Brooklyn Heights

by Miral al-Tahawy

  For weeks after that, Hend was forbidden to join in any of her father’s many projects and expeditions, from raising silkworms or hunting for black widow spiders, to observing the mating habits of yellow lizards. In the end her father failed to find his cure for diabetes. He simply abandoned the experiment altogether. He stopped going to the Heights and the reception house, and he confined himself to the eastern balcony, where he told her stories of the Prophet Solomon. He told her that when Solomon died and his soul went up to meet its Creator, his body remained behind, leaning on a cane. The construction of his splendid palace had not yet been completed, and Solomon’s body stayed on to finish supervising the jinn who were building it. The jinn only realised he was dead when the ants had finished consuming his cane from the ground up, and then the body that had pretended to be living immediately toppled over. Her father died in the same way the Prophet Solomon did. One day, he just toppled off his chair in the eastern balcony. The smell of camphor drifted down from the Heights and the wind passed through, carrying off his soul and leaving his body leaning on his cane and clutching at his left shoulder in terror as the death spittle trickled out of his mouth.

  When Hend’s father died, her mother descended into the most profound silence. She no longer shouted at Hend, she no longer laughed or flew into rages: she just sat in the eastern balcony every evening on the wooden rocking chair, her eyes resting on the long washing line that hung between a branch of the mulberry tree and the house beam, the line that had been swinging back and forth before her eyes ever since she came from her father’s house to her husband’s house. On that line she had hung the silky underwear of a young bride and her white sheet stained with tears and sweat and the secretions of love. At first the scent of lavender and violets rose from the line, then, years later, the clothes that weighed it down began to smell of milk and urine and baby spittle. The line swung harder than ever under the sun, and smiled to itself.

  Alone at night, it stretched out between the two worlds, keeping an eye on the balcony and listening to the stories that drifted out on the evening breeze from the rush mat. During the day it took in the smell of freshly baked bread and the leftover scraps tossed to the chickens and roosters. Her mother gazed at the lonely line, which, like her, was watching the swallows perched on the branches of the mulberry tree and listening for the shouts of the children as they ran underneath and tugged at it playfully. The children didn’t care in the least whether it was warmed by the sun or tousled by the wind, and they never noticed the fine layer of dust that settled on it. Their mother sat on the balcony watching her children grow up and move further and further away from her, leaving her with long wrinkles under the eyes and minute and flexible lines on the forehead, the threads of insomnia. The clothesline watched this little woman growing old in its lifetime, each of them demarcating a space of absolute solitude. They pulled at each other, silence for silence. They watched each other intently like partners in a crime. The line would swing back and forth with its cargo of pistachio-coloured dresses and satin hair ribbons, children’s socks, and brassieres stained with cancerous, clotted milk. One night, the mother smiled as she sat on the balcony and watched the old line swing to and fro; then she walked into her room and shut the door behind her, and that was the end of their story together.

  *

  Hend is walking towards Fourth Avenue when the wind of longing suddenly blows up over the trees of Prospect Park, brushing against the silver and white poplars and the fragrant cypresses and oaks. Nobody usually notices the turning of the seasons in a big city like New York, where people are constantly running around, but some discerning observers will later remark upon the exceptional movement of the planets in the heavens on that day: an alignment that astronomers say occurs every forty-five years or so. They call it Yud, which means the Finger of God. During this period, the planets all seem to be suddenly moving backward. It’s as though you were driving a car, and all the trees on the road ahead were now behind. The trees haven’t really moved backward, and the planets don’t either. It just looks that way. This spring, three planets have moved backward and produced the alignment the old people call the wind of longing. Mercury, the planet of memory, moved into Capricorn, Saturn moved into Libra, Uranus into Pisces, and the earth shakes in awe at this momentous event. People wonder in amazement how all the distant memories they left behind long ago are now suddenly standing squarely before them. They cannot understand why so many things that had been erased from their thoughts are once again haunting them. The past has become the present and it is sweeping one and all away with the force of its violent return. People gather around Jojo the fortune teller on Fourth Avenue, with her ancient Egyptian scarab and her statue of a clay frog representing the god Sekhmet, guardian of the western tombs in the Valley of the Kings. And though her Russian friend Emilia tells them not to believe anything she says (‘They’re just a bunch of old wives’ tales!’), they do not doubt that the planets now gathered to draw the image of creation have truly provoked the fragrance that fills the park with its bitter-sweet scent. They congregate in circles to watch the total eclipse of the moon over their city and talk about the stars and horoscopes and bad luck. The park has burst into flower like never before, its trees blooming with life, their white blossoms carpeting the soft ground. The scent of longing makes people fan out in groups on stoops and sidewalks and lawns and exchange greetings with random strangers. The foreigners amongst them are suddenly seized by an urgent need to talk about their distant home countries.

  Narak, who had been sitting in his shop going over the accounts, picks up his violin and falls into a deep sleep. Just before he drops off, he says to his friend, ‘I can smell the wind of paradise, Naguib.’ Naguib al-Khalili chuckles, one eye on the lovers kissing on the green lawn and the other watching out for Lilith. He wants to tell her about things that he suddenly remembers again – the camel market, the fish market in Ataba Square, the smell of violets in old Garden City – but she doesn’t come. No one has told him that Lilith had been lying in a white hospital bed for the last three days and that she can no longer move at all. She lies in her bed and says to the people standing around her, ‘Open the window.’ Longing blows in with the breeze that carries the smell of guava and wild mulberry and of the mastic and tamarind trees in the garden of an old house by the river, a house with a balcony smothered in gorgeous jasmine and violet and bougainvillea bushes.

  She sits in a rocking chair, a small laughing child dressed in white on her lap. An elegantly dressed man smiles at them between sips of clove tea. He smokes his five o’clock cigarette before getting up to prune the branches of the jasmine bush and twine them round taut strings so that they will grow upward and cover the roof of the small villa. He is a man who likes things to be tasteful and ordered and pleasing to the eye.

  Lilith closes her eyes and leaves. She doesn’t watch the little boy curled up against her breast grow into a handsome young man with a wife and a retinue of dignified associates from the Muslim community in Brooklyn. They have all stood by him during his mother’s illness, an illness that is now in its last stages as the doctor takes him aside. ‘She’s very fragile and her memory is completely gone. She might not be able to understand what’s going on around her any more. I doubt she has much longer to live.’ Omar Azzam shakes his head in grief and goes back to reading his Quran. He sits at the open window and gazes at Lilith’s pale face. He bends down and uncovers her legs to rub ointment into the ulcers. He contemplates the colour of her skin, the marks left by childbirth on her belly, the blemishes on her face, the breast at which he never nursed. The fragrance of the lemon and orange trees in the garden of the Helwan house fills his nostrils, that fragrance that bursts forth when the delicate white blossoms carpet the ground, and he hears the buzzing of bees and sees the ghost of a young woman absorbed in a sketch of a weeping child.

  As Lilith’s health deteriorates, Nazahat’s presence becomes essential. She is the one who changes the bedpans and takes c
are of Lilith’s body as it lies submissive in the face of approaching death. She turns her over this way and that to avoid putting any pressure on the bed sores that have left pitiful marks on every part of her body. Nazahat takes her blood pressure and examines her urine while Erica discusses with Abd al-Karim the protocols of washing and shrouding the corpse according to Islamic law. Omar holds on tightly to his Quran and re-reads all the verses about the living and the dead as he watches his childhood pass before his eyes.

  Three days later, Lilith closes her eyes forever. The wind of longing rattles the glass windows and sweeps in. It whispers to her soul and carries it far away. She goes alone, as she had arrived. The family and friends who had gathered around her sickbed now bustle about preparing for the burial. Abd al-Karim arrives with a hearse, Nazahat quickly sews up the white shroud, and Lilith’s son Omar goes off to take care of the necessary documents for the burial in the Muslim cemetery in New Jersey. Then, after everyone has performed their respective duties, they all go home and pick up the threads of their busy lives.

  *

  Hend and Emilia are walking along Fourth Avenue when they run into Dawij, the girl from Haiti who cleans houses in the neighbourhood. She is too busy to stop and chat but she briefly tells them that she is packing up the contents of an old lady’s apartment. The lady was called Lilith and she had died a few days ago. Dawij has been hired to pack everything up into cartons and put them out on the sidewalk with a sign that says, Take me if you want. ‘The garbage trucks will take the rest away later,’ she says.

  Music lovers pick up a few of the Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra records and ignore those of Fathiya Ahmad and Layla Murad. Some people rummage around in the boxes full of silky dresses with plunging necklines like the ones Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren used to wear. They inspect the satin robes, the bedspreads and sheets and pillows with Arab and Afghan and Persian-style embroidery, the Indian saris and the old-fashioned handbags. Emilia stands there with her cart, then quickly swoops down on the feast of shoes with a practised eye. She knows exactly what she wants and why. She searches for seventies-style platform shoes; pointy, high-heeled shoes like the ones in erotic movies; battered old shoes and others that no one had ever worn; cheap shoes and shoes by famous designers.

  Hend pokes around in the book cartons. There are a lot of Arabic books in rare editions – The Arabian Nights and The Book of Songs, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran and books of Persian poetry, books that Lilith has handled and read and annotated in the margins. She turns to the cartons containing pillows and bedspreads and exquisitely embroidered sheets, then to the glassware and dresses. ‘I feel like I know these things,’ she says to Emilia. ‘The gilded blue glass sherbet set . . . my mother had one exactly like it in her trousseau. You see this tulip china set? I swear there was one exactly like it in the silver cabinet in my grandmother al-Sharifa’s house, God rest her soul. And this chiffon dress . . . I’ve seen my mother wearing its twin in a photo. I wish I could show it to you.’ Emilia, who is busy sorting out shoes before the garbage trucks get there, laughs shrilly. ‘The dead lady must have been from an Arab country – and rich!’ Two Russian women pass by and exchange greetings with Emilia. One of them picks up a wig from the pile of cartons. They walk away quickly as one of them says to the other, ‘You can find so many little things for free in this city – but unfortunately the apartments are too small.’ Many of the passers-by stop to admire the paintings stacked in wooden crates. The same scene repeats itself for the next couple of days and people come back again and again to carry off things that they really didn’t have room for in their homes. Antique dealers haul away the rarest and most unique pieces.

  Hend plants herself next to a box stuffed with the papers of a woman she knew only from afar, a woman whose body now lies in a freshly dug grave. She goes through the papers and finds diaries and old photos. She says to Emilia sorrowfully, ‘Why are they throwing all this stuff out right away? Doesn’t she have relatives?’ Emilia sighs. ‘Maybe she doesn’t have any kids, dear. And even if she did, where would they put all this old stuff?’ Hend examines the signature on dozens of self-portraits in oil and charcoal. ‘Look, Emilia, this is what Lilith looked like when she was young. Doesn’t she look a little like me? Isn’t that old scar under her eyebrow like the one I have? Look . . .’

  ‘All Arabs look alike, dear – I can’t tell them apart, to tell you the truth.’

  Hend stretches out her legs on the sidewalk and leafs through the bits of paper tucked away in the handbags of the woman she used to see sitting with Naguib al-Khalili from a distance; a woman that she sees clearly now for the first time. She goes through all the clippings and letters and photos: Lilith, exposed to the gaze of casual passers-by. She stares at the photos of the ubiquitous Omar Azzam – the photos they had sent to Lilith from Cairo so that she could see him growing up thousands of miles away. Each photo was dated on the back (Cairo, 1975, Mama I miss you, your son Omar).

  Hend’s head spins. She looks at the photograph of a boy who is the same age as her son is now. ‘Look, Emilia, doesn’t this boy look like my son?’

  Emilia has no time to look at anything. ‘Children all look the same at first, then they shoot up and you just can’t keep up with all the changes they go through,’ she grumbles.

  Hend lowers her head. Her dizziness gets worse suddenly and a feeling of déjà vu sweeps over her. ‘Emilia, I know these papers . . .’ And I know that I’ve written every word in them myself, she thinks. This is my handwriting, they belong to me.

  ‘They’re yours now, little one. The lady who wrote them is deader than a doornail and it’s all yours now. You can take them and believe whatever you want to believe.’

  Hend’s voice grows more querulous. ‘You don’t understand. I feel like I’ve lived all this before, that these letters are mine, these words are mine.’

  Emilia just wants to finish loading up her cart and go because it’s starting to get dark. She has no time for this pointless discussion, so to cut the conversation short she says, ‘You’re still young, daughter, you haven’t lived anything yet. When you get to be my age you’ll realise that everything starts to look and feel the same when you’re old. At my age everything that happens feels as though it’s happened before. I know I’m getting senile, but you’re still young.’

  Hend sits on the sidewalk of Fourth Avenue in the middle of the boxes and furniture and lights a cigarette. She can smell the hateful odour of the milk that still burns in her breasts. She clutches a sheaf of papers to her chest, despairing of ever understanding what Lilith wanted to say. Hend walks next to Emilia as she drags her cart loaded with shoes behind her. The old Russian woman’s face suddenly starts to take on Grandmother Zaynab’s features before Hend’s eyes – the deep wrinkles, the single tooth and flaming red irises – and Hend hears the echoing rustle of the rabbits scurrying out of their lairs and surreptitiously devouring the piles of vegetable scraps.

  Emilia moves away down the street, hunched over like a weird apparition. Her parting words linger in the air between them. ‘You mustn’t get too worked up about these things . . . such is the way of the world . . . everything gets mixed up suddenly. We believe what we want to believe, then amnesia strikes and you don’t even know who you are – or used to be – any more. We all become sorry copies of each other in the end. But you’re still too young. You’re too young to forget, my little one.’

  Hend hurries down the sidewalk towards her house. She runs to escape Emilia’s terrifying face. She does what she used to do when she was a child: she buries her head under the covers and tries to blot out her fear. In the dream that comes, the legions of identical little rabbits peep out of their lairs and scurry up the pile of clover in her father’s courtyard. They nibble furiously on the green leaves, then dash back to their dark maze of tunnels under the ground of the pantry. The old women used to say that rabbits come up from their subterranean lairs to watch over the dead, that they roam the underworld eternally, repr
oducing themselves in the twilight space between life and death. Hend hears the hesitant patter of their nimble feet in her dreams. She stuffs a handful of hair into her mouth and reaches down to feel her underpants under the covers, wet with fear.

  About the author

  Critically acclaimed Egyptian author, Miral al-Tahawy was born in Sharqiya in the Egyptian Delta into a Bedouin family of the al-Hanadi tribe. The youngest of seven children, she is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, and Director of the Arabic program at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Her previous works The Tent (1998), Blue Aubergine (2002), Gazelle Tracks (2009) have collectively been translated into many languages. Brooklyn Heights is her first novel to be published in English.