Mother of All Pigs

by Malu Halasa

  The farm manager has gone against the wishes of the younger, more radical elements of his community by continuing to work with the pigs. That he has carried on for so long is a tribute to his loyalty to Hussein. Whenever the old man is confronted about his employer, he responds by saying: “I submit myself to Allah just as you do. If He wants me to provide for my family and sick wife by working for an unbeliever, then so be it. Like all devout Muslims, I give ten percent of what I earn to charity. Do not criticize me for doing what I must.” Until now this has been enough, but with tensions growing each passing day, in the end he knows that he and his sons will have no choice but to leave.

  Loud shouting rouses Laila from her thoughts. Ahmad runs out of the farrowing shed, his arms waving, evidently disturbed.

  Inside the shed, Mustafa and Ahmad’s sons are standing in front of Umm al-Khanaazeer’s pen. When Hussein enters, Mansoor and Salem rush to him. He pushes through. Once Laila reaches her husband’s side, she gasps, “My God, the size…”

  The repeated pregnancies have had the same effect on the animal as it would a woman, except few women grow to more than six hundred pounds. Blood drips down the pig’s forelegs onto the straw. Around her hooves, like trampled flowers, are the remnants of her latest litter. Within hours of their birth they were crushed beneath their mother’s gargantuan weight. She simply rolled over them as though they never existed.

  But that doesn’t explain the blood streaming from the sow’s mouth. Then with sinking disgust, Hussein understands. Nothing on this earth should be forced to breed indefinitely. The stress has been too much and it was, as he repeatedly warned his uncle, only a matter of time before his worst fears were realized. Umm al-Khanaazeer, eating the remains of a piglet’s hindquarter, crunches it in huge, powerful jaws like an apple. She appears to be relishing it. Smeared blood and bits of bone cover a once inquiring snout. Mortified, Hussein shoves past his wife and sons and strides quickly outside. Within seconds the sound of the butcher’s van can be heard driving away from the farm.

  18

  An intense disembodied voice cracks the clear blue dome of the sky: “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar!” “God is great!” The words bounce back and forth between the mountains, fusing with the succeeding lines of prayer. “There is no god but God.” “I bear witness that Muhammad is God’s messenger.” “Come to prayer.” “Come to success.” “God is most great.” “There is no god but God.” The message falls like rain over the town.

  Some people in the Eastern Quarter immediately stop working and kneel facing Mecca. Others accept the invitation and head in the direction of the mosque. In the town’s Christian community, the six o’clock call to prayer has a different meaning. For those who religiously avoid the heat of the day, it is a call to life. In walled gardens elderly grandmothers, their hair and skin whitened from old age and self-imposed seclusion, emerge to sweep walks. Roads and alleys fill with visiting relatives and friends. Farmers greet each other on their way to the fields for one last look before retiring to the Rest House and Internet Café for coffee, backgammon, and gossip. The stifling oppressiveness that has hung over them all day begins a slow retreat.

  Across the road from the Sabas house, a neighbor comes out into a yard, as if recently awakened from a long sleep. Samira and Muna have whiled away the late afternoon on the front terrace. If they are going to take what should appear as a leisurely walk, Samira realizes, they should leave soon. She needs to be at the appointed place before the streetlamps come on. On the floor Fuad carefully stacks wooden blocks. With a capricious flick of his wrist, he knocks them over. Missed appointments are as easy as that. Samira scans the road again. Three figures appear. It is Laila and the boys.

  “Let’s go,” she urges Muna. With Fuad in her arms, she hurries down the front steps of the house. In the dirt street, she hands the toddler to Laila and explains that Muna wants a stroll in the town. “It would be nice to show her a few things before dark. We’ve been cooped up all day.”

  If Samira had been by herself, Laila would have given her grief. Instead her sister-in-law silently gathers her youngest son in her arms. Mansoor and Salem are also subdued, their faces smudged and dirty; it has obviously been a trying afternoon.

  The last stone house along the dirt track—the one with a garden—belongs to the widow who monitors the street. As the two young women pass, a voice calls from an open window: “Up and down, where are you going, my child?”

  Samira reaches in through a gap, grabs hold of fingers laden with gold rings, and jokes, “Auntie, I’m always at home, watching you from my window. I promise to visit soon.” She and Muna continue down other dirt tracks and across unfenced yards. In fifteen minutes they join a partially paved main road and groups of teenage girls walking in twos and threes. Something about their mood suggests that they are not simply taking the air.

  At the far end, by the roundabout, teenage boys wait. A battered Mustang drives past, and the driver shouts out, “Hey, Wafiqa!” followed by several short stabs on the horn. The opposite sexes seemingly keep to their own side of the street.

  Samira checks her phone and reduces her pace. Because of the time she isn’t worried. Also, other girls are out, another clear indication that she and Muna don’t have to rush. When she sees the twins heading toward them, she realizes there is no way to avoid her friends without being rude.

  “Welcome to Lovers’ Lane,” Yvette greets Muna. In front of them, a boy breaks away from his crowd of friends. Hands in his pockets, whistling, he darts across the roundabout and casually falls in behind a group of girls. He keeps at a discreet distance but moderates his walking speed and follows behind them.

  “He’s got some nerve!” Yvette’s tone is more admiring than accusatory.

  Samira would like to get going, but unable to offer a good excuse to the twins, she meekly suggests, “I don’t think Muna is interested in this.”

  Yvette loops her arm through Muna’s and nods at the boy. “Not interested in love Arab style? Come on. He’s making his intentions perfectly clear.”

  “What intentions?” To Muna, someone crossed the street.

  The twins nod at each other. “I can see we’re going to have to take her through this step by step.” Yvette expands, “For those who can’t pick out the finer nuances, looks can be deceiving.”

  Gigi whispers to Muna, “He walks behind the girl he likes.”

  When the group cuts in front of them, she stops talking. The boy is still whistling as he passes.

  Yvette giggles and sings a few bars of the same song: “Your eyes make me hungry. I am weak from lack of food.”

  Despite herself, Samira laughs out loud. Yvette is perfect. Occasionally, when Samira is attending political meetings, her thoughts meander back to Lovers’ Lane. In the capital, they take themselves too seriously. She misses the antics of her friends. At the roundabout with the twins, she is suddenly reminded of Walid. He once stood watching her from the other side. She shakes her long, dark hair to expel him from her thoughts. She was so unsophisticated then. There is no reason to feel sentimental about acting stupid now.

  “Come on!” Yvette stamps her foot, encouraging her to keep up.

  One of the teenage girls waits behind her friends until the boy catches up to her. Yvette brings her small group to a standstill as the couple exchange a few words. Then, as the boy runs back across the street, the girl catches up to her group.

  “They’ve made a date to meet,” Yvette deciphers.

  “Dania,” Samira calls out, “wait till I tell your mother.”

  The teenager turns around, alarmed. When she sees Samira, she skips over and gives her a big hug.

  Looking over her spectacles, Samira rolls her eyes. “That’s the trouble with girls in love—they hug anybody.”

  Dania places her head on Samira’s shoulder and takes her hand. They walk together. “My mother doesn’t like him,” she admits.

  “So what else is new?” says Yvette, overlooking the proceedings.
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  “I don’t want to disappoint her.”

  The twin is sympathetic but stern: “Nobody should be disappointed.”

  “Least of all you,” adds Samira soothingly. “You must follow your heart.”

  “You think so?”

  Samira nods sagely.

  The younger girl skips back to her friends.

  “The voice of experience,” Yvette squeezes Samira’s arm. “Sounds like your heart has been broken.”

  Even though Yvette is teasing, Samira knows she is curious. Walid has not been mentioned since he found a job in the Gulf and is no longer a fixture on Lovers’ Lane. In the not so distant past Samira claimed that they were e-mailing each other, but she can no longer bother with the pretense.

  “Whatever Dania does, her life will not change. She will still yearn to walk out in the evening, like we old women do. You know”—Samira links arms with Yvette and Gigi—“there will be a time when we won’t be welcomed. Instead of agony aunties we will be…” she whispers naughtily, “…spies.”

  She has managed to get the twins and Muna striding along at a reasonable pace and they reach the line of shops. As they pass the butcher’s, Samira waves to Khaled behind the counter serving customers and wonders where Hussein is. Her chattering friends push the thought away.

  “When we’re old we’ll wear scarves,” promises Gigi, shaking her long, curly hair.

  “And we’ll go to church every day. But until then we might as well”—Yvette stands by the opened door of a small music shop—“enjoy ourselves.”

  Samira hesitates and checks her phone. There’s still time. She would like to arrive early, but Yvette blocks her path. “What’s going on? Come in for a few minutes, Laila won’t mind. Also, Muna needs to see and hear our one guilty pleasure.”

  Meekly Samira follows her in. Everywhere on tables, cassette tapes, old vinyl records, and CDs have been stacked up against walls, in shelves and boxes. Some have pictures on their cases and sleeves, but most are unadorned except for a single line of Arabic writing. The hole-in-the-wall shop belongs to Abu Za’atar’s youngest son, Sammy, who built it up from a cardboard box of cassettes outside the Marvellous Emporium. His father, not much of a music lover except when he thought that Sammy was going to make a fortune writing ringtones, was unsympathetic to his son’s obsession. This changed dramatically with the growing crowd of youngsters hanging around Sammy and his CD/cassette player. The Featherer lost no time in securing a tiny storefront for his son’s business. Sammy, more interested in collecting music than selling it, had other ideas and procured a used DJ mixer and two turntables from the Beirut Craigslist. To subsidize the shop, he does odd jobs for the Marvellous Emporium and keeps the music store open late into the night. Whenever he is asked about closing, his answer’s the same: “We never shut. Where would the broken hearted go after Lovers’ Lane?”

  In a hoodie, with a face scarred by acne and bad food, Sammy displays his father’s hunting instincts as soon as Muna is introduced to him.

  “I could use an American connection.” He outlines his preferences: “Rap, hip-hop, dub, and grime. Anything you get to me would be appreciated.” He closes with a short but effective bow. Tacked on a shelf behind him is an article about Michael Jackson torn from a magazine. The headline speaks of pharmaceuticals and the singer’s last tour.

  Noting Muna’s curiosity, Sammy observes, “The one story that never fails to entertain across the generations is tragic fame.”

  “You know what tragedy is?” interrupts Yvette. Crinkling her nose, she describes the attack on the music shop by vandals who tore down its collection of vintage posters.

  “Except for Michael. He so saved us!” Sammy gives Yvette a high five. “If it had been Liberace, Sylvester, or the Village People, the shop would have been burned to the ground.”

  “And the posters were of who exactly?” asks Muna.

  “Glamorous singers and belly dancers showing too much…” Sammy whips his finger down the front of his shirt to indicate cleavage, then holding his hands in the air, he shakes a bony DJ ass. “Imagine being hot and bothered by a woman old enough to be your grandma. But in business, the customer is always right.”

  “You sound like Abu Za’atar.” Gigi, browsing through a box of recently arrived tapes, has been nominally following the conversation. “How come there’s never any new music, Sammy? Some of this stuff is ancient.” She moans, “My mom’s collection of seventies LPs are more up to date than this!”

  “The problem with bootleggers is their small-mindedness,” the youthful proprietor explains to Muna. “They pirate nothing that isn’t a worldwide smash. Why should I carry the same trash as the next guy?” He turns to Gigi. “If you don’t find what you want, with my blessings, go elsewhere.”

  “There is no other place.” Gigi hands him a cassette tape with a picture of a stylish middle-aged woman with perfectly coiffed hair and a pair of large sunglasses. It is a singer Muna recognizes: “Umm Kulthum!”

  Yvette joins them and sighs, “When she sang even the nightingales stopped to listen. Four million people attended her funeral in Cairo. Sure, a million more attended Abdel Nasser’s, but unlike his, none of her mourners was shot dead by the Egyptian army.”

  Sammy, yawning, slides the cassette into the player and hits play. A mass of soaring glissandi rises dirgelike. Bored, the frustrated enthusiast supports his hoodie-covered head in his hands, with his elbows on the counter.

  Yvette tells Muna, “Unrequited love and brutality are the themes of our lives. It was true then and it’s true now.” She reaches behind Sammy and turns up the volume. The ear-splitting violins strain against the speakers.

  Mesmerized, everyone stands perfectly still before mournful singing begins: “My darling, don’t ask where the ecstasy has gone. The citadel of my sensual imagination has collapsed. Quench my desire and drink on its ruins…” The song bounces against the walls of the shop and swells out onto the main street. Evening shoppers outside stare in through the open door. It is too much attention.

  “We have to go,” Samira says to Yvette, who can’t hear her above the music. She takes Muna forcibly by the arm and the two of them slip out with sadness and betrayal trailing after them: “Tell my story as long as the tears are flowing…”

  Down the road from the shops, through an alleyway below the air-conditioning ducts of the Holy Land Hotel, the singing dissipates in the steady whirl of plant machinery. When they emerge, a strand of melody and disembodied lyric—“Set my hands… free…”—float toward them on the wind. Samira takes a track that leads behind the Rest House and Internet Café to an old garden. Surrounded by a tangle of flowering jasmine and honeysuckle, the two are obscured from view behind an unfinished wall. Through the windows, a bluish glow from a line of monitors illuminates the back of the building, as voices intermingle with the slap of backgammon tiles, the tinkling of glassware, and the sound of computer games. Where Samira and Muna stand the air thickens with the evening perfume of flowers. In the garden, someone lingers.

  The shadowy figure doesn’t look like one of Samira’s usual contacts. He is young, with some facial hair, but from what she can tell in the light, not an awful lot. In a loose tunic and light-colored trousers, he’s also wearing a woven prayer cap on his head. She thinks she has seen him before, maybe with the sheikh. Some of the people she has dealt with in the past are religious but by their own admission not fundamentalist. To her knowledge, the women’s committee and its umbrella group do not associate with extremists. It goes against everything Zeinab, observant and moderate, believes in. For a split second Samira again worries about her involvement with the Syrian women. Maybe the youth is not whom she is supposed to meet, but he is the only one here. From the look of impatience on his smooth face, she thinks he is expecting her. Samira emerges from behind the wall with Muna. They walk toward him.

  “I was told you were coming alone.” He studies Samira.

  “This is my cousin,” she says, stepping forwar
d. “I can vouch for her.”

  The youth doesn’t appear convinced. Nevertheless he reaches inside his tunic and pulls out a crisp brown envelope. He sneers, “Don’t lose it.”

  Samira slips the envelope into the pocket of her skirt. It is almost dark. A young couple holding hands enters the abandoned garden but, upon seeing people already there, leave quickly. Samira’s contact looks at her as though she’s the one to blame, but she stares back at him, refusing to be intimidated.

  “If you picked the meeting place, you must have known.” Her tone is matter-of-fact: those in the town her age and younger are aware that the garden serves as an unofficial annex of Lovers’ Lane. The romantically inclined arrange their assignations in public view. Only the determined find their way to the bushes. It is her turn to sound irritated. However, when she emphasizes, “So don’t be surprised,” she thinks she sounds shrill. His unwarranted stridency has really gotten on her nerves.

  A streetlamp on the other side of the garden wall starts to buzz. In a moment, it will turn on. Then the loved and the unloved, the loners and the thieves, will consider the time and return home. The unofficial curfew for the young at heart is to be respected at all times.

  “When will the letter be delivered?” demands the youth.

  “Tonight.” Samira can tell he has no confidence in her whatsoever. The streetlamp flickers into a weak yellow light.

  Out of provocation, she thrusts her right hand forward to shake his. With his arms rigidly at his side, he abruptly walks away.

  “Chilling” is Muna’s verdict.

  Samira, exasperated by the encounter, makes light of it. “Remember, we’re improperly dressed. No headscarf means we might as well be standing naked in front of him. Imagine if we said you just arrived from America—he would have lectured us on war crimes!”