Читать книгу Somewhere, Home - Nada Jarrar Awar - Страница 6

Maysa

Winter

This house, my house, saw its beginnings with the marriage of my grandfather. Built to hold the family in its overflowing numbers, the house became a meeting place for grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and numerous cousins from surrounding villages, its rooms expanding around them like sunlight in winter.

My father, Adel, remembers its high ceilings, the echo of footsteps on bare tiles and glimpses of his mother’s long white veil floating through doorways behind her. At three, he once sat on the outside ledge of one of its arched windows and gestured towards the fields beyond, his own private kingdom, before falling into a prickly bush below and getting up a more humble boy. I remember, as a child, holding my hand against the hollow in my father’s scalp and imagining I could feel the memory of that fall between my fingertips.

He would call me to him, ‘Maysa, Maysa’, and speak to me of his life in this house in fragments, in snatches of colour and longing, pausing to be the distant and more familiar figure of my childhood. But he did not know that it was his silences that intrigued me most, those moments between words that allow the imagination to wander.

I saw the brown dust of unpaved roads wrapping themselves round the mountain like arms entwined. I saw the sun on those roads and the air that carried it. I saw stone houses and armies of men and women in black and white sitting in front of them, their hands spread fanlike on their knees, their eyes squinting in the sun. I saw my grandparents, Alia and Ameen, and their five children sitting on low seats round a wood-burning stove in winter, their cheeks flushed red, their hands reaching towards the warmth, their voices low and intimate.

Now, years after they have all gone, as Beirut smoulders in a war against itself, I have returned to the mountain to collect memories of the lives that wandered through this house as though my own depended on it. And as my heart turns further inward, I nurture a secret wish that in telling the stories of those who loved me I am creating my own. The village hangs against the side of a mountain. The mountain grows pine trees and wild thyme, and is no longer home to wild boar and wolf dogs. My grandmother told us, as children, of the famine that struck during the Great War and the fear felt by men walking through the night with sacks of Damascene wheat on their backs, watching for animals that might attack.

The mountain seems tame now by comparison. I stand at the front door and stare lazily into the garden. It is almost autumn, almost cold, almost the end of freedom and summer. At five o’clock the mist appears and hangs listlessly over the house, over its crumbling red-brick roof and around its jagged stone walls. It floats over fig trees and grapevines, and ripens waiting fruit until it is ready for picking. I touch the vine that hangs from the roof and winds its way through the pointed arches that frame the front of the house. It runs along the rusty green balustrade at one end of the terrace overlooking an empty field and the village beyond, and edges towards the faltering wooden front door.

Since my arrival several weeks ago, I have been busily preparing for the cold winters that invade the mountain. Most of my things are now in the large room adjoining the kitchen. My bed is tucked into one corner with a large sofa across from it, and in between them is a Persian carpet woven in red geometric patterns that once belonged to my mother, Leila. Lined up against one of the walls is my grandmother’s oak dressing table which has a full-length mirror stained with age and a secret drawer that no longer opens.

In the centre of the room I have installed the old wood-burning stove where I will boil water for bathing and do most of my cooking throughout the winter months. The kindling wood and dry pine cones are in a large tin container next to the stove and the blocks of firewood that I bought last week are piled high behind the door. The kitchen cupboard is stored with jars of pickled cheeses and green olives, and cloth sacks filled with cracked wheat, lentils, beans and pine nuts line its shelves.

The weather gets colder. I spend much of my days wrapped in blankets sitting on the sofa with a large notebook and sharpened pencils in my hand. When the stove heats up, I breathe in the green scent of burning pine until my head swims with it. Then the notebook slides to the floor, the palm of my hand opens to release the pencils and the words escape and float up to the high ceiling.

In the early evenings I watch the short-lived sunsets, not with a dreaminess, but in a slow and deliberate way, until the sun becomes a part of me too, going down in a blaze of red. Everything beckons me then, the pine trees, the stars and the singing crickets.

At night, when the village falls silent, I sit in my room and listen to the now familiar creaks and sighs of this house and revel within its reluctant embrace. If sleep does not come easily, I lie in my bed and try to imagine old age and loneliness enveloping me, getting closer and closer until they touch my skin and there is no running away from them.

Selma, the midwife, has become a regular visitor. A tall, dark amazon in whom wisdom sometimes outweighs kindness, Selma is a second cousin once removed and chooses to remain in the village because ‘the world out there is no better’. She cares for me as she would an errant younger sister who does not really deserve her sympathy. She does not ask me about Wadih, the father of my child, nor why I decided to return to the mountain after a lifetime in the city. During her morning visits we drink tea made from dried flowers and herbs, and nibble flat, hard biscuits flavored with cardamom and musk. Because I am thirty-two, Selma wants me to be examined by a doctor, but I tell her that my confidence in her abilities is so great that I am certain nothing will go wrong on the day.

After six years of marriage Wadih and I had both given up hope of having a child when I discovered I was pregnant four months ago. For several weeks I lived through something close to stupor, unsure whether to be happy or shocked and sensing in my husband an equal uncertainty. As we slept, exhausted with thinking, his body stretched itself so that it seemed somehow to pass over me, his breath like slow mist in the evening. I stared at him and pressed my hand to his brow, and wished he would wake up and catch me watching him.

‘This city is no place to bring a child into,’ I told my husband.

‘What do you mean?’ There was indignation in his voice. ‘This is our home, Maysa.’

‘What about the fighting? What if something happens to the baby because of this wretched war?’

‘Our baby will be as safe as every other child in Beirut.’

I thought then how lonely a man seems when he is alone, the hesitation in his step, his brows pushed up in astonishment at the finality of solitude, his heart ready to embrace the first curious look, the first hand touching, willing to touch.

Whenever Wadih had something of beauty to show me, the sea rushing and indifferent, the magnificence of mountains in winter or the distance in a blue sky, he would place a hand on the back of my neck and absently rub the skin there until I felt whatever I was looking at move up my spine, down my arms and into my fingertips.

The day before I left for the village we went for a walk on the beach.

‘It’s not just about the fighting, is it?’ he asked me.

‘That house is where everything began, Wadih,’ I whispered.

‘And what about me, Maysa? What about me?’

He walked past me then, another lone figure in the sun, vulnerable and fiercely strong both, as we all are.

* * *

My world feels so small now, the house, the garden and the shadows in between. On the rare occasions when I go down to the village, I encounter no one who can lift my spirits. When she comes to see me, Selma tells me people have begun to talk. Your belly, she says, is going to be difficult to hide soon.

I tell her that I am not afraid of village talk.

‘And the child,’ she retorts. ‘What about the child? What about its father?’

I stand in front of the dressing table and stare at my figure in the full-length mirror. My dark hair looks long and unkempt, and my face is forlorn. I place my hand on my belly and rub gently. I am nothing like my former self, less poised and more vulnerable.

To comfort myself I think that my child will be different from the rest. She will have my dark hair, the sultry green eyes of her father and her skin will glow somewhere between gold and olive. I shall call her Yasmeena and dress her in shades of blue and yellow, and she will grow up to recognize the scents of pine and gorse just like her mother.

It is winter and I am resigned to my fate. My concern for the wilting vine will not be silenced. I fetch the ladder and climb up high enough to touch the trellis and the ropelike, dry branches of the once luxuriant plant. Looking up through the netting at the distant sun, I am overcome by dizziness and fall off the ladder. I lie on the ground for a moment or two, breathing in the mixed smell of earth and dust, and feeling a tingling through my body.

Selma arrives but she is less than sympathetic.

‘I found blood.’

‘Lie down and let me look at you,’ she says, gently pushing me onto the bed. ‘What made you do it?’

‘The vine is dying.’

‘Dying? It’s coming on to winter. Of course it’s dying. It’ll come back to life next year.’

I turn my head to the wall, fight back tears and hope she does not notice my distress.

‘Yes,’ she says abruptly after completing the examination and walks into the bathroom to wash her hands.

‘Yes, what?’ I call to her with alarm.

‘The baby may have been affected by the fall. We’ll have to call in a doctor.’ She comes back into the room.

‘You know I don’t want a doctor, Selma. You know that’s why I have you.’

‘I know that you care about this baby more than about your pride.’

This house, this old, dilapidated house, was once a castle, alive and spilling over with energy. My grandmother sat in a wooden-backed chair at the southern window, watching for the last of her children running home from school, and now there are shadows where she has been, shadows without sunlight, clouding my vision, filling me with fear.

The doctor is a small man with a smooth face and delicate features. We do not talk during the examination.

When he is done, he sits down on the edge of the chair opposite my bed, his brown doctor’s bag placed by his feet. His voice is soft. ‘Yes, well, the baby is alright, but you’ll have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’

Outside, the morning is well under way. I can hear the revving of engines and the children who use my front garden as a short cut on their way to school. The smell of pine cones burning in the stove fills the room with a soft scent and I cannot stand this man’s clinical distance.

‘You think I should be having this baby in a hospital, don’t you, doctor?’

He looks taken aback. Then he stands up and prepares to leave, holding a piece of paper in one hand and his bag in the other. ‘I’ll ask Selma to fill in this prescription for you. If you notice any more bleeding, please call me.’

Selma sees him to the door and returns to my bedside. ‘I’ll go and get that medicine for you now.’ She pulls the bed sheets up so that they almost touch my chin. ‘Do you need anything else?’

The defiance rushes from me and leaves a sudden fluttering fear behind it. I reach for my friend’s arm. ‘Why can’t I be more like Alia?’

Selma’s reply is gentle. ‘Do you think Alia never had moments when she felt unsure of herself?’

‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ I say with a sigh. ‘I’m trying so hard to understand.’

‘What is there to understand? Your grandmother was capable and dutiful like most women had to be at that time.’ Selma pats me on the shoulder and stands up. ‘You have no way of knowing all these things now, Maysa,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘But I can imagine, can’t I?’ I call out as she walks out of the door.

My woman’s body carries itself from this doorstep along the dirt road beyond and falters by the apple tree where children played it seems a hundred years ago. Like the yolk of an egg, I am alone and sheltered. I shift around on stiffening hips and wish for summer. I know that this journey I take, I take without guidance, without searching, without hope. I walk alone and into the sun.

* * *

I am wakeful again and feel regret inching its way into my resolve. I get up to feed the wood stove and place a concoction of flowers and herbs into a pot to make a hot drink.

Outside, there is unqualified silence. I begin to wonder if I would not manage to rest easier if I moved into another room. I wrap a thick blanket round myself, light a candle and tiptoe to the other side of the house where the four boys, my father and his brothers, once slept.

The room is spacious and bitterly cold. I can see them, Salam, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel, lying one against the other for warmth on mattresses placed together to accommodate their growing bodies. I hear their breathing and see the shadowy figure that makes her way into the room, and feel the gentle kisses she gives them on flushed cheeks.

‘Boys may grow soft if shown too much affection,’ my grandmother whispers. ‘My boys will be men.’

I sigh and wrap the blanket more closely round my shoulders. I want to have worn a different history, begun a different past. I want to have been a Chinese warrior, a rounded Eskimo, or perhaps a Scottish prince. I want to have looked up at wider skies, walked through thicker forests, waited for longer winters. Anything but this weighted, haunted longing for a distant past.

I move to the large cupboard at one end of the room and pull at its rickety doors. I have been planning to clear it out for weeks. When I get it open, a cloud of dust rushes into the room and I step back for a moment. The cupboard is empty except for a pile of books on its bottom shelf. There are story books and school books, Arabic, History and Mathematics, each with a child’s name inscribed on the inside front cover. I open a literature textbook that once belonged to my uncle Rasheed and imagine his small head bent over in reading, a pencil in his hand and his heart somewhere hopeful.

I lift my head and savour the infinite silence of the night. Memories and imaginings mix together in my mind so that I can no longer tell which is which. My breath becomes uneven. I return the textbook to the cupboard and just as I prepare to get up notice a thick, leather-lined notebook on top of the pile. I pick it up and blow some of the dust off its cover. When I open it, I realize that it is some kind of ledger, its yellowed pages lined with black and bold red ink. I leaf through it and in my excitement tear off one of the pages. The notebook is empty, no words to comfort or inspire me.

I crumple the torn paper in my hand, make a ball with it and throw it up in the air. I begin to tear out other pages from the notebook and scatter them around the room, then stop. I get up and return to my room, hugging the notebook to my chest. Its smell intrigues me, stale, musty, with a hint of the sharp scent of virgin paper. I sit on my bed, look at it in the weak light of the candle on the table beside me and reach for a pencil. I open the front cover of the notebook and turn to the first page where I write Alia’s name in big letters across the top.

I once asked my grandmother if when they were very young she had ever wondered what her children’s future would be. It was only months before Alia’s death and she was very frail, escaping into a vast silence when she could, waiting patiently on her invalid’s bed. I looked into her eyes, her skin was white and transparent, and her face, under the thin white veil that she still insisted on wearing, looked small and clean.

She placed her hand on my arm and pulled herself up slightly. ‘I knew,’ Alia said.

‘You knew what they dreamed they would be?’ I asked.

She shook her head with impatience and gripped my arm. Then she suddenly let go and laid her head back on the pillow. ‘They were my dreams too,’ she said before turning her head to the wall.

Late into the night, I lie down on the bed and close my eyes, the notebook resting loosely in my arms.