The Blue Between Sky and Water (2 page)
Flowers and fruit cycled through hues with the seasons. So did trees. So did the skin on Mariam’s arms, from brown to very brown in the summer. But her hair was always black and her eyes were always the way they were: one green, one brown with hazel accents. The green left eye was her favorite, because everyone loved to look at it, but such curiosity made Nazmiyeh nervous that her little sister might become cursed with
hassad
, the misfortune of the evil eye that befalls one because of the jealousy of others.
My teta Nazmiyeh told me that she had been the prettiest girl in all of Beit Daras. She said she was the baddest, too, and I tried to imagine my teta in the glory of her youthful badness.
It was up to Nazmiyeh to protect Mariam from the evils of
hassad
. Some people just had hot, greedy eyes that could easily lay the curse, even if they hadn’t intended. So, Nazmiyeh insisted Mariam wear a blue amulet to ward off the envy people felt toward Mariam’s unique eyes, and Nazmiyeh regularly read Quranic
suras
over her for more protection.
The subject of Mariam’s eyes came up once among Nazmiyeh’s friends as they washed clothes by the river. Most were recently married or expecting their first child, but some, like Nazmiyeh, were still unmarried. “How can she have only one green eye?” one asked.
Nazmiyeh flung off her headscarf, releasing a medusa’s head of shiny henna-dyed coils, plopped her brother’s white shirt in the wash bucket, and quipped, “Some Roman stud probably stuck his dick in our ancestral line a few hundred years ago and now it’s poking out of my poor sister’s eye.”
In the private female freedom of those laundry mornings, they all laughed, their arms deep in wash buckets. Another young woman said, “Too bad it wasn’t a double-headed snake so she could have two green eyes.”
And another, “Mostly too bad for your ancestor, Nazmiyeh. How she might have liked a double-headed one!” Their laughter reached higher notes, liberated by the vulgar immodesty they dared. Such was Nazmiyeh’s power to undress decorum, allowing those around her to acknowledge what lay unsorted in their hearts. She was crass in a way that both intrigued her friends and embarrassed them. Few dared reproach her, for though her tongue could be the charm to melt a heart, it could be a poisonous sting or path to appalling impropriety. People loved and hated her for that.
Nazmiyeh believed the odd coloring of her sister’s eyes was related to her special ability to divine the unseen. Mariam was not a clairvoyant, but she could see people’s shine.
“What do you mean
shine
?” Nazmiyeh once asked her.
“The
shine
!” Mariam traced her hand in the space around Nazmiyeh’s head. “Right there,” she said.
Nazmiyeh came to understand that the inner world of individuals formed a colored halo, which only her little sister Mariam could see. The family spent days after that testing Mariam’s ability. “Okay, tell me how I’m feeling now,” her brother, Mamdouh, said upon returning home from a fight with the neighborhood boys. “You’re red and green,” Mariam replied and turned back to whatever she was doing. Nazmiyeh mocked, “Red and green together means you’re scared and horny.”
“Mariam has no idea what horny is; so I know you’re lying, you horrendous unmannered girl!” Mamdouh slapped the back of Nazmiyeh’s head and ran for cover.
“You better run, boy!”
“I feel sorry for the poor donkey who marries you,” Mamdouh said, taking cover by the door.
Nazmiyeh laughed, which only irritated Mamdouh more.
Although Mariam’s special ability waned over time, it remained one of two family secrets, and Nazmiyeh used it to her advantage. When the mother and sisters of a suitor came to their home to meet Nazmiyeh, she treated them with arrogance and sarcasm, because Mariam could intuit that they found Nazmiyeh unworthy of their son. In the market, she shamed many a merchant who tried to cheat her. Mariam’s gift was Nazmiyeh’s secret weapon and she forbade mention of it outside their household, just as she forbade talk of Sulayman.
Um Mamdouh, my great-teta, lived before my time. They called her the Crazy Lady, but she was all love, the quiet impenetrable kind. She saw things others couldn’t, though not like Mariam did.
There were five Major family clans in Beit Daras, and each had its neighborhood. The Baroud, Maqademeh, and Abu al-Shamaleh families were the most prestigious. They owned most of the farms, orchards, beehives, and pastures. “Baraka” was Nazmiyeh, Mamdouh, and Mariam’s family name, but it was nothing to brag about. They lived in the Masriyeen neighborhood, a ragtag muddle of Palestinians without pedigree who had settled in the poorest part of Beit Daras. They had arrived in Beit Daras from Egypt five centuries earlier and had disguised or dropped their family names because they had escaped the wrath of a tribal feud or had perhaps dishonored their families in some way and had had to leave. No one really knew.
For most of their lives in Beit Daras, Nazmiyeh, Mamdouh, and Mariam were known as the children of Um Mamdouh, the village crazy woman. Even though they had no father, people didn’t dare speak ill about their mother in front of them because Nazmiyeh would have appeared at their doorstep, her tongue sharpened with scandal and an alarming lack of inhibition. Although the children lamented their mother’s state and fiercely tried to protect her from the scorn of others, they could not always shield her. Um Mamdouh was often found staring off into the distance, engaged with the wind, speaking in a strange language to no one; and she would sometimes laugh inexplicably.
Once, people saw Um Mamdouh hitch up her
thobe
and shit in the river, and Mamdouh, then only eleven years old, pounded a boy much bigger than he for daring to mention it. There were many nights when the three of them would have to coax their mother away from sleeping in the pastures among the goats.
Their father was said to have left them before anyone could remember him, except Nazmiyeh, the oldest. “Our father came back once, and we all ate
ghada
together,” Nazmiyeh told them. Mamdouh could not remember, but he believed Nazmiyeh because she swore it on the Quran. Besides, it had to be true. How else could Mariam have been conceived?
Still, Mamdouh wished he had memory of a father.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself and tell you about Nur. She was still two generations away when my great-khalo Mamdouh went to work for the beekeeper. But if you believe as I do that people are part love, part flesh and blood, and part everything else, then mentioning her name now makes sense, at the source of her love part.
As Mamdouh Grew older, his limbs stretched into manhood and his voice deepened in authority. He was able to secure a steady job with a beekeeper, whose jars of honey were sold throughout the country and beyond to Egypt, Turkey, and reaching even to Mali and Senegal. The old beekeeper realized in only a month that he had found the boy whom he could nurture to one day take over the family business that had been passed down to him through multiple generations. He had three wives, two of whom had borne him five daughters and one son, who died shortly after birth. Only one child, his youngest daughter, Yasmine, had shown an aptitude for beekeeping. Little did he know that in less than three years the centuries of bees, apiaries, beeswax, hives, honeycombs, and beekeepers that marshaled his life would be gone, as if history had never been there. All that would remain would be his love of bees, which Yasmine, his favorite child, would carry in her heart and plant in the soil of another continent. But no one could have known that then. The future of the people of Beit Daras was so far from their destiny that even if a clairvoyant had announced their fate, no one would have believed it.
Thus the beekeeper began to teach Mamdouh everything he knew about the art of apiculture. His smile was nearly toothless, owing to rickets, and he never wore protective gloves, insisting that he did not like separation from his bees—although he always wore his hat and veil and kept a smoker nearby in case of a swarm. He insisted that Mamdouh wear gloves until he could feel the connection to bees in every part of his body, beginning with his heart and moving to other vital organs until it reached his skin. “Only then can you stop wearing gloves,” he said, patting Mamdouh’s shoulder.
In truth, Mamdouh could never have such a visceral connection to beekeeping as his mentor expected. True, he arrived early to work every day and stayed late listening to the beekeeper for hours. But Mamdouh’s enthusiam and attentiveness was born from the wound of fatherlessness, and from a desire deep in his thighs. He heard very little of the beekeeper’s tales, absorbing instead the warmth of being there and scanning his surroundings for a glimpse of Yasmine, the beekeeper’s youngest daughter. And as memory will often succumb to the insistence of longings, Mamdouh invented a memory of a father, whose features took on those of his mentor and his character that of a beekeeper, sitting down to tea after a meal to speak of honey while Mamdouh searched the room for wafts of love.
Before Mamdouh became the apiarist’s apprentice, his family had lived on whatever he could peddle or earn from small jobs and what charity they got from mosques. But it was never enough, especially when his mother’s strange cravings grew. Once, during Eid when Mamdouh was not yet twelve years old and the mosque had given their family half a lamb, Um Mamdouh got a frightening appetite that no amount of food could satiate. Mamdouh had to slap her before all the meat was gone. The Quran says that heaven lies beneath the feet of mothers, and everyone knows that to slap one’s mother is to make a reservation in hell. But surely Allah would forgive him because he had acted not as her son, but as the man of the house who needed to ensure the family might have meat to eat. That was when Mamdouh and his sisters started to turn against Sulayman, the other family secret, because they knew their mother’s appetite was his fault. They knew when he was near, by their mother’s voracious appetite, her transported eyes that showed only the whites, or by the singed odor of smoke Sulayman brought wherever he was.
People who knew my great-teta Um Mamdouh eventually learned of Sulayman. Or they learned of her after they heard of Sulayman. In those days, they all recalled a verse from the Holy Quran (Al Hijr 15:26–27): “And indeed, He created man from sounding clay of altered black smooth mud. And the djinn, He created aforetime from the smokeless flame of fire.”
On a Dark, Cloudy December evening in 1945, Um Mamdouh wandered in search of the moon until she found it, a thin crescent tangled in the stars over Beit Daras. Sulayman was with her. He always was now. As she gazed at the night sky, she heard moaning and muffled laughter behind a wall of ruins from a Roman bathhouse. She moved toward the sounds and saw outlines of four teenage boys, their skin glistening with the juices of moon and starlight. Shivering and panting in the cold dark, the boys’
galabiyas
were pulled up over their waists and each was masturbating, not with pleasure, but in competition, it seemed. She began to curse them, damn them to hell for such sin. The boys went instantly soft with fear and scrambled to pull down their galabiyas, until one of them saw who it was.
“It’s the crazy Um Mamdouh,” he shouted, and they sighed with relief, then laughed with malice.
“Go back to the Masriyeen neighborhood,” yelled one boy. “Crazies are not allowed here,” said another. “Are you going to pull up your thobe and shit in the river again?”
Um Mamdouh retreated, frantically waving her hands. “Stop it! Sulayman is getting angry. He never gets angry. Stop it! You must stop.”
Their laughter intensified. “Who is Sulayman? Is that your sissy son’s nickname? Is he going to shit in the river, too?”
Suddenly, before she could stop him, Sulayman began to emerge through her face. Specks of stars from a black sky glistened on the contours of her head as his presence grew. It expanded to the width of her shoulders, a dark immensity with raging eyes of red fire. It spat gibberish in a voice that thundered from all directions, and a cauterizing smell, like pollution, soaked the air.
Transfixed, their legs held upright only by the fear that stiffened them, their souls limp as their dicks, two of the boys urinated involuntarily, one shat himself, and the oldest among them, Atiyeh, the one who had been most arrogant and cruel to Um Mamdouh, was stunned into a knot of silence.
For the rest of their lives, the boys would compare their memories of that instant, and they would all agree that never had anything terrified them more, not even the Jewish gangs or later the Israeli military that came first with guns and machetes and later with incredible machines of death. They had glimpsed Sulayman in rare anger. A real djinni.
The Quran says that Allah made the djinn from smokeless fire. Everyone knew that. Some revered the djinn, others feared them, but everyone respected and cowered at their power. And those who communicated with the djinn were avoided by some, revered by others, and feared by most.
The next day, the parents and elders of each family convened and went to Um Mamdouh’s house, where they were welcomed in the Barakas’ small stone dwelling. The women were invited to sit on the carpet inside, while the men, including the stunned boy, received the hospitality of Mamdouh in the courtyard, where they were offered tea and dates and
argileh
s, or hookahs, already packed with tobacco and filled with rose water and lemons. Clearly, the family had been expecting them. Sulayman had emerged to protect their mother and, as there was no way now to contain this family secret, Mamdouh had surmised that the town would come. So, he had borrowed the argilehs from the beekeeper, who happily obliged, assuming they were for Nazmiyeh’s suitors.
Inside their hut, little Mariam watched suspiciously as visitors arrived. Nazmiyeh served the women sweet mint tea. Her headscarf was trimmed in cheap metal coins that chimed shamelessly when she moved her head, and a brazen portion of her hair escaped for the world to see a hint of her wild copper curls. Nazmiyeh walked slowly, aware that the women were watching her. She had worn her green and orange
dishdasha
, the one that snugly clung to her large breasts and arrogant buttocks and thighs that fanned from a small waist. Nazmiyeh had a way of filling every room she entered, sucking up all the air.