Mother of All Pigs. Malu Halasa

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СКАЧАТЬ all Al Jid kept saying: “So I’ve sent you all the way to America to drink alcohol?”’”

      Feeling as though she is holding a precious time in all of their lives, Mother Fadhma smiles gratefully at Muna for allowing her to share it. “I can’t tell you the excitement these letters caused when we first received them.”

      Samira, who has been watching quietly and listening all along, interjects, “Whenever an airplane passed in the sky, all us kids used to point up and call out, ‘Abd! Abd!’”

      “And one by one,” Muna inquires, “all of them left home?”

      “Yes,” Fadhma affirms. Why pretend otherwise? In the beginning she thought of her husband’s children, both home and abroad, as two equal halves of the same whole. But as one place claimed more than the other, it simply wasn’t true anymore. Apart from the letters and the funds that were sent home, they disappeared. By the time her own children were old enough to travel, Fadhma understood she was losing them for good.

      “Their lives are better there,” she sighs. What she wasn’t going to say was that during those days she still clung to an unreasonable belief that Abd, the son who was destined to care for them, would not desert her and Al Jid completely. She continued feeling that way even when her stepson’s financial contributions began to arrive less frequently and his letters exhibited a marked change in tone. Instead of reporting minute details of his day-to-day life as a way of including his parents, he seemed to be building up defenses. Occupied by his intense studies for a college degree in chemistry, he had little to write about. The personal news he included was ominous. He was becoming friendly with another foreign student, a young woman and fellow immigrant to the United States from the Philippines. Then, without warning, they married.

      It was a blow to the family. No one in the Sabas family married a stranger. Abd had not only wedded outside his tribe but outside his culture. And who could predict the consequences of such reckless behavior? Fadhma feared the worst, but it was Al Jid who took the news particularly badly. He had already mapped out his son’s life. He had chosen a suitable woman to be Abd’s wife and even made the initial approaches. The young couple would have probably ended up in the Gulf, where his son, the chemist, would have worked to support the rest of his siblings. When that was no longer feasible, Al Jid accepted the inevitable and sent his blessing… even though it was not asked for.

      The second eldest’s brazen independence humiliated his parents, but there was worse to come. Another letter in Fadhma’s box, one that had been folded many times and shoved to the bottom—never referred to but never forgotten—had been written in English. It arrived after Abd’s wedding. But with no English speakers in the village, it remained unopened until business called Al Jid to the capital. That night he returned home clearly depressed. Mother Fadhma thought it was the low price for barley, but when she inquired, he pulled from his pocket the letter with a translation written in Arabic. In an expressionless voice, he read, “‘All you do is write and ask for money. How dare you bastards keep bothering us! I’m pregnant, and your son wants me to give you the little money my family sends to me. Go to hell.’”

      Not even this message completely destroyed Mother Fadhma’s confidence in Abd. Her illusions were finally shattered a few years later, when a snapshot arrived in the mail. The picture was of a little girl in a grass skirt and Hawaiian halter top, with an orange lei around her neck. Her hands were held to one side and a bare foot pointed forward. It was Muna, aged three and a half, poised to dance the hula. The accompanying letter was simple and direct. Fadhma recites it as though it arrived yesterday:

      “‘My dear family, I am writing to you from my lab, the only place I can find peace. I have a good job with a big company that makes plastics. My wife and daughter are well. As you can see, the child does not look Arab. This is the problem of a mixed marriage. Neither she nor her mother would be accepted in Jordan, and all of our lives would be miserable. So I think it’s best for us to remain here. God bless you.’”

      Saying nothing, Fadhma hands Muna the picture of herself when she was small. “I don’t remember this,” her granddaughter grins uncomfortably. After a long, hard stare, she passes it to Samira before asking Fadhma, “Why did you give your children Muslim names, Jadda?”

      The old grandmother again regards the girl in a new light. At least Muna isn’t unintelligent. Fadhma smiles proudly. “It was your grandfather’s idea.”

      In the hopes that Muna’s interest in family history is greater than Samira’s or Laila’s, she begins slowly. “Hundred of years ago, Christians dedicated to Sabas, the patron saint of our family, waged war against the pagan gods of the desert. After those battles, they settled in the Crusader fortress in the country’s south and would have gladly stayed there, if not for a dispute over a local woman—”

      “There’s always a woman,” interrupts Samira with a laugh. “Someone looks at someone. Someone’s father gets upset. So-and-so’s brothers become involved, which pretty much all the time leads to murder.”

      Fadhma refuses to acknowledge her daughter’s comments and continues: “It would have ended in a sectarian war, but the church leaders in Jerusalem petitioned the Turkish governor in charge of the region and the Christians were given permission to come to the mountains here”—Fadhma twirls a finger in the air—“and settle in the ruins of an abandoned Byzantine city that had been destroyed seven times by earthquakes. When the tribes arrived, they took shelter in a cave by a spring, which they thought was God’s gift to them. It belonged to someone else. Inadvertently our relatives traded one fight for another, and your great-grandfather was killed in a battle. It was devastating for the family. But at the young age of ten, Al Jid made a solemn vow not to avenge his father’s murder, something remarkable considering the code of honor among the tribes. Once he married and had children of his own, he called them not by Christian names but ones that were either Muslim or considered neutral. That way they could live unmolested among strangers.”

      She pours herself a second cup of coffee. “Your grandfather believed Islam and Orthodox Christendom were a large and small tree that had grown into one. The leaves were different but the shade the same. He also taught himself to read and write.” She could see him now, spending hours in the window alcove at the front of the old house, where he sat in the natural light with his books. “He was in love with the history of Arabia. Our daughters were named after great Islamic women, some of them warriors. Would you like to hear his favorite poem? It was their bedtime story.”

      Mother Fadhma sits up and recites a little self-consciously:

       We are daughters of the morning star,

       We tread on pillows underfoot,

       Pearls adorn our necks.

       Musk perfumes our hair.

       If you fight, we will embrace you,

       If you retreat, we will abandon you.

       And say farewell to love.

      “This was the song of Hind and other rebellious Meccan women on the field of battle,” she goes on explaining. “They banged their drums and urged their men to kill Muslims who had come from Medina to steal Mecca’s profitable pilgrim and caravan trade.”

      Finally Mother Fadhma feels like she is enjoying herself. Since Hussein’s troubles, she has been denied a favorite pastime, taking morning coffee with the elderly women of the town and telling stories. Neither Muna nor Samira displays the wit or feistiness of her old friends, but the young women are a reasonable audience. Fadhma would have told them all she knew about the bravery and savagery of Hind on the battlefield СКАЧАТЬ