A face like the moon

by Mina Athanassious

  “Well,” he said. “What are they?”

  She sighed. She knew she had to answer. She didn’t want him to push her to the ground again. She knew she had to tell the truth. The fat man looked like he knew a lie too well.

  “I wanna meet a nice dove,” she said staring out the window.

  “A dove?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why a dove?”

  “They know where the wind goes. They fly where the wind flies.”

  Shokry laughed a heavy laugh. She knew he would, just like her father did. He patted the girl on her head.

  “Oh the dreams of a princess,” he bellowed with a smile. “I think they have their own village somewhere close to the Sinai. Maybe they need to get back to their families. Doves have families too you know?”

  Nijma sighed and nodded her head. She heard a few footsteps approach from outside and turned around. The door swung open and an older boy with a patchy beard walked in with a chubby woman. She was dressed in an all black, except for her orange headscarf that only covered the back half of her head, her dark thick hair streaked with lines of copper. Her cheeks were so fat, so round, like a child, and she was short.

  The man was paying for his treatment, so this woman must’ve been the doctor. Nijma was stunned. She’d never seen a female doctor in her village before. Mr. Shokry wasn’t lying. Maybe she would be a doctor someday, just like the lady in the orange headscarf. But she wouldn’t work for Mr. Shokry, even if he was her uncle.

  “How much do I owe you?” he asked before he spotted Mr. Shokry.

  “Fifty on the table.”

  The young man spotted Nijma on his way to the table. He cocked his head back as he reached under his galabeya for his wallet.

  “They just keep getting younger and younger don’t they?” he said.

  “She’s not ready yet you animal,” Shokry said. “Put your money on the table and get out.”

  “This is the girl?” the doctor yelled. Her accent wasn’t from around here. She smiled and walked towards her. “She looks like old pictures of me when I was young.”

  “Really?” Shokry said as the boy was leaving. “Maybe I should give her back to her baba before she turns into you.” He laughed. “And why didn’t you come out with that dog with the pompadour? He could have left without giving me my money.”

  “He smelled like garbage. I couldn’t stand another minute with him. I’m not gonna let him in next time.”

  “Money is money,” Shokry said.

  The doctor pulled the little girl towards the oven and sat on the floor beside her. “Stick out your palms,” she said.

  Nijma shook her head but the doctor forced her palm out from underneath her. “Look at that,” she said running her finger down Nijma’s lifeline. You’ve got a long long life ahead of you.” Nijma didn’t understand what was happening. But at least the doctor’s words were good.

  She stopped at an intersecting crease in her lifeline.

  “There we go, there’s the disaster,” she said. “You live and you die at seventeen.”

  Nijma looked up at the doctor’s eyes, confused, and tried to pull her hand away. The doctor wouldn’t let go.

  “Married at seventeen,” she said. “Then another sixty years of slavery.”

  The doctor let Nijma’s palm go.

  “Nope. That’s not the life for me,” she said. “I was born alone and I’ll die alone.”

  The doctor looked like she was approaching her thirties. Nijma had never seen or even heard of a woman that old still unmarried.

  “You don’t want a husband?” Nijma asked.

  “Ha!” the doctor yelled. “So I can get on my knees every day and clean the crud off the floor? And carry tiny monsters in my stomach for a year and bear them for the rest of my life? Yeah you’re right. I guess I’ll just sell my soul to a garbage man and birth his garbage children.”

  “Don’t be so indignant to the little girl you pig,” Shokry hollered. “You’ve already sold your soul to me.”

  He stood up and pulled Nijma away from the doctor. “Sorry about Aisha. All those years in med school turned her a little crazy.” He turned and winked at Aisha.

  Aisha laughed. “Man after man after man. I don’t know how many prescriptions I have left in me.” She rolled up one of her sleeves and smoothed the hairs on her arm to one side. “It’s a busy life,” she hushed to herself.

  Nijma heard someone knocking at the door. Shokry told her to go stand by the table and look as if she’s cooking bread. He called for the people at the door to come in. Nijma heard the door crack open as she approached the hutch to fetch the flour. A man in a skullcap and moustache walked in with his big headed son. Nijma panicked and tried to hide herself behind the hutch, but she knew both had seen her already.

  “Why’s there a little girl here?” the man with the skullcap asked Shokry.

  “In training,” Shokry said. “Who’s this?”

  “My son.”

  “Why would you bring your son to a place like this?”

  “I can’t get him married,” the man in the skullcap said. “This is the only way it’ll happen.”

  “I d-, I don’t w-wanna do this,” the boy with the big head cried.

  His father slapped him on the back of his neck and pointed his finger to the boy’s face. “You may be retarded,” the man whispered with such hostility, “But you’re my son. My blood. You’re a man. Do what men do.”

  The boy dropped to the floor and held his hands to his face and cried. His father shook his head, disgusted, and yelled at him to get up.

  “Get the girl so we can finish this,” he said to Shokry. Shokry waved his hands at Aisha, but she squinted her eyes and shook her head. She looked disgusted.

  “Let’s go,” Shokry said. She shook her head again and looked away. Nijma wondered why she wouldn’t treat the boy. He was obviously sick. She wondered why the boy didn’t want to get better.

  Shokry breathed a heavy breath and marched up to Aisha. She threw her arms over her face and tried to duck behind the table. With a slight smirk and a raised brow, he slapped her with a swift hand, the rage of the devil in his eyes. She fell on the dirty floor and laid there, her legs curled to her stomach. She grasped her cheek. Her whimper muffled by the stupid cry of the fat headed boy.

  “What, you’re disgusted by him because he’s retarded?” the boy’s father yelled. “You’re a whore!”

  Aisha crawled away from Shokry’s feet and stood up. She ran out of the house cursing under her breath. The man in the skullcap picked his son up off the floor, pushed him out the door and followed her.

  “Suh-s-save me chicken girl!” the boy cried, reaching one hand out to Nijma. His eyes were wide like the sun and the darkest black. She saw his tears and she remembered her own. She saw him struggle as his father heaved him out of the home and followed Aisha, slamming the door closed behind him. He writhed like she did when she tried to squirm off the fat man’s lap. She wondered if she was retarded.

  Nijma held the bag of flour between her arms in a corner of the room. She held it close and clenched at its fabric, eyes and lips open.

  “What’s a whore?” she asked Mr. Shokry.

  Shokry turned to face the young girl. “She’s a doctor, I told you. She helps men feel better.”

  He turned back around and walked to his desk and sat.

  “You hit her,” she said, not surprised, but very scared. The man moved between rage and peace by the grace of his open palm.

  “Money is money,” he shrugged.

  Nijma sat quietly and stared at the man. He was sketching again. He smirked. He almost always smirked. Even as he hit Aisha, he smirked, though his eyes looked different at the time. Now he looked calm. All that he cared for at that moment was the piece of paper that lay in front of him.

  She stood up and dragged the flour bag to the small table. She got a few extra ingredients from the hutch and began making sun bread. The two hardly spoke a word between each othe
r for the rest of the day. He took the meat out of the oven himself and told her he’d eat it with his wife in his blue home where he’d spend the rest of the day. He needed her to tell Aisha to take the names of her patients as they left, just in case they didn’t pay. Nijma told her when she came back. He also needed to redirect the patients to the blue house to see him before they saw Aisha.

  Nijma made the dough, kneaded it, and set it out in the sun to rise. She didn’t make many loaves. Maybe ten in all. Her hands were too small to be productive. She spent most of the time sitting outside, waiting for men to pass through. She told them to report to the blue house first and watched the bread rise. She also watched the birds fly above her, land, and peck around the grass and dirt floor for food. Most of them were pigeons. She didn’t care much for pigeons. She even ate them. Pigeon meat was expensive, but not like meat.

  But every once in a while, she’d spot a dove. Beige underbelly, copper wings that faded to a light blue at their tips. They were beautiful. They flew with a grace pigeons lacked, as if they didn’t fly at all, but glided.

  She tried that afternoon to sneak up behind one. It spotted her, waddled away stretching its wings, and flew off into the sky. At least she figured out where they went that day. To a far off village in the Sinai to be with their families.

  By the time the bread rose, Nijma realized her day had almost passed. She gathered the risen pieces of dough on a large tray and moved them inside. She decided not to put them in the oven since she didn’t know how to turn it on. A few minutes later, she heard someone open the door.

  Mr. Shokry walked in. And scurrying behind him, a bird. Its copper wings faded to blue at its ends.

  A dove! Nijma thought when she saw it, though she didn’t say it out loud. Nijma noticed the big smile on Mr. Shokry’s face. Maybe hers was infectious.

  The bird raised its wings and tried to fly away but couldn’t. One of its legs was tied to a short string that Shokry held in his hand by the opposite end.

  “Where did you get that?” she beamed.

  “I have a pigeon coop on the farm. Sometimes I find doves. You like it?”

  “Yes!”

  “You want it?”

  Nijma looked up at the man, smirking as always, then back down at the dove, which tried and tried but couldn’t fly away. It stood at his legs, shifting its head from one side to the other. She walked towards Shokry and reached and grabbed the string out of his hand.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “See you tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked out of the house and towards the stable where Shusho stood.

  “I need to name you,” she said. She spotted her father under the stable. He waved her down.

  “Look what I have,” she smiled.

  “How’d you get that?” her father asked.

  Nijma explained to him that she didn’t catch it. Mr. Shokry gave it to her and she wanted to name it. Nijma picked the dove up into her arms and her father threw her onto Shusho. She petted him from the top of its head down to his back, but she could feel him try to stretch his wings and fly away. She wondered why he wanted to leave her. She loved the dove, her only dove. She might never have another in her arms again. She named him Mahboub, or Beloved, and promised she’d feed him and play with him and do whatever she needed to do to keep him happy.

  Mahboub and Nijma rode home on Shusho that night. Nijma’s father walked beside them, whipping Shusho along. At half past six, the sun ducked its top beneath the approaching horizon. The day’s light faded to a dim orange that reminded Nijma of Aisha’s headscarf.

  In her mind, she hadn’t decided whether she thought Aisha was beautiful or not. She was so portly and small, like a fat child. Her hair grew down to her chest, long and wavy, just like Nijma’s. And her dark brown eyes, even when she smiled, she didn’t look happy. Like Nijma, she was born alone. But unlike Nijma, Aisha would die alone. At least according to Aisha’s prophecy.

  Mahboub tried to fly away. Even though Nijma held his string, he tried and tried again.

  When they got home, Nijma took a few pieces of bread she’d stuffed in her head scarf and tried to feed them to him. He pecked at the bread on the floor, turned around, flapped his wings and tried to scratch the string off one of his legs with the other. Nijma sang Little Duckie Nunu with Mahboub, but he wouldn’t whistle back.

  She tied him to a post at a far corner in her house and petted him.

  “Did baba get that for you?” her mother asked her.

  “No mama,” Nijma said. “Mr. Shokry gave it to me.”

  Her mother’s lips cringed at the sound of the fat man’s name. She shook her head and walked to the stove. She poured some molokhiya into a bowl, the soup spilled like green mucous, placed it on a tray with some sun bread, and brought it to her husband who sat on the floor. She laid it in front of him and stood in front of him watching him eat. Nijma stood beside her.

  “Sit,” he said not looking up at them.

  They sat and broke off a piece of sun bread and dipped it in the soup.

  “When do you want me to make that dove?” her mother asked.

  “No mama!” Nijma cried. “It’s not for-”

  “Nijma!” her dad yelled punching the ground. “Don’t ever yell at your mother!”

  Nijma ducked her head to the food and broke off another piece of bread.

  “It’s Nijma’s bird,” her father said. “She can do what she wants with it.”

  Her mother nodded. Nijma ate fast and she finished within a few minutes. Her parents were not yet done. She asked if she could go outside with Mahboub for a while. Her father let her go. She untied the bird and walked out. She stood in front of her home below a window. She could hear her parents talking inside while she watched Mahboub.

  “We can’t keep her with that man,” her mother said.

  “She’s only helping him around the house. He promised me.”

  “How can you trust a man like that,” her voice raised, cautiously. Nijma wondered what she was talking about.

  “He’s not a liar.”

  Nobody spoke for a while. Nijma tried to feed Mahboub some pebbles to weigh him down so he wouldn’t fly away. He wouldn’t have it. She massaged his little head. He shook her off and flapped his wings.

  “Do you not have any shame?”she heard her mother say. “Where is your honour?” Nijma heard the slap. It wasn’t particularly loud. She shuffled away as fast as she could so her dove wouldn’t hear. She and Mahboub were going for a short walk.

  So many people around the village told her how beautiful her bird was. Many asked when she’d eat it. To that, she blew them raspberries, picked up her bird and covered his ears, and walked away. Some didn’t mind, others cursed at her, but she didn’t care. She was bold for his sake. But still, Mahboub tried to fly.

  At night, after her mother told her to get to sleep, she climbed a ladder to her roof with a small hand towel covering Mahboub in her left hand. She placed the string that held his leg under a brick she found on her roof. From far, she could see the lights from passing ships slowly guide her eyes down the Nile. She usually slept within minutes of the first owl’s hoot. It had already been a half hour and she couldn’t fall asleep.

  “Why do you want to leave me?” she said, adjusting the hand towel around Mahboub’s back.

  You think I do but I don’t he said. We’re friends. I’m happy I met you.

  “Then why didn’t you eat the bread and the pebbles I gave you? I put them right there in front of you.”

  I wasn’t hungry Nijma. I ate enough grass in the day.

  “Well why didn’t you whistle with me when I sang to you? You didn’t like the song?”

  I love that song. Little duckie Nunu, You lost your little shoe shoe, When you walked around you stepped on some doodoo. Nijma sang the song along with Mahboub.

  “Why didn’t you whistle then?”

  My mouth was tired. I’ve been whistling all day.

 
“So you don’t want to leave me? You’ve been trying to fly away since I met you.”

  I have a family Nijma. I have a wife and a hundred children and all my friends are in the Sinai. They miss me. They don’t even know where I am now.

  “So, you want to leave me. For your family?

  I’ll never leave you he said. You’ll see me and I’ll see you. And when you don’t see me I’ll see you and I’ll be there.

  With that, Mahboub fluffed his feathers, turned his head and buried his beak in the down on his back, knocking the hand towel off of him. He shut his little eyes and slept standing on the brick that weighed him to her roof.

  “If in the morning, you want to leave,” Nijma said pulling the string from underneath the brick, “I’ll understand.”

  She crawled a few steps over to the blanket she slept under every night, pulled it over her, and turned to Mahboub. “Goodnight,” she said, and closed her eyes.

  The weight of the sun’s light beat on her olive eyelids the next morning. She opened her eyes and yawned and stretched her arms out to the light. She sat up and turned towards where Mahboub had slept the night before. There, in front of her, sat a brick. No string. No dove. A brick.

  Nijma felt the dull impact of the sun move down from her head to her chest to the core of her stomach. That moment, she knew Aisha’s prophecy was wrong. At the birth of a new day, she’d lost her love to the Sinai. She never would have lost him if she hadn’t given him his freedom. She was stupid to think he would have stayed. She put her hands to her face and whimpered. No one heard.

  Aisha would understand. She probably cried on the floor all the time.

  Nijma heard her dad call her from the ground. She breathed, wiped her eyes with her sleeves, and climbed down the ladder. She washed her face in a bowl of water and brushed her teeth with an old brush she’d gotten as charity. She changed her galabeya from the night before, she’d already worn it for a few days, and walked out to her father standing beside Shusho. He said good morning and she said good morning and he threw her on top of Shusho. He whipped Shusho’s backside and they made their way through the village.

  “Where’s your little bird friend?”

  “With his family,” she muttered.