Читать книгу Somewhere, Home - Nada Jarrar Awar - Страница 9

Saeeda

Saeeda was the last child, the happy one, a girl. She had rosy cheeks and dark hair, and as an infant showed an inclination for joy that none in her family possessed.

Alia’s feelings for her daughter wavered between love and irritated concern until the day she promised five-year-old Saeeda’s hand in marriage to a first cousin’s son and no longer felt the need to worry about her future.

Asaad was only thirteen at the time and was already half in love with an olive-skinned and indolent village girl who lived on the other side of the village. Alia had watched one day while Asaad gazed in awe at the girl as she sauntered back from the village spring, a clay jar perched on one of her shoulders, her arms lifted to steady it so that her dress swung high above thin ankles and small feet. As she knelt to rest her jar on the roadside, a gold cross appeared round her neck and swung between the two small breasts bound by her bodice.

Saeeda never knew of her mother’s plans for her, nor of the overwhelming sadness they would make of her life, and grew up thinking the world of herself. Her brothers loved her with guilt-ridden indulgence, trying to make up for the indifference she would encounter as a grown woman. Adel, who was closest to Saeeda in age, was fiercely protective of his sister, fighting off any attempts to harm her, assuring her that she was as good as any boy he knew.

But whenever he urged her to find the strength to hit back at trouble, she would shake her dark head and smile. ‘You’re my courage, Adel. There’s enough anger in you for both of us.’

That was when he determined to look out for her for the rest of their lives.

Like her brothers, Saeeda attended the village school, but unlike them her enthusiasm was for the company rather than the learning. She was an unexceptional student who would incite her friends into spontaneous laughter and smile as soon as the teacher approached to reprimand them.

The only uncertainty Saeeda felt was in her mother’s presence, sensing Alia’s restless heart and wanting to reassure her. Saeeda would often rush in from the garden to sit by her mother and reach out to touch her hand lightly. Alia would look up from whatever she was doing and smile at the little girl, before turning away without seeing the light in her daughter’s eyes falter.

In early adolescence Saeeda refused to wear the long white veil her mother had ordered for her from Damascus, tentatively touching the delicate white silk and then pulling her hand away.

‘What is it, Saeeda?’ Alia asked.

Saeeda shook her head and did not answer.

‘Is it the material? It’s the best silk to be found anywhere.’

Saeeda looked at her mother and replied in a whisper, ‘I don’t want to cover my hair.’

‘What do you mean? You know very well that all the women in the family do.’

‘I won’t cover my hair!’ Saeeda said before stomping out of Alia’s room.

Later that day Saeeda found the veil neatly folded in a small square on her bed. She picked it up and gently shook it out. She scrunched the material in one hand and lifted it up to her cheek. It was softer than she had imagined and smelled faintly of the olive oil soap her mother used to wash her hands. Tiptoeing across the hall, Saeeda sneaked into Alia’s bedroom and walked up to the dressing table. She placed the veil on her head and watched the folds of silk fall over her narrow shoulders. She lifted one end of the cloth, threw it over one side and admired the way the whiteness set off her black hair and rosy cheeks. I am beautiful, she thought, and twirled lightly round.

‘Saeeda, what are you doing?’ Adel stood in the doorway watching her.

Saeeda tore the veil off her head, and rushed out of the room and into the garden. Alia was tending to her flowers and did not see Saeeda run as fast as her legs would take her to the pine forest behind the village school. She buried the veil and returned home.

When Saeeda married at fifteen, her father and eldest brother were not there to see the despair in the young groom’s eyes. He was dressed up, his hair combed back, and after the wedding was sent home with a child on his arm, a child unaware of the dramatic turn her life was about to take. The marriage lasted less than a year, cut short by the groom’s sudden departure for South America. He was never heard of again.

Saeeda lost her little-girl look and took on the re sponsibil ity of caring for her departed husband’s parents. Until their deaths the old couple took from her all the attention they thought their due. Unused to housework, Saeeda did her best to keep their home clean and tidy, looking for corners to wipe dust away from as she had seen her mother do, scrubbing the old people’s clothes with the natural soaps she bought from the village souq and hanging them out to dry on the front-yard clothesline.

On early summer mornings Saeeda would reluctantly get out of bed and check on her in-laws, and coax them into the armchairs she had placed on the front terrace where they could watch the comings and goings of their neighbours. Then she would rush into the kitchen, boil some flower tea and make the labneh sandwiches they loved. As she sat talking to them, asking after their health, insisting on an enthusiasm for the day that she did not feel, her thoughts would wander to her childhood and the endless joy some moments had held.

She thought back to Thursday nights when her mother wore a long white veil of Damascene silk wrapped tightly round her head, covering her soft hair and showing only familiar eyes. ‘I’m going to the prayer reading,’ she would tell the children through silk. ‘You may sit outside and listen. Quietly, children.’ They would sit and stare at the rows of polished shoes arranged neatly outside the prayer room beside Grandfather’s grave. It was there Saeeda committed the most magnificent act of defiance of her life. Sneaking past her waiting brothers, she grabbed an armful of shoes and threw them across the garden before reaching out for more. Then, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, she turned from her staring brothers, laughing loudly, her head flung back, and ran away. She was married a year later.

When her in-laws died, Saeeda returned home to live with Alia and Ameen, and at twenty-eight prepared once again to put the comfort of others before her own. She watched the two people who, one in her presence and the other in his absence, had shaped her life and loved them with the same intensity she had as a child, the anxiety she had once felt turning into insistent tenderness. She took over the running of the house, working quickly and quietly, her efforts imperceptible, mindful of her parents as she might have been of the children she never had.

Alia did not know what to do with the woman Saeeda had become. She would watch her daughter doing the housework and prepare to criticize a mattress unturned or a floor left unswept when something would stop her and the words refused to make themselves heard. In time, Alia realized that her heart had begun to dictate her actions. The tears that doctors told her were the result of the stroke she had suffered came to her without warning, trickling down to the taste of salt in her mouth. If Saeeda noticed her mother’s sadness, she did not comment on it, discreetly handing the older woman a handkerchief and then moving on to something else.

Saeeda’s attachment to her father grew as he became older and more vulnerable. Whenever he complained of pain in his arthritic hands, she would pour a spoonful of olive oil into her own and gently massage it into his long fingers, rubbing slowly at the swollen joints and humming a quiet tune to soothe him. Once, as she reached out to take his hand, he lifted it, placed it lightly on her face and smiled with such sweetness that Saeeda thought her heart would drop.

‘Are you alright, Father?’ she asked him.

‘You’re a good child,’ he whispered in his old man’s voice. ‘A good child.’

When Ameen died, Saeeda had just turned forty-two. She was rounder than she had once been, but her black eyes still betrayed hope and the rosy white complexion that had always been her only claim to beauty had not withered. Her mother was by then feeble.

Saeeda’s brothers insisted on bringing in a middle-aged widow from a nearby village to help care for Alia.

With extra time on her hands, Saeeda decided to tend to the long-neglected garden of the family home. She began by clearing it of the debris that had accumulated over the years, making way for the herb and flower beds she planned for, and raking the pebbles out of the earth. She scrubbed the floor of the terrace clean until the criss-cross pattern on the tiles that covered it shone in the sun, and had the iron balustrade around its edges painted with the same dark-green colour as the front door. She planted a clinging vine that would climb up the balustrade and enclose the terrace in green. Then she placed tall yellow rose bushes at the end of the garden overlooking the souq, and pink and red geraniums just behind them where they could be seen from the terrace.

But it was the herb garden that Saeeda was most proud of, a small square plot just outside the kitchen door, which she filled with basil and thyme, parsley, mint, rosemary and coriander, everything she loved to touch and smell and taste in her cooking. She spent so much time tending this part of the garden that the heady scents seeped into her clothes and skin, and stayed there so that she only had to lift her hands to her face and the smell of fresh basil mixed with the sharpness of parsley, mint and the exotic aroma of thyme and coriander would fill her nostrils.

Villagers said that it was the fragrance emanating from that herb garden that lured the stranger to Saeeda’s doorstep one summer afternoon. He carried a large sack of unshelled peanuts in one hand, a gray felt fedora in the other.

Saeeda and Alia had been sitting on the terrace in the imperfect shade of the still young vine, sipping aniseed tea in silence. Saeeda put down her cup and walked up to the man. He was small, thin and had the kind of face that from a distance seems familiar. She thought at first that he had lost his way, until he asked to see her father.

‘My father passed away over a year ago,’ Saeeda said, shaking her head.

‘May the loss be compensated in your own life.’ He paused before adding, ‘I once worked with your father in Africa. I wanted so much to see him and thank him for all he did for me.’

Khaled came from a small village across the mountain. Returning home after a twenty-year absence, he carried the mystery of distant places about him that Saeeda’s father once had. She sat Khaled next to her mother, served him tea and sweetmeats, and listened to the stories of adventure Ameen had neglected to tell her and her brothers. When he left some time later, the two women made their way into the house and prepared for bed.

‘I never knew Father had such an exciting time of it in Africa,’ Saeeda said.

Alia grunted.

Saeeda could feel her mother’s eyes following her around the room. ‘Is everything alright, Mother?’ Saeeda turned and asked.

Alia only looked at her daughter more closely. ‘Let’s go to bed, then.’

* * *

Khaled came regularly after that, sometimes as often as three times a week, always carrying a gift for Saeeda and her mother, always with a smile on his small, angular face. Saeeda was welcoming though she did not quite understand his interest. He was nothing like her beloved brothers, all with families of their own, strong and no longer needing her or their mother. Khaled was fragile, a man whose energy seemed finally to have dissipated after years of exile and hard work. In Saeeda he seemed to find the pause from activity that he needed, the quietness of a resigned existence. They sometimes spoke for hours, Khaled telling her of his years in Africa, Saeeda recounting stories of her childhood. At others they would sit in silence, watching the movement of the village around them and fussing over Alia if she sat with them.

Saeeda began to look forward to Khaled’s visits, not allowing her thoughts to wander beyond them but sensing suppressed anticipation inside her nonetheless.

One evening Khaled arrived later than usual to find Alia already in bed and Saeeda preparing to follow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, standing at the front door. ‘I must be disturbing you.’

‘Come in, Khaled.’ Saeeda opened the door wider. ‘Come in.’ She showed him into the living room where a small side lamp cast shadows across the walls. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked him.

‘No, no, please. I just want to talk to you.’

Saeeda sat down and looked closely at Khaled. Suddenly she felt uneasy.

‘We are friends, you and I, aren’t we?’ he began.

She nodded.

‘I feel I can tell you anything and you would understand.’

Saeeda smiled.

‘They want me to get married!’

‘They?’

‘The family. There’s a cousin from our village, they want me to marry her . . .’ He got up and began pacing up and down the room.

Saeeda’s heart raced and her eyes followed his every movement.

‘They don’t know,’ Khaled continued. He turned and looked straight at her. ‘I already have a family back there. I told you about it, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘We never married. She is African.’

Saeeda shook her head in disbelief and continued to stare at Khaled.

‘I left her and the children, thinking I would be able to stay away,’ he said, sitting down next to her. ‘Your father knew about it. He understood, was so kind.’ He started to cry.

Saeeda reached for him and then pulled her hand away. She was surprised at how angry she was.

Khaled looked up at her and opened his eyes wide when he saw the look on her face. ‘I thought you would understand, Saeeda.’

She folded her arms over her heart. ‘We can’t all be loved the way we want to be.’

His once fine face seemed suddenly ungenerous and pinched. She looked away.

‘I’m sorry. I just came to let you know, I’m leaving the country next week. You won’t see me again.’

The next day Saeeda was clearing up in the kitchen after lunch. When Alia got up from the table, Saeeda turned to her. ‘Mother, what do you say we take the tea out on the terrace?’

The air was fresh and a subtle breeze lifted the green vine leaves into a gentle flutter. The two women settled themselves on the old sofa. Saeeda leaned over and poured the tea. She handed her mother a cup and took one for herself. It was that quiet hour between day and sunset, when village life seemed to float as if on an afterthought.

Saeeda felt a sudden impatience. ‘Did you love my father?’ she asked her mother.

Alia stared back at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. Did you love your husband, Mother?’

‘In those days no one talked about love,’ Alia replied firmly. ‘I saw little of Ameen through most of our marriage, until he turned old and needed me to care for him.’

Saeeda looked at her mother and felt a deep, wide anger moving through her body. She had a sudden urge to get up and run, anywhere, away from her mother’s indifference, beyond the house and the village and everything she had ever known. ‘Did you at least miss him?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

Alia put her cup down, bent her head and placed her hands in her lap. When she looked up, her face had the waxed look of age all over it. ‘I wrote him a letter once, asking him to come home,’ she said with a weak smile. ‘It was after the two older boys were hurt when the school collapsed over them.’ She shook her head and looked past Saeeda. ‘I never sent it.’

Why didn’t you let him know you needed him, Mother? Saeeda wanted to ask, until she remembered what had happened to her the night before and the enormity of her own fears.

‘Does that man want to marry you?’ Alia had recovered herself.

‘You mean Khaled?’

‘He was here last night, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘What was he thinking, coming so late?’

‘It wasn’t that late, Mother. I had been planning on staying up a little longer anyway.’

‘Does he want to marry you?’ Alia persisted.

‘No, Mother,’ Saeeda said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t love him. I don’t want to leave our home. I never have.’