A Girl Made of Dust. Nathalie Abi-Ezzi

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СКАЧАТЬ the left and right sides. The tall stained-glass saints looked hot and red-faced in the brilliant light that shone through them and fell on the congregation, making pale outfits glow pink and blue like cartoons. The pews were filled with stiff suits and gold jewellery, the air thick with cologne.

      We sat near the aisle, Teta and Naji in front of me and Mami. Beside me was a fat lady with a clinky bracelet and a man with a fleshy roll of neck.

      ‘Sit quietly,’ whispered Mami to Naji, who was humming and knocking his heel against the pew.

      A priest in black robes and a puffed-up hat stood at the pulpit. Like all priests, he had a long beard he chanted through. Then it was our turn and the grown-ups chanted back to him.

      Naji glanced back and rolled his eyes, but I was trying to guess when Mami would bow her head, and when the priest would turn round to speak to the altar and the big gold cross again instead of to us. He spoke a foreign language a lot of the time, maybe so God could understand, only I didn't think God would be interested if He'd heard the same thing every Sunday for a hundred years.

      The lilies and carnations near the altar were wilting, and the pages of the Bible belonging to the lady next to me stuck sweatily together. Up on the right, a stained-glass saint looked like Uncle Wadih, except that Uncle didn't wear a long cloak. Or blush.

      It seemed Mami and Teta had plenty to pray for. They knelt on the cushions with their eyes closed and their lips moving while the priest walked about swinging incense in a container he held by gold chains.

      I heard Teta begging God and Jesus to keep a long list of our relatives safe and to bless the souls of her husband and mother. Most of all, though, she wanted ‘the children and my sons and daughter-in-law to be happy’. I didn't think God had much work to do with Uncle Wadih, though, because he was always happy.

      Mami was praying too. ‘Give him back to us. Oh, Allah, please make Nabeel come back to us.’

      I prayed too: that the curse on Papi would be lifted, that Uncle would come in time for my birthday, and that I would never have to wear grandmother pants like Teta's.

      Outside again, I could almost hear the sun beating down. The men took off their jackets and stood in groups smoking and talking while the women crossed the road to the nut shop to buy boxes of chocolate for Sunday visitors. One gave money to the man in the wheelchair who was always waiting near the steps after church. He had a pair of tattered boots at the ends of his shrivelled legs, and crutches laid across his knees.

      ‘How did the priest swing that incense so high without any falling out? It was over his head.’

      ‘He does that so that God can hear our prayers,’ said Teta. ‘So they go up to heaven with the smoke.’

      They went on ahead.

      ‘The Rose Man says it's no use,’ I told Naji, ‘that we're like plants – we're here and then we're not. Why do people go to church anyway?’

      ‘I don't know. Perhaps they want something from God. That's when most people go and pray. The rest of the time they don't care much about it.’

      The leaves hung loose on the trees, and white morning glories spilt down a wall.

      ‘What does Mami want, then?’ I thought of her hardened, dried-up fig heart.

      ‘To be rich, probably. That's what everyone wants.’

      But I hadn't heard her pray about that. ‘Doesn't God get annoyed because people only go there for Him to fix things that are wrong, the same way they go to a doctor when they're ill?’

      He left a wavy finger line along the side of a dusty car. ‘Well, He'd be annoyed if you bothered Him when everything was fine, wouldn't He?’

      ‘Taste this.’ Mami held something in either hand between thumb and fingertip for each of us to taste. It looked like a piece of stuffed meatball, or it might have been fried cauliflower.

      Once it was in my mouth I didn't want to swallow it, but Naji was good at lying about the things that came from Mami's hands.

      ‘Mm.’ He smiled, then hurried away.

      Mami pounded meat using a stick with a wooden block at the end. She hit the thin piece of meat so hard and for so long that the animal must have hurt even though it was dead. A warm sweet smell of frying onions and pine nuts came from the large bent pan, and a soft khrish-khrish-khrish from the wooden board where she was chopping parsley. Her green-specked fingers stopped as she glanced up at the petunias on the window-ledge.

      ‘Why do flowers die in winter?’ I asked.

      ‘Because it's too cold.’

      She'd put them there to have something pretty to look at, and now I wondered how she would feel when they died.

      Naji and I ate enough lunch to stop being hungry, then pushed the food round our plates. Something was bitter, although Papi didn't seem to notice: he just ate at a steady pace with plenty of salt.

      Mami was pleading with him to open the shop the next day. ‘School's starting soon and we need money. I haven't much left.’

      The lines in Papi's face deepened.

      ‘You haven't opened for a week now. Must I go up there again?’

      He continued eating, staring at his plate as he chewed.

      The rice shook on Mami's fork. A few grains fell off. Maybe Naji had been right and it was being poor that was making Mami unhappy.

      Papi spoke quietly. ‘I'll open the shop. But not tomorrow.’

      ‘When, then? The day after it'll be the same thing.’ No one was eating now. ‘You'll go back to that chair and not get up.’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘You'll sit in that chair and—’

      Papi's fork clattered onto his plate. ‘What do you want me to do, my love? Go out there and chit-chat with whoever walks in – about nothing? About nothing!’

      ‘You don't have to talk to them. No one's asking you to have a conversation.’

      ‘No, just to behave like nothing ever happened. Like this country's not hell! Can't you understand, Aida?’

      ‘No – no! I don't understand how you think we're going to live. Time is passing, the children are growing up, and still …’ Her hand slid down to cover her eyes.

      ‘Still nothing changes. But am I going to let you all starve? Is that what you think?’ Roughly, he pushed away his plate. ‘I'll do it, didn't I say so? Just not tomorrow.’

      ‘How are the children going to learn with no books, and how are they to go to school with no clothes or bags or pens?’ She was breathing hard. ‘Why can't you …?’

      Papi smiled bitterly. ‘Have you lost patience with me, ya Aida, you, with your bottomless well of patience? You might have to be patient for ever. Do you understand? For ever.’

      Mami's lips disappeared into her mouth and she got up.

      ‘Don't bother her,’ Naji said to me after lunch, but it was hard not to watch. СКАЧАТЬ