Mama Hissa's Mice

by Saud Alsanousi

  Instead of scolding Fahd, she insulted him in her own way. “Are you laughing, you Jew? We’ll see who’s laughing when the sky falls on us!”

  Imagining the sky falling, I felt my grip slacken momentarily. I clung to the branches of the sidra. “How can the sky fall on us if God is . . . ,” I wondered aloud. “God forgive me!”

  Fahd kept laughing.

  His grandma looked at him with pity. “Boy, I warned you,” she said as she shook her head. “Can’t teach an old cat new tricks either, it seems!”

  Only years later did I finally grasp the true meaning of what she had said. How I wish that everyone could learn to change.

  We scraped together a small amount of fruit, some not yet ripe and some on the verge of ripening. I tossed some fruit into the basket on the ground. My mouth watered and my stomach growled as the aroma of Tina’s food wafted from the kitchen that opened out to the courtyard, reminding the three of us of the emptiness inside us. This was the first Ramadan where we actually fasted. From behind the courtyard wall, we could hear the crunch-crunch on the asphalt of the wheels from the shopping cart brought all the way from the central supermarket. “Old Lady Shatt’s train has arrived.” Mama Hissa snorted about Mama Zaynab, our neighbor, or Bibi Zaynab in Iraqi dialect, as her twin grandchildren called her. She looked just like any other grandmother on the block, but stood apart because she could read—the Quran, her cookbooks, and the telephone book—without having to go through the state-sponsored literacy program that Mama Hissa had failed, despite claiming, “The Miss told me I was bravo!” Mama Zaynab was educated in Iraq up to elementary school level before she ended up marrying Sadiq’s grandfather, Abdul Nabi, and leaving her country behind. It was a source of pride for her grandchildren that not only could she read and write but she also descended from a noble Iraqi bloodline. Mama Zaynab’s pastime, for which she was known in our neighborhood, was going to the supermarket with her shopping cart—a cart from the store itself. The market manager would often blame her for what the asphalt had done to the shopping-cart wheels. “The cart’s for using inside the store, not outside!” he’d shout.

  “Shame on you that I have to keep reminding you! My son, Abbas, paid good money to establish this supermarket. Withdraw however much it takes to put things right from his fund, number 364,” she’d respond. Not once was the manager satisfied with her response or able to convince her to do otherwise. She’d always have to jog his memory of how much we in the neighborhood put in when the Surra Cooperative Supermarket was being established in the mid-1980s.

  “Open the door for Old Lady Shatt,” Mama Hissa commanded Sadiq in a voice louder than the crunching of wheels on asphalt. From high up in the tree, I watched Mama Zaynab behind the wall. She was sporting a wide grin that doubled the wrinkles on her face, all the while pushing her cart brimming over with fruit and vegetables. On the way to her house, she stopped at the Al Bin Ya’qub residence. “I heard you, troublemaker!”

  “God spare us the hellfire,” teased Mama Hissa.

  Mama Zaynab’s guffaws echoed hers from beyond the wall.

  “Come on in, come on.” Fahd’s grandma insisted that Sadiq come in despite the short amount of time left before the sunset call to prayer and the setting of the table for iftar, when they would break their fasts. Between the two households there was a difference in timing for when fasts would be broken. “Your sun sets ten minutes after ours . . . Why the rush?” joked Mama Hissa. From behind the iron door to the courtyard, Mama Zaynab peered in with her deeply lined face, her abaya tightly drawn across her forehead and chin in a fashion that was a stark contrast to Mama Hissa’s hijab. She passed through the door, greeting Fahd in her usual way: “How are you, my bazzun?”

  “Meeeeow!” he chimed in accordingly as he clawed at the air.

  Mama Hissa dragged her feet toward the door to welcome Mama Zaynab and kissed her forehead, not thinking anything of it. This level of respect between the neighbors left us bewildered. Mama Hissa turned to us, justifying her reverence. “We’ve got to respect our elders!”

  Mama Zaynab shuddered, vowing in her Iraqi dialect, “I swear to God and on my mother’s milk, you’re older than me.”

  “Are you off your rocker?” Mama Hissa asked incredulously as she beat her chest with her open palm while staring at her neighbor.

  The two old ladies spent some time in the courtyard debating who was younger while the three of us looked on, deriving more enjoyment from their scene than that of the patients leaving the psychiatric ward on our TV show. Their feigned squabble turned to kitchen talk, then to tea sit-downs in the Gamal Abdel Nasser Park in Rawda after the evening prayer, then to news of the bomb blast outside the Saudi Arabian Airlines office that had shaken the city yesterday, before finally ending with the war.

  Mama Zaynab was talking about Iran with the same sort of compassion that she had for Iraq. After having thrown down the last of the lotus fruit into the basket, I found myself unable to contain my question any longer and I cut her off. “Bibi Zaynab! Who do you support? Iran or Iraq?” Both grandmothers turned to me.

  “This is a war we’re talking about here, may God protect us, not a soccer match, you fool!”

  I didn’t pay Mama Hissa any mind, and kept my eyes locked with Mama Zaynab’s. She shook her head indecisively, pulling at her lips. She finally settled on the common saying: “In my back and in my stomach, I feel pain. Both hurt just the same.”

  4:20 p.m.

  Present Day

  I sit in my car and close the door. I’m holding Ayub’s camera, empty, free from the images in my head that are clamoring for attention. My attempts to get in touch with Sadiq and Fahd have been fruitless. What Ayub said shortly before spurred me to log into our email account. No messages, except for one from Ayub with the six o’clock news brief attached. I move to the Fuada’s Kids Twitter account, even though I had entrusted its management to some members of the group, exempting myself a while back from this responsibility in particular. I had long ago discovered my threshold for tolerating attacks from Twitter trolls: some were extremist religious groups, while others didn’t recognize any religion. They meted out their accusations to us, cursed and threatened our families so that they would be forced to get involved, and put pressure on us to end our “bullshit,” as they called it. Many demanded that we reveal our identities. “If you’re real men!” I type in @FuadasKids on my phone’s app. The profile picture for the page pops up: Fuada in her bloodred dress, sky-blue bow in her hair, her eyes as wide as possible and mouth agape, carrying the orange mousetrap, wagging her finger as she warns whoever will listen. I cast my gaze over the words below the photo. I’m history in its entirety! I’m warning you all, the mice are coming . . . protect yourselves from the plague! I hear this repeated within me, in Fawzia’s dry and hoarse voice, which used to scare me as a child. The most recent tweet on the page is a few minutes old. “God is one,” it says. It looks like Dhari tweeted it. I don’t think Ayub is behind it, seeing as he limited his involvement with the account to only tweeting news items. It has four likes and eight responses bashing us, and more than fifty comments from different tweeters going at one another:

  “What crap, we know that God is one, but you guys are nonbelievers!”

  “You’re scum, all you Shi’as who don’t revere the Prophet’s companions.”

  “God damn you all!”

  “Nawasib.”

  “Damn you!”

  “I hope your faces get smashed up!”

  “Umar, Umar, Umar!”

  “#Shi’aswontbehumiliated.”

  I can’t take it. I don’t have it in me to delete tweets that aren’t mine. Nonetheless, I still click on the upper-right-hand corner of the tweet “God is one” and delete it. My phone rings, showing a number I learned by heart as a child and still know; it covers up the Twitter page. It’s ’Am Saleh’s house line; the first few digits match those of ’Am Abbas’s and our old house. They were the first phone numbers I ever memorized,
back when there were only seven digits in a number, easy enough to learn before they increased and became . . . How many now? I press my phone to my ear.

  Apprehensively, I let out a “Hello, Fahd!”

  The voice from the other end comes through: “It’s me, Um Hassan.”

  I breathe in sharply. “Hawraa!” The name rolls off my tongue like it used to many years ago. So much has happened since I last said her name. Perhaps the phone number on the screen is what took me back in time, to a time when, if she came up in conversation with Sadiq, she was “Hawraa.” After she put on the hijab, you could only call her “sister,” ensuring there was a respectful distance between you. Then she got married and was only known as a mother, “Um Hassan.” Even now, whenever Fahd does mention her briefly, she’s swallowed up by the blanket term family, her name never to be uttered again. “I went out with the ‘family’ . . . Hold on, phone call from the ‘family’ . . . I told the ‘family’ . . .” It got to the point where I found myself having to sign off all our calls with “Say hi to the fam.”

  I take another look at the screen to confirm the number. Maybe it’s ’Am Abbas’s house in Rumaithiya. I find the number is the same as the first time I saw it. It’s the Al Bin Ya’qub’s house. Despite their ups and downs, I expect good things from Um Hassan’s call, seeing as she’s calling from her husband’s house after their rift. I ask how her two boys are doing. She responds that they’re playing outside. She asks me about her husband and her brother. Other than the stock “It’ll be fine,” I don’t have a response for her. To me, who knows her so well, her demeanor speaks loud and clear as to how pained she is over their disappearance. It reminds me of what her grandmother had said long ago: “In my back and in my stomach, I feel pain. Both hurt just the same.”

  “Khala Aisha is broken. She’s worried sick about Fahd,” she says, sounding worn-out.

  Both of us knew what this woman’s worry would end in; the Soothsayer, as we used to jokingly call her, because everything she worried about came to pass. She would lie in wait for earthquakes before they happened.

  I hear myself nosily prying into her and Fahd’s marriage. “So, Um Hassan, you’ve gone back to . . .”

  She doesn’t give me any wiggle room. “’Am Saleh’s been in Mubarak Hospital for the past hour. He was whisked away in an ambulance with Khala Aisha at his side.”

  I’m hoping that whatever has happened to Fahd’s dad was the only source of pain for Khala Aisha when I saw her earlier this afternoon. I hope it wasn’t more than that. Hawraa keeps silent before going on to say that she can’t make head or tail of anything; Fahd’s mother came back from the hospital after two hours, picked up a pot of food from the kitchen, and left again without so much as a word. I barely hear what Hawraa is saying. I’m not interested in Fahd’s mom’s obscure quirks. If only Fahd could come back now to see his wife, who has returned to their home. As if she read my mind, she explains why she is back in her husband’s house in Surra. “I couldn’t leave Fawzia alone.”

  Something indescribable washes over me every time I hear the name of Fahd’s aunt. I ask how Fawzia is. “She’ll be fine, God willing,” Hawraa says before abruptly hanging up on me. I look down at my phone; the Fuada’s Kids Twitter page is showing again after my call with Um Hassan. People are unleashing profanity at Fuada’s Kids—ruin, downfall, and other horrible things. I nearly sign out. A tweet with an image of our slogan God is one has popped up; it says: “Fuada’s Kids have deleted their tweet “God is one” for their friends the Atheist Network. Pens down, ink dried. Too little, too late.”

  Dozens of people have retweeted it. Whereas others have responded by hurling accusations at us, calling us everything from Sunni to Shia to atheist extremists, from being loyal to the government to conspiring against it; the Atheist Network is content with one tweet that adds fuel to the fire: “Religion is a blindfold.” My trembling fingers type our group’s name in the Twitter search bar, waiting for the results. Some hashtags pop up: “#TheMiceAreComing” and another seemingly recent one, “#StopFuadasKids.”

  The final hashtag leads me to a tweet of Dhari’s ID, with his picture and personal details: “Well, look what we have here: one of Fuada’s mice.”

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE

  THE NOVEL

  Chapter 10

  Hardly had Mama Zaynab set off on her way home, pushing her shopping cart, when she came back to the Al Bin Ya’qub family courtyard, her face grim. She had forgotten to buy some tomato paste.

  “Tiiinaaa . . . Tiiiiiinaaa!” Mama Hissa called out.

  “Really, there’s no need, Um Saleh. Let one of these boys go to Haydar before he closes the store.”

  We would fall over ourselves to go to the grocery store or the supermarket whenever either of the grandmothers needed something; those errands were an invaluable opportunity to make an escape. Oh, the joy whenever Mama Hissa needed samosa flour; we’d race to Shakir’s Indian restaurant to surreptitiously buy it so that Jaber, his Egyptian competitor, wouldn’t be any wiser. We’d come back and ask her, “Don’t you want liver or kidneys? How about some kebab?” She knew us, that we’d only be satisfied if we could go to the end of the street, toward the Al Awaidel house, where Adnan the Syrian had his butcher shop. We’d draw out what should have taken minutes into hours before returning. Mama Hissa would go out now and again to meet her friends in Gamal Abdel Nasser Park or to the fresh produce market, accompanied by Khala Aisha whenever Tina’s kitchen was running low on fruits or vegetables. She’d pass by us, wearing her abaya. We’d stand in front of her, blocking the courtyard door. “Mama Hissa, take us! Take us!”

  She’d ask us, “Now who do you love more . . . God or me?”

  Our faces drained of color. She’d insist on hearing the answer that pleased her. “God, of course,” we’d all dejectedly chime.

  “Excellent! Let God keep you with Him then, and I’ll be free of you.” Time and again she cunningly extricated herself from our pestering. She’d hide behind the door, stifling her laughter at our downcast faces. At these times, I would wonder how I could love God as much as I said I did but not want Him to keep me to Himself. Since my question wavered between ayb and haram, what was shameful and what was forbidden, I swallowed it.

  We huddled around Mama Zaynab that day, grabbing at her abaya. Our voices grew louder, begging her to send us to Haydar’s to buy tomato paste. “Bibi Zaynab, pick me! Pick me!” She stuck her varicose-veined hand into her black leather handbag, giving Sadiq enough for the tomato paste, then gifting each of us a quarter dinar to buy whatever our little hearts desired. “Instead of buying gum and sweets, you should . . .” On one such occasion, just as Mama Hissa started to counsel us, Fahd interrupted her; his back bent over, lower lip jutting out, and mimicking her, he finished her sentence with the usual refrain, “Donate to Palestine.” She looked hard at him, her eyes so wide it seemed her eyeballs would fall out. She freed her foot from one of her sandals. She bent down to pick it up as she yelled, “You’re making fun of me, eh, you Jew?” Fahd set off running with Mama Hissa’s sandal flying behind him, before it careened into the iron door and then fell to the floor. The loyal bloodhound that I was, I ran to the door and flipped the sandal over to its rightful position.

  At the front door stood Samir and Hazim carrying a dish of roasted sumac chicken and awwameh for dessert. Like every other Ramadan, their mother had sent them. Mama Hissa’s face lit up as she called Tina to collect the food. She sent the two boys on their way, carrying her greetings to Um Taha as well as her update that “the Nablus soap has almost run out.” After the two boys left, Mama Hissa spoke to Bibi Zaynab about how fair Um Taha’s forearms were, thanks to her magical soap. “You’d have to wash yours with Clorox to get that white!” Bibi Zaynab joked.

  Both Fahd and Sadiq had inherited a trait from their respective fathers, which I started to observe in the way each of them spoke. A few days earlier, we were on our way to see Hassan the optician at t
he main supermarket overlooking Tariq Bin Ziyad Road, which stretches to the bridge that leads to Jabriya—Mahzouza and Mabrouka’s street, as we used to call it. We were running on that very street, but not in the direction of the psychiatric ward; instead, we were running away from the mice, as Mahzouza and Mabrouka had done. Fawzia had sent us to buy contact lens solution; she’d been suffering from deteriorating vision brought on by her worsening sickness. Outside Hassan the optician’s, Fahd whispered to me, “Why this place? Why not Omar’s?” ’Am Saleh had exaggerated his hatred for his neighbor to the point that Fahd thought he automatically had to hate what his neighbor liked. When I pushed Fahd on what the harm was with Hassan, he responded, “It’s a name that doesn’t belong to our sect.”

  “But my uncle’s name is Hassan!” I retorted. My uncle’s serene face and long black beard came to mind. “Also, didn’t we learn in Islamic education class that ‘God’s peace be upon the Prophet’s grandsons Hassan and Hussain, which are Ali Bin Abi Talib’s sons—May God be pleased with him’?”

  Fahd’s eyebrows shot up. “You swear those were their names?”

  Sadiq, taciturn as always, responded on my behalf after his ears had reddened. “By God the Almighty,” he swore in affirmation, before he asked, “Why do you like Omar?”

  Fahd contented himself by saying, “God was pleased with him.”

  “Why shouldn’t we like him?” I rashly responded to Sadiq’s question with one of my own. I reached for my lips as Mom’s voice reverberated in my ear: “If your mouth wasn’t already covered in blood, I’d slap you!” I didn’t say anything more.

  “Because he’s damned,” Sadiq uncharacteristically slipped in, referring to a childhood lesson.

  Fahd mulled this over before reminding Sadiq, “You told me that your father says that the Prophet’s family damns us.”

  Before stepping into Hassan the optician’s, Sadiq shot back, “And your dad says that our kind hijacked the Jabriya plane and that we’re infidels—that’s what you told me!”