I can’t really claim that my childhood was miserable. On the contrary, it was filled with excitement, fun, and good food. With the exception of my difficult interactions with my father’s wives, my unfulfilled dream to return to the homeland, my hope to receive a phone call from my mother in Los Angeles, which never came, and a single visit with my grandmother without one of my father’s wives spoiling it, it was a breeze.
I enjoyed living with my father, who was as dear to me as my soul and the light of my eyes. He was a good-hearted man, full of memories, anecdotes, and funny stories. I still remember him when he used to gather us around the large wood-burning stove on New York winter nights and tell us old jokes while grilling chestnuts, drinking araq, and eating mezze. He used to say that he was a child of the world. He had toured the globe, seen everything, and heard it all. Nothing surprised him or shocked him anymore, and yet, at the mention of the name of a relative or a friend in Beirut or Damascus, he would be overcome with emotion and cry.
He liked sad songs. He would listen to them and move with the rhythm, flapping his hands as if flying. Then he would get drunk, relax, and shout after each rhyme, in appreciation, “Allah! Allah!”
I would observe him quietly from my place, my tears flowing down my face. The tears, the rhymes, and the stories kept me from feeling totally ostracized from my family.
Whenever I remember the knife and that final look, I recall the tears of longing and the dream of returning to the homeland, a wish that was never fulfilled. His words still ring in my ears, “It’s true that I’m a worldly man, but I have never dishonored anyone or betrayed the trust of any person. Every woman I’ve been involved with I have known according to God’s law. I’ve never taken people’s opinion lightly. All my life I’ve cared what they said and thought of me. Listen to me, Zaynab, the most important things in life are a good reputation, the fear of God, and the Day of Judgment. It’s possible for a person to live without this and that, but if you forget God, He forgets you, and if you ignore God’s words you won’t remember people’s words. That’s how life is, and that’s the way the world works. Life is but a lesson, an exhortation and a path. Life is a message, a message of love and forgiveness. What is life Zaynab?”
I would answer him, with tears running down my cheeks, “Life is an exhortation, Daddy.”
“What else?”
“Life is a test, Daddy.”
“What else?”
“Life is a path.”
“A path to where? Toward whom?”
“A path to the afterlife, to the Prophet and his Companions, and the believers, both men and women and the pure men and women.”
“Great, my daughter, great, great. May God protect you in this world, smooth your way and cover it with good intentions and good deeds. Come sit beside me and eat this. Be careful with the mezze and don’t spill the araq. What’s wrong with you my daughter? What’s wrong?”
When I became pregnant the first person who came to my mind was my grandmother, Deborah. Maybe because Hoda had sought refuge with her grandmother, I did like her, and maybe because my grandmother was in the habit of sending me every Christmas, a fruitcake and a card decorated with candles. She even had sent me on another occasion, a bear as big as a baby. It was the first time I ever had been given a big toy. My father didn’t like the bear and said that it was a boy’s toy. He took it away and threw it very far. That’s what he told me, but actually he had done nothing of the sort. Ten years or so later I found the bear in the attic among old things belonging to my mother.
When I found out that I was pregnant I went up to the attic and jumped up and down ten times on the floor. Afterward, I felt tired and sat down amidst old things covered with dust. I was alone in the dark except for the bear. I put it on my lap and began sobbing on its tummy. I was afraid my father would find out about my pregnancy and would kill me as he had once threatened to do. He did try to kill me when he learned of my pregnancy, but I ran away from my home in Brooklyn to my grandma’s house in Washington D.C.
I lived a normal life in her house; in other words, I had no life at all. There was a huge difference between my life in Brooklyn and my life in Washington, where my life with Grandma was quite different from the life I had lived with my father. Whereas he had loved having fun, my grandma never drank and never dreamed. Her kitchen was sparkling clean, as white as a pharmacy. Everything in it was organized and kept in jars that revealed every grain and every seed. She had placed a label on each jar with numbers and letters. If there were more than one jar for the same product, she would write, sugar 1, sugar 2, sugar 3, or English tea, Australian tea, Chinese tea. Although my father had his own system of keeping things, her kitchen was more organized than our grocery store. He could find anything you requested in a few seconds, from a strange collection of garlic hanging from the ceiling to dried fish to sausages to onions to pickled turnip to eggplant to dry mulukhiya, to araq from Qurtas to tomato paste and orange-flower water. He would ask the buyer questions without waiting for a reply, “A kilo of mixed nuts? A kilo of black olives? Three yards of rope? A kilo of coffee with cardamom? Just relax, the world isn’t going anywhere, why do you keep running, life isn’t a race. Have you become like them, running like a horse without a bridle? Take it easy and enjoy life. Why run, why crowd your time? With whom are you competing? Can you go faster than life or death? Let me tell you this, the fastest is death. My God, how fast and close by it is, closer than the eyebrow to the eye! Trust in God and sit here. Drink a cup of coffee and smoke a water pipe. Let me tell you a story, come on, sit down, I won’t let you leave, by God you won’t go. I swear I’ll divorce my wife if you leave, what’s with you, man? Do you want to destroy my family and give my children a stepmother? I have gone through four wives and you haven’t found one yet? What do you say, let me find you a bride. I know a girl from a good family, beautiful like a full moon and to your taste. She has a green card and you would obtain your citizenship without delay if you marry her. She has a waist that moves like a spring, and a couple of killer green eyes, may God be praised. She’s as plump as a duck and her cheeks are like apples. She’s young and as delicate as a twig of peppermint and you can shape her the way you want. Would you like to see her? Stay here then, she’ll soon return from school. You’re welcome here, give me a minute and I’ll have everything ready for you in the blink of an eye.”
One second becomes one hour and then you stop counting, and you don’t feel the time passing, not because the service is slow, since he usually prepares your order as promised, in a wink, but because of all the stories, the tales, and the laughing while listening to tales from the Arabian Nights, ‘Antar and ‘Abla, al-Shatir Hassan, and Bilal the Stupid, to the news of the neighbors, the scandals, the politics, the price of gold and silver, the merchandise ads, the apartments for rent, the cars, and the tires. Didn’t he say that he was a man of the world? A totally different world!
The confrontation between my father and my grandma came to a head after I got pregnant and took refuge in her house. I had been with her for a week when he came to see us. We were in the kitchen baking a cake when Grandma saw him from the window; she immediately pushed me to the storage room. He came into the kitchen, and Grandma tried to talk to him but he didn’t answer her and began searching the place for me with the eyes of a hunting dog. He looked much older and darker. I didn’t think he would really kill me, he loved me deeply, and I didn’t believe him capable of doing such a thing. I hadn’t lost hope in spite of my grandma’s incessant warnings: “Didn’t you see what happened to Hoda and to the others? Weren’t they young girls? Didn’t their parents love them?”
I held my breath while watching him through the holes in the door. His face was gloomy and his eyes were bulging. I saw him push my grandma away, and when she tried to use the telephone he snatched the receiver from her, pulled out the wires, and shouted in a thundering voice, “Nothing doing! Don’t interfere! It’s over; consider her dead. She must pay for her mistake. I mus
t wash away my shame and hers.”
My grandma tried to convince him that I wasn’t there but he refused to believe her. Instead, he went to the sitting room and began breaking everything in his way, kicking things and shouting at the top of his voice, until he reached maximum anger. Whenever that happened, which was rare, he would turn into a ferocious beast incapable of reasoning or grasping the true meaning of events. He wasn’t the father I knew but a total stranger.
He returned to the kitchen holding the big bear in one hand. I crouched back in fear and apprehension, causing a jar to fall and break. In a second I found myself at his feet. He dragged me into the kitchen, my body covered with pieces of glass, jam, and blood. He pulled my hair and shouted at the top of his voice, “Daughter of a dog, by God I will suck your blood!”
I held the hem of his trousers and begged for mercy. He met my pleas with heavy blows to my stomach and head. He pulled my hair and yanked my face up, asking with eyes afier, “Who is the bastard responsible for this?”
He was drunk and stunk of araq, the smell making me vomit. My father began to shake me as if I were an empty sack, and then shouted, “Who is this bastard who soiled my honor with mud?”
I couldn’t utter a single word as I was gradually losing consciousness, but I was aware of his movements and felt that my end was near. I closed my eyes tightly and felt his kicks to my chest, while waiting for his knife to fall. Suddenly we heard a crack like a bomb exploding. It shook the whole kitchen. I felt the muscles of my father’s legs tighten, then he collapsed on the floor. As our eyes met for a second, I saw in his amazement, extreme pain and surprise. I looked toward the door, where my grandmother stood holding a hunting rifle in her hands. She whispered, hissing, “Move and I’ll blow your head to pieces.”
Her face was calm, while her eyes moved left and right.
“Drop the knife right now,” she told my father.
He replied, rattling, “Daughter of a dog.” Then a second bullet hit the table near him and it fell on him.
“Zaynab, come here, quickly,” said my grandmother. But I was dazed and couldn’t move. She turned to my father and said, “You’ve seen what I can do, Hajj, throw away your knife.” He did as she said, using his left hand while pulling his wounded arm to his chest.
“And you, young lady, move, go to my room and call the police, fast.”
I climbed the stairs, but I didn’t dare call the police. A mixture of guilt, shame, fear, pity, and loss froze my thinking and paralyzed me. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window. Fall was nearing its end and the leaves were falling from the trees, a few remaining on the branches. I whispered, wondering, “What did I do? What will I do? What’s next?”
A gloomy feeling took hold of me and I felt a strange calm. I was unaware of rime passing but I finally went downstairs and heard him say to my grandma, “You’re the cause, you made her leave. You destroyed my family and broke my heart. You’re neither a woman nor a man.”
She replied quietly, “Calm down, Hajj, let me clean your wound. Hold this for me, put your mind to work, and let’s talk quietly. Zaynab is staying here. You can go to your people and tell them that you acted like a man and killed her. Don’t play games or go to court or do anything else. You know what will happen. You tried that once before, so don’t try it again. Forget Zaynab like you forgot her mother.”
He answered her, crying, “I have not forgotten her and I never will.”
I, too, never forgot him and lived with my grandma for many years. I later forgot my mother and my son, but I never forgot the sight of my father crossing the hallway with his arm tied to his neck and his back bent under the weight of thousands of years of shame. I shouted at the top of my voice, “Forgive me, Daddy.”
He turned and pointed to the skies with his sound arm. The road was desolate as he walked heavily, his head hanging, a bandage attached to his neck, and dragging his feet through the dry, fallen leaves.
I shouted, feeling quite guilty, “Forgive me Daddy! Please forgive me!”
He motioned once more with his hand and disappeared down the road, forever.
Life with my grandmother passed quickly. Events raced by and I can’t recall the details except for two events that haunted me day and night. The first was giving up my son to an adoption agency and the second was meeting my mother for the first time. Between the two events my grandmother taught me how to deal with life. At the beginning I proceeded carefully, like someone walking in the rain trying not to get wet. My Grandma continuously repeated to me, “Make success your aim because if you fail, people will feel sorry for you, but they won’t respect you or befriend you. If you want to keep your son, take him only if you are able to support him.”
From then on, I became a winner in everything I did, whether sports or academics. At first I thought I was doing all this for my son, not for me. I thought that my success would make me strong and would make it possible for me to get him back. The reality was different, however. The more successful I became, the more I wanted to succeed. Success meant proving myself, but it made me lose touch with the rest of the world.
I became aware of people only when I wrote about them. I saw them as nothing more than competitors, individuals to beat. I had no time for love, emotions, family ties, or friendship. No one counted except Grandma Deborah and me. Eventually, Deborah melted away and disappeared, leaving me alone following my path, with a forlorn heart. I was all alone, no one with me and no one supporting me. I saw nothing but my shadow and even my steps stayed behind me. My questions remained unanswered. I had no time to talk with others, no time for memories or feelings. I did nothing but run.
I changed completely. I lost my unique personal characteristics. I didn’t feel nostalgic for the strange stories and tales of my childhood. I didn’t laugh or have fun, and I no longer enjoyed eating with others. I learned to eat sandwiches on the go. I learned to live in silence and spend my days alone. I became accustomed to spending long hours in social gatherings without songs and music. There was nothing strange about this life because my grandmother was serious by nature, and so were my university colleagues and others I met. They were kind, but each was for himself, and all moved in their own orbits. I learned from them, locking myself in a glass cage and keeping people and emotions outside.
It was comforting to live that way. It was agreeable and our conversations were superficially pleasant. There were no fights, no blame, no frictions, and no aversions—and how could there be with such high walls erected between us! In this social setting, so different from the one I knew when I lived with my father, we neither touched anyone nor were touched.
Yet, despite all that peace, under that pleasant and innocent surface, something cold was growing inside me, making me shiver on the hot summer days. At night, I would switch off the lights and withdraw to my grandma’s rocking chair, spending hours in the dark feeling my enthusiasm for life draining away. Whenever my grandma returned late from one of her meetings, she would sit beside me and read the day’s newspapers. Out of consideration for her I would usually relinquish the rocking chair, except when I felt a cold chill around and inside me. Then I would remain seated in the rocking chair oblivious to my surroundings. Grandma would feel sorry for me and say, “You must have had a long day, poor thing? Did you?”
If I didn’t respond she would continue, “Poor thing, she works so hard!”
She would remain in her seat for an hour or longer, and before she went to bed I would hear her say, “Oh! My God, what has happened to America and Americans! What has become of us?”
The “us” was painful to me. What does “us” mean? Who is “us”? “Us” Americans? I am not American.
“What are you then?” Grandma asked me one day as I said those words.
I didn’t say I was Arab because I wasn’t. Who am I then? Despite my mother’s citizenship, my birth certificate, my school certificate, my books, my accent, my clothes, and everything about my life, I was not truly American. The
depths of my mind were inhabited by visions and pictures, love songs, those Arabic mawwals moving like the passage of a breeze, the scent of violets, the fragrance of memories, all leaving behind a honey-sweet solution in the heart. Memories would rush in like a swarm of butterflies, hovering in the room until the morning, filling the darkness with the fragrance of jasmine, rare incense, Arabic coffee with cardamom, almonds and cinnamon, mahaleb and nutmeg, grilled bread and chestnuts. The butterflies would glide like the sails of a boat, a waving hand, a flock of pigeons. My ears would respond to a remote voice calling and singing, Amaneh ya Layl, ‘I trust you, O night.’ I would plead in my longing, “Forgive me, Daddy, forgive me.” I would spend the night watching the flames change into ashes. Grandma’s hand would then reach to me in the dark and shake my shoulder, whispering, “It’s nothing but a dream Zayna, just a dream.”
The Inheritance Page 2