He tossed it out there in the context of their contest.
‘You pygmy!’ Eliyya exclaimed, full of confidence, his clear proof being the short stature of his opponent.
‘You’re a sicko!’ his opponent said, targeting Eliyya’s leanness and gaunt face. This was fired at Eliyya without any need for proof.
‘Lettuce seller!’ Eliyya spouted off, mocking the occupation of his opponent’s father who was a greengrocer. This was Eliyya’s first venture into that type of exchange.
The insult caught Eliyya’s opponent off guard because Eliyya had now opened the door on fathers, where he had the advantage. Eliyya’s opponent had been disarmed, and he hesitated, not finding a way to respond. He looked around hoping for some help; a young man around twenty years old leaned over and quickly whispered something in his ear. The younger boy squealed with joy as if he’d found some long lost object.
‘Son of Kamileh!’
A short silence followed, broken by laughter that resounded the moment the bystanders understood the meaning of the accusation. Those who understood and those who didn’t all laughed. It was as though Eliyya’s opponent had won the victory on points and deserved acclaim from the audience. Eliyya hesitated. He got flustered for a minute and then he suddenly started throwing rocks at his rival, an indication that words had reached their limit and the only response left was to hurt him directly. When his opponent ran away, Eliyya rushed home, angry and crying. He, too, hadn’t understood exactly what happened, but he felt the sting of the insult when everyone laughed.
From the kitchen and from the balcony, Kamileh constantly tried to watch over Eliyya. She worried what they might do to him and wished he wouldn’t go out into the streets, because he didn’t know what was waiting for him out there. She, on the other hand, did know and expected the worst. Being stabbed with a knife would have been easier for her to bear than his tears. She consoled him and decided then and there to send him to the Sisters of the Holy Cross School. And to anyone who asked her about it she said, ‘I don’t have any others beside him and this is a difficult environment here. He learns all sorts of bad things from them. If I leave him to his own devices he won’t learn anything.’ By which she meant ‘school learning’. She visited him there at his new school twice a week. She cooked for him, fed him, gazed at him. But she didn’t want him to come back home. She couldn’t stand the holidays when the school would send him home to her with his accordion. She’d invent all sorts of reasons for him not to leave the house. But they sought him out and would congregate below the balcony hoping he would join them.
They could say she had no feelings and didn’t miss her son as much as they wanted, just as long as they kept their dirty looks away from her — their dirty looks and nasty tongues. She remembered what her brother-in-law, Yasmeen’s husband, was always saying, ‘Staying far away from all of you is a blessing!’
She sent him far away and remained steadfast and alone. But they didn’t forget and wouldn’t forget even after a hundred years. They never said anything to her face, they didn’t dare, but she got the feeling from their little questions — ‘How’s Eliyya doing? We hear he’s very clever’ — from the way they dragged out the question and curled their lips — ‘Did he find himself a nice girl, your son, huh Kamileh, over there?’ She felt they were still lying in wait for her. And now she didn’t want to undergo the cataract surgery because she didn’t want to see what was in their eyes, what was still in their eyes, because what was in their voices was more than enough for her. Maybe the reason her eyesight weakened was so that she wouldn’t have to see them anymore. She didn’t want to see them and she didn’t want Eliyya to come back home. The further away from her he remained, the easier life was for her and for him. By herself, her head butting against theirs, they couldn’t get the best of her, but she wouldn’t be able to fight them off with him standing next to her.
Chapter 17
Samih was the only man among all those women. In every bakery there was just one man who ran the show and withstood the heat of the oven for them — from the moment the women arrived at the break of dawn with the bread dough in trays up on their heads, until the moment they left just before noon carrying their round loaves with the little bubbles on top that looked so hot and appetising and cried out for nothing but a little olive oil and a dash of salt.
Samih did even better than his father had done and was so talented that the large white bread came to be associated with him by name.
‘This is Samih’s bread for sure,’ they’d say, savouring it.
Samih’s bread came out nice and thin and could be separated into two layers that looked like delicate communion wafers. Samih kept his eye on the fire, turned each loaf over and then took it out of the oven at just the right time. The whole operation hinged on timing. Samih would decide to remove the loaf of bread the moment he started to smell the faint odour of burning that had to occur otherwise the bread would turn out doughy. It was an odour he sensed within seconds of it reaching the bread, in the flash of time between burning, for which he would have to pay the price if it happened, and the appearance of little black spots on the surface of the loaf as it glowed in the fiery oven.
Samih’s bread loaves were baked to perfection. They came out of the oven all round and puffy. Whenever we were on vacation and went with our mothers to the bakery, there was nothing we loved more than to make a little vent in the fat loaves Samih would toss to us; we so enjoyed watching the steam come out as if from a fiery chimney before they began to go limp.
Samih’s eye was always on the flames, and his livelihood, too, was in the flames. His father had known how to disregard the women’s chatter and would say that if he responded even once to what one of the women said, he’d burn something in the oven, without a doubt, as punishment for paying attention to their talk. Samih maintained that same rule; either your eye is here or it’s there.
And the women never stopped talking, as if they didn’t have time for a truce. There was a saying about them that said if one of them fell silent one morning, all the others would think there was something — some sickness or need — behind her silence about which they should worry. She’d be bombarded with questions until she spoke, at which time their anxiety was sure to fade away once she’d joined back in. Most of the talk was generalities, nothing that hurt anyone, a preliminary exercise. The morning would begin with vague homilies about the importance of education these days, even for girls, or something about the sanctity of neighbourly ties, or that a boy belonged to his family whereas a girl belonged to her husband’s family or possibly the opposite of that; then the talk would move on to a specific person, though how he got into their conversation nobody knew. That was when they’d start getting serious. First of all, they’d take a quick look around the table to make sure none of the women sitting there was related to the person. If not, their tongues would be let loose; otherwise they’d choose some other person of no relation to any of the women. Sometimes they’d miscalculate and one of the women would start talking, unaware that the person she was talking about was a distant relative of one of the other women. But there was always someone ready to rescue the situation by changing the subject and bringing up some much more serious matter that drew their attention away from the impending embarrassment.
Samih’s mother also had advised him not to listen to the women and not to let them take advantage of him. His mother died only one month after his father. She was no good at living without him — that’s what the bakery women themselves said, praising her loyalty despite knowing that she didn’t really like them.