by Hoda Barakat
Said, ‘See here, lad, now here’s the truth,
If you do what I tell you to
There’s jewels and cash in it for you.
Now fetch your mother’s heart for me.’
So he stabbed her, cut it free,
But running, fell and dropped the heart.
And it goes on…
But just imagine, now, the child stumbling, and then the heart falls and rolls across the ground, and it is the heart that calls out in worry. ‘My son, my darling, are you hurt?’ And when the son realizes what he has done and begins to bathe his mother’s heart in his own tears of regret, and then tries to knife his own heart in remorse over a lesson learned, his mother’s heart comes back at him, screaming, ‘No! Take your hand away! Do you want to kill my heart twice over?’
Hah. It’s a tale that calls for laughter so strong and wild that it opens the lungs to their painful fullest, where they’re siphoning off air like a running sewer pipe until it hurts so much you think you will burst. Sometimes one just has to laugh and laugh, to keep away the demons of depression.
Anyway, I still have this bad poem in my head. To this day. I don’t understand why or exactly how the man bribed that boy. Or how people can teach children such terrible things: a bloody knife stab, slicing a chest open to draw out the heart, and then a heart stabbed to death that screams words as it falls and rolls. Ya latif altaf! Good Lord of ours, be kind to us! So, what this song really says is that a child could do something like this, even if for most children the possibility would just live in their imagination. And then, it’s also saying that the child can be certain of his mother’s forgiveness, without ever having to seek it, because she will forgive him no matter what, and in advance, and instinctively, even for such utterly primitive, barbaric behaviour, which also takes violence to the extreme. Or perhaps, that she would forgive him the violence of this most primitive of acts. Would she? Really?
It is, of course, the most extreme kind of violence, and primitive barbarity, to mutilate a body. Your heart, whether it is still in your chest or somewhere beyond, will not forgive me, even if I’ve had no choice about the things I have done. Shame, violation, the unthinkable! But I have given this a lot of thought. And I know what it means, but the circumstances we’re put in have their own laws of necessity. I never in my life had to do anything like this, to mutilate a body. We assigned certain condemned men to carry the dead bodies out to the waiting lorries, and after that – I don’t know anything. I don’t know what they did with them. How could I have possibly hidden the body, even for a short time, just enough time to ensure I could get out of here? Where would I hide it? I thought about one of the wardrobes. Impossible. The body was too stiff.
My Lord will bring me to account. And I will ask Him what I could have done. ‘What could I have possibly done differently, once You cast me into the furnace, into the furnace of Hell. What could I have done, once You rid yourself of me, Lord?’
I will go back there tomorrow to change the lock, and then immediately I’ll come back here. God have mercy on her, and God help me.
I guess I will need to consider whether to keep this letter I’ve written, so that I can send it to you, or give it to you directly. Maybe instead I should destroy it, given the bare confessions it contains, which could well send me to the gallows or to life in prison. We’ll see, tomorrow.
I’m going to add Fairuz to my phone playlist, and I’ll go to sleep listening to her sing. I will try hard not to cry. Her voice is so beautiful. So tender.
My darling mother, wherever you are, sleep well. Good night.
My Dear Brother,
I have been thinking about writing to you, now that you have learned what you call ‘the truth’. You’re right to call it that, up to a point. But the pure, unadulterated truth is something other than what you believe it to be. Everyone has secrets, and you must help me with a secret of mine, because it is in both our interests. I don’t have much time.
We are waiting for a plane to land; it’s still in the air because the plane at this gate that was supposed to make way for it was delayed. They pulled a passenger off that departing flight. The plane had already taken off but they made it turn around and come back to the airport. I know why security took him away in handcuffs, because I have a letter in my pocket that this man wrote to his mother. He must have tried to hide it before they reached him, because it’s not the kind of letter anyone would just forget about or be careless enough to lose. I found it when I was putting the aircraft seats back in order after they unloaded all the bags and made the passengers disembark so they could search the plane. The pages were crumpled up in a wad and shoved down between the seat and the wall of the aircraft. When I saw it and could tell right off that it was written in Arabic, I stuffed it into my trouser pocket. I know now why they didn’t search his seat very thoroughly. The man wasn’t a terrorist, he didn’t have any bags or weapons. Based on what I read, the guy is just a criminal. He killed a woman who’d given him a place to stay, and he needed to get away. So they know his crime. They’d already found the woman’s body and were on to him. He tried to escape but couldn’t manage it.
It’s dreadful, what the man did. But because I delayed handing over this letter to the police, having hung on to it long enough to give it a thorough read, I can’t very well give it to them now. What excuse would I have for keeping it this long? Anyway, since they’ve arrested him, they don’t really need the letter, which would only add a few details to the charges they’ve already got against him. Plus, it’s written to his mother. His poor, miserable mother; where she is now only God knows. It’s a son’s confession to his mother, the last person one can go to in life, the final resort – whatever it is he has done, and whatever she has done. I couldn’t find it in my heart to give the police these final words he wrote. I was afraid, yes, but apart from that I felt real sympathy for him. That’s bizarre, of course, because he’s a criminal, a murderer. But every person alive in the world has an innocent side and it shows when they stand in front of their mother. In front of a mother, everyone becomes a little child again. The child-self left behind long ago, and all but forgotten. Later on, I will have to think about what to do with this letter.
Your mother’s heart: it’s the last, the final, heart you have in life. I lost my mother, just like this man, the letter writer, who will spend all the rest of his days in prison. At night, alone, he will weep for his mother. Far from everything he knows, estranged. He too is a person whom Time has abandoned, or Fate, perhaps. No one will have mercy on him, neither God nor any human being.
It’s because she is our mother – for she is your mother too – that I’m writing to you. The truth is that I lost her long before she died.
I could never figure out what caused such a change in her. In a nutshell, all the money I was sending her was no longer enough. She would tell me that Umm So-and-So and Umm What’s-Her-Name, the old bags (and they too were somebody or other’s mothers), were rich by now. People were building houses and blocks of flats, and buying all sorts of things that cost hundreds of dollars. She couldn’t stop talking about how the girl’s expenses were going up and up. ‘The girl’s eating so much.’ ‘The girl makes so many demands. She has to have this, she has to have that.’ I could only believe, in the end, that my mother no longer wanted my daughter there.
I phoned her. ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘I love you. And you have put up with so much from me. As long as I live, I will never forget what you’ve done for me. Just give me a little more time, and I’ll collect the girl and bring her to live with me.’ But my words made her angry, and she began cursing me over the phone. She said her patience had run out. My sweet talk wasn’t a solution. ‘Do you want me to work the streets?’ I asked her. She hung up on me. After that she no longer picked up when I rang her.
The pain and stress of it forced memories on me of how my mother had been behind my miserable marriage, which she forced on me before I turned fourteen. She never forgave me for
insisting on a divorce, and you didn’t either. In fact, the two of you were the reason I fled to this country. You are the reason I have worked here as a maid, cleaning houses and scrubbing the filth of people I don’t know from restaurant toilets, hotel rooms and planes. Mother was contented enough in those days. I had gone away and that put some distance between her and the scandal of my divorce. And I sent money to her regularly, enough to take good care of all my daughter’s needs. But those daughters of the women she knew, like So-and-So and What’s-Her-Name, had ‘broken protocol’, as they say so politely here. I began hearing about how the girls were making trip after trip home. One of these girls would arrive with armfuls of gifts, pricey brands, showing off her jewellery to the many visitors. I was hearing about how she would hire a car, build a house, do things that allowed her father to stop working. No one seemed to be asking where all this money was coming from. When a girl is wearing a hijab, and often covering not only her hair but her face as well, how can anyone have doubts about her morals?
I couldn’t get my mother’s angry complaints out of my head. After all, hadn’t she basically sold me off to that man who married me, for the price of the dowry he offered? That didn’t furnish me with what a bride ought to have but it did furnish my family, easing the financial burden on all the men. I didn’t see a penny of it, apart from the price of the ticket that meant I could vanish from her sight after my divorce. No, I didn’t see a penny of it. I endured all that hardship and misery, hoping that she would come around, that she would understand me and treat my daughter well. Sixty lavatories I was cleaning before 10.00 a.m., running tens of kilometres in a race where the only hope of reward was a smile from my line manager – and she was a woman who never smiled. And what did I have to show for it? That’s what I began asking myself.
I cried stinging tears over the way my life had gone, and then I decided to work as a prostitute. A whore. A streetwalker. What is the difference between one kind of humiliation and another? Only money, a little money, would lift me a notch above the stink of the lavatories and the filth of the depths I had sunk into. After all, it was my mother – my own mother! – who was the first to grind me down. You…well, you had gone to prison by then. I kept my part-time work as a hotel cleaner just to make ends meet.
It was easier sleeping with my customers than it had been having sex with my husband. They treated me gently, politely, spending half their time talking to me, and then flirting with me. They awakened me to a world of pleasures I had never tasted in the past, and on top of it, they paid very generously. My one condition was that they not take me from behind, like that pig did – by force, until I was bleeding. I think he preferred men and he was trying to hide his desires even from himself. I can see that now, having become a woman.
I had heard a lot about how much street women suffered, but I didn’t see any of it. No pimp, no unsavoury houses. I selected my customers from ‘Evenings in the Afternoon’, that is, from the tea dances where older people gathered from mid-afternoon, following their dessert after their midday meals, until returning to their flats in the evening for soup before bed. Most were retired men. Some were married men, bored and restless with their lives at home. I only approached men who showed up there alone and those who were new regulars.
At first, they didn’t understand what a young woman like me was doing there. I didn’t much like people of my own generation, I always told them, and I was a romantic. I played the role of the innocent young woman, maybe a little naïve, maybe even a bit simple-minded. At their age, this was the type they preferred. And they could recognize the type by my clothes. I kept to old-fashioned styles they would have known from back then, when women really made them enjoy life – a style of dress that reminded them of their youth. I got some enjoyment out of it too, because they found me pretty. The low lighting inside, the reddish glow it gave out, could take ten years off a man’s age, perhaps even a little more. That’s why, emerging into the natural light, they usually hurried away very quickly. Even in the dimness of early evening, the outside light suddenly brought back all those harsh years they had lived. The light exposed the fatigue and sweat on their careworn faces, the make-up running down their cheeks and the thin hair plastered to their skulls. They always scuttled away, except when it came to me. With me, they lingered on the pavement. It didn’t take long for them to realize what they had to do if they wanted to be alone with the flirty, flighty girl.
The men I singled out were the ones with soft hands, those who got their nails trimmed at the salon. That signalled a man’s financial status to me more convincingly than the smartness of his clothes. I became expert too at judging the quality and cost of a man’s shoes, and it wasn’t about the age of those shoes or how much wear they had had. Those men were so delighted with me that I never felt embarrassed at taking the money they gave me, offering it as though it were a gift, albeit a modest one. In fact, in view of their loneliness, I truly felt I was doing each of them a service, giving him back confidence in the magic of his manhood. You would have to see how they thanked me to believe what I’m saying. With them I was a respected woman, a respectable one. I didn’t have any doubts about that, and I was happy about it.
Everything was fine until I encountered that Arab man in the hotel. He came back to his room while I was still cleaning it. He began making a move on me, using offensive language. I answered him in Arabic, hoping that would make him suitably ashamed of himself. But he just got uglier and then he attacked me. He hit me hard, he beat me, and he raped me. I sent for the hotel security and the head of personnel. I showed them the bruises, the red marks – the signs of my beating – and my torn clothes. They took me down to the ground floor and when I went on screaming in the lobby, they said, ‘We know you’re a whore, but we’ve looked the other way. It’s your life. But making up a scandal to extort money from this rich guy just because he’s an Arab and he’s afraid of scandal – no, we won’t go along with that.’ They threw me out.
That’s how I moved to the work I do now at the airport. A gentleman, one of my former clients, put in a good word for me. I had set some money aside, so after the incident in the hotel, I decided to fetch my daughter and bring her to live with me, and of course to stop seeing any men.
My very dear brother, listen closely to what I have to tell you.
I went back there, my arms full of gifts, in a hijab, just like all the other women there. I went further – I wrapped my body in black from head to toe. I found our mother sick and bedridden, but my daughter wasn’t there.
‘Your daughter ran away,’ my mother told me. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
Her neighbour, Umm Rashid, took me by the hand, led me to her home and sat me down. She told me that my mother had forced my daughter into marriage and now she was living in the Gulf with her husband.
Umm Rashid and I worked hard to find out what had happened. She knew the shaykh who had performed this marriage, which was forced on my underage daughter, and I eventually got the name of the man who’d taken her. From embassy to consulate to the family law judge I went, and finally I got an address. I travelled there and I found her. I found her working as a maid and a dancer in a house that was more like a brothel. He had married her, as he had dozens of others. When I met him, I was surprised to find he was neither a man nor a woman. He was some kind of trans, a man who dolled himself up, wore women’s dresses and moved like a woman. He was an ageing man, grown fat with his dissolute behaviour. I felt my hair going white. ‘My daughter is underage,’ I said. ‘I am going to send you to jail.’ ‘Take her,’ he said with a wave of his pudgy hand, his fingers bulging around his fat rings. He ordered the people perched around him to haul us outside.
The whole way back to our home town, my daughter didn’t say a word. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions. I confronted my mother, asking why she had sold off the girl when I was sending her plenty of money. I knew from Umm Rashid that an odd-looking lawyer with very strange manners had been coming to
see my mother regularly, about getting her son – you, that is – out of prison. He deceived her and took her money. My money, all of it. It was all mine.
I turned the house upside down. I found gold and silver there. I found the property deed to the house and I forged your signature and my mother’s. I bribed the people I had to bribe and I sold it. Am I the one who removed her bracelets and pendants from her hands and neck as she lay on her deathbed? Yes, that was me. Did I leave her to die alone, not even summoning the doctor at the free clinic? Yes, true. But it is not true that I suffocated her with her own pillow, as you once hinted I’d done.
My daughter still would not speak even after I brought her back here with me. I told myself I would see her cured, even if it meant taking her to the very best clinics. You can probably imagine the rest of the story. Because of the girl I had to find more income, and so I took another job as a maid. The lady of the house couldn’t stand me. I don’t think she could stand any human being. The first time she slapped me, I stayed silent. When she wasn’t there, I was using her toilet and not the servants’ washroom. That’s what she said to me. Nothing provokes hatred more than poverty. She took pleasure in humiliating people, even her husband. Maybe her husband more than anyone else, and to a point where sometimes I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. He loathed her, too, and I served him well when I let that woman die.
Yes. I saw it, I saw what was going on when she fell in the bathroom, bleeding. ‘She’s fainted,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s all.’ I left her there. I stole all the little jewellery boxes she had and the chest that contained her really pricey gems. I stole some money that I found in a desk drawer in her husband’s office. I left the place, closed the door and locked it with my key. It was I who alerted the police, saying I’d discovered her body after I returned to the flat, as if arriving there for the day. That’s what I told them, that I’d arrived and found her body. They accused the husband, who had no money and no work, and who always complained to everyone about how bad-tempered she was and how difficult she was to live with. They declared he had faked the theft and murdered her in order to inherit. They threatened me too, and then they searched my home thoroughly, but they didn’t find anything. They believed then that I was innocent. I cried really hard while they were interrogating me. It was an honest reaction; I cried because I was terrified, and I feared for my life. They thought I was crying because I’d been accused when I was innocent.