I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops (10 page)

So it was that as one rabbit grew up Bus exchanged it for another, younger one. My brother got used to this process. Perhaps he even welcomed it, as all rabbits look alike and behave in the same way, from the quivering of their mouths and noses to the expressions in their eyes, but baby rabbits have a particular charm that is hard to resist.

Spring had come and the heat was still bearable. We moved the rabbit hutch out onto the roof, and as we climbed the steps to see it the following morning my brother predicted that the rabbit would be gone.

We had been made to move it, as my mother began to find the smell of rabbits in the hall and kitchen unbearable. She had never let us put it in the garden from the beginning, claiming that she had heard or read that the smell attracted snakes and scorpions.

My brother asked once again if snakes could climb vertically and I assured him that they couldn’t and we finally reached the roof terrace. To my surprise, he had guessed right and the rabbit was nowhere to be seen. We stood looking around us uncertainly, until we noticed some movement in a pile of leaves and an old pullover that I’d left up there ages before. It was the withdrawn rabbit, which had never let us play with it like the other rabbits. I managed to separate it from the little creatures it was protecting with its fur. They looked like mice or rats. We picked them up and hurried to show them to Bus, who told us angrily that they’d all die if we separated them from their mother so early on. Sure enough, they all died even though we put them in a cardboard box in the living room with a glass of hot water beside them to give them warmth. When Bus wanted to take them away, we were convinced he wouldn’t bury them but would just throw them out with the garbage. So we waited until my father came home from work and took us to bury them outside the compound, where they wouldn’t attract snakes to the house, to keep my mother quiet.

As I scrabbled in the sand, I was filled with a kind of happiness, as if I were at the seaside and all that was missing was the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, and the smell of the ocean. It was early evening and from where
we were the compound looked like a green dot on a brown paper bag.

We stopped ourselves from picking up the black rabbit and made do with watching its stomach swell. Whenever my brother complained to me, I encouraged him by reminding him of the baby rabbits that would soon be born. Then we discussed whether Bus was going to let us have them all. But he left us one rabbit only, which soon died. We blamed him, claiming that the rabbit had died of grief because it was separated from its brothers and sisters. But Bus laughed scornfully and told us that feeding it parsley and coriander was what had killed it. He promised to bring us another rabbit the next morning.

My brother, pacified, nodded and went out to play, but a few minutes later he rushed back in to tell me that the neighbor’s children had a peacock and a bird like a parrot with an electronic voice. I went outside, holding his hand, to ask the children how the peacock and the parrot had got here, and they swore that their servant, Kameel, had brought them from his country.

The compound children had begun to raise young rabbits like us, and their servants, like Bus, would exchange them for younger ones when they grew up. I thought of the canary in a cage that we had seen sitting on the conveyor belt at the airport. The people waiting for their luggage had
laughed out loud at the sight of the canary among the suitcases, apparently enjoying the occasion.

One of the children said that peacocks spread their tails out like fans.

“So what, if we can’t even see our peacock yet,” said another.

I asked him what he meant and they all chorused back at me, “Kameel always forgets to bring it from his room, even though we remind him every day.”

“He must be lying,” I said. “Bus used to tell my brother that in his country there were TV sets as big as whole rooms.”

I decided to take them to the servants’ quarters at the far end of the compound. “Why don’t we go and find out the truth?” I said.

The children reacted enthusiastically to my suggestion and rushed off like gazelles to ask their parents.

Perhaps they were slow to come back, or was that just how it seemed to me? I took my brother’s hand and began running in the direction of the servants’ rooms. As I ran, I wondered why I was more anxious than them to see the peacock, or else to find out that the servant had been lying. Why hadn’t I grown up yet? I was interested in the rabbits and everything else that filled the days of the younger children, so much so that my mother had told me reprovingly that my brother was more mature than me: this was when I
put war paint on the children’s faces with felt-tipped pens and it took two days of rubbing with soap and face cream to get it off.

I used to enjoy playing with them, and it made me laugh when they laughed. I was also their leader, teaching them to do dangerous things and suggesting roles for them to act. My cousin, who had stayed in Lebanon and was the same age as me, wrote me letters about boys and makeup and rock singers.

I felt happy, as if I was setting off on an adventure, when the stars came close to the earth and the houses thinned out. The sun was red and almost sinking into the sand, and the twilight turned violet and orange and then gray. I had an idea about the sort of places the compound’s servants lived in, because I had always thought of the compound as being like a factory and the servants as the machinery that made it run. They lived near a small mosque whose walls were covered in blue mosaic tiles.

The sense of being my own mistress and having my brother under my control was short-lived as he began lagging behind and complaining that he was tired. When I offered to carry him he confessed that he was scared more than tired; I wondered why, as it never got properly dark in the desert. I looked around for a stone or a stick to defend him with. Everything was still: the gardens were semi-arid and the sloping ground around us was bare except for some
fanlike shrubs and a little plant that wilted and surrendered to me, roots and all, the minute I touched it. I gave up the idea of finding a stick or a stone and asked my brother what he was afraid of.

“Bus,” he replied.

“Sweetheart,” I said, bending down to him. I took him in my arms but changed my mind rapidly when I found how heavy he was, and put him down again.

“Don’t be scared. Bus is still in our house. And anyway, you can’t be scared when I’m with you!”

I was sorry I had made him frightened of Bus. It reminded me of my grandmother telling me stories about the ghoul to frighten me into being good.

“Why didn’t we wait for the others?” he asked. “Why don’t we go back and get them?”

“If we go by ourselves, we can see the peacock before they do, and maybe take the bird with the electronic voice,” I answered.

“Steal it?”

“Maybe.”

I couldn’t imagine that there was a peacock or a bird like a parrot in those wooden huts; however, I wanted to escape from the house and also prove that the servant had lied. Darkness enveloped us suddenly, as I had taken a short cut off the main road; then it was gone again as we
walked along another road with houses and streetlights on either side.

My brother no longer clung to me. We got nearer and smelled cooking and then heard children talking in a foreign language, and I was sure that they must be the servants’ children visiting for the holidays. I had once heard Bus saying that he would have liked to send for his children if the fares hadn’t been so high. Hearing other children made us feel easier, but then a man came out of the wooden huts and noticed us and stopped and stared and my heart beat faster again. I knew I must ask him where Bus lived, or Kameel, in the strongest voice I could manage. He indicated the last hut. I thanked him loudly and he went on staring at me. He started to move. Was he going to follow us? My brother was clinging to me so tightly now that I could hardly walk. I realized our parents had been right to be worried: here I was rushing into the trap, and I only understood how terrified my brother was of Bus now that I felt the same way about this man.

A horrible smell distracted my attention, then a washing line strung between the building and the streetlight. We had to duck our heads down under the washing to get to the house the man had indicated. I thought the compound’s sewage pipes must come out here. The washing flapped noisily against the back of my head. It seemed strange. They
must have used a powder that made their clothes dry hard and stiff in the sun. The smell grew stronger and the washing was all the same shape, like babies’ sleeping suits. A light came on in one of the rooms. The washing blazed into life in front of me and I screamed. Then my brother screamed. We both noticed at the same time that the washing hanging out to dry was rabbits, still with their heads and ears on. Rabbit skins, black, white, spotted, small, large. Their dried-up legs were bumping painfully against our faces. There was one rabbit hanging there that looked as if someone had outlined its eyes in black kohl. We used to call her Cleopatra. We took to our heels. There were so many of them. The smell was suffocating. We used to hug them, bury our faces in their fur and give them rides in my brother’s car, and now we were running away from them. They followed us with their dead, carrot-colored eyes. Their perpetual movement, their different colors had staved off the monotony of the desert for us, and yet now we could have been escaping from a forest fire. We flew along the asphalt road shrieking. When the houses and gardens of the compound came in sight we cried louder, hoping that somebody would come out to ask what was wrong, so that we could describe the horrors we had seen. But music, the smell of food, the murmuring of voices was all that came out of these peaceful houses.

“Why did he do it?” asked my brother. Then, as if he
had worked out the answer for himself, he clutched my hand tighter and said, “He killed them like he wanted to kill me. Why?”

“We’ll kill him,” I said.

“We’ll hit him,” replied my brother.

‘No. We’ll kill him. I’ll slit his throat,” I said breathlessly, running as if Bus were getting away from me.

“No. No. We’ll just hit him,” said my little brother. Covering his eyes, he shouted tearfully, “No! We’re not going to slit his throat.”

Perhaps we would give him some of the sleeping tablets my mother sometimes took, or slip poison into his food. Where would we get poison from? My father would sack him as soon as he found out. But that was too good for him. He’d find another job. We had to take revenge. I was so full of rage and fear that I didn’t think about whether I would be punished for disobeying orders and going to the servants’ quarters.

My entrance did not have the impact on my mother that I had anticipated. Her eyes remained fastened on the book in front of her. She only looked up curiously when she heard the words “servants’ quarters” and then suddenly seemed to take notice of our tears. She jumped up to see what was wrong, and when she made out what we were saying she burst out laughing, asking us to repeat our tale and dissolving into helpless laughter again. She called Bus
and when he didn’t answer, she carried on as if she were talking to herself, saying she had never pictured him as being so sharp. His only job before he came to the desert and worked in people’s houses had been carrying messages between villages in his own country, and now here he was getting the compound’s children to raise rabbits and selling their meat and fur: a profitable operation with very low coats.

She called him again. I knew he’d gone to fetch water from the tank as his bike and the plastic water container weren’t by the door. I let her call, still shocked by her amused reaction. I grabbed hold of my little brother’s hand violently, to show her how angry I was. How could she talk to us like this when we were hysterical? I wanted to tell her how unfeeling she was, how all grown-ups were unbelievably stupid and cruel, and I didn’t want to grow up. I left the room in a fury, as I had entered it.

I picked up my brother and carried him to bed. We hadn’t had anything to eat or drink, because we didn’t want to go into the kitchen and see the murderer. We didn’t change into our nightclothes or brush our teeth. I held my brother tight, wiping away his tears and promising him that we would take revenge. We fell asleep with the salty taste of our tears still in our mouths.

We woke up the next morning to find a little white rabbit at the breakfast table, looking at us helplessly.

Instead of putting out his hand to touch it, my brother looked at me, waiting to see my reaction. I rushed impulsively to pick it up and felt it trembling as I held it to my face and kissed it. Then I gave it to him and he took hold of it hesitantly. Bus came up, peeling a potato, and asked him for a thank-you kiss, but my brother ran over to me and we rushed out of the kitchen together.

Like a thirsty horse
I made for the water. But I wasn’t thirsty. I was on fire. I threw the water over the English boy and his friend, and fire blazed in my head and heart and between my legs.

Images kept, on coming at me that, like an enraged horse, I tried to resist, defiantly tossing my head high, but each new picture flashing into my mind provoked me more and I shook my head frantically from side to side.