be ridiculous,” Yousif told him. He and Hikmat and others had enough of the stranger and tried to stop his harangue, but the doubter ignored them.
“Who is this man?” Yousif asked Hikmat. Shrugging, Hikmat said he did not know. Perhaps he was a friend of Ustaz Murad. The sour-faced teacher shot them an irritable look, pursed his lips, looked at his gold-chain watch and walked away.
“It’s fake, I tell you,” the tormentor insisted. “Has anyone here ever seen the face of her baby?”
“No, I haven’t,” Yousif replied. “But I’d take her word before yours.”
Yousif had always disliked men with leathery faces or narrow eyes or thick necks as much as he disliked those who smacked their lips when they ate or chewed gum in public. He decided on the spot that Rabha’s obnoxious accuser had such offensive qualities.
With her eyes fixed on the stranger, Rabha unveiled her baby’s face. It was a nine-month-old boy, she told them. His black hair was uncovered, and his eyes were closed. The tense silence was interrupted with words such as “lovely” and “beautiful” and “ismallah,” uttered by everyone around. Except the accuser.
“It’s not yours,” the accuser said, sounding more and more belligerent.
“Whose is it then?” Rabha shot back in furious calm.
“You must’ve borrowed him to make people feel sorry for you. It’s a cheap trick. And you shouldn’t get away with it.”
Now Yousif was truly infuriated by the unending insolence. But before he could take the stranger on, the man himself clenched his fist. “I’m sick and tired of your insults . . . your scowls . . . and your intrusion,” he snarled at Yousif.
Hikmat was quick enough to stop a blow from landing on Yousif’s face. But the scuffling was ended by the arrival of a Bedouin soldier making the rounds on the street,
“Is someone bothering you, ya okht?” the soldier kindly asked. “Why the commotion?”
Rabha wanted no trouble. She thanked the soldier and flashed him a beguiling smile.
“Just a friendly dispute,” she pretended. “I tell them it’s a boy and this one keeps insisting it’s a girl.”
The short, pleasant-looking soldier had a shaggy goatee and wore his hair long underneath his red-and-white checked desert hatta. He looked around for confirmation of what he had just heard.
“Here,” Rabha said, “look for yourself.”
Slowly, a big grin burst on the soldier’s dark face. “Tabarak Allah!” he said, almost touching the baby’s cheek with his bony forefinger. “Tabarak Allah. Not dark enough to be a Bedouin, but he’ll make a fine warrior.”
The nimble soldier left them in good cheer, but Rabha was still piqued. Some in the group began to walk away, taking the scoundrel with them, and she followed. Yousif was a couple of steps behind her.
“I should’ve let that soldier handcuff you,” she accosted her accuser. “But I wanted you to see that I’m more decent than you are.”
“Let it go, Rabha,” Hikmat advised, gently trying to block her. “You don’t have to listen to his nonsense.”
Yousif appreciated her justifiable outrage and stayed right behind her as she pushed her way through the congested sidewalk to catch up with the jerk who seemed sheepishly trying to get away. But she cornered him.
“What makes you say such lies?” she asked him, aware that a small circle of pedestrians was forming around her.
“Those who know you say you’ve never been married,” the offender replied, “and that you’re not a mother.”
“And you believe them?” Yousif said, his tone hostile.
“I do,” the stranger said, giving Yousif a dirty look.
Suddenly, and right on one of the busiest sidewalks in Amman, Rabha calmly and methodically pulled out her ample breast and squirted her motherly milk into her accuser’s astonished face.
Eyes bulged. Words froze in onlookers’ mouths.
How ironic, Yousif thought, for a woman born and raised in a conservative society to abandon her cultural modesty in order to defend her personal honor. The fragility of principles, he rationalized, must be another tragic outcome of war. His reverie ended when he realized that the new commotion had brought the Bedouin soldier back.
He arrived on the scene: unhurried, grinning, and still murmuring his blessings: “Tabarak Allah . . . Tabarak Allah.”
With all the soul-searching and the anguish that had sent Uncle Boulus to the bottle, driven parents and children to suicide, made men like Tariq depend on sedition as a way of life, and compelled Rabha to bare her breast in public; with all the interminable talk about politics—at home, at school, at work, at coffeehouses, and, presumably, in bed; and with all the accusations and counter-accusations which flew around and which saw the Palestinian point his finger of suspicion at himself, at Arab kings and presidents, at the Ottoman Empire, at the West in general and Britain in particular, Yousif was a young man who could not swim across his troubled ocean.
And what a stormy ocean it was. Every time he attempted to float, the high waves crashed over him. To make bad things worse, the futile search for Salwa wrapped him in a shroud of despair.
Uncle Boulus, whose penchant to foretell was now spiked with liquor, once observed, “One day children will grow up and spit in their fathers’ faces.” Yousif thought often about that statement and wondered just how far off that day was. The night Uncle Boulus made that prediction Yousif had a dream. He saw himself straying into a room full of switchboard operators. Hundreds of hands were plugging and unplugging wires in and out of tiny sockets, and hundreds of foreign-sounding voices were overlapping each other into hundreds of microphones. Lost and helpless, he could not understand a word. He desperately needed someone who could talk to him in his tongue, someone who could guide him out of the maze.
It was revolutionary Basim who in the spring once again returned home, this time from Syria and Lebanon. And for the first time he seemed in no hurry to rush back out. Basim brought with him all his worldly possessions: two battered suitcases full of dirty laundry, two pairs of shoes, two belts, and a shaving kit. His suits and shirts, all in solid colors, were in an equally scuffed garment bag. That, to Yousif, was a clear indication that his cousin was home to stay. For how long he had no idea, and Basim would not tell. What Yousif did know was that Basim’s appearance made life at home quite interesting. The children clustered around Basim who showered them with hugs and kisses and never failed to pull out of his pockets two or three packs of gum or a handful of English toffee.
Uncle Boulus and Salman welcomed Basim’s return as a tonic for an existence that had grown stale and monotonous. Many close friends began to visit, although Basim did not yet want it widely known that he was back. As to the women of the house, they were beyond themselves trying to stretch their meager means to prepare him a favorite dish, although Yousif suspected the ambivalent Basim was like the enchanting hedonist who preferred “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou beside me,” the “thou” here being a political animal like him or an
