White hair in a tight bun clustered against the nape of the old woman’s neck. She reclines in bed, mute and paralyzed. An ancient cat hovers nearby but dares not jump up to snuggle next to her in bed. It is Umm Yusuf — by her premotherhood name, Hasiba Haddad — who died when Milia was three years old and was erased from the girl’s memory, or perhaps she never actually entered Milia’s memory in the first place. Why does she return today? And why the cat?
Milia awakened, her eyes flashing open to the morning rays. She swung her feet out of bed, setting them down into her slippers as usual. The cat jumped between her legs and the slippers turned into a bounding cat. She chased after it, cornered it, crept toward it, and put her feet on it, hearing a meow that was more like a rattle. She saw her grandmother, Hasiba, whose name originally had been Habisa. Preferring not to be known as “Imprisoned One,” she had switched two letters around and called herself Hasiba. Much better to be thought of as one respected!
Saadeh did not understand why Abu Said had given this name, Habisa, to his daughter. Perhaps it had been the name of the daughter’s own grandmother, but then why had that grandmother gotten the name? In any case, the woman had changed her own name and everyone began calling her by the new one — everyone except her daughter-in-law. Even after Hasiba’s death Saadeh went on calling her by her original given name. Distressed by it, Yusuf would beg his wife in a shaking voice to stop, but Saadeh was Saadeh.
I want to call her Sitti Hasiba, Milia said to her mother.
Call her whatever you want, my dear, but her name is Habisa. God has released her, and released us, and released the cat, too, and in one fell swoop!
What was the story of the cat of whom it was rumored that Saadeh had poisoned twenty-four hours after the death of her mother-in-law? Milia did not remember her father’s tears but Saadeh did. He cried over that cat more than he did over his own mother, she said.
Grandmother had given the cat the name Pasha because she said he looked like the Turkish pashas: light yellow hair, brown eyes, long whiskers, and a body as fat as a sheep’s. He was old and had an eye problem — glaucoma, most likely, for he was nearly blind. But Saadeh said his stumbling walk wasn’t because of his blindness. It was because he was senile and couldn’t tell the difference between one object and another. Instead of behaving with typical feline modesty, he did his business everywhere and filled the house with the smell of shit. Saadeh wanted to throw him out but Yusuf felt sorry for his invalid mother and gave the cat his patriarchal protection, ordering that Pasha be allowed to stay in the house.
He pleaded with Saadeh. Mother is going mad, he said.
She’s already mad.
God be kind in your afterlife, woman, don’t say that! I’ll clean up after the cat.
And your mother — who cleans up after her?
Lower your voice! She’ll hear you.
Grandmother sat in bed listening to everything and saying nothing. She had already entered the desert of silence and would never find her way out. Milia did not know where the expression had originated; it must have been the nun’s. The saintly woman labeled Hasiba’s silence the desert. All saints chose the desert at the end, she said. And the only person who showed reverence and respect to Hasiba was Sister Milana. Arriving at the house, she would go directly to the old woman’s bed, sponge her brow with a cotton wad that had been immersed in blessed oil, give her a kiss on the top of her head, and refrain from showing any disgust at the smell coming out of the old woman’s cracked skin.
Was Sitti born paralyzed? asked Milia.
No, my dear. When she was born, your grandmother had nothing wrong with her. She slept on this bed right here, next to the one you were born on. But she didn’t sit at home much. She was always going about. When you were about five months old, one day they brought her in and said she had fallen, out on the road. She was never the same again, until she died.
And when she died, where was I sleeping?
You were with her, sleeping in the very same room, but we didn’t let you know anything, you and your brothers. Except Salim, who came into our room and said his grandmama was frozen. I ran to her — your father stayed in bed, unable to move, until I screamed and he came after me. We sent all of you children to my mother and you didn’t come back home until after everything was over and we had buried the cat as well.
Milia did not remember her grandmother. Whatever images of the elderly woman did come to her came from the memory of words heard from her mother, fragments of stories gathered from a scattering of words to become images that had their place in her dreams.
I must let go of this dream, Milia said. She stood up, opened the door to her room, and begged the cat to come, but the cat ran and crouched under the bed and began to meow. Milia knelt down and made kissing sounds. The old cat lifted his head but his body shrank back as if he were getting ready to pounce. Her fear pushed little Milia into retreat. He was beneath her bed in the liwan. The grandmother watched, her head bowed forward onto pillows set on her thighs, her eyes open. The woman was bent almost double; she could not straighten her body.
Why does she sleep like that? Milia wondered. Now she could see only the old woman’s back, her pale cheek turned sideways on the pillow, white froth around her lips that were always shut, always silent. That is how she spent her final three years.
The story goes that Yusuf got up one morning to find his mother asleep in this odd position. His mother told him she had decided to sleep bent over to keep death at a distance. If I sleep on my back, she warned, the Angel of Death will come and steal my soul from inside me.
Hasiba believed she would likely die if she lay on her back. If she was curled up, she could face death. Death could not enter a circle, for life is round. That is what Yusuf said his mother said, but no one believed him. How could a senile woman whose ravings ranged far and wide and made no distinction among things speak in this wise, philosophical way?
When she died she was wooden and cold, a rigid back nearly snapped in half, bent over itself, face supported on two raised pillows, feet twisted into an odd position, and a thread of dried blood that had trickled downward along one ear. Had Saadeh not been so quick to realize what this meant, and had she not gotten her husband to help her pull the old woman’s corpse into proper shape, it would have hardened to the point where they would have found it nearly impossible to fit it into the coffin.
Milia makes sucking noises at the cat, who tenses to pounce. But then, suddenly the cat walks out from under the bed, staggering crookedly, and dives into the slipper.
No! screams Milia. And sees Mansour standing by her bed. The clock shows that it is five o’clock in the afternoon, not yet dark. Milia had gone to bed because she felt an unusual weight in her belly. She thought she would lie down for a bit before making supper in anticipation of her husband’s return. The numbness which would take her to sleep swept over her and the pain came in one wave after another before fading away. The cat appeared in the guise of a slipper and she heard moaning.
She opens her eyes and waves to Mansour to leave her alone for a few minutes. Five minutes and I’ll be up, she says. Then everything goes and she is submerged in dusky light. Her stomach contracts. She folds double to lighten the pain and once again sinks into the story. She sees that the cat has died and hears her father sobbing as he carries the dead cat wrapped in brown paper outside, for burial in the garden. The cat had eaten poisoned food; without a sound it crept to the foot of the bed in which Hasiba had slept. It collapsed on the floor and died.