Mama Hissa's Mice

by Saud Alsanousi

  The tears in Fawzia’s eyes, triggered by my description of the moon, forced me to go quiet. Fahd grumbled. I continued. “Shuhab complained to the moon about not being able to catch Shail, and asked the moon, the largest body, the one that inevitably sees everything, to show him to his friend instead of simply lighting the paths of the sky. The moon sobbed. An enormous tear fell from the sky onto the earth that the mice had ruined. Crops grew in it once more: rice, wheat, maize, and barley. The moon asked Shuhab to return to plow his land instead of wasting his time. Shuhab didn’t understand. ‘But you see everything!’ he said to the full moon, begging him to show him where his friend was. The moon answered that he couldn’t see anything in spite of the light that he cast in every place, because he was actually blind. Shuhab went pale, not believing that the beautiful celestial body, all the light that he reflected around him notwithstanding, couldn’t see a thing. But because he was blind, he found himself illuminating the way for others. Shuhab then picked up his lamp, bidding the moon farewell, and no one knows which way he went, whether he went searching for his friend or returned to his land.”

  Fawzia passed her finger under her eyes as soon as the tale was over. She smiled and said that I was good at making up stories. “I didn’t make it up!” I insisted.

  She was content to smile while Fahd jumped in, insisting, “Mama Hissa never told boring stories like that.”

  “Boring stories? Come up with one like it if you can!”

  Hawraa burst out laughing. Fawzia’s face was serious as she encouraged me to write stories for kids. Maybe one day I’d be a famous writer.

  “I’m confident that you will be.”

  I didn’t read Abdel Quddous that day. Before I went home, Fawzia said, “You’re the sight of my eyes . . . and the best brother in the world . . . Write for me.” At the door to the courtyard, Fahd grabbed my arm as I made for home.

  “You love my aunt like a sister . . . right?”

  I nodded. He pulled me closer and squeezed my arm. “Swear to God!”

  I couldn’t look him in the eye with Mama Hissa’s voice in my head warning, “The sky’ll fall on us!” I freed my arm from his viselike grip.

  “Just leave God out of it, please.”

  8:00 p.m.

  Present Day

  I’m sitting on the ground of what remains of Fuada’s Kids’ headquarters. I lean back against the wall amid the blackness that tinges everything. The blackness caused by the absence of light and the soot caked on the ground, walls, ceiling, transmitter, the computer, and printers. Hissa, in her black robe, is in the corner, hugging her knees to her chest. She plays around with Ayub’s phone, searching for a game to kill time with until the curfew is lifted at sunrise. Ayub cuts yellow pieces of tape that the criminal investigators used to cordon off portions of the apartment. He feels something with the tip of his toe. “Weird!” he exclaims as he directs his flashlight to a charred mouse. He disappears inside the rooms, flashing his light, searching for anything left intact after the fire.

  Hissa comes forward to sit down beside me and clasps my arm. “I hate the dark; the dark took my father. I was going to die in that elevator in the dark.” She pays no attention to my silence. She looks at my face and says, “I love Mama Hissa.”

  From where did she come up with Mama Hissa’s name? I don’t have the chance to ask. She rummages through her bag, takes out three small books, and hands them to me. I don’t mask my smile as I clutch the three books. The first in a series of children’s stories: the Ibn Al Zarzur stories. How this little girl is able to make me forget all that is going on! She says that she loved Mama Hissa the storyteller. She hands me a pen and asks me to sign one of the books. I give her a choice: Shail’s story, the sidra jinn story, or the story of the three palm trees.

  “I like the Kayfan girls.”

  “I like them, too . . . and their friend,” I whisper.

  “I have two sisters.” She grins. “I’m Ikhlasa, and my two sisters are Barhiya and Sa’marana.” She giggles. She vows then that when they grow up, if things don’t change, she’ll start an organization like ours and call it the Kayfan Girls. Who said that writing is useless? I open the cover to an illustration that Sadiq created using watercolors. An image of Mama Hissa seated in her black abaya between three boys wearing dishdashas and a girl with long black hair in a poofy pink dress is on the first page of each of the stories in the series. The old woman sets the stage for her story, “Zur Ibn Al Zarzur . . . illi ’umro ma kadhab . . .” I write in the blank space above the illustration: To little Hissa, a.k.a. Ikhlasa . . . for you, the best story ever told by Mama Hissa. She puts her books back in her bag. She kisses my cheek. Ayub’s phone rings in her hands. “Uncle! Your phone is ringing.”

  He yells back, asking who’s calling. She reads out the number to him. The Al Bin Ya’qub household number on the screen pushes me to take the phone from her hands. “Hello!” Hawraa is still with Fawzia in Surra. She asks me about how her stomach and her back—Sadiq and Fahd—are doing.

  I don’t have any new answer. “All will be well, God willing.”

  She says that Saleh is still in Mubarak Hospital. It’s confirmed that his condition is critical. “I’m scared that ’Am Saleh will die with one eye closed and . . . one eye open.”

  I recall his face this afternoon at the door to his house. I remember how disparaging he was. “This is your group’s doing, you sower of fruitless earth.” Now, which one of us sowed the other, Saleh?

  I ignore what Hawraa is saying and ask about Fawzia. She says that she’s been silent since that afternoon. I remember the last time I saw her, eighteen years before in the Diamond Hall of the Sheraton Hotel. What does she look like now? Hawraa tells me she is fine, as are her two boys, then ends the call. She advised us not to go out until the curfew is lifted. I notice Hissa fishing for something in her bag. She grabs it and brings it close to her mouth. She holds it out to me. I shake my head, letting her know that I’m not hungry. She laughs. She puts whatever was in her hand back in her bag. She takes back Ayub’s phone. Directing the lit-up screen toward the barricade tape, she rips off a small piece, and ties back her hair with it. Next thing I know, she’s seated beside me, shining the light in my face. “Uncle . . . can I ask something?” I nod encouragingly. She asks me how old I am.

  “Forty-two. And you?”

  “Eleven.” She fidgets. She seems weighed down by a question.

  “You want to say something, Hissa?” It pains me to say her name. She nods. She says she wants to share a secret with me, only if I answer her question first.

  “Don’t you smell it?”

  “What?”

  She pouts. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  Ayub watches us from the door of one of the rooms. I beg her to go on. She does. She’s embarrassed to be disgusted at the decaying air, because no one else takes notice except for her, her father, and the policeman who brought her to our headquarters a few hours before. I assure her that Ayub and I smell what she smells. She beams. She asks me what’s behind the smell. Because I’m older than her father, or so she thinks, I must have a more convincing answer than what he had said. I ask her what he said. She hesitates before answering. “He says that the smell won’t go away unless the Bayn River dries up and the corpse-catcher dies. And both of those won’t happen until . . .”

  Hissa falls silent. Ayub comes closer and hugs her, encouraging her to go on. She shakes her head. He asks her what her father’s name is. She shakes her head again. He asks her what he does. She shakes her head. I run out of patience. “We’ve got to know who he is so we can help you, Hissa!” I shove aside the pain of her name as I try to get a straight answer out of her. She ends up describing him. He’s thirty-five. Tall and thin. Thick black glasses. The masked men took him three days ago.

  Ayub and I exchange glances while she asks, “Uncle, are you sure you can smell it?” I describe to her the stages of the smell. At first it’s bitter, burns the eyes. She nods in agreement. Th
en rancid like rotten eggs. She raises her eyebrows, absorbed.

  She shoves her hand in her bag and hands me a perfume bottle. “Here, take this.”

  Ayub’s phone beeps with a text message. His eyes widen as he reads it. Holding out his phone, he brings the screen close to my face. Hawraa’s text reads: “Someone’s beating down the door!”

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE

  THE NOVEL

  Chapter 6

  Two years of writing stories and changing others. I would retire to my room to write on pieces of paper in preparation for my visits to Fawzia. I became her Ihsan. I peppered my stories with Mama Hissa’s anecdotes and the national songs that Fawzia loved. I annoyed Fahd with the excessive romance in what I wrote, despite the love that bound him to his Hawraa, who no longer attended our get-togethers in Fawzia’s bedroom. Fahd ended up dropping out as well, obviously. Their relationship was clear, an ebb and flow, push and pull.

  Fahd installed a new phone line in his room; each day, his voice mail would play a different, usually solemn, melody. One could tell from the song of the day which stage their love was in. “We didn’t plan to meet . . . and if we did, it would be in hardship.” Such songs would sadden me when I heard them on his phone. Fawzia clued me in. “Fahd spoke to his mom about Hawraa.”

  Aisha didn’t tell her husband. She simply warned her son. “Her father is Abbas, and yours is Saleh . . . Are you crazy?” Hawraa spoke frankly with Fadhila. Her answer didn’t differ much from Fahd’s mother’s. I felt their bitterness, which was reminiscent of my bitterness toward whom? Deep bitterness and feelings of loss when I was made to leave Surra in September 1997. We didn’t travel that summer because we were moving from Surra to Rawda. I was in my car that night, parked across from our old house when Fahd and Sadiq came to see me off. My parents had moved to the new house a week before, whereas I stayed back, stretching out my time before Surra spit me out. I made room in my house for the new owners, scarcely believing that a stranger would now live in my room, becoming a neighbor to my old neighbors.

  “My aunt is waiting for you in the courtyard; she wants to say bye to you,” Fahd said.

  “Tell her I said bye.”

  “She’s waiting for you!”

  “Tell her I said bye,” I repeated. I turned on the engine, my finger pointing into the distance. “I’m going to Rawda . . . not another country.” But I was well aware that I was on a journey, never to return. I drove off. I reached the end of the street at a house that had been owned by the zalamat seven years earlier, next to Alameen the Punjabi’s store. The image of Abu Naiel’s grief-stricken face on his last day appeared. Comparing the distance between Amman and Surra, and between Rawda and Surra, didn’t ease my bitterness at having to leave my old street. Rawda is close by, and Amman is far away. In my case, distance had nothing to do with my emotions. Unwarranted feelings pushed me to turn my car around. I didn’t stop at our house or Abbas’s house. I stopped in the courtyard in front of the house between them. I looked over at the Kayfan girls: Ikhlasa, Barhiya, and Sa’marana. The black iron door. The sidra behind the wall. I opened the window on my left. A chorus of the night suweer among the grasses in front of Sadiq’s and Fahd’s houses chirped, singing my farewell song. Most of the cars on their street were dusty, wrapped in fabric covers. Their owners were abroad. I hated traveling. “You’ve come back, have you?” Sadiq’s yell surprised me from his doorstep.

  I made up a reason. “I came back to tell you to let Mama Zaynab know that I said I’ll miss her . . . take care.”

  “It’s not like you’re moving abroad!” he joked, staring at my face.

  I gunned my engine and set off, looking at the butcher’s shop in the Al Awaidel house and the stores in the Al Anbaiie Mall, despite the haze in my eyes. They all were bursting with life, except for Al Budur Bookstore, its facade plastered with Abu Fawaz’s name and his phone number, announcing For Sale. At the bend in Abu Hayyan Al Tawhidi Street in Rawda, I glided by Shehrayar’s, a restaurant whose shawarma looked nothing like Jaber’s in Al Anbaiie Mall, and which didn’t sell macaroni sandwiches with ketchup. I was struggling to breathe in my car with all the cigarette smoke. All the windows were closed so that Abdulkareem’s voice couldn’t slip out: “Farewell to our final night together.” I doused myself in cologne before entering the house. My mom knew what leaving our old street really meant. That night she stayed very close to me. She opened up her arms as wide as they could go, hugging me for a long time when I entered the new house for the first time; my arms didn’t reciprocate. She breathed me in.

  “Your cologne’s nice,” she whispered in my ear, “but your breath stinks.” She squeezed me in her arms, reprimanding me for smoking. I didn’t say a word. I was restless in her embrace. She knew exactly the depth of my loneliness in the new house. “If you’re not at ease in the new diwaniya, go to Surra and see your friends whenever you want.” I untangled my body from her hug.

  “Mom.” She gazed at my features, anticipating what I was going to say. I stared into her eyes. “Say, by God Almighty, who raised the heavens, that I won’t ever go back to Surra.”

  She rested her palm on my shoulder and worriedly asked, “Why?”

  I couldn’t look at her face any longer. I insisted that she say it. She evaded me. She gave me a sidelong glance. “What’s gotten into you?”

  She kept asking, and I kept responding with “Swear, Mom.”

  “Why all these oaths? Why don’t you swear? Should be easy, seeing as you don’t seem to want to go back!”

  My voice jumped a few octaves. “I can’t . . . I can’t, Mom . . .”

  She embraced me in her arms once more. I knew that I wasn’t good at what she was used to doing, sticking to her oaths, making God a boundary between what she said and did. I couldn’t stretch my finger to the sky and invoke it to bear witness, believing it would fall on my head if I broke my oath, because a promise like that would be no small thing, and because I wasn’t like the sparrow’s son, Ibn Al Zarzur, who never lied in his life. My mother’s eyes twinkled. “Honey, you’re blowing this all way out of proportion!” She took my face in her hands. “Has someone upset you?” I pursed my lips so nothing would come out.

  “Honey, what’s eating you? Will you breathe easier if I swear?”

  I nodded my head like a petulant child. She nestled my face between her neck and shoulder, stroking the back of my head. “Damn Surra . . . By God who raised the heavens, you won’t go back there while I’m still around!” I raised an arm and hugged her fiercely.

  “But why?” she asked.

  8:34 p.m.

  Present Day

  Both Ayub and I call Hawraa. No answer. The Al Bin Ya’qub house. No answer there either. Hissa clings to my dishdasha. “I’m going with you!” Ayub begs us to stay put while he goes to his cousin in Surra.

  I get up from the floor, dusting the soot from my dishdasha. “I’ll go with you.”

  “It’s Surra,” he reminds me.

  I nod my head. “I’m still coming with you.”

  He assumes that I still haven’t been back to Surra. He sets his surprise aside and looks at the girl. She looks back at him. He looks at me and inquires, “And the curfew?” As if the curfew only applies to me and her.

  “God is our protector,” I answer.

  We rush downstairs. I carry Hissa. Ayub leads us with his flashlight. The corpse between the third and second floors is still there, its features deformed in the dark, the corpse-catcher perched with its claws on the man’s chest, slipping its hooked black beak in, tearing the flesh apart.

  “Corpse-catcher!” Hissa shrieks. I shield her eyes with my palms so she won’t catch sight of the body under the bird. The open main door reveals flickering lights outside. Ayub turns off his flashlight. From behind the door, he peeks out to look at the street. He raises his head to ensure that there isn’t a sniper on top of the surrounding buildings. He looks to the left.

  He goes out the door, mumbl
ing, “Sons of bitches!” I follow him, holding Hissa’s hand, wondering why the colorful language. I find him standing at a distance from his car. It’s on fire.

  “My car is over there.” I hobble toward it as much as my limp allows me. Ayub trails me. He becomes aware of my pile of scrap on wheels.

  “Your car’s a piece of junk. Does it even run?” I nod. He points to its front, the missing windshield. “Accident?” he asks.

  “I’ll tell you later.” He almost says something. I tell him not to worry. I drive my car with no lights. Ayub searches for the radio dial. “And this is the result of the thirty-five booby-trapped cars exploding in four minutes. The cabinet has announced that the Kayfan area has been struck and urges all citizens everywhere to stay in their homes.” For once Kuwait National Radio doesn’t bury the truth.

  “Not true!” Ayub yells.

  “Al Mansuriya is in flames.”

  “Rumors,” he dismisses.

  “Hostages are being detained in a hussainiya in Bnied Al Gar.”

  “Pack of lies!”

  “The Ministry of Interior Affairs encourages snipers not to target the black birds; they alone guarantee the recovery of corpses.”

  “What a load of . . .”

  “People wounded in clashes in Rawda today at dawn.”

  I turn off the radio.

  “It’s all bullshit,” Ayub reassures me. I don’t answer. Houses on the right are in flames. A mountain of car frames burns at the exit of the Fourth Ring Road. Ayub grumbles, urging me to turn around. “Quickly!”