Hamoud, like a tree and its soil. Back where he lay, his face still uncovered, with her fingers she dabbed the paste onto his forehead and nose and rubbed it in, but still the brown tinted his pale skin. With his hand in hers she worked the paste into one palm and then the next, reached beneath the sheet and dabbed the knees, and then the feet. She wished it were her feet on the table, her legs, her body. Imagined his hands stained brown as he touched her forehead instead. But his face, as she imagined it, contorted in silent grief, pushed the thought from her mind.
The three of them had arrived in a new country seeking darkness, the quiet of unlit rooms and the absence of knocks. A place where names had no meaning. Together they searched for the missing pieces of their mother, the stories that had shed their words. Not knowing why, she felt relief when he grew taller and bigger than she was. When he was found in the early morning hours behind the shop where he worked, his skull opened and spilling blood that ran through the black hair and onto the asphalt, she had been the one to call for doctors.
I had a little bird.
I looked after him,
and when his feathers grew and he was big,
he started to peck my cheeks
Zik zik zik zik zeek
Gently now she bent the left arm so that the palm flattened against the chest, folded the right arm so that the right palm rested on the left. And this is how we pray, ya Hamoud. When he was six, she had taught him to bend and clasp his knees with his hands, to touch his forehead to the ground. Her parents laughed that he was too young, but she had spent years waiting for him to grow, to learn words and what they meant, so that she could show him things, teach him what she knew; the alphabet and how to ride a bike, the names of animals alive and extinct, the planets in the solar system and their moons. So when she stood beside him on the prayer rug and told him to move as she did, he did as he was told, touching hands to chest and then to knees, forehead touching the carpet and back up again. For years after he would only pray if she led.
She stood beneath the bright lights, her fingertips grazing the sheet’s edge. Her eyes traced the arc of his brows, the hairs that strayed from their place. She imagined what they looked like when he smiled, the way they drew together, and noticed for the first time the thin lines near his eyes. Whose eyes will see us now? Her mother, she knew, would never speak again. Her own words as she pulled the sheet above the mouth and then higher still were like boats with neither sails nor oars. After the sheets were wrapped around him, the center looped with ropes, the ends fastened, she stood with empty hands. Make me like a sandwich, ya Zaynab. She would have him lie on the bedsheet and roll him from one end to the other, and through the layers she could hear his giggles. If her mother or father was walking by, they laughed with them. Make sure he can breathe, ya Zaynab.
DAUGHTERS OF MANĀT
She woke to the same slight wind drifting through the drapes. Again the early dawn shadows spread across the ceiling, gray forms that appeared to be reflections of other shadows, a mirrored image from time primordial, its source erased. Outside, the ensemble of birds grew louder. A quavering tangle of notes. Who else do they wake?
In the bathroom she brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and in the mirror saw only the outline of her face. With the lights off she dressed, a long dark skirt and a light blouse, thick tights and high boots. She passed a makeup brush across her cheeks and with her moistened fingertips smoothed her brows. The sound of her heels on the stone floor crushed the birds’ chorus, and when for a moment she stopped moving, only a single warbler’s interlude reached her ears. A thin melody that trilled and rattled. She walked to the window and opened the drapes, lifted the pane. Stepped onto the windowsill and jumped.
As she fell her skirt unfurled and blossomed, and those who saw her from beneath said she glided across the sky. Her body blocked the rising sun but her sheer blouse absorbed the early rays so that she glowed. A baker opening his shop watched her beam brighter as she moved, until she was an orb ablaze, a burning Venus. A pastor on his way to the day’s first service paused in the street to cross himself and plead the precious blood of Jesus. The Lord of Phosphorus was again in their midst.
She felt as she fell that time had slowed. Before her the earth spread indefinitely and though she knew she hovered high above the ground it seemed to her that there was but one plane and that it contained land and sky alike. This flattening allowed her to see far beyond her street, her city. She could make out the curve of Africa’s horn and the blue of the Red Sea. What else did she see? A Simien fox hunting a mole rat, a masked butterflyfish searching for its mate. She realized the earth was smaller than she had been led to believe, that only its curvature had made its parts seem discrete.
**
By the time she was twelve, my aunt Zaynab was taller than her father in stature and fuller than her mother in shape. Her hair was black and bright and reached down to her waist. Her lids were rimmed in double rows of lashes, a genetic mutation that made her eyes gleam like polished sunstone. Boys she had grown up with, neighbors’ children, who used to tackle her to the ground in games of tag and give her piggyback rides up and down the narrow, hilly streets of East Amman, now moved out of her way with quiet reverence, with mild hostility.
After months of turning away suitors who stood at the front door with sweaty palms gripping boxes of sweets, and chasing away others who trailed their daughter home from school and hissed at her heels, my grandparents decided something had to be done. Zaynab herself had learned to not mind the stares and catcalls. She had a quick wit and a serrated tongue that could raze the confidence of even the most cavalier suitor and to her the boys were more like feral cats, skittish and afraid. But, as they say, it was a different time, and girls like that had to be looked after in measured ways. And so by age twelve, my aunt was married.
The man was in his twenties and came from a devout family that agreed to my grandmother’s demand that Zaynab remain chaste until she reached womanhood. The first time I heard Zaynab’s story I wondered how they could tell. Would it be when she grew taller? Was that how I, too, would become a woman? My own mother was shorter than some children. Was she not one?
Child or not, Zaynab was put to work in her in-laws’ home, sweeping the courtyard and scrubbing the tiles, pulling hair clots from drains and chopping onions for soups. Crates of onions, pyramids of onions. So many that even in her old age my aunt despised them, would cover her nose with her sleeve, curse the day she was born and rush outside to escape their smell.
I don’t know how long young Zaynab had to endure her husband’s family – my grandmother would say two weeks, Zaynab claimed two months – but every day at sunset my aunt would escape her in-laws and return to her family. Each night she stayed later and later in her parents’ house, cursing both families and bemoaning her fate, crying hot tears and spitting at the floor, promising misfortune for them all. Each night she was dragged back to her new home, her hair wild and voice hoarse.
When the neighbors intervened, it was with prayers and support, teas and ointments, but nothing worked. Zaynab remained ferocious, going so far as to cut off her black, bright hair – so short that the tops of her ears protruded. ‘Like a boy elf!’ my grandmother would say. Zaynab threatened to do more, to take to the streets and humiliate them, to scream their names to strangers. Finally it was agreed that a mistake had been made, and to everyone’s relief, the marriage was annulled.
**
My aunt Zaynab looked after me while my parents were at work. She was seventeen years older than my mother and her own children were grown and gone by the time I came along. I spent more time with her than I did with anyone else and for years I thought
