Brooklyn Heights

by Miral al-Tahawy

  The Guest was a tiny, timid peasant woman with a green tattoo on her chin. The back of her hand was also covered with tattoos – a bride, a fish, and a lion. Her room always smelled of perfumed candles. She wove rope out of long strands of fibre and mended the holes in old clothes. Her dresses too were embroidered with tiny lions and fishes and dolls. Little Hend would crawl after her mother for half the day, crying and trying to catch hold of the hem of her long robe: ‘Mama sit. Mama dees’ (Mama sit down so I can nurse). And because her mother was constantly running around taking care of the housework, she would always send her to the Guest’s room. The Guest had no work to keep her busy. She would take the squirming Hend into her lap and stroke her back until she fell asleep. Or she would teach her how to stretch out her hand and feed the chicks and the baby ducklings with the leftovers from a carton. When the Guest died, they prayed for her soul: ‘Her hand was blessed . . . May God have mercy on her,’ adding, ‘if she bore witness to the One God before the Angel came to take her away.’

  Said her mother: ‘Your grandfather Muqawi was big and strong and bedded both slave and freewoman, Arab and non-Arab. But the peasant girl from the Coptic Estate – she was the only one who bore him children. May God rest her soul, if she truly testified before the Angel came for her.’

  And this was how Hend came to understand – after the Angel of Death had swept through their house – that the woman who had lived in that solitary room was her grandmother; a small peasant woman who came from the Coptic Estate, or ‘the White Estate’ in the days before the Nur Mosque (as the people called it), with its enormous marvel of a marble dome, had been built. She was a young girl with the ragged cloth belt of impoverished agricultural day labourers tied around her waist. One day the Chief of Bedouins with his regal headdress passed through the fields on his stallion and saw the delicate white flowers of the cotton plant blooming from that belt. He looked at the girl’s belly, puffed up with cotton blossoms, and straight away divined the auspicious signs of a fertile seed. ‘She will surely be the mother of a male child,’ he said to himself. ‘The Prophet himself – peace and blessings upon him – begat from a Coptic woman.’ Then he pulled her up by the arm onto his horse and rode off with her. The girl’s father, bent and filthy, ran after them brandishing a lump of the fecund mud in his hands. ‘With God’s blessings,’ he murmured, after the Sheikh placed a coin of pure gold in his astonished palm.

  She undid the dirty belt from her waist so that he could look upon the body that was like a piece of smooth white cheese. The body, rounded like a morsel of moist halva, surrendered to his touch. The grandmother – whose name would soon become ‘the Guest’ – bathed for the first time in a basin of pure copper and combed out the long, luxuriant hair that Hend would inherit. The fish tattoos flexed and gleamed in the water that streamed over her body and the servants sang to her from the other side of the door.

  Whose daughter is this in the village,

  you whose shawl has been caught?

  I’m betrothed to the Chief of Arabs,

  he whose uncle is a prince.

  The Chief of Bedouins disliked houses because of their low, cramped roofs. He lived in a large tent pitched in the middle of an open expanse of land. His wives lived in the compound in a series of adjoining mud-brick rooms that opened onto the sandy courtyard. On the other side stood a similar row of rooms, the kitchens and granaries. A group of palm trees stood between the two rows. The Guest was not given one of these rooms in the main compound. She was like a frightened she-camel and it would take her some time to settle down. The grandfather built two rooms for her alone up on one of the smaller elevations of Pharaoh’s Hills. She never visited the women down below and not once did she cross the perimeters of the main compound. She never witnessed the hustle and bustle of the kitchens nor smelled the pungent odours of milling day. She would hear the noise and guess at what was happening in the granaries. From a distance she would watch the shadows of the women running back and forth between the rooms. The Guest would sit in front of her house and wait for the young servant girls, pungent with kitchen odours, to come to her. They would step inside quickly and set her meal down with a perfunctory greeting, then run back outside without giving her a chance to exchange a single word. They never called her ‘Mistress’ or ‘Auntie’, only ‘the Guest’ or ‘the master’s foreign woman’, names that were a summing up of her place in the world.

  Her husband brought her precious gifts of Damascene silk and fine cotton cloth from Ashmun. Whenever loneliness crept upon her, she would run her hand over one of her black velvet gowns and, taking up the needle, begin to embroider its bodice with sequins and little bits of coloured glass. A rope on which she hung these gowns stretched along the length of the wall of her room. As time passed, the gowns piled up on the rope and it sagged like her breasts, from the burden of the heavy weight.

  She would perfume her gowns with incense and musk and lay them out in the eye of the noonday sun – to preserve them from moth eggs, or perhaps to provoke the envy of her co-wives. At night she would stuff their pockets with henna and basil leaves and stow them away under the mattresses to smooth out the creases. Then she would sit and keep watch on the gates of the high encircling wall from the corner of her eye.

  The Guest was not inclined to conversation. On the rare occasions when she did speak, she would tell the same story about the husband who owned a caravan of camels laden with wooden chests that travelled between Gaza and Khan Yunis. The chests were piled high with grain and they came back with olive oil and bars of Aleppo soap, robes of silk and Meccan velvet and Yemeni incense. The wives of this husband were many, she said, but it was she alone who mothered a male child.

  ‘As soon as I emptied my belly of an infant,’ she said, ‘I’d put him in the basket and send him to the big tent for his father to hold. The child would come back silent and listless every time, and after a night or two, his face would puff up and turn blue and then he would die. When the fifth boy-child came, I said to myself, “The evil eye can shatter rock.” I piled rags over the basket and said to the women, “The boy has died. He’s followed his brothers.” Then I placed him on my breast and he nursed, sleepy and soft like a ball of white cotton. Our Lady Mary came to me in my sleep and took him from my breast and plunged him in holy water and in the morning he was pink and white like a rose. The Saviour and the Virgin decreed that he should live when I feared he would go to the place the others had gone. Then I sent him to his father and he said, “God be praised,” and named him Ibrahim.’

  The Guest loved to exercise her nimble fingers. She loved to winnow cotton, peel garlic, and strip corncobs of their brittle husks. She twisted rope out of fibre and the wicks of kerosene lamps out of cotton and she wove mats out of strips of bamboo. If she had nothing else to weave, she would twist thin paper cones out of bits of old newspapers; these she used to light the kerosene lamps in order to save matches. On that hill opposite the tent of the Bedouin Chief, she would weave and sing and see after her hens. From time to time she would dip her feet into the running waters of the canal. She was a peasant and could not live without soil and animals.

  Little Hend would fall asleep in the Guest’s lap as she flung open the gates to her world of marvellous stories. She always began these stories in the same way. ‘If our house were close by . . .’ she would whisper, ‘if our house were close by . . .’ And yet she had no other house. Her house was their house. Hend would squat next to her as she emptied the cotton stuffing from the pillowcases onto the floor and spread it out in the sun, pulling it to make it light and fluffy like spun sugar. In the grandmother’s stories, the maidens endlessly laboured over the recalcitrant cotton, pulling and teasing it for the velvety smooth pillows that would receive the sweat of love and childbirth, and the tears of desertion and loss. The pillows that cradle our sleeping faces and catch our dreams at night should be soft and secret. Hend lay her head in the Guest’s lap and listened as she began to tell a story: ‘If my father�
��s house were close by—’

  ‘Where is your father’s house?’ the girl interrupted her. The Guest laughed as she tried to remember. ‘Near the village threshing ground? Past the Valley of the Angel? Behind the salt marshes on the White Estate?’ (The grandmother did not know that the White Estate on which she lived was now called the Mosque Estate.) She said, trying to pinpoint the very moment: ‘One day your grandfather, may he rest in peace, passed our way. I was standing there at the door of the house . . . sweeping the floor? No! I was picking cotton in the fields of the Bedouin tribes . . .’ She went on to tell the story of how he came and took her away on his horse and shut her up in a house with high walls. The Guest gazed at the open sky but she couldn’t tell east from west, and she didn’t know whether any member of her family was still alive. She still dreamt of walking along the bank of that faraway canal, of scrubbing her dress in the running water, and scraping the heels of her feet on a sieve at the top of a field planted with broad beans. She strung broad beans together in necklaces that Hend wore around her neck. Hend hopped around her grandmother like a rabbit and scurried off to run her errands. The Guest sent her from time to time to buy a few candles from Salim the druggist’s shop. When Hend returned, she plied her with questions about a long-ago world.

  ‘Is Salim still alive?’

  Hend nodded her head.

  ‘Does he still run the shop?’

  Hend shook her head.

  ‘Who’s at the counter?’

  Hend moved her lips lazily to form a brief answer. ‘His son.’

  ‘Is Abu Ma’tuq’s house still opposite Salim’s shop?’

  Hend didn’t know who Abu Ma’tuq was. She didn’t recognise half the names that the Guest remembered, but she nodded her head to assure her that everything was still just as it was in her imagination. The threshing machine still stood on the edge of the Bedouin field opposite the Muqawi Aqueduct and the migrant labourers still lived in the salt marshes. All those folk who peopled her memory – shop owners, carpenters, fishmongers – were still there, as she remembered them to be long ago.

  Hend had no idea why they called her grandmother the Guest, nor why her clothes were stowed away in a wooden chest as though she were forever on the verge of embarking on some voyage or other, or why she took out her velvet gown at the beginning of each season, perfumed it, then carefully refolded it and placed it back in the chest. Hend was mesmerised by the dark freckles stamped on her face, the same ones she had inherited along with her long hair, her short stature, and her dark and brooding disposition.

  She herself is still that same restless child, she muses, always looking for a suitcase in which to pile clothes grown tired of being shut up in closets, a travelling case that she can place under her pillow for safe keeping, a thing to be seized and whisked away in anger, a thing to rest her head upon in sorrow. In her dreams she sees the Guest passing her fingers over her palm and stroking the lifeline there. She laughs and says, ‘The way of Abu Zayd the Wanderer.’ Hend did not know then that her life would become a smouldering fire, a long exile, like that of the legendary Abu Zayd. Her restless spirit was no longer content with stories of fleet camels and noble steeds and fiery comets shooting through the corridors of the sky. The journey of winter and summer in those stories was not enough to plug the pit of fear in her heart. Hend slept in the Guest’s lap whenever she grew tired of the coarse, cruel pillows that refused to give up their tenderness. In the dream she would say to her:

  If my father’s house were close by

  I’d go and bring a plate of raisins

  for you to eat and then you’d pray over the beloved

  for all lovers pray to God to pray for the beloved.

  Sleep would overcome her and the dreams that followed would carry her across the seven seas.

  Then the dreams came true at a single stroke. Here she is now, walking down Flatbush Avenue without a map. She has come to know a good number of streets by heart. She spends her days sitting in front of the huge discount supermarket in which she often shops. She examines the store circular and compares. She’s learned the essential words by now, words like ‘savings’ and ‘coupons’ and ‘buy one get one free’. She walks through Greenwood Cemetery and examines the crosses on the tombstones and tries to forget the grandmother who lived in a small house on top of the hill and never once left it.

  The grandmother died hugging her wooden cross to her chest and was buried in the family crypt with the following epitaph: ‘The Guest, mother of children, God rest her soul and lead her into His vast gardens of Paradise.’ She left nothing behind but a small wooden chest in which she had packed her many dresses of satin and velvet embroidered with fishes and dolls, and a short rope on which had hung a gown of black velvet, fragrant and still, never once soiled by the dusty ground. In a smaller cardboard box she left a few candles and needles and bits of soap, while in the nooks and crannies of the room she had carefully placed a few stray strands of the hair that had fallen out over the years from pregnancy and childbirth, the death of suckling babes, and the endless days, both white and black.

  4

  South Slope

  Long ago, before Fourth Avenue became Fourth Avenue, the entire area was made up of Dutch farms spreading out over the fertile slope of eastern Brooklyn. The Saturday market is the last remaining trace of that distant world. It is a vegetable and poultry market, mostly frequented by artists shopping for natural or ‘organic’ foods and enchanted by the din and the air of nostalgia that hovers about the place. Hend likes the Fourth Avenue market because the prices are reasonable and she can bargain there. She likes to sit on the sidewalk of the wide avenue on Saturdays and watch the young women in the stiff brown wigs that hide their shaved heads going in and out of the Jewish synagogues nearby.

  She stares at their long black skirts and heavy coats curiously. They nod their heads shyly at her and sometimes they stop to ask if she is Jewish. She quickly shakes her head in the negative before they have a chance to hand her one of their fliers: printed invitations to visit the House of God. She prefers to steer clear of those kind of invitations. The sidewalk of Fourth Avenue is wide like a terrace and it hosts a second-hand market that they call a flea market in English. Things no longer wanted by their owners are piled up on the pavement for sale: kitchen utensils, old clothes and shoes, wooden boxes, framed paintings, photo albums whose owners are long dead, records with pictures of Elvis Presley, Liza Minnelli, or Frank Sinatra on the sleeve, antique cameras, entire libraries spilling out of their cartons, notebooks still carrying the imprint of their owners’ fingers. The most intimate moments of ordinary people transformed into stacks of abandoned memories, legacies to be picked over by cheerful amateur collectors once the bones of their former keepers have finally been deposited in Greenwood Cemetery. Hend likes to sit with her friend Emilia as she spreads out her wares on the pavement. Emilia knows all the styles and brand names of her old shoes by heart, and she prices them according to decade of origin: 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. ‘They call this stuff “vintage”,’ she tells Hend. ‘I don’t know why Americans are so crazy about it. Maybe it comes in handy for Halloween parties and such. All the young actor-types around town know me. They come all the way from Manhattan: “Hey, Emilia, I need a pair of Marilyn Monroe shoes.” Those crazy kids are always looking for outlandish things.’

  Hend passes through the South Slope district daily because her son’s school is nearby. She likes the wide streets and the way the meagre winter sun passes slowly across the sky above. She likes to watch the old women sitting out in the sun like her and trying to recollect the years that had vanished so quickly. She likes to sit on the wooden bench and watch Jojo tell fortunes from across the street. Emilia sits next to her and smiles. Her grey coat looks exactly like the one Hend is wearing. She’s short and thin, with a slight stoop. Her face is covered in fine wrinkles and tufts of white hair sprout from unexpected places, like her nostrils and the edges of her upper lip. Her eyes are sharp and al
ert. They look like two balls of fire, and when she opens her mouth wide to laugh she exposes a row of stained, broken teeth. She pulls her coat up around her when she sits down and takes off her shoes and socks to sun her feet. She moves her bare, swollen legs back and forth as though she were a child on a swing, and the downy hair that covers them gleams in the sunlight. Emilia likes to talk a lot, and when she gets started on the story of her long life it’s almost impossible to interrupt her. She keeps mysterious coupons in a cloth purse and organises them carefully so that she can find exactly what she wants when she needs it. She talks with great authority about how to save pennies and where to find the cheapest stuff but she also loves to philosophise about life.

  Hend met her for the first time at the library, at a talk about how the media shapes public opinion in the United States. Emilia was sitting in the front row because she was hard of hearing. She had simply removed the ‘reserved’ sign on the chair and sat down. Hend was sitting right behind her and, before the event had even gotten under way, Emilia started talking to anyone who would listen about the meaning of critical thinking. She said that she was a citizen of the former Soviet Union and that she had emigrated to America with her husband in the 1970s during the Cold War. Her husband – who had retired long ago – used to be a physics professor and he had come to the States as a political refugee. She talked about how she had lived her whole life in a country with an official state media, but that after twenty years of living in New York (she was now almost eighty years old) she had grown even more tired of the supposedly ‘free’ media here. It reminded her of the old Soviet days, the propaganda, the calculated manipulation of people’s tastes, thoughts, and choices. Now the only thing she watched was Dr Phil, and sometimes Oprah, while her husband preferred to watch the BBC. She had come to America without knowing a single word of English. She and her husband had moved into a mixed Russian and Latino neighbourhood, and she could have easily spent the rest of her life without learning any English at all. But she liked to listen to the tiny transistor radio that she took everywhere with her, and that’s how she learned to speak the language.