Brooklyn Heights

by Miral al-Tahawy

  Umm Hanan’s breasts were full under the frill of her plunging neckline, but there was still enough room for the scissors and the sewing needle and other little items like her tweezers and eyebrow pencil and her change purse. Her round breasts could still be compared to all the usual fruits because she never breastfed any of her three daughters, but gave them to her sister to nurse instead. When she bent over her sewing machine her breasts spilled out over the frills of her dress.

  Her house was full of young girls who had come to learn the trade. They called her ‘ma’am’ and Hend never saw them sitting at the machine. Mostly they swept and cooked and scattered water in the street in front of the house to tamp down the dust, but when Umm Hanan began to cut out a piece of fabric they huddled around her on the rush mat and tried to memorise her every move. Umm Hanan’s mother lived with her. She was an extremely thin old lady with lots of wrinkles. She liked to sit in the sun because it soothed her inflamed eyes, crusted and shut fast with ophthalmia. She quietly peeled the garlic or shelled the peas, breaking her silence only to do her ablutions and pray for the Prophet or tell a few stories to the girls now and then. They had to repeat everything they said to her because she was hard of hearing. Hend knew that she used to bake bread in people’s houses like Grandmother Zaynab, but then she retired when the pain in her eyes got worse thanks to the heat and smoke of the ovens. One day Hend came by with a message. ‘Mama says can you make some pies for her for Ramadan, Grandmother?’ Umm Hanan got up in a huff from her spot at the sewing machine. ‘Tell Mama that we don’t work for the Bedouins any more,’ she said emphatically as she wiggled her eyebrows, ‘and my mother doesn’t make pies or bread any more either.’ Hend remembers feeling mortified. She didn’t understand who these ‘Bedouins’ were in the first place, or what her family had to do with them.

  Umm Hanan played with the radio dial every few hours to find her favourite songs. At some point, she started to refuse the mending work that Hend brought from her mother. ‘Tell your mother that I don’t do alterations any more,’ she said bluntly. ‘My scissors only cut brand-new clothes now.’ Hend stared at the floor self-consciously as she stood there with the old clothes in her hand. Umm Hanan must have felt sorry for her because she took them gently and said, ‘Alright then, just this once for Mama’s sake. But tell her that my scissors are legendary and that she’ll never see anything like the cut of my sleeves.’ Hend nodded her head obediently and went to sit next to the old grandmother, who told her the story of ‘Hend the daughter of King Nu’man’. She watched the girls as they scrubbed the pots and pans. They stole glances at Umm Hanan as she yawned and said, ‘My back is killing me, girls. One of you can fix this piece.’ She left the machine to them and stretched out on her stomach on the rush mat. She nodded off as one of the girls massaged her back. Sometimes they plucked stray hairs from her eyebrows or her plump legs without being asked, as if they’d been trained from the start to do that kind of thing. Umm Hanan emerged from these sessions glowing and smooth-skinned, looking just like Fathiya Ahmad, especially when the kohl smudged in circles under her eyes. Her men friends were in the habit of dropping by the house. They walked in as though they owned the place, stretching out comfortably in the living room with its three clean, brightly coloured sofas. Umm Hanan’s door was never shut fast, and anyone outside could easily hear her echoing laugh and the sound of her fine, plaintive voice as she sang.

  One day the two girls went up to the roof, Hanan pulling Hend by the hand. They climbed the wooden ladder and lay down together on the straw. Hanan wept, and her voice sounded exactly like her mother’s. ‘She wants to get married. Every day she tells me the same thing. “I don’t know where your father is. From the day he left for Jordan he hasn’t sent a word or a penny. He said he’d be back in the blink of an eye but he never came. I’m not going to stay single like this forever, living without a man, and you’re older now and you’ve got to understand.”’

  Hanan’s mother didn’t get married after all, but certainly not for lack of suitors. Hanan grew up and sprouted full breasts and rounded buttocks before any of the other girls. This provoked the Arabic teacher and he would make her wipe the blackboard on purpose so that he could examine the telltale signs of her approaching womanhood at his leisure. He talked a lot about the ancient Bedouins’ passion for female posteriors. Hanan disappeared from class suddenly, like Noha, and when Hend took a bag of oranges and went to visit her, ill with a stomach ache at home, Umm Hanan laughed coquettishly and purred, ‘That’s it . . . your little friend is a woman now.’ Hend sat next to Hanan and Hanan told her about the talcum powder and her aching legs and the cramps. Hend thought long and hard about the sculptor of girls and wondered why he still hadn’t paid her a visit, she alone amongst all the girls. She waited impatiently for him to come and take her as far away as possible.

  Soon, different kinds of guests started to come to Umm Hanan’s house. Some of them wore the white Bedouin headdress. They looked a lot like Hend’s uncles, impassive under the weight of their heavy robes. A few months later, one of them carried Hanan off to his distant country, a place further away even than the Red Estate, or Jordan, or anywhere Hend had ever heard of. Umm Hanan abandoned her sewing machine and built two new rooms out of red brick. She began to shut her door fast from then on, a new door made of elaborately carved wood. The townswomen would come to examine her merchandise: Saudi gowns and Gulf-style scarves, black veils and heavy stockings for covered women. She changed her title from The Lady Umm Hanan to The Hajja Umm Hanan. She took to visiting the blessed city of Medina and the Prophet’s tomb every few months and she’d come back carrying suitcases full of merchandise. She would sell and bargain and swear on the Blessed Prophet’s tomb that she had ‘loved’ it (meaning that she had kissed it) with her own two lips. She insisted that she never made any profit, and that she only did it for the love of God. She also began to praise the virtue of the town’s young women to the skies and she offered to marry them off in those pure and blessed faraway countries, free of charge, her only recompense being the approval of the Creator of All Things, and the joy of settling the girls – especially the youngest of them – comfortably in life. The neighbours started to place all their hopes in her and her business. They sent the spinsters to work as servants and married off the youngest and prettiest of their daughters in distant Saudi Arabia. They began to say that her visits were blessed, especially when she knocked on their doors in her elaborately embroidered velvet gown and repeated any one of her newly acquired expressions: ‘May God reward you with good’ or ‘May God permit me to do a good deed with every step’ or ‘In God’s keeping’ – those turns of phrase that clothed her in an aura of strength and purpose.

  Hend sat alone in her classroom at the Muqawi School. She was the only girl left in the class now that all the other girls had disappeared, one after the other. She sat there, quiet and well behaved, convinced that hopscotch was a shameful game that made girls spread their legs and that beads were sinful because they disturbed the peace of households and brought about their ruin. She even began to hate Little House because houses were places that thrived on wretchedness and calamity. After Hanan disappeared, she didn’t want to have friends any more, or maybe she just didn’t know how to make them. She started to refer to the people she met as ‘classmates’ or ‘acquaintances’.

  Here in Brooklyn, she waits for the phone to ring or for a strange woman to smile at her on the street. She doesn’t see Fatima any more either. ‘Everybody in this city is running around after something. Everybody is busy,’ she would say to make herself feel better. She walks alone towards Atlantic Avenue. The winter rain falls steadily and the homeless people hide in the subway station or make a quick dash for Dunkin’ Donuts. They sit alone and glance longingly at strangers with whom they hope to exchange a smile or a few simple words. The rain falls on the glass windows of the coffee shop and she watches the solitary drops and thinks how closely she fits in with the wretchedness around her. As
she walks down the long avenue she passes the halal butchers and the stores that sell fragrant oils and religious books about the torments of hell, pilgrimage clothes and velvet Meccan prayer rugs and short white Pakistani jalabas and so many different kinds of headscarves. Sometimes she rides the bus from Atlantic Avenue in the north of Brooklyn to Coney Island or Brighton Beach in the south. She sits next to the window and remembers how she used to love watching the world go by from the window of the old Cadillac. She stays on the bus till the end of the line and then rides back again, without getting off.

  She sits down on the wooden bench near his school. The boy she’s waiting for has grown taller somehow. He walks a few steps ahead of her in silence. He answers her questions abruptly, ‘Fine,’ and then he suddenly says this: ‘Life is hard here. But you have to keep dreaming because dreams do come true sometimes.’ She has no idea where he got that from, but she tells him that she likes the way he pronounces the words in English. ‘Dreams come true sometimes, Mom.’

  8

  Fulton Street

  Fulton Street runs through the heart of Brooklyn. A small one-storey building with a back garden and terrace stands on a small side street opposite a church. They call it the Refugee Assistance Agency. She goes there every week and takes her place next to the young women, and older ones like herself, who come here looking for work and food stamps or a meagre weekly handout. The women are from Burma and Bosnia, Iraqi women in cheerless black robes, fair-skinned Kurdish women, and Afghans with bright, flushed faces.

  Hend always sits next to Nazahat. Nazahat, who fled Bosnia years ago, has a habit of producing an ID card from her pocket every so often to prove that she used to be a doctor back home in a city that Hend has never heard of. Her face is small and pink and she wears thick prescription glasses that give her a dignified look. Her voice is measured and grave – as a doctor’s voice should be – and her limited English is Russian-accented. Thanks to her many skills, Nazahat is much sought after by immigrants with no health insurance from the communities scattered on the peripheries of Brooklyn and particularly in the area of Canarsie. The Refugee Assistance Agency is usually full of them: legal and illegal immigrants, many from conservative Yemeni Muslim families who all live together in big houses. Nazahat’s skills open the door to their world. She is an expert at diagnosing and treating all kinds of aches and pains. She takes her patients’ pulses and checks their blood pressure and temperature. She examines pregnant and nursing women, and the families always send for her in emergencies. They call her ‘doctor’ and they trust her because she is a Muslim, and therefore permitted to examine the private parts of other Muslims. She also carries a small portable sewing machine with her as she goes from home to home so that she can alter the voluminous black abayas at the waist or neckline or hips; shapeless clothing that has been transported to New York in standard sizes by merchants and returning pilgrims.

  Nazahat’s hands are accomplished hands, small and agile and criss-crossed with minute veins, the hands of a miracle worker. The only Arabic phrases she understands are ‘God willing’, ‘thank God’, ‘take it out here’, ‘take it in there’, and a few other basic expressions that she needs to communicate with her clients – especially with the old matriarch who runs all those households from her permanent spot on the prayer rug, where she constantly murmurs to her beads, ‘There is no power or mercy save in God.’ The young ones don’t resemble their mothers at all. They wear designer clothes and speak fluent American English in spite of the fact that they rarely make it past junior high school because the grandmother promptly arranges early marriages for them from her spot on the prayer rug. Nazahat’s services are especially in demand during the marriage season. She is the one who cuts and sews trousseaux and prepares facials and treats pelvic inflammations and prescribes ointments of various kinds. She plays the roles of bathhouse attendant and nurse all wrapped up in one. The matriarch, who chews on mouthfuls of qat grown in the small garden behind the house and rubs her hands with saffron and aloe musk, is fond of her, and calls her ‘a true Muslim’. Nazahat also does the shopping for her Yemeni clients because they don’t like to send their women to the supermarket. The women mostly take care of the housework and don’t go out at all except in the company of their husbands. Hend has discovered that many of these wealthy Yemeni families own most of the delis in Brooklyn as well as a good number of the Brooklyn Laundry Clean franchise stores, and that they compete with the Mexicans in the construction business. They started out as small contractors, then expanded into business dynasties, marrying amongst themselves and forming a ‘ghetto’ that stretches from Canarsie to Fifth Avenue.

  Nazahat sits on her chair in the waiting room of the Refugee Assistance Agency between Hend and a group of young Bosnian women covered from head to foot, and she tells Hend about Omar Azzam. She says that he is very rich and very generous and that he supports dozens of Muslim families with monthly stipends. She urges Hend to meet his wife, Erica, an American girl who saw the light and converted to Islam thanks to him, and who is very charitable to the Muslim refugees in Brooklyn. Omar Azzam is rich – richer than anyone could imagine, richer even than his Yemeni partners in the construction and deli businesses. Hend turns her face to the window to escape the conversation. ‘That kind of charity isn’t for me,’ she says. ‘I don’t have anything to do with the God that you people are always talking about. Or at least I’m trying to forget Him for now.’ Nazahat turns her back on Hend and doesn’t say another word.

  The group of women who sit to the side at a distance from the circle of men are plump like her. Their rear ends are heavy and they use obscure body language to reply to simple questions like ‘How are you?’ There is something slightly bizarre about them. Their transparent Uzbek scarves partially conceal their faces, and they wear strange dresses printed with primitive shapes – squares and triangles – in bright colours, red and green like the flags of disappeared nations drowned in some unknown sea. They smile for no reason. Their children will grow up and learn to speak American English and they will never ask after their absent fathers. Their papers are marked ‘physical and emotional abuse . . . humanitarian asylum’ – phrases that Hend understands too well. A large group of relatively young men also wait at the agency. Most of them are from Burma or Afghanistan and they exchange a few listless words until their turn comes to receive their handouts. They don’t talk much because each of them is preoccupied with his own affairs. They don’t share their stories like the women do because they want to forget them. They look forward to becoming ordinary American citizens in a few years and never again having to answer the question, ‘Where do you come from?’

  *

  Abdul approaches her with a big smile on his face. She has seen him around before. He is twenty years younger than her and desperate to find a job and a woman to keep him company. She smiles back but she doesn’t want to get involved in a conversation because he talks too much and isn’t very intelligent. He asks her the same question that he asks everyone, just to pass the time.

  ‘Are you from the agency?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Arab?’

  She nods.

  ‘Iraqi?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Ah. Palestinian, right?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’m Egyptian,’ she answers curtly, hoping to nip the conversation in the bud.

  ‘Christian, right?’

  She doesn’t reply. She withdraws into herself even more, but Abdul isn’t giving up.

  ‘Do you go to the English class?’

  She nods.

  ‘And the job-training classes?’

  She shakes her head no. Her head is getting tired from all this shaking, but he still won’t shut up. He wants to show off, to prove to her that he is some kind of expert on refugee affairs. He tells her that he is from Afghanistan, and she thinks how his small brown eyes are like the eyes of a mountain wolf. He volunteers his story, a pack of lies like everyone else’s i
n this place. They lie to cover up things that they don’t want anyone to know and they bury the truth deep down, deeper than anybody could see. He tells her that he used to work for the American army, and he says it proudly.

  Abdul goes out to the terrace to smoke. She follows him because she wants to bum a cigarette, to exhale her anxiety along with the smoke, to get away from the crowd. The agency office is part of the library, just a small room looking out onto Park Avenue. The terrace is full of wooden chairs too. He sits on one of them and crosses his legs. The sun glances off his coal-black hair and lights up his athletic, martial build. He hands her a cigarette as he leans back in his chair against the railing. She sits on the other side of the terrace and smokes in silence.

  Abdul grins because he has finally found someone to talk to. ‘Do you pray?’

  She shakes her head no. She refuses words, words are meaningless. Only silent gestures can guarantee an existence free of lies.

  ‘Do you like vodka?’ he asks lewdly. Hend thinks that he must be mocking her loneliness because he asks the question as though he is making her a generous offer. He says it with the cunning of a restless wolf looking for a partner to howl at the moon with. She laughs because she hadn’t expected that he would try to seduce her.

  ‘I like vodka, but I don’t go out with children,’ she replies playfully. Then she looks him straight in the eye and tells him that she prefers to drink alone because when she gets drunk she always cries a lot and then passes out. She adds that men don’t usually like to witness this disappointing little drama. He nods his head shrewdly this time, evidently convinced of the wisdom of her observation, and returns to a more general line of questioning.