She became a lovely, refined bride and her life turned into a Zahrit al-Ula movie: from now on she would play the role of the young, abandoned wife. She went back to the role of victim and deliberately courted the pity of one and all. Whenever she shut herself up in her room, her husband would say to her, ‘You just can’t live without some melodrama for a single day, can you?’ But she was smart enough to know that he had it backward. Melodrama was part and parcel of the way of the world, like birth and death and sorrow and boredom.
In the end she decided that the most appropriate finale to that particular movie should be spectacular and open-ended, so she ran away for good. And now here she is coming down from the Brooklyn Bridge after finishing her scene and discovering the truth about her acting abilities in one fell swoop, with no make-up or lighting to keep up the illusion of a lifetime. All she had to do was run after a little whore pretending to be her daughter – the very role that she had spent her whole life trying to avoid. She thinks to herself that her life has been nothing but a series of adaptations of old movies. She tells herself that the many costumes she’s worn at one time or another were never sized to fit her soul. She remembers the red knit dress with the three green flowers that she used to wear as a child. She remembers that the colour of her school uniform was a dull grey, rather than the standard navy blue. Grey suited her because she wanted to be different, to declare her superiority. Sometimes she would throw open the doors of her mother’s wardrobe and examine the flounced dresses that looked like the ones Layla Murad wore in the movie The Education of Girls. Her fingers lovingly lingered on the loose silky cloches, the double cloche cambered and arranged in a perfect oval around the elegant neckline. Her mother, who always complained of her aching back, no longer wore any of them, and Hend dared to hope they would be hers one day. Her mother’s serial pregnancies had left their mark on her body and the abandoned dresses became a shrine to her aristocratic lineage and the days of her first slenderness, as well as a memorial to her fashionable Armenian dressmaker, who lived in Tal’at Harb Street in Cairo and made clothes for all the great actresses of the day. Now her mother was content to make an annual trip to the department stores Sednaoui and Shamla, because they were close by and their prices were reasonable. She would cautiously inquire about the price of the fine cotton linen, but she always bought the cambric printed with miniature flowers because it was cheaper and the piqué because it was tough and naturally stain-resistant.
Hend was forever taking yards of the cheap fabric to Umm Hanan. The seamstress turned them into clothes that constantly came back to her for alterations. ‘Mama says can you shorten the sleeves?’ ‘Mama says can you lengthen this hem?’ ‘Mama says can you take in the waist?’ Umm Hanan finally lost patience: ‘You think I don’t have anything to do but take care of you?’ she exploded. ‘Go tell your mother I don’t do alterations any more!’
Her mother took care of everything – that’s why Hend’s clothes all looked the same when she was a young girl: modest knee-length skirts and blouses with three-quarter sleeves that would keep the sun from burning her arms but not get wet when she washed the dishes. All her blouses and dresses had to be high-necked because, as her mother always said, no daughter of hers went around with bare bosoms like actresses and prostitutes. And so Hend wore those clownish dresses made of piqué that turned her body into a neutral, shapeless thing. From time to time she tore them up or packed them away for her great escape and on these occasions her mother would say to her, ‘You’re driving me crazy! Are you a girl or some kind of evil spirit?’
The rending of clothes was a family tradition that she was careful to keep up, especially after she got married. Faten Hamama performed a brilliant version of this ritual in Hend’s favourite film The Thin Line, where she played the role of a furious, abandoned woman. Hend used to take solace in the remarkable fact that even the lovely and talented Faten Hamama could play a character like that. In the end she took to wearing an embroidered abaya because she was ‘the daughter of Bedouin Arabs’, after all, the descendant of some tribe called the Tiyaha whose women all hid behind black veils. Her grandmother used to hang her black gowns on a washing line stretched between two nails in her room because she claimed that the moths devoured everything piled up in closets. She would point proudly to each of the gowns hanging on the line: ‘Velvet from Mecca, Yemeni satin, Indian silk.’ Hend never saw her wearing her Indian silk or her Yemeni satin because she only ever went out to attend the funerals of the old women in the neighbourhood. She died suddenly in her turn and the other old women put on their scented black gowns and sat at her wake, mournfully reeling off the virtues of the departed Guest. Towards the end of her life, Hend’s mother also took to wearing a black abaya whenever she went out of the house on one of her rare trips to the doctor. ‘Well, it’s just something to cover yourself with after all . . .’ she would sigh.
Hend runs her hand through her hair as she walks across the bridge. She remembers how it used to be long and black when she was a child, hiding her small skinny body and consuming all her strength. Her mother used to twist it into a single, long braid. She would get angry as she pulled and plaited the unruly mass of hair. She complained that it was like horse hair rather than human hair. Hend had no idea what horse hair was like, all she knew was that it hurt when her mother combed it. She didn’t like wearing it in two braids, either. Her mother did it that way sometimes because it supposedly warded off the evil eye of the enviers. In old photos Hend can be seen staring gravely at the camera with her hair done in those two long braids. She is not beautiful. She looks out from the photograph still and quiet, obscured by the long horse-like hair that she inherited from no one. Her mother used to say that she had longed to have hair like Miss Nadia’s when she was pregnant with her. Hend discovered that Miss Nadia was the music teacher who had come to Pharaoh’s Hills before she was born and taught her mother how to crochet hats. She was the one who knitted the red dress that Hend always saw in the family photos, and she was apparently the one who had bequeathed her that long, ponderous mass of black hair, the like of which they had never seen in the annals of the family. Miss Nadia left Pharaoh’s Hills and went back to her own country ages ago, but her name would always come up whenever the subject of Hend’s hair did.
When she grew up she left the braids behind and took to wearing her hair in a huge bun pinned tight with clips because whenever she let it hang loose down her back her mother would say to her curtly, ‘Gather it up.’ So she gathered it up since it hid her thin face anyway. She wished she could cut it off but didn’t, because she knew that her mother would then say something like, ‘But your hair’s your only good feature!’ The men who loved her were also quite open about their obsession with her hair, and she began to hate it. On many a sleepless night as she lay struggling to ignore the painful swelling in her breasts and the acrid smell of milk that assailed her nostrils, she would suddenly realise that her baby had wound his little fist tightly in her long thick hair and fallen asleep with a blissful expression on his face. She would spend hours trying to free the strands from the vice-like grip of his fingers, but he always woke up with a start and wound his hand in the mass even more tightly. In that period of her life, her hair became a reliable barometer of the generally wretched state of her emotional health. It fell out in clumps, leaving bare patches like ulcers behind. It grew thin and frizzy as a result of her many fits of jealousy and bouts of depression, as though sharing in the wasteland of her loneliness. Her hair determined many of the roles she had played in her life.
When the Arabic teacher came back from Yemen – having performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and repented to God – he informed her that her hair was sinful, and so she hid it underneath veils of fear. The Arabic teacher was an expert at detecting temptation wherever it was to be found: this girl’s chest was too big and she should cover it completely, or the outlines of that student’s rear end were too high and round under her uniform and therefore she should take off the
belt around her waist and wear a loose skirt. He was quite practised at pointing out the differences between those still growing bodies. Hend covered her hair and drew closer to God. She covered it because each and every strand was sure to lead her straight to the fires of hell. She cut it short, then regretted having done so because now she could no longer recognise the girl looking out at her from the mirror.
Her hair was the battleground of many wars. She cut off a piece of it and presented it to the one she loved, a small token of her undying troth. Her mother pulled her around by it. She said things like, ‘Do you think you can just let it all hang loose like that?’ Hend threatened to set it on fire if they didn’t let her marry of her own free will, to make her own decisions for once. She started to wear it down, in one cascading mass, liberating it from the casing of cloth and fear. It fell out in clumps after each scene with her husband. It piled up on pillows and in the teeth of combs and in the corners of her father’s house. Grandmother Zaynab – God rest her soul – used to gather it into cloth pouches and bury it in the sand to protect her from the work of evil spirits once she realised that Hend’s stars were crossed and that she was the object of the evil eye of the enviers. But that didn’t stop her being miserable. She began to suffer from migraines. The pain emanated from underneath her scalp and the pills that she constantly swallowed were no use at all.
After he left, her mother took her head in her lap and held her close to stop her crying. She told her with the wisdom of a woman who knew everything there was to be known about migraines and aching backs and the fickleness of men, ‘To hell with him, my daughter, men are good for nothing but headaches. Are you going to kill yourself fretting? Forget him.’ Hend tried but she didn’t forget him.
She stands gazing in the mirror at the strands of hair that fall away when she tugs at them with her hand. They lie in stray piles on the floor like a hodgepodge of memories waiting to be gathered up and tossed in the waste bin. She neither cries nor rejoices. She only feels that she’s free now, just as she had always longed to be. She runs across the Brooklyn Bridge in the black coat that she picked out carefully one day from the rack in a second-hand store: a coat that expresses her fashion sense, loose and dark like a shapeless sack. It adds a few extra years and generously conceals all the things that Hend wishes to conceal. Her hair is short and black, her step hesitant, her dress modest and dignified, her gaze lowered. Some of the passers-by on Seventh Avenue mistake her for an orthodox Jew and some even hand her leaflets about Temple Beth Alohim and call her ‘my little Jewish lady’. She smiles to herself because this always happens to her whenever she walks past the old watch-repair stores in Williamsburg or on Third Avenue. People in that neighbourhood always mistake her for a Mizrahi Jew. The Latinos too think she’s one of them, because of her full figure and her black hair, and the Indians look at her kohl-painted eyes and nod their heads at her affectionately (‘Kashmiri?’ they ask her), while other immigrant communities claim her as one of their own. She walks along Seventh Avenue in the long black coat that transforms her into someone else, anyone else. She looks at herself in the mirror but can’t find the little girl who used to trek past the agricultural cooperative and the Muqawi Primary School to join the dusty procession of gypsies. All she sees is a strange woman who looks like her.
12
The Cold Season
From time immemorial the Arabs have attached many meanings to the wind, perhaps more than it can bear. They took it as a good omen, but also a bad one, and they gave it countless names: the poison wind, the wind of good tidings, the lunatic wind. It carried scents across the deserts and prophesied the arrival of travellers; it warned tyrants and laid waste to villages of sin till they became like the hollow stumps of palm trees. They charged it with their dreams and desires, for the wind carried the beloved’s sighs and brought tidings of the coming of the rains. They said, ‘The wind plants fear in the heart of the seafarer,’ and, ‘The winds are hostage to His command,’ for they believed that everything that happens in this world is predestined and subservient to the Supreme Will, against which men are powerless to act.
The khamasin winds descended upon the Heights in spring. They ruffled the sands on top of the hill where Hend sat with her father in front of the reception house. The leaves fell from the camphor tree and the air grew thick with dust and the smell of camphor and death. Her father said to her, ‘This is the Yud wind.’ She didn’t know what the word meant, so she said nothing. ‘The Persians and the people of Khurasan called it Yud – the wind of longing. Do you know why they gave it that name? Because of the souls of the dead. The dead constantly long for those they’ve left behind in this world, so they come back in the form of a gentle breeze and take away a few of their loved ones, then go back to the place they came from.’ Hend was frightened. Her father went on. ‘Do you know why they rub the bodies of dead people with camphor leaves after washing them?’ Hend shook her head, not wanting to hear the rest of the story. For the first time, the tone of her father’s voice filled her with fear, and the faraway look in his eyes made her shiver. She begged him to tell her the story of ‘Hend the daughter of King Nu’man’ instead.
Her father put his hand on her shoulder and they walked side by side. Hend was his only companion now that Doctor Shamil the pharmacist had left for Libya and Mr Emile the principal had gone to join his relatives in Canada. The new civil servants in town weren’t interested in the reception house and its host, and most of the parties in local disputes now preferred to solve their problems in the mosque according to the laws of religion and the ways of the Prophet. Fatma al-Qarumiya had donned a long black veil and taken to sitting on the ground in front of the Nur Mosque selling musk oil, siwak toothpicks, Qurans, and pamphlets on prophetic medicine with detailed cures for such ailments as asthma and migraine. Fatma al-Qarumiya’s immense body squatted squarely on the ground. She looked like a seated camel, a mass of flesh that shook when she let out her famous laugh and said to passers-by, ‘What can I do, cousin? I’m a just businesswoman, I buy and sell whatever I can get in the market.’
In spite of the rapid urbanisation that had swept through Pharaoh’s Hills, there were still desolate rocky heights and woods crawling with scorpions. Hend isn’t sure exactly when her father started to develop an interest in the life cycle of insects, or when he began to collect with a pair of iron tongs the tiny yellow scorpions that came out at night from their lairs around the Heights. She would walk next to him carrying a fluorescent flashlight and when she pointed it at one of the creatures, it instantly froze. Her father caught the scorpions with the tongs and put them carefully in an airtight glass jar. He kept the jar in the Guest’s old bedroom in the reception house. The Guest’s scent still lingered in that abandoned room. Hend sniffed the familiar perfume: a mixture of olive-oil soap, musk, peppermint, and the camphor that she used to put in the folds of her gowns. When the Guest passed away her gowns grew shabby and faded, of course, but the strong smell remained, drifting out every time they opened the door to her abandoned bedroom.
Her father entered the room, followed by Hend. He placed the glass jars containing the scorpions on the windowsill. Hend stared at the wide old sill where a tray with clay water-jars and a small kerosene lamp used to sit. The Guest used to hang strings of chilli peppers, grapes, and figs to dry on its wooden frame. She often left plates of stewed beans and kishk sitting out on the sill to keep them cool and fresh. Hend gazed out at the Heights through the window, the window that let in the cold north wind. She spotted Venus gleaming in the twilight sky. The Guest used to mark the passing hours and the change of seasons as she sat at that window basking in the summer breeze, which she claimed was more exquisite than the fans of paradise. Hend stood watching her father as he transferred the yellow sand scorpions into larger transparent pickle jars, then carefully sealed them and left them on the windowsill. He shut the door fast behind him as he told her about how he was on the verge of discovering a cure for diabetes made from scorpion veno
m. Hend felt happy to be helping her father on such an important project, but also because he spent much more time with her now that all his old friends had gone away. They went on long walks together – from the reception house to the Heights, and from the Hill Estate back home, and they always stopped to greet the migrant workers that they passed in the fields. They spent hours every day catching spiders to feed to the scorpions. He explained his theory to her: a small injection of scorpion venom strengthens the body’s immunity. He also told Hend – who wanted to believe him – that Bedouin Arabs like him knew these things because they were natives of the desert. The little scorpion farm on the windowsill became their special secret. Hend learned to tell the difference between the males and females just by looking. She had mostly gotten over her initial fear of them, until the first time she saw them mating in a weird dance that went on for hours.
It was a scene that she would never forget for as long as she lived. The male scorpion scurried back and forth, revolving around the female warily in ever narrowing circles, and they turned together in a long, cautious tango without touching. The male ejected his sperm onto the ground and the female scooped it up into her abdomen with her rear legs. She puffed up slowly, enormous and satisfied, then fell perfectly still while the male ran up and down the side of the glass jar frantically searching for an exit. The impregnated female scorpion moved towards him with slow, heavy steps, her poisonous tail raised stiffly in anticipation. The male jumped around even more frantically, knowing he was trapped. She caught him between her jaws and devoured him piece by piece, and once she had finished she fell into a long period of total immobility that lasted for days. Finally, the mother scorpion woke up. She carried the tiny embryos around on her back for weeks. After this period of gestation, the embryos were transformed into little scorpions that scurried rapidly around the jar, much like the fleeing male. They ran up and down the sides of the jar; they ran circles around themselves. They were small and hungry and terribly excited. The mother scorpion submitted to them. The little scorpions gathered around her in a tight circle and began to feed on her body. Hend was twelve years old at the time. She started having terrifying nightmares about scorpions and began to wet herself again. Her mother scolded her father sharply: ‘Shame on you, the girl is unstable enough as it is and you’re making her help you raise scorpions!’
Brooklyn Heights Page 18