‘Is something wrong with Mum?’
But Lulua never answered. She would dodge the question by starting some new topic of conversation. ‘Have you seen what my uncle’s arranged …?’
Once, as they stood waiting for cream cheese fateer from the Damascus Fateer House on Layla al-Akheliya Street, he cornered her. ‘You throw me out of the house and hide everything from me, even my mother’s disease.’
She told him that their mother had had a tumour in her colon for the last four months. ‘Seems that it’s benign.’
‘Seems!’ he shouted in anger. ‘What do you mean, “seems”? Listen to me, Lulua, I have to know: is it malignant or benign?’
Gradually she told him and finally conceded that it was malignant, though, according to the doctor, it was in its early stages and a cure seemed likely, God willing. But the uncle said that cures came from God and even Yasser the doctor said that the treatment would be painful and psychologically damaging; herbs were healthier and more effective.
After sunset prayers each day their uncle would open the street door and come inside with his bulk and muttered incantations. The cat would flee from the entrance with her kittens, and he would climb the long staircase panting loudly, short of breath and searching for Lulua, who would prepare a glass of water into which she had dipped a strip of fine Hejaz paper dyed with saffron. Having blown over the water for several minutes he would sit down next to Soha, give her three mouthfuls and start blowing on her as he held her forehead in his right hand, tugging at her roughly while reciting Qur’anic verses and puffing at her face and chest until at last she gave a sigh and forcefully thrust his hand away. His strong grip hurt her and no sooner did he desist than she would slump, her eyes drooping, and sleep with the calm of the dead, as though she had run vast distances during his recitation and now he was done she was seeking out the nearest bench in a public park to stretch herself out to nap.
On their way back to the flat after picking up the fateer the message tone sounded on Fahd’s phone.
I love you, the sweetest man in all of Sham.
His conscience painfully unfurled, tree-like, until his limbs trembled. He thought back to how Thuraya had made a fool of him, making him drive to a strange and filthy flat, throwing her small handbag, patterned like snake skin, on to the living room sofa and embracing him.
Burying her head in his chest she had lifted it up to face him, her narrow, ardent eyes turned towards him. Though he had responded, he was tense and frightened. She pulled him to her by his hair and he surrendered like a suckling infant, led on like a masochist who needs a firm hand to proceed. She gasped and thrust his head down but at the critical moment he leapt up like a cat sensing danger and fled to the kitchen where he opened the tap over the sink. The long stream of water made a loud sound as it struck the bottom of the zinc basin, drowning out the gurgling of the water in his mouth as he tipped his head back then ejected the water in a single spurt, spitting as if hawking up his guts. Thuraya didn’t immediately understand what had happened but he motioned to her that they should leave.
Slumped in the living room at Saeed’s flat, the smell was still in his nostrils. It had the scent of agarwood oil, and though not in and of itself unpleasant, the sudden image of the dark oil that his uncle had scattered on his father’s white casket made him gag. Was this the reason why, to Saeed’s astonishment, he had abstained from food for two whole days?
‘Come on man, she’ll come right in the end, God willing!’ Saeed said, assuming his fast had been precipitated by his mother’s illness and recent decline.
For two days the smell of oils never left him. He squeezed the paint tube, moving the rough brush distractedly over the paint and staining the canvas the purest black then suddenly attacking it with red, sketching out a small bird hovering in the top left corner that almost escaped the edge of the canvas to fly around the living room ceiling. When Saeed asked him if he wanted anything from outside, he handed him the wrung-out, empty tube of white paint and told him they could be found at Maktaba on Ulaya Street or any branch of Jarir. He returned to the painting. Along the bottom edge he painted a bunch of hands, just hands held aloft, impossible to tell if they were pointing to the sky, bearing witness to something, threatening someone or raised in supplication to the bird in the top left corner.
By dawn the next day the paint had dried a little. With Saeed still sound asleep, Fahd opened a small tube of white paint and selected a one millimetre brush with a rounded, tapered point. Very delicately he swept up the white paint and in the centre of the canvas, right in the eye of its stormy blackness, began to draw exceptionally fine white lines, bunched together and bowed like swords. At first he imagined he was painting palm branches, bent and flying through the air, but after an hour spent hunched over the canvas in the quiet of the hateful city the outlines of a little feather started to appear, rocking in the heart of the painting; a bird’s feather falling from the lofty heavens to a sickeningly silent city. It seemed to be swaying between two skyscrapers, but it was bigger than both of them, the artist’s lens held close against it, rendering the vast towers no more than a distant backdrop to the scene.
Fahd painted with precision and perfection while in his mind an old memory unfurled of his Aunt Heila’s house in Buraida, of the wood fire in the coffee room where one cold winter’s night he had been playing with cousin Faisal, Hissa’s son, and Heila’s daughters, Shareefa and Lateefa.
The elder daughter, Shareefa, ordered them to all place their hands on the floor then suddenly lifted hers: ‘The car has flown!’
They kept their hands on the floor, alert and repeating warily and suspiciously,
‘It has not flown …’
Whoever got it wrong and raised their hands saying, ‘It’s flown,’ was out of the game, and so on until there was a winner.
‘My mother Noura’s flown.’
‘She hasn’t flown …’
‘The cat has flown.’
‘It hasn’t flown …’
‘The pigeon’s flown.’
‘It’s flown.’ and everybody raised their hands as one, while Fahd wavered for a moment before lifting his own.
‘Fahd, you’re out,’ screamed Shareefa.
‘No I’m not,’ he shouted angrily.
‘You didn’t lift your hands fast enough.’
‘Pigeons don’t fly!’ he said, swaying.
‘Pigeons fly, you idiot!’ said Lateefa, laughing.
‘Fine, Fahd gets a let-off,’ said Faisal sympathetically. ‘Let’s carry on.’
Sharifa thought for a bit then shouted, ‘The palm tree’s flown!’
‘It’s hasn’t flown …’
‘The feather duster’s flown!’
‘It hasn’t flown…’
‘The feather’s flown.’
‘It’s flown,’ said Fahd.
‘It hasn’t flown,’ shouted Faisal and Lateefa together.
The children began arguing in the still of a night broken only by the chirrup of cockroaches on the tall palms in the courtyard. Shareefa said that feathers don’t fly and Fahd objected loudly and angrily, saying that feathers flew.
‘No, no. Wrong,’ yelled Faisal and Lateefa. ‘Feathers don’t fly. It’s the pigeons that fly.’
Did pigeons fly? In his friend’s flat in Maseef, Fahd peered at the painting and thought back, spreading the wings of his memory and flying away to where the velvety pigeons in his uncle’s yard in Buraida scuttled on red legs, pursued by Yasser or Faisal. They dashed about flapping their clipped wings, tipping forward on to their breasts and righting themselves, then continuing their scampering and pecking at the tacky earth floor.