by Eman Quotah
One late evening in the parking lot, she calls to him.
“Sayyidi Muneer, I heard you’re leaving for a bit.”
The moon is a pearl in an ocean of sky and the air is cool enough for a blazer over his thawb. He shivers a little. She appears to be in her late twenties, older than most unmarried women.
“Yes. Personal business in America.” The PI’s envelopes stopped coming four or five years ago. Clearly, Fareed thought the search had become hopeless. But Muneer will never give up; he saves up for one or two trips a year.
“You went to college there,” Lamees says. “Godspeed.”
“Would you like something from there?”
“No, no. You’ll be too busy.”
The urge to tell her the truth pushes him a step toward her. She jumps a little in surprise, smiles to cover up the awkwardness. Her driver is waiting for her. She disappears into her car.
That night, Muneer calls his latest informant in the United States from the phone in his bedroom. He tries to whisper, though Mama isn’t home. She eavesdrops on him sometimes, presses her ear noisily against the door, as though she wants him to know she’s listening.
“And the girl was wearing what? … How many times did you see her? … And the mother?”
He hears hope in his own voice. Yet he doesn’t believe in hope anymore, God forgive him. The phone calls come in strings, and always the story is the same: a friend of a friend has seen Saeedah and Hanadi—or so they think. When he can afford to go, he goes. When he can’t, guilt wakes him up at night.
He changes into a white T-shirt and a green waistcloth. The front door slams, and he hears puttering sounds: Mama taking her shoes off, Mama putting her abayah in the hall wardrobe. He opens the door, and, yes, there is Mama.
“You look like a Yemeni gateman,” she says.
He rubs his face, runs a hand through the triangle of hair on his head. She tells him the skin under his eyes is dark and he looks weary.
“What do you want, old lady of mine?”
He calls her old as an endearment, but today he can tell it bothers her by the way she strings her fingers together and squeezes, a sign of annoyance from a woman whose face remains ever tranquil.
“Who were you talking to?”
“No one, old lady.”
He kisses her on the forehead and slips into the bathroom. He senses she wants to fix whatever has gotten into him, the jinni that eats at him from inside.
When Muneer returns from his latest failed trip, there is a wedding invitation from his mother’s cousin Lama in the post office box. He opens the envelope with a fingernail and reads to Mama from the pink and gold card without a hint of jealousy in his voice.
She has not stopped encouraging him to get married, but according to her he has been picky—no girl in Jidda has pleased him. Four—was it five?—years ago, she reminds him, there was an engagement to his father’s sister’s daughter. He phoned Mama from America to tell her to call it off. She did as he asked, but he suspected her anger boiled in her belly like coffee brewed in a metal pot. When he came home again, she had gathered his brothers, who told him, “You can’t wait till you find Hanadi before you marry again. God willing, you’ll be blessed with other children. Please do this for your mother’s sake.”
He never listened.
He laughs. “I thought marriage was for my sake. What about this invitation? Will you go four hours to Madinah for a wedding?”
He’s a young man, but she tells him often that he is growing older than his years in front of her: his eyes sinking into his face like seeds in bread, his mouth collapsing, his cheeks drawing in between his teeth. He laughs her worries off.
“I can’t possibly look as old as you say I do.”
But she insists: Of her seven children, he is the one she stays up at night worrying about. Him, and the missing piece of him, Hanadi, she says.
No matter how often he tells her to stop this litany, she never does.
“I might go,” she says, returning to the topic of the wedding. He sees on her face that an idea has come to her, and she clings to it, like Umm Kulthum clutching her famous handkerchief. If he will not marry any of their friends’ or relations’ daughters in Jidda, she will seek suitable girls elsewhere. Why didn’t God give her the idea sooner? she says. There will be many girls at the wedding.
“That’s not necessary, Mama,” he says. “But go to the wedding if you want to.”
The next day, while Muneer works at the newspaper office, Mama has their maid, Sara, find the little red address book filled with relatives’ phone numbers. Sara is Indonesian and reads enough Arabic to look up the number and dial it. Mama herself is as illiterate as the Prophet.
When Muneer comes home for lunch, she tells him about the conversation with Lama.
“I had to make sure that awful person”—her sister Faizah—“will not be there.”
“Will she, Mama?” He eats her green bean stew with a piece of bread.
“No. Lama told me, ‘Darling Haleemah. I promise, we understand the situation. You’re my favorite cousin. Who else from Jidda would I want to be at my daughter’s wedding?’”
Mama appreciates that her cousin sees things her way. And if her sister were invited, Mama is certain Faizah would not make the trip to al-Madinah, where their relatives refuse to allow musical instruments at weddings—no lute, no dancing, no “Ya Layla Dana,” no stereo, no songs by Amr Diab or Ragheb Alama. Only drumming and human voices, songs about God and the Prophet. Nothing about love, about eyes like a gazelle’s, about longing for the stars.
“You should stop talking, old lady, and eat. God bless your hands that made this food.”
“‘Who has time for such boring people and their boring weddings?’ Faizah would say.”
Mama keeps going: She will attend her cousin’s daughter’s wedding because her son needs a pious, old-fashioned girl. Yes, let Muneer’s bride be one of those women who wears a coat instead of an abayah, who covers her hair in front of other women. Let her raise daughters who cover their faces when they go out and never listen to music. The more religious, the better.
“Mama, be patient. God rewards the patient.”
But Muneer is the one who must be patient, as Mama rails about her sister, a familiar monologue she trots out to prove to him that Hanadi’s disappearance has affected her as much as it has him.
He listens because, as the Prophet said, “Paradise is beneath the mothers’ feet.”
Mama and Faizah haven’t spoken in nearly ten years, and Mama can’t banish the idea that her sister knows where Hanadi is and won’t tell. Muneer has never told her about the private investigator.
In the beginning, Auntie Faizah swore to God three times that she had no idea where they were. Mama had tried to believe her—what a sin to think her sister would swear to God on a lie!—but one weekend soon after, as she was about to join a gathering at their younger sister Fahmah’s apartment, she saw Faizah’s black sandals on the mat outside. The sight of those shoes, of the imprints Faizah’s toes had made in the insoles, caused hatred to possess Mama like a fever. The way to exorcise it was to never come within a centimeter of Faizah ever again, she has told him time and again. She didn’t set foot in Fahmah’s place that night, and everyone—Faizah included—knows she will not enter a room Faizah’s perfume has wafted into.
At first, Muneer’s grandmother tried to persuade Mama to talk to her sister Faizah. “You’re both from my womb. You want me to die of sorrow because my daughters won’t speak? It’s not your sister who did this thing to you.”
Mama refused to back down.
Tonight, Muneer lets her talk. One topic winds into the next. She is annoyed because he can’t take her to the dressmaker. The wedding is in a week, but Muneer’s mother insists there’s time for a new dress to be made with the gray silk she bought a few months ago. Bandar’s wife employs two Filipina seamstresses in an annex behind his villa. Muneer reminds her he will be in America, but he’ll
be back in time to take her to al-Madinah for the wedding. She pouts.
“Can’t Bandar send you his driver?” he says.
She sighs and begins clearing the food, though Muneer hasn’t finished eating. “My granddaughter, surrounded by kaffirs—to think of it makes my head throb. I pray to God you find her on this next trip.”
“Maybe you should take a Tylenol or read Surat al-Fatihah,” Muneer says. He separates a cinnamon stick from a green bean and mixes more sauce into his rice.
Mama sets a dish down and removes her glasses. She rubs her eyes, her temples.
“I should lie down. People say I should have found you a bride years ago. I pray for you every day. I’ve prayed for you at the Haram in Makkah, asked God to guide you. I’ve prayed for you at the Prophet’s Mosque in al-Madinah. I’ve prayed for your daughter, and I’ve prayed for her mother. What more can we do? God will lead you to a bride.”
He doesn’t want to tell her he already has a bride in mind.
MADINAH WEDDING
The morning of the wedding Muneer has returned from another useless trip. When he wakes up, Mama has already zipped her gray silk dress into a garment bag, packed a blue tweed suitcase, braided and wound her hair in the back, and put on a black-and-white cotton dress with a high neck and long sleeves. She has already had Sara set out olives and cheese and bread and cream on a floorcloth in the living room. She is not hungry, she tells Muneer. She is thinking about God’s plan. But Muneer should eat.
On their way to the car, parked on the street outside, Mama adjusts her black scarf with one hand. He tries to help her into the car, but she pushes him. She lifts the door handle with two fingers and maneuvers herself into the front seat, pulling her cane in behind her and settling it next to her.
The air is hotter in the car than it is on the street. Muneer rolls down the windows and braces himself for hours of Mama’s talk. With one hand, he steers through the neighborhood, its streets lined with apartment buildings with marble façades, tinted-glass doors, and barely used balconies.
She puts her hands on the dashboard and says, “God knows best, but maybe you should stop going to America. Maybe you should live your life here. A man needs a companion. A man needs children.”
Muneer’s mind wanders for an instant. He sees an empty bedroom, the tiny sneakers and cardigans and T-shirts left behind in the closet. He sees his daughter’s face in black and white.
“God save you, don’t drive so fast,” Mama says.
“You have other sons. Let one of them drive you.”
“Say a prayer for the Prophet,” she says. “Calm yourself.”
He breathes in, but he doesn’t slow the car. Air whips past and into the window, blowing his ghutrah about. Her tightly wrapped scarf barely ripples.
The sky beyond their neighborhood is high and blanched pale as an almond. Palm trees and streetlights line the highway, keeping watch over it, separating them from the desert. As they leave the city, they pass a large sculpture of an open Qur’an and Mama begins to quietly pray. Muneer can’t hear the words, but he imagines she is saying, God save Hanadi from the unbelievers. God bless my son with a wife, children.
Mama sifts through her big white purse. She hands a cassette to Muneer and he clicks it into the player. He rolls up the windows and turns on the AC.
Surat Yusuf begins. It is the story of a man who loses his child. The boy Yusuf abandoned in a well, rescued by strangers, raised far from family. The father, Ya’qub, gone blind with grief, thinking his son killed by a wolf.
Muneer stops the tape, clicks it out of the player, brings it up against the steering wheel, and stares at it. He flips it over and slips it back into the tape player. Another surah begins.
“Why did you change it?”
“Calm down, Mama.”
“I’m calm.” She stabs the dashboard with her fingers, but she doesn’t know what button to push. “Stop it, stop the tape.”
Muneer slides the cassette out and deposits it in Mama’s purse. She turns to the window. They have left the city, with its ful mudammas and rotisserie shops, its marble façade apartment buildings and neon lights, its grassy boulevard dividers that smell of the sewer water used for irrigation. When Muneer was a boy, the city smelled more like the sea. Here on the outskirts, he imagines he could smell the clean sand of the wilderness. The road seems to cut directly into the desert, barely making a dent in its vastness. Sand has crept onto the shoulders. Road signs provide the only color; cars are the color of dust.
The plain gives way to mountains, low and brown, like the desert has pulled itself up to the sky.
Soon Mama falls asleep, slumped against the window. Muneer drives. Baboons sit on the low stone wall along the roadway. The monkeys are lined up, the babies on their mother’s backs, watching.
The car comes into a valley, the next set of hills shades of brown and gray, hulking shadows against the sky. Muneer pulls over and gets out of the car before Mama can wake up and ask why he’s stopping. At the side of the road, a man in a turban is selling cucumbers, laid out on an overturned wooden crate. The man sits on a large green cooler. He has a face like a dried date. At his age, he should have his sons out in the sun, selling for him.
Muneer buys yogurt in a plastic bag.
“How are we going to keep that?” Mama says when he returns to the car and heads off again.
“We can eat it,” he says. But there’s no spoon, and by the time they reach the hotel, the yogurt will be drippy and warm and clotty. This is what makes her worry about Muneer, she says, his impracticality.
He’s regretting driving her. “You’re worried because I bought yogurt, Mama?”
There’s a sound like something is rattling up along the side of the car and inside where the wheel is, followed by a loud pop. The car lurches. Mama grabs the dashboard. Muneer veers onto the side of the road and gets out without a word. More monkeys appear. As Muneer prepares to change the tire, they watch, scratching their ears, sinking their sharp teeth into bananas someone must have tossed to them, and swallowing in a businesslike manner, picking at each other’s fuzzy heads.
Mama taps the window and waves at them.
“Shoo. Shoo.”
With the AC off, the car heats up. Mama fans herself with a tissue box.
Muneer takes off his ghutrah, iqal, and kufiyyah, and rolls his sleeves up. He gets the spare tire and jack out of the back.
“You have to get out, Mama,” he says.
She doesn’t want to stand by the side of the road, so he brings her a suitcase to sit on. She fans herself with the box, stops to pull a tissue out and wipe her forehead. Cars pass so close she can feel the hot air on her face. She flips the edge of her scarf across her face; through the cloth, she keeps her eyes on the monkeys. They make her nervous with their sharp teeth and big yawns. The monkeys gaze at her, wagging their chins and cheeping disapprovingly, as though they are telling her to climb back in the car.
When Mama and Muneer arrive in al-Madinah, the Asr call to prayer is sounding. They pass near the Prophet’s Mosque. The green dome looks like something a child might paint. She remembers once that Saeedah got lost at the mosque—that child was always getting lost. Faizah found her at the prophet’s grave, praying with worry beads she claimed to have found lying on the ground. Mama tells Muneer the story as they inch along in traffic.
“I always knew she stole those beads.”
“I don’t want to hear about her, Mama,” he says. “I’m tired.”
“That girl was trouble, I always thought so. She wasn’t praying. She was pretending so her mother wouldn’t spank her in front of the world. You never should have married her.”
“You never objected.”
“I did, I did object. I said marrying a cousin is a bad idea. I said find a girl with good manners.”
“You must have said that to someone else.”
They sit idling at a red light. He can tell she’s offended by his comment from the way her silence sits be
tween them, but she quickly becomes distracted by a little girl approaching on the median. The girl wears a headscarf gray with dirt and a long dress with ruffles at the wrists, a flounce at the hem. She doesn’t smile; beggar children never do. She starts to wipe the windshield with a brownish rag. Muneer waves—“Go on, go on”—but she keeps wiping as though the car belongs to her.
That child could be Hanadi, Mama says. The girl’s chin is dimpled, the little bulblike tip of her nose is sprinkled with perfectly formed droplets of sweat. The dark brown birthmark on her forehead looks soft as felt. Mama convinces herself that Hanadi had such a birthmark, though Muneer swears otherwise and reminds her that Hanadi is fifteen, much older than this girl.
Mama doesn’t listen. She lowers her window and sticks her hand out with a riyal.
“What’s your name?”
“Come on, Mama. The light will change any second.”
The girl stares at the ground and reaches for the bill. Mama tugs it gently for a second, as though she could keep the little girl from going too quickly. But the girl wants the bill, and she takes it, leaving Mama empty-handed.
“God protect you, Miss,” the girl says, moving to the next car.
The light changes to green, and they leave the girl and her median and the Prophet’s Mosque behind.
The hotel is hidden by fig trees and bougainvillea bushes, pink flowers flaming. Muneer drives back and forth several times before he finds the gate into the parking lot, which is quiet and nearly empty, shaded by hills.
“We’re not late,” Muneer says. “We’re early.”
“You drove too fast.”
In the hotel room, before showering, Muneer eats the warm yogurt with a spoon room service delivers. He swears the stuff is delicious. They pray, nap, pray again. Mama puts on her gray dress, oils her hair and braids it again, coiling it the way it was before. She applies sandalwood essence behind her ears. She pulls the kohl rod swiftly over her closed eyelids. She calls Muneer’s sister Aaliyah. “Your brother drives too fast,” she says.