Omar has done a lot of charity work in the community. He has started giving his mother Qurans as presents in the hope that she might pick one up and read God’s word a little before going to sleep. He talks to her a lot about the Quran and how reading from it regularly would soothe away her sorrows and strengthen her memory. The remedy for forgetting, he says to her, is forswearing sin and disobedience to God. But poor Lilith can’t even remember her sins. He once brought her saffron as a remedy but she brushed it aside, saying that she had no need for it. And yet she does need it, and she fears this need. She fears that she will end up like the old people on the street, with dirty clothes smelling of the body’s final collapse. She changes her clothes constantly, but she then forgets that she had just changed them, and changes them again. She has gotten into the habit of washing her hands every few minutes. She sits at the window that looks out onto the park, leans her head against the glass and lets her thoughts wander far away as she listens to her old Sinatra records.
Omar decided to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. ‘I’ve forgiven you, Mother, and I want God to forgive you too,’ he said to her. ‘Come with me.’ He wept as he spoke. It was the first time she had heard her son say such things about her. She never really understood that she had broken his heart all those years ago and that he had lived his whole life desperately needing her to repent of it. He still remembers after all this time, she thought to herself; and then she got angry.
‘So you want me to turn in circles around the Ka’ba? Son, I have no patience for turning in circles and I don’t like your innuendos. You go. If He wants to forgive me, He’ll forgive me.’
It was a constant struggle to stay as she was. She had never been conscious of committing the vague sins he begged her to atone for. Back then, she was still capable of living alone, of sitting on a park bench by herself and jotting down the sentences that she hoped would eventually become her memoirs in a little notebook. But she never got further than the title. Her memory rebelled against the blank white pages. She was incapable of conjuring all the little details that make up a life. She turned in circles round herself in a final, stubborn attempt to assert her independence. She pasted old photos of herself in Washington Square Park on the blank pages of the notebook. In one photo her hair is short and wild like Liza Minnelli’s and her bare arms are covered in tattoos. In another, she has African braids and she’s showing off a tattoo on her back that says ‘I’m free’ in English. A third photo shows her sitting on the sidewalk of Thompson Street, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
The notebook, meanwhile, remained innocent of writing. She sketched one self-portrait after another in charcoal on the white pages, images of a woman with hollow cheeks and a long nose and curly black hair, hands clasped to her withered breast – a solitary woman on the threshold of winter.
11
Brooklyn Bridge
The hanging bridge sleeps, surrendering to the footsteps of the passers-by and the tourists and immigrants who have walked across it for two centuries or more. Small boats called ferries pass underneath it on the river that separates Brooklyn from Manhattan. Before the bridge was built the ferries were the only means of crossing to the other side. The Fulton Street and Wall Street ferries still carry photo-snapping tourists and pleasure-seekers from one bank to the other. The bridge is like a hardy old ship battered by time, welcoming the legions of unemployed on sunny winter mornings and drawing noisy activists protesting about every kind of issue, from the environment and racial discrimination to gay rights and health insurance. The processions all start out from the bridge and head to City Hall in Manhattan, and sometimes they move in the other direction, towards downtown Brooklyn.
The bridge casts a glittering mantle of enchantment over Brooklyn with all its contradictions. Hend walks across it at night for the first time, Ziyad at her side chattering away about Tarantino and the film he’s about to start shooting. He laughs suddenly and Hend’s heart contracts painfully. Venus has been fast asleep in her zodiac for the past few days. She marvels at the thing called love, its unexpectedness, and its breathtaking absurdity. She resolves to play out the first and final scene of her short life in the manner of a diva. As a young girl she was convinced that she resembled a few of them. She had always been a passably good actress with a talent for melodrama and histrionics. She was passionate and wilful, even though life hadn’t given her the chance to express these traits to the full. When Ziyad told her that he was looking for an Arab woman to act in his short film about a family of Arab immigrants, she seized the chance to do something she had always dreamt of doing. Even when he told her that the only remuneration was a hot meal, Hend enthusiastically agreed.
Ziyad, tall and captivating, stops halfway across the bridge and tells her the story in his strong Palestinian accent. It’s about a girl whose father beats her because she’s forgotten how to speak in Arabic. Whenever she tries to say something, she stutters and stumbles and falls back in frustration on ‘the F word’ (an obscenity that means ‘you and your language can go to hell’). The father, whose own dreams lay in ruins, had named his daughter after his beloved mother, and he absolutely forbade her to talk to boys. When the girl gets older she chooses a new name for herself. The father catches her kissing a boy on the Brooklyn Bridge one day. He drags her away by the hair, swearing by everything he holds sacred to kill her. At home, he forces her to take off her tight jeans and kicks her over and over. ‘Whore! Slut!’ he screams. Then he takes off his leather belt and beats her on her legs and buttocks as she screams in pain and fury. The police come and haul the father off, and in the last scene, the heroine runs hysterically across the Brooklyn Bridge, her desperate mother running after her and calling out in vain.
When filming begins, at first she doesn’t realise that her part will be confined to one short scene. Ziyad tries to soften the blow. ‘It’s the most important scene in the movie!’ Hend nods her head and glances at Diana Kirdashi, the eldest daughter of Abd al-Karim, who spends his days in the Arabian Nights coffee shop and distributes leaflets about the coming Day of Judgment. Diana wears a pair of torn jeans and a white T-shirt with ‘I Love New York’ printed on it. Hend, on the other hand, is dressed in a long Pakistani salwar kameez and her head is covered in a shawl of the kind worn by pitiful Muslim mothers in old movies. She is supposed to run after the heroine and shout ‘Daughter, daughter!’ with a mixture of conflicted emotions – anguish, love, fear, and disappointment. It has to show in the cast of her eyes and the hoarseness of her voice. Ziyad tells her that the shawl has to slip as she runs, uncovering her heaving breast and letting the sun glint off her grey hair.
They have to re-shoot the scene more than once because she keeps getting it all wrong and stumbling on her long clothes as she runs after her screen daughter, and Ziyad complains that she doesn’t look terrified enough. He tries to explain the scene to her more clearly: ‘You’re a mother who is about to lose her daughter to suicide. Just concentrate your emotions on what that might feel like. Please, this is the most important scene in the film.’ Hend nods to show that she understands him – even more than he imagines. But she doesn’t like this role. She doesn’t want to be anybody’s mother. For once, she just wants to be herself; she had wanted Ziyad to see her as a woman in her own right, to see that she could play other roles than the one he had in mind.
Hend has always secretly wanted to be an actress and dreamt of playing the starring role. As a child she used to stand in front of the mirror and play-act. She would cock her eyebrows like Faten Hamama in A Happy Day and declare out loud, ‘Shall I bring you the coat now or in a little while, sir?’ She would talk to herself in a loud theatrical voice and, at the end of the ‘movie’, kiss the image reflected in the mirror. Her mother mocked this secret conversation with her cinematic ghosts. ‘You must be possessed by demons, child, staring at yourself night and day like that in the mirror. What would you be doing if you were actually pretty?’ So she spent even more time in front of the mirror,
her one solace and refuge. She daubed her face with milky white lotions and stole her mother’s fuchsia lipstick from the vanity drawer so that she could paint Layla Murad lips in the shape of a small deep red heart over her own. She took off her blouse and cupped the breasts that hadn’t fully appeared yet as she sang her favourite song: I’m in love and I have no regrets / People, advise me! It was a song that she had heard her grandmother the Guest sing many a time as she washed her plastic sandals on the roof of her grandfather Muqawi Abul Karmat’s house.
She put her ear to the transistor radio and repeated Shadia’s lines from the radio soap opera Bitter Honey. The heroine was a siren who seduced men with her hoarse, lascivious voice. Shadia’s voice dripped bitter honey but it wasn’t as moving or provocative as the part called for. It was low and silky, and full of gentle sensuality, a dreamy voice that sounded like Zubaida Tharwat’s in the movie A Night in My Life. Hend wished that she could escape and hide like Zubaida Tharwat in that movie – then they would miss her desperately and search frantically everywhere for her.
She would buy Star Magazine and gaze, moonstruck, at her favourite heroines. She tried to copy their hairstyles. She really was a great actress. Her family was constantly rediscovering this talent of hers whenever she flew into a rage and tied up her clothes in a cloth bundle and swore that she wasn’t their daughter, that they had probably found her abandoned some place or other. ‘Those eyes of yours are full of crocodile tears,’ her mother said to her. ‘What am I going to do with you? You’re driving us both crazy. Dear God, instead of a daughter You’ve cursed me with this endless heartache.’
Radios soon become a thing of the past and her father bought the first TV set (Arab Toshiba) in all of Pharaoh’s Hills. They put it in the living room between the two balconies, and Hend watched all three episodes of the wildly popular TV soap opera called The Victim – The Departure – The Fugitive. A group of townswomen quietly gathered around the TV in the living room, watching the show like her and crying. She tried to act out the most moving scenes, and most of the time her tears were real. She grew moody and quarrelsome, at times like a changeable breeze, at others like a raging bull, depending on the role she was playing that particular day.
When she grew a bit older, she took on the role of ‘the saint’. She wore herself out praying and talking about sin and scandal. She lost weight and went around with a skinny Christ-like body covered in rags that exhibited her piety for anyone who cared to notice. She walked down the dusty paths of Pharaoh’s Hills, charitably bestowing greetings on the people who lived in the cemeteries. She stood under the mulberry tree at the crossroads waiting for her friends to join her from the nearby estates, their shoes caked in mud and dust as they made their way to school. She never raised her lowered eyes for fear of temptation. During play period, she sat in the furthest corner of the classroom so as not to be noticed, shrinking into herself, practically sticking to the window so that she could gaze out at the desolate cemetery next door and contemplate sin and death while the other girls spent the whole period singing and dancing. Zuba – whose real name was Zaynab – was one of those girls. Her father had come to Pharaoh’s Hills from Cairo and she was always boasting about being from the tough neighbourhood of Bulaq. She was plump and fair-skinned and she wore a pink blouse that revealed the flesh between her ivory breasts. All the male teachers constantly stared at that very spot and considered it an ode to feminine beauty. The female teachers scolded her and told her to button up her blouse, but she would just laugh her deep, throaty laugh and say, ‘I swear they’re just jealous of me.’ The female teachers weren’t the only ones. Hend was bitterly jealous of her too.
Hend always sat apart contemplating the cemetery and fantasising about a slender, movie-star figure with voluptuous, shimmying curves. Zuba carried a case in her pocket with a pair of tweezers and a roll of sewing thread, always ready to do the eyebrows of the envious teachers and students for five piastres. She sat at the very front of the classroom because she adored the spotlight. The male teachers were all obsessed with her in one way or another – their attitudes ranged from fatherly to brotherly to openly lustful. Zuba would laugh and wiggle her eyebrows at them, drawing them further into her snares. In place of a heart she had an enticing pair of breasts and she easily did without the handful of feelings that make a person laugh or cry. During informal lessons like arts and crafts or home economics, Zuba would leave the door slightly ajar and dance. She really knew how to shake her belly in a way that rivalled the infamous ghawazi dancers that Muhammad Ali banished from the city of Cairo. She pranced around and wiggled her body from head to toe. The echo of the rhythmic drumbeats never got as far as the principal’s office, which was tucked far away behind the classrooms.
Why did they all envy her, Hend wondered, when she had freely chosen the role of the playful and erotic public dancer? Zuba was extremely talented, as she herself liked to say. She was an expert at waxing women’s private parts and painting their eyes with kohl and their nails with cheap, flashy red polish that brought out the enticing whiteness of their hands. The ‘saint’ was content to observe all this with frigid contempt. She extracted a deep moral and religious lesson from the cemetery outside the window, though she knew the rumours that circulated about Zuba and the cemetery, how she charged the boys twenty-five piastres to take off her clothes in the dark between tombs so they could gape at her naked flesh. And whenever the competition between Zuba and her rivals exploded out into the open, as it sometimes did, they called her ‘the graveyard girl’, because the tombs were a place full of worms and corruption.
Zuba would put her hand on her hip and let out a string of obscenities. She was from Bulaq, as she kept telling everyone. ‘Who do you think I am, you mommy’s girls?’ The girls stared at her open-mouthed while the art teacher stared at the floor in silence. He was a pious man who feared God – so pious that he forbade them to draw human beings, or any creature with a soul for that matter. Instead he made them draw landscapes that illuminated the Creator’s infinite wisdom. The art teacher didn’t like Zuba and he didn’t pay any attention to her, so Zuba summarily dismissed him as ‘a pansy’. ‘You think he’s a man?’ she asked defiantly. Hend glared at her. ‘He’s respectable and he has a romantic spirit. Not the type of person you’d be familiar with.’ Zuba laughed. ‘Girl, you’re the romantic one,’ she said insinuatingly. She knew that Hend had a crush on the art teacher and that her exaggerated interest in cemeteries was her way of impressing him with her piety. Hend didn’t bother to ask how Zuba had managed to discover her secret passion. Everyone knew that the art teacher had sent her a letter in which he addressed her as ‘my little kitten’. The letter had been for her alone, and Hend had accordingly hidden it in her bundle of secret papers. Despite the letter, they both stuck to their habitual roles of saint and mentor. When he talked he never looked at her. He looked at Angele – who shared her bench – instead, and said things like, ‘You’re a good girl, Angele. You’re a saint, an angel come down from heaven.’ Everyone knew his words were really meant for Hend because Angele was dark-skinned and overweight and not very attractive. The girls in the class looked at Hend with new eyes. They started calling her Mariam Fakhr al-Din, the dreamy, romantic movie star with the sweet and innocent face who trailed catastrophe in her wake. One day Zuba suddenly disappeared along with the art teacher, and rumours began to circulate that he had made her pregnant and run away with her. A number of years later they came back to the town as an officially married couple with a bunch of legally begotten children.
After their disappearance, Hend was filled with jealousy and shame. She wished she could hide behind Angele’s huge body and shut her ears against the sarcasm and jibes of her classmates. She started to hate the role of ‘saint’. She decided that it was stupid and endlessly boring and she began to try on the role of ‘victim’ instead. She told herself that she must be a victim, just like her mother, who did nothing but sob and sniffle and say ‘yes’ and ‘alright’ al
l day long.
When her mother sat on the balcony and sang to herself, she reminded Hend of Layla Murad. There was one song in particular that she would sing to her husband – provided he was in the mood, of course – when he laid his head in her lap. She would run her hand over his hair affectionately and sing: Who can compare to him? How sweet and beautiful he is! He would laugh and she’d continue, Marvellous spring rose, carnations, oh carnations. He’d kiss her on the lips in front of the playing children and for those brief moments her mother would become the leading lady and her heart would swell with happiness. She sang as she cooked and cleaned and her voice rang out with the sweetness of a woman who knew that she was loved and that the time for love was, alas, too short. But when her mother got angry, she took on the role of the victim, weeping and complaining about her trials and tribulations. Hend learned her own role in life from her mother, especially after she became a mother herself. She spent her entire adolescence and youth in the belief that victims like herself had no will of their own, that they were objects of pity or compassion who played crucial roles in stories and films because they spoke to the hidden cruelty in the hearts of men and women. But one day Hend finally rose up in rebellion. She kicked the battered glass door and said to her brothers, who had by then grown into men, ‘I’m going to marry him whether you like it or not’ (an immortal line in countless old movies). The family elders who solemnly gathered in their white Bedouin headdresses to discuss this unheard-of insurrection declared, ‘Let her go to hell, we don’t want any scandals.’
Brooklyn Heights Page 17