Brooklyn Heights

by Miral al-Tahawy

  But Hend did find a husband, at least for a few years. She had a baby, she sprinkled perfume on her pillowcases, she kept her supple skin smooth and inviting. She diligently followed all the instructions that she had pored over as a young girl, in articles with titles such as ‘How to ward off marital boredom and keep your husband by frequently changing the colour of your underwear’ and ‘Learning the difference between acceptable and unacceptable jealousy’. But all these recipes led to the same dead end that her mother had long ago predicted. The simple fact was that she was ‘no good’, and that she didn’t understand the first thing about life or men.

  The history of that short-lived marriage was summed up in an endless string of domestic spats involving slamming doors and hurtful expressions. These verbal skirmishes evolved soon enough into packed suitcases and copious tears and neighbours spying and friends intervening. That was when a simple truth, clear as the light of day, gradually dawned on her: one of them had to choose the best way out.

  One morning, her husband took a shower, splashed on his favourite cologne, carefully chose a pair of white cotton boxer shorts still soft and velvety like a first night of passion, stuffed a pair of black silk pyjamas and some condoms into his briefcase, then walked out the door and never came back. A few months later, Hend put everything that still belonged to her into a few suitcases, covered the furniture in plastic sheeting, and left with her bags in tow. From her husband she inherited a visa for the US, a child, and two suitcases containing the smallest and lightest of his toys. And this was how they ended up in a tiny apartment on the corner of Flatbush and Fifth. Her father used to say, ‘Whatever the north wind brings, the south wind takes away.’ And here she stands now, wretched and alone, in a place where the four winds mightily converge. The women around her – some younger, most older – who come from all over God’s mysterious lands look exactly like herself in ways that are painful, frightening, and comforting at the same time. Every day she crosses Grand Army Plaza to go to the subway station or the Public Library. She likes to go to the Library to look at the pictures of famous writers whose ranks she dreams of joining. They comfort her high up there on the walls, because they, like her, one day discovered that life is not beautiful. She moves past Hemingway’s portrait and shyly sits down next to some people who seem much more at ease than herself. Above the table there is a poster with the words ‘Learn English’ printed on it. Next to the poster hangs a black-and-white photograph of Albert Einstein, underneath which is written, ‘Einstein was a refugee too.’

  ‘My name is Hend. I came here from Cairo – why, I don’t exactly know. I’m trying to learn English. I love the Arabic language. I used to be an Arabic teacher. I feel really shy whenever I have to speak in English. Even the words I’ve learned properly I seem to pronounce in a way that no one can understand. I like to go to places where cultured people gather, and I pretend to be one of them though I don’t really understand what they are talking about. I sit on a chair in a far corner so that no one bothers to ask me anything and I don’t feel the need to say anything. The expression, “Excuse me, what did you say?” which I hear all the time, makes me freeze. I have a serious problem communicating with people. I know that Pluto is in the House of Capricorn – meaning in the seventh house opposite Cancer. This is the house of tolerance and compassion. Maybe that’s the reason people don’t understand me – because the opposing energy of Pluto is facing my zodiac sign. I feel my stupidity and ignorance more than at any other time in my life. I feel that I have to re-think so many things.’

  The others introduce themselves simply and clearly.

  ‘Fatima from Mali. Twenty-four years old. I grew up in France. I came here to visit family. I’m a salesgirl in a store.’

  ‘Faridnaz, Pakistan. Twenty-two. Recently married. I came here to join my husband.’

  ‘Alejandro from Peru. I’m a building superintendent.’

  ‘Nazahat. I’m from Bosnia. I used to be a doctor. I’m fifty-five.’

  ‘My name is Dawij. I come from Haiti. I’m eighteen years old. I clean houses.’

  ‘Said. My name is Said. I’m an Egyptian Copt. I’m a limousine driver.’

  They always change. Some come and some vacate their places for new ones to come. After class, they peddle cosmetics and cleaning detergents. The informal introductions are always much simpler. With her they exchange truncated sentences, as though she were an outsider, not belonging. Some of them ask her in bad Arabic: ‘Is you Muslim?’ She nods her head happily, longing for connection, a few friendships or acquaintances to pass into her life. She talks about her country and tries to pinpoint its location for them somewhere between Israel and Mecca – those two poles of strategic interest in the region. She is forced to show her own ignorance when she asks about the location of Haiti or Peru. In the end, they exchange the useful titbits of information gleaned by exiles and immigrants: the best places to shop cheaply, job openings, where to find soup kitchens and welfare offices, rental prices for apartments or single rooms, and short, cheap excursions to places like Sheepshead Bay near the end of the subway line, where the exiles sit on benches by the sea that reminds them of other ports and waterways. They spend the endless time on their hands fishing in the ocean that separates them from their homelands. They watch the passing ships and gaze at the Statue of Liberty in the distance, the Verrazano Bridge, and the contours of New Jersey. They smoke cigarettes and talk about the motherland and things like visas and health insurance and social security.

  In class she gets to know a lot of Arabs who have recently arrived from Morocco and Algeria, Sudan and Yemen. They never speak to her in Arabic: ‘I speak colloquial,’ they say, if she tries to draw them into conversation. They chatter together in bad English and claim that they know next to nothing about each other’s countries because the Arab world is so big and wide and very different. She tries to believe this, and she tells them that she’s an Arabic teacher, that Arabic is an endangered language, a language that is slowly dying out, but she clings to it because, unfortunately, she tends to get insanely attached to things and love defies forgetfulness.

  She clutches her papers and crosses Flatbush, talking to herself. She often talks to herself in that obscure, whispered, endangered language that makes passers-by stare at her. She sits on the wooden bench in front of her son’s school, sipping coffee, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for him to come out. The cold pierces her to the bone and the cigarette doesn’t warm her up. She muses on the cold piling up in layers around her face, turning her into a tired, autumnal woman, a woman naked and alone who resembles no one. He comes towards her slowly, gingerly, and he doesn’t kiss her. He gently puts his hand in her hand and they walk side by side, keeping pace. Mother and son are almost the same height. He startles her with questions to which she has no answers.

  ‘Mom, you didn’t do your hair.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You look strange these days. Why don’t you put make-up on any more?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t have time.’

  ‘You just don’t care how you look.’

  ‘The important thing is that I care about you. What did you do today?’

  ‘We had a demonstration and we made signs saying Change, and we had a food strike.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The food in the school cafeteria is awful. Every day it’s the same thing. So we all complained and we wrote a letter saying that we want pizza and hamburgers and ice-cream instead, and we waved pictures of Obama with Change written on them. You have to change too, Mom.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Your hair, for example. The way you look. You know . . .’

  ‘So you don’t like your mother any more?’

  ‘No, it’s just that you have to change. You’re always sad. Sad,’ he repeated in English.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But Mom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When you change the way you dress and everything, you have to promise me that
you won’t love anyone else. You can go out with your friends and have fun – you know, you can hang out with them.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘But if one of your friends asks you to go out on a date, you have to say no. Date means you have to get married and stuff, and I don’t want you to love anyone else.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’ll always keep on loving you, but in high school I might start doing dates and go out with a girlfriend!’

  ‘Okay, when we get to high school we’ll figure it out.’

  ‘But I’ll never ever leave you, and I’ll always visit you. You can even live with me when you get old and stuff.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll get old and wrinkly and die.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to get old.’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘Or die.’

  ‘Alright, then, I won’t.’

  2

  Bay Ridge

  Flatbush Avenue is crossed by many streets. She travels the vast length of Flatbush alone because for the longest time she was too shy to go into any of the many Arab cafés and restaurants by herself. She takes him by the hand and walks along the boardwalk, watching the small ferries crossing the Narrows. She walks till she can no longer feel her feet moving. She wants to get rid of those extra pounds and the din of the thoughts crowding and jostling in her head.

  ‘I know this street by heart,’ he says in a thin, irritable voice. ‘I don’t want to go to Bay Ridge again. Please.’

  She can’t leave him at home by himself and he can’t keep up with her long, hurried strides for miles on end. Sometimes he insists on staying home: ‘I don’t want to go to Bay Ridge!’ And when he does go with her, the sacrifice is inevitably tied to a long list of demands: ‘If I go with you, can I . . . ? Can I buy . . . ? Can I have . . . ?’ The older he gets, the more he reminds her of his father. The older he gets, the more she begins to realise that they are each moving in opposite directions, and that she will have to let go soon.

  On her way to Bay Ridge, she passes through many different ethnic neighbourhoods. There’s the Mexican area, where doors are never shut fast and people sell home-made ice-cold drinks from hospitable stoops. The women have skin the colour of wheat and thick black hair like her own. They cross the threshold of middle age in bright colourful clothing that bares their full, sated breasts. Playing children dart and weave around them. She watches the unemployed day labourers standing in groups on the wide sidewalks, waiting for work with tool kits in hand – ropes, bits of iron, small axes, garden shears. Rough hands and sturdy muscles ready to carry and move and fix just about anything. They look a lot like the day labourers she used to see scattered in squares and on the narrow sidewalks of her own country. They too wait patiently for small jobs that may or may not materialise. They sit here and there in circles, rubbing their rough hands in slow, relaxed, almost ritual motions, sharing cigarettes and coffee and cheap street-food, staring down the unknown with fierce, defiant eyes. She’s afraid of these gatherings, which are always pregnant with the possibility of sudden, mysterious fights breaking out, trivial skirmishes with passers-by, or conspiratorial whispers that end in heckling a passing woman like herself with the short dark hair of their sisters, and a child in tow.

  On her walk she passes the cemetery that sits on top of a hill and looks down upon a huge church. She is fond of the plaster virgins that stand in front of the houses of this neighbourhood. She feels that she herself is frozen, like them, in some dimension or other, with that same expression of martyrdom. She likes the atmosphere of the cemetery and the colourful bouquets of plastic flowers. She likes to see the old women sitting in rocking chairs on their porches. Their friendly greetings always take her by surprise. The Latin neighbourhood is much gayer. Beautiful mulatto women noisily bustle around houses whose front rooms have been turned into small restaurants. In the evening many of them are transformed into schools or dance halls for salsa and tango. The smell of the great trade in temporary joy wafts out from around them: music, warm bars, the dancers vying to demonstrate their talent, and the scent of intoxicating green smoke drifts through the places of buying and selling.

  She’s never had the chance to linger into the night there. He always pulls at her clothes to drag her away as though in fear of the spectacle of bodies coming close together in the dance. He would pull her by the hand in the direction of the bus stop and then begin his interrogation.

  ‘Mom, do you love me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you’ll never leave me?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go home.’

  *

  Her father’s house was like no other house. As a child, Hend would wander around the village and peer at the dark clay houses that opened onto long corridors and narrow alleys. Their roofs were made of straw piled in high mounds and the walls were left unpainted. Through the open doors she could see interior courtyards and cowsheds, or large ceramic urns and clay braziers with a teapot or a few potatoes perched in their smoky bellies. On cold nights, cats – and sometimes people – would climb up to sleep on the warm stone ledges of these ovens. The doors of all the houses around stood open to her gaze. On her walk, she could see all their nooks and crannies: the plastic bamboo mats for sitting and sleeping, the noisy play of children, men and women gathered in the rituals of dispute and forgiveness.

  The streets were dry and dusty in the summer and full of sticky mud in the winter. She walked along them on her daily trip to the mosque and she watched the women pour the dirty washing water out in front of their houses. The smell of cooking wafted out from kerosene stoves, and the smell of dung and laundry detergent filled the air. In the mosque’s interior courtyard she contemplated the tall eucalyptus tree that stood next to the wooden bier on which the dead were washed in preparation for burial. She passed the power station, the municipal registry of births, and the local threshing machine. She heard the loud rhythmic sound of the gears grinding in its guts, and the clamour of the women crowding around it. She passed the village’s only public drinking-water faucet, fixed above its stone basin. On her way to the Muqawi Primary School, she saw lots of things.

  She is certain now that their house was not like any of the other houses. Her father’s house was surrounded by a sturdy mud wall covered with coloured chalk pictures of camels, litters, and caravans travelling to Mecca with drawn curtains. The drawings, smudged now by rain, were a record of her family’s descent from a tribe of grandfathers whose ancestors bestowed the precious linen cloth from the Land of the Copts upon the sacred Ka’ba. They were meant to bear witness to the long-ago voyage of a pilgrim who had saddled his camels, gathered his men, and ridden the sea to cross over to those blessed shores, and then safely returned from the land of God’s chosen prophet. In the middle of the wall stood a huge gate, once stately and imposing but now battered by time and patched up with wooden planks. Inside the walls, an avenue of eucalyptus and flame trees led to a number of small, adjoining clay rooms. An old Cadillac inhabited one of them and the others were all empty like abandoned train cars. The grandfather’s wives were once housed in those rooms – the pure-bred Arab Bedouin woman, the noblewoman descended from the Prophet’s line, and the Coptic wife. Her father inherited these structures, like everything else, from his father, and the empty clay rooms were eventually used to store grain and feed. It was the ideal spot for games of hide-and-seek. Her mother sent the children to play there whenever visitors came.

  Their house was not beautiful. A flight of steps ascended to a large balcony that led in turn to a vast, bare reception room, empty of furniture because ‘furniture is so easily broken’. Her mother would spread a rush mat on the floor in the summer and a woven wool carpet in the winter. In this wide-open space the children ate and ran around and did battle. With the seasons the family moved from the western balcony to the eastern balcony and from the summer room to the winter room. The reception room was usually reserved for guests, and the door to her fa
ther’s room was always shut fast.

  Her mother would sit on the balcony and dream of a new house like the many-storeyed houses of the village with commanding views of the world inside and out. She once plucked up her courage and told her husband of her dreams: ‘I wish I could live in a house like that of my noble uncle Lamlum.’ Her father, who had just taken the last sip of his bottle of beer, twirled his moustache ironically and replied, ‘God bless him, my dear. He’s the son of Bedouins just like us – or was he born with the mark of prophecy on his shoulder?’ Her mother, who usually avoided talking about her distant uncles, turned her face away from him in silent anger.

  Just once, upon the death of the uncle in question, she took Hend with her on a trip to that faraway house. Her mother spent half that memorable day washing, ironing, and brushing her black mourning clothes, and rummaging through her remaining jewels and perfumed handkerchiefs in musty drawers. In a picture-perfect image, like a photograph preserved in an old family album, she turned to adjust her husband’s tie as Hend stood watching in her crisp blue dress and shiny white ribbons.