“And then I had a dream. One night before she was going to get rid of you I dreamed. In my dream the white man came to me. He came from the back, not from the front, he spoke to me and I didn’t see his face, the words came from behind. Don’t let her get rid of this baby, he said, this baby will bring good luck.” She stopped again, gently withdrawing her hand from the child’s grip, stroking her chin, her lids closing over her eyes, leaving a narrow slit. “Well?” asked the child.
“I went to her. I picked myself up and sat with her all night before she went to get rid of it, till three o’clock in the morning I sat with her and told her what the white man had said. I said to her, ‘Have this baby for me, give it to me. It will bring us luck, you and me.’ And she agreed. She cried and cried, and I cried with her, and she agreed, and that’s how you came.”
“And what happened afterward?” the child asked, disappointed. “Nothing, life,” said the Nona. “As if you came out of my stomach.”
The front door opened, forcing a ringing slap of air into Nona’s sealed room. The mother appeared, one quick look, only for a second. “Yallah, home, enough for today,” she said to the child, abruptly pulling off the blanket. “Get up, let’s go.” “Get up ya habibti,” the frightened Nona hurried her. “Go to your house.” The child laced her shoes with exquisite slowness, wet the laces with spit, and pulled them very straight before threading them into the holes, stealing a sidelong look at the mother’s calves in their thick brown nylon stockings, the memory of whose slippery touch sent cold shivers down her spine. “Why is the child shivering, does she have a fever?” asked the mother from on high, in the dense air above the child’s head that grew hot and cold by turns.
THE NIGHT BEFORE
THE NIGHT BEFORE the morning of her death, in the hospital. We gathered without coordinating in advance, coming together for a moment on common ground, because of a common concern — her. My brother in work clothes that were so ostentatiously work clothes as to be a cartoon of work clothes. My sister with the luxury of petit fours that my brother polished off in the blink of an eye and the casual luxury of her outfit, her platinum blond hair combed back with oil, her crocodile, or leopard, or something skin handbag. In those flat hospital room colors, in that visual bleakness, she appeared like a radiant strip of halogen, my sister Corinne.
“Why are you in work clothes? Didn’t you go home to clean up a little?” the mother asks Sammy with obvious satisfaction, her face glowing: how she loves his work outfit, the demonstrative shabbiness, the declaration of manual labor. He understands what she is saying: he is the beloved son. My sister-in-law sent strawberries, warning him not to eat them on the way but he did. He lay the green plastic basket with the handful of remaining strawberries on the mother’s sheet. “I’ll wash them,” Corinne said sternly, rebuking my brother with a look for not paying attention, not to the strawberries or to the dance of looks and hints that is going on. Oblivious he fished a dirty check folded in three from his trouser pocket and smoothed it out. “Sign it,” he said to the mother, “I need a signature here.” She signed. She had a habit of wetting the tip of the pen with her tongue, which left a little blob of blue ink behind. “Is it for that building materials guy?” she asked. My brother nodded with immense weariness, rubbing his eyes with grease-stained fingers. The pickup got stuck on the way; he left it in Gat Rimon and came here on foot. With the strawberries.
In the meantime my sister washed them and put them on one of the blue plastic hospital plates. She looked with revulsion at the permanent brown stains on the plastic, and placed a paper napkin on the plate to hide them. “It was a nice day today,” said the mother. “I got up for a bit and saw that it was a nice day.” A light cloud passed over her face. “Did you water the roses, so they won’t dry up, poor things?” she asked my brother. He didn’t answer, having fallen asleep on the armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, his head tilted sideways, his mouth open. I sat on the edge of the bed and Corinne stood, stood, stood, looking at the mother in supplication, in boundless rage. “There’s no doctor, we can never find the doctor here,” she said. The mother examined a hexagonal cookie tin. “The way they know how to make these tins today,” she marveled absentmindedly, stroking the tin with one hand while the other bunched the sheet in her fingers, bunched and let go. She gave off a kind of nervousness, but different, not the old kind, a nervousness of suspense and expectation in anticipation of something that held a big surprise for her, a prize. I looked at her with a certain apprehension, embarrassed by the new language of her body, the expression on her face: tension and tenderness, a suppressed gaiety, her cheeks seemed freshly ironed, glittering. She glittered with something, inside something, perhaps a promise. She held out the cookie tin to me: “Take.”
I took one, sniffed absentmindedly, and bit into it. She looked at me. “Allahu aalam, you’re just like your Nona. She’d sniff everything like that before she put it in her mouth. You remember how she used to drive me crazy by smelling everything like she was being poisoned?” she asked. Corinne came tapping on her high heels, bringing in dark tea from the kitchen. “Drink. It’s good with those cookies.” Her fingers were still bunching the sheet but not moving, in their muteness almost rebutting the animated gaiety of her look. “Why have you brought me tea, am I sick?” she said.
SHE SAID
OF MY BROTHER Sammy she said, “When he gets hurts, it’s me who says ay.” My brother was her firstborn son, her portrait of herself from a different geography, a different fate. She looked at him as if at dark water that reflected someone if not exactly herself then some woman standing before her with a face obliterated by sorrow. She looked at him with infinite yearning, with dread, with longing for her dread, for her love. He was the “wound-child.” The child who was a wound. I said to her once, “mon fils mon horreur” (a quotation from a French translation of Akhmatova, I don’t remember which poem); she thought for a minute and repeated the words, holding them in her mouth:
“Mon fils mon horreur. Yes.”
This notion, “my son my dread,” reached deep into her soul, deep into the well where the hook on the end of the rope hits the hard cement at the bottom, and the hook bangs on the cement, trying to get through to the water beneath the water: the child who is the son, who is the dread, who is the young girl. The son who is the girl.
She was a girl when she became pregnant, a child-mother, sixteen years old. Nona married her off at fifteen to a man years older, wealthy, religiously observant, from harat el yahud, the Jewish quarter in Cairo. There was a situation at home: Grandfather Izak lost the family property to gambling debt, and Nona took the initiative and did something about it. “It was her decision. My father didn’t have a say in the matter,” said the mother, when she said anything. The facts related to that marriage and to the circumstances of the marriage only came up in subordinate clauses to the main clauses spoken by others, not by her; they emerged from the flow and were submerged beneath it like the tips of basalt rocks, whose great bodies were sunk in the ambiguous waters of the phrase “apparently.”