Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Ayesha runs inside and kneels beside her, stroking her face and calling her sweet names and crying.

  “Akhmim?” Hariba says. “Why did you go get Ayesha?”

  “Because you’re sick, and you need your family.”

  “No,” she shakes her head. “Ayesha, no, you mustn’t tell anyone you saw me…” and then she dissolves into weak tears.

  “You need a doctor,” Ayesha says.

  “No,” Hariba says. “No, he’ll tell the police! Akhmim can take care of me!”

  “You need more care than I can give you,” I say, kneeling down next to them. “I have to work, to take care of us.”

  Ayesha hisses at me, “Get away from her.”

  I sit back on my heels, unsure what I’ve done. Maybe I didn’t know what to do and I’ve made Hariba more sick? “I’ve been trying to take care of her-”

  “Shut up,” Ayesha says.

  Hariba cries wordlessly.

  Ayesha says, “I’ll go get Nabil.”

  “No!” Hariba says.

  But it’s all in motion.

  Ayesha comes back with a small stocky man-I can see Hariba’s face in his, although her hair is straight and his is in loose curls. They have a pedicab with them and they bundle her in.

  “Akhmim!” she says. “Akhmim has to come with me!”

  Ayesha stares at me in hate. Her brother doesn’t even admit I exist. They take her away-she’s too weak to do aything but cry for me.

  I’ve failed. I’ve left her unhappy, and I can hear her calling me, even when she’s out of sight.

  I wish I were at Karim’s. I wish I were with the harni .

  3

  Duty

  All of my children are taller than me. Their father wasn’t a particularly tall man, but my father and brothers were tall. Allah made me small so I wouldn’t need much, I always said. I gave it all to my children. Fhassin was tall. Even Rashida, my second daughter and the smallest one, she is bigger than me. But look at what has happened. I’ve lost one. Fhassin is dead to us all, though I pray for him. I think it was because he was my favorite and no matter how much you hide it, children know. And now Hariba comes home, sick and in disgrace.

  I go over it in my mind. What did I do wrong? Was it only because they grew up without a father? The youngest, Nabil, wasn’t born when his father died.

  I am sitting in the door of my sister’s house-my grandniece climbs onto my lap and holds out her chubby fist and breathes, “Look.” She uncurls her fist to show me a raisin stuck with crumbs. She has a biscuit in her other hand. She smells of crumbs and sour food. She closes her fist again. Opens it again and breathes, “Look.”

  “I see,” I say.

  Sarai, for that is her name, puts the raisin down in the doorway, deliberate and thoughtful. She looks at it, her hand splayed open suspended in the air. She reaches back down to pick it up and her palm squishes it against the floor. She fumbles and picks it up and it is covered with dust. She raises it toward her mouth and I say, “Sarai, no.”

  She looks at me, considering. Watching me, she brings it toward her mouth again.

  “No,” I say again. I expect her to try to put it in her mouth anyway, and then I’ll take it from her and she’ll cry. Instead she holds it out to give it to me. I open my hand and she drops it in.

  My sister has a cat and it has had a litter of kittens. Skinny, long-legged things with heads too small for their bodies. Sarai sees a kitten and toddles after it. The kittens are half-wild things. They can take care of themselves. I throw the dirty raisin into the street.

  My youngest daughter is pregnant. I want to have grandchildren, but am I ready again for babies? Am I ready to still myself and to slow myself for her little ones? When Hariba was a year old and Rashida was on the way, I remember crouching on the floor, bulky with child, and saying to Hariba, “No, no, no. Sharp. Don’t touch.” I remember that moment, not because of what I said but because I realized how many hours of my life I had already spent slowing my mind down, and thinking of nothing but this child, and that I would have years of children ahead of me. I loved her. I loved her too much, the way when she was sitting she would roll onto one hip and put her hand on the floor, trying to decide if she should crawl or walk, if the speed of walking was worth the difficulty of getting up and the danger of falling down. But I wanted to talk to someone, and my husband and I, we were new to the neighborhood then and I didn’t know anyone. Women can only survive if they have other women who understand, who know what it’s like when you’ve been saying “no” all day to a toddler and you are tired of her anger and her unreasonableness, when you have become nothing but “no” and “no” and “no.” Don’t climb that, don’t go out there, don’t walk away from me, don’t eat that, don’t pick that up. Hours of “no” s. Years of “no” s. And you’re tired because you have the baby and your home and your life and the baby has nothing but itself.

  I didn’t love Hariba when she was born. I thought she would come out of me and I would love her. When she was born, I looked at her and I was frightened. We were living in my husband’s family’s flat over the barbershop and his mother and his sister and my mother were all there and they put her on my swollen belly. Her face was flat and creased, you could barely see her eyes and I thought I would see her and become a mother at that moment. But I didn’t feel she was mine. She was dangerous, so frail, I was afraid I would do something wrong. Did she feel that denial in me? After she was born, I grew so sad and tired that I could barely get out of bed, and Samil, my poor husband, would come home to find nothing cooked, nothing done, and me sitting on the bed, holding the baby.

  She had an empty mother those first months. I had nothing to fill her with. When Rashida was born, I had friends. They came to the birthing. We would trade children, give each other a break sometimes. Hamet would come over with her boy on her hip and say, “Talk to me! I need an intelligent voice or I’ll go mad!” She was plump and pretty and desperate, and we’d laugh. In the death houses it was a city of women and children and old people during the day. It was full of mess and crumbs and noise. Then it would start to get dark and the men would come home. Samil would say to the little ones, “Stop making that racket!” and I’d shush them. The doors of the death houses would be open and bars of light would come from them, and between the bars of light would be purple shadows. The sound of cutlery on plates. The smell of charcoal and flatbread and rice.

  In my memory those nights are calm, quiet, and still, but in my memory I’m always looking at the glow of other houses. It wasn’t nearly that simple. Hamet came to me one day with a cloth bag and said, “Please, keep this for me. Don’t ask me anything, just keep it.” I took the cloth bag and looked inside and there was a gun, a shiny plastic-looking thing, oddly heavy. I looked at her, looked into her face. Ibrahim, her husband, he might have had a temper, what did I know? I had never seen her with bruises on her face, but I’d heard them argue. I had heard everyone argue, everyone had heard Samil and me argue. We lived at elbows. Her face was calm, closed. I could feel the fear in the way her face was so serene. I put the bag away where the babies wouldn’t find it and didn’t even tell Samil. A few months later she asked for it back. “I’ll take that bag back now,” she said. “Thank you for keeping it.” I gave it back to her. I don’t know why it was okay, or if Ibrahim had missed it and made her give it back. We talked, but we weren’t close beyond the concerns of motherhood.

  When Samil died and I had three babies and the fourth on the way, Hamet sat with me. All she said was “You’ll get through this.” I didn’t want someone to tell me I’d get through it. But she was right. Still, for months I was hollow again, until my baby was born. Hariba and Fhassin, both infants with a mother hollowed by fear or grief. Is that where it happened?

  I’m thinking about this when Nabil brings Hariba to my sister’s house in the pedicab. I’m thinking of her as a baby, all round-faced, so that I’m even more shocked by this thin girl. When she went to be jessed, I was s
addened for her because who would marry a jessed girl? She would never have children. But I didn’t ever think my children might die before me.

  The skin under Hariba’s eyes is purple and full of fluid, but the rest of her is nothing. Her hair is brittle and full of broken ends. She see me and she starts to cry, reaching out from the pedicab with her thin arms. I reach up to hug her. “Child of my heart,” I say. I don’t know where the words come from, formal and frightening to a sick young woman, I’m sure.

  “Mama,” she sobs, and coughs, choking on her own sorrow.

  “It’s okay,” I soothe. “Mama’s here now. Hush, my girl, hush.” Words, meaningless words, like petting a dog. To her little brother I say, “Get her in! Get her in! She doesn’t need to be out in the street like this!” It takes the two of us supporting her under her thin arms to get her inside.

  “Mama,” she says, “Akhmim needs to come see me.”

  “Shhhh,” I say. “Come lie down. You need to lie down.”

  We help her into the cool darkness of my sister’s house and help her lie down on the bed we’ve made for her in the back.

  My sister is making cheese. Her daughter is diapering a baby. The house has the ammonia smell of diapers. Hariba is crying silently, tears coming unheeded. Hariba was always proud. The others were always complaining, “Mama, Hariba is bossing me around.” “Mama, Hariba is telling me what to do.” The oldest child always grows up too fast, has too much responsibility and too little fun. I would come home from selling flowers and find her, her dark eyebrows knit into a terrible line, willing them to behave. I was always telling her, “You watch them, Hariba. You have to be the little mother.” They weren’t allowed to go outside while I was gone, and I was afraid she would let them. She was only six. I remember frightening her, telling her if she let them go out, men would take her sister and sell her.

  “Don’t be angry when you turn your face to her,” my sister Zehra would say. I was always afraid and it made me fierce with Hariba. Zehra puts the press on her cheese and comes to crouch beside my daughter with me.

  I pet Hariba and hush her.

  I had to work. We had to eat. There was nothing to be done for it. A child needs a mother, but a child also needs food, a roof. When they could go to school, it was better, it wasn’t all on her. What else could I do? It was what had to be, and there’s no sense crying over it. Nothing would change if I did it again. Our children are hostages to the world.

  “Little one,” I say.

  She falls asleep.

  “Is she going to die?” Nabil asks.

  “No,” I say and my sister Zehra hisses at my son through her teeth. I’m not sure, though. It’s instinct to tell your children it will all be okay, and my youngest boy has never become a man. Fhassin I could have told. Fhassin had a thread of metal running through him when he was fourteen.

  “She looks sick,” Nabil whispers.

  “We’ll find a doctor,” I say.

  It’s just words to push away the darkness. When you are a mother, though, you do things you don’t know you can do. When I had four children and no husband, I did things I never would have thought I could do. And now I will again.

  “Will you watch her?” I ask my sister.

  “As if she were my own,” my Zehra says.

  Once Hariba said that she wished Zehra were her mother. I cried for nights.

  Walking out into the sunlight makes me blink. It’s the heat of the day and people are closing up until evening. Nabil follows me, hopeful and hesitant. “We’re going to look for a doctor,” I say.

  “What if they call the authorities?” Nabil says.

  “We’ll find one that won’t,” I say.

  My house is still cool and smells of rose perfume. For most people it’s the smell of death, but for me it’s the everyday smell of coin. I have a little money, some saved and some for the rent. I keep it in the wall, in a crack of a burial niche. People are too squeamish to reach inside and rob me. It doesn’t bother me to reach inside-nothing there but dust and bone.

  It’s a pitiful amount of coin, but I have it tied up in a rag. Who would I ask to tell me about a doctor who would do something illegal? Not my neighbors. I don’t know anyone who would know such a doctor, even if I could ask.

  Fhassin would know, but not Nabil.

  “We are going to talk to the dead,” I say to Nabil.

  He looks around him. We who live in the Nekropolis are always surrounded by the dead, and if we know anything, it’s that they don’t talk.

  SPECIAL_IMAGE-clip_image002.jpg-REPLACE_ME

  I’ve never been to prison. Never gone to see my son. I’ve sent money, if you don’t send money to prisoners, they’ll starve, but it felt as if I dropped it into the hand of someone outside the Moussin of the White Falcon. We take the underground outside of town, to where it comes above ground and the tracks have to be swept clear of sand. There isn’t much sand to see. Most of the desert is bare, just rocky places and dead land. There are a couple of villages, marked by the green of a well or the fence of a military installation. I was born in a village by a well. I know what life is like out here. The train comes by, but the city is far away, as far away as heaven or hell.

  Eventually we pass kilometers of fence. A single wire, that’s all, just what is needed to disrupt a prisoner’s brain. No people, no buildings, just the single wire swooping between each post.

  The prison itself is more than one building and except for its size it could be one of the government buildings we’d passed on the train. It’s the color of the soil, the color of emptiness under a blue sky. Three large buildings and then a dozen smaller ones. Men in army uniforms with guns, standing in the train station, apparently bored. Thank the heavens a lot of people get off the train.

  I follow Nabil out onto the platform, and the hot dry wind tangles my robe around my legs, strong enough to push me forward. Is it the will of Allah? I balk anyway, pulling my headscarf around my face to keep the grit out of my eyes. I pretend to be looking for a sign to tell me where to go, but I want to get back on the train.

  “This way, Mama,” Nabil says.

  I follow him through the turnstile. Most of the people coming to the prison are women. Young women, old women. A river of women whose men are in this place. Nabil stops at a stall that sells fruit and candy. “What?” I say.

  “We need something to take him,” Nabil says.

  He’s been here before. I didn’t know. Nabil is short, like Rashida, but stocky. A bulldog, a turtle, with curly hair tight against his head and a flattened nose. He is a man when he’s not with me, I suppose. Do I turn him into a child? Just by being his mother? He is bigger than me. What is this that we do to our children, to make them always children until we are so old we become children?

  I think about putting my hand on his arm and telling him that I see he’s grown up. But I don’t know how to tell him, so I just watch him buy oranges and chocolate. As if we’re visiting the sick.

  I give myself over to him, to his expertise in this place, and it’s as if I’ve been holding my breath. For years I have been holding my breath. Since Samil died, I have been doing all these things myself, with no man to do for me.

  We walk a few meters from the railway station and we’re at the prison gate. More army men in uniform. They check Nabil’s string bag of oranges and chocolate and wave him through. Nabil is wearing a shirt and trousers and already the heat has made half moons under his arms. Anything he puts on is wrinkled as soon as he touches it. It’s been that way all his life.

  We walk up a long, rutted dirt road toward the big buildings. Women are chattering, holding on to their children. What is worse, a husband killed in an accident like Samil or a husband in a place like this? At least I am an honorable widow and I get to wear black. I feel the protection of my black chador now. My husband is dead, he is not here. I’ve always had a kind of secret pleasure in being a widow. When Samil died, it marked me as someone outside of life and it answered questions
. Then, later, it let me be a man when I wanted to be.

  This place is the end of the world. Or the rest of the world is gone. Only the train tracks go back across the desert, an insect line rising and falling across the rocky hills until finally they disappear. Nabil waits while I look back, but his hand on my elbow is a subtle pressure to go on.

  We go through another gate, this one in a low wall, and a guard with a clipboard takes our names. And then in twos and threes we pass through a doorway. When Nabil and I go through the door, it closes behind us and we are in a place with high walls and no windows and a closed door in front of us. Above us, men with rifles stand on the high walls.

  Nabil murmurs, “This is the dead man’s gate.”

  I cannot bring myself to open my mouth. I wait mute for the gate in front of us to be opened.

  Then we’re in a courtyard, where families are talking to their men, and other men squat, waiting, their eyes on us. I look for Fhassin. Will I know him?

  “He’s not here,” Nabil says. “We didn’t let them know we were coming. I’ll have them go get him.”

  The desert-colored walls of the prison rise before me. The windows are long grates, broken a bit in some places, but too shadowed to see into. In the places where the breaks are large enough, a hand reaches out into the sunlight. I look away from the hands, perched in the windows like birds.

  The men are frightening, broken-toothed, raw. They crouch and smoke, or eat oranges. Some of them don’t have shirts. A few have fantastical mustaches and some have shaved their heads, as if they were holy men. One man’s shaved head has writing tattooed all over it and he is talking to a thin-faced young woman whose veil is skimpy and whose hair is dyed red. I’m afraid. There are guards, and I don’t know why any of these men would pay any attention to an old widow, but I feel like a rabbit.

  I glance up at the wall, wondering if one of those hands belongs to Fhassin, if he can see me here. One of those hands is moving, cutting the air, birdlike but decisive. Swoops and chops. Is it Fhassin? I raise my hand, tentatively, but the bird-hand just continues its strange flight.