“No!”
“That’s enough now, shshsh….”
But she runs to the house, ramming open the door — Daddy, my daddy is going away, he might be killed, or drowned before he even gets there — up the stairs two at a time — and he’s leaving me here with this horrible woman! Into her room, avoiding the mirror, slamming the door, locking it.
“G’bye fellas, say a prayer for your old dad.”
He knows Materia will pray, she’ll pray her fool head off.
He’s right, she does. She prays so hard that her head really does seem to get a little wobbly. She prays he’ll be killed quickly and painlessly in Flanders.
Over Here
With James gone, Materia comes to life. She takes pleasure in her little ones — Mercedes is such a good girl and Frances is a clown. Kathleen keeps up a life of her own, staying late at school to train with Sister Saint Cecilia or to practise with the choir, solos of course. When she’s home she’s impossible, but at least she’s out of harm’s way, inshallah.
What to feed her is a constant conundrum. Nothing satisfies. She rolls her eyes, sighs ostentatiously, flounces from the room. Materia falls back on James’s old standby of toasted cheese, slicing it daintily into four, placing it before her, “SaHteyn.”
“Mother! English, please.”
Kathleen, Mercedes and Frances share the impression that their mother doesn’t speak much English. This didn’t used to be true, but it has come somewhat to pass simply because Materia doesn’t speak English much. For with whom would she converse in English? Not her husband. And Mrs Luvovitz has always been mercifully undemanding of Materia in that regard, their friendship having revolved around food, children, the old Yiddish songbook. Materia has been content just to sit at Mrs Luvovitz’s kitchen table and listen to the older woman hold forth on what’s what.
Prepositions were the first to fall away, then adverbs crumbled, along with whole clauses, until Materia was left with only the most stolid verbs and nouns.
The difference between Kathleen and the younger girls is that Materia speaks plenty with Mercedes and Frances — although she has lost some of her mother tongue too, through disuse, all but the indelible language of her own earliest memories. Thus Materia and her two younger daughters speak the Arabic of children — of food, endearments and story-telling. Ya aa’yni, te’berine.
Mercedes and Frances understand that Arabic is something just between them and Mumma. There are many Arabic-speakers in Cape Breton by now, but the little sisters think they and their mother are the only ones, outside the mysterious population of that far-off place called the Old Country. A place better than any on earth, but a place you are nonetheless lucky to have escaped,
“Why?”
“Because of the Turks.”
“Oh.”
A place where everyone speaks the Piper girls’ private at-home language right out in the open, and everyone looks like their mother.
“Tell us about the Old Country again, Mumma.”
On the kitchen cot, before Kathleen gets home, they sink into Materia’s soft body, which provides a pillow for each head, her plushy smell of fresh wet bread and oil, a pot of bezzella and roz with lamb on the stove, the lid buzzing sleepily. Outside, the winter drizzle blurs the window.
“Lebanon is the most beautiful place in the world. There are gentle breezes, it’s always warm there. The buildings are white, they sparkle in the sun like diamonds and the sea is crystal-blue. Lebanon is the Pearl of the Orient. And Beirut, where I was born, is the Paris of the Middle East.”
“Can we go live there?”
“No.” You were lucky to be born on this damp grey rock in the Atlantic, beautiful in its own mournful way.
“Because of the Turks?”
“Yes.”
This island, familiar to famished Irish and gnarly-kneed Scots who had been replaced by sheep in their Old Country.
“Mumma, what’s Turkish delight?”
“It’s nasty.”
“Oh.”
Cape Breton Island is not a pearl — scratch anywhere and you’ll find coal — but someday, millions of years from now, it may be a diamond. Cape Breton Diamond.
“Mumma, tell us about Jitdy and Sitdy again.”
“Your jitdy was my daddy. He and my mother, your sitdy, came here with nothing and they worked very hard. They had many children and they prospered.”
“Why didn’t they stay?”
“They missed the Old Country.”
“Someday we’ll go see them, eh.”
“When you’re a grown woman with children of your own, you can go there.”
“Mumma, tell us about the good Muslin lady again.”
“Muslim.”
“Muslim.”
“She was a good woman. Her name was Mahmoud. Many years ago, when your jitdy was a baby, the Turks came to his village in the Old Country. They were looking for Christian babies to kill. The Mahmoud woman took your jitdy and put him among her own children. When the Turks came to the door and said, ‘Are there any Christian babies here?’ she said, ‘No! All these children are my own.’ And to convince them, she put your jitdy to her own breast and suckled him. The Turks went away. When he grew up, your jitdy took the Muslim lady’s name out of gratitude. Even though he was really a Christian.”
“Oh…. Mumma, can we see the picture?”
And Materia gets out the picture of her and James in front of the painted Roman arch from that long-ago day at Wheeler’s Photographic. Mercedes and Frances pore over the photo: when Mumma and Daddy were young. In Frances’s mind, the arch leads sometimes to the Old Country, sometimes to The War.
“When’s Daddy coming home?”
“Soon. We must pray.”
Materia has heard from her sister, Camille. Camille waited outside the Mahmoud kitchen door for the Jewish butcher to finish his weekly cup of tea with her mother. When he came out, Camille handed him a flat square parcel. She asked him to give it to Materia and, without waiting for a reply, hurried away. Benny passed it on to Mrs Luvovitz, who gave it to Materia. Materia cried when she opened the gift. An Arabic record. Its paper cover bore a water-colour of Beirut by night. She looked inside eagerly for a note — half-expecting the childish printing of years ago, smiling at the memory even as it hurt her heart; my little Camille, “you’re the prettiest of all of us, ya Helwi.” But there was only a scrap of brown paper and the words, “I’m married now.”
At least once a week, Materia takes the record from the hope chest, carries Kathleen’s gramophone down to the kitchen and winds it up. She aims the brass bloom and places the needle on the spinning wax:
First the antechamber of snowy static, airlock to another world, then … open sesame: The deerbeki beats rhythm, ankle bells and finger cymbals prance in, the oud alights and tiptoes, a woodwind uncoils, legless ancestor of the Highland bagpipe, rising reedy to undulate over thick strings thrumming now in unison. It all weaves and pulses into a spongy mesh for the female voice to penetrate — no words yet, a moan between joy and lament; the orchestra suspends itself below, trembling up at the voice, licorice, liquid, luring, “dance with me before I make love to you later, later, soon”.
Materia gets up and dances the dabke. Her mother taught her this dance, and Materia has taught Frances and Mercedes. The dabke is a continuous series of small lilting steps in quarter-swirls which sway your hips, laze your shoulders back and forth and breeze your arms like treetops over your head. Your hands are supple seaweed, waving on unresisting wrists, encircling, grazing, flirting with each other.