Amreekiya

by Lena Mahmoud

  He slid the door open, the wind cold enough to make me fold my arms. “Let’s check it out later,” I said.

  He kept on insisting, and anyway he had the door open still, so there was no avoiding it. We walked out, huddled together, and he pointed at a rosebush against the window of the master bedroom. “Look, there’s still a couple of roses,” he said, and walked over to the bush. He took his keys out and used the Swiss Army knife he had on the chain to cut one off and shave the thorns, pricking himself every now and then.

  He brought it to me with a proud smile. Now that it was in the light, I saw that it was pink. I pulled my hands from my pockets and took it. “Thanks.” I hugged him and gave him a peck on the mouth, but he pulled me in for more and put his tongue in my mouth and tasted my lips.

  I pulled away and put my hand to his mouth; he kissed the fingertips. “Let’s make love here,” he said, then laughed. “Well, inside. I don’t think my dick could handle this cold.”

  “Not now.”

  He bit down on his lip hard. “When’s it going to be, Isra? It’s been four months, and yes, I’ve been counting.” He looked to the side and stepped back up on the porch. His lips turned paler in the cold. “Is it about that thing I asked you about? If it is, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was curious, that’s all.”

  “It’s not about that.” Though it still made me cringe when I thought about it. “I’m … I was thinking that I’ve been going on all these interviews and trying to make a career for myself, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to get pregnant.”

  He tucked in his bottom lip. “So what’s that mean? We’ll have a sexless marriage?”

  What right did he have to take that tone with me? “No, I was thinking we should use protection.” He should know about that. That’s probably what kept him from knocking up any of his girlfriends. Unless he was fucking them the way you didn’t have to worry about pregnancy.

  He stormed back into the house and sat down on the hardwood floor. Right when I came inside he lashed out at me. “I want to be a father. I want a baby, and I thought you wanted the same, and … you just change that on me because of one loss. You don’t let me touch you at all—”

  “You don’t touch me because you can’t fuck me, and I’m just saying that I don’t want to have a child right now! I want to build something for myself. You do it, and I never have a problem. I never say anything about how you’re gone all the time. I let you have your life, and a baby will get in the way of my life now.”

  He shook his head. “What I do is for us. I share everything I have with you.”

  “But it’s always yours. It’s always what you want! And it is such a lie that I’ll have it, because if you’re gone, it won’t be mine. It’ll be all yours, and I’ll be the idiot who gave everything I had to a man.”

  His expression was hard and cold, but his whole mouth shook. “Let’s go home.” He picked himself up. He wasn’t finished, though. “You never told me any of this before. I’ve been working hard for us to have that life.” He turned his back to me and blew air from his mouth.

  “I didn’t think you were so backward that you would have such a problem.”

  He whirled around. “If I were backward, maybe I’d at least be getting laid.”

  I refused to go home with him. I told him to leave without me, I would figure out where I’d be staying and how I’d get there. He relented and admitted he went a little too far with the last comment. “You cut me deep, though, Isra, with all this backward business and not wanting children.”

  “It is too soon for us, Yusef. Look at what happened when I got pregnant last time. We can’t agree on anything. You really want to bring a child into this?”

  “Yes.” He folded his arms. “We’ll never be perfect. We won’t be able to do anything if you wait for that.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.” I balled up my fists and shrieked. I slid down the wall to the floor and sobbed in my fists. “You do whatever you want, and no one thinks worse of you for it, but—”

  “You think worse of me for it. God, I made a mistake, and it’s so hard for you to forgive anything.”

  I stood back up. I said we should just go home, that I didn’t know it was so much to ask for him just to listen to me. What did I expect, though? All he ever cared about was his own needs and wants. That’s all that ever mattered.

  I walked past him and went out the front door, waiting for him to follow. It took a minute, but eventually he came as I wiped the last of my tears from my face.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia never announced Amtu Samia’s pregnancy, at least not to us kids. She just started showing fast. She hadn’t gained much weight, but she had been so thin before that her protruding belly stood in great contrast to her skinny arms and legs. As she entered her second trimester, she looked better than she had before; her body and face were filling out, her straight chestnut hair came in thicker, her skin showed some color.

  It was the first time I noticed in over three years of living with her that Hanan looked a lot like Amtu Samia. Before I only noticed the early lines that framed Amtu’s mouth and her sallow skin.

  I didn’t think it was possible, but she became even lazier when pregnant. I used to only clean and cook, but now I had to bring wet washcloths for her to put on her forehead and bring food up to her bedroom when she was feeling too tired to get up.

  “I want to have a little sister so I can be like Isra to her,” Hanan said one day while she rested her head on her mother’s belly, watching an Abdel Halim Hafez movie. Amtu Samia’s pregnancy hormones made one of her few consolations watching all the Hafez movies she owned and having her relatives in Jordan send her more nearly every month.

  “No, a son will be better,” Amtu told her daughter. “There’s too many women in this house already.” She looked over at me with her eyes narrowed.

  Amtu got her wish. She was having a boy.

  And that’s when Amu Nasser’s interest in the baby awakened. He spoke about his plans for this son to go to an Ivy League school, which Amu had dreamed of for himself since his childhood in Jerusalem, but he ended up “only” going to Berkeley. He said that this boy would follow in his older brother’s footsteps, though he didn’t seem to believe that part of it. Rasheed was just about to start eighth grade, but he had been getting into a lot of trouble, and his grades were dismal.

  Amu hadn’t yet resigned himself to having a loser for a son, an oldest son no less. He would lecture Rasheed about how he would soon be a man and had to act like one. Amu Nasser would look at his son’s quarterly report cards and sigh and fuss about them, but he wouldn’t yell or name-call the way he did with me. “Do you want your little brother to see you this way, see you with these bad grades going to a community college?” he would say to Rasheed.

  Rasheed would shrug and say, “He won’t even know anything when he’s born. What’s he gonna care about my grades?”

  Amu gave him countless lectures about how he had risen from a poor family in Jerusalem and worked his way to Berkeley, where he got his law degree. “I had no money, no nothing. I never slept more than three hours every night. I studied five hours each day and attended class and worked.” He would continue by bragging about his job and his salary and his two houses (he didn’t have the third until I was in high school). “This is what hard work brings you. I can only carry you so far. If you are lazy, you will end up like Isra’s father. He was my cousin, so I got him a job here, but what does he do? He uses drugs, and he gets fired and runs around.” Whenever he saw a loser on TV or spoke to us about one of his clients who was unsuccessful, he made sure that Rasheed knew he could not follow in that man’s footsteps.

  But, true to form, Amu did not enforce his rules. When his son got terrible grades, he never took away video games or banned the use of the TV or the computer. He might give him an ear pull or criticize him, but he never gave him any idea of what it was like to be a poor loser: no video games, no spendi
ng money, no new gadgets that Rasheed seemed to get all the time. Because Amu couldn’t bear to make his oldest son, his father’s namesake, the continuation of his branch of the al-Shadi family, suffer for poor performance.

  Even if it would have turned him into a better man.

  Everyone was excited about this new baby. Relatives called on the phone, people came over to give their congratulations, and Amtu Samia walked around with her back straighter despite a lot weighing her down in the front. I couldn’t believe that the flurry of attention had been greater when Amtu Samia was pregnant with Rasheed. Back then Amu Nasser and Amtu Samia had been a young couple and felt blessed that they had a boy the first time around. Nothing could match that, Amtu assured Rasheed, but this was a great excitement to have the second time around. Another boy to be Rasheed’s companion and make him feel more a part of this home.

  Hanan was left out of all the celebration and not given any reassurance, though I thought she needed it more. She had been the baby of the family, had grown used to her father coming home and blowing raspberries on her belly and giving her extra candy on the weekends. That abruptly stopped when everyone found out her mother was having a boy. Her parents became busy talking about the boy, buying things for the boy, and discussing what they were going to name the boy. The boy, the boy, the boy. Al walad, al walad, al walad. That’s how they always referred to the baby. Hanan became convinced that when her parents had this baby, they would forget all about her and even leave her behind in a grocery store, like her friend’s mother did one time. She would have to always make sure her parents didn’t forget her.

  I found Hanan’s complaints irritating and tried to come up with ways to get her to shut up, but there was no way to stop her whining and tears. I was the only one who listened to her at all.

  Still, I realized that Hanan’s concerns were more than the woes of a spoiled little girl. We had something in common now: we were both treated like we were invisible. The only difference was that I suddenly morphed into visibility when something went wrong, and Hanan just remained invisible. I had an ally. A very little, young, and naïve one, but I had to take what I could get.

  Sometimes I read Hanan a picture book from the big collection that was handed down from Rasheed. Her parents added to it once in a while, buying her a book to go along with her birthday present or for Eid or some other holiday. She barely knew how to sound out words, and her parents rarely ever read them to her or helped her get through them. These books usually made Hanan fall asleep faster, so I read to her, but the only ones I thought were half decent were the educational ones and the ones about animals. The other ones were always about some problem that a “normal” kid had, like getting in trouble at school or feeling jealous that a new baby was coming along. No one worried about where the next meal would come from, if Daddy would come back home, if Mommy and Daddy would have a huge fight that day and call each other horrible names.

  I made up stories myself to tell her. We lay side by side while I told her about a girl who was trapped in a land of snails, toads, and rats—Hanan hated slimy things, and rats terrified me, so it seemed fitting—and the only way she could get out of this land was to kill the monster that lived in the enormous ocean that separated her from the rest of the world. The monster regularly fed off the land’s inhabitants, but still, if this girl tried to kill the monster, all those snails, toads, and rats would try to attack her because they believed the monster was what kept them safe from the rest of the world.

  “Oh, no! Is the monster a boy?”

  “No, he’s a man.”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth turned into an oval. “What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Noor. Because she has to get up in the morning at first light before the monster wakes up, so that’s her name. Light. Noor.” Now that I had her name settled, I had to figure out a way she could conquer this monster. “So Noor gets up early in the morning, before all the light is out, and she goes into the water—it’s clean, so she can see through it—and she sees the monster sleeping. He snores really loud.”

  She giggled. “Like Baba.”

  I nodded. “He makes the water bubble up a lot with his snoring, so she has to go in there and take out her sword. She stabs the monster in the head, but he makes a loud scream.” I did a muffled scream to illustrate what I meant as best as I could, but I couldn’t be too loud or I’d get in trouble.

  Hanan gasped, her eyes riveted on my face. It occurred to me that this might be a bit violent for a child’s bedtime story, but I liked it too much to stop. “Then all the snails, toads, and rats in the land wake up because they hear the monster screaming, and they want to stop Noor from killing it. They all run in the water—they’re bigger than regular snails, toads, and rats—and they have swords.”

  “Are they going to hurt her?”

  “Well, they try. They run into the water and try to beat her up, but she throws”—I didn’t know the name of much weaponry, and I had to think fast—“she throws arrows at them. It’s not enough, but it gives Noor time to call for her cousin, a girl who—”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Um, it’s … Zaynab.” I didn’t know the meaning of that name, but I figured I might as well give all the characters Arab names.

  “Is she big like you?”

  I raised my eyebrows and widened my eyes. “Bigger, and she has magic powers to stop all those gross things and the big monster.” Why didn’t Zaynab come at the beginning and save Noor all that trouble? But I figured Hanan was five, so I didn’t need to iron out that plot inconsistency. Besides, help always took its time getting to anyone. “So Zaynab shoots the magic out from her mouth, and the monster explodes. She picks Noor up and brings her over to where she lives, an enchanted forest. None of the snails, toads, or rats know where Noor is.”

  “What happens to Noor and Zaynab?”

  “Well, you have to wait until tomorrow night.” I was out of ideas.

  “No, ’Sra, I can’t wait!” She pouted.

  “See, it’s way better than that shit that’s in your books.”

  “Ooo-whoo! You said a bad word.”

  “You know where they tell you you can’t say bad words? In the land guarded by the monster. Because if you don’t have bad words, you can’t say bad things about them.”

  “Saying bad things isn’t nice.”

  “Yeah, but sometimes you need to say bad things.”

  “Oh,” she said, but I could tell she was confused. She had a deep wrinkle between her dark eyebrows.

  By the time I turned out the lights, I regretted telling Hanan that story. Hanan was very sociable, and she volunteered a lot of information. I was relieved when the next day she didn’t mention anything to her parents about Zaynab and Noor and a monster that snored loudly like her baba.

  I continued the story every night, keeping her up past her bedtime on the nights when I felt most creative. My stories didn’t have much of a point, or an ending; they were just scenes in the life of Noor and Zaynab. Sometimes a few snails, toads, and rats would break through the enchanted forest Noor and Zaynab now lived in, and they tried to steal the magic that the two girls shared. Noor and Zaynab had to find a way to fight off those creatures. They would create new weapons, hide in trees, or simply step on one of the creatures to kill it. If I was in a better mood, Noor and Zaynab might just sing songs like the ones Hanan saw on Barney, sometimes even the Arabic ones she saw on satellite television. She kept on insisting that they sing “Baba Fen?” (Where’s Daddy?) because she liked seeing all those Egyptian kids dancing in the video and getting on and off the phone to sing, but I said no, it was a stupid song, and why would two girls who escaped from the monster be singing about where their babas were?

  “Because they love their babas.”

  “Well, Zaynab doesn’t love her baba because he was really mean to her, so she doesn’t like to sing that song, and it would be mean of Noor to sing that song in front of her.”

  “Okay.”r />
  As her mother’s belly grew bigger, Hanan wanted to know more about why the snails, toads, and rats believed they needed the monster. I had no explanation. I told her it was part of the mystery, and probably those creatures were just too stupid to think about what the monster really was. She wanted to know more about how the monster looked.

  “It’s sort of like a crocodile, but it has bigger eyes and smooth blue skin. That helps the monster blend in with the water better. The water’s a clear blue, too; it’s not full of junk like the lakes here.”

  “We should go and visit Noor and Zaynab.”

  I laughed, picturing the two of us running hand in hand, wheezing and red-faced, to visit the girls while on a high-speed chase from big snails, toads, and rats. Maybe the monster would even find a way into the forest to kill off the visitors. If we did manage to make it through and meet Noor and Zaynab, I imagined us in a shack deep in a sort of forest/jungle (I hadn’t quite decided what Noor and Zaynab’s land looked like) that was always damp and smelled like mold and mud. Hanan would probably cry nonstop, having to sleep in such a place. I didn’t tell her these things. I said I didn’t know how to get there, and if we found it, Noor and Zaynab would most likely run from us. After all, they didn’t know what sort of trouble we would cause them.

  Hanan lay in my bed that night and pestered me past midnight with schemes she came up with for finding Noor and Zaynab’s enchanted land without them being afraid. She suggested that we walk everywhere on earth until we found them, and when we did, we could tell them that we were nice and could help out with the snails, toads, and rats. I told her this was impossible: no one could walk everywhere on earth and make it out alive. My eyelids were so heavy that I couldn’t keep them open any longer.

  She sat up and shook my arm. “Do you think my little brother will be mean?”

  I shrugged. It was likely, considering the kind of parents and brother he was going to have. “We can help make him not mean,” I said.