The Bamboo Stalk

by Saud Alsanousi

  ‘First repent of your sin,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘I will, Father, but . . .’

  ‘Pray for the Lord Jesus twenty times and for the Virgin.’

  The priest smiled, a sign that the ritual was over.

  ‘But is there any way I can get the bee out of my head, Father?’ I asked.

  The priest looked surprised.

  ‘When I ran away from Inang Choleng’s house,’ I explained, ‘a bee followed me.’

  Now he looked interested. He nodded his head, encouraging me to continue.

  ‘I was running and the buzzing was right by my ear and I was frightened.’

  I started thrashing the air around my face to explain what had happened.

  ‘I tried to shoo it away, but it was insisting on something. It hit my ear.’

  I hit my ear with my finger, continuing my little reenactment.

  ‘I hit it, but I dropped the chicken and it fell to the ground, then . . .’

  I put my hands over my ear and stared into the priest’s face.

  ‘Suddenly the buzzing outside stopped. But then I could hear it inside my head instead.’

  The priest smiled. His smile gradually faded. He was thinking about something else but he wasn’t silent for long. ‘That’s guilt,’ he said.

  ‘The Lord will forgive you if you pray, and the buzzing will disappear.’

  I prayed and prayed, but the bee chose to stay in my head for ages.

  6

  My mother never stopped talking about my father and Kuwait and the life that awaited me. I used to cry when the subject of Kuwait came up. It was a country I knew nothing about and I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere other than on my grandfather Mendoza’s land in Valenzuela. I got annoyed when I heard the name Rashid, because my mother never stopped mentioning him. But because life was hard and my mother painted a picture of the paradise that awaited me, I ended up looking forward to the day when I would be rich and I could get whatever I wanted without having to work for it. If I was impressed by an advertisement for an expensive car, my mother would say, ‘You can have one of those if you go back to Kuwait.’ If I pointed to something in the shops that my mother couldn’t afford, she would say, ‘In Kuwait Rashid will buy you one like that.’ I imagined myself as Alice in Wonderland, running after my mother’s promises instead of the rabbit’s and falling down a hole that led to Kuwait, the Wonderland. My mother convinced me that we were living in hell and that Kuwait was the heaven I deserved.

  I had learned to read English, and one day my mother gave me my father’s first letter to her to read. He had sent it after we left Kuwait, when I was four months old.

  In his letter my father wrote:

  Dear Josephine,

  It’s been three months since you left and you still haven’t asked why I abandoned you and Isa so mysteriously.

  I handed the letter back to her and sighed. ‘I hate the name Isa,’ I said.

  She frowned. ‘But Isa’s a beautiful name,’ she said reproachfully. ‘It’s Arabic for Jesus,’ she added, patting my head.

  ‘If you choose your mother’s religion, then Isa is the son of God, and if you choose your father’s religion then Isa’s a prophet sent by God. In either case you should be proud of your name.’

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Go on reading, José,’ my mother said with a smile.

  I continued, mainly because she called me José: I know you won’t ask, because you’re the one who was always saying that everything happens for a reason and for some purpose and you’re not the kind of woman who looks for explanations.

  We know, or rather we admit, you and I, that getting married and what we did later on that crazy night on that boat was reckless.

  I looked up at my mother’s face.

  ‘What happened on the boat, Mama?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll find out one day,’ she replied, a look of irritation on her face.

  I read on: That’s why we accepted the consequences and lived with them in the beginning. But afterwards I must admit I couldn’t take it and in my weakness I put all the responsibility on to you.

  I was sure that Isa would soften my mother’s heart in her anger, because before I admitted our relationship to her she never stopped saying she wanted to see me have children before she died. But that night, after we came out of the hospital and went to visit her with Isa, I felt she would rather have died than see the child.

  She was so angry she had changed the locks on the doors so that I couldn’t come in if I ever thought of coming back. I wasn’t happy about the way she behaved and I know how much she loves me, but although I couldn’t open the door to the house, I thought I held another key with which I could open her heart, a key called Isa.

  I looked at my mother with a frown. She laughed.

  ‘Very good, keep on reading,’ she said.

  The smell of incense was the first thing that hit me when the servant opened the door. Was my mother burning incense to celebrate my possible return, I wondered. I stepped inside, impatient to see my mother’s face after months apart. The servant followed me, asking, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I didn’t reply. I asked for my mother. She pointed to the stairs and said, ‘She’s upstairs.’ All the lights in the house were on, something that only happened on special occasions. I headed for the stairs and had gone one step up when my mother appeared at the top, about to come down.

  I stood stock still on the first step. She hesitated at first. She was about to back away as soon as she saw me but she resisted the impulse. My mother wasn’t one to run away. She looked me in the face, eye to eye. At first she looked angry and severe, but with every step I took up the stairs she mellowed and softened. I kissed her hand and her forehead. I held out the baby boy for her in my arms. ‘Isa,’ I said.

  I gritted my teeth with irritation at the name Isa, without looking at my mother’s face this time.

  Did her eyes water at the sight of the baby? Did she have visions of my father when I said the name Isa to her?

  She took the baby into her arms and walked slowly downstairs, while I stood on the top step, watching as she stared into the baby’s face and tried to hold back her tears. She sat down on a sofa at the bottom of the stairs and I watched them from the top. I could see them between the crystal pendants in the large chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Isa started crying in her arms. My mother held him close, then burst into tears as I had never seen her cry, except years ago when she heard that my father had died. My eyes filled with tears as I watched my mother and my son, in the house where I grew up, surrounded by lights and the smell of incense. The smell reminded me of the question in the back of my mind: why the incense? Had she had a premonition about this day in particular?

  I walked downstairs to where she was sitting on the sofa and knelt on the floor in front of her, with my hand pressing hard on her knee. Although my mother and the baby were both crying I heard the door bell ring. The servant arrived a few seconds later. ‘Madam, there are four women outside asking for you,’ she said. My mother pushed the baby towards me as if it were a bomb about to explode. ‘The suitor’s family! The suitor’s family!’ she said. She wiped away her tears, stood upright in front of the mirror to restore the hard look that the baby had softened. Without turning towards me she pointed to the back door that led to the garage. ‘Take your son and get out of here,’ she said. I was stunned by the change in her mood. ‘Mother!’ I shouted, over the sound of Isa crying. ‘Mother, please,’ I added. She stepped towards the back door and opened it. ‘Get out. Now,’ she said, emphasising the words. Then she pointed to the baby. ‘And mind you never bring that thing back here again,’ she said.

  I left through the back door, carrying the curse of Isa with me, so that good fortune could enter the house through the front door. My mother had an appointment to meet the family of a man who wanted to marry Awatif, my eldest sister.

  Josephine, there’s more to this than you imagine. I won’t keep
playing a game when I don’t know the rules. I completed the divorce procedures a few hours before writing this letter. Believe me, this will be best for me and for you. As for Isa, I promise I won’t abandon him. I’ll take care of all his needs and I’ll send him whatever money he needs at the end of each month until the time comes when I can take him back. I promise I will do that when the time is right.

  Rashid

  Kuwait, September 1988

  My mother cried when I read out the words ‘I completed the divorce procedures’, despite the fact that she had read the letter years before and had married another man after Rashid. I cried too, but that was when I read about my grandmother saying ‘Mind you never bring that thing back here again.’

  ‘Why does Grandmother hate me, Mama?’ I asked. My mother was busy mopping up my tears with a handkerchief that was already soaked with her own.

  ‘As Jesus said, even prophets are strangers in their own country,’ she said.

  ‘So I’m a prophet?’ I asked her in surprise.

  ‘God alone knows,’ she said, looking away towards the window.

  Frightened, I took her hands. ‘Mama, if I grow up and go to my father’s country as a prophet, won’t they crucify me there?’ I asked.

  She hugged me tight and laughed. ‘It was the Son of God that was crucified. Don’t worry. They won’t crucify you for being the son of Rashid,’ she said.

  Although he had let her down, Rashid still meant much to her.

  7

  My mother said she was stunned when she read the letter for the first time, not because of the divorce, which was how she expected the relationship to end (‘The decision wasn’t your father’s. A whole society stood behind him,’ she said), but because she was afraid of his promise. She couldn’t imagine being able to give me up to my father under any circumstances. That was at the beginning, but when she thought about it hard, unemotionally, she realised that everyone in the Philippines dreamed of living abroad in a country that provided stability and a decent life. Women gave up everything to marry Western men who would take them off to their countries, for the sake of an opportunity to live well and have a family, but men found it hard to fulfil this dream. In the Philippines it’s the dream of every man and woman to emigrate and settle in Europe, America or Canada, giving up everything – their past, their country and even their family.

  My mother realised that a secure future, of a kind rarely available to men, awaited me there in Kuwait, where the state provides citizens (and I was a citizen) with much more than even the most developed countries provide. My mother accepted my father’s promise, expected it to be fulfilled and prepared me for it. Although he had let her down and abandoned her by divorcing her, she would still say, ‘I never loved anyone as much as your father.’ Despite that love, about two years later my mother married Alberto. He was about ten years older than her and he lived in our neighbourhood. He worked on merchant ships and sailed the oceans for eight months a year. He spent the other months with her in his little house near my grandfather’s land. My mother had a better life with her new husband and when he was in the Philippines she left me in the care of my Aunt Aida. My mother almost went back to work as a servant in the Gulf at about this time so that she could secure her own future and that of her new husband, but she dropped the idea after my father intervened.

  In a letter he sent more than two years after we left, he wrote:

  Dear Josephine,

  How are you? And how is Isa?

  I received your last letter and read what was in it. I hope that being married is not distracting you from bringing up the boy, and also that you’ll give up the idea of coming to work in the Gulf again. I’ll send you enough money so you won’t need to go abroad. Just stay close to Isa. I don’t want him to grow up separated from his mother. What his father has done is already quite enough.

  In a few days I’m going to marry a nice girl, Iman, who loves me very much. She follows what I write and it’s good to have her read it. I’ve told her about our son and she didn’t object when I told her that he would come back to live with me once my three sisters have married. She’s going to move in and live with me in my mother’s house until things improve and we can go and live in a new house and start our own family.

  Keep well, you and Isa,

  Rashid

  Kuwait, May 1990

  At first it was my mother who asked me to read my father’s letters to her, but then his letters started to get me interested and I asked her to show me more of them.

  ‘I don’t have any more, José,’ she replied, putting the letters back in the briefcase. ‘He stopped sending letters and the money transfers stopped after that letter because of the war over Kuwait.’

  8

  My grandfather began to hate me. When my father’s transfers stopped arriving, he no longer bothered to hide his feelings towards me. ‘You’ll settle down in Alberto’s house one day,’ he told my mother, ‘and I don’t want that boy staying here.’ But Aida stepped in. ‘I’ll look after him,’ she said, silencing my grandfather.

  When the money stopped coming it had a big effect on Mendoza, although he still had a faint hope that the war would soon end and the monthly transfers would resume. But deep down he doubted this would ever happen.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t go missing in the war,’ he said, addressing no one in particular, while my mother rapped her knuckles on the wooden part of the sofa for good luck.

  ‘Or the war doesn’t drive him crazy,’ Mendoza added.

  It was an implicit admission on the part of Mendoza, who had experience of war, a suggestion that his own mind was disturbed.

  ‘War’s like that,’ he added.

  He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. He was staring blankly as if looking at mental images of his own.

  ‘War isn’t just the fighting on the battlefield,’ he continued, ‘but also the war that’s fought in the minds of those who take part. The first ends, the second goes on and on.’

  His eyes were frozen still. My mother said his eyes glistened as if he was about to cry. He turned his face towards the door and headed towards his house next door. He shook his head and said in a low voice, ‘That man will never come back, never come back.’

  My mother said that before he went out, she heard three knocks on the wooden door that led outside.

  9

  The war in Kuwait ended in February 1991 but even then no letter arrived from my father. My mother called my grandmother’s house several times but all she received was insults and shouts, and then the usual tone you get when the line is disconnected. She asked women working in Kuwait to look out for any news of my father but nothing came of that. She asked after him in the Kuwaiti embassy in Manila but there was no response from the people working there. She waited a long time, but he seemed to have disappeared.

  The first person to gloat, my mother said, was Aunt Aida.

  ‘All men are like that. They’re all bastards,’ she said.

  From that day on my mother would reply with her favourite expression: ‘Except Rashid.’

  The days passed, but my mother’s faith that I would go back to Kuwait one day never wavered, even when no letters or news of him arrived.

  Although I was still young, Mendoza became openly hostile towards me. ‘If there was any good in this boy, his family there wouldn’t have abandoned him,’ he said.

  My mother held her tongue and he continued: ‘If he was older, we could make use of him.’

  My mother was in the first months of pregnancy by Alberto at that time. When she had her son Adrian I was about three and a half. My mother decided to move into Alberto’s house, whereas previously she had stayed there only four months a year, when Alberto was on leave in the Philippines. She visited our house every now and then to ask after me and give Mendoza some money, and once a week to clean Inang Choleng’s house.

  My mother hadn’t settled there long before she started thinking about going abroad again because her financ
ial needs had increased. When Adrian was six months old she went off to work in Bahrain, leaving me and my brother in the care of Aunt Aida for three years.

  It can’t have been anything but poverty that persuaded her to leave her children with Aida, who always had bloodshot eyes from smoking too much marijuana.

  In a letter she wrote to Aida one year after she left, my mother said:

  How are you, my crazy sister?

  And how are the kids?

  A few hours ago I sent you my whole salary. Please make sure that none of it goes to my father and that it’s shared out to José and Adrian and you and Merla. I’ll try to save some money to help Pedro with his new building project.

  Alberto called me a few days ago and told me he would be back in a few weeks. Please clean his house before he comes back and don’t forget to take Adrian to him every day because, as you know, Alberto doesn’t like to visit our house because father harasses him and is always pressing him with demands for money. I don’t want to lose this man, even if all men are bastards.

  Tell José I miss him very much and I’m working in a country close to his father’s country. I wish I could swim across the sea to meet Rashid or find out what happened to him, so that I could feel confident about José’s future.

  I’m well. Bahrain isn’t like Kuwait when it comes to the standard of living. Although the family I work for is well off, some people are poor. Simple people.

  Bahrainis do all kinds of work. They wash cars, work as porters in hotels and sell stuff in shops. Even the woman I work for very often shares the housework with me. I like the people very much.

  The people are kind. Tell José that. Kindness seems to be the most obvious feature of the poor. The poverty here is not like the poverty we have but, even for people who are relatively better off, it’s still poverty.

  Josephine

  March 1993

  Aida told me that my mother loved me and missed me very much.