by Mai Al-Nakib
That would have been a mistake. Eighteen-year-olds Mish‘al and Mishari adored their mother. They were not happy to see her dead. They were devastated and, soon enough, would begin to feel as if their skin were being peeled off slowly, lemon and salt rubbed into their exposed flesh. The feeling of losing a mother. But there was a secret hidden beneath the ribs of their family, and their twin hearts beat wildly with excitement because they realized the age of vagueness was over. That second gulp was an acknowledgement between brothers that the years of living under the shadow of a mystery, a childhood of unanswered questions, nearly two decades of stories impossible to pin in place, were done. The golden age of certainty – what they craved more than any other thing, even more than a father – would dawn. They believed, as they had been led to believe by Mama Hayat herself, that their mother’s death would bring with it disclosure.
The family secret would be revealed.
* * *
Truth be told, the twins had not suffered in the early years of their childhood. On the contrary, until they were eight, they believed in the full glory of their lives. They lived with their mother in a typically Kuwaiti mud brick house overlooking the glowing waters of the Arabian Gulf. The thick, mostly windowless outer walls enclosed a charming open courtyard overrun with pots of purple and yellow flowers reaching out to the sun all day, then tightly folding up their petals in late afternoon. In the middle was a sheltering sidr tree ringing with sparrows and red-vented bulbuls. Bright rooms with windows and paned doors opened onto the central courtyard which could be seen from every corner of the house. The courtyard was bordered by a shaded, arched corridor surfaced with tiles hand-painted blue, green, and rust. Burnished teak beams, likely scavenged from one of the dhow-building yards nearby, supported the roof.
When it rained in late November, Mish‘al and Mishari would sit huddled close together on one of the wooden benches along the corridor and watch as muddy rivulets streamed down from the sidr tree to the four corners of the courtyard where the drains were located. It looked to them as if the tree were growing new roots before their eyes. They would convince each other that the normally placid tree, aggravated by the unfamiliar thunder and rare deluge, was planning to take over their home and that, in the dead of night, its roots would twist around their mother’s neck, their necks, and pop their heads off. Screeching with self-induced terror, the boys would jump off the bench and, each trying to get ahead by pulling back the other’s dishdasha collar, they would scramble madly to the kitchen where Mama Hayat could always be found preparing something unusual for them to eat – chickpeas and pine nuts simmered in molasses or crabs poached in red lentil broth.
The kitchen, like every other room of the house, was cooled by wind tunnels designed to suck in the sea breeze. Even during the hottest days of August, the temperature of their home remained tolerable, even pleasant, the tiles refreshing under their cracked bare feet. The sound of the wind wending through the rooms and corridors was constant, a familiar fourth member of their household. The family slept together upstairs in a loft with paned doors that opened onto a terrace. On summer nights, when the wind was still and the temperature hot enough to boil a pot of water, they would pull their mattresses out onto the terrace to sleep. From there they could see the silent black sea, flat as a mirror. When they looked down over the low terrace ledge, they could make out the shadows of their tree, and the brothers, feeling vulnerable in the night, never forgetting for an instant what the roots of that sidr tree might be capable of, would glance down frequently just in case. Spending the night on the terrace under the stars was part of summer life in Kuwait. In the days before air conditioning, everyone slept out on their terraces during the long, scorching months. It was like a slumber party to which the whole country was invited. Mama Hayat would tell her boys stories late into the night, making them giggle and gasp, allowing them to eat sticky, almond-stuffed dates in bed. They would fall asleep to the sounds of their neighbors’ snoring, their furtive whispers in the night. The sleepy trio would often blink open their eyes at exactly the same moment too early the next morning, stirred awake by the rose glow of the sun peeking over the terrace wall.
Mama Hayat told stories. She raised her boys under a steady drizzle of tales. A drizzle in the desert was a luxury the twins never took for granted. Mama Hayat’s tales were often amusing. In her kitchen, as she was busy concocting meals nobody else would think to put together, her stories would gush out forcefully, like black oil. In the middle of frying and grilling, boiling and baking, their mother’s narratives would rise and rise, so wildly hysterical they made the twins fall to the floor and roll around the courtyard, two rubber balls of uncontrolled laughter. But by late afternoon, especially right after siesta, Mama Hayat’s accounts would turn sad. She would speak in elusive fragments, puzzle pieces the boys would grab on to and try, over weeks, months, even years, to put together. Only rarely could they forge sense out of her afternoon words, a procession of slow, solemn beetles. She would say things like: “Ships arriving and sailing past. Yellow follows no logic. A mountain of courage. Lost compass. Two in a drum left behind. What becomes of after?” Her glazed eyes would gaze out at the tree, and the boys, squatting together at her feet, would stare at their mother, transfixed, baffled, echoing her words, hoping to lace logic into her peculiar utterances.
It might have been these confusing afternoon sessions that created in the twins the odd habit of unconsciously echoing each other’s words. It could also have been the fact that all during her pregnancy Mama Hayat had softly repeated to herself, “One becomes two. Two makes one.” She would mutter this as her hands tapped a waltz across her tightening stomach drum, a distended dance floor for her fingers. Who knows what floating eggs hear or what effect the outside has on the in, but a mother’s whispers, her incessant tapping, probably shape in unforeseeable ways. For twins, already uncommon, bagged together as they are, closer than close but with different fingerprints, the likelihood of an unusual outcome is no doubt doubled. Whatever the reason, Mish‘al and Mishari made statements always together, never separately. When they spoke, they sounded as if they were sitting atop a great, craggy cliff in Wadi Ram. The volume of their voices would decrease as the repeated portion of their statement or question shortened. A conversation with their mother might have gone something like this, with one of them starting and the echo bouncing back and forth between them:
“Mama, could we please have eggs for breakfast?”
“eggs for breakfast?”
“for breakfast?”
“breakfast?”
“fast?”
“st?”
“Not today boys,” Mama Hayat might have answered.
“But Mama!” Mish‘al would begin.
“Mama!”
“ama!”
“ma!”
“a!”
“Why not?” Mishari would complete.
“not?”
“ot?”
“t?”
“Because it’s blisteringly hot out. If you eat eggs on a day as hot as today, chickens will grow inside your bellies and, soon enough, you’ll be laying your very own eggs to eat. Two little egg boys you will become, round as cherries and unhappy as plums. Now, useful as two egg-laying sons would be to me, is that something you could live with for the rest of your long lives?”
“No, Mama, not especially.”
“ot especially.”
“ecially.”
“ally.”
“y.”
“No. I didn’t think so. For lunch you’ll be having chicken stuffed with fruitcake. For now, I’ll put extra sugar in your milk and tea.”
Mama Hayat never seemed to notice her sons’ echoed speech. Maybe it was because they were born to her this way, their earliest gurgles and babbles already ricocheting between them. In a vacuum, oddities instantly lose their oddness, idiosyncrasies are registered as normal. Mish‘al and Mishari spoke as one and their mother heard them as one. “One becomes two. Two m
akes one.” She believed this, had perhaps even made it so, and she lived with the sound of her boys’ voices harmonized inside her head. But when the boys left the vacuum of their small home, venturing beyond the mud brick paradise of their first eight years, the world outside was less oblivious. Pearl divers peering over the sides of their great, hand-built dhows, fishermen with shrimp-kissed baskets, gold-faced women selling henna from Oman and matches from Sweden in the covered souk, men sipping tea and gossiping together after maghreb prayer on the benches along the outside walls of the numerous diwaniyas along the shore – all were awestruck by what they heard, flummoxed by the flying trapeze act in language the twins performed without effort, without even, it seemed, awareness.
Uncanny repetitions generate discomfort. On seeing the boys striding through the streets in their clean, white dishdashas, men and women alike would blink hard or rub their eyes with their knuckles to remind themselves that they weren’t, in fact, seeing double but that Hayat’s boys were just out again. It could be that because nobody in town had seen the twins until the boys were eight, they simply had not had the time to grow accustomed to their doppelgänger effect gradually. Or, perhaps, the first shock of seeing little yellow-haired, fair-skinned doubles walking down the narrow, shaded lane one unusually cool October day in 1946 had simply been too much for the town to get over, so that even ten long years later, at eighteen, the boys still left behind them a wake of shaky bismillahs and a‘uthubillahs wherever they went. It was also possible that the real reason behind the perpetual unease felt by the townspeople whenever they caught glimpses of the twins was that it forced them to remember something cutting and nasty about themselves, something they collectively felt would be best forgotten. And on top of it all, when the people heard the twins’ strangely echoing speech, it took everything in their power not to reach immediately for a leather strap or slipper to knock two forcibly back into one, to pound to dust the jarring effect of having to face their own shame, not once but twice.
* * *
Mama Hayat had sworn to herself she would cloister her boys only until they asked to see the world beyond their walls. She was grateful for the eight years. She had expected five, six at most. Some may judge cruel the decision to keep children locked up, preventing them from playing with kids their own age, from exploring the edges of their town and discovering their own versions of adventure. But Mama Hayat knew from experience that cruelty lurked outside her walls, not within them and not within her. She worked hard to transform their home into a place where enchantment was possible for her sons. She embroidered a world of words for Mish‘al and Mishari. Her stories were threads of gold around their necks, her poems pearls tightly tucked in their closed fists. She sang old sea shanties to put them to sleep, her voice lilting through the house with the wind. Even her recipes transformed the bland, repetitive ingredients available to her into lush, intricate meals it often took the boys days to figure out. Guessing ingredients was one of the games they would play with their mother while she sipped istikans of tea, filling the time after lunch and before siesta.
“Fish, rice, and cardamom?”
“ice and cardamom?”
“ardamom?”
“mom?”
“Not fish. Not rice. Not cardamom.”
“Wheat, chicken, cumin, and coffee?”
“cumin and coffee?”
“and coffee?”
“offee?”
“ee?”
“Coffee, yes. Wheat, chicken, and cumin, no.”
Until their mother’s lids would begin to droop, slow as melted sugar, the boys would shoot out as many combinations as they could, hoping to hit the mark.
In this way, Mama Hayat kept her sons curious and smart. She taught them to read, and they spent hours every day poring over the Qur’an. They also read chunks of novels, poems, and articles about places, people, and objects they had never heard of, in pages left at the foot of their mattress once a week. They didn’t ask their mother how the stacks of ripped and crinkled pages got there. There was no one other than Mama Hayat; it had to be her. Still, they liked to keep open a crack of mystery, a flicker of someone (their father?) or something (the roots of their tree?) sneaking up into their room at night, leaving piles of mysterious paper clues for them to pore over. One thing years of isolation had produced in the twins was a leaping imagination. This, as they would learn once they left the protective walls of their little kout, or fortress, was rare in Kuwait and gave the townsfolk yet another reason to mistrust Hayat’s unusual offspring.
Mish‘al and Mishari learned instinctively, as children do, never to question their mother about their father. They tried to solve the riddle of their conception through traces they felt were everywhere to be found – in their mother’s post-siesta murmurs, in her poems and stories, even the funny ones, in her food, in the pages left at the foot of their bed, in every corner of their safe home. They had not asked to creep out into the world because they had always figured it was the world inside that held the answers. Mama Hayat made them feel that way, and for the longest time they hadn’t even realized a world outside their walls existed. When they were four or five, they began to notice that late in the evenings their mother would fold her layers of sleep dress around her body and steal down the stairs. They would hear the unfamiliar cluck of the heavy padlock, the creak of the lazy front door, and the sound of their mother whispering urgently to someone whispering back. They did not, at this juncture, begin to prod Mama Hayat about letting them out. But they did begin to ask indirect questions about the padlock, the voices of neighbors, the steady arrival of supplies. They knew about fathers from their mother’s stories and their own reading, and they would wonder about the invisibility of their own.
* * *
Hayat’s story was not a complicated one. It had to do with an illicit relationship and the crossing of unmarked but widely recognized lines in the sand. The blond hair that covered the round heads of her boys was not a result of albinism. Their hair was fair because somewhere in their genetic tangle, blond was strong. In 1937, the year Hayat met the father of her boys, Kuwait was overrun with oil diggers, many of them blond and British. Though they would set up camp in the desert and stay mainly out there, sometimes they would come down to the water’s edge to coax the dust from underneath their nails, from between their knotted strands of hair. They would saunter into town, into the souks, to remind themselves of chatter and bustle, to purchase coveted tobacco and kerosene, black ointment for boils, pomade to keep their hair in place. Kuwait was a port, a fishing and pearling town. The menfolk were regularly at sea, gone for months at a time, so the womenfolk often found themselves without male guardians. They took advantage of their autonomy by going out to select on their own the freshest flapping fish on the market, the longest grains of rice, the prettiest patterned cloth. Some of the women – widows, grandmothers, those with insistent mouths to feed – even started to sell everyday essentials themselves, displaying their wares on small square mats on the ground of what would come to be known as Souk al-Hareem, the women’s souk. Kuwaiti women were used to dealing with traders arriving from Oman and India, and they were not shy about negotiating bargains. White men in search of scissors, thread, nails, locks, or matches would come to Souk al-Hareem to pick up what they needed and to stare curiously at the women covered in black selling to them, searching out their heavily kohled eyes. They were startled when these women stared back, when girlish giggles erupted from under the black cloth, when they felt themselves, incredibly, being flirted with. The women of Kuwait were headstrong. Staying within the confines of their closely built homes was out of the question.
Hayat was one of the Souk al-Hareem vendors. She had grown up an orphan. She may as well have grown up a prostitute or the daughter of a prostitute. Like twins and the mentally unstable, orphans were not well regarded in old Kuwait, and orphan girls were especially suspect. Orphans were viewed as rivals, trouble-makers, takers with nothing to give. They were at be
st snubbed or scorned, at worst beaten or otherwise abused. The difference between Hayat and the sorry lot of parentless children she grew up with in a dilapidated building at the edge of town was that she owned property and had a good bundle of money set aside, and everyone knew it. Since her land and her money were held in safekeeping by the town mullah, an old and honest friend of Hayat’s father, nobody could weasel it away from her, though many tried. Like Hayat herself, Hayat’s parents had been only children. The two had been unnaturally close, had loved each other ferociously, so the rumors went, and, one orange afternoon, had floated out to sea together on a small boat never to return. Their bodies had not washed up on shore, and none of the many ships passing in the area had sighted the lost vessel. Hayat, at four, had found herself very suddenly alone, without parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins, without a friend in the world.
As far as Hayat was concerned, her childhood was sealed, off-limits, unmentionable. Nobody in town ever spoke to her of her vanished parents, and she never spoke to them of her dismal early years. At eighteen, when she moved into her home, the home that had once belonged to her father, and collected her inheritance from the old mullah, she decided the best way to proceed was discreetly. She quietly hired able hands to work for her – whitewashers, tilers, carpenters aplenty – but she did not open her doors to the neighborhood women or the gossips, not to the pious or the well-meaning or the simply curious. She wanted the bridge to the outside, to alliances of camaraderie especially, burned forever. Hayat’s easy confidence was enough to repel would-be companions anyway. Her flagrant independence, deemed a threat, promptly became a source of acute envy. She walked through the streets with wide strides, routinely leaving behind the customary black cloth or gold burka so she could raise her pretty cheeks to the sun. No father, brother, uncle, or husband was around to tell her that such a thing simply was not done. She walked directly to wherever she wanted to go, never stopping along the way to visit with inquisitive neighbors. The townsfolk wondered whether anyone would ever stoop so low as to marry the brazen orphan girl. Wives, worried their husbands might be tempted to take Hayat on as a second, filled their ears with tales of her unruliness, her wayward conduct, never suspecting their words inflamed rather than dampened desire.