by Nihad Sirees
I aimed the rifle at his head in an awkward way I’d learnt from the movies.
“Now, you’re going to get the hell out of here, Ismail. You’re going to leave the two of us in peace,” I told him, sucking my teeth in order to let him know I was ready to kill him if he didn’t do as I said.
“You’re nuts,” he said. “Put the gun down.”
“No. Did you hear me? I’m warning you, don’t come near me.”
“All this for a story?”
“Yep, all this for a story.”
I let him see my finger on the trigger and he stood up. He stared hard at me in anger and spite, almost spewing poison. I backed away from him slightly so that he wouldn’t be able to come at me suddenly and grab the rifle, and nodded towards the door. He turned and headed out.
“Can’t you see what your guest is up to?” he asked the old man, who had gone all yellow and was shaking miserably.
“Leave the old man alone,” I commanded. “Get out.”
He left. I inched my way forward without lowering the rifle, ordering him to shut the door behind him. He took hold of the handle and looked at me with an expression I can’t quite describe. But before closing the door, he spat at me; spittle sprayed into my face, and the door was slammed shut. I wasn’t bothered by his phlegm as it dripped down my face, and I hurried instead to secure the lock and rotate my chair so I’d be able to sit there and monitor the door and the window at the same time.
This all happened quickly, and in a way that stunned me more than it seemed to have affected the old man or Ismail. I had to explain to the old man exactly what I had done. His hands started to shake violently. Meanwhile, as I’ve said, his smiling face looked yellow and skinnier somehow.
“Please forgive me, sir. I had to do that. Now you’ve seen for yourself that he’s trying to keep me from hearing your story. Let’s not waste any more time talking about poisonous plants. Once again, I beg your pardon. Please, get back to the story. I really want to hear the rest of it. It’s riveting. I’ll do anything to hear it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
From the Train Station to the Roxy Cinema
“As FRUSTRATED AS I AM with Ismail,” the old man said, once he had calmed down and his face had returned to a more natural colour, “I can’t blame you for reacting like this. The story has to be told somehow. Now we’ve reached the part that has to do with me in particular.”
“With you?” I asked him, breathless. “I’m dying to hear this. This whole time I’ve been wondering what connects you to Widad’s story. Also, I’d really like to figure out the mystery of Ismail.”
“He’s no mystery. But I simply will not begin the story from the end. I mean, I won’t tell it backwards. If I did that, you wouldn’t be able to understand, and you’d ask me to start again and tell it the right way.”
“I’m so eager to hear it, sir. I hope you won’t pay any attention to Ismail if he tries to disturb us.”
“Let me begin with the story of my uncle Ibrahim Pasha,” the old man said, “and his fat wife and daughter…
“I used to live with Uncle Ibrahim Pasha. My uncle wasn’t a pasha the way some might think. The word pasha just stuck to him for some reason, like a badge that everyone got accustomed to using. The first person to use it was my father. I don’t know why. My uncle loved it when people added that extra adjective to his name. Most likely my father, who was five years older than my uncle, was trying to flatter him by using the honorific title pasha, and then he just got used to calling him that. My father started to use the word even when he wasn’t around. Whenever Uncle Ibrahim telephoned he would identity him by using that name, which was how he came to be known that way all over town.
“My mother and father were going to travel to Paris by steamer, and they wanted to take me with them. They even recorded my name on the travel papers, but two weeks before the ship was set to depart, I came down with typhoid and was bedridden. My body was frail, very frail. When I got sick my mother wished that she could die in my place, or at least along with me. I was her only son. Typhoid was very dangerous and only the strongest men survived it. A scrawny little boy like me didn’t stand a chance. This is how our relatives started to talk, and their chattering eventually found its way to my mother’s ears.
“Because she knew me and realised how weak I had become, she believed all those prognostications and broke down completely. They had to take care of her and me at the same time. But I proved all the gossip and the advice wrong. I didn’t die. Even the Jewish doctor who oversaw my treatment—or to be more precise: who oversaw my decay and my slide towards death—was astounded when I returned to health. He had been convinced that a recovery was impossible, certain I was going to die, which is why he spent more time caring for my mother than he did attending to me. When my fever broke and I came out of the coma, he pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulders in wonder, even as my mother’s blood pressure hit its lowest ebb. He couldn’t heal her. She couldn’t get out of bed. It was only when I slowly approached her bedside that her blood pressure would return to normal and she would smile.
“My father paid the Jewish Dr Behar well, concluding that I was out of harm’s way thanks to his care. He paid him double for me and my mother, even though the doctor had no hand in either of our cases. Nevertheless, the doctor offered my father some medical advice that was well worth his payment, and even more… hundreds of times more. He recommended that I shouldn’t travel to France with them as my health might deteriorate even further, which would no doubt result in the typhoid killing me.
“The two of them had to travel so that my mother could be treated by superior physicians in France. She suffered from chronic low blood pressure and depression. Because they had managed to get permission to travel from the French Mandate authorities, and since their steamship was set to depart in two days’ time, they decided to go without me, leaving me with my uncle until they returned. But they didn’t come back. The ship sank somewhere between Beirut and Marseille, which is how I managed to stay alive, thanks to typhoid and the advice of a Jewish doctor.
“I had moved into my uncle’s house along with our servant Khadija. At the time I was only twelve years old. Khadija was twenty-five. She was an incomparable woman, married to a man who used to beat her savagely, until her body was black and blue. The problem was that she hadn’t borne him any children. This terrible catastrophe led to her having to endure the ferocity and abuse of her husband. Despite her impassioned pleas—she was as gentle as a bird—he refused to divorce her. She was relieved when he finally married another woman, hopeful that his new wife would distract him from her, especially when, a few months after their marriage, her stomach started to swell. But Khadija was deluded. Her husband continued to beat her. His other wife only helped him do it. When she came over to our house for the first time, her face and body were bruised from the beating. My father nearly went to her house to confront her husband. My mother wept at the sight of her, giving her work on the spot. And that’s how she came to live with us, despite the threats her husband shouted at her from the pavement outside our house.
“Khadija became my father’s personal crusade. He offered her husband a substantial sum if he agreed to divorce her, but the man refused, so my father sent a police officer who threatened to throw him in jail. Nothing came of this, however. One day Khadija casually glanced across the street to where her husband usually camped out all day on the pavement, but didn’t see him there. Several days passed without her seeing him. Khadija was worried about him—just imagine! Had something unfortunate happened to him? It seemed she couldn’t be at peace until she made sure that her husband—who used to beat her with the strength of a horse—was all right. Khadija begged my father to send someone to look into the matter. My father chuckled at this behaviour, at her kind-heartedness. What kind of a woman was she? She truly was both strange and a good person. But we were shocked to discover, through my father’s investigation, that Khadija’s husband was dead. That’
s right, dead. His new wife had murdered him in a fit of rage, burying a kitchen knife in his chest. The killer went to jail and was sentenced to death. Her older brother took custody of her two children, one of whom was still breastfeeding at the time, and they nailed the door of her house shut.
“Khadija mourned her husband for a long time, remaining in seclusion for the entire period stipulated, without receiving my father or any other man. She lived in our house with us as if she were part of the family. The truth is that she didn’t have anywhere else to go. When my mother and father drowned she totally fell apart, and when she managed to pull herself together, she said, ‘I don’t have anyone else in the world except for you.’
“One week after the tragedy, my uncle called me to say that he wanted to speak with me in private. As I sat across from him, I avoided looking him directly in the eye. I was afraid of him. I can’t recall ever caring for the man. This is the first time I’ve admitted that. I never even told Khadija, who was so good at keeping and manufacturing secrets. Still, she instinctively knew somehow, as soon as I got back to our room from that meeting.
“My father and my uncle owned an artisanal soap workshop they had inherited from their father, that is, from my grandfather, who died before his time. It was one of the most important and best-known workshops in the country. The quality of their soap was renowned as far as away as Cairo and Istanbul. It was said that people would check inside the boxes of bay leaf soap in search of the stamp imprinted with our family’s name, al-Aghyurli.
“The workshop was in an ancient airy building divided into three sections. One for storing raw materials before production; another, for cooking the soap, with an enormous vat that had a giant burner underneath—from the vat, the soap would be poured and then left to cool before being cut into equal-sized cubes; and, finally, the section where the bars would be stacked on top of each other in a pyramid, leaving gaps for the soap to breathe and dry well. At that point the soap was ready to be sold.
“It used to make me very happy when my father took me to the workshop with him. I loved to inhale the smell of bay leaf that hung in the air. I was even more amazed by the sight of those soap pyramids as I walked around them. I never tired of looking up at them. I would knock over those structures all the time. But my favourite activity was stamping the bars of soap before the pyramids were even built. I would insist on helping to stamp them, despite how weak I was. Strong arms were required to bring down the heavy press hard enough on the surface of the soap bar. When I grew up and became a man, I realised how spoilt I’d been by my father and his employees. They always used to humour me, gladly giving me the stamp even though they wound up having to try and sell bars of soap marked with indecipherable designs. Everything changed whenever my uncle Ibrahim Pasha was at the workshop, and I would sit there in silence, not daring to move a muscle. He used to shout at the workers. He despised children, and he thought of me as a parasite and an idiot.
“When my grandfather got sick, my father and my uncle vowed not to sell off the workshop, to keep it within the family for ever. It would be a struggle for the two of them, one that would require all the means at their disposal. In order to control the succession of the inheritance, they would have to marry two sisters and give birth to boys as well as girls in order to marry them to one another… and so on and so forth for several generations. One of them would have to give birth only to males while the other would have to have females. But if they gave birth to the same sex, whether male or female, they would both have to get married all over again, again to two sisters. In other words, they had to move heaven and earth in order for the workshop to remain in the al-Aghyurli line and to hold on to the distinguished soap brand, the one I got a thrill from whenever I stamped the fresh bars of soap.
“And just as my grandfather had hoped, my mother gave birth to a boy, and my uncle’s wife Hamideh Khanum had a girl, whom she called Jalila. Despite the fact that my mother and my uncle’s wife were sisters, the two of them couldn’t have been more fundamentally different. Whereas my mother was slim and emotional and good-natured, her sister was heavy-set and emotionless and not so bright. She weighed more than two hundred pounds, and in the days when Khadija and I lived with them she might have weighed as much as two-fifty.
“Because she was so fat, she moved very slowly, and couldn’t walk without someone else’s help. She preferred to remain seated to avoid exerting too much energy. They built a custommade seat for her, one that was strong enough for her tremendous weight. Anyway, she used to wheeze whenever she tried to drag her arse from one place to another. And when she had to get up to use the bathroom or go to bed, she would call for my uncle Ibrahim Pasha or the servant to help her. But my uncle stopped taking the risk of picking her up or even supporting her in case he slipped a disc. He already suffered from back pain. And because there was a constant exodus of maids who fled after just one week of working in my uncle’s house, they were forced to constantly search for new staff to work for them and take care of the house. My uncle had to employ several maids at once, two to tend to his wife and another one to tend to the rest of the house.
“Ayyoush and Ammoun, Hamideh Khanum’s two private maidservants, were strong and accustomed to hard work. For example, Ammoun worked in a quarry. Both of them stayed by her side from the time she woke up in the morning until the moment she went to sleep, at which point they would tuck her into bed and return to their own homes.
“That fat blob needed someone to help her bathe and dry herself off, to get dressed and brush her hair. Once I became part of the household, I took great pleasure in watching my paternal uncle’s wife, who also happened to be my mother’s sister and looked like a mountain of jiggling white flesh. One time I saw the two servants helping her put on her underwear. She couldn’t do it by herself because she was unable to bend over to grab hold of it. But what really disgusted me was when I happened to see her sitting on the kind of toilet that children sit on when they’re potty trained. She struggled to get up. I examined the bowl later and discovered that it was quite large. I concluded that my uncle must have ordered a custom-made model to the specifications of his wife’s rear end.
“Everyone who ever saw her found it hard to imagine how such a creature could have given birth to Jalila. Her thighs were so large they stuck together. How had she given birth at all? I often wondered this myself after learning that babies don’t come out of their mothers’ belly buttons, as Khadija told me when I nagged her to explain. Actually, I also heard some of my uncle’s wife’s friends laughing at her when they asked the same question. The mystery becomes even greater and stranger when you see Jalila, my uncle’s daughter and my fiancée. She was eight years younger than me, meaning she was four years old while I was living with them. Like her mother, Jalila was overweight, meaning that she was set to be just like her in future, if not even heavier. She was also lazy and an overeater, consuming prodigious amounts of food in a single meal. She neither moved nor played, and was always looking for somewhere to sit down. What’s worse, she was as stupid and callous as her mother. The thing that infuriated me most was that I only seemed to bump into her when she was sitting on her special toilet, struggling, all red in the face. Another thing she inherited from her mother was chronic constipation.
“My uncle’s wife Hamideh Khanum did have one positive attribute: she loved music. I don’t know where this love came from, but she had as good an ear as the country’s most famous ladies at that time. Maybe she was just emulating them for the sake of it, but she really did like to listen to and play music, and shimmy and sway to good Arabic music.
“My uncle had one of the most beautiful houses in the entire city. My grandfather had built it for the whole family to live in but he passed away before it was finished. It had two storeys connected by an elegant staircase. The rooms on the ground floor were large and private: three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen. Wooden doors as large as the wall separated the rooms from one another, and when they were
folded back all the way the three rooms could be converted into a large living room for entertaining. Usually most of those doors remained shut, and the family would only use the front room near the entrance and the three bedrooms; to be clear, right across from my uncle’s wife’s bedroom. A lot of the time, or perhaps even most of the time, I could see what was going on in her bedroom while I was sitting in the living room. She would always leave her door wide open, closing it only when she went to bed. The upper floor was totally neglected because Hamideh Khanum wasn’t able to climb up there. They gave me my own room directly above my uncle’s room, and which looked down on both the garden and the street. Because the upper floor had been completely forgotten, they let Khadija take the room adjacent to mine.
“The house had large balconies facing in all directions, with especially good views of the front yard and the street. In the summertime my uncle and his wife liked to sit in the shade of the cypresses, oleanders and chinaberries, their leaves crinkling in the breeze and blocking them from the sight of anyone on the street. In that season the westerly winds were pleasant but they also inspired sorrow in people’s hearts.
“My uncle Ibrahim Pasha was sitting on the far side of the table when I walked into the living room. I sat down across from him. To my left, the door was wide open and I could see my uncle’s wife in her room. It was late on Friday afternoon. Typically my uncle wouldn’t go to the soap workshop on Fridays. He would stay at home after getting back from prayer, and relatives might drop by to say hello. A week had passed since we had received the disastrous news of my mother’s and father’s ship sinking. I was discombobulated and inconsolable. The idea that I would have to live my whole life in that house made me even sadder. So did my knowledge that, with that cruel twist of fate, my slim and tender mother had been replaced by my uncle’s wife, a fat and vulgar woman.