A Girl Made of Dust, page 8
‘Always doing things the difficult way,’ muttered Teta.
‘Teta, why can’t Karim do Burbara with us? I was going to help him choose a mask and everything. He would have looked wonderful in a lizard one!’ I watched Teta drop the fruit into the pot.
‘They’re Muslims.’
‘So what?’
‘Listen to the child! She wants Muslims to celebrate the festival of a Christian martyr.’ She shook her head at my stupidity. I hadn’t liked the story the teacher had told us about Saint Burbara: how she was kept in the tower by her father and how he chopped off her head when she said she was a Christian. I didn’t see why he should have got so angry about it – unless she’d stopped cooking his meals too, and in that case she should have carried on cooking and kept quiet about being a Christian. That way she’d have lived longer.
‘Mustn’t Karim eat the sweets or the burbara?’
‘That boy needs to eat. He’s as skinny as a length of string.’
‘He can come over afterwards, then?’
‘Of course.’ She dropped the fruit into the pot with some more spices.
‘But Teta, what does it mean, being a Muslim? Is it bad?’
‘Is Karim bad?’
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
I thought back to Jbeil. ‘Does it make him different from us?’
‘Before the war we all lived together in the same villages, no matter what our religion. Now we live mostly in different villages and in different regions. There are still a few Muslims here, but not many. They don’t dress any differently from us and they’re part of the village the same as we are.’
Outside, in the cold December night, Naji was pulling up weeds from the side of the road. He didn’t want to go round the houses with me, but I begged till he gave in. We went to the Rose Man’s first.
‘Be happy you have the intestines to eat such things,’ mumbled Samira as she offered us nougat. ‘What with this war, I can’t stomach a thing.’
When we’d done the block of flats opposite we knocked on Karim’s door and brought him home with us, passing other masked children along the road. As we neared home, we saw Juhaina waiting in her car with the motor running while her maid handed a tray of cakes to Mami.
Juhaina hooted. ‘Yalla, ça suffit,’ came her voice. ‘Do you want me to be attacked by all these children while you hide in my friend’s kitchen?’
Mami went to church afterwards, and Teta dished out the burbara for us, muttering, ‘What’s that woman thinking, giving us her left-over cake? The country’s bursting with the poor and the hungry; is it us who need her charity? And not even the decency to come in herself.’
Then she stood back, enjoying the way Karim shovelled the burbara into his mouth. She was even more pleased when he took a second helping.
Naji had been snappish all evening, but now he pushed back his chair. ‘Let’s go and play. Come on.’
The door to the living room where Papi was sitting was closed.
‘What are we going to play?’ asked Karim.
Naji pulled on his mask. ‘Chase.’ He had turned all friendly now. ‘The bear will have to chase because he’s the fastest, and whoever he catches first is the loser.’ He took off the mask and looked from me to Karim. ‘Who wants to be the bear?’
‘But you wouldn’t let me try it on earlier,’ I reminded him. ‘Why are you letting us wear it now?’
Karim didn’t care. ‘I haven’t worn a mask yet, so it should be me.’
‘But Naji, we’re not supposed to wear them inside. If Papi sees—’
‘We won’t go in there,’ said Naji.
Karim looked funny with a bear-face. ‘Get ready. One, two–’ he started running ‘–three!’
With a yell, I sped down the hall, into the dining room – twice round the table, back to the hall and into the bathroom – the door nearly closed, opened again as Karim pushed against it, then shut. There was a moment’s silence, then I heard him move away.
When I opened the door there was no one outside, only a flash of Karim’s green jumper as he vanished through the living-room door.
‘Karim! No!’
When I got there, a thin bear was hanging onto Naji’s sleeve singing, ‘I win! I win!’
The world stopped, except for Karim’s song. Papi seemed to shake as he rose, the mark on his forehead dark against his bleached face. Worry beads were strewn across the floor, their string snapped.
‘I won! It only took me a minute and I won! I saw you run in here!’
Naji watched calmly as Papi stood rocking and trembling, his black eyes filled with a deeper blackness. There might have been a crack like stone breaking, then Papi was flowing across the room. Nothing else moved – the walls, the plastic flowers, the tray of cigarettes, an orange colouring pencil sticking out from under the sofa. They were stiller than real life, still as only photographs can be.
Papi moved towards the plastic-headed bear. He grew tall as the ceiling and Karim’s head fell back as he looked up at him. Naji remained frozen as, with mad eyes, Papi jerked the bear back by the shoulder and roughly took off Karim’s mask.
It lay a long time in Papi’s hands, staring up at him.
Karim looked terrified. When Papi moved, Karim’s arm came up protectively. But Papi didn’t hit him. Instead, holding the mask in one hand and gritting his teeth, he stuck two fingers right into the eyeholes, forced them in until they were halfway through and wouldn’t go any further.
Karim’s arm fell as the two fingers twisted left then right, left then right, as if Papi wanted to get them further in; as if he wanted to mash the bear’s eyes right up. I knew then that he was crazy.
A rope of vein stretched up the side of his neck to the rock jaw, and above it, his face was clenched. Naji gasped. The fingers ground left and right in the eyeholes, and a thread of blood zigzagged down the white inside of the bear-face.
Karim gave a shout, but Naji pushed him towards the doorway. ‘Get out.’ And the two of them stumbled past, taking me with them.
Chapter Nine
I couldn’t explain to Karim why Papi had acted that way. ‘He didn’t mean to scare you,’ I said, but it made no difference. Karim stopped visiting our house.
In the weeks after Eid el Burbara, leading up to Christmas, Mami took us to church so many times that even the priest was tired of seeing us, and school blossomed into colour. Paper chains hung across classroom walls, tinsel was taped to the doors, and squares of painted aluminium foil glared from noticeboards. The lentils and chickpeas we’d been watering in cotton wool sprouted and were set in the manger round the brown-paper figures of Joseph and Mary, and schoolwork gave way to preparations for the Christmas play.
‘Ruba,’ called Mrs Atallah from the stage one afternoon, ‘go and help Amal with her wings.’ She waved to the side of the hall where a row of chairs was set out beneath the large windows. All alone on one of them, Amal sat curled up over a trail of white material.
‘What?’ I said, but Mrs Atallah had turned away to roll up a turban that had come undone.
My cow costume – a tail, horns and an old brown shirt that had belonged to Naji – was finished. I looked around for Karim but he wasn’t there. His parents had said he couldn’t be in the play, so he was helping to carry things on and off the stage. Ever since the night he’d seen her in the witch’s window behind the face in the mist, we had avoided Amal. What had she been doing there? I didn’t understand her, nobody did, yet now I had to walk across the hall and help her make angel’s wings.
With every step, I moved further and further away from the children clustered near the stage. A sea of floorboard stretched out in front of me, and mountains sprouted behind as I went, cutting out the noise and putting miles between me and help. Dragging my tail behind me, I wished I was a Muslim too and not in the play.
The light fell on Amal’s back, white as sugar, as I crossed the last mile of floorboard, and made a huge rectangle on the floor that hemmed us together. Standing beside her, I looked at the hair falling to her shoulders, straight and shiny like threads of black silk. Near her ear, a beautiful hairpin with a yellow and blue enamelled flower glistened in the sun. A pair of stiff white wings lay on her lap, a large needle plunging awkwardly in and out of them. The length of white material for the angel’s skirt hung down in shiny folds over the side of the chair, and the black hair swung as the needle tugged and jabbed, making the wings twitch as though they were alive.
It was my feet she saw first. The needle stopped. Her eyes travelled up to my face.
I clutched my brown tail in both hands. My mouth was dry. ‘Mrs Atallah said I had to help you.’
With the needle stuck halfway into the material, she stared – the questioning gaze I remembered from my birthday.
‘She said I had to help you with the costume.’
Amal nodded.
Sitting down beside her, I glanced at the heart-shaped pieces of cardboard covered with cloth and white feathers and joined in the centre. One was bent.
Amal began again, her left hand holding the wings down as the right stitched them to the dress. She was barely halfway and already the wings seemed battered and dead.
‘I–I can hold.’
The cow’s tail slipped to the floor as I pulled a chair round. Reaching out, I slowly pressed down on the wings to hold them in place, and a moment later felt her fingers brush mine as she pulled the needle out and the cotton thread tightened.
Faint and far off near the stage there was a laugh and a shout. A girl giggled, and Mrs Atallah shouted impatiently at the boy with the turban, but in our spot beneath the window, the rectangle of light held us apart from the world.
A feather tickled my arm, reminding me of the chickens I’d let loose in the witch’s yard. I was glad I’d done it: I had got back at her a little for what she’d done to Papi.
Amal bent down again and the metal point vanished in and out of the white cloth.
‘You missed the wings!’ I blurted.
I shouldn’t have said it. The noise from the stage faded, or perhaps it was the light filling my ears. I waited, but Amal didn’t pounce and my head didn’t fall off. Only her big eyes made me uncomfortable.
‘You’ve got to go to the left.’ My mouth wouldn’t stop flapping. ‘To the left, not – not there. Shall I try? If you hold, I can try.’
She nodded.
I was careful not to touch her as I took the needle. But my hands wouldn’t work with her so close beside me. Each stitch pointed in a different direction: one section was puckered tight, the next was loose.
I stitched upwards along the wings, away from her. Fast. The thread grew short before the end but I pulled it tight. ‘It’ll be enough,’ I muttered. I didn’t want to get another, to thread it under her gaze and spend even more time here.
It was her smile that made me lose my place: a sudden, unexpected smile that came from nowhere. It revealed two large front teeth with frilly bottoms. I had never seen them before, and they made the needle jerk.
It stabbed into her flesh a little above the knuckle. Stabbed in and stuck there, a fine point of silver and white light. Her watery eyes fixed on me. Then, still held by its thread, the needle fell out.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered from behind my fingers. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’ Amal’s finger made a bulge inside her cheek. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
A bang and a shout came from the far end of the hall, followed by laughter, but I didn’t care about that. Amal was taking her finger out of her mouth. She didn’t cry or make the slightest sound. Instead she reached up to her hair, drew out the enamelled pin and put it into my hand.
‘Ghada, what do you know about Amal?’ I didn’t want to ask Papi or Mami, and Ghada knew everyone in Ein Douwra.
‘Oh, that one,’ she said. ‘She lives up on the high road with her grandmother.’
‘Her grandmother?’
Ghada was taking care of the shop today, and she put three more courgettes into a bag for me. ‘What useless vegetables. What is there to do but stuff them with meat?’
The glass in the door shuddered as an explosion boomed. It seemed to come from everywhere.
‘Burn their religion! My hair’s going to turn white from nerves, and then who’ll marry me? They’re landing just down the road, I’ll bet, and here I am in the shop. I might as well put a red flag on the roof so they can see more clearly where I am.’
‘Missizbel’s left,’ I said. ‘My teacher. She’s gone back to Scotlanda.’
Ghada sighed and turned on her little radio. ‘If only the rest of us could turn our arses to this country and fly off.’
‘She says there’s no shelling there.’ I tried to imagine what it would be like, but couldn’t. Perhaps Mami wanted to go somewhere like that, where things were so different she’d be happy the way she was in the photo.
Ghada shivered. It had snowed again last night, so heavily that the world was plugged up and hushed, and cars from higher up in the mountains crawled through Ein Douwra wearing tall hats of snow, many with chains wrapped round their tyres.
The air roared again, from further away this time, but we hardly noticed because a procession of hooting cars had turned off the main road and was streaming down the hill, the snow squeaking beneath their tyres.
Ghada stood watching at the door with a hand on her hip as they passed, their fronts, boots and door-handles decorated with flowers and ribbons. ‘Which florist’s responsible for such a tasteless arrangement, do you think? I wouldn’t have accepted it for my wedding. Look – nothing but carnations, and half of them wilted. There’s the bride.’ Ghada pointed, then sank back against the doorframe. ‘In any case, they could have done better with the flowers. Last week a beautiful one passed with lilies and roses. Even yesterday’s funeral did better.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘You see how it is? One day they’re laughing, the next they’re crying. It’s nothing but weddings and funerals these days.’
Back at the counter she wailed along to a song on the radio about ‘true love’ and some man holding your hand ‘until it melted’. She seemed to think that would be a nice thing to happen.
‘Any news from your uncle? Is he planning another visit?’
The image of the two men drinking coffee and talking in Jbeil flashed into my mind, but perhaps I’d been wrong. ‘I don’t know. But about Amal, some children at school think she can speak even though she never has, not even once.’
‘Oh, that one had a voice all right – when her father tossed her here as if he were tossing out garbage, the shiftless good-for-nothing.’ Ghada grunted scornfully.
‘She had parents?’ I exclaimed.
‘What – then?’
‘Where’s her mother now?’
‘Miss Yumna? Her parents married her off to that same good-for-nothing I was telling you about. An old man he was, compared to her. She didn’t want to, of course. Who would?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he wouldn’t do a thing for a soul other than himself, that’s why not. Wouldn’t pee on your finger if it was on fire. And he had wrinkles like an elephant, a head of dyed hair and half a dozen gold teeth to round off the picture. But he was rich, and that counts with a lot of people. It did with her parents. And money’s no bad thing,’ added Ghada, releasing another sigh into the shop. ‘Now what else did your mother want?’
‘Two kilos of tomatoes.’
She snapped a plastic bag off a metal hook. ‘Tomatoes. You see what life has become? Life has become tomatoes.’ She muttered to herself as she turned them over to make sure they were good. ‘Here I am in the flower of my youth and I have to pick out other people’s vegetables for them.’
Ghada lifted the bag onto the scale and the long needle shivered, then darted back to zero as she lifted it off again.
‘Isn’t Samira helping you?’
Ghada rolled her eyes. ‘Every day it’s something.’
‘Is she sick?’
‘That’s what she says, but she’ll outlive us all, you wait and see – unless they go and drop a bomb on us first. One day she hasn’t the strength to eat, another she feels faint, and so it goes on. Last night, for instance, she couldn’t sleep, so she had to keep everyone else awake too. Then at three in the morning she gets out of bed, makes a full rakweh of coffee, drinks the lot, comes back to bed and sleeps like a cow.’
I bent to pick a large tomato from the bag and cradled it in both hands. ‘What happened to Amal’s mother after she got married?’
Ghada whipped a metal file across her nails so that a tiny puff of nail-dust flew into the air. ‘She came back for her father’s funeral and never left.’
‘You mean she’s still up there?’ A finger squished into the tomato.
‘No, no, she’s dead. When Miss Yumna died, there was only her husband’s family left to bring up the child, but I suppose they couldn’t be bothered any longer so she’s been thrown here with her grandmother. But she had a voice back then, ya haram, before her mother died, that’s what I remember.’ She gave a mouth-shrug. ‘It must have been the shock.’
I dropped the punctured tomato back into the crate. ‘What did it sound like, her voice?’
Ghada lit a cigarette. ‘Like a voice. What should a voice sound like?’
Chapter Ten
A few weeks after Christmas, Juhaina came by to ask Mami to a party, and I escaped to Teta’s. Using both hands and with a cloth wrapped round her head, Teta was stirring her clothes in a large pot of steaming water with a wooden stick. The pot was in the bathtub, and the smell of hot soap rose with the steam. When she stopped stirring to pound the clothes, white cotton swelled into balls on the surface and was squashed down again.
I told Teta about Juhaina. ‘She didn’t go inside, just stayed in the kitchen. I don’t think she likes Papi.’
‘Will your mother go?’
‘I’m not sure. She said no, but Juhaina said she must. She said she’d lend Mami a dress.’
I heard Juhaina’s voice again. ‘Soyons pratique, Aida. You’ll look nice, and no one will know.’
