Qissat (3 page)

We giggle and Mama says, ‘
Kaffik
’, and I give her five.

From the room next to ours we hear a girl soldier yell, ‘Ma
zeh
?’ and then another woman scream in Arabic. Then our soldier tells us to put our clothes on and goes outside to see what’s going on. I rush my dress on, step outside the small room and see the two soldiers looking at a big gold chain and speaking a language that sounds a lot like Arabic.

‘Eyfo?
Where?’

‘Ba
Kotex
shela
!
Ken
! In her Kotex! Yeah!’

The girl who’d hidden her gold chain in her Kotex stands next to them, her arms crossed over her chest. ‘I don’t have money to pay the tax!’ she tells them in Arabic. Mama comes out of the room and takes my hand.

We go and look for our shoes. They’re in a huge laundry bin in the centre of the bigger room. I ask Mama why they’re there, and she says the soldiers took them and X-ray-ed them to make sure we weren’t hiding anything in them.

‘Like what?’ I ask, dangling the top half of my body over the bin. I find cute flower sandals, brown shoes and pretty red heels, but not my shoes.

‘Like bombs,’ Mama says, inspecting her beige heels, ‘and grenades.’

‘But,’ I say, finding one shoe but not the other, ‘I thought grenades were bigger than a … shoe!’ At last I find the other one.

‘Hhhhm!’ exhales a woman in jeans and skinny glasses. ‘The girl’s got more sense than those blind ones!’

A few minutes later the entire bin is emptied, yet the woman in the jeans and the skinny glasses still hasn’t found her shoes.

‘You stole them!’ she says, pointing at a pretty girl soldier with braces on her teeth. The soldier laughs. ‘You bitch! You can’t take my shoes, you hear me?
Walek
, they’re mine!’

‘I didn’t take your dirty shoes. Now get back in line and get out.’

‘Who took them then? I put them in your goddamn bin and now, poof!’ she clicks her fingers. ‘Gone! Where are they?’

‘Only
Hashem
knows, lady! Now get in line!’

‘Bala hashem bala khara!
Don’t give me that God shit! I want my shoes!’

‘Take them!’ the soldier screams, hurling the strappy sandals at her.

The girl lifts up her glasses and examines the heels. Apparently satisfied, she slips them on and, once outside, says, ‘First my land, now my Guccis! God damn it.’

We sit on a bench in the bright sun and search for Baba. In a little while he reappears and walks over to us with a bottle of water. I want to tell him stories about what just happened, but he says we have to be quiet in case they call our name so we can collect our bags and go. Mama hands me some cookies, which I inhale while black flies buzz around my face and eyes. All around us there are people, people hungry and tired, people waiting. Mama tries to talk to a woman next to her, but Mama’s Palestinian dialect is shabby, and the woman is a peasant. Mama tries the Egyptian dialect, and another woman tells her to keep talking ‘like a movie star’. Mama is embarrassed and stops talking altogether, which suits Baba just fine.

When the sun is half way down in the sky, a soldier yells out our name and Baba crosses the yard and gets our bags from him. We then look for a taxi to take us to Baba’s village, Jenin, and find a van full of people who are going there too. I sit on Mama’s lap this time, and Baba takes my sleeping brother. I watch the ponies as we drive by, the olive trees, the almond trees. I notice how neat the rows of trees are, small sprinklers shooting water at them, the green army jeeps that zoom past us, Baba’s face looking like the sliced rocks in the mountains on our left. I’m so tired; I close my eyes, smell the lemony air, and bury my head in his shirt.

Sitto and I sit in the kitchen in the house that my Baba built her and roll cabbage leaves with rice and meat and cumin and salt inside. Sitto looks like Baba, exactly like my Baba, except her hair is longer and she doesn’t scratch her omelets because she doesn’t have any. Her kitchen smells like farts because boiled cabbage releases the farts entrapped within the leaves by evil gassy trolls that comb the countryside. Sitto tells me the story about the two sisters, one poor and one rich. The poor one goes to the rich one’s house and the rich one’s stuffing cabbage leaves. The poor one craves some but the rich one’s a bitch and doesn’t offer her any, so she goes home and makes her own. The mayor comes to visit the poor one’s house for some reason, so she offers him cabbage and he accepts, but while she’s serving it she farts. She turns red and slaps her cheeks and wishes the earth would open up and swallow her, and it does. Underneath the earth she sees a nice town, people and carriages. She walks and bemoans her fate out loud. Suddenly she sees her fart sitting at a café drinking coffee and dressed very posh. She tells him he’s a bastard and why did he embarrass her so? He says he felt stuck inside her and wanted out. The people of the underground town harass him and tell him he needs to make it up to her, so he says, fine, every time you open your mouth gold will drip from it. She goes back up and the mayor is gone and her husband asks, where have you been wife? And she starts to explain but gold drips out of her mouth, and she becomes rich, and never wants for a thing again! And her rich bitch sister, she gets jealous and wants even more riches, so she emulates her sister and farts in front of the mayor when she has him over for stuffed cabbage and the earth swallows her up and she looks for her fart but everyone’s a bum in her underworld, everyone’s sad and impoverished, and when she finally finds her fart he starts cursing her and saying he felt so warm inside her why did she push him out? But she doesn’t get it and she asks him for gold and he tells her to get lost, the villagers expel her and she goes back to her world where the mayor is gone and the husband yells where were you no good wife? And she opens her mouth to explain but scorpions drop out of it and bite her all over until she dies. By the end of the tale all the cabbage rolls are stacked in the pot and Sitto puts the pot on the flame and says,
‘w-hay ihkayti haket-ha, w’aleki ramet-ha
And that’s my tale, girl, I’ve told it, and to you, girl, I’ve thrown it.’

I wonder if I love Sitto because of her
hikayyat khuraifiyeh,
her tales. She tells me to remember the tales, and even though there are a lot of them – one about half a pomegranate, one about a girl who loses her slipper, one about a man with two wives – I do. She tells me that like her grandmother told her the tales and she tells them to me, I must one day tell my kids the tales when they visit me from afar. I want to tell the tales to everyone, and I wish I won’t ever have to have kids, but I don’t dare tell her that.

Back home, in Kuwait, when Baba got letters from his now-dead father, they would include a message from Sitto. My grandpa Sido would write the message for her, and her signature would be a little circle with her name inside it, because she can’t write. Baba explained to me that she used a ring. I never understood this, and thought the ring was the same as her wedding ring. But now, while we wait for the cabbage to cook, she asks me to write her daughter’s husband a letter about the white cheese crop. She dictates it to me. When I give her the paper so she can ‘sign’ it, she takes out her signing ring; it is not her wedding band at all. She dips it in ink and then smashes it onto the paper dramatically, winking at me. It occurs to me that Sitto doesn’t care that she can’t write, because she tells tales and winks and makes cheese.

In the afternoons of the forty-day funeral, for which we will only stay for three days, the women sit in a circle and tell stories about Sido, once in a while slapping their cheeks and rending their dresses. I slap my cheeks and try to rip my dress but Mama shoots me laser-looks and I stop. I just want to be like everyone else.

When I’m alone with Sitto again, I ask her how she met Sido. She laughs and laughs, even though I don’t think my question is funny.

‘He came to our house as a messenger for his father,’ she says. ‘You see, his father had come to visit us about the olive trees. I took his horse at the gate because the stable keeper was praying. Your great-grandfather was very taken with me, because even though I don’t have a lot of teeth now and I’m very fat, I was pretty in those days.’

‘You’re pretty, Sitto!’

‘God send away the devil! You liar!’ she pinches my cheek, hard. ‘Your great-grandfather sent your grandfather to come ask after me. He wanted to know if I was available for marriage. But when I saw grandfather, I wanted to be his wife. Like that, I don’t know why. He was very handsome in those days too, and not bald! Your grandfather asked if I was available for marriage, and I answered, yes, I am available to marry him. And I winked! Your grandfather understood, and forgot all about his father. He took me for himself. And after I gave birth to six girls, your father, God keep him, arrived!’

I like sneaking over to Sitto so she can tell me more stories. The day before we leave she tells me about the half-a-half boy who was half a human because his father ate half the pomegranate he was supposed to give his infertile wife to help her carry his child. I wonder if she tells me this because she thinks I’m half a girl since I’m only half-Palestinian. But Sitto must have Mama’s gift, because, as though she’d read my mind, she tells me that the boy in the story is stronger and better than the kids that come from the whole pomegranate, and when she calls me ‘a half-and-half one’, that’s what she thinks of me.

Baba takes me, that last afternoon on the bank, to the cemetery plot. Sido’s grave has a wooden plank with his name and a
sura
carved onto it. It is the opposite of Yia Yia’s grave. It has a Muslim Man in it, instead of a Christian Woman. I stand with my hands folded over my chest and recite the
fateha,
wondering if my Baba’s baba is comfortable under all that dirt. I then recite, in my head, all the verses I’ve learned, like a show-off, because I want Sido to know I’m good, so he won’t worry about me. We take a short walk past the cemetery and the shrub-dotted land to a tiny house on a hill. Baba opens its gates and shows me the big room inside.

‘This is where I grew up,’ he says. ‘Here, with my sisters. And whenever a brother would die, since three of them did, they buried them in that lot over there.’

‘Where we just were,’ I gasp, scared by the thought that Baba’s little brothers are buried already. Where would Gamal be buried? Would we all be buried separately, far away from each other the way Mama and Baba’s families are?

‘And we went to the bathroom outside.’ He looks around at the room and bites his inner cheeks. He doesn’t look sad. Mama says Baba is the kind of man that is happy being sad. Maybe she’s right. I look around the room and try to picture nine bodies sleeping on the wooden floor, six girls with all their girl problems.

‘All my sisters,’ Baba says, ‘got married before they were fifteen. No, I’m lying; Kameela was seventeen. They got married against that whitewashed wall outside … like prisoners awaiting execution.’ Baba stops and exhales wearily. ‘The minister came and married them to their husbands, who were usually ten years older, twenty times uglier, and a ton less sad about the entire deal.’ The wall is the one on the east end of the old house, the end facing the valley. I scan the scratched-up floors, touch the worn door handles, and try to imagine Baba as a child.

‘I walked to school, or rode the ass. I carried my book in a length of rope over my shoulder.’

‘Did you miss it here when you had to go to Egypt?’

‘I’m glad you mention that, my girl. I was sad, but going to Egypt, going to university, gave me my freedom. Your aunts never received such an opportunity. I want more than anything in the world for you to have that opportunity.’

I stare at the hills outside.

‘Do you understand this?’ he asks me, his voice filled with urgency, and I nod.

‘It’s hard to explain this to you,’ Baba says, leading me outside. ‘Although I lost my home, I gained an education, which later became my home. This can also happen for you,’ he pauses, mines his mind for better words. ‘War is terrible. Terrible! But good things can come of it too.’

He wants to take a picture of me: he tells me to lean and rest my back against the once-famous, now-dirty white ‘wedding’ wall. I stick my chin out and smile, my hands like soldiers at my sides. The flash makes me see stars. When I look at this picture closely now, I see that there is a ladder at the left-hand side of it, propped up against the yellowed wall. Baba had left me an escape route.

There are the same number of plastic slippers as usual – no more, no less. Nuwwar won’t collect them now. After the water has reached the narrow drain at the doorstep she’ll pick them up, along with the sandals with a broken buckle. Her back is about to part company with her bottom. If only the broom were a bit bigger, she wouldn’t be forced to bend over so far. But the broom grows skinnier day by day, just like her. Its coarse hair falls out each time it sweeps the wet floor. Nuwwar’s back is on the point of parting company with her bottom on a daily basis, but when she’s finished sweeping it remains straight and upright and firmly attached to her skinny buttocks.

The water loiters at the doorstep now, cooling its steamy breath. Nuwwar straightens up slightly, so that the blood drains out of her lean cheeks into the rest of her body. The water rises and falls. Nuwwar’s chest rises, and with it the plastic slippers. Her chest falls, and with it the sandals. Broken bristles bob playfully around the opening of the narrow drain. The water lies above the drain, which is partly choked, rising and falling. The volume of water increases, rising and falling more, and the drain doesn’t drain it away! Nuwwar hurries to open the door and the water races over the doorstep onto the raised porch, then out into the street, but the slippers stay behind. Nuwwar picks them up two by two, slapping them together so that the fine spray bathes her face, or wiping their soles on the side of her dress, which is tucked into her long trousers, then putting them all with the sandals into the crate and lifting it out onto the right-hand side of the porch, the side that gets the sun, so they’ll dry quickly. They’ll go a bit hard and crinkled, but as soon as they’re worn again they’ll soften up. Now she reaches her hand into the narrow drain which opens out in the porch, scooping up grit and sand and bent and twisted bristles. She reaches in further – a green bean pod, stringy heads of okra, clumps of hair. The sluggish film of water trapped behind the doorstep begins to dwindle as the drain carries it slowly out into the porch. Nuwwar bends lower over the porch, watching as the water gushes out of the drain towards her feet. Her toenails are getting more brittle. They aren’t long like Umm Shihab the matchmaker’s, but Umm Shihab doesn’t clean floors, so her nails grow and she paints them.