by Jamal Naji
“You seem to be certain of the existence of a son. I am greatly troubled, sir! Why should I acknowledge him if I am going to die at his hands?” the Basha asked again, in the tone of a complaint.
“He will be an extension of you in this world, he and his descendants, even if he kills you. It doesn’t matter how you die; death will inevitably come to you in this final third of your life. What matters is that your blood will continue to pulse through someone’s veins on this earth after your own body vanishes.”
As if suddenly remembering something important, the Basha asked, “But can you explain to me the coincidence that brought Uroub to my sixtieth birthday party?”
Al-Hakim raised his head with a sigh. “Nothing happens by coincidence. All of it happens in accordance with destiny’s will, which led Uroub to you so that you would be led to me. The most unusual thing about you all is your belief in coincidence!”
The Basha pursued his questioning with a tone that made me feel his whole being was foundering. “Will I meet this illegitimate son of mine, if he does indeed exist? And supposing I find him and I acknowledge him, will that change my fate and allow me to live?”
At that point Al-Hakim looked to the translator, then to the Basha, and said, “I have answered all of your questions. I have nothing more to add.”
The translator stood up and the usher came in, leaning on his staff. They motioned to us that the meeting was over.
We left the sage’s abode dumbfounded by what we had seen and heard. Our shock increased further when we found ourselves not having to bend down the way we had to on our way in. The entrance door was more than two meters high on our way out. As for the cold fire the old man was bathing the snake in, it was now mint green in color.
On the way back, the Basha said, “If what Uroub and Al-Hakim said about my demise is true, then acknowledging my son will not change anything.”
From that I understood immediately what decision he had taken, and what I had to do.
Samah Shahadeh
Fawaz returned from Mumbai. His driver brought him home from the airport. The sun was yearning to set.
Whenever Fawaz returned from his travels I got the feeling something about our life was going to change.
Despite the long hug he gave me, I didn’t feel the intimacy I was used to feeling when he came back from a trip. I felt he was merely performing a duty. It was a cold hug and I didn’t feel the usual embrace of our souls.
In the days that followed, I noticed he was different. He was much quieter and contemplative. He no longer laughed boisterously. He didn’t eat like he did before; he was satisfied with a few greens and he told me he no longer liked meat or chicken. He started spending a lot more time in his office, away from me.
I called Sari’s wife, Rasha, who was a nutritionist, to ask her to prepare a vegetarian diet plan with detailed instructions for the cook, on account of Fawaz’s sudden switch from eating meat and animal products.
I felt that lurking beneath Fawaz’s calm exterior was a deep anxiety about some secret matter. I tried to find out what was worrying him and he told me that the deal with one of the currency trading companies he went to India to settle had fallen through.
Plausible, I thought to myself.
I asked Sari and he gave a similar story. Sari was also different from how he had been before the trip.
Then I remembered what Uroub had said about how all cats look gray at night, and how they all looked the same, too.
Another strange thing was that Sari didn’t come to our house for many days, which was unlike him. I called him on my cell phone a number of times and he told me he had some family matter to tend to and that he had asked the Basha to pardon his absence.
I could have sought out his wife and asked her what was going on with Sari, but I didn’t. Despite my strong affection for Rasha, I felt that my status made it inappropriate to ask.
It was the first time Sari stayed away from our house for such a long period. Previously he came to the house nearly every day, and was never absent or feigned an illness, or came up with excuses. At 9:10 a.m. almost every morning, he would come to the house and sip his coffee with Fawaz while they discussed and reviewed the day’s agenda. They would make phone calls and give directives to the managers and bosses at the various offices and companies connected with our group – the Samah Investment Group.
I didn’t like sitting with them, because their talk was of no interest to me. But the daily routine always set my mind at ease, because it meant there was nothing new that might be hidden from me.
Now I felt there was a dark cloud hovering over them.
I think I am the type of person who can be patient, and not because I’m older now. It’s just the way I’ve always been since I was a child.
In the end, I would find out what they had been hiding, if indeed they were hiding something from me.
My father always liked to brag about me in front of family and friends, saying that patience and I shared a special bond, despite my young age. Sometimes he swore I had more patience than he did. I hadn’t really thought about that before he mentioned it.
My father’s comments might have contributed to the transformation of that description into my specialty. I grew up and coped patiently when illness left my mother bedridden for four years before she finally passed away, God rest her soul. I used to personally supervise the nurse who cared for my mother and changed her bedpan, bathed her, and washed her face and her arms. I fed my mother myself and gave her her medicine every day, without ever tiring.
I patiently stayed home alone with the maid for days on the many occasions when my father traveled, and I was very patient as I completed a degree in English literature. And this was despite not really wanting to pursue an English major, except out of deference to my father who thought I should be proficient in at least one language other than my native Arabic, and know its literature. When I told him that my ability to use and comprehend English was much better than other people’s because of all my trips to Europe, he told me that didn’t excuse me from studying literature.
It probably never occurred to my father that my choice to major in English literature would lead me to choosing Fawaz, who was a fellow student at the university and graduated two years ahead of me.
In college Fawaz was a very calm and self-assured young man, one of those obscure and introspective types. He never chased after any of the other college girls as far as I could see and didn’t employ the obvious tactics other guys liked to use to get girls, like showing off in a new car, or parading around in fancy clothes, or talking about their possessions and the power that their father or mother or family exerted. Fawaz was not like that, and he didn’t own a car, either, unlike the guys who were always coming on to me or who acted surprised to run into me by coincidence in the narrow walkways beneath the cypress trees, even though they had secretly been following me.
Fawaz was from an ordinary family with a father who owned a perfume shop in the old downtown area. He lived in the Misdar quarter east of Amman in a modest house, but he was very self-confident.
I like people with a self-confidence that doesn’t simply come from money or a family name.
That attracted me at the time, and I felt that unlike the others, he didn’t trip over himself trying to get to me. That made me happy, because masculinity to me was much more about being noble and proud than being male.
I started stealing glances at him secretly and felt something drawing me to him. Most likely he noticed my attention, but he never made any move to get close to me, which confused me and only increased my attraction to him.
One day I was leaving campus in my car and I saw him standing about 200 meters away at the gate waiting for a ride. I pulled up beside him in my car and he peered inside the window. I waved to him and he opened the door and got in.
I had never given any of my classmates
a ride before that, and despite our having seen each other and run in to each other over the course of two years, it was the first time we ever spoke together all alone and in such close proximity.
He was wearing a white shirt and linen trousers and was carrying what appeared to be a very heavy textbook.
In those days I was bent on wearing tight blue jeans and tucked-in blouses, the kind that made my breasts protrude. I let my bangs grow half way down my forehead and tucked the sides behind my ears.
He politely shook my hand. “Thank you, Samah. You shouldn’t have troubled yourself.”
I liked how he used my first name directly, without using “Miss” the way others did so pretentiously.
I got right to the point and said, “You arouse my curiosity.”
That loosened his tongue. “You’ve said exactly what I have been unable to say myself, with one slight modification. You stir my curiosity and my admiration at the same time.”
I discovered he had been following my journey all along, but without making it known.
I dropped him off at Abdel Nasser Circle in Jabal Husein, as he could get home easily from there, and I headed back to my house, thinking of him the whole time.
It was the first time anyone besides my father and mother had found something special about me.
I believed him when he said, “I kept my distance from you as a way of getting close to you. It was the best way to build a relationship with you − you in particular.”
What he said was absolutely correct.
My father saw dimensions to people and things that I didn’t see. I felt he was different from other men. He had a way of thinking that bewildered and upset me at the same time, because I couldn’t keep up with him.
When he found out about my relationship with Fawaz and I told him about his character, his background and his desire to marry me, he surprised me by saying, “Watch out for poor people.”
“What’s wrong with poor people, Father?” I said, getting worked up. “Aren’t they human beings?”
“What I mean is that rich people have certain interests and possessions; they are greedy. You can satisfy them or silence them by either promoting or threatening their interests. Poor people, on the other hand, require caution, because they do not possess anything they fear losing, and because deep down inside they have an inherent desire to take revenge against something, against the rich maybe. But the decision is yours and I will support it no matter what.”
Sari Abu Amineh
It was difficult for me to carry out the task of finding the woman called Muntaha al-Rayyeh because the Basha didn’t know her father or grandfather’s names. All he had was her first name and her family name. And all he could guess was that she was around sixty years old now, and he remembered that she worked at the Malco Stock Company, which had been liquidated during the wave of failing investment companies that came after the April protests that broke out all over the country in the 1990s and ended up sweeping away the regime of longstanding Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifai.
But I couldn’t come across any records belonging to the company at our headquarters. Even the Basha told me, “That company in particular melted like salt. We don’t know what happened to all its records and documents. Figure out some other way to find the woman.”
A needle in a haystack.
What made my task even more difficult was not being able to seek the help of any of the Basha’s employees. The whole thing was top secret. No one was to have any inkling of anything. And even if I covered things up, it was very difficult for me to ensure the dust wouldn’t be stirred up by some new development in the future.
I gave one of my relatives, in whose abilities and connections I had a lot of faith and who could be trusted to keep a secret, the job of finding and investigating the woman called Muntaha al-Rayyeh in the civil records and other sources.
There are people in this world created specifically for those types of tasks. They almost always have big ears and a face the shape of an upside down triangle. My cousin was one of them.
After a few days he brought me a report that stated:
Seventeen women were identified who carry the name Muntaha al-Rayyeh, or Abu Rayyeh, or Abu Rayyah, with variations among them with respect to the father’s name or the grandfather’s name.
Upon inspection of their respective ages, those who fit the requested age profile were narrowed down to seven females.
According to the death records, three of those have departed this life: one in the city of Amman, the second in Irbid, and the third in Madaba.
With respect to the places of residence of the four remaining females, one immigrated to the United States and another is living in a nursing home in the Jumruk area east of Amman after being diagnosed with early onset of dementia. Another has been living in Saudi Arabia with her husband for the last seventeen years, and the other lives in Swayleh but took up residence there only recently, because the rent contract in the income tax records was dated March 4, 2010 and contains her address and phone number.
This now made the task much more complicated. What if the woman in question turned out to be one of the ones who’d died? Or emigrated? Or was stricken with dementia? What if she was the one who gave birth to the Basha’s illegitimate child?
Oh why did I have to go and prepare that surprise for the Basha and bring him Uroub the fortune-teller the night of his birthday?
Muntaha al-Rayyeh
It felt like ages had passed since those long ago days.
Two whole months went by after that evening I met Fawaz, and I hadn’t heard anything from him.
Maybe he had been impressed by my hard work and willingness to stay late as my boss the Porcupine said, but something inside me kept telling me he had different intentions. He had circled around me and brushed his fingers against the back of my neck.
I began to lose hope. I told myself that he must not have liked me.
I truly wasn’t trying to be attractive to Fawaz or anyone else, but it was important to me that men found me attractive. It didn’t mean I was going to respond to their advances.
Women understand what I mean.
The day Fawaz saw me, he gave me his office phone number at the Sixth Circle building, but I didn’t call him. In those days we didn’t have mobile phones that could facilitate forming relationships the way we do now. They were non-existent.
After two months and three days, the Porcupine called me into his office to say, “It’s your lucky day. Get ready for a trip.”
“A trip to where?”
“To Paris. I gave my approval for you to attend a conference on the trade balance between Europe and the Arab world. You will be doing Mr Fawaz’s typing for him. This is a golden opportunity. I told you he never forgets hard workers. But if the other employees find out you are the one going to Paris, they’ll go berserk and declare you an enemy.”
“They’re going to find out sooner or later,” I said, but then he went on.
“You will request a ten-day vacation starting the beginning of next month, and I will approve it. Don’t forget to bring your passport with you tomorrow to get the visa. And don’t tell anyone.”
Don’t tell anyone. This statement worried me.
Hesitantly, I said, “But trips cost money and I don’t have any.”
He laughed so hard I could see his tongue. “All expenses are taken care of, including a stipend. Just go to the Royal Jordanian Airlines office in Abdali with your passport in hand and they will give you your plane ticket.”
At night I started thinking: I have never gone outside the borders of my country, and likewise it has never occurred to me – even in my most optimistic moments – that one day I would go to Paris.
Now here I was being given the opportunity to leave the continent of Asia completely.
I asked myself: Could all this be innocent?
Misgivings began to crowd my mind and my soul: It’s not innocent, and the Porcupine told me not to tell anyone.
But I also felt another idea swimming against the current and encouraging me to go forward. And so I said to myself: Let it be.
Then I felt as though this thought process going on inside my head was all just an act to cover up the decision that had already been made and was huddling in the corner of my mind somewhere.
I wanted to give the situation the benefit of the doubt and get past my uncertainty. It occurred to me that I knew myself very well and that no one could force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. So why should I lock myself out of the world and pass up an opportunity that may never come around again?
When I told my parents, my mother looked me in the eye and said in a listless tone, “What about the expenses?”
“The company’s paying,” I answered.
Looking over the top of his prescription glasses, my father asked, “Is it mandatory for you to go?”
“No,” I answered. “But it could negatively affect my position at the company if I refuse.”
He shook his head and didn’t say anything.
My mother appeared to have her suspicions, but she encouraged me, which I found very strange.
The day of my trip, I intentionally left late to Marka Airport, and my father ended up contributing to the delay by taking a long time to find a taxi to take all of us – my father, my mother, and myself – to the airport. This served me well, because when we got there, there wasn’t any time for them to pry into the details, or to see who would be accompanying me on the trip. I bid them a rushed goodbye for fear of missing my flight and walked through the little passageway leading to the gate area.
Samah Shahadeh
Finally, after a sixteen-day absence, Sari came to the house.
I was pretty sure Sari was aware he was indebted to me. It was I, after all, who asked Fawaz to offer him his first job, in the accounting department, which involved calling payments due and following up with the various interested parties among the employees and managers. I got to know Sari through his wife, Rasha, who worked as a nutritionist at Al-Khalidi Hospital in Amman. Rasha came to my room in the hospital while I was recovering from a surgery I had undergone for a female problem. She was very sweet and cheerful, with a pleasant voice and tranquil fair face with naturally red cheeks. She had chestnut-colored hair cut in a short bob style. She had an excellent ability to carry on a conversation, skillfully switching from one topic to another in a manner that warded off boredom and kept one interested, to the point that I begged her to come back in the evening so she might further lift my spirits.
