Be responsible . . . Don’t go and break your poor mother’s heart now.”

  Fawzia kept on hugging her in silence.

  I stood in front of the TV, hunting for the latest photo that Khala Aisha had taken of Fahd. My hunch proved right when I found yet another photo where Fahd was compelled to smile for his mother’s camera. Like every other Friday, Abdulkareem Abdulqader was on TV, with his lopsided egal and famous hand gestures on display as he sang “Sparrow and Flower.” Like every weekend morning, ’Am Saleh was in his striped house dishdasha and white skullcap. Though there was no shortage of sofas around him in the living room, he would sit cross-legged on the cerulean Persian carpet under the crystal chandelier, a monolithic ornament. His tea was always with milk. He’d justify sitting on the hard floor by saying it was better than those too-soft sofas that hurt his back. His grumbling about aches and pains would inevitably set off Mama Hissa. “You’re only thirty-eight! May God heal you!” She’d pester him, saying that the real reason behind his back pain was what preceded his late-night showering in the wee hours. I didn’t get why he’d laugh and chide her at the same time, saying, “Mo-ther!” And I didn’t understand why Khala Aisha would flush red, seemingly disapproving of the old woman’s comments. I didn’t get a lot of things back then, like the neglected newspapers on the ground beside ’Am Saleh, who never bothered reading them. There was nothing worthwhile in the papers, he’d say, and that since the government had enforce
d its censorship policy they were better used as place mats. I’d commit to memory what he said; I wasn’t like Fahd or Sadiq. They actually understood the ins and outs of censorship and the dissolved parliament. I knew that ’Am Saleh would eagerly anticipate Mondays, just like Mama Hissa. She would fast while he went out with a bunch of men carrying placards, but I didn’t understand what they wanted. I learned that the Monday diwaniyas—as they were called—were collective demonstrations for protesting the government’s censorship and dissolution of parliament.

  Fahd sat in his white dishdasha behind his father on the couch in the corner, holding scissors, lost in his reverie—a cat playing with a ball of yarn—while paging through a copy of Al Riyadi magazine. I didn’t need to ask him what he was up to. I knew he was looking through the sports magazine for shots of his favorite player, Muayyad Al Haddad, to add to his ever-growing collection on his bedroom wall. I can see his face now: olive skin, wide black eyes, sunken cheeks, coal-black hair. Maybe those were his happiest moments: gazing at Haddad’s photos in a magazine, listening to Abdulkareem’s voice on TV in the background crooning, “Glory to You and thanks to You, O God.” Fahd put down his magazine. He looked at the screen and, squinting, emulated his music idol by playing the invisible strings of an air oud. The song came to an end, and the living room fell silent, except for the hum of the AC and the intro music for the opening credits, announcing Sheikh Mutwali Al Sha’rawi’s weekly halaqa. Fahd’s dad would always make sure to catch this recurring religious discussion before going to the mosque for Friday prayers.

  At that time my understanding of religion was far removed from what we were taught at school. Instead, it was what I picked up from the religious TV serials: images and sounds that left an indelible impression on me before any words were even uttered. The simplicity of Sheikh Al Sha’rawi, sitting cross-legged on his wide, engraved wooden seat; the serenity of Sheikh Khalid Al Mazkoor on his show With Islam; Sheikh Ali Al Jassar’s quavering throat on Weekly Khutbah; and the sound of Ahmad Al Tarabulsi reciting the Quran whenever you turned on the TV in the morning on any given day. The time would come when I’d dwell on these images, but I wouldn’t be able to identify with them any longer.

  I approached ’Am Saleh to kiss his head. His protruding, hooked nose almost beat his lips to his teacup. I salivated at the aroma of cardamom, freshly baked flatbread, and nakhi. He turned to me with his full double chin jiggling, and asked maliciously, “The boys knocked out your tooth, huh?” I bit my tongue, turning to Fahd for some sort of sign of what to say or not to say. He retracted his head between his shoulders as a turtle would, without breathing a word or glancing in my direction. “If I were them, I would’ve cracked your skull open!” ’Am Saleh jeered. Mama Hissa, who was sitting next to her son and the tea tray, didn’t like that one bit. She shot him a withering look. She reminded ’Am Saleh about what they had spoken of at the farm. “What did we say just yesterday?”

  He wasn’t bothered in the least.

  “Fear God, Saleh! Children don’t know any better and you do. Stop stirring up trouble.”

  “They should know who’s on their team and who isn’t, Mother.”

  I’ll never forget the sharpness of her face as she looked at him head-on.

  “The only thing you’ll get from fire is ashes.” It then clicked, at that very moment, why she had been eluding my question about the zoo. Fahd had already told them about the fight at school. ’Am Saleh became a different man after the tragedy of losing his father three years before, when those cafés had been bombed. Years later, I would come to hear the speculations about the bombers’ identities. It was said that they were part of a plan hatched by groups loyal to Iran, exacting their revenge on Kuwait for its staunch support of Iraq during the first Gulf War. Iraq stood for a sect. Iran stood for the opposing sect. Looking grave, ’Am Saleh responded, “They’re the ones who started it, Mother.” He referred to “them” just like Hercules had done two days ago. Them. My curiosity around “them” grew. Mama Hissa poured a little bit of tea in her saucer as she usually did to cool it down, before she drank it with a loud slurp.

  “You’re all idiots!” she exclaimed. “They’re tearing each other to pieces over there, and here you’re all just being copycats.” She started to talk about the Iran-Iraq War. I remember her falling silent, staring at the tea saucer in her hand, pensive. She spoke of Sri Lanka’s and Lebanon’s civil wars: “Next it’ll be us, you watch! God will destroy us like the other fools.” Mama Hissa looked at her son. “Before you know it, your wife will be working as a servant in someone else’s house!” Her son snorted at this prophecy of hers while she remained quiet. For many years to come, my ears rang with her words about the civil wars started by the “idiots” as she called them: the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Muslims and Christians in Lebanon. ’Am Saleh pestered his mother, saying that if she kept listening to Tina’s stories about back home, that she’d soon be speaking fluent Tamil. She ignored his wisecrack. “Tina’s brainwashed you.” Fahd finished cutting out pictures of Al Haddad from the magazine. He started to play around with the scissors, opening its jaws wide and snapping them shut. Mama Hissa yelled at him, ordering him to stop that very minute, to stop bringing misfortune and discord into her home. Fahd furrowed his eyebrows, not catching on to what his grandmother had said. She started telling him about the invisible strings that bind members of a house to one another. By his horsing around with the scissors, he could cut these ties without realizing it. Her grandson laughed. She upbraided him. She got up and pointed to what was between his lazily splayed thighs with her fingers moving like scissors. “Keep it up and I’ll cut off your balls!”

  He hastily slammed his thighs shut. He drew his knees to his chest. “Tawba! Tawba!” he chanted in repentance, begging her to have mercy. She lowered her voice, insulting him the only way she knew how: “Jew!”

  Mama Hissa looked at the wall clock with its pendulum. She turned back to Fahd in his corner and urged him to take me out to play in the courtyard. We still had ample time before Friday prayers. Fahd pulled at his lips in disappointment, and badgered her, “Do we really have to go pray?”

  “Don’t go, then . . . let the sky fall on our heads!” she baited him as she wagged a finger. I asked her why the sky would fall down on us if he didn’t pray. She bowed her head, meditative, and thought aloud. “We all die, and when we do, we’ll go to heaven, but he’ll go to hell.” Turning to Fahd again, she barked, “Yallah, out.” Turning to ’Am Saleh, she observed, “Question after question!” Before we left she reminded Fahd, “Don’t be late, lunch is mutabbaq samak, you stray cat!” Fahd’s face lit up at the mention of his favorite fish dish. He spread his fingers out, clawlike, and meowed in delight. He’d never leave the house when his nose picked up on fish fat frying in Tina’s kitchen. Mama Hissa looked at my face, feigning apology. “Oh, I’m sorry, my dear boy. It looks like we’re fresh out of bananas!” She read the expression on my face like an open book, it seemed, because immediately after her quip, she opened her arms wide. “Come here.” She hugged me to her bosom and whispered in my ear, “Don’t get upset and cut us off like your mother . . . I’m laughing with you, not at you, my boy.”

  In the courtyard, near Mama Hissa’s sidra, Fahd told me that everyone in the house already knew about our schoolyard scuffle, going on three days now. Like mine, his head was pulsing with questions. “Such things won’t do you any good,” his grandmother had warned him, urging him to drop this talk that would only breed resentment and headaches. “Soon we’ll all die and leave you, Fahd,” she had told him, “and your friends are the only ones who’ll stand by you.” Fahd gestured to Barhiya, Sa’marana, and Ikhlasa, the three palm trees behind the courtyard wall. “Mama Hissa told me to be like them, the Kayfan gals.” I looked to where he was pointing. I listened to Mama Hissa’s advice from his lips about these palm trees that had moved together from the old Kayfan house to the new Surra one, outlasting their owner, Mama Hissa’s husband.
“You promise you’ll stick together?” his grandmother had asked him. “Wallah,” he solemnly swore.

  “If you swear to God and lie, know that the sky will crash down on us!”

  ’Am Saleh never said the same things that Mama Hissa did. The relationship between him and ’Am Abbas didn’t match the one between their two mothers. But ’Am Saleh did respect Mama Zaynab, the mother of his nemesis. He ascribed his respect for her, as Fahd told me, to Mama Zaynab’s mother—whom we knew nothing about, except for her name, Hasiba—because she wasn’t one of “them.”

  Fahd’s dad blamed his son for getting himself caught up with Sadiq. He advised Fahd to keep away from him. He had no qualms telling Fahd about what the ulema thought of Sadiq and his family. “They call them infidels!” I imagined Sadiq’s father and mother, Uncle Abbas and Auntie Fadhila, in black clothes with scowling faces, throwing thorns in the path of the Prophet—in accordance with how unbelievers were scornfully portrayed in TV shows and films. I warned Fahd not to tell Sadiq about what his dad had said. “Whatever, it’s normal. I mean, Sadiq said that his dad was going on about how that family damns us,” he responded straightaway.

  “Wait, you mean ’Am Abbas’s family?” I asked incredulously.

  “No, moron, the Prophet’s family—Ahl al-Bayt—that ’Am Abbas, Khala Fadhila, Mama Zaynab, Sadiq, and Hawraa idolize,” he responded with a chuckle.

  I was left to think about what he had said.

  “Remind me of Sadiq’s grandpa’s name,” he said.

  “Abdul Nabi.”

  “Abdul Nabi . . . Slave to the Prophet.” He nodded his head in confirmation. “Get it now? They don’t worship God; ‘they’ worship the Prophet and his family.”

  1:08 p.m.

  Present Day

  I park my car in the basement garage of a building in Jabriya. Tranquility—something that was inconceivable only a little while ago when I was passing through the bridge checkpoints—clutches me in its embrace. I get out of my car and drag my lame leg toward the elevator. I press the buttons for the fourth, fifth, and eighth floors as a cover before I finally press the button for the tenth floor—where Fuada’s Kids is headquartered. I’m used to all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, especially given the recent threats we’ve received to disclose our tucked-away location. I pleaded with Fuada’s Kids to move our HQ to a neutral location, far away from Surra and Jabriya, but . . . oh well! I transfer all my weight to one leg to give my injured knee some relief. I catch my reflection in the elevator mirror; I’m a walking corpse. A cripple with dusty hair, a missing tooth, and dried-up blood crusted on my lower lip. If only this elevator were a coffin, going past the final floor in this building and ascending into the sky, it would take me to . . . and like a reflex, I utter, “God forgive me.” Is it true what Mama Hissa used to say way back then, that the sky was closer than we thought? The elevator stops at the final floor. My steps are heavy, as if the tacky hallway floor leading to the apartment is covered in glue. The door is open. There’s a paper stuck on the wall next to it: RELIGION IS A BLINDFOLD! I examine the paper. It’s stamped with the slogan of the Atheist Network, as they’ve started calling themselves lately, getting rid of their old name to make it easier for people to know exactly what they stand for. Their activities are no longer restricted to the Internet. They’ve started roaming around residential and public areas, handing out their leaflets, though we’ve actually never come across them making their rounds. Whenever we tear up one of their flyers, another one appears as if it has sprouted spontaneously out of the wall. I grab the flyer and rip it up. I make my way inside, aware of the difference in pace between my heartbeat and my steps. “Hey, guys!” I move through the apartment, opening one door after another. “Anyone here?” But it’s just me, the computer, photo printers, and a transmitter connected to the Internet, still playing on repeat the song we dedicated to listeners at the end of our radio broadcast after midnight last night. “This Country Demands Glory.” How long will we insist on something that will never change? We ripen like dates: soft and pliable flesh on the outside, with an inflexible, hard seed inside. We go on trying to hide what’s within us—after having failed to repair it—with songs that have faded away. It’s as if we gathered here in this apartment to exact revenge on a deceitful past by tricking an idiotic present, by replaying and broadcasting out-of-date music. We’re trying to pull one over on the next generation so that we don’t feel that we were the only ones who were hoodwinked into believing these idealistic songs.