Mama Hissa's Mice

by Saud Alsanousi

  “Just look at that son of a bitch—what is he babbling on about?” slipped out of my mouth into Fahd’s ear. My language took Fahd aback. It also caught me off guard. He squeezed my knee. “It’s just the usual . . . Let’s see who’s next.”

  The microphone moved from one hand to another. The voices were different, but the words were the same. The turban, beard, and bisht agreed; politics and religion—all of them singing from the same hymn sheet, “Everything is fine and we’re fine.” A member of parliament concluded that what united the sects was greater than the lies being spread about discord by those seeking to ambush state security. Our country was apparently a paradise, and all the happenings were nothing more than lies, slander, a fiction concocted by sick souls. And as it should be, he had to quote the Prophet’s saying about sedition and God’s damnation of those who awoke it. I was beyond disappointed. I, who had to shut down my diwaniya and almost lost my friends because of the poison they had injected into our homes as children. I, who embraced my muteness ever since my mom had raised her hand threatening to slap my mouth if I uttered a word. I remembered my first fight at school like it was yesterday. The blood on Sadiq’s shirt. The humiliation on Fahd’s face, crying, caught between two boys preventing him from saving his friend. Me out cold on the cool sidewalk, my tooth knocked out. I shivered. My mouth felt dry. I listened to the drumming in my chest, as if someone had shaken Mama Hissa’s sidra within me and released the jinn. I stood up and raised my arm once the Q&A began. I paid no mind to Fahd and Sadiq, who were urging that we leave.

  “You love drama,” Sadiq said, poking fun at my irritation.

  Fahd became aware of my state. “Why are you so worked up?” he asked. All the questions from the audience were from the VIPs seated in the front row; it seemed like everything had been rehearsed.

  I raised my voice as I extended my hand as high as it could go. “Mic! Mic!” I don’t know what had come over me all of a sudden. A perplexed Dhari got up from his chair and patted me on the shoulder. The scent of oud cologne on his hand wafted up to me.

  “Calm down!”

  “This is a joke,” I snapped. I remembered Mama Zaynab’s words: “We’re not wild animals that they can make fun of!”

  Either Dhari or I was on another planet. He was simplifying the matter, and I didn’t see it as simple. It pushed me to release all that I had kept trapped inside of me since childhood; to talk about a hatred that had only grown as the days passed by. The audience craned their necks in our direction. Embarrassment crept onto my cousin’s face, while Fahd and Sadiq were strapped down to their chairs like they didn’t know us. Dhari grabbed my arm and squeezed it. He whispered, “Easy does it . . . God will bring the r-r-r-rain.”

  I didn’t intend to make fun of his stutter, but I did. I answered him, yelling in my outburst, “I don’t want the r-r-r-rain, I want the damn microphone!”

  He let go of my arm and sat next to Sadiq and Fahd. I spat one question in the faces of the puppets onstage: “If sedition is asleep, if this thing staring at us and lying in wait for us is in fact nothing, if we’re such angels and our country is a paradise, and if we have nothing to worry about under the guidance of our wise government, then what has brought you all here today for this rally?”

  I pulled a ghutra off one of the organizer’s heads when he forcefully yanked the microphone from my hand. Like schoolboys. He faced me, chest puffed out. I did the same. He pushed me, so I pushed back. He cursed my mother; I cursed his ancestors. He hit me; I hit him. I only remember voices spouting profanity at us. Ghutras on the ground, sandals flying. Fahd whipping someone with his egal. Sadiq stamping on someone’s stomach. Ayub crashing the camera down on the back of a guy holding Dhari in a choke hold. “Calm down!” everyone else entreated.

  We calmed down in the police station while we signed bonds of good behavior, promising never to do that again. It turned out to be a great night for national unity after all!

  Without it, the Rawda diwaniya wouldn’t have opened its doors once more. We got together, the five of us, without reservation. We circled around the newspapers the following day, reading the headlines: Intruders wreck national unity rally. Ayub guffawed at the description. He raised his fist high, his voice booming, “Long live the wreckers!” Fahd pumped his fist, Sadiq and Dhari following suit, all laughing. “Hear! Hear!”

  Ayub turned to me and asked, “What are you thinking?”

  10:28 p.m.

  Present Day

  I don’t think of anything except being in the company of two women and three children in possible imminent danger. We walk up the stairs single file, Fawzia at the front and me at the back. I carry Hissa, her robe wet, in my arms. The generator in the courtyard suddenly roars to life. The spotlight awakes from its sleep, revealing the naked fear on our faces. Hissa is in my arms, semiconscious. One of us fears the dark, and the other, when trying to hide, fears the light. Hawraa’s phone rings. The caller: Abu Sami. He says a black car is parked by the gate of the Al Bin Ya’qub house. One of its passengers gets out. He climbs the boundary wall and jumps inside. Hawraa grows weak. She sits on the steps, hugging her two boys. “We’re going to die!” I beg her to go higher up. Her legs fail her. “We want to live,” she mumbles deliriously. The sound of someone opening the hallway door travels up the stairs. He slams the door open against the wall. At this point, the sound of any voice would reduce us to wraiths. Unless it’s a familiar one.

  “Hawraa . . . Hawraa . . . where are you all?” we hear Ayub call out.

  The two boys, followed by their mother, run downstairs. A worn-out Ayub falls on his knees at the base of the stairs. Naked, except for white underwear soaked in blood and on his body something resembling seaweed. He looks up to me and Hissa, fighting back a smile. “I saw your pile of scrap parked outside . . . and knew that you guys were here.” I sit on the stairs, catching my breath. I set the girl down. I stare into Ayub’s eyes and don’t respond. He knows I’m angry about the way he acted at the bridge. He lies down on his back, laughing with a sad face or crying with a face of joy, about escaping death. “I was going to die.” I look at my watch, calculating the time that has passed since his disappearance into the river. He sits up and justifies his tardiness. “Forget about the bullets from the men on the bridge, the corpse-catchers have started attacking live bodies!” If the volunteer patrol hadn’t found him and transported him here, he wouldn’t have arrived in this state. He says this while pointing to the bleeding wounds on his body. It’s as if he’s only just become aware of his nakedness. He bends. “I’m sorry.” Hawraa goes upstairs. She comes back with one of Fahd’s dishdashas. Ayub puts it on after washing himself.

  Hissa sits on the ground. She draws mice on the boys’ hands; they have completely surrendered to her. Hawraa turns on the TV and flips through the channels. The national TV station urges families to avoid the militias by staying away from threatened areas, to keep off the seven main roads, and to stay at home. Names of the areas appear on-screen while the anchorman reads out the news. Damascus Street is overflowing with sewage. Peaceful protests on Cairo Street, despite the curfew. Residents of Hawally put out burning fires at the entrance of Tunisia Street. Khaldiya: clashes on Tripoli Street between armed men and security forces. Salmiya: Baghdad Street under the control of rebels and families demanding the end of the curfew to make it easier for them to reach safety. Abdullah Al Salim: an IED explosion between Fatima Mosque and the gas station on Sana’a Street. The closure of Al Aqsa Mosque Street without any reason given. The news moves on, after broadcasting the names of the seven closed roads, to Kayfan: images of civil defense workers extricating corpses from under the rubble of houses overlooking Fahad Barrak Al Sabeeh Street. I look at Fawzia and the name of the area on the screen. I stretch out my hand to Hawraa and grab the remote control. I mute the TV, worried that Fawzia will pick up on what’s happening in Kayfan. Everyone has been doing their best for a while now to shield her from any bad news about her beloved area. I follow th
e figures on-screen, thinking of Fawzia. She doesn’t need all this coddling. Nothing on the radio or the television points to a place she loves. She doesn’t know that Andalus Park has now become Kayfan Oasis and that Abdul Wahab Al Faris Mosque, which was burned down last week, is the same mosque that people long ago used to call Bin Abidan Mosque. She doesn’t know that Al Mas’ud Theater has become Al Tahrir Theater, and that Al Tahrir Theater became a prison camp when the prisons were overcrowded with militants and suspects. If only she hadn’t lost her sight, she would have still been able to read the newspapers; she would read of the municipal council’s decision to change the name of Ishbiliya Street to Fahad Barrak Al Sabeeh Street. She’s confident that no harm has come to the locations of her cherished memories and that the corpses in the news are in a street far from hers. If only she had heard the news broadcast on the radio a little while ago, when I was searching for a safe route to get out of Jabriya: “Kayfan has been struck!”

  Ayub breaks my train of thought by snatching the remote control from my hand. He turns off the television. He looks at me and asks about what happened to us at dawn today . . . Sadiq, Fahd, and me. I shift my gaze to Hissa, who has almost finished her artwork on the boys’ palms. She’s drawing X’s that go through the mice. Ayub persists, “Where are they?”

  Hawraa repeats his question like an echo. “Where are they?”

  I know exactly what happened. But I . . . “I don’t know where they are . . .”

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE

  THE NOVEL

  Chapter 13

  I spent months using everything I could think of to try to convince them. We should be a patriotic group, a genuine one at that, including members from all religious and political leanings. We would sound the alarm and call a spade a spade. The country was in a deplorable condition.

  “It doesn’t call for all this,” Sadiq said after he laughed, claiming I was going to extremes. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” He didn’t give me a chance to explain that the molehill had actually become a malignant tumor. “What, a group with only five members?” he scoffed.

  While Dhari exercised restraint, Fahd remained neutral. “I’m up for whatever you all agree to.” Ayub was as enthusiastic as I was, maybe even more so. He said that the group’s headquarters, if we agreed, could be in his apartment in his father’s building in Jabriya.

  Dhari was opposed to this. “Get rid of the b-booze you’ve got lying around in there first.” Ayub ignored his words.

  Ayub and I did all that we could to achieve our aim. After a few days, Fahd said that he was wholly convinced of the importance of the project, after Hawraa and Fawzia had expressed interest as well. He said that they would be the first members to join the group. “We’ve become seven!”

  Dhari threw up his hands in what looked like surrender. He directed his words at Fahd. “May God grant you all success, but I’m against m-men and women mixing. It’s either me, or your wife and your aunt!”

  Fahd stayed calm. “Keep cool and say peace upon the Prophet, man!”

  Dhari said, “Peace be upon the Prophet, his family, and his companions.”

  “The best of them,” Sadiq added, specifying.

  Dhari knitted his eyebrows. “All the companions of the Prophet are good . . .”

  “They’re good for you guys,” Sadiq thoughtlessly answered.

  The disappointment that had come over me during that farce of a rally was the very same I felt now in the diwaniya. In each of us was an Abbas or Saleh rearing his head just as we were about to agree. We had spent months without getting one step closer to establishing the group. I was afraid to utter a word and have everything come crashing down. I knew that if I didn’t succeed in this endeavor, it would be equivalent to undoing everything that I’d done in the hope of keeping us together as friends. It was my last hope for us, the five of us, who had become seven, to do something. My gaze wandered between them, listening to their opinions, searching for anything that would prove my mom wrong when she said my friends were sacks of coal. Coal, whose harm didn’t stop at staining my clothes black. Coal that blazed one day, then became ashes; the ashes that are all you get from fire, just as Mama Hissa had warned all those years ago.

  Fahd convinced my cousin that Hawraa’s role would be at home, restricted to managing the group blog and website. “Where’s the mixing in that?” Sadiq jumped in, frustrated by Fahd’s justification. “I as her brother and Fahd as her husband don’t have a problem.”

  Dhari glossed over Sadiq’s words. He asked Fahd, “And your aunt? May God ease her condition, b-blind as she is . . . What’s her role?”

  “My aunt—thank you for your well wishes—my aunt’s memory is important. She has stories, a store of national songs richer than the Ministry of Information’s, and we need—”

  “Songs? God grant you success, but I’m against m-music . . . It’s either me or your aunt!” Dhari cut in.

  Voices rose in debate, each one trying to convince the other, whereas Sadiq remained silent. Fahd asked him what he thought. He responded, his ears flushed with blood, “God grant you success . . . but either I’m with you all . . . or Dhari is!”

  Many days of deadlock ensued. I begged them to listen to me. It was easier than all their complications. A blog, Facebook page, radio station, and my weekly column in the newspaper. This is what we’d start with, then we’d expand our activities, and each of us would express his opinion as long as it didn’t go against our mission. Ayub’s face was my main motivation to keep on talking despite their interruptions. I didn’t get annoyed. Their discussions, despite their conflicting views, reassured me that they believed in the importance of the idea.

  We wouldn’t have reached a consensus if the newspapers hadn’t published, during those days, images of offensive slogans about the Prophet’s companions that had been scrawled on the walls of a mosque and now shattered glass windows of a hussainiya. “Where are we headed?” Dhari said, as if he had only just then perceived the gravity of the situation. Ayub answered him that we, we were the ones who would determine where we were going.

  “But . . .” Dhari hesitated.

  Ayub jumped to kiss his forehead. “Please, for God’s sake, without any ‘buts.’ We’ve got to get to work.”

  Dhari smiled like I’d never seen him smile before and said, “God will bring the r-rain.”

  Ayub started to weave his way through the diwaniya, dancing and clapping. He wiggled his shoulders as he walked around, his steps deliberate, singing an old ditty: “Drip, raindrop, drip . . . our house is new . . . our drainpipes are now iron.” His infectious clapping moved me, then Fahd and Sadiq, resulting in the four of us circling around Dhari, who was trying but miserably failing to keep from smiling. Our clapping became delirious, and Ayub’s dancing soared to a zenith that made it like a zar, an exorcism party, only missing the traditional drumming and the incense. I listened to the drops of rain splattering on the street’s asphalt. I smelled the aroma of moist soil. In my head, the sky was showering down indulgently.

  We agreed that our group wouldn’t be backed by any authority, political movement, religious group, or government—so that only we could represent ourselves. Deciding what to call the group was all that remained. They started to select names: Ayub suggested “the Alarm Bell”; Dhari proposed “the Anti-Sedition League”; Sadiq and Fahd didn’t pay attention to him as they had already agreed on the name “Like Before.” I shook my head, rejecting all their suggestions. We needed a name that commanded attention. A name that would strike terror into people’s hearts, to make them aware of the danger of staying on the same path. Sadiq turned to me. “Fine then . . . you choose a name.”

  I looked everyone in the eye before saying, “Fuada’s Kids.”

  Dhari gaped at me. “Who’s this F-Fuada?”

  Fahd sprawled out on his back, laughing uproariously.

  I told Dhari that it was the Fuada from the Rest in Peace, World television se
ries, the crazy hoarse-voiced history teacher Fuada, who said that the mice were coming, carrying the mousetrap, calling out, “Protect yourselves from the plague!”

  Fahd could barely bring his laughter to heel. “Fuada? Scary? Only you’re afraid of her! She doesn’t scare people,” he said as he gawked at me.

  He got up from the floor and, taking on a serious air, said, “Okay, enough with the jokes . . . seriously, you’re the one who thought of the group, so now you’ll choose the name.”

  I stood my ground. “Fuada’s Kids. With the slogan, The mice are coming . . . protect yourselves from the plague!”

  “But that name is a joke!”

  “This whole situation is a joke!” I shot back.

  THE FOURTH MOUSE: ASHES

  All of them are villains,

  the murdered and the murderers

  They claim . . . that they . . . are carrying

  the cross to Golgotha

  when they . . . are burning the roots

  if . . . they bloom . . . with buds

  —Ali Al Sabti

  11:05 p.m.

  Present Day

  “I don’t know where they are!”

  I stay silent. I hate how I’m choking on my tears like a child. I remember myself with both of them at dawn today. I feign a cough that tightens my vocal cords. Ayub and Hawraa are still staring at me, demanding an answer.

  Fawzia tilts her head. She turns one ear to me, sensing my voice. She repeats their question: “Where are they?”

  “What I do know is that we were together. The three of us. We were celebrating in our own way the successful completion of the first day of the truce. We finished broadcasting the last of the programs after midnight. We chose the song ‘This Country Demands Glory,’ Fawzia. We filled the silence of the airwaves with it during the night hours until the broadcast resumed with your morning news bulletin, Ayub. We left the HQ for Rawda. ‘Should we go home?’ I asked Fahd and Sadiq, thinking that on an occasion like this, my day should not end just like any other. ‘Of course not,’ Sadiq said to me. He was the one who made the suggestion, ‘Gamal Abdel Nasser Park, let’s have dinner there.’ I laughed. Where did he get that idea? The park’s been dead for so long. He said he needed a place far away from people. He said he was missing a place that felt familiar.