I would wait for them all, but I would wait for Abed more than the others. I wouldn’t sleep at night until I heard the key turn in the lock; I would stir at his steps and say “Abed?” I would hear his voice and then give myself over to sleep. His grandmother barely saw him; it did not seem as if she missed him. When he happened to be home during the day he would bend over her playfully, seeking a kiss, or say, laughing, “Will you marry me, Grandma?” She would cling to the old relationship, muttering as she waved her hand dismissively, “Good-for-nothing!” He would laugh and say “By your leave,” and go out.
21
Amin’s Gift
I said that I was beset by panic, and that my imagination was running wild. No, it wasn’t my imagination but the earth that had gone wild, making everything wild and savage familiar. Was Ruqayya completely sane in those days? Before the boys wake, before “good morning” or boiling the coffee, she goes down to the street to buy the newspapers. She takes them home and reads the large headlines and the small ones and the details, the commentaries and the articles, the first page and the last and everything in between. Before “good morning,” she buys the newspapers and takes them home; she leaves them folded just as they were, not glancing even at the headlines. She does not buy the newspapers; Amin or the boys bring them. In the evening one of the boys asks, “Where are today’s papers, Mother?” “I don’t know.” She helps him look and then remembers, “I used them to clean the window glass.” “I put them at the bottom of the wastebasket.” “I gave them to the garbage collector.” “Didn’t you notice they were today’s papers?” She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t say, of course I noticed. Then she goes back to going out early to buy the papers….
She says to Hasan, “Show me a sketch of Beirut’s neighborhoods and the suburbs.” She knows where East and West Beirut are; she knows the museum and Martyrs’ Square and the hotel area and the site of the markets. She knows where Khalda is and al-Naima and al-Damour. She does not know exactly where Ain al-Rummana is, or the Ghwarna neighborhood, or Sabnay. Where is al-Nabaa, where are al-Maslakh and al-Karantina, where is Ashrafiyeh, and where is Furn al-Shubbak? She comes back and asks Hasan to draw her another map. “I drew you a map, Mother, where’s the map I drew you?” She looks at him questioningly, as if she were the one waiting for the answer from him. Then she notices, and says, “I tore it up.”
Amin spends his day at the hospital and comes back exhausted, not given to talking. If he does say something he does not allude to the war or the number of killed or wounded who were brought to him. Hasan is preparing for the baccalaureate examination; she doesn’t know how he can keep the noise of the rockets away from what he’s studying in the book. Sadiq is going to the university, to get his certificates and graduation papers. She knows that he and other students chafe against the administration and the Phalange youth, holding sit-ins and demonstrations, but the area of the American University is relatively safe; no rockets fall on it and the war in it is curbed and kept within limits.
Ruqayya returned to her old silence. She had not lost the power of speech; she would speak to her aunt to reassure her, or exchange brief words with Hasan or Sadiq or Abed or Amin, but if that wasn’t necessary, speech would retreat into silence. She lived barricaded in it.
She can’t wait for Sadiq’s trip to the Gulf, to work there; she can’t wait for Hasan’s trip to Egypt to enroll in the university. “Can’t we send Abed to Egypt with Hasan, to study in a high school there?” Unlike every other mother, she wants them to leave her and go away, to travel to any place far away. Any place.
The two boys departed, and all that was left was waiting. Waiting for Amin to come back from the hospital at a late hour of the night. Waiting for Abed, who would come back one night and stay away for two or three. She took care of her aunt. I look from afar: I know that the old woman’s needs and requests and her talk, however disordered at times, were all a mercy that relieved the pressure of waiting.
Then Amin brought Maryam.
He came carrying her one night and put her before me, saying, “She will be our daughter. Tomorrow I’ll begin the official adoption process.”
Sometimes a man commits a stupidity, or his eyes dim and he loses all power of sight. I said, “The time for raising children is over, so why are you bringing me a nursing baby and telling me to start over? Besides, my aunt has become like a child, needing care morning and night — should I occupy myself with her and take care of her, or watch over this little one who needs everything, from nursing to cleaning her bottom to teaching her to walk and talk?”
I was angry and I didn’t understand why Amin had chosen to adopt a nursing baby, put her in my hands, and just simply go off to the hospital, as if he had not left her behind him. He was calm, as usual. He looked at me and said, “Look at her, Ruqayya. When they brought her to me to examine her I looked into her face and she captured my heart. I said, ‘A daughter has come to us, a gift from heaven.’ A rocket destroyed the house and everyone died, the mother and the father and maybe the brothers and the neighbors; only this child was destined to live. The ambulance brought her to me from beneath the ruins. There wasn’t a wound or bruise showing but they thought she must have internal bleeding or a wound that didn’t show. I examined her, and she was fine. Look into her face, Ruqayya, how beautiful her face is!”
I did not look.
I look now from afar: I’m carrying Maryam, perhaps out of pity, because she’s an infant without a mother, poor thing. I do what’s needed, as if she were the daughter of a neighbor and I must look after her until her mother returns and reclaims her from me. Then one night when the shelling was intense I carried her and took my aunt’s hand and we moved to sit on the stairs, and I hugged the girl. I looked into her face and felt that tickling in my breast, as if my breasts were about to produce milk. Maybe there was a lump in my throat, and a film of tears in my eyes. Until now I don’t know if I was protecting her, in that moment when I encircled her completely with my arms and shielded her small head from a likely rocket, or if I was seeking protection in her.
She became a daughter to me. The most beautiful and dearest of all that Amin left me.
I say that her face was like an angel. Then I reconsider: none of us has seen an angel, and here she was before my eyes, more beautiful than the angels we imagine.
Yes, it was falling in love, purely and simply. Perhaps it surpassed motherly love, which nothing can surpass — because that love comes cumulatively and following preparation, the nine months of pregnancy and the birth, and then you find the boy before you and he’s yours, flesh of your flesh, from his father’s seed. But Maryam just came to us, she just came, without any preparation. I denied my feelings as a lover does, for a day or two, a week or possibly two, then I accepted that I had fallen in love. It was love in the time of war, of killing for one’s identity, of rattling bullets and explosions and rockets and dynamite and car bombs and chasing people out of their houses and neighborhoods for no fault of theirs other than being Muslim or Christian; in the time of chaos and stealing and confusion between a noble effort and the greed of petty thieves. Maryam was here before me gurgling like a bird, assuring me with every morning that in spite of everything, this life held something worth living for.