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Chapter 1
I am recalling now that last summer before I was sent away. It was 1979, and the sun was everywhere. Tripoli lay brilliant and still beneath it. Every person, animal and ant went in desperate search for shade, those occasional gray patches of mercy carved into the white of everything. But true mercy only arrived at night, a breeze chilled by the vacant desert, moistened by the humming sea, a reluctant guest silently passing through the empty streets, vague about how far it was allowed to roam in this realm of the absolute star. And it was rising now, this star, as faithful as ever, chasing away the blessed breeze. It was almost morning.
The window in her bedroom was wide open, the glue tree outside it silent, its green shy in the early light. She hadn’t fallen asleep until the sky was gray with dawn. And even then I was so rattled I couldn’t leave her side, wondering if, like one of those hand puppets that play dead, she would bounce up again, light another cigarette and continue begging me, as she had been doing only minutes before, not to tell, not to tell.
Baba never found out about Mama’s illness; she only fell ill when he was away on business. It was as if, when the world was empty of him, she and I remained as stupid reminders, empty pages that had to be filled with the memory of how they had come to be married.
I sat watching her beautiful face, her chest rise and fall with breath, unable to leave her side, hearing the things she had just told me swim and repeat in my head. Eventually I left her and went to bed.
When she woke up she came to me. I felt her weight sink beside me, then her fingers in my hair. The sound of her fingernails on my scalp reminded me of once when I was unlucky.
I had thrown a date in my mouth before splitting it open, only discovering it was infested with ants when their small shell bodies crackled beneath my teeth. I lay there silent, pretending to be asleep, listening to her breath disturbed by tears.
During breakfast I tried to say as little as possible. My silence made her nervous. She talked about what we might have for lunch. She asked if I would like some jam or honey.
I said no, but she went to the fridge and got some anyway. Then, as was usual on the mornings after she had been ill, she took me on a drive to pull me out of my silence, to return me to myself again.
Waiting for the car to warm up, she turned on the radio, skipped through the dial and didn’t stop until she heard the beautiful voice of Abd al-Basit Abd al-Sammad. I was glad
because, as everyone knows, one must refrain from speaking and listen humbly to the Koran when it is read.
Just before we turned into Gergarish Street, the street that follows the sea, Bahloul the beggar appeared out of nowhere. Mama hit the brakes and said ya satir. He wandered over to her side, walking slowly, clasping his dirty hands tightly to his stomach, his lips quivering. “Hello, Bahloul,” Mama said, rummaging in her purse. “I see you, I see you,” he said, and although these were the words Bahloul most often uttered, this time I thought what an idiot Bahloul is and wished he would just vanish. I watched him in the side mirror standing in the middle of the street, clutching the money Mama had given him to his chest like a man who has just caught a butterfly.
She took me downtown to the sesame man in the market by Martyrs’ Square, the square that looked on to the sea, the square where a sculpture of Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor born all those years ago in Lepcis, proudly stood.
She bought me as many sesame sticks as I wanted, each wrapped in white wax paper twisted at either end. I refused to let her put them in her bag. On such mornings I was always stubborn. “But I have some more shopping to do,” she said. “You’re bound to drop them like this.” “No,” I said, curling my eyebrows, “I’ll wait for you outside,” and
walked off angrily, not caring if I lost her or became lost from her in the big city. “Listen,” she called after me, attracting people’s attention. “Wait for me by Septimius Severus.” There was a large café on one side that spilled out onto the passageway. Men, some faces I recognized from before, sat playing dominoes and cards. Their eyes were on Mama. I wondered if her dress shouldn’t be looser.
As I walked away from her I felt my power over her recede; I began to feel sorry and sad how on such mornings she was always generous and embarrassed and shy, as if she had walked out naked. I wanted to run to her, to hold her hand, latch on to her dress as she shopped and dealt with the world, a world full of men and the greed of men. I forced myself not to look back and focused instead on the shops set within arched bays on either side of the covered passageway. Black silk scarves billowed gently above one, columns of stacked red caps stood as tall as men outside another. The ceiling was made with dark strips of fabric. The white blades of light that pierced through the occasional gaps illuminated the swimming dust and shone still and beautiful on the arches and floor, but darted like sparkles on the heads and down the bodies of the passersby, making the shadows seem much darker than they were.
Outside, the square was flooded with sunlight. The ground was almost white with brightness, making the dark shoes and figures crossing it look like things floating above the world. I wished I had left the sesame sticks with her. Small needles were now pricking my arms. I told myself off for being stubborn and for letting her buy me so many. I looked at them in my arms and felt no appetite for them. I leaned against the cool marble pedestal of Septimius Severus. The Roman emperor stood above me, his silver studded belt curving below his belly, pointing his arm toward the sea, “Urging Libya to look toward Rome,” was how Ustath Rashid described the pose. Ustath Rashid taught art history at el-Fateh University and was my best friend Kareem’s father. I remembered our Guide standing in one of his military uniforms like this, waving his arm as the tanks passed in front of him on Revolution Day.
I turned toward the sea, the shining turquoise sea beyond the square. It seemed like a giant blue monster rising at the edge of the world. “Grrr,” I growled, then wondered if anyone had heard me. I kicked my heel against the pedestal several times. I stared at the ground, into the heat and brightness that made me want to sleep with my eyes open. But then, not looking for but falling directly on my target, I spotted Baba.
He was standing on the edge of the pavement in a street opposite the square, looking both ways for traffic, arching forward as if he was about to fall. Before he stepped on to
the road he motioned with his hand then snapped his fingers twice. It was a gesture that I knew. Sometimes he would wave to me like that, as if to say, “Come on, come on,” then
snap his fingers, “Hey, wake up.” Behind him appeared Nasser, Baba’s office clerk, carrying a small shiny black typewriter beneath his arm, struggling to keep up. Baba was
already crossing the street, walking toward me. For a moment I thought he might be bringing Nasser to Septimius Severus, to teach him all the things he had taught me about the Roman emperor, Lepcis Magna and Rome. For Baba regarded Nasser as a younger brother; he often said so himself.
“Baba?” I whispered.
Two dark lenses curved like the humpbacks of turtles over his eyes. The sky, the sun and the sea were painted by God in colors we could all point at and say the sea is turquoise, the sun banana, the sky blue. Sunglasses are terrible, I thought, because they change all of this and keep those who wear them at a distance. At that moment I remembered how, only a couple of days ago, he had kissed us good-bye.
“May God bring you back safely,” Mama told him, “and make your trip profitable.” I had kissed his hand like he taught me to. He had leaned down and whispered in my ear,
“Take care of your mother, you are the man of the house now,” and grinned at me in the way people do when they think they have paid you a compliment. But look now, look;
walking where I could touch him, here where we should be together. My heart quickened. He was coming closer. Maybe he means me, I thought. It was impossible to see his eyes.
I watched him walk in that familiar way—his head pointing up slightly, his polished leather shoes flicking ahead with every step—hoping he would call my name, wave his hand, snap his fingers. I swear if he had I would have leaped into his arms. When he was right there, close enough that if I extended my arm I could touch him, I held my breath and my ears filled with silence. I watched his solemn expression—an expression I admired and feared—caught the scent-edge of his cologne, felt the air swell around him as he walked past. He was immediately followed by Nasser, carrying the black shiny typewriter under one arm. I wished I was him, following Baba like a shadow. They entered one of the buildings overlooking the square. It was a white building with green
shutters. Green was the color of the revolution, but you rarely saw shutters painted in it.
“Didn’t I tell you to wait by the sculpture?” I heard Mama say from behind me. I looked back and saw that I had strayed far from Septimius Severus.
I felt sick, anxious that I had somehow done the wrong thing. Baba wasn’t on a business trip, but here, in Tripoli, where we should be together. I could have reached out and caught him from where he was heading; why had I not acted?
I sat in the car while she loaded the shopping, still holding on to the sesame sticks. I looked up at the building Baba and Nasser had entered. A window on the top floor shuddered,then swung open. Baba appeared through it. He gazed at the square, no longer wearing the sunglasses, leaning with his hands on the sill like a leader waiting for the clapping and chanting to stop. He hung a small red towel on the clothesline and disappeared inside.
On the way home I was more silent than before, and this time there was no effort in it. As soon as we left Martyrs’ Square Mama began craning her neck toward the rearview mirror. Stopping at the next traffic light, she whispered a prayer to herself. A car stopped so close beside us I could have touched the driver’s cheek. Four men dressed in dark safari suits sat looking at us. At first I didn’t recognize them, then I remembered. I remembered so suddenly I felt my heart jump. They were the same Revolutionary Committee men who had come a week before and taken Ustath Rashid. Mama looked ahead, her back a few centimeters away from the backrest, her fists tight around the steering wheel. She released one hand, brought it to my knee and sternly whispered, “Face forward.”
When the traffic light turned green, the car beside us didn’t move. Everyone knows you mustn’t overtake a Revolutionary Committee car, and if you have to, then you must do it discreetly, without showing any pleasure in it. A few cars, unaware of who was parked beside us, began to sound their horns. Mama drove off slowly, looking more at the rearview mirror than the road ahead. Then she said, “They are following us; don’t look back.” I stared at my bare knees and said the same prayer over and over. I felt the sweat gather between my palms and the wax-paper wrapping of the sesame sticks. It wasn’t until we were almost home that Mama said, “OK, they are gone,” then mumbled to herself, “Nothing better to do than give us an escort, the rotten rats.” My heart eased and my back grew taller. The prayer left my lips.
The innocent, Sheikh Mustafa, the imam of our local mosque, had told me, have no cause to fear; only the guilty live in fear.
I didn’t help her carry the shopping into the house as was usual. I went straight to my room and dropped the sesame sticks on the bed, shaking the blood back into my arms. I
grabbed my picture book on Lepcis Magna. Ten days before I had visited the ancient city for the first and, as it turned out, last time. Images of the deserted city of ruins by the sea still lingered vividly in my mind. I longed to return to it. I didn’t come out until I had to: after she had prepared lunch and set the table and called my name.
When she tore the bread, she handed me a piece; and I, noticing she hadn’t had any salad, passed her the salad bowl. Midway through the meal she got up and turned on the radio. She left it on a man talking about farming the desert. I got up, said, “Bless your hands,” and went to my room. “I will take a nap,” she said after me. My silence made her say things she didn’t need to say, she always took a nap in the afternoons, everyone did, everyone except me. I never could nap.
I waited in my room until she had finished washing the dishes and putting away the food, until I was certain she had gone to sleep, then I came out.
I was walking around the house looking for something to do when the telephone rang. I ran to it before it could wake her up. It was Baba. On hearing his voice my heart quickened. I thought he must be calling so soon after I had seen him to explain why he hadn’t greeted me.
“Where are you?”
“Abroad. Let me speak to your mother.”
“Where abroad?”
“Abroad,” he repeated, as if it was obvious where that was. “I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“I miss you.”
“Me too. Call your mother.”
“She’s asleep. Shall I wake her up?”
“Just let her know I’ll be home tomorrow, about lunchtime.”
I didn’t want the conversation to end so I said, “We were followed today by that same white car that took Ustath Rashid. We were side by side at the traffic light and I saw their faces. I was so close I could have touched the driver’s cheek and I wasn’t frightened. Not at all. Not even a little, I wasn’t.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said and hung up.
I stood for a while beside the telephone and listened to the thick silence that seemed to descend on our house during those hours in the afternoon, a silence edged by the humming of the fridge in the kitchen and the ticking of the clock in the hallway.
I went to watch Mama sleep. I sat beside her, checking first that her chest was rising and falling with breath. I remembered the words she had told me the night before, “We are two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the same book,” words that felt like a gift I didn’t want.
Chapter Two
I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of
glass shattering. A light was on in the kitchen. Mama was
on her knees, talking to herself and collecting pieces of glass from the floor. She was barefoot. When she saw me she covered her mouth with the inside of her wrist, her cupped hand full of broken glass, and giggled that strange nervous giggle that was somewhere between laughter and crying. I ran to fetch her slippers, then threw them to her, but she shook her head and stumbled over to the rubbish bin and emptied her
hand. She began sweeping the floor. When the broom reached the slippers she paused then put them on.
I could see her medicine bottle half empty on the breakfast table. There was no glass beside it, just a cigarette burning in an ashtray littered with butts and black-headed matchsticks. Her glass must have shattered. Mama was ill again. I felt my cheeks burn with anger: where is Baba? He should be here because when he’s home everything is normal, she is never ill and I am never woken up like this to find everything changed.
She sat down, stood up again, fetched another glass and filled it with medicine. The kitchen reeked of it. The smell made my head heavy. She turned to me. I was still standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She giggled again, asked,
“What?” and rolled her eyes away. “What’s the matter with you? Why are you staring at me like that? Have you got nothing better to do?” She shook her head to herself. “I don’t know why you are looking at me like that. I haven’t done anything.” Then with an exaggerated earnestness she said, “Go back to bed, it’s late.”
I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. I heard her go into the bathroom. She was there for a long time. I didn’t hear any water running. My heart began to race. Then suddenly she came out and went to her room. I walked to her door, then hesitated.
“Hello, habibi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t sleep?”
I shook my head to say no, happy to play her game, to pretend that some bad dream had broken my sleep. She patted the bed and I lay beside her. Just when sleep was curling itself around me, she started her telling. Her mouth beside my ear, the smell of her medicine alive in the room.
The only things that mattered were in the past. And what mattered the most in the past was how she and Baba came to be married, that “black day,” as she called it. She never started the story from the beginning; like Scheherazade she didn’t move in a straight line but jumped from one episode to another, leaving questions unanswered, questions the asking of which I feared would interrupt her telling. I had to restrain myself and try to remember every piece of the story in the hope that one day I could fit it all into a narrative that was straight and clear and simple. For although I feared
those nights when we were alone and she was ill, I never wanted her to stop talking. Her story was mine too, it bound us, turned us into one, “two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the same book,” as she used to say.
Once she began by saying, “You are my prince. One day you’ll be a man and take me away on your white horse.” She placed her palms on my cheeks, her eyes brimming with tears. “And I almost didn’t . . . You are my miracle. The pills, all the other ways in which I tried to resist. I didn’t know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my heart . . .” This is why I often lay in my darkened bedroom dreaming of saving her.
When Mama heard that her father had found her a groom, she swallowed a “handful of magic pills.” “They called them that,” she said, “because they made a woman no good. For who would want to remain married to a woman who couldn’t bear children? In a few months, I thought, a year at the most, I’ll be free to resume my schooling.
It was a perfect plan, or so I thought.
“They rushed the wedding through as if I was a harlot, as if I was pregnant and had to be married off before it showed. Part of the punishment was not to allow me even to see a photograph of my future husband. But the maid sneaked in to tell me she had seen the groom. ‘Ugly,’ she said, frowning, ‘big nose,’ then spat at the ground. I was so frightened. I ran to the toilet ten times or more. My father and brothers—the High Council, who were sitting right outside the room became more and more nervous, reading my weak stomach as proof of my crime. They didn’t know how it felt waiting in that room, where the complete stranger who was now my husband was going to walk in alone and, without introduction, undress me and do filthy, revolting things.
“It was a dreary room. It had nothing in it but a huge bed with a square, ironed white handkerchief on one pillow. I had no idea what the handkerchief was for.
“I walked up and down that room in my wedding dress wondering what kind of a face my executioner had. Because that’s how I saw it: they passed the judgment and he, the stranger armed with the marriage contract signed by my father, was going to carry out the punishment. When he touches me, which I was sure he was going to do, there will be no point in screaming; I was his right, his wife under God.
I was only fourteen but I knew what a man had to do to his wife. Cousin Khadija, a chatterbox who had fallen as silent as a wall after her wedding night, had later, when she and I were alone, told me how her husband had lost patience with her and with his fingers punctured her veil and bled her. It was the duty of every man to prove his wife a virgin.”
I didn’t know what Mama meant, but feared that when the time came I might not have what it takes to “puncture” a woman.
“Betrayal was a hand squeezing my throat,” she continued.
“Those hours seemed eternal. My stomach churned, my fingers were as cold as ice cubes, and my hands wrestled with each other.
“On one of my journeys to the toilet, pulling my wedding dress up and running like an idiot, I saw my father bury a pistol in his pocket. ‘Blood is going to be spilled either
way,’ were the words he told your grandmother. She told me this later, almost laughing, relieved, giddy and ridiculous with happiness. ‘If, God forbid,’ she had said, ‘you didn’t turn out virtuous and true, your father was prepared to take your life.’
“Your father, the mystery groom, was twenty-three; to the fourteen-year-old girl I was that seemed ancient. When he finally walked in, I fainted. When I came to, he wasn’t there. Your grandfather was beside me, smiling, your grandmother behind him, clutching the now bloodstained handkerchief to her chest and crying with happiness.
“I was sick for days. The stupid pills didn’t work. I took too many and all that vomiting squeezed them out of me. Nine months later I had you.”
The medicine changed her eyes and made her lose her balance.
Sometimes even before seeing her I could tell she was ill. I would come into the house and notice a certain stillness, something altered. I knew without knowing how I knew, like that one time when, playing football with the boys, one of Osama’s mighty strikes had hit me in the back of the head and I was knocked out. Just before it happened I remember seeing Kareem’s face trying to warn me, then I listened to that strange silence fill my ears. This felt the same. I could be reading in my room or playing in our street, and that quiet anxiety would visit me. I would call out for her even though I didn’t need her. And when I saw her eyes lost in her face and heard her voice, that strange nervous giggle, I was certain that Mama was ill again. Sometimes I felt the panic, then found her well, immersed in a book by Nizar al-Qabbani, her favorite poet. That upset me more.
When she was ill, she would talk and talk and talk but later hardly remember any of what she had told me. It was as if her illness got the spirit of another woman in her. In the morning, after I had fallen asleep exhausted from listening to her craziness and from guarding her—afraid she would burn herself or leave the gas on in the kitchen or, God forbid, leave the house altogether and bring shame and talk down on us—she would come and sit beside me, comb my hair with her fingers and apologize and sometimes even cry a little. I would then be stung by her breath, heavy with medicine, unable to frown or turn my face because I wanted her to believe I was in a deep sleep.
She was shocked when I repeated to her the things she had told me the night before. “Who told you this?” she would ask. “You,” I would shout—shout because I was unable not to. Then she would look away and say, “You shouldn’t have heard that.”
Sometimes she talked about Scheherazade. A Thousand and One Nights had been her mother’s favorite story, and although my grandmother couldn’t read she had memorized the entire book, word for word, and recited it regularly to her children. When I was first told this, I dreamed of my grandmother, whom I rarely saw, struggling to swallow the entire book. Nothing angered Mama more than the story of Scheherazade. I had always thought Scheherazade a brave woman who had gained her freedom through inventing tales and often, in moments of great fear, recalled her example.
“You should find yourself another model,” Mama once began. “Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death. You know the closing chapter? ‘The Marriage of King Shahryar and Scheherazade’? When she finally, after having lived with him for God knows how long, after sleeping with him—nothing, of course, is ever said of that—bearing him not one, not two, but three sons, after all of that she managed to gather her courage, your brave Scheherazade, to finally ask the question: ‘May I be so bold as to ask a favor of Your Highness?’ And what was this favor that she was pleading to be so bold as to ask? What was it?” Mama shouted, her eyes not leaving me. “Was it to rule one of the corners or even a dirty little cave in his kingdom? Was it to be given one of the ministries? Perhaps a school? Or was it to be given a writing desk in a quiet room in his palace of endless rooms, a room the woman could call her own, to write in secret the truth of this monster Shahryar? No. She gathered her children around her—‘one walking, one crawling and one sucking,’ as the book tells us. All sons, of course. I wonder how successful she would have been if they were three harlots like her.”
What scared me the most during such nights was how different Mama became. She said words in front of me that made my cheeks blush and my heart shudder. Saliva gathered at the corners of her lips. She didn’t look beautiful anymore.
“Your heroine’s boldness was to ask to be allowed to . . . ?” She held the word in the air, staring at me, casting her hand slowly in a curve as if she was presenting a feast. “To live.”
Her eyes fixed on me, expecting me to say something, to be outraged, to slap my thigh, sigh, click my tongue and shake my head. I faced my lap, pretending to be busy with something between my fingers, hoping the moment would pass. And when she started speaking again I was always relieved that her voice had come to fill the void.
“To live,” she repeated. “And not because she had as much right to live as he, but because if he were to kill her, his sons would live ‘motherless.’” Mama covered her mouth with the back of her hand and giggled like a child. “‘Release me,’ your Scheherazade begged, ‘release me from the doom of death as a dole to these infants. You will find nobody among all the women in your realm to raise them as they should be raised.’ Stupid harlot. My guess: five, maybe ten years at the most before she got the sword. As soon as the ‘one sucking’ became the ‘one walking’ and her muscles, Scheherazade’s fine, supple muscles . . .” Mama said, frowning in disgust. The ceiling light seemed too harsh on her face. I wondered if I should switch it off, switch on the side lamps instead. “Those so important for pleasing the king, the mighty, the majestic Shahryar, had loosened . . .” Her eyes were wet now, her lower lip quivered slightly. “As soon as she was no longer tempting, useful; as soon as she was no longer beautiful: whack! Gone with the head,” she said and then her own head dropped and her legs extended before her. I thought she was going to fall off the sofa, but she remained still, silent for a couple of minutes. I imagined how it might be to live without her. A warm swirl spun in my belly, something warm and dependable gripped my heart and sent a rush through me. I wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement that I felt at the thought of losing her. Then she seemed to wake up. She looked at me as if it was the first time we had met. She scanned the room, paused for a moment, then lit a cigarette. “You should go to bed,” she said, looking away.
On the mornings after she was always nice. She liked to take me out driving. If it was a school day she would ask, “Anything important today?” I would shrug my shoulders and she would say, “I’ll telephone the school and tell them you’re not well.” In the car she talked a lot and wasn’t surprised by my silence. She didn’t mind stopping under the pedestrian bridge that crossed over Gorgi Street so I could watch the bad boys hanging above the fast traffic by their arms and some, the truly brave ones, by their ankles. Normally, when we passed under them, she would ask me to shut my eyes. But on such mornings she was happy to park beside them and let me watch. Sometimes she would even say, “I must admit, they are quite brave.” Then, “Promise you would never do that. Promise you would always protect yourself.” Sometimes I nodded and sometimes I didn’t. On some mornings she took me all the way to town just to buy sesame sticks. Or, if she had been very ill the night before, she would take me to Signor Il Calzoni’s restaurant by the sea, in Gergarish, for grilled shrimp and spaghetti. In winter I ordered the beet-and-tomato soup with bread and cheese and bresaola. I liked the way the beet painted my spit and tongue purple for hours.
Signor Il Calzoni had a big machine that squeezed oranges all on its own and he would take me to push the button that set the whole thing working, cutting oranges and squeezing them in front of you. I didn’t like orange juice that much but some days I drank up to five glasses just to watch the thing work. After the meal I always got gelati. Mama ordered cappuccino and sipped it slowly, looking out on to the sea, squinting her eyes at the horizon where on a clear day we could see Malta, a giant biscuit floating on the sea. Signor Il Calzoni was always pleased to see us. He would take us to our table by the window and hover in search of conversation. He spoke about how much he missed Italy and how much he loved Libya. And occasionally he would chant, loud enough for all in the restaurant to hear, “Long live the Guide,” toward a large mural he had had a couple of art students paint at one end of the restaurant. It showed the Colonel in his full military uniform, curling his eyebrows and looking very serious. And if the restaurant had a table of Revolutionary Committee men, or Mokhabarat, people we called Antennae, he chanted, “El-Fateh, el-Fateh, el-Fateh,” punching the air with his fist until the waiters joined in. Sometimes the chef too came out and I got to see his tall, puffy white hat.
The things she told me pressed down on my chest, so heavy that it seemed impossible to carry on living without spilling them. I didn’t want to break my promise—the promise she always forced me to give, sometimes over thirty times in one night, not to tell, to swear on her life, again and again, and then be warned, “If you tell a living soul and I die, my life will be on your neck”—so I tried to tell her. We were at Signor Il Calzoni’s restaurant. She kept interrupting me, pleading with me to stop. So I covered my ears, shut my eyes and spoke like a robot above her. She slapped the table and said, “Please, Suleiman, I beg you, don’t embarrass me,” and whispered sternly through flexed lips, “A boy your age
should never speak such things.” Then she changed her tone and said, “Habibi, light of my eyes, promise you won’t tell anyone. Especially Moosa. I know how much you love him, but nothing ever stays in that man’s mouth. Promise.” I nodded, wrapping my arms around myself, doubling over: this was the only way I could keep it all inside. Signor Il Calzoni avoided coming to our table when he saw us like this. He would stand beside his cashier, pretending not to look.
Sometimes I couldn’t get myself to eat, and Mama would think I was punishing her. “What do you want from me?” she would whisper angrily across the table. “I have given up everything for you. You’re not even satisfied.”
If I began to cry, Signor Il Calzoni would take me to squeeze more oranges, holding my hand and talking in his funny accent. Then, if the restaurant was completely empty, he would sit beside me, look out on to the sea and say, “Ah.
Look how beautiful your country is, Suleiman. Now it’s mine too, no? I am also Libyan, like you. I speak like a Libyan, no?” “No,” I would say just to make him laugh. He had a wonderful laugh. His entire body would bounce beside me. The seats were spring-upholstered and so I would do the same. And that made him blush in front of Mama.
“You should change your name from Signor Il Calzoni to Signor al-Husseini.” That always made him bounce. On the way home I regretted all the talking and laughing, regretted breaking my silence, allowing myself to be tricked like a cat teased out from beneath a bed with a string. I knew I had failed when, on our way back home, late in the afternoon when the bread was no longer at its best, she would stop by the empty bakery. I would stand to one side, pretending to be drawing shapes with my sandal into the flour dusted floor, and watch the baker Majdi reach beneath his deep counter and think, that’s the devil. He would hand her a bottle wrapped in a black plastic bag, and she would immediately bury it in her handbag. And when we were in the car she didn’t place her bag beside her as she normally did, but beneath her legs, well out of view. I knew it was her medicine, bad for her and bad for me, but, doubtful of the world and my place in it, I said nothing. I massacred the hardened ends of each loaf and she didn’t complain that I was ruining them.
Mama and I spent most of the time together—she alone, I unable to leave her. I worried how the world might change if even for a second I was to look away, to relax the grip of my gaze. I was convinced that if my attention was applied fully, disaster would be kept at bay and she would return whole and uncorrupted, no longer lost, stranded on the opposite bank, waiting alone. But although her unpredictability and her urgent stories tormented me, my vigil and what I then could only explain as her illness bound us into an intimacy that has since occupied the innermost memory I have of love. If love starts somewhere, if it is a hidden force that is brought out by a person, like light off a mirror, for me that
person was her. There was anger, there was pity, even the dark warm embrace of hate, but always love and always the joy that surrounds the beginning of love.
Chapter Three
That summer Ustath Rashid taught his son how to drive. He would prop Kareem up on a pillow and let him drive around the quiet streets of Gergarish. A week before we went to
Lepcis, Kareem took his father’s car keys without asking permission and drove me to the sea. He tried to get as close to the water as possible, but as soon as we reached the shore
the wheels sank into the sand.
“Why won’t you come to Lepcis?”
“Mama won’t let me.”
“Stop making excuses. She already told Baba you can. What are you afraid of?”
“I am not afraid.” He didn’t seem convinced. I worried he would think me a mommy’s boy, so I told him. “She’s ill,” I said. “I think she will die soon.”
“But all women are ill,” Kareem said. “Mama bleeds all
the time.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Sometimes I go into the bathroom and find the toilet water red. It’s disgusting. It’s their curse. But don’t worry, it doesn’t mean they will die.”
The sea was as flat and still as oil. We ran until the water tripped us. We raced toward the turquoise, where the deep sea was cooler. I felt bad for Kareem, but also relieved that
at least my mother didn’t bleed.
“You’ll love Lepcis.” He dived and tickled my feet. Back on land we collected stones, wood and any rubbish we could find to stuff behind the wheels. The engine moaned
and the car shifted sideways before it wriggled its way out of the sand.
Kareem had been to Lepcis Magna several times with his father.
He had also seen Ghadames and Sabratha, the cave paintings in Fezzan. He had even been on a boat to Crete, where he said women swam naked. Like me, he was an only
child. This was very rare because parents with only one offspring were always at risk of leading people to believe that either the woman was no longer good, or, God forbid, both
the mother and the father were objecting to God’s Will. Mama was often asked why she didn’t have more children.
She would blush at the question. Baba blushed too when he was nudged by a friend and asked in a whisper why he didn’t take another wife. Maybe it was this that in spite of
the age difference—Kareem was twelve, where I was nine—had brought us close to each other. Because what united Kareem and me rarely felt like friendship, but something like blood or virtue. I wanted so much to be like him.
When Kareem and his parents first moved in next door, Mama went to pay them a visit. She asked me to put on my black leather shoes, which I hardly wore because they were
heavy and scraped against my ankles, and she ironed my white shirt and insisted I button its collar. I didn’t mind because I was eager to meet my new next-door neighbor, who, the boys in the street had told me, was like me, without brother or sister. But when we arrived, his mother, Auntie Salma, said that Kareem had gone out with his father to explore the area, then smiled, tilted her head to one side and said, “Sorry.”
Our street was mostly lined with building plots, the foundations dug up and abandoned. The only five completed houses, identical in design, huddled together in the center of the street: ours and Kareem’s on one side; the other three, where Adnan, Masoud and Ali and Osama lived, on the opposite side.
I wandered around our new neighbors’ house, amused by the strangeness of being in a building that was the mirror image of ours on the outside but on the inside was completely altered by the different furniture and the colors of the walls: like two brothers who had grown distant. Our walls were lined in Italian wallpaper, European flowers in full bloom, autumn leaves falling always, the same bird perched on top of the same branch and plucking at the same twig over and over again, foreign butterflies on armchairs, tables in dark, satisfied woods and our windows dressed in Dutch cloth and French velvet. Their walls were painted pastel, the baseboards a dark brown, “So that when they get dirty it won’t show,” Auntie Salma explained, showing Mama around the house. “What a clever idea,” Mama said, with worrying enthusiasm. Their windows were covered in the same cotton fabric, the sort of thing that was commonly found in Libya then, imported from Egypt. They weren’t as well off as we were; Ustath Rashid was only a university professor, whereas Baba was a businessman who traveled the world looking for beautiful things and animals and trees to bring to our country. That night I thanked God for our wealth and asked him to keep us so forever and ever.
A couple of days before Ustath Rashid was taken I joined him, his students and Kareem on a day trip to Lepcis. I felt a string in my heart break as I looked back at Mama waving
good-bye. Baba wasn’t home. At the beginning of the trip I was nervous, but then the whole bus began singing and clapping. Ustath Rashid’s students were wonderfully jubilant; watching them I burned with anticipation to be at university. A couple of girls were pulled up to dance. With eyes downcast they shook their hips and twirled their hands in the air. Passing cars blew their horns. We were like a wedding party.
Kareem and I were sitting in the back, Ustath Rashid in the front, occasionally looking back at us and smiling. When the dancing and the clapping subsided, a chant took hold: “al-Doctor, al-Doctor, al-Doctor” . . . We didn’t stop until Ustath Rashid stood up and turned to face us.
“I am truly honored to have such an orderly, wellmannered and respectable group of students. I would just like to know where you unruly bunch have hidden them.”
We all laughed, clapping and whistling as loudly as we could.
“The city of Lepcis Magna was founded by people from Tyre . . .”
“LEBANON.”
“Yes—very good—modern-day Lebanon. Subsequently it became Phoenician, then, of course, Roman, when it was made famous by its loyal son, Emperor Sep . . .”
“SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS.”
“Yes, our Grim African, both a source of pride and shame.”
“PRIDE, PRIDE.”
“Well, if you insist.”
Then the bus turned down a dirt road that led to the sea.
“Welcome to Lepcis,” Ustath Rashid announced.
He seemed transformed. Stepping down from the bus, smiling at the abandoned city scattered by the lapping sea, its twisted columns like heavy sleeping giants by the shore,
he gave a deep sigh and recited a poem:
Why this emptiness after joy?
Why this ending after glory?
Why this nothingness where once was a city?
Who will answer? Only the wind Which steals the chantings of priests And scatters the souls once gathered.
Some of his students clapped. He smiled, bowed, his cheeks blushing.
“Sidi Mahrez’s lamentation for Carthage could have equally applied to Lepcis,” he said, marching ahead. We all struggled to keep up.
He took us to see a broken frieze that displayed part of the emperor’s name. Absence was everywhere. Arches stood without the walls and roofs of the shops they had once belonged to and seemed, in the empty square under the open sky, like old men trying to remember where they were going. Coiled ivy and clusters of grapes were carved into their stone. White-stone-cobbled streets—some heading toward the sea, others into the surrounding green desert—marched bravely into the rising sand that erased them. Ferns, grass and wild sage shot through the stone-paved floor. Palm trees bowed like old gossiping women at the edges of the city. He showed us the Medusa medallions carved in marble and inset high between the leap and dive of the limestone arches. They were boys with healthy cheeks full as moons, encircled with lush curls, their foreheads flexed, eyes anxiously inspecting the distance, lips gently open. “They are also known as the sea monsters,” Ustath Rashid said, “always facing the sea, always expecting the worst.”
Kareem continued staring up at the Medusa medallions long after the group had wandered off to the next object.
“What’s the point?” he said.
“To scare away the enemy,” I said.
“And how do you expect them to do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said and walked away.
“Children are useless in a war,” he said, following me. We caught up with Ustath Rashid in what were the baths, tiled rectangular cubes carved into the ground and under domed roofs. Flaked frescoes of men stabbing spears into the necks of lions and cheetahs, others on boats in a river full of yawning fish, lined the walls and ceilings. Ustath Rashid stopped in front of a painting of a naked woman.
“This is a maenad, a follower of the cult of Dionysus, the god that alleviates inhibitions and inspires creativity.” Her eyes were as strange as a bird’s, her lips full an melancholy, the area around her nipples glowed pink, and her stomach stretched down to hips that widened out softly. She was dancing, one hand above her head, the other out by her waist. I could hear Ustath Rashid’s voice going further, footsteps following him. I came closer to her, traced my finger around the dark swirl of her belly button. I turned
my finger around the pink center of her nipple. Then my eyes fell on her dark lips. I kissed them, hearing my own breath against the cool dry stone. Something like guilt or
fear made me withdraw. I felt a swirl of excitement in my belly. Her eyes seemed to be looking at me. I quickly kissed her again and ran to catch up with the others.
We picnicked there, and when everyone was lying under trees resting, Kareem and I went exploring. We spotted two of Ustath Rashid’s students hugging below a chestnut tree.
We watched him slip his hand beneath her jumper. She moaned a strange moan. Later the man got in a fistfight with another student. We weren’t sure if it was over the girl.
When one punched the other in the face it didn’t sound like it did in the films; instead of a bang it was more like a wet kiss. Ustath Rashid put himself between them and got his
spectacles knocked off. Everyone fell silent then. He smiled strangely while he searched for his spectacles. They all watched him. Kareem spotted them in the dirt and picked
them up. He placed them in his father’s hand. Ustath Rashid fixed them over his ears and smiled again, facing the ground, as if it was he who had lost his temper and was now embarrassed.
Just when everybody was preparing to leave, Kareem took me to see the amphitheater. We took turns running down to the stage to hear our voices amplified against the rising steps shaped in a crescent moon. By this time thick clouds were drifting into the sky, black and bruised. The sea was growing louder, crashing against the shore, then the
rain fell.
On the way back most of the bus was asleep. I watched Kareem nuzzle into his father’s side.
At times I used to wish that Baba was more like Ustath Rashid. The two men were good friends, if unalike. Baba was much more aloof. The times I felt closest to him were when he was unaware of my presence: watching him spread his library of neckties on the bed, for example, humming an unfamiliar tune. Even the way he swam seemed distant: floating on his back, his toes pointing to the sky, his eyes shut, unconcerned where the waters might take him. At home he was often busy with a book or the endless number
of newspapers that appeared at our door every morning. I would sometimes curl up beside him, but his powers of concentration were amazing and he would hardly notice me. I would study his face as he read. Even the English mints he bought on his trips abroad, and which he kept in a small silver box, seemed mysterious: they were the size of small aspirin pills, but as soon as I put one in my mouth it set it on fire. He would sometimes say something in Italian at the newspaper. That always made Mama laugh. “Your father is swearing at the paper,” she would say.
Although he traveled more than Ustath Rashid he never took me with him. I begged him several times and once I felt so sick with sadness that I screamed, kicked his shins and
pummeled his thighs, and, when Mama restrained me, I cried and called him “Ugly!” He drove off just the same. I never again asked him to take me with him or cried in front
of him when he came to leave.
At other times I secretly wished that Moosa, Baba’s closest friend, was my father instead. Moosa was much younger, closer to Mama’s age, and as tall as a tree. He often carried
me on his shoulders to pick the high fruit, sweetened by the sun, on the crowns of the plum and orange trees in our garden.
Once Baba returned from one of his business trips with a huge open truck full of trees that had come by sea from Sweden. It was strange to have them sleep outside our
house. They were dark and moist and smelled like human skin. Mama and I spread the atlas on the kitchen table to see where exactly Sweden was and by which sea route
Baba’s trees had come. Another time the truck was full of cows, black and dark brown from Scotland. We—Baba, Mama, Moosa and I—fed them without letting them off the
truck, stuffing the feed through the fence, their round big black glassy eyes following us in silence. Mama sang to them the way she sang to herself when she was in the bathroom, or when she was hanging clothes on the clothesline in the garden, softly like a little girl unaware of herself. Baba walked around the truck several times, making sure each cow got its share. The cows were silent the whole time, chewing gloomily.
I spent the whole of that day unable to leave them alone, turning around the truck, looking up at their pink titties, climbing to stare into their peculiar eyes. After naptime the boys came out and began teasing them too. Masoud wiggled his bum at them and mooed, causing his brother Ali to laugh so hard a vein on either side of his tiny neck bulged out.
Osama wanted to hear them moo so he threw a couple of stones at them and the cows huddled together, their sudden movement causing the truck to rock slightly. This seemed to awaken a new fear in Ali; he ran to his front door and stood frowning at his fingers. “Come, don’t be such a baby,” his brother Masoud said. Ali ran inside his house and didn’t come out for the rest of the day. When I threatened Osama I would tell Baba, he sighed and dropped the stones in his hands. By nightfall the cows began to moo.
“Maybe they are frightened,” I suggested.
Moosa said it was the heat that bothered them. “Where they are from the sun has no heat and barely any light,” he said.
“So you want to convince us you’ve been to Scotland?” Mama told him.
“No. I saw it in a film. I felt a chill just watching it.” Baba couldn’t say how cold Scotland was because he had bought the cows off a man in Malta, which was only across
the sea.
The following morning, after Baba had driven off with them, Um Masoud came to our door to complain. She was Masoud and Ali’s mother and lived in the house across the
street from ours. Like her two sons, Um Masoud was fat. Her buttocks were the size of giant watermelons. Although I never tried it, of course, I was certain I could balance a glass of water on one of them. Holding her youngest, Ali, by one hand and waving the other beside her ear, she said, “I can still hear their mooing and suspect I will for a long time to come. Ali couldn’t even sleep.” Ali was only six and, standing beside his huge mother, he looked like a dwarf. I stuck my tongue out at him. He frowned and looked away. “He woke up several times screaming. And this is to say nothing of the stink they left behind in our street.”
“You just have,” Mama murmured.
“What did you say?” Um Masoud said, suspicion forcing
her eyebrows into a deep V.
“Nothing,” Mama said.
Um Masoud walked away, pulling Ali by the hand, and repeating, “Cows? Cows in our street?”
“Next time we will import snakes,” Mama said under her breath. “Silent, odorless snakes.”
“What would people say?” Um Masoud continued.
“That we bring cows into our homes? It’s not normal, this.” I was glad she hadn’t heard what Mama said about the snakes. Um Masoud’s husband, Ustath Jafer, was an Antenna, a man of the Mokhabarat, “able to put people behind the sun,” as I had heard it said many times.
Two days after we returned from Lepcis, and a week before I had seen Baba walk across Martyrs’ Square, Ustath Rashid was taken.
I had seen men interrogated on television before. I remembered once a man who used to own a clothing factory in Tripoli. He was accused of being a bourgeois and a traitor.
He was dressed in a light gray Italian suit that shimmered slightly under the spotlight. He sat stiff in his chair, as if he was in pain. I was standing just outside the entrance of the room, where I wouldn’t be seen. Baba and Moosa sat on the sofa, Mama beside them in the armchair. Moosa said softly to Baba, “They deliberately spare the face. I bet his
body is a patchwork of bruises.” Then a dark cloud grew out of nowhere on the man’s groin, a stain that kept spreading.
I saw it first. I ran to the screen, stabbing my finger at it.
“Move,” Baba yelled. I ran and stood beside Mama. “Go to your room,” he said. “It’s all right,” Mama told him and he shouted, “He shouldn’t see this.” “It’s his country too,” she
said calmly, facing the screen. He stormed out of the room. We watched the man trying to cover the wet patch with his hands, squirming in his chair.
But to see Ustath Rashid arrested was different. I had heard it said many times before that no one is ever beyond their reach, but to see them, to see how it can happen, how quickly, how there’s no space to argue, to say no, made my belly swim. Afterward, when Mama saw my face, she said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” When I told her what I had seen she brought her hand to her forehead and whispered, “Poor Salma.” She took me to the bathroom and washed my face. “You shouldn’t have watched. Next time run straight home.” Then she made me soup and tea as if I had the flu.
Somebody, a traitor, was printing leaflets criticizing the Guide and his Revolutionary Committees. They came in the middle of the night and placed them like newspapers on our doorsteps. I say somebody, but there must have been hundreds, maybe even thousands of men. The boys and I took turns staying up, hoping to catch sight of one. We imagined them to be all in black, masked and very fast. Ali claimed he saw one. Masoud whacked him across the head and said, “If you lie about such things again I’ll tell Baba.”
Everyone feared these leaflets and made a point of tearing them up in full view of their neighbors. Others, like Mama, took them inside only to watch them burn in the kitchen sink, then ran cold water over the ashes. I overheard her once say to Auntie Salma, “They are going to get us all in trouble.” When I asked her what she meant, she sighed and said, “Nothing.” Another time she stood stiffly out on the pavement listening to Um Masoud speak against the “traitors,” saying, “Jafer is very distressed by these leaflets.”
Mama spoke differently to Um Masoud; she seemed sympathetic. She frowned and shook her head and agreed with everything Um Masoud said. “May God forgive them, they
don’t know how wonderful the revolution has been for this country.”
The morning before Ustath Rashid was taken the boys and I were so bored we took the leaflets the traitors had left during the night and tossed them over the garden walls,
where they immediately became, officially, inside people’s houses. We only did this in neighboring streets, where we didn’t know anyone. We tied their light paper bodies to
small stones and hurled them over the high walls the way grenades were thrown in war films. The act was exhilarating, but soon boredom set in again, so we returned to our
street and began preparing it for a football match.
Gergarish was a newly constructed district and apart from the main roads that connected it to the center of the city, most of its streets were yet to be named or tarmacked. We called ours Mulberry because there used to be an orchard of mulberry trees here, the last one remaining was next door in Ustath Rashid and Auntie Salma’s garden. The sun reached the center of the sky. We heard the crackle of the local mosque speaker. We could see the pencillike minaret rise in the distance above the low houses of our
street. Then Sheikh Mustafa’s voice came. We marked the goalposts with rocks and empty plastic bottles, argued about the sides and finally the game kicked off. After a few minutes a car hurtled toward us, billowing dust as if it was the only creature in the world. When we saw it, white in the sun, we stopped playing and ran to the pavement,
letting the ball roll away.
The car pulled over in front of Kareem’s house. Kareem froze, as if his heart had dropped into his shoes. Four men got out, leaving the doors open. The car was like a giant dead moth in the sun. Three of the men ran inside the house, the fourth, who was the driver and seemed to be their leader, waited on the pavement. He smiled at the two fat brothers Masoud and Ali. I didn’t register then that he knew them.
None of us had seen him before. He had a horrible face, pockmarked like pumice stone. His men reappeared, holding Ustath Rashid between them. He didn’t struggle. Auntie
Salma trailed behind as if an invisible string connected her to her husband. The man with the pockmarked face slapped Ustath Rashid, suddenly and ferociously. It sounded like
fabric tearing, it stopped Auntie Salma. Another one kicked Ustath Rashid in the behind. He anticipated it because he jerked forward just before it came. The force of it made him jump, but he didn’t make a sound. He wore that strange embarrassed smile of his. He didn’t argue or beg, as if the reasons why, all the questions and answers, were known. His
shirt was torn. But no blood. I was surprised by this, and later thought that if he had bled—even a little—it would have made it easier on Kareem, because we all would have respected a bleeding man. Ustath Rashid looked toward us, and when his eyes met Kareem’s, his face changed. He looked like he was about to cry or vomit. Then he doubled over and began to cough. The men seemed not to know what to do. They looked at one another, then at Auntie Salma, who had one hand over her mouth, the other clasped around her braided hair that fell as thick as an anchor line over her shoulder. They grabbed Ustath Rashid, threw him into the car, slammed the doors shut and sped between us, crushing our goalposts. I couldn’t see Ustath Rashid’s head between the two men sitting on either side of him in the backseat; he must have been coughing still.
Kareem took a few steps after the car. For a moment I thought he was going to run after it. He stood with his back to us, then turned and walked home. Auntie Salma was standing, still clutching her hair, looking in the direction the white car had vanished, as if it was arriving, as if Ustath Rashid was in fact finally coming home from a long trip.
No one knew why Ustath Rashid had been taken, but the next day the rumors began to spread that he had been a traitor.
Um Masoud came to our door, clicked her tongue, looked around her and said, “That’s the fate of all traitors.”
Baba had heard Um Masoud gossip before: she claimed that Bahloul the beggar was richer than all of us put together, that Majdi the baker didn’t only sell “innocent bread”—that was how she put it—but something else too, called grappa, which wasn’t only haram, but also illegal in our country. Such rumors didn’t bother Baba, in fact sometimes they amused him, but Ustath Rashid was his friend.
The two would often go walking by the sea when the sun was low. And many times they sat talking softly in Baba’s study, where they were sometimes joined by Nasser. I would bring them coffee. Mama would knock twice, then open the door for me. Walking in slowly, balancing the tray, I would be hit immediately by the coarse, smoke-filled air. It made the bitter smell of cardamom and gum arabic rising up from the coffee almost pleasant. “Don’t spill,” were often Mama’s last words before she swung the door open on those secret meetings. I quickly learned that the best way was to look ahead; not caring if I spilled, or not caring overtly, seemed to be the trick. But at the beginning I walked with my head down, facing the three black pools of coffee on the silver tray, telling my hands to be firm as I caught to my left, in the periphery of my vision, the knees of the two men sitting in the comfortable butterfly-cloaked armchairs, and to my right the brown wooden expanse of Baba’s desk. When I had safely placed the tray on the desk, Baba would say, “Well done, Suleiman.” When I looked up to face him I sometimes heard my neck crack. Their conversation was suspended from the moment Mama had knocked on the door, they were eager for me to leave. “Close the door,” Baba would say, but then he often called me back at the last minute. “Here,” he would say, “empty this,” handing me an ashtray full of cigarette butts and dead matchsticks. And a few weeks before Ustath Rashid was taken, I placed the tray on Baba’s desk and saw tears in his eyes. He was reading something. Ustath Rashid and Nasser were sitting in silence watching him. I went to his side. I nudged him and asked, “Who upset you, Baba?” Ustath Rashid held his hand up and smiled. “I am afraid it’s me, Suleiman.” I was confused; why would Ustath Rashid upset Baba? Nasser chuckled.
Baba put his hand on my head and in a scratched voice said, “No one upset me, Slooma. I was just reading . . .” He looked at the piece of paper in his hand. “It’s so beautiful. We will have to publish this,” he said, handing the piece of paper to Nasser. Nasser folded it twice and put it in his shirt pocket.
I had never seen Baba cry before. I couldn’t understand why reading something beautiful made him cry.
When Baba heard Um Masoud click her tongue and say, “That’s the fate of all traitors,” he couldn’t keep silent.
“That’s a lie,” he told her, his voice bubbling with anger.
“A lie the authorities spread to justify the disappearance of the innocent.”
Um Masoud studied her fingers, comparing the length of her nails.
“But then they don’t need to, obviously; there is always a volunteer more than willing to lie for them. The effortlessness, the automatism by which it happens . . .” Mama tugged at his sleeve. “Let me,” he snapped. He squinted his eyes at Um Masoud. “Weeds!” As he spoke the word, he turned his hand as if tightening a screw, as if that word was meant to fix Um Masoud in her corner. “Weeds, like rumors, need no help.” Baba’s face reddened. It frightened me to see him like this because, although he was often serious, he very rarely became angry.
Um Masoud continued to study her fingers, smiling knowingly now, as if some old suspicion had finally been confirmed.
Ustath Rashid had once told Baba that their wives were like two lost sisters who had finally found each other. The first time they met—standing in Auntie Salma’s kitchen among the half-unpacked boxes—the two women seemed happy that fate had finally brought them together. Since then, no two days would pass before one called or visited the other. They found excuses to interrupt each other’s life. Many mornings Auntie Salma would come to our door to borrow sugar or flour or salt, and Mama would always ask her in. “I am short of time,” Auntie Salma would say, but then forget herself until Ustath Rashid or Kareem would come for her, upset she hadn’t even started preparing lunch yet. And sometimes it was Mama who went next door, and we were the ones left without lunch. Mama never forgot herself as she did with Auntie Salma.
They drank tea and talked endlessly; occasionally they would hunch over into whispers, then one of them would clap her hands and burst out laughing. They brought the latest
music to play for each other, and sometimes one would play the tabla, calling out aywa aywa with the beat while the other danced, knocking her hips from side to side. And once
I saw them dancing in Mama’s bedroom to Julio Iglesias, dancing slowly the way men and women did in foreign films, then Auntie Salma bowed and kissed Mama’s hand.
Mama pulled her hand quickly away when she saw me. Auntie Salma came to me, held my hands and we danced. She was so sweet, full of smiles, her cheeks red.
When Baba was away and Mama became ill, we didn’t answer the door, pretended we weren’t in. But once I was so frightened I opened the door for Auntie Salma. She saw
Mama on the floor in the bedroom, smelled her. It was as if a black shadow had fallen on Auntie Salma’s face. She left the room, then came back with a wet towel. She patted Mama’s face. Mama woke up, she seemed disoriented.
“What are you doing here?” she said. Auntie Salma helped her up to bed, then asked me to fetch a glass of water. When I returned I found Mama crying. Auntie Salma said, “Praise the Prophet, girl,” and with a deep sigh Mama praised. After Ustath Rashid was taken Mama didn’t go to Auntie Salma and Auntie Salma didn’t call or visit. Mama didn’t want me to see Kareem either. “No need for you to be so close to that boy,” she said. She had never called him “that boy” before. “This is a time for walking beside the
wall,” she said. When I asked her what she meant, she said,
“Nothing, just try not to be so close to him, that’s all.” She could feel my eyes following her, trying to understand, so she added, “It just isn’t good for you to be so close to all of his sadness. Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo. Be careful.”
I was affected by Mama’s words; I did feel myself nudged by guilt whenever Kareem and I were alone. She was right: a certain sadness had entered his eyes the day Ustath Rashid
was taken, but it wasn’t the sadness of longing, it was the sadness of betrayal, the silent sadness that comes from being let down. Or at least that’s how it seems now. He became quieter—he was always quiet, but not this quiet—and refused to join in any of the games we played. Instead, he would lean on a car nearby as we played football in the street, looking at us in a way that made me feel far away from him. At those moments I wished the Revolutionary Committee would return and this time take my father so that we would be equal, united again by that mysterious bond of blood that had up to that day felt like an advantage. Later, when we were alone, I told him, “Sorry, Kareem. Sorry we didn’t all stand arm in arm to block the way. After all, Mulberry is our street.” He curled his lower lip and shrugged his shoulders. I felt the way Mama must have felt when, after she had been ill, I was angry at her; I wanted so much to bring him out of his silence. I took him swimming. But instead of heading for the deep, clear waters of the sea that touch the horizon, quickly past the blue-black strip that always frightened us because its floor was alive with dark weeds and movement and things, Kareem swam reluctantly. When I was past the dark waters, moving like a streamer with my long flippers, stabbing my arms fast into the pale turquoise, I looked back and saw him on the shore, walking away.
Excerpted from IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN © Copyright 2008 by Hisham Matar. Reprinted with permission by The Dial Press, a division of Random House. All rights reserved.
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