Emilia talked on and on without pausing once. The panellists looked at each other in dismay and wondered who was going to be the one to gently put an end to her homily on American television and radio. No one dared. She was a forceful speaker, and always on high alert against any attempt to shut her down. People in the audience began to drift off, one after the other, some quietly, others muttering angrily, until no one was left except for Hend, who remained sitting right behind her, waiting. That was the beginning of their friendship. Emilia’s easy, undemanding companionship was soothing to Hend, and Emilia grew attached to Hend because she listened to her quietly till the very end, and went along with her to book discussions and lectures. Emilia always came up with clippings and fliers advertising upcoming events of that kind, and she meticulously noted dates and times and venues in a little notebook that she kept for the purpose. She often called Hend to invite her to this or that event. The two women enjoyed each other’s company.
Emilia’s husband hated going out. He liked to cook and do the housework as he listened to his favourite classical music. He worshipped peace and quiet and so he never gave Emilia the chance to open her mouth.
Emilia waits for Hend every morning on the wooden bench in front of the green market on Fourth Avenue. Together they soak up the thin sunlight and drink coffee out of paper cups. They watch the passers-by and exchange food coupons and news about free events or classes: dancing and cooking classes; street fairs and cultural festivals: the Middle Eastern Festival, the Brooklyn Jazz Festival, book signings at the library, and so on.
They sit together in silence, like carbon copies perched on a paradoxical wooden bench. They gaze out at the stingy winter sun. Emilia begins to lay out the coupons that she doesn’t really need. She gives Hend the ones for diapers and baby food. Then, as though suddenly remembering something, she asks her, ‘How old is your son?’
‘Eight,’ Hend replies.
Emilia takes the coupons back from Hend and puts them in her purse. ‘Okay. Take this instead.’ But Hend refuses.
‘You’re still young, you can use this stuff.’
Hend shakes her head again. ‘I don’t need them any more.’
‘You’re still young. It’s only temporary.’
‘It stopped years ago.’
Emilia nods her head sympathetically. ‘I got menopause when I came to this country. I was still young back then . . . fifty-seven years old.’
Hend just nods her head and doesn’t say anything. Emilia gets up all of a sudden and crosses the street to her Mexican friend Jojo’s storefront. Jojo is Abd al-Karim’s ex-wife, and she tells fortunes now. A sign hangs in the glass window: Your fortune told. Palm readings, zodiac, tarot.
Hend sits there on the bench by herself, clutching coupons for sanitary napkins that she doesn’t need. Her eyes fall on the spider web of thin varicose veins that has sprouted on her leg. She slowly tears up the coupons into small pieces and drops them into the empty coffee cup.
Emilia comes and goes, for no particular reason, without hellos or goodbyes. Now she comes back and sits next to her again, picking up the threads of a conversation that she alone can begin and end. She smells like all old people: an obscure, undefinable smell that time deposits without making any excuses. Hend knows that smell well from her childhood days, when she used to trail around after an old woman who worked in her father’s house. People used to call her Grandmother Zaynab from before anyone could remember. Grandmother Zaynab was chocolate brown but when she stood in front of the clay oven in the courtyard her skin took on the colour of dry crusty bread. She would spill a pail of washing water over her bare neck and chest, which were burning hot from the stinging flames of the oven, then wet an old rag in the pail to wipe down the oven rack. A small woman squatted behind her to help her with the baking. As soon as Grandmother Zaynab eased a loaf into the mouth of the oven, she would say, ‘Hand me another one, sister,’ and the woman would scoop out a round lump of dough in the palm of her hand and place it on the bread paddle. The balls of dough were magically transformed into perfectly formed loaves of bread as they came out of the oven’s mouth.
Grandmother Zaynab was not her grandmother. She was no relative at all. Her voice rang with that Delta accent that distinguished the outsiders from the Bedouin. Her official job was to bake the family’s weekly bread but she would also come to prepare for the dough-making ritual. She washed the wheat and spread it out on bamboo mats, scented it with grains of fenugreek and lupine and rough corn, and carried it on her head to the distant mill. She kept the keys to the grain storerooms, scrubbed the kneading basins, and collected the dry tree leaves to fuel the oven. Every Friday she came to sprinkle the corners of the house with blessed herbs and water and salt, murmuring invocations against the evil eye of the enviers: there is no might or grace save in God. She gave the people of the house enchanted water to drink to chase away mischievous spirits and prepared steaming earthenware pots of pigeons and rice on feast days like Ashura and Ragabiya and the first of Sha’ban. People said that her hand was blessed. She would dip it in olive oil and rub her mother’s constantly aching back, or set the sprains and fractures of the boys who were always tripping and falling and breaking bones from bouncing off the walls. Grandmother Zaynab was not their servant. There was nothing about her that suggested this. She worked in other houses besides theirs, delivering babies and tying the umbilical cords of newborns, treating aches and pains with ointments made from camphor and linseed oil and applying plaster with an agile and practised hand. Her forehead boasted a green tattoo in the form of a fish. Another plastic fish hung from a cord around her neck and the same green fishes also decorated her wrist. Her nostrils were split from the weight of a ring that had once ornamented her nose and left behind a sharp vertical slash.
Grandmother Zaynab’s hair was like white cotton candy. She used to rub the parting with soft butter to make it shine. She moved through the house like a length of thin, dry, hollowed-out sugar-cane, a heavy anklet of pure silver clasped around one skinny leg. She lived in a mud hut that had been built against the wall of the baking rooms. Hend used to climb the low wall straight into the heart of Grandmother Zaynab’s house. ‘Grandmother, Mama wants you.’ A little while later, Grandmother Zaynab would come to the house to milk the cows and make the cheese and collect the eggs and check up on the duck sitting on her chicks. She packed the coals into the water pipe and the thick smoke crept out of her split nose as she laughed. ‘The pipe chases away the ghouls in your head.’
Grandmother Zaynab regularly attended Sheikha Safina’s weekly exorcism. She put on her green gown on Thursday market day and wrapped her head in a white scarf. She came back from the market and laid her bundles down on the ground. ‘I’m going to the dakka,’ she would curtly inform them. ‘I’ll see you later.’ She disappeared from high noon to sunset and always came back exhausted and speechless. She would lay her body down in the western balcony and passers-by would hear her talking sleepily to her invisible qarina.
When Hend went into the baking room that day, all she wanted was to watch the soft, hot bread coming out of the burning mouth of the oven. ‘Give me a little one, Grandmother,’ she murmured, mesmerised by the movement of the bread paddle sliding the soft dough into the oven. A ‘little one’ was a miniature loaf of bread made especially for children. Grandmother Zaynab, who was busy finishing her story, ignored the girl. ‘. . . And I said, by God, don’t you dare raise your hand against me!’ Hend knew that Grandmother Zaynab was telling the story of her first husband to her qarina. She had heard the story many times before: ‘He started hitting me on my face and saying, “Where were you, you bitch?” and me saying to him, “I had to fulfil my vow to Sheikha Safina.” He didn’t let go of me until he had knocked out this big tooth,’ and she opened her mouth to show her qarina the big gap there. Hend repeated herself irritably, ‘I want a little one now, Grandmother.’ But the Grandmother was busy talking and wiping down the top of the oven. ‘He left me lying there
just like this old rag, sister.’ She pointed to the ash rag, then added, ‘He went to do his ablutions at the canal bridge and he started invoking the Prophet’s name, but he’d forgotten that the switchblade he’d just slashed me with was still in his pocket. It was sharp!’ and she pointed to a jagged scar on her face. ‘I warned him, “God’s command! God’s prohibition!” But he had no faith in God or man. The switchblade cut into his stomach as he was washing himself for prayer and he was already done for by the time they brought him home to me.’
Hend was bored of listening by now, and angry at Grandmother Zaynab for ignoring her. ‘Come on, Grandmother!’ she shouted impatiently.
Grandmother’s face grew red like a burning coal and she picked up a piece of firewood and waved it furiously at her, ‘Get out of here, girl! No little ones for you.’
They were used to her sudden inexplicable fits of anger. She would shoo away the children like a barren bitch, then a few minutes later turn and pat their heads with her rough hand, dip the small loaf in molasses and feed the open mouths around her in a gentle token of peace. Hend wasn’t afraid of her, though. She scooped up a handful of dirt from the ground and threw it in her face. The second time she did it, the dirt settled on the soft balls of dough. She ran off and didn’t stop running until she got to the flame tree and scurried up it breathlessly. Grandmother Zaynab ran after her, brandishing a long stout stick and shouting threats. When Hend finally came down, the rough hand seized her, dragged her into the dark room, and shut the old wooden door fast. Half the day went by with her locked up behind that door. The damp mud room was full of hidden rabbit lairs and piles of green clover. The rabbits hopped around surreptitiously in the clover, suddenly emerging into the open with twitching jaws, then scurrying back, trembling, into their holes. Hend sat there on the black basalt stone behind the door and stared at the dark holes as the skylights above sifted the meagre light coming in from the washed-out crimson sky.
Grandmother Zaynab eventually came back carrying the miniature loaf of bread and some honey, but the girl, who had wet herself, didn’t open her mouth. She made her drink some enchanted water from the fright pan, and then she made her jump seven times over a bowl of burning Javanese incense, but it didn’t do any good. Hend grew listless and her eyes took on a strange, faraway look. A few days later she claimed that she had seen Grandmother Zaynab in the shape of a green toad the colour of clover hopping around on the pile of vegetable scraps, and that she had stuck out her white lizard tongue at Hend and ordered her to lick her belly and then swallow the saliva afterwards. Hend was afraid of the dark and of the scurrying rabbits, so she did it. She licked the green toad’s belly and then she wet herself. She kept on wetting herself for many years after that and the pungent, acrid smell of urine clung to her clothes no matter what she did.
Grandmother Zaynab stayed at their house for weeks after this incident. She sprinkled blessed herbs throughout the house and chanted magical incantations. She washed the girl’s body in rose water and clothed her in a spotless white dress and took her to see Sheikha Safina. She lit seven candles in the Sheikha’s window and said, ‘By your darling prophet don’t fail me now. I’m the one who scared the wits out of the girl.’ But Hend kept wetting herself. In her dreams, the green toad pursued her down secret subterranean passages, foamy spittle leaking from its mouth.
One evening Grandmother Zaynab ruffled Hend’s hair and yawned as she started to tell her stories about long-ago travellers. Her sharp eyes picked out a few grey hairs that had begun to sprout on the girl’s head – a girl who was not yet ten – and she noticed that the roots had begun to turn white too. So she put the henna to soak in boiled tea with black seed, then applied it to Hend’s long hair, transforming it into a curtain of deep black and flaming red. The white embers cleaved the roots and sprouted again. Grandmother Zaynab sighed in despair and said, ‘I don’t know what to do with this daughter of yours, mistress.’ Her mother added three new nicknames for Hend to her list: ‘Little demon’, ‘Loopy’, and ‘Head-in-the-clouds’.
*
Hend and Emilia stroll up and down the wide sidewalks of Fourth Avenue so that Emilia can inspect cartons full of bric-a-brac that their owners have thrown away: books and pictures, anything that has become old and useless and disposable. Hend reads the phrase take me if you want printed in Magic Marker on the sides of the cartons. She wonders at this oblique expression, and she feels that it is somehow directed at her.
Emilia rummages in the cartons for old shoes and empty bottles. She pokes around slowly and patiently in garbage cans. On Saturdays, she takes her choicest treasures to the flea market and spreads them out next to the other vendors. Emilia specialises in shoes. ‘Marilyn Monroe shoes,’ she calls out to passers-by. ‘I’ve got Audrey Hepburn, Farrah Fawcett . . . I’ve got kids’ shoes too.’
Hend tells Emilia that she reminds her of so many people she’s met in her life. Emilia laughs, revealing the gaps in her mouth where teeth used to be. ‘I know, I know. Everybody says that I look like the old woman in Zorba the Greek. It’s too bad I never saw that movie. I don’t know about Mrs Zorba, but all old people look alike, my dear.’
Scattered raindrops fall on Emilia’s frail, wrinkled face. Hend leaves her to her never-ending task of poking through abandoned cardboard boxes. She goes to sit on the wooden bench in front of her son’s school while her eyes follow Emilia as she moves further and further away, pushing the little cart piled high with shoes that fit her and others that don’t.
5
Coco Bar
The smell of fresh beer wafts up from old wooden barrels in the little bar right under her window. She likes the smell of beer because it reminds her of her father. Grandmother Zaynab used to say, ‘Your father was popular with the ladies, God rest his soul. He used to walk around the Heights and the girls would sing to him from behind their windows.’ Fatma al-Qarumiya used to compose poetry about him:
He’s the lovely one who passed beneath our window
Beneath our window his lips drip honey
Beneath our window, and what can I do, girls?
Beneath our window, he’s the lovely one who passed through.
He was handsome and refined, and he always wore elegant suits. That’s what Hend still remembers about her father. It was a lot of extra work for her mother. She ironed his white pocket handkerchiefs, folded and organised his socks, and carefully matched his neckties. Another photo in the family album: her father stands in front of the auditorium of the Faculty of Law at King Fuad University, looking trim and smart. For some reason that Hend doesn’t fully understand, he never took a job after graduation. He hung a sign that said ‘Lawyer for Misdemeanours in the Civil Courts’ on the door of the reception house on the hill, but he didn’t have an office or clients, and he never attended court proceedings except when he wanted to see his friends. Every day he left the house in his elegant suit, his jacket unbuttoned, his black hair slicked back with Vaseline, and strolled down the alleys, where he was known as a distinguished man of leisure. He religiously attended all the agricultural cooperative meetings, the municipal assembly meetings, and the local council meetings. All these organisations were housed in the same red-brick building in the centre of the town and her father’s educated friends were all to be found there: Doctor Shamil the pharmacist, Mr Emile the school principal, and His Excellency the President of the Municipal Assembly, whoever he happened to be at the time.
These were the same men who would regularly meet in the evenings in her father’s cosy reception house. It was a small house perched high above Pharaoh’s Hills where a woman called the Guest used to live. Hend would constantly find excuses to go there. She would climb up the hill bringing him anything he might need: ‘Father, do you want dinner? Father, do you want fresh clothes? Father, do you want some snacks?’ Her mother prepared small trays of home-made pickles and boiled broad beans marinated in lemon juice, and Hend carried them up to the reception house. Sometimes her mother sent her to ask
for money. Hend hated carrying that particular message. Her brothers simply refused to do it. The daily negotiation over money was always conducted through her. Sometimes her father would explode into a barrage of curses that she knew by heart: ‘Money, money, money! Do you think I’m sitting on a money machine? Minting shitty new coins every day?’ But faced with Hend’s unflinching, reproachful gaze, he would finally give in and hand her a few silver coins from his pocket. Sometimes Hend would go back empty-handed, with only the curt message: ‘I don’t have any.’ Her mother’s nose would colour slightly, then she would sigh heavily after listening to Hend repeat those four words that seemed to encapsulate the entire story of her misfortunes, and Hend knew that this sigh was the harbinger of a breakdown that was sure to envelop the whole house in a flood of misery and gloom.
Sometimes she went up to the reception house for no particular reason. ‘Mama says go see if your father wants anything’ was the innocent phrase she used as a password. Only she was allowed to play this little trick. Her father always had a smile for his little girl. He could never manage to be harsh with her, even if he tried.
Brooklyn Heights Page 5