Читать книгу Somewhere, Home - Nada Jarrar Awar - Страница 8

Maysa

Spring

The vine is coming back to life. I can see bright green shoots pushing out of its branches that revel in the sun and make tiny shadows on the tiled floor below. Every morning I carry a plateful of fruit and a cup of flower tea out to the terrace, sit on an old sofa I have placed there and stare out at the view. The village wakes with a start, to the sound of children preparing for school and shopkeepers rolling up the corrugated-iron fronts of their shops, to the smell of wood stoves being relit and the sight of the thin white smoke that rises from them.

Soon after the first small commuter bus inches its way up a steep hill and away to the city, cars appear, dozens of them that whiz up and down the main road. By then, the movement of people and machines appears almost frenetic and I carry the remains of my breakfast back into the quiet of my house lest the anxiety invade me too. There, I wonder how different Alia’s mornings must have been, the duties of house and children to see to, stretching her days into a fever of physical activity. She once told me that she had always favoured early mornings in the village, those moments before the children woke up, when the house pulsed with their collective heartbeat and she could stop and contemplate her fortune.

I look down at my now huge belly that hangs low and round over my legs and feet. I wear different versions of large, comfortable sweatsuits that have only just begun to strain against my widening girth. Selma has cut my hair so that it frames my face in a curly dark cap and lifts the circles from under my eyes. My skin has lost its flaky winter appearance and glows with the freshness of the mountain air. If I did not know better, I would believe Selma when she tells me that a woman who grows prettier as her pregnancy advances is carrying a girl.

The doctor, I know, already has an inkling of the gender of my child, but after the tests I have taken at his clinic he has refrained from telling me which it is and I have feigned indifference. He has extracted from me a promise that I will let him know as soon as labour pains begin and that I will be willing to go to a nearby hospital if he thinks it necessary. ‘We have to think of the baby.’

Alia had all her babies at home, with her mother-in-law and a local midwife in attendance. It was a matter of life or death every time but she always got through it. What it must have felt like to greet each of those babies, their sudden plop into being, a startled screech and the touch of roughened mother-hands on slippery, transparent skin. Did she cherish the approval of the family and indulge in the brief admiration shown her by her husband when he was there?

‘What does it matter either way?’ Selma says to me.

I shake my head and tell her I don’t understand.

‘What does it matter what anyone thinks or says,’ she continues. ‘All you can do is just get on with it.’

Maybe that’s what Alia knew she had to do. I am surprised into silence at the thought. ‘You mean she may not have thought about it at all?’ I ask Selma.

‘I mean she accepted her fate like most women did in those days.’

But I don’t believe that, I begin to say and then stop. ‘What was it, then? What did she really feel?’ I ask instead.

The truth is that I don’t know. I strain to remember the look in her eyes and come up with little more than a mixture of tenderness and distance, the look of a woman with secrets that she will not disclose to a child. Did she love Ameen or had he merely been a part of a destiny she could not avoid? Did she really long to go with him to Africa and did she miss him when he left? Who was her favourite of the children, who held that special place in her heart?

‘If Alia hardened her resolve when it came to bringing up the boys, then what softness was left over for Saeeda?’ I ask Selma. ‘She married off her only daughter before Ameen knew anything about it.’

‘She had no choice,’ Selma retorts. ‘Girls could not be left to fall in love on their own, especially if they were as flighty as Saeeda was.’

‘You remember my aunt?’

‘Yes, of course I do. You do as well, don’t you?’

Saeeda had a small dark mole just above her top lip that moved as she spoke. I remember watching it with intense fascination when I was a child. My aunt took care of Alia and Ameen during the last years of their lives, and we saw her whenever we went up to the village for a visit. Until I moved back to the mountain, my interest in Saeeda had always been superficial.

‘She never told those children that she loved them,’ I say.

‘She didn’t need to,’ Selma replies. ‘They already knew it.’

‘No. Children don’t just know,’ I protest.

I place my hands on my belly and rub gently at the stretching skin beneath my clothes.

‘But they always find out when they grow up,’ Selma says. ‘That you love them, I mean.’

‘Is that what you’re hoping will happen with your own children, Selma?’

She is offended, mutters a quick goodbye and leaves the house.

Spring makes its way into my heart and lifts my spirit. I have the wood stove removed from my room and place the bed underneath the window that faces the front garden. Hovering between sleep and waking in the early morning, I breathe in long and deep and imagine living on the mountain for ever, my child and I self-contained in our splendid, crumbling house. I air out the rooms of the house, and watch the sunlight sweep over the rooftop and stream through the open windows.

Father, dreamer, your thoughts are still hanging in the air of this house, wandering and waiting for you. Do you remember the day you held our hands, my brother Kamal’s and mine, and swung us into the air of this garden? Mother, the silence here is you, the graceful movement of your head turning away and your quiet, wistful step. I think of you both, your plunge into old age, a final acquiescence, a fitting goodbye.

I see Alia shuffling around in old age, dreaming of her boys, a businessman, a lawyer, a doctor and an engineer. They left her, married and had children of their own, taking the city for their permanent home and believing, as all men do, in their immortality. Until they stumbled into complicated lives that demanded the resourcefulness and expanse of vision they had learned from Alia and Ameen.

I wonder how much of their anxiety Alia really felt and have a wish that she showed each of them a moment’s weakness, a taste of unclouded tenderness.

Selma loosens my worries over the impending birth as she would a stubborn knot, visiting me in the evenings and clattering about the house with practiced efficiency. She has put aside clean sheets, towels and two new pillows, and placed them in a plastic bag on top of the bedroom cupboard. ‘We will need them all when the time comes,’ she says with authority.

She tells me my single bed will be too small for the baby and me, and orders a new and larger mattress, which a handyman places over Alia’s old bed in the adjoining room. Her fussing comforts me but makes me feel somehow apart from the coming event and the anxiety begins to return.

‘Alright, what is it now?’ Selma asks with gruff tenderness.

I shake my head, watch as tears fall on the crisp white baby sheets on my lap.

Selma sits on the bed beside me. ‘It’s not unusual to be feeling like this so near your time.’

‘Yes. You’ve told me before,’ I whisper, suddenly realizing that just this once it is not Selma I want beside me.

She pats me lightly on the back and gets up again. ‘It’s time I left,’ she says, making another of her unexplained departures.

I take the notebook from my bedside table and go out to the terrace. It is early afternoon and I have been unable to find comfort in sleep. I feel heavy and lethargic, and my feet are slightly swollen. I lower myself onto the sofa, rest my legs up on it and place a pillow behind my back. When I open the notebook, I am pleased at the sight of pages that are filled with words, at the names of those who came before and are here no longer, in delible now, but I still cannot explain the hollowness in my heart.

I turn to a new page and write Saeeda’s name at the top.