Mother of All Pigs. Malu Halasa

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СКАЧАТЬ Tentatively he enters a silent room. Muna, in one of the single beds, gives the impression of being fast asleep.

      Tiny juddering steps take him to an opened suitcase in front of a table between the beds. For someone still honing his rudimentary motor skills, stepping over something no matter how sleight is akin to scaling a mountain. He crouches beside the suitcase, then without warning hurls himself into it face-first. He uses a tartan miniskirt to pull the rest of himself inside. Muna, amused, raises herself on her elbows and watches.

      Meddlesome fingers trawl buttons and zippers. Unable to find anything suitable to suck in his mouth, the child considers his options. Ignoring a natural inclination to pull a strand of Samira’s long dark hair escaping from a nearby pillow, he grabs a convenient table leg and pulls himself upright. He’s still not tall enough. An erratic sweep of a small hand brings that which glitters enticingly on the surface within reach. Plopping down, he prepares to taste each contact lens package and family snapshot, when he is inexplicably removed from his heart’s desire. The intrusion is so rude and unexpected that he falls backward into Muna’s arms and screams. The more she soothes him, the louder he becomes. Once he sees that Auntie Samira is awake, he insists on going to her, bawling and kicking. An indifferent shake of her head sparks another outburst.

      The aroma of coffee and cardamom signals his imminent rescue.

      Mother Fadhma had left Fuad for only a moment. As quickly as her ailing physical condition allows, she enters Samira’s room and places a steaming tray of Arabic coffee on the table. “Shame on these girls for treating you badly,” she scolds, and takes the little boy in her arms. Safe with his jadda, Fuad swallows deep, long gulps.

      “Mamma is his favorite,” Samira says, and yawns. “The rest of us are fed up with babies.”

      Sitting next to Muna on her bed, Fadhma retrieves a handkerchief from her apron pocket and wipes the tears from the child’s blotchy face.

      “I didn’t mean to…” Muna is embarrassed but her grandmother raises a hand.

      “Nobody can be held responsible for a tantrum.” As she rocks baby Fuad, she remembers Muna’s father, Abd. Her special affection for him began the instant she saw him, seconds after a difficult premature birth. Fadhma had been a teenager at the time—probably a decade younger than Muna now. She took the tiny dark baby from her fifteen-year-old sister, Najla, and fell in love. It was Fadhma who had given him his nickname. In any other mouth Abd, which means “servant” or “slave,” would have been derogatory, but in those few moments she could tell his future: he would be dedicated in the service of his family. Although she couldn’t foretell her own: after her sister’s death and Fadhma’s marriage to Al Jid, she would raise thirteen children.

      After the inappropriate playthings have been safely retrieved, the suitcase shut and Fuad prowling with a newfound swagger on all fours, Mother Fadhma takes the photos Muna brought from America and looks through them again. She’d glanced at them last night, but in the harsh morning light they tell a different story. The sons of her sister dominate the pictures as they do the family. There are no proper images of Mother Fadhma’s beloved daughters—Magda, Loulwa, and Hind—even though they too live in Cleveland. Sometimes the camera catches a shoulder, back, or side view showing more hair than face, as they cook and clean in the houses of their half brothers and husbands. Her fourth daughter, Katrina, and her two sons, Abdul and Sharif, don’t appear at all: they settled in Chile with Najla’s eldest, Yusef.

      In the United States, her sister’s boys have grown old. Mother Fadhma looks twice to pick out Farouk in his businessman’s suit and tie. Qassim lost all his hair, but he remains the comedian, still joking with the others outside one of the garages he owns. Boutros, a medical technician, appears quietly content as the father of four girls. Abd has an even darker complexion now that his hair has grayed. Mother Fadhma wonders whether it is his scientific career or his stormy marriage that is to blame.

      The men stand beside cars or in stiff family groups, or play ball with their sons and daughters. Everyone looks smug and overfed, even the children. “Like fattened calves,” Mother Fadhma whispers to herself. In their rush to assimilate, her stepgrandsons in their Cleveland Cavaliers jerseys seem to have lost any connection to Jordan.

      Normally the old mother would not have expected gratitude. She has long been accustomed to unrewarded work. She was the one who scrimped and saved; she had even sold her few pieces of gold jewelry to pay for their travel. While they didn’t have to constantly thank her, she wouldn’t mind being remembered once in a while. Mother Fadhma becomes aware of Muna’s eyes on her. The girl had been remarking on one of the pictures, but the old woman had been far too engrossed in her own thoughts and hadn’t paid attention. It occurs to her now that Abd’s daughter shouldn’t be blamed for her father’s and uncles’ apathy, just like she cannot be faulted for a toddler’s tears. It really is time, Fadhma thinks, to rid herself of this burden of resentment. Ever since Muna’s arrival the Jordanian family has been too preoccupied with their own troubles to be truly hospitable. Leaning over, Mother Fadhma wipes the sleep from her granddaughter’s foreign eyes—her first act of intimacy toward the girl—then returns the stack of pictures to the table. She pours out two demitasse cups of Arabic coffee and tells Muna and Samira to start without her, as she gets up, albeit painfully, from the bed and moves slowly from the room.

      She returns with a battered cardboard box and declares proudly, “Every piece of correspondence the family sent over the years.” Inside, neat bundles of papers and letters are tied with brown string. At the bottom lies a faded powder-blue airmail envelope, as dry as onionskin. It contains extra passport photographs taken before each of Al Jid’s children—her sister’s and her own—left the country. Fadhma wants her granddaughter to see her aunts and uncles when they were young and starting out in life, full of hope.

      At first Muna doesn’t recognize the two yellowed snapshots of Magda and Loulwa. “Look at them!” she exclaims, somewhat baffled. The middle-aged, overweight women in Ohio bear little resemblance to these two rouged, willowy girls. The next picture is easier to identify: “It’s Hind,” she cries out. Muna knows Mother Fadhma’s second-youngest daughter well. At age sixteen, Hind was sent to live with Muna’s family in Cleveland. She was only two years older than Muna. It took a while, but eventually the two girls became close, Fadhma knows through Hind’s letters home. She also wonders if Muna agrees with her daughter’s assessment that it was during this period that Abd and his foreign wife fought most bitterly.

      As Muna leafs through the old photos, Fadhma unties the string around Abd’s correspondence. “The freak pockets of snow at home did not prepare your father for the severity of American winters,” she tells her. In Greenville, Illinois, his German landlady, Mrs Schneider, had given Abd the clothes that belonged to her deceased husband, a man who had been over six feet four inches. “‘Not all the loaves of Wonder Bread and peanut butter and jelly I eat during the night shift at the town’s cafeteria,’” Fadhma starts reading, “‘are ever going to make me taller.’

      “Then he found work in an extremely dirty kitchen,” she says, grimacing at the next letter. “‘I got rid of ten-day-old pork chops—eight big bags of stinking garbage!’ But your father wrote that this job was not without its benefits. The owner, it seemed, sewed better than she cooked and cut down the dead man’s clothes to fit him.” When Abd was hired as a hospital ward orderly, he paid his landlady for his new wardrobe and sent home to the family whatever cash he could spare.

      He had also written about a very shocking incident. One evening, after he left work and went to a bar. Mother Fadhma’s voice rises in excitement. Her eyes still grow wide with the horror she felt all those years ago. Fadhma still can’t imagine the dens of iniquity that are American bars—do the women walk around naked? Is this how all the young Arab men become ensnared, end up forgetting their families and staying abroad? Pushing aside СКАЧАТЬ