She sighed and shook her head as she grabbed the rope from him. She turned the pulley to bring the bucket back up.
“I guess I look like an idiot to you now, huh?” she smirked at Morqos. He didn’t answer. He knew she’d be angry if he told her the truth.
“You’ve got some sense boy,” she said. “Mama taught you well.”
Morqos thanked the girl and tried to pretend she didn’t say that. He watched the girl draw her bucket from the hook at the end of the rope.
“Give me a drink,” he said, reaching for the bucket in her hand. The woman laughed and set the bucket down beside her.
“I never seen you around here before,” she said.
“I’m from Koshk,” the boy said. “I’m Morqos, son of Mina, a farmer from Koshk.”
“Ahh, the name, the village,” the woman said. “A Nazarene.”
The boy nodded.
“So tell me,” she said, leaning forward and smiling like she wanted to play. “Why would I give my water to a Nazarene?”
The boy stared into her dark eyes that undid her smile. She was a fraud, hiding something only she knew beneath her glow. Maybe she fooled herself into thinking she was happy, trying to swallow the fear in her eyes.
“What do you need a whole bucket for?” the boy asked.
“My family needs to drink,” she said.
“Your husband?”
The girl held her forced smile and stared through the boy like she was examining the dirt behind him.
“I’m not married,” she said. “Not yet.”
Morqos believed her.
“Brothers and sisters and mother and father,” she said. “That kind of thing.”
“They must not drink that much then,” he said.
“My brother will be back here in the early night to fetch more water. Just a couple of hours.” She sighed and leaned towards the boy, resting her face on her palm.
“It only fills you up for a little while,” she said. “You’re always thirsty in the village.”
“I guess it wouldn’t be a big deal if I got a little sip then,” he said.
The woman stared into the horizon. She shrugged her shoulders, defeated.
“I guess not,” she said, and raised her open palm towards the bucket. “But just a sip.”
Morqos nodded and grabbed the bucket from under her, cupped his hands and dipped them into the water. He drew his hands to his face and drank. The water went down cold and sweet and smooth, the finest drink of water the boy could remember. He was happy that he didn’t wait until he fetched his own. He thanked the girl and wiped his wet hands on his face and sighed. For a moment, he forgot about the drought. Maybe she did too.
“You’re welcome,” the girl said and smiled at the boy, a real smile this time. he sat for a moment, lost in the horizon. She felt like a giant to Morqos. There was something huge in her quiet stare. Something heavy that held her down to the cold stones under the sycamore tree. The shade was her hiding place.
The woman pushed herself off the side of the well and stood. She walked towards the boy who had her bucket at his feet. Morqos noticed the tiny bulge under her galabeya, sticking out just enough to exist. He wondered what she kept under her long dress.
“So you’re from Koshk?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“By the mountains?”
“By the mountains,” he nodded.
“You ever watch the shadows of mountains, how they move with the hours?”
“I never really noticed how they move,” Morqos said.
“Right before the sun sets, they look like men.”
“The mountains?”
“Their shadows. They look like men. All in armour. They surround your village and sit real still, like they’re waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I wish I knew.” She looked too certain not to know.
The woman grabbed her bucket, balanced it atop her head, and waved goodbye.
“Salam,” the boy said as she walked away. He watched her move quick in the light, then turned towards the well and hung his bucket around the hook. He stood at the well for too long.
His father was waiting. He fetched the water and brought it back to the cornfield. His father was pleased.
The two worked the fields for the rest of the day, collected their wages, and walked back to Koshk in the late afternoon.
“Baba,” the boy said. “Be nice to mama today.”
His father looked at the boy and put his sweaty palm on his shoulder as they walked.
“She’s a good woman,” his father said. “But she’s broken right now. The only way she’ll know that everything is okay is if I treat her exactly like I did before Halim was dropped. Then she’ll know. Everything is fine. Everything is still the same.”
Morqos didn’t respond because he didn’t understand. He thought of his father’s words as they walked home.
His mother sat on the floor cutting okra. He took a seat across from her. She looked up.
“Habibi,” she smiled, and looked back down, mouthing something with no sound to Jesus. The boy picked up a knife on the floor – his mother was waiting for him. He grabbed a piece of okra and cut it into pieces, his hands still heavy from the cornfields, and threw the pieces into a pot beside her.
“I think my hands got fatter today,” Morqos said. “I saw them grow in front of me.”
His mother grabbed one of his wrists and pulled it to her face. She examined the lifelines in his palm, the rosy patch of skin under his thumb, the blisters and patches under his fingers and lined behind his nails.
“They are fat,” she smiled and let go of his palm. “Fat hands of a little angel boy.”
Morqos laughed. He hadn’t heard his mother say a nice thing to him since his brother was dropped. Maybe she forgot.
She didn’t forget. Thin streams of blood flowed through the white of her eyes and into the dark brown of each iris. He wondered if she saw the world in shades of red.
She asked the boy to pass her the pot and told him she didn’t need his help anymore. He begged her for permission to stay. His father told him to get up and stop doing woman work. Morqos’ eyes moved back and forth between his mother and father. A dull thud led his scattered sight to the table that sat under the sun’s light. His father had plopped a watermelon on the table and took out a knife.
“She’ll be a while,” his father said. “We can have some watermelon until she’s done.”
~~~
The boy made it a habit to fetch water every day. His father allowed it. He said it helped him work.
Every day, the boy hoped he’d see the girl at the well again, her small body wrapped in the shadow of the sycamore tree. But she never came. Maybe the skill he taught her was too effective. Why would she need to be at the well for too long when drawing water could be so easy? But still, she’d need to fetch water for her family. He wondered where she was when he didn’t see her, and walked away from the well disappointed every time.
Morqos wasn’t sure why he missed her. He only saw her that one time. He didn’t know, but it was something in the weight of her dark eyes that drew him. She was weak. When he stood next to her, the boy became a man.
Still, he couldn’t find her. He’d seen so many other people at the well though. So many girls of so many different ages and colours and dresses. Even Bedouins. But the one he cared about never came.
A few weeks had gone by and still no sign of her. He arrived at the well one day, and in the shadows he spotted the man who picked up his garbage every so often. He didn’t know him well. He also didn’t know what use the man had for his watermelon rinds and empty bean cans. But that man was the only person the boy knew from Abu-Sandal. He was glad to have seen him. Maybe he could help.
The man spotted him and nodded as the boy approached.
“Don’t you usually come with mama?” the man asked.
“Not anymore,” the boy said.
The man nodded.
“I see,” he said. “So your brother’s still dead then.”
The boy’s fists clenched, his dirty nails digging into his palms, hard enough to draw blood, though he couldn’t feel the pain in that moment. He wasn’t worth the garbage Morqos’ father gave him. The boy looked at the man and breathed quietly. He couldn’t ruin his chance. The boy let his fingers loose and approached the man.
The man drew the bucket from out of the water with the pulley. Morqos knew he needed to say something. He didn’t want the man to leave before he got what he needed from him.
“What do you do with all our watermelon rinds?” the boy asked.
The man turned to look at him. “Compost,” the man said.
“Oh,” the boy said. He didn’t know what compost was.
The man was almost done. He stood at the ledge of the well and reached for his full bucket. The boy became scared. He was never good with small talk. He needed to ask.
“Do you know a girl in your village,” the boy started, “with an orange head scarf?”
“Are you stupid, boy?” the man asked. “There are a lot of girls in the village.”
“She’s young, fifteenish? Dark skin? Dark eyes? She’s got a gap between her two front teeth.”
The man laughed and shook his head no.
“Skinny girl,” the boy said. “But she was getting a little fat. Or she was carrying something under her galabeya, I don’t know.”
The man peered over his shoulder at Morqos, standing in the sunlight. He nodded at the boy as if he knew now. He knew that girl. The man picked the tin bucket from off the hook and made his way towards the village.
“Do you know her or not?” the boy followed the man as he walked away.
“I might.”
“What happened to her?” the boy asked.
“You know what you do with a girl that has too many friends?” the man asked.
“What?”
“The same thing you do to a dog with worms,” he turned his head and smiled at the boy as he walked.
The boy’s short, quick steps couldn’t match the man’s stride. He was a few feet away from him and the distance only grew. The boy jogged to keep up.
“What does that mean?” the boy asked.
“It means God’s justice,” the man said. “I’ll see you on Tuesday.”
The boy stopped. He hadn’t yet fetched his own water yet, and this man’s words had no meaning to him. What did the girl do to need God’s justice? And what was God’s justice in the first place? The boy left with more questions then he came with. And still, he missed her.
~~~
That night, the boy laid down on his roof under a linen sheet and a blanket of stars. He could hear his father yelling in his home below him. Morqos wished his father would stop so he could hear his own thoughts.
God was up there somewhere, looking down at him. He prayed that God would bring the girl back to him. She was gone for too long. Maybe her family wouldn’t let her out anymore. It was possible someone saw her talking to Morqos on that day. Maybe the person told her parents Morqos wanted to marry her.
The boy wanted no such thing. He’d found a friend is all. He liked her for her weakness. He liked her because she was thirsty. She gave him water. She listened to him.
She knew she needed to get more water as long as she lived in the village, she told him. You’re always thirsty in the village. She probably wanted to leave, to live in a place where the water flowed from the east to the west. She wouldn’t need a bucket, she could drink any time. He liked her because she was unsatisfied. She wanted more, and he could see it in the bulge in her stomach. Whatever made her fat, all that well water, only filled her for a time.
The yelling below him stopped. He heard the patter of footsteps on the ladder that led up to his roof. He watched his mother’s head bob from side to side, as she climbed up the ladder. It was a cool night, almost cold. She looked tired and calm. She was always calm after an argument.
She took a seat next to the boy, spread the blanket over her, and laid herself down. She petted the boy, ran her fingers through his curls as she stared with him at the stars.
“I’ve been watching the two big stars in the middle of the sky there,” the boy said, pointing. “They keep getting closer and closer. I think they’re gonna hit. Once they touch, they’ll break to pieces.”
“I don’t think stars are physical bodies,” his mother said.
“What are they then?”
She thought for a moment.
“Holes,” she said. “God puts a big black canopy between the sun and us at night. Those stars are just holes. The light from the sun is peeking through.”
Morqos considered her words. If she was right, the stars he stared at all night weren’t really moving. Maybe he was imagining things. Or maybe she was wrong. He tried to count the stars. They were too many. And there she was, the large moon among them.
“What do you do with a dog with worms?” the boy asked.
“Depends on how you want to kill it,” his mother said.
“You have to kill it?” the boy whispered. He heard her words and he felt their truth. They surfaced above his skin and slowly, slowly worked their way into him. The boy tried to feel something else but all he felt was heavy.
“To kill a dog because he has worms,” he said. “This is God’s justice?”
She thought for a minute.
“No,” she said. “God gives and God takes.” Her voice quivered with her words. “Man has no right.”
She wiped her face with the linen sheet and sighed. The night was quiet. Morqos heard his father snore below him.
“I think he’s alright now,” his mother said.
She kissed her boy and stepped off the roof and down the ladder. The boy laid there for so many hours staring at the sky, though it felt like a few minutes.
In time, both his parents fell asleep, and the gravity of truth gripped him. The blacks of the boy’s eyes grew between the brown. He felt the darkness condense into something heavy, the sky above came closer to surround him. The weight of the pale moon herself pinned him to his roof by her glare. Her calm. She had nothing to lose.
Holding his hands to his face trying not to make a sound, he cried like a girl. And for the first time in months, it rained at night. Light rain, but rain nonetheless. His face was wet from the rain, he convinced himself – not from his tears.
The boy thought about the dead girl on the other side of the canopy as the water from heaven poured through the holes in the sky. At least she had water now. Water as far as the east is from the west. She could drink forever.
EPILOGUE
A changed man from his bloody past, the years Moses the Black spent under the spell of a knife haunted him. He was a tall, dense man. Dark eyes, dark hair and dark skin. He remembered the wide eyes of fear of each man as he died, the power that came with fear, and the women that came with power. His body still wanted the women, but the past works of his hands that cut, slashed and stole crippled him when the memories arose. He fought them with psalms and songs for so long but they were only quieted for a moment. He was imperfect, his past filled with bad works and the blood of many men. He feared judgement. He feared eternity.
Anba Isidore heard Moses’ pain. He walked him to the roof in the early morning. They sat and talked into the dawn as the first rays of a new sun pierced the darkness.
“What do you see?” Anba Isidore asked.
“I see light. I see a hint of a new day.”
“A hint. It does not come all at once. The new light of dawn takes time to conquer the darkness of night, just as the new man inside takes time to conquer the old.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mina Athanassious is a Coptic Canadian writer who was born in al-Abbasiya, a Cairene neighbourhood in central Egypt, before his family emigrated to Toronto, Canada when he was a small child. Mina received his MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and currently wor
ks as an Intervention Support Worker, assisting persons with mental and physical handicaps with their academic endeavors. On his spare time, Mina writes and hangs out with street folk.
www.MinaAthanassious.com
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