‘You’re the object of scorn, Kamileh! You didn’t listen to me. Make them hold their tongues now if you can…’
‘What do I do, Mother?’
‘Don’t do anything. You have to eat well and get plenty of rest… Don’t pay them any attention.’
The news spread and along with it all kinds of talk, behind her back of course.
Then came the questions, heartless questions that lashed at her and gnawed at her. Where did she get it from? Fifteen years without children… her husband dies one minute and she gets pregnant the next, how’s that?
She preferred to hide inside the house, even avoiding the balcony. Only her mother came to visit her — her mother and Muntaha. And her sister Yasmeen whenever she managed to persuade her husband to let her chance it. Her mother brought her everything she needed.
‘Don’t go anywhere. I’ll make sure to get you everything you need.’
And Muntaha brought all the news, what people outside were saying, the neighbours in the area. Muntaha also had news of the fighting. She would come trembling with fear, and one day she came saying, ‘Kamileh, you won’t believe it. They are going to start sending wives back.’
‘Sending wives back?’
‘Yes, yes. I’m worried about my mother,’ Muntaha said. Her mother was an Al-Rami. ‘She’s been hearing things here in the quarter.’
‘Who’s saying it?’
‘I don’t know who, but they’re saying that she’s been relaying information to her family in the Upper Quarter.’
‘What information?’
‘I don’t know, Kamileh. They just say, “She’s been relaying information…”’
‘Does your mother visit her family’s quarter?’
‘Her sin was going there just once after the Burj al-Hawa incident, and they ganged up on her. Now, every time they run into her on the street or pass our house they curse the Rami family and curse their dead. My mother cries and says, “I am one of them, and so are my husband and children. Why are they saying those things to me?”
‘Where will my mother go if they kick her out of her house?’ Muntaha asked Kamileh, pounding her chest with her hand.
Kamileh didn’t answer. Muntaha let out a heavy sigh and raised her arms over her head in despair.
Her due date had come, but Eliyya was late. The army re-entered the town. A delegation consisting of members from both sides was formed and patrolled the streets to ensure the barricades had been lifted. The shooting stopped. The ambushes stopped. The same army commander who hadn’t taken sides was elected President of the Republic. It was what the Americans and Nasser wanted. People started talking about the law of ‘no winners and no losers’. The revolution was over and life went back to normal. Now there wouldn’t be anything to distract them from Kamileh anymore; no more dead and wounded. They would eat her alive.
Eliyya was ten days late. He was a big baby with a big head; he weighed a lot.
He was her life’s dream. A baby boy. Her mother taught her how to hold him, how to cradle his head in her arm. She stayed cooped up with her an entire month, training her in everything she knew. Kamileh’s mother was so wrapped up in worrying about the baby’s health that she didn’t have time to express her utter joy over him. She developed a severe lung infection and Eliyya hadn’t yet succeeded in calling her ‘Taita’ when they took her to the hospital and asked for a priest.
Kamileh had all the necessary equipment — nappies, clothes and even shoes. She had no need to go shopping. She washed his clothes for him and hung them to dry on the balcony — actually on a washing line she put up inside the house.
She was not going to show him in public.
In spite of all that, she was scorched by gossip. They’d all become experts on pregnancy and the lunar month. They made all kinds of calculations, salivating as they did. They besieged her with their calculations, which verified all their original suspicions.
All the talk reached her ears though she hid inside the house. She named him Eliyya after the last saint she had made supplications to. The saints had defeated her. She had thought she’d been released from her debt to them. She had trouble choosing between naming him Yusef after his father or naming him Eliyya. Kamileh was afraid of Saint Elias; his vengeance might be severe and she couldn’t bear that.
If only she could pick him up and fly away — a white swan spreading her immense wings, picking him up by his nappies with her beak as he slept all pink-cheeked and tender, his hands and little legs dangling in mid air. She’d pick him up and fly away to the ends of the earth, to lands where she didn’t know anyone. A voice whose owner she couldn’t see would guide her. A man’s voice like her father’s voice. She, the swan, would set him down from her long beak in a natural nest between two rocks high up in a mountain, far away from all the eyes and all the predators, so she could go out to battle every day and come back to him with food. She would fight with everything she had — her beak, her wings, her legs. She’d be wounded all over but she wouldn’t die. Her enemies were everywhere, in the air, behind the rocks, between the grains of sand and over the waves of the sea. She woke up from her dream to his cries of hunger. She gave him her breast and they both fell deeply back to sleep. The white swan would never return to her after that night.
Eliyya grew up and went to school. He was a skinny boy with a weak constitution and weak eyesight. She accompanied him to class, to the same room her father had removed her from back then. She wanted to know who the boy sitting next him was, wanted to know who his father and mother were.
‘Do not hit him, do you hear?’
The high praise for Eliyya began at the start of his school days. ‘He’s clever,’ the nun in charge of the small children would say. He was top of his class in every subject.
Kamileh forbade him to participate in gym class. She made a special request of the administration to excuse him from athletics.
‘Can’t you see how skinny he is?’ she’d say, looking at him.
Muntaha thought he looked like Kamileh. Kamileh would gaze at him at length without seeing the resemblance.
People’s eyes were quick to attack him. And so were their tongues. As soon as he was able to understand, they began saying things to him. The words were already on their tongues, poised and waiting for someone to hear them.
The words were on women’s tongues especially, spinsters in particular. They attacked little Eliyya on the streets, sought him out. One of them would start asking him questions, with her hand on her hip and her jaw hanging open, ‘Whose son are you, honey?’
He couldn’t understand the woman’s question. It embarrassed him, and he wouldn’t know how to answer.
The woman would smile. She’d ask him his name and he’d answer. Then she’d repeat the first question.
‘Whose son are you, Eliyya?’
He’d look at her with big, wide eyes, not answering. The woman would be satisfied with that. The child’s silence was a confession.
He didn’t tell his mother, but she knew. She knew and kept it buried inside.
Sometimes she would get upset. She’d blow up over a word or a look or nothing at all, pouring out her anger on young and old alike. She began cursing people out loud, on the street, as she walked by. She cursed them for no reason, talked to herself in a loud voice, and clashed with the people who had ruined her life.
Eliyya enjoyed competing, with words and by fighting. One time he and one of his buddies in the quarter were exchanging insults. A bad word here, a curse there, swearing against family and relatives, until Eliyya finally outdid his opponent with a good dose of adjectives. The other boy had no recourse but to pelt him with, ‘Son of Kamileh!’