Mother of All Pigs

by Malu Halasa

  Although she probably would agree with his assessment of US foreign policy, it is his attitude toward her that she finds unacceptable. As her fingers nervously skim the surface of her pocket, feeling the contours of the letter inside, she wonders what is so important that it couldn’t be e-mailed. Samira rarely knows the contents of the messages and parcels she carries and as a rule doesn’t want to. However, her previous errands never involved someone so dubious and close to home. She suppresses her nervousness by thinking about Zeinab. What would she have done under similar circumstances? How would she have avoided an unnecessary confrontation? She is cool under pressure, a trait Samira is attempting to master. With practice, in time she expects it will come naturally. The woman who called her promised she would be approached later that night. She didn’t know when it would happen, but she warned Samira not to change her plans and to go to the wedding feast. Whoever has been assigned to find her will know where to look; it’s such a small town. All she needs to do is keep watch and be on her guard.

  19

  Hussein, crushed inside the van, is panting heavily. He bolted away from the disaster like a man spooked by his own shadow. At the turnoff to the farm, instead of heading downward toward the town, he veered in the opposite direction, leaving black skid marks on the smooth road maintained for the Holy Land sightseeing tour buses. By a cross, he pulls into the entrance leading to a church, monastery, and museum. The van jerks to a stop in a car park, inches away from a stone embankment with nothing beyond it but sky.

  All around the air radiates with the last vestiges of the golden light, but Hussein is oblivious. He should have stayed and consoled Laila and the boys, but the sheikh’s threats combined with Umm al-Khanaazeer’s filicide set off a chain of violent jolts as his brain exploded with images of his wife and children on the rack. He thought he was making sacrifices for their sake when in fact he was only placing them in the line of fire. The realization is electrifying. His shaking hand gropes for the steering wheel; he feels nothing but shame and self-loathing.

  Nothing good comes from religion. Hussein doesn’t feel God nor does he blame Him. If God does exist, He must be malicious. Hussein wearily climbs out of the van. Coming to Jebel Musa, the very place his father loved, is the cruelest of jokes. Tourists finished praying in the church can pick their way through the ruined monastery to the museum, where they can add their names to a mosaic for the world.

  For Hussein’s father, Musa taught the word of God by teaching people about themselves. According to the philosopher Ibn Sina, the prophets were not only mirrors of the divine, they embodied God’s greatness. One could not narrate a point of understanding between the worldly and the celestial without their intercession.

  There was a Qur’anic verse that Al Jid, as a Christian, held dear: “He is Allah; there is no god but He; all the excellent names are for him.” Some names, he explained to anyone who cared to listen, were well known, such as All-Preserving, Time, Eternal, Proud, and Watchful. Others were distinct aspects of the Godhead, and then there were the secret names. Al Jid celebrated what he considered two facts of creation: there was not one truth for all but many paths to enlightenment, and God’s mystical powers were not His alone; these too were manifest in exceptional men and women. Whenever Hussein searched for signs he came up short. However, for his father, they were everywhere, in the landscape around them and the air they breathed.

  Al Jid told his son that Musa learned his ancient arts of healing in the desert. Medieval Islamic scholars believed the prophet cured the afflicted by serenading them with a magic flute. Faith, like storytelling, requires a suspension of disbelief. Musa could have easily parted the Red Sea and saved his people with a pop song of his day.

  Pilgrims on Jebel Musa found Al Jid after he had fallen off his horse and suffered a stroke. With most of his children gone, his once busy home was deathly still except for the singing of his small daughter Samira, who puttered through empty rooms like Zenobia of Palmyra. Hussein, his only son in the country, was off on a secret assignment for the army, or so the family had been informed, when in truth he was on a terrific bender. By the time Hussein resurfaced, it was too late. The old man was gone and buried.

  Mother Fadhma is a woman who rarely takes advantage, but this time she did. Because of her stepson’s remorse, she extracted from him an irrevocable promise. It was an onerous task but one she would insist on from beyond the grave. Al Jid and his second wife had presided over an extended family, even after nearly all their children and her sister’s disappeared into exile. In death as in life, the two of them never once turned anyone away, and as a consequence the family grave became overpopulated with distant cousins and upstart relatives.

  “When my time comes,” she instructed Hussein, “retrieve the bones belonging to Al Jid and the great loves of his life, Grandmother Sabet and Mamma-Sister Najla. Bury them with me. Let us be a family once more so the women are not left among strangers with our honor compromised.”

  Whenever Hussein considers his promise, he can almost taste the dirt and dust rising from calcified bones, wrapped in shredded muslin, deep in a sandy grave. It is a job he will not like and will resent. Memory and death have made him conscious of feeling one thing: parched. His thirst for oblivion like his father’s goodness is deep and abiding. Fed up with communing with other people’s deities, he plans to seek solace in the company of his own.

  20

  With curtains drawn and no lights, the new house appears forlorn and unloved. Mother Fadhma inches up the front steps one at a time. The locked front door only confirms her suspicions that no one is home, and she resorts to her latchkey. Inside she can just about make out her grandsons’ whispering in the gloom. They are usually this mindful only when their mother is suffering from a bad migraine. Fadhma ventures past the living and reception rooms down the hall to a partially opened door and peers inside. In the bedroom Salem and Mansoor regard her despondently. When Fuad crawls toward her, his brothers gently grab hold of him, and the three return to a quiet game. Mother Fadhma, keeping her own counsel, moves farther down the hallway.

  Samira’s bedroom is empty, as is Laila’s, although the old woman expected to find her daughter-in-law’s door shut. Still, it is uncommon for the boys to be left alone in the house. She could have missed a note on the table by the front door and goes to check, but nothing’s there. In her own room she sinks into the softness of her bed and pulls off her scarf. She is relieved to have reached home without falling down. Leaning forward, she barely manages to unlace her shoes. She knows she is not far from when this simple task will elude her but not yet. She feels with her toes across the tile floor for her slippers, ignoring the pain in her ankles. The mattress creaks as she tries to stand up. Eventually successful, she continues her investigations into the rest of the house.

  She only has to reach the kitchen. Laila is slumped over the table. When Fadhma places a firm but consoling hand on her shoulder, the younger woman whimpers, “It was horrible.”

  Fadhma draws near. “Never mind,” she whispers. Emboldened by church, she wants to channel her strength of faith into the younger woman, but Laila dispiritedly shakes her head.

  “Umm al-Khanaazer as big as a house, and she was devouring her babies… Hussein was so upset. He left us at the farm and disappeared. I don’t know where he is or…” Uncertainty hangs in the air.

  “How did you and the boys get home?” Mother Fadhma masks her disappointment with a question. Whatever happened, this is a new low for her stepson who in the past would never have abandoned his wife and children. But it is not totally out of character either. Sometimes at his drunkest, Hussein has difficulty remembering who any of them are. It is Laila’s mention of the pig that Fadhma can’t let go of, but Laila continues.

  “Ahmad couldn’t take us. He was already behind for the weekend, so we phoned Mikhail and started walking on the road down toward town with one of Hussein’s men. A soldier—Mustafa?”

  Mother Fadhma is immediately
grateful; the young man returned her hospitality and safeguarded her family.

  “I couldn’t have done it without him.” Laila is breathing slowly. “He seemed to carry the boys off the mountain. As we walked down together, he told them not to dwell on the bad. They needed only to remember that their father loves them and will do anything for them. He said he knows this to be true because Hussein was like a father to him and his brother in the army. The soldier told us of his travels. The boys enjoyed his company, but still I worried about Hussein…” Her voice weakens again. “Then Mustafa cried out. He was cowering on the ground, initially, I thought, from some kind of attack. I’ve never seen anything like it. When the boys rushed to help him he yelled at them to leave him alone. He told us to get away while we could.”

  The wild, disbelieving look in her eyes suggests that Laila has her own doubts about what happened next.

  “But he wasn’t shouting just at us. He was talking to people who weren’t there—as real to him as I am to you.” Her eyes grow wide. “That’s when the boys and I ran away. Soon after, Mikhail came and got us. When the taxi turned around, the soldier was standing where we left him. Oh, Fadhma, what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know.” Because Mustafa assured her grandsons of Hussein’s love, Mother Fadhma feels a growing responsibility toward the soldier. Along with those she loves, she has already included him in a protective ring of candlelight. She also glimpses another shape in the shadows, rotund and snuffling. Fadhma has never been into speciesism, so she prays that all of them will survive the rising tide of terror.

  21

  Samira feels too wired to go home. She doesn’t want to say anything that would unduly worry her mother or, worse yet, rouse Laila’s suspicions. “Let’s go to the Internet café,” she suggests to Muna. “You were complaining about not being netted up. Here’s your chance.”

  “Great.” Her cousin nods appreciatively. “Can’t wait to check my e-mail and tell friends where I am.”

  The two of them cross the garden to a squat annex housing the Internet café, part of the larger building belonging to the Rest House. In an open-plan room with fluorescent lighting overhead, computers are arranged to make optimum use of the space, some facing each other or the walls, others with their monitors back to back. After the early-evening rush, many machines have been vacated. A few refugees from Syria and Yemen occupy those in use. In the café Samira purposely avoids scrutinizing other customers’ monitors. It is a simple courtesy on her part that she expects from others.

  She talks to the kid in charge. She knows Salameh’s family. He has been running the café since it opened. “We want fifteen minutes on two separate computers,” she tells him. As she waits for the codes, she inquires, “Anyplace you want us to sit?” The café’s variable access to cyberspace depended on the wind and the proclivities of the secret police. Salameh answers with a gruff jerk of his head and two paper slips. Samira leads Muna to the back, and as soon as a code is in her possession, she happily types away.

  Samira checks her e-mails but there is nothing except spam. Because she has been reading the Arab press and perusing political tracts, the websites she visits display banner ads for Syrian charities and the documentary about Edward Snowden.

  Muna eyes Samira’s screen, suitably impressed. “And all I get offered are sale T-shirts with ugly rhinos on them.”

  Samira goes to Facebook. “Nowadays you can tell who’s religious and who’s not, even when people don’t declare themselves outright.”

  “How’s that?” Muna is back again, perusing her cousin’s monitor.

  “By their reactions. Some Sunnis like L+U+V+Surie.” Samira shows Muna a Facebook page with a picture of Astro Boy in a keffiyeh and with an Islamic beard. “He is against the Syrian regime but a staunch supporter of the Bahraini royal family.”

  “Oh yeah,” says her cousin, who seems a little distracted but then focuses. “I read an article about the new housing constructed for Bahrain’s latest recruits, South Asian Sunnis hired to police the dissidents.”

  “Then there are Shias,” points out Samira. “On Twitter Iranians express regret over their country’s involvement in regional wars—Syria, Iraq, and Yemen—but Tehranis don’t care that their government is on a war footing. More Revolutionary Guards abroad means less at home to control ‘bad hijab’ women. It seems the religiously righteous are always behind violence. The real revolution should be one of tolerance and compassion, not in defense of the faithful but the rest of us.”

  “I keep asking myself,” Muna says as she goes back to her keyboard, “what happened to old-fashioned secularism? Less than a generation ago people thought there could be a political solution.”

  Samira, casting an eye over the room, is no longer listening. “One second.” She maneuvers through the café and wonders if she’s right. She stops alongside a computer. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  Mustafa peers up at her. He looks more unsettled than the last time they met, and that was only a few hours ago.

  “Hey,” he replies softly. On the screen in front of him is a lurid website on the dark web filled with bold Arabic script and hundreds of photos.

  “I thought you were with Hussein.” Samira is trying to sound and look casual.

  “I was.”

  He returns to the screen, and she notices the cotton jersey, the one he put on in their house, is soaked through with sweat. The soldier has been going through a rough patch.

  “What are you looking at?”

  After a long pause, Mustafa gestures at a picture in the corner of the page and hits the maximize button to enlarge the image. “My brother.”

  Samira leans in closer. The photograph shows a group of bearded men and boys in traditional clothing in the mountains of Afghanistan. They look at the camera like it is an imposition. More striking is that all of them, even the smallest, are armed to the teeth.

  “There’s Sayeed.” A young man with a slightly smaller build than Mustafa’s holds an old-fashioned Lee-Enfield. The person on his right clutches a ground-to-air rocket launcher.

  Samira’s finger lightly grazes the screen. “That you?”

  Before he can answer, there is a loud scraping of a chair, and a brash, jocular voice calls out, “My favorite…” Samira reaches down and strikes the quit function on the computer keyboard, and the webpage instantaneously disappears into the blue oblivion of the desktop. Composed, with a broad friendly grin, she turns and faces her uncle Abu Za’atar.

  “Amo, you’re the last person I expected to see. What brings you here?”

  “Research.” He darts about her, trying to get a better look at the computer screen. “And your friend?” He smiles at Mustafa. “Don’t think we’ve met.”

  Mustafa stands as Samira makes the introduction. “Ali and I know each other from college.”

  “So you were training to be a teacher too, at the women’s college?”

  Another hand is vigorously thrusted toward Mustafa’s. Muna gate-crashes the small group. “Hi! Don’t believe we’ve met.” She winks at him. “I’m Samira’s cousin from America. Just arrived from the land of the Great Satan!”

  Then shining her goodwill onto Abu Za’atar, she takes his arm and begs him, “Come and join me.” On the way back to her seat they begin an animated discussion on the dark arts of Internet bidding.

  Alone once more, Samira confronts Mustafa. “According to my brother, you need to keep out of sight. You should get out of here.” When he doesn’t react, she promises, “You leave first. Muna and I will catch up.”

  She coolly rejoins her cousin and her uncle. “Don’t mean to interrupt, Amo, but Mamma and Laila are waiting for us. See you at the wedding feast tonight.”

  Both girls give Abu Za’atar an affectionate peck on the cheek and depart quickly. Beyond the windows of the Internet café, they find Mustafa in the garden in the back. No one speaks until the café is out of sight and the streets empty.

  Samira addresses Muna: “
What made you come to our rescue?”

  “I could see you needed help,” Muna replies. She turns to Mustafa. “What’s happened to you?”

  With downcast eyes the soldier admits, “I must be suffering from…” He doesn’t continue.

  “PTSD.” Muna recites the letters as though quoting from a medical journal, then catches herself. “Oh, sorry,” she apologizes. “American soldiers who served in Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s all over the US news.”

  With his gaze still lowered he describes to Samira and Muna the walk he took with Laila and her two children. “I had a…” His voice trails off again.

  Muna, who has been watching him closely, finishes his thought: “An episode?”

  Samira understands now the reason for Laila and the boys’ upset.

  “I’m leaving.” He takes Samira’s hand and holds it gently—his warmth against her natural coolness. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  “I thought you were staying around a little longer.” She peers over her glasses up at him.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Well, good-bye. Again.” She looks long and hard at him. She will remember his intensity. But she doesn’t want his memory of her to be meaningless; she does care. “Listen, stay,” she won’t let his shy smile derail her. “Stay out of sight. Take the most direct route home. Talk to no one.”

  It takes everything in her to turn away and go with Muna in the opposite direction. Once the two women are beyond earshot, Samira sighs sadly and pushes the soldier from her mind.

  As they pass Sammy’s music store, Syrian rap blares from the loudspeakers: “Outside the tent there was talk about honor… about haram... I’m a woman not a slave…” Samira and Muna keep to the shadows away from the flashing signs of the Marvellous Emporium and skirt the deserted roundabout of Lovers’ Lane. Walking briskly through unfenced yards, the women emerge fifteen minutes later onto the unnamed dirt road. From the new house they can hear the TV before they see light flickering through the living room curtains. Samira pauses before the front steps. In all the excitement she almost forgot the letter. She checks that it is secure before running after Muna.