The only activity Baba and I did alone was the walk together to the mosque on Fridays. Although Mama never herself prayed or insisted that I did, she was still proud to see me dressed in my white jallabia and cap, holding Baba's hand, musked and ready for prayer: a miniature replica of Baba. I didn't look forward to Friday prayer and was always happy when it was over, but I did like the walk with him. I remember holding his hand and squinting against the bright noon sun, our white jallabias glowing in the heat. He was always silent during these walks, no doubt refraining from speech in order to listen to the Quran as it blared off the minaret speaker, recited by Sheikh Mustafa, too loud to be understood. Many times during the prayer I remained standing while all the worshipers bowed. Watching the entire place change colour, I felt frightened to be the only one in the world seeing them like this: a carpet of hunched white backs like seagulls grooming their chests. After the prayer Baba enjoyed introducing me to his friends. They thought it sweet that I was dressed like him. I never went to prayer when Baba was away.
When he was home, Baba seemed distant. Away he seemed closer somehow, more alive in my thoughts. For this reason it was strange when Mama merged us together. She did this by using the plural form of'you'. 'You always leave me alone,' she would say, after I'd come in from playing in the street, meaning both of us, using the you that made Baba and me inseparable. It obliged me to defend him, to say, 'But Baba is working hard for us,' when I had no idea whether he was working hard for us or not. I defended him because I was defending myself. But I know now that that, of course, made us indistinguishable, the man who was her punishment and the boy that sealed her fate.
Sometimes she would say, 'All you men,' 'All you men are the same,' combining me not only with Baba but with many other men. I never knew what to say to that. I couldn't possibly defend all of them: all her brothers and her father – the men she called the 'High Council' – the men who met to decide her fate when she was only fourteen, after she was seen sitting across from a boy in the Italian Coffee House. And all the other men who met at the Italian Coffee House, where talk started and things were decided. These were the men who were bound to talk if she wasn't married at once. The men whose threat of talking made my grandmother say, 'If a slave came to propose, a slave as black as this night, I would give you to him.' Those were the men the High Council imagined gossiping in low voices, saying, 'Look, look who's over there, sitting with a boy, and touching hands under the table, now above the table, daughter of a good family, the shameless creature, the boy is blushing like a pig, has more shame than her,' in the Coffee House, the Coffee House from where shame was going to fall on everyone in the good family if they didn't act quickly, if they didn't marry her at once, even to a slave. She had told me the story so many times of how she and Baba came to be married, of that 'black day'. Every time she would leave something out or remember something new. 'It was because I was so beautiful,' she sometimes began, or, 'It was all because of Khaled, that stupid uncle of yours. He was the one who gave me up, betrayed me; the dagger was his.'
Khaled was Mama's brother. He had left for America to attend university, and everyone missed him. When I was born they asked him to choose a name. 'Suleiman,' he had told them, 'after Suleiman the Magnificent.' Later he returned with an American wife who didn't like the taste of our water. Her name was Cathy, she smelled like no one else in our country, a mix of eucalyptus and grass. She was the reason why I had for a long time imagined America as a forest. She used to bring a book with her when the family gathered. She didn't join the women in the kitchen, but sat alone and read. I once heard Auntie Nora, Mama's only sister, whisper that what Cathy was reading was her Holy Book. But I didn't think she was because the book had a picture of a woman in a sleeveless dress running from a man in a dark suit and hat holding a gun.
I once saw them, Uncle Khaled and Cathy, argue under the glue tree in our garden. He slapped the tree, and she covered her eyes with one hand. Soon after that they returned to America. I missed Cathy. I liked having someone with yellow hair in my family. The boys used to elbow me and giggle whenever she visited us.
Before America and Cathy Uncle Khaled lived in Tripoli and wrote poems that half of the family was ashamed of and the other half loved. When I asked Baba what he thought, he said, 'A great poet, your uncle. Very important.' And the only time I heard Baba shout at my grandmother, the one who had swallowed the entire book of A Thousand and One Nights, was when she had neglected Uncle Khaled's wooden trunk of papers. She put it in the chicken shed, where the clever chickens picked at the lock and ate all the poems.
'Ignorance!' Baba shouted. Then, 'Ignorance! Ignorance! Ignorance!' he repeated like a bell.
My grandmother seemed perplexed, perplexed and slightly embarrassed, as if someone had farted loudly in the room.
'Don't raise your voice at her,' Mama told him.
'Are you happy now?' Baba said. 'The only copy of The Feast of Ants is inside the chickens.'
The Feast of Ants was a play Uncle Khaled had completed before he went off to America. It took him seven years to write and it read like a long poem, telling the history of our country.
Mama said, 'Feast or no feast. Don't raise your voice at my mother again.'
Baba looked at Mama, then at my grandmother, then at Mama again before he left the room.
When Uncle Khaled returned from America and found out that his poems and The Feast of Ants had been devoured by the family's chickens he laughed, then laughed some more and laughed again until his laughing took him out of the house and to the end of the garden, where he sat for a long time alone not laughing. He refused to eat an egg laid by those chickens the whole summer. 'They are full of poetry,' my grandmother teased. He smiled but didn't eat.
Mama blamed Uncle Khaled for that black day she was forced to marry Baba because of what he had done when, on one of his visits from America, he saw her and her friend Jihan in the Italian Coffee House drinking cappuccino with two boys. Mama and Jihan were fourteen years old, as were the two boys.
'The coward. Thinking himself the enlightened American. He was nice. Cordial. Said hello as if he admired his little sister and her friend. The foolish girl I was; I even thought, with his liberal ideas, he was proud of my little rebellion. He paid for our cappuccinos, said hello to my friends. When he left I cried with happiness and told Jihan how much I loved my brother. Having a brother like him was the only thing in my life that in any way resembled Jihan's life.'Jihan was Mama's childhood friend, a Christian from Palestine. Her parents treated her the same as they did her brothers. 'Talk about a rude awakening. When I got home every light in my life was put out. The High Council was already adjourned. Oh yes, when it comes to a woman's virtue we are fierce. Fierce and deadly. And when it comes to a daughter's virtue we are fierce, deadly and efficient. In such matters our efficiency rivals that of a German factory.' A smile crossed her face and was gone. 'Your grandmother grabbed me by the hair and threw me in my room. "You have shamed me, you little slut. Now your father will think I haven't brought you up right." I didn't know what she was talking about. It was like a nightmare, no sense in it at all. But soon I learned that the poet-prince had run straight home after seeing me at the cafe and told his father, "Your daughter is fourteen and is already spending her days in cafes with strange men. I tremble to imagine what next. Marry her now, or she'll shame us all." "Strange men"? They were boys, just boys. "Tremble to imagine"? Only a poet would have the cruelty for such a phrase.'