After the death of the Guest, her father hung his sign on the door to remind everyone that he was still officially a lawyer at the Higher Court of Appeals. In point of fact, he believed that the courts were a waste of time, and that reception houses like his were the proper place to solve disputes. He spent every evening up there with his friends. Hend would sometimes hear Fatma al-Qarumiya’s voice coming from inside and the ring of her long voluptuous laugh mingling with the laughter of the men, but on those occasions she never dared to disturb them.
At school, everyone respected Hend because her father always made a point of attending the parents’ meetings that no one else ever went to. The first time he went, he sat with the school principal, Mr Emile, and they chatted about things like the importance of raising the town’s abysmal educational standards. Her father gave Mr Emile one of his Dunhill Red cigarettes and the man practically fainted with joy as he accepted the proffered offering and launched into his favourite subject. ‘Your Excellency, I’ve got more than one hundred students in my school and the municipality doesn’t give us a single penny, not even to fix the school bell. Imagine, Your Excellency, I have to use this whistle to signal the start of classes!’ Her father knew that Mr Emile spent most of his spare time sitting in front of the small bicycle-repair shop (which also doubled as a warehouse) that he had recently opened next to the school courtyard, but the principal quickly became a bosom friend of her father’s. Hend would watch him busily preparing plates of hot sausage in the reception house and setting out cold bottles of beer as he laughed out loud at some joke or other. The sound struck Hend as strange, because Mr Emile rarely laughed. From time to time he would declare, ‘By God, Your Excellency, you’ve made our stay in this godforsaken place easier to bear. The village would have been terribly lonely without these little soirées of yours.’
Hend knows that her father made life a lot more pleasant for outsiders like Mr Emile and Doctor Shamil, as well as the women who came to the village from other parts of the country. The reception house became a temporary home for some of them: Miss Ibtisam, for example, the music teacher from Port Said who wore provocatively short skirts, and Miss Fayqa, the home economics teacher who taught her mother how to crochet the duck stitch. The reception house up on the hill hosted many a lady teacher for a few weeks at a time. Hend would take them their breakfast tray in the morning and their dinner tray in the evening, and at the end of their appointed stay some of them would come down to the house to thank her mother for her hospitality. They would sit with her for a little while in the western balcony and teach her how to crochet a new stitch or how to use hair curlers and dress a chignon. Some of them didn’t come at all, though. Some contrived to make husbands of the village’s petty bureaucrats, while others left town pretty quickly because Pharaoh’s Hills ‘is a tiny, bone-dry, backward village’, or so they said. The nurses who worked at the local hospital were also habitués of the reception house, and these women almost never went down to the main house to greet her mother. It was Doctor Shamil who introduced the new girls to their evening soirées, and he ended up marrying more than one of them. Most of them simply left as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving Fatma al-Qarumiya to laugh out loud in her opaque, masculine voice – the undisputed queen of the circle of men.
Her father’s generosity was not limited to hosting itinerant female guests. He also liked to resolve ongoing disputes between the local families. His powers of persuasion were superlative, what with his aristocratic looks, his clean, elegant suits, and his deep, melodious voice. Besides, the courts’ tentacles were long and tangled and people preferred to avoid them if they could. The preparations for these reconciliation sessions were elaborate. Clean rush mats were spread out on the floor of the reception house, pots of tea and coffee were served, and sometimes, if a satisfactory settlement was reached amongst the parties, small animals were slaughtered and roasted over an open fire. Her father, dressed in his beautiful Bedouin cloak, would lean back comfortably on the mat against a pile of pillows and reel off the relevant provisions of the criminal code, the sayings of Imam Ali, and the counsel of the prophets, and back up his claims with ringing Quranic verses. The feuding clans were almost invariably persuaded to accept judgment of a few kilos of grain, five Egyptian pounds, or occasionally an inch of land separating their respective waterwheels, because ‘possession belongs to God alone’. After the warm welcome, the tea and coffee, and the elaborate feasting, the feuding parties would leave the reception house content, and for the next few weeks her father would be easy and cheerful.
Her mother in her honey-coloured robe would say to him in a disapproving tone that he pretended not to understand: ‘Why do you always have to wear yourself out for other people?’ He would shake his head wearily and reply, ‘You’re the daughter of Bedouin Arabs. You of all people should understand our customs. You know it’s a duty.’ Whenever he called her ‘cousin’, her mother would smile one of her rare smiles because it meant that he was pleased with her; that he would sleep in his own bed for the next few days and that he’d narrate the story of the feud to her over and over and in great detail, carefully explaining exactly how he artfully managed to put an end to the crisis. However, if she crossed the red line, if she complained or criticised too much, if she dared to say (in that angry, resentful voice of hers that he knew so well), ‘What have we got to do with all these problems? Banquets and parties and expenses every other day! My children come first and your own household is more important,’ the peaceful conversation would turn into a violent argument. He’d storm out angrily through the eastern door, shouting bitter remarks about grief and worry and tiresome women. He’d slam the glass door a couple of times and spend the night in the reception house high above Pharaoh’s Hills. He’d light the brazier and the air would become thick with the smell of incense and hashish and cigarette smoke and melancholy – not to mention Fatma al-Qarumiya’s heavy perfume. Fatma’s deep laugh would set her plump white flesh shaking merrily: ‘I’ve told you time and again, cousin, living with women is a miserable state of affairs.’
*
Her father liked to read. He read a lot because he wanted to seem like an expert on everything. He read biographies of Christopher Columbus and Edward Lane. He read about places he’d never seen before, like the lands of the White Nile and Mount Lebanon. He talked about Paris and Naples and Tangiers and he gave his friends in the reception house the impression that he was a seasoned traveller. They acted as though they believed him when he spoke confidently and bolstered his words with convincing details. Hend did believe him. She rode the sea of his imagination and saw ships and distant harbours there. His friends pretended to believe him for the sake of the party and the sheer delight of make-believe. Doctor Shamil told them all stories about how he had travelled to important conferences and invented new drugs for epilepsy and bed sores and arthritis. He was an expert at mixing up a special hashish-and-opium paste that he claimed could vanquish every disease but prostate cancer, for which, God preserve us, there was no cure. They would all laugh because they knew that the important conferences he went to were just a few dozen kilometres away in Alexandria, and that they were more often than not nothing but fishing expeditions for fair-skinned prostitutes. They also knew that he was hopelessly addicted to the opium that whittled away at his brain. Mr Emile liked to tell extravagant stories about his virility. He was short, thin, dark-skinned, and very hairy. The macho fantasies that he wove around his scrawny body were truly comic but everyone got a kick out of his risqué jokes because they went well with the sausages and cucumbers and pickles. Fatma al-Qarumiya, meanwhile, claimed that her ancestry went back to the Prophet’s illustrious line at Mecca and that she was purer even than the folk heroine al-Khadra al-Sharifa. She was both a mother and a whore and the womanly smoke she blew out from her water pipe stirred up the men’s admiration and provoked their lust.
Her father was in the habit of drinking a beer or two before he went to bed every night. She would r
un over to Amm Mahmud’s shop and say, ‘Two bottles of Stella beer and a pack of Dunhill cigarettes, please.’ He had been sleeping in the reception house for days. Smoke drifted out from behind the door as Hend approached. ‘Mama told me to come and ask if you want anything.’ They walked side by side, hands clasped. They passed the threshing machine and the Muqawi Aqueduct and a string of small mud houses. He pointed to things as they walked by. ‘That was your Grandfather Sulayman’s estate, and this was your late Grandmother Shaqawa’s guest house, and this is the Raml Aqueduct.’ She stumbled on the stones scattered in the sand as she walked next to him. On the way back home, tired and worn out, he smiled sadly. He stretched out on the balcony and the children formed a circle around him.
He began to tell the story of the Prophet Moses. ‘Pray for the Prophet,’ he said between each part, but Hend preferred the tale of the Prophet Joseph. She liked the sound of her father’s sad voice as he told it in between mouthfuls of yellow foamy beer. ‘Son, tell not thy vision to thy brothers lest they lay a trap for thee, for Satan is a mortal enemy of man.’ He liked to repeat that particular verse. He knew the Quranic text by heart and never made a mistake in pronunciation or punctuation. He slowly sipped at his beer as he talked. ‘He said, “My son, enter not from the same door, rather enter from different doors.”’ Her mother would sometimes interrupt to point out the dangers of the envier’s evil eye. His head would be in her lap at this point, and her fingers would be playing with his hair while the children sat around his feet, small, wide-eyed, and hanging on to every word formed by that deep voice that drew them all like a magnet. As she listened, Hend dreamt of becoming a great prophet or saint, carrying a large rod with which to cleave the sea or running through the desert, plumes of water spurting up from beneath her feet. She was always fantasising about being a character in an epic, and her Arabic teacher encouraged these fantasies: ‘You’ll do great things one day, inshallah.’
She began to seek out a real-world instrument for her greatness to manifest itself and found it in Angele, an easy victim. Angele was round and plump, like a short, dark bear, and she always sat at the back of the classroom, quiet and timid. Her features seemed to have been moulded from a mixture of mud and sweat and they were stamped with an expression of astonishing simplicity. Hend began her self-appointed mission of guiding humanity with Angele. She would take her aside and talk to her about how she absolutely had to repeat the phrase ‘There is no God but God’ so that she could enter the gates of Paradise as a good Muslim. Angele would shake her head miserably but Hend kept insisting. ‘Just say it in your head – the important thing is to go to Paradise.’ Angele took out a piece of soft bread filled with halva from her dirty cloth bag and held out half of it to Hend. ‘Want a piece of my sandwich?’ That was how she always tried to change the subject and safely evade the iron grip of her would-be saviour.
Angele was always lurking next to walls because she was afraid of running around and bumping into people. Her step was hesitant and slow; she was always kind to others but sometimes she acted terribly stupid. She didn’t understand the jibes the other girls flung at her. She was resigned to it all – she was incapable of being any other way – and this dull indifference saved her a lot of trouble. She listened to all Hend’s attempts to convert her without comment or resentment. She would just nod her head gently and say, ‘Only God can show us the way.’ She repeated this phrase as though it were a cheerful incantation; as though she truly believed that there might be some hope in this promised awakening to God’s will after all. But Hend didn’t give up on her chosen disciple until she disappeared from school altogether one day. Only then did she accept that she had definitively lost her first great battle in the war to deliver humanity from error.
Hend was the first girl at school to put on the long, flowing hijab. This was also part of her mission to transform herself into a storybook heroine. The other girls – even the peasant girls – wore light scarves on their heads that left their long, thick braids uncovered. Hend wrapped a thick, heavy scarf over her entire head. ‘God commanded women to wear the khimar, not a transparent scrap of cloth,’ she would proclaim in order to show off her piety and asceticism. She began to turn her eyes away from the sight of her father’s evening bottle of beer and she often begged God to forgive him. Soon, many of the other girls followed her example and started wearing the heavy khimar to show that they were just as pious and modest. Not to be outdone in the fear of God, Hend went one step further and started wearing dark, forbidding colours: black or navy blue. She even took to wearing a pair of black gloves in public. (‘I don’t shake hands with men – may God curse those who do.’) She trod a long road of self-abnegation and self-praise and she clung to it tenaciously, even after she had read the Quranic commentaries and discovered that the prohibition in question actually referred to bodies coming together in the act of love, and that it had nothing to do with a simple handshake. Nonetheless, she continued to insist that men and women were prohibited from shaking hands in Islam and that the act opened the door to lustful thoughts and actions. ‘Though hearts may meet in greeting, bodies will sink into sin’ was a phrase she often repeated. She was one of the first girls at school to substitute the Islamic expression ‘God’s peace upon you’, an unusual greeting at the time, for the simple ‘good morning’. She believed that all those who refused to pronounce God’s peace in greeting sullied their hearts. She was constantly preoccupied with sin, constantly reading about it, parsing and interpreting it, and hunting for the definitive bibliography of commentaries that would make her alone the possessor of its true meaning. She started a preaching meeting at school with a few fellow classmates. She had a genius for making the other girls cry and feel the heavy burden of their guilt – any guilt. It made her spirits soar to see them in tears because her own long road began and ended in tears. While the other girls were busy with the school radio station and the wall newspapers and all the other extra-curricular activities, she lowered her eyes and stifled her desires and went on acting the part of a great heroine, an instrument of God. For a long time, she really believed herself to be just that.
But in the same way that she had been the first girl to put on that long black curtain, she was the first one to discard it. Now she began to claim that modesty and beauty could comfortably coexist in God’s eyes. She entered into a long, confusing period during which she dug around once again for the commentaries and legal opinions that would support her about-face with textual evidence that she could interpret as she liked. She was still busy being different. She exchanged the loose robes that she used to drag behind her in the dust for others that were shorter, tighter, and more flattering to the curves of her body: bright, colourful dresses whose sinfulness had yet to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. She unleashed a strategic strand of hair from beneath her headscarf, because God is merciful and compassionate and He would surely not consider her strand of hair to be a mortal sin. Here she is now, walking down Flatbush Avenue completely bare-headed, and no one is so much as glancing at her. But her eyes are still lowered out of habit. Her timid glances are the product of years of fear and frustration. She still wears loose clothes because her body is less than perfect; the flaccid figure of a middle-aged woman whose hair is caught up in a severe bun just because she can’t find the time to do it properly. She has to run around all day after the bus, to the market, to her son’s school. The Latina women walking down the same street are dressed in tight skirts and pretty, revealing tops or short-shorts, and no one bothers to look at them. They stretch out on the green grass of Prospect Park and their naked thighs lie open to the sun.
*
Hend crosses the Park on her way to the library every day. She sits on the wide stone steps waiting for her English class to begin. Said sits next to her, smiling sweetly. She inspects the sweetness in his eyes and isn’t sure how to interpret it. She looks at the vertical scar on his cheek and the tattoo on his chin, and she remembers that her father had a similar scar i
n the same place because he grew up at a time when bloodletting was the only treatment for any number of ailments. She doesn’t understand why he has a tattoo, though: tattoos are for women, but it makes Said’s smile seem broader and more inviting. Said always wears dark suits because he’s a limousine driver. Sometimes he shares his halva or falafel sandwiches with her before class or after. These impromptu snacks are often interrupted by sudden telephone calls. He answers politely: ‘Yes, Father. Okay, Father.’ Afterwards he explains to her that his parish priest wants him to do some volunteer work at the church. Said has never told her how he ended up in America. He has spoken only about his many relatives, the lottery, and the church’s charitable work, and one day he shyly invites her on an outing: ‘Why don’t you come and spend a Sunday with us and then we can go for a walk afterwards?’ She accepts because she likes his boyish, comical manner, and because he really seems to enjoy her company. It is something she needs: someone to care for her, someone she might possibly love and be loved by; something to hold on to should everything else crumble away. Hend often glimpses the ghostly features of her only true friend in Said’s face. This friend was born in the House of Capricorn. He had loved her sincerely and he died simply. She likes being with Said because he is kind and says sweet things to her. He reminds her of all the people she has cared for in her life.
The only church that Hend ever knew as a child was an unfinished structure that stood between the Hill Estate and Pharaoh’s Hills. On her way to the schoolroom built by Mr Wadi on top of the hill she always passed a few scattered houses. Mr Wadi was the French teacher and he was married to Miss Ellen, the chemistry teacher, who had a small cross tattooed between her eyebrows. More and more teachers from the outside world came to Pharaoh’s Hills. They always settled in and around the far-flung and inexpensive area near the schools. Mr Wadi’s house was next door to Doctor Shamil the pharmacist’s house and also to the houses of Mr Mina, the Greek jeweller, and Madame Teresa, the seamstress. More teachers came to Pharaoh’s Hills at the beginning of every school year: Mr Samir Girgis, the math teacher, was one of them. Their houses huddled together in an intimate circle. The schoolroom sat on top of the hill, solitary and white. It was built of mud and plaster and it was bare but for a few chairs. Sometimes it smelled of burned candles. Outside there were a few trees and a large metal sign: ‘Permit to build the Mother of Light Church on the Muqawi Estate, district capital of Pharaoh’s Hills’. Nearby, the Nur Mosque – also known as the Kuwaiti Mosque – would soon be born. It was named after the Kuwaiti sheikh who donated the funds for its construction. The mosque stood high and proud, with a tall minaret and marble steps and green carpets and taps that spouted cold water in summer. The town had never seen anything so luxurious before, but the small hill had trouble accommodating two buildings consecrated to God in such a tight space. The Mother of Light Church was consumed by fire every few months and rebuilt every time. After each fire, fights would break out. Mr Wadi and some of his neighbours always took part in these brawls. The road to Mr Wadi’s house bristled with security details and was littered with broken pieces of coloured glass from the windows of both buildings. New paths sprouted up on the hill and Hend began to avoid the area altogether. She still doesn’t know if the Mother of Light Church was ever finished.
Brooklyn Heights Page 6