Mother of All Pigs

  “You, my dear, are a contortionist!”

  He is in fine form, his good and bad eyes glinting. Obviously something’s going on.

  Abu Za’atar reprimands her. “I don’t know why you don’t confide in me. I’m the only one in a position to help. Your mother won’t understand and Hussein is”—he gestures toward the garden—“a fool.”

  Samira is having trouble following him.

  “And if you do,” he promises, “the both of us will benefit enormously—you for your causes and me for me!”

  Samira finally understands her uncle’s strategy: first enticement, then the stick. “And what is it you want?” She is actually curious.

  “Your interesting friend—”

  “Is gone.” Even if she knew where Mustafa was, she wouldn’t give him up. “He was just passing through,” she comments, “so I’m afraid you’re too late.” However, because Abu Za’atar has declared an unqualified self-interest, she doesn’t hide her own: “And I didn’t get the chance to tell him how much I cared.”

  Abu Za’atar is crestfallen, amused, shocked, and guilty all at once. It occurs to Samira that perhaps the damage he intended to do has already been done. Once Mother Fadhma appears, perturbed by the sight of her daughter and brother in earnest conversation, he slips away.

  In the dining room waits an elaborate six-tier wedding cake from the European bakery in the capital. With all the guests assembled, Asaf lifts Anna’s veil and a cry fills the air.

  “Yabayeh! Yabayeh!”

  A low, gravelly voice that could have been mistaken for a man’s belongs to Umm Omar, who sings, “I put bracelets upon thy hands and a chain on thy neck.” The song is reminiscent of desert wastes and the lamentations that follow the birth of girls. Holding the knife, together the bride and groom are poised to cut the first ceremonial slice.

  With all the attention in the room on them, Samira takes the opportunity and sneaks outside, followed by Muna, waiting on the fringes of the party. The garden is empty; even the bartender is indoors. A man, slumped against a table inside the tent, casts a forlorn shadow against the canvas. Samira points out the silhouette to her cousin. Then, reminded of her uncle’s words, she investigates and discovers Hussein inside. Near his sagging head, on a side table, is a near-empty bottle of whisky. When his eyes momentarily clear and he tries standing up, he staggers as though the ground is moving beneath him. His chair becomes a raft.

  “Relax, brother.” Samira has seen him out of it before, but tonight he’s in really bad shape. Her hopes from the afternoon vanish.

  He regards Muna behind his sister. “Don’t you think our way of life is peculiar?” his sad voice slurs.

  “La amo, la, I’m fine.” Muna means it. “I’m glad I’m here.”

  “How different we are from you.” He draws his words out slowly. “I have seen the world and loved, but love is unpredictable. The more you love, the more you know, and knowing more leaves less room for respect. Here, we marry strangers and learn to respect them. The family sees to that. And love? Keep your loves for yourself.”

  A thin line of saliva trickles from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes glaze over as he slips into his private world of pain. Samira pulls her cousin away. She would prefer Muna not see Hussein like this, but he can’t be her priority at the moment. Outside the tent she tells Muna to join the party and promises to come soon, she needs a few moments to compose her thoughts. Alone, she surveys the garden and spies Mr. Ammar and his accomplice near the house. Samira walks over and thrusts the letter into his hand. Without looking, he places it in his coat jacket. He doesn’t thank her.

  “We’ve expanded our activities to include new people,” he states.

  “Like the contact I met this evening?”

  Mr. Ammar is noncommittal. As his friend moves off to keep watch, he says, “We need to talk. Is there somewhere private we can go? We have a car.”

  Samira chooses her words carefully. “This isn’t a good time. Can it wait?”

  He is either unsympathetic to her situation or doesn’t care. “No, tonight,” he insists.

  Begrudgingly Samira points to the hills above them that grow into Jebel Musa. “My brother’s farm is up there, a half hour by car.” She isn’t sure whether this is a good idea. If they do need to talk it will have to be out of sight. She will also have to be back before anyone misses her. Then she remembers Muna and demands, “My cousin has to come too.” She sees that her demand is not one Mr. Ammar expects, so she explains, “My mother won’t worry if we’re together.” Certainly the man is no fool and can understand the importance of a girl’s reputation in a small town.

  “All right,” he agrees. “We’ll meet you among the parked cars. We came late; the blue Nissan in the field is ours.”

  Samira reenters the Matroub house and collects Muna. Samira tries to make it sound like an adventure: “We’re going for a ride.” As they cross the front garden, she isn’t sure why she feels it but she does: the two of them are being watched. She doesn’t remember Hussein as they pass the tent. Outside the gate she gestures for Muna to slow down and Samira takes another good look around. A woman in a niqab and abaya loiters behind them at a respectful distance. Samira and Muna start off again. In the darkness, they nearly stumble into a couple lost in each other’s embrace. It is Dania and the boy.

  Parked cars line the driveway and spill into an adjacent field. As Samira attempts to pick out the car in the dark, the woman in the niqab brushes past and says in a barely audible voice, “Over there.”

  Samira takes in a sharp breath. Does she know this woman? The robed figure, complete with keys, unlocks the Nissan and issues a rebuke under her breath. “You should know better than to get into a car with a strange woman.”

  There’s no doubt in Samira’s mind. “Zeinab!” She doesn’t speak too loudly.

  “Took you long enough.” The sly voice belongs to the mischievous moonfaced woman, who furtively unhooks her face mask. Samira’s political mentor climbs into the driver’s seat and invites Muna to sit in the middle between them.

  “This is my American cousin,” says Samira, closing the passenger-side door.

  A small, delicate gloved hand reaches for Muna’s. “Welcome, cousin. Has Samira told you about us?”

  “Not much.”

  Once the car maneuvers onto the main road, Samira can no longer contain her excitement. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to come and tell you myself.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’m going back to Syria.”

  Her news doesn’t surprise Samira. This has probably been in the works long before she joined the women’s committee.

  “Why now?” Samira wants to know.

  “I feel I might be too late.”

  “Too late?” Muna inquires.

  Zeinab glances at them from the road. “I watched a news report about the last garden in Aleppo. A ten-year-old boy stopped going to school so he could help his father grow flowers and plants—there were roses—that they planted in the city’s roundabouts. It almost seemed normal except for the shelling, but the father was not afraid. He said it was like listening to Beethoven. Then a bomb killed him—a tragedy like so many others that left another child alone in a destroyed city.

  “Then my aunt phoned me from Syria. She was watching the evacuation of Daraya on the TV with two friends, a man and his wife, who left the district after a massacre by government troops in 2012. They were hoping to see the son they left behind in the fleeing crowds. In Daraya, the activists are unable to return to government-controlled areas. They’ll be imprisoned, so they’re fleeing to Idlib, Daesh’s stronghold in the northwest. Torture by the regime or enslavement by the jihadists, how can it be that these are the only two choices left for the Syrian people?”

  Zeinab’s smooth, open face fills with anger. “I can no longer stand on the sidelines. In my worst moments I believe there’s no difference between me and the Palestinian delegation, which bro
ke Ramadan fast with members of the regime in Damascus. They ate a lavish iftar while a few miles away my family and friends were starving, and still are, in Yarmouk Camp.” Her tone becomes defiant. “It’s time for me to dirty my hands or those brave people will have died for nothing. Their blood cannot be wasted.”

  Samira knows Zeinab is referring to the human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh and her colleagues from the Violations Documentation Center: Wael Hamada, Samira al-Khalil, and Nazem Hamadi. They had been verifying the identities of the dead, until they were kidnapped by a splinter Islamic faction in Douma. Zeinab was always trying to find out about them, asking people who had just come from Syria. Over a year ago she heard that the Douma Four had been sold to another front more extremist than the previous one. Then the trail went cold.

  “What are you going to do?” Samira asks her.

  “Whatever I can. We Palestinians have a history of woe, but we’re not the only ones at the bottom to be kicked.”

  Zeinab pulls the car abruptly to the side of the road, and Mr. Ammar and his companion get in. They had found a way from behind Matroub’s house and scrambled up the rocks.

  “Okay?” Zeinab peers through the rearview mirror, then checks with Samira for directions.

  “Follow the road. Near the top there’s a turnoff,” she tells her.

  Zeinab starts driving again. “There’s something I want to ask you—”

  “Not now,” objects Mr. Ammar, “wait until we get there.”

  Ignoring him, Samira whispers to her friend, “When do you go?”

  “Tonight.”

  Samira is stunned. “It’s too soon.” She tries not to sound upset, but her tone is terse; she is becoming increasingly anxious for Zeinab and for herself. She understands that it is selfish, but she relies on Zeinab and the other women in the committee. Without them she would be lost.

  The car ascends the hills above the Matroub villa. From the road’s edge, Samira can clearly make out the lights, the house, and the tent. She imagines the bride feeding cake into the mouth of her new husband, an experience she will never know. Her involvement with the women’s committee ushered in a new era of realism in her life, which banished romantic illusion forever. But the evening showed how easy it was to become enthralled once again with the dream of the bride.

  If their time together is short she has to tell Zeinab. Only she and the other women from the committee would understand. Leaning across her cousin, Samira admits quietly, so the men in the back won’t hear, “Tonight I came face-to-face with the ‘enemy within.’”

  Zeinab keeps her eyes firmly on the road. “I don’t know about your cousin, but you and I are susceptible to weddings.”

  From where Samira is sitting, she can see her leader smiling. It is a small consolation. Samira leans back, distraught. She glances out the window at the fairy lights from the Matroubs’ garden but she doesn’t see them. Her anxiety over Zeinab’s imminent departure clouds her vision. She also doesn’t notice a group of uninvited guests or the man they drag away between them.

  25

  The car leaves the road and heads down a dirt track toward a barn illuminated by a single bare lightbulb. Zeinab parks in a clearing, near a cluster of small buildings. The night is intensified by the singing of the mountain cicadas.

  Holding the door, Samira whispers as Muna gets out, “At least you’ll see the pigs.”

  Muna doesn’t think it’s funny. Wide-eyed, she is unsure of the darkness and Samira’s friends. She would like her cousin to tell her why they’re here. Or perhaps she hasn’t a clue, which makes Muna more apprehensive.

  Meanwhile Samira refuses to make any excuses for the farm. There is an awful rancid smell that cannot be concealed by any number of cigarettes Mr. Ammar and the bodyguard, who introduced himself as Uthman, smoke by the car.

  Mr. Ammar apologizes and leads Samira and Zeinab to the side of the barn and the light, where they settle on a pile of plastic crates. Mosquitoes mass in the yellow haze above their heads.

  Alone in the dark, Muna and Uthman stand awkwardly together. Aside from the fact that the man is no stranger to weightlifting, all Muna knows about him is his name. They could discuss his namesake: Uthman ibn Affan, the third caliph to rule after the Prophet’s death, collected Qur’anic revelations and inscribed them on camel bone and pottery shards. Vellum manuscripts did not appear until a century later. She would prefer talking about that than her anxieties. She has just met the bodyguard and she doesn’t feel she can trust him.

  The big man might have the same impression of her. Throwing down his cigarette, he moves toward the other end of the barn. In the gloom, Muna hears what sounds like a large wooden door sliding open. “Let’s look inside,” he calls to her, then vanishes.

  Muna stubbornly stays put until the electric generator has been located and fluorescent lighting reveals the open expanse of a barn crisscrossed and subdivided by all manner of pens.

  As she joins him, he whistles under his breath. “So this is the place!”

  Hussein’s business is not factory farming, although it is on a grander scale than Samira led Muna to believe. To the untutored eye, everything appears ramshackle. Some of the pens or stalls are blocked off with railings, others with wooden planks and strips of corrugated tin, but on closer inspection she sees that the enclosures are clean and well maintained. The feed is kept in burlap sacks stacked against the wall, and there is a dedicated soiling area. Uthman considers the pigs stirring in their pens.

  “I would have never believed it,” Muna says, astonished, as she takes in the animals and then Uthman. A man named after a caliph might have another opinion. His expression is one of amusement rather than outrage.

  “Personally I don’t care for them, but there are cousins on the other side of the river waiting for a shipment of pork. On this side we always wait—always—for guns.”

  “You mean your cousins?” says Muna, a little confused. He’s talking about his family?

  “Our cousins,” Uthman roguishly replies. “All Semites are related whether we love them or not.”

  The big man continues with his thoughts. “Some of the money from the pork sold there is siphoned off to purchase guns that are sold at even higher prices. It is the cycle of ever-increasing profit.”

  When Muna, mortified, doesn’t comment, he observes, “Now, I know you’re American.”

  “How can you tell?” This guy is getting on her nerves. Surely pig rearing is an unlikely setting for gun smuggling.

  “Naive and simplistic,” he informs her. “Americans are all the same. To them it’s always a binary equation: us against them. You feel better if one side’s good and the other is bad. Life is more complicated than that.”

  He isn’t finished. “My mother’s brother in Florida told me that every time a bomb goes off in the US, Americans assume that Arab terrorists are to blame. There’s violence on your streets, in your homes, in your schools and churches, and each time it’s our fault? The warm wind blows in from Mexico, the cold comes down from Canada, and there is nothing good in between.”

  “We suffer from the same thing,” Muna comments drily. “You don’t know my country and I am not familiar enough with yours.” She motions in the direction of the pigs sleeping huddled up against one another. “If anyone is living constantly under the threat of death, it’s them.”

  When one of the tiny bodies rolls over, the next one adjusts itself ever so slightly to optimize the use of space. Little mouths curve into tiny, toothless grins, the very picture of innocence and contentment. In the next pen, a heat lamp is attached to one wall. Tiny piglets, no bigger than her fist, press against it in an untidy pile of snouts and tails.

  She and Uthman stop in front of a subdivided pen holding five stretching and yawning boars, each in its own cell. The light woke them and they mill about, scratching themselves against the railings. As Uthman approaches they press forward, competing for the best spot. He touches a bristly forehead. “They’re hungry,” he call
s out.

  Muna doesn’t reply, transfixed by a corpulent backside of black-and-tan fur, covered in sharp ginger bristles, dominating the largest pen in the barn. Closer inspection reveals the shape and dimensions of an enormous sow with a snout as big as a bear’s. Over five feet long, with broad muscular shoulders, its tremendous bulk nearly fills the sty. On its side, the pig lays in imperious splendor. A milky liquid oozes from teats that cover a massive swollen underbelly; the same sticky substance has been smeared all over the pig, the straw, and the pen. The sight, combined with the smell, nearly makes Muna retch, but she doesn’t look away. The animal’s mouth is open, its eyes rolled back. A rippling movement in the blubber caused by shallow breathing indicates that it is alive.

  Muna murmurs out loud, “How disgusting!”

  Uthman comes up beside her. “So this is the famous beauty!” The mocking of Muna’s country has been replaced by curious admiration for a pig.

  As though on cue, a wave undulates through the humongous body and the head slowly lifts. Once the animal’s eyes turn, the stare is fixed and rigid. The pig groans. Low and menacing, part animal, part human, it sounds like someone being tortured or out of their mind. Wheezing and grunting, it strains to shift its weight in an effort to stand up, but the necessary equilibrium is, at first, beyond its control. With each attempt, the groans become louder. The piglets in the other pens, now fully awake, fidget. The larger ones paw the ground. The sow’s discomfort is having a visceral effect on the rest of the animals. Finally it pulls itself upright. Muna can’t tell which is worse, the pig’s terrible smell or its incredible ugliness. “What’s up with this one?”

  “You don’t know?” Uthman becomes effusive. “Let me introduce you. Umm al-Khanaazeer, Mother of All Pigs, queen of the sty, meet your cousin from America!”

  Muna, wrinkling her nose, turns away as loud voices breach the barn walls. Not everyone is in agreement outside. Muna can easily pick out Samira’s angry voice while the others attempt to calm her down. Peering at Uthman, Muna wants to gauge his reaction, but he appears uninterested; opposing viewpoints among comrades are nothing new.