Brooklyn Heights

by Miral al-Tahawy

  She moves away from the window and picks up her mop again. She sprays air freshener in the bathrooms to dissipate the oppressive winter air.

  Every morning, Fatima takes her shirt off in front of Hend in the bathroom, where they change into their uniforms. Little red spots cover her back and neck. She scratches her skin ferociously, then gently rubs in layers of ointment before carefully putting on her clothes. Hend asks her about the inflamed pimples. ‘Bedbugs,’ she replies in disgust. ‘Haven’t you heard of them? Don’t you know what they are?’ She tells Hend that bedbugs live in the folds of your mattress and come out at night to suck your blood. She says that they feed on the blood of their sleeping victims, and that they reproduce a thousand times every night. They’re entirely resistant to pesticides and repellents, they burrow into wood and stick to clothes, and the only way to get rid of them is to burn everything. Hend never knows where Fatima sleeps. Sometimes she spends the night at ‘John’s house’, other times, at some other man’s place. She doesn’t like anyone to ask her about the pimples, or about the men, or about Somalia. She dreams of becoming another Naomi Campbell because Naomi’s got a tall, slender, graceful figure that hints of faraway countries, just like her.

  They walk next to each other down the streets that the two of them have come to know like the backs of their hands. Sometimes Hend sits alone for a couple of hours on a wooden chair in front of a washing machine owned by one of the religious Yemenis. He always greets her modestly in the Islamic manner – asalamu ‘alaikum – then turns his face away from Fatima’s leotard-clad body. They sit together and puff on the cigarettes that they’ve been postponing since early morning. Fatima never talks about herself. She isn’t like the other immigrants who love to chatter and gossip and invent stories to fill up the blank spaces in their lives. Hend knows that Fatima only hangs around with her so that she can spend the night at her place every once in a while when she needs to get away from John or another ex-boyfriend. There isn’t much spare room in Hend’s studio, so when Fatima sleeps over she has to lay a mattress on the only available floor space in front of the kitchenette. When she is staying with Hend, Fatima races up the many flights of stairs, bursts into the apartment, and immediately heads for the shower. She gives her body up to the pulsing water (maybe it will heal those spots on her back). She spends most of her time showering and rubbing lotions into her skin and watching the world go by from the only window in the apartment. She offers Hend advice about her son as he sits quietly drawing his map of Africa: ‘This kid is going to stay stuck to you like that forever. You should leave him to me – I’ll take care of him.’ She plays chess with him sometimes – a game the boy has discovered a talent for.

  Fatima is even more beautiful than Naomi Campbell but nobody seems to want to discover her. Maybe this is why she wraps herself tightly in the blanket at night, covers her face in the same way Hend does, and tosses and turns endlessly: another solitary, pitiful woman in the apartment. Hend draws a little comfort from the likeness. She too likes to press up against windows and dream. At first Hend believed that Fatima was her friend and that she came over to keep her company. Now she realises that she is just looking for a free ride, that she isn’t a friend after all, and this makes Hend feel even lonelier. A friend is someone who freely gives sympathy and understanding, and this is exactly what Fatima is unable to give. She is too preoccupied with her pimples and her skin and her obscure future.

  Hend lives in a world of her own too. She often thinks about her old friends and realises that they have been few and far between. She has never been very sociable or vivacious and amusing. She ascribes this to her timid, introverted birth sign. Nobody could penetrate the tough outer skin that she hides beneath. At school she sat between Noha and Hanan; Noha on her right and Hanan on her left. Noha’s woman-body blossomed quickly but she still liked to play with Hend. Her favourite game of all was hopscotch and she was always playing it on the sidewalk in front of her father’s shop. When her dress flew up as she jumped from square to square, Hend could see the inflamed spoon marks on her thighs. Noha loved hopscotch. She would carefully draw the squares with a piece of chalk, pull up her dress, fling out her shapely white legs and relentlessly pursue the pebble as it skipped from square to square with astonishing speed. A group of boys from the Muqawi School always stopped to stare at her bare legs as they passed by, and she would pull up her dress even further, not caring one bit about the consequences. Keeping her legs raised high for as long as possible was the first womanly skill that Noha had acquired and her talent began to capture the attention of passers-by who would stop to watch her skipping from square to square in wonder. Then her furious mother would pull her away by the hair and drag her inside.

  Their house was made up of two rooms behind the small shop owned by Noha’s father, Amm Mahmud the grocer. Noha watched as her mother took off her dress and a plump woman called Fatma al-Qarumiya proceeded to rub her tired back with a paste made of olive oil and plaster. Fleshy, dark-skinned Fatma al-Qarumiya massaged her back as she sat on a rush mat in the airless room. Her hand slid down from the top of her spinal cord to the compact base of her torso while Noha eavesdropped on the advice she gave her mother as she relaxed into the massage. ‘So what, seven girls? Your oldest is a boy – what more does he want from you? Another boy? Humph. That’s all he needs! How on earth is Mahmud the grocer going to support all those male-kids he’s constantly dreaming about having?’

  Noha’s mother slapped her cheek pitifully. ‘But he says he’s going to get married, Auntie!’

  Fatma al-Qarumiya grabbed hold of the woman’s naked legs. ‘Listen to me . . . raise your legs.’ She depilated the triangle between her thighs with caramelised sugar, then rubbed some oil into it. When she had finished, she sagely nodded her head, which was decorated with two bird tattoos like the ones the gypsies have. ‘All men are sons of bitches, you silly woman. They’re like dogs, hanging on to the world by their cocks.’ She said this with the wisdom of a woman who had known all kinds of men in her long life; a woman who had achieved complete harmony with the ways of the world.

  Noha’s mother’s skin was loose and drooping from all those pregnancies and her stomach was bloated with layers of fat and criss-crossed with long stretch marks. Fatma al-Qarumiya slapped the woman’s stomach. ‘Suck that in,’ she said. Then she pointed to her legs. ‘Raise those up.’ She poured a mixture of oil and warm, perfumed water onto them and the dusty ground greedily sucked up the sweet mastic. Noha’s mother put on a transparent, open-necked slip printed with pink flowers and decorated with a ribbon around the collar. She smiled, plump and fragrant and ready for the night ahead.

  The mother caught her daughter spying on her from behind the half-open door and she pounced on her, pulling her by the hair and pinching her thighs with all the force of her pent-up frustrations. ‘All day long she plays hopscotch and spreads her legs wide, Auntie. The girl is going to bring calamity down upon me. I’ve told her over and over, “Don’t you dare spread those legs of yours, girl!”’ Noha cried as she told Hend about it, but she kept on playing hopscotch in the school yard because she knew that the game brought out all her hidden talents. She drew the squares and spread her legs and skipped ever so gracefully from square to square, and she didn’t give a damn that the boys were spying on her. She balanced the pebble on her head, then tossed it with her eyes closed and skipped away to escape the fate that awaited her mother after the massage of oil and mastic: that moment when she would emerge from the bedroom with wild, unkempt hair and red bruises on her cheeks.

  The voice of Noha’s father, Amm Mahmud the grocer, would follow her – but it was not the gentle and tolerant voice that he used to bargain with his customers. As he shouted at his wife, it sounded like a fierce, drawn-out hiss. ‘What are you, a piece of rock, you bitch?’ Noha’s mother would cry and complain of a splitting headache that never left her, and Fatma al-Qarumiya treated it by engraving a tattoo right where it was tender. Noha, meanwhile, balanc
ed the pebble on her head and tried to forget what her mother’s face looked like as she gathered in her seven daughters on the mat around her and painfully hunched over them like an old rag. Still, she was always ready for her husband because she never knew when he might want her. He shook her by the shoulder some nights and said, ‘Come.’

  Noha practised more and played even harder, so hard that Hend was reduced to watching her friend zip around the court alone, never ever falling or stumbling. Meanwhile, Amm Mahmud the grocer sat in his shop behind the wooden counter that was covered by a filthy stone slab they called ‘the bank’. The women parked their breasts there or plopped down their nursing infants on it as they negotiated with him over the exact number of pennies in their pockets. Sometimes they even came out of these negotiations with a free handful of dried mint or a thin slice of the spun sugar or sesame halva that sat uncovered in the window. The grocer sold cigarettes too, but tobacco wasn’t the only thing he rolled into them. ‘Satlana’ – that which intoxicates the mind – was the other ingredient. ‘Stuffed or plain?’ he asked his customers. The bottles of soda and Stella beer, the barrels of oil and ghee and the sacks of sugar paled in importance compared with the rolling paper and the hashish cigarettes that were his most profitable source of income. Those townspeople who had grown rich from the suitcases and money orders coming from Iraq and Yemen and Saudi Arabia were his most valued customers. With the money he made from this trade he built a couple of brick rooms behind his shop and installed an iron gate to prevent his seven daughters from spilling out onto the streets.

  Hend would stand on the other side of that gate, trying but usually failing to catch a glimpse of her friend. Noha’s mother was more often than not the only person in sight. She would sit just behind the gate, pulling in the smoke from the water pipe and breathing it out through her nostrils. A fish tattoo decorated her temple and a necklace of plastic fish hung round her neck along with a few chilli peppers: charms against the evil eye that she took to wearing after moving into her new red-brick house. And while it was true that God had blessed them with money, He had cursed her – Umm Noha – with headaches and migraines.

  Mahmud the grocer eventually built a second floor made up of two rooms with a stone staircase. He was the first one in town to add another floor to his house, and he painted the upper rooms pink. He began to spread the word of his matrimonial intentions amongst all the women who leaned up against his ‘bank’: ‘I want to get officially married – I swear! The Prophet came to me in a dream and said, “Mahmud, at least God gave you one son – I only begat girls.” So I said, “Bless you, I just want another little boy to carry the load,” and he replied, “It’s your God-given right, Mahmud.”’

  And so Mahmud the grocer married a young, skinny girl in the hope that her back would be stronger and her womb more hospitable than his first wife’s, and that therefore she would be more likely ‘to bring the boy to term’, as Fatma al-Qarumiya – who knew all about women – advised him. She pulled on the hashish cigarette that he gave her and said cheerfully, ‘Brother, God said marry two women or three women. I know the well and its cover like the back of my hand. The mother of your children is finished – not an ounce of suppleness or beauty left in her.’ Noha’s mother’s migraines grew worse, and Noha started to tell Hend all kinds of stories about her newborn siblings. One day Noha’s father said to her, ‘I’ll kill you if you ever play hopscotch again. Do you want to bring scandal down on us, girl?’ So Noha began collecting shards of pottery for her new game.

  Hopscotch – that perilous, obscene game – was replaced by the game of beads. Noha took Hend by the hand and ran off to the pottery workshop behind the Hill Estate. Inside the workshop there were mounds of raw clay and finished crockery and round, smooth, long-necked water jars in red and white, turned on an iron lathe to produce the perfect, narrow holes that neatly disbursed their liquid into the drinker’s mouth. The pitchers, unlike the water jars, had large, projecting spouts that shamelessly disgorged their water onto the bare thighs of people washing out in the open. There were other things for sale in the workshop: oven paddles; huge storage jars for water, standing there erect and virile; puffed-up clay jars like pregnant bellies; dovecotes for pigeon chicks to sleep in. The way of the world: forms whimsically created by the master craftsman, then burned in the fiery kiln and laid out on the straw facing the workshop for the passing women to pick up and examine, and perhaps even buy.

  Hend and Noha ran off together and climbed Pharaoh’s Hills. In order to reach the pottery workshop they had to cross the open space where the Friday market was held and pass the gypsy camp. They tirelessly collected bits of broken pottery and ran back home with their booty. They sat on the doorstep of Amm Mahmud’s shop and proceeded to round the broken shards into smooth beads that they scooped up and tossed with long, experienced fingers as their plastic bracelets jingled merrily on their wrists. But once again Noha’s angry mother came out to drag her daughter away by the hair and pinch her thighs because ‘the girl has gotten into the habit of wandering around like a stray cat’. And that was the last time Hend and Noha ever played together.

  She spied on Amm Mahmud’s shop in the hope that she would catch a glimpse of her friend making paper cones for the sugar or polishing the slippery floor. Now she only ever saw her sitting behind the iron gate and playing beads alone, every movement executed with a grace and skill that only Noha could possess – the grace and skill of someone who was used to playing alone. When Hend asked about her friend, Noha’s mother said: ‘That’s it, no more schooling for her.’ But that didn’t stop Hend from hanging around the iron gate that no one ever opened for her. Her old friend talked to her from the other side with the calmness and self-possession of a little woman. The sculptor of girls visited her before any of the other girls. Her face grew fuller and her body more lithe, and she walked now with a deliberate, self-conscious stride. Hend watched her behind the gate as she played alone, surrounded by the odour of kerosene coming from the corrugated-iron barrels and by plastic containers of oil and canvas sacks of sugar. Noha never came out, and a few months later she disappeared entirely while Fatima al-Qarumiya came and went through the iron gate with her kit of pastes and oils and medicines for nausea and pregnancy, and when Hend asked her about Noha, Fatma laughed that deep, masculine laugh of hers that terrified children and excited the lust of passing men, and said, ‘The sculptor of girls kidnapped her.’

  *

  Hend’s other friend, Hanan, was round and heavy with skin the colour of wheat, a miniature version of her mother, The Lady Umm Hanan the seamstress. Once Noha had gone to live with the sculptor of girls, Hanan and Hend would sit next to each other on the sofa of her mother’s house and Hanan would show her the colourful snippets of leftover fabric that she hid in her pockets and used to make blackboard erasers or soft cotton rags for wiping the chalk off your fingers. Hanan was always wiping the board clean and the whole classroom would stare at her round, plump rear end as she did it. Hanan didn’t know how to play hopscotch, or beads either, but she was very good at making rag dolls and blackboard wipes. She was also good at cutting out patterns for doll dresses, especially ones with lots of frills – all from the leftover fabric that she gathered from under her mother’s sewing machine. She embroidered the dresses with sequins and coloured stones and sold them to the girls in the other classes for five milliemes apiece. She drew eyebrows and mouths on her rag dolls with coloured pens and sewed two green stones in for eyes. In arts and crafts class she crocheted tablecloths with the duck stitch like a practised housewife. She also sold crocheted hats that she made herself, as well as scarves and embroidered handkerchiefs. Her passion for embroidery and her quiet perseverance were extraordinary, and she became an expert at making exquisite tablecloths that she called ‘sunflowers’ because they were the colour of open sunflowers in all their glorious shades from dark brown to bright sunshine yellow.

  The only game that Hanan was good at was Little House. She would c
ome to Hend’s house and collect the empty matchboxes from the garbage, as well as old bottles and cartons. Together they traced out the borders of their imaginary house in the sand with pebbles and scraps and some tree branches and leaves. Everything was now ready to play-act mother and daughter. Hanan was the daughter and called Hend ‘Mama’, or sometimes she was the maid and called her ‘ma’am’. She was anything Hend wanted her to be, because Hanan had been trained to obey. She was sedate and well behaved, an immovable object, while Hend ran around like a lunatic in the courtyard that hosted an imaginary house of dust full of imaginary stoves and refrigerators and beds.

  Sometimes Hend’s mother sent her to Umm Hanan’s house with clothes that needed altering. Hanan’s mother took them in or let them out or shortened them, from one child to the next. Hend skipped happily through the narrow streets covered in straw. Women sat at their doorsteps, washing the dishes and drinking tea or exchanging good-natured insults. Hend liked Umm Hanan’s house because it was always full of women, the door always stood wide open, and the hubbub of the sewing machine and the transistor radio gave it a festive atmosphere quite different from that of her own home. Umm Hanan was stout and dark-skinned. Her voice was mellow and pleasant to the ear and she liked to sing. They called her Fathiya Ahmad – after the actress – because she had thin eyebrows that she painted with kohl. Her eyes were deep black, she wore her hair in a chignon perched coquettishly at the side of her head, and she always matched the colour of her hat to her outfit. Her voice sent shivers down Hend’s spine, especially when she bent over her machine and sang that particular song: ‘If Only We Could Be Together Again’. She also sang songs to make the girls laugh. She wiggled her eyebrows wickedly as she sang: ‘Pull the Curtain Against the Breeze Before the Neighbours Break Our Hearts’.