Somewhere, Home

NADA AWAR JARRAR

Somewhere, Home

For my family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One

Maysa

Alia

Maysa

Saeeda

Maysa

Leila

Maysa

Maysa

Part Two

Part Three

Also by Nada Awar Jarrar

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Maysa

Winter

This house, my house, saw its beginnings with the marriage of my grandfather. Built to hold the family in its overflowing numbers, the house became a meeting place for grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and numerous cousins from surrounding villages, its rooms expanding around them like sunlight in winter.

My father, Adel, remembers its high ceilings, the echo of footsteps on bare tiles and glimpses of his mother’s long white veil floating through doorways behind her. At three, he once sat on the outside ledge of one of its arched windows and gestured towards the fields beyond, his own private kingdom, before falling into a prickly bush below and getting up a more humble boy. I remember, as a child, holding my hand against the hollow in my father’s scalp and imagining I could feel the memory of that fall between my fingertips.

He would call me to him, ‘Maysa, Maysa’, and speak to me of his life in this house in fragments, in snatches of colour and longing, pausing to be the distant and more familiar figure of my childhood. But he did not know that it was his silences that intrigued me most, those moments between words that allow the imagination to wander.

I saw the brown dust of unpaved roads wrapping themselves round the mountain like arms entwined. I saw the sun on those roads and the air that carried it. I saw stone houses and armies of men and women in black and white sitting in front of them, their hands spread fanlike on their knees, their eyes squinting in the sun. I saw my grandparents, Alia and Ameen, and their five children sitting on low seats round a wood-burning stove in winter, their cheeks flushed red, their hands reaching towards the warmth, their voices low and intimate.

Now, years after they have all gone, as Beirut smoulders in a war against itself, I have returned to the mountain to collect memories of the lives that wandered through this house as though my own depended on it. And as my heart turns further inward, I nurture a secret wish that in telling the stories of those who loved me I am creating my own. The village hangs against the side of a mountain. The mountain grows pine trees and wild thyme, and is no longer home to wild boar and wolf dogs. My grandmother told us, as children, of the famine that struck during the Great War and the fear felt by men walking through the night with sacks of Damascene wheat on their backs, watching for animals that might attack.

The mountain seems tame now by comparison. I stand at the front door and stare lazily into the garden. It is almost autumn, almost cold, almost the end of freedom and summer. At five o’clock the mist appears and hangs listlessly over the house, over its crumbling red-brick roof and around its jagged stone walls. It floats over fig trees and grapevines, and ripens waiting fruit until it is ready for picking. I touch the vine that hangs from the roof and winds its way through the pointed arches that frame the front of the house. It runs along the rusty green balustrade at one end of the terrace overlooking an empty field and the village beyond, and edges towards the faltering wooden front door.

Since my arrival several weeks ago, I have been busily preparing for the cold winters that invade the mountain. Most of my things are now in the large room adjoining the kitchen. My bed is tucked into one corner with a large sofa across from it, and in between them is a Persian carpet woven in red geometric patterns that once belonged to my mother, Leila. Lined up against one of the walls is my grandmother’s oak dressing table which has a full-length mirror stained with age and a secret drawer that no longer opens.

In the centre of the room I have installed the old wood-burning stove where I will boil water for bathing and do most of my cooking throughout the winter months. The kindling wood and dry pine cones are in a large tin container next to the stove and the blocks of firewood that I bought last week are piled high behind the door. The kitchen cupboard is stored with jars of pickled cheeses and green olives, and cloth sacks filled with cracked wheat, lentils, beans and pine nuts line its shelves.

The weather gets colder. I spend much of my days wrapped in blankets sitting on the sofa with a large notebook and sharpened pencils in my hand. When the stove heats up, I breathe in the green scent of burning pine until my head swims with it. Then the notebook slides to the floor, the palm of my hand opens to release the pencils and the words escape and float up to the high ceiling.

In the early evenings I watch the short-lived sunsets, not with a dreaminess, but in a slow and deliberate way, until the sun becomes a part of me too, going down in a blaze of red. Everything beckons me then, the pine trees, the stars and the singing crickets.

At night, when the village falls silent, I sit in my room and listen to the now familiar creaks and sighs of this house and revel within its reluctant embrace. If sleep does not come easily, I lie in my bed and try to imagine old age and loneliness enveloping me, getting closer and closer until they touch my skin and there is no running away from them.

Selma, the midwife, has become a regular visitor. A tall, dark amazon in whom wisdom sometimes outweighs kindness, Selma is a second cousin once removed and chooses to remain in the village because ‘the world out there is no better’. She cares for me as she would an errant younger sister who does not really deserve her sympathy. She does not ask me about Wadih, the father of my child, nor why I decided to return to the mountain after a lifetime in the city. During her morning visits we drink tea made from dried flowers and herbs, and nibble flat, hard biscuits flavored with cardamom and musk. Because I am thirty-two, Selma wants me to be examined by a doctor, but I tell her that my confidence in her abilities is so great that I am certain nothing will go wrong on the day.

After six years of marriage Wadih and I had both given up hope of having a child when I discovered I was pregnant four months ago. For several weeks I lived through something close to stupor, unsure whether to be happy or shocked and sensing in my husband an equal uncertainty. As we slept, exhausted with thinking, his body stretched itself so that it seemed somehow to pass over me, his breath like slow mist in the evening. I stared at him and pressed my hand to his brow, and wished he would wake up and catch me watching him.

‘This city is no place to bring a child into,’ I told my husband.

‘What do you mean?’ There was indignation in his voice. ‘This is our home, Maysa.’

‘What about the fighting? What if something happens to the baby because of this wretched war?’

‘Our baby will be as safe as every other child in Beirut.’

I thought then how lonely a man seems when he is alone, the hesitation in his step, his brows pushed up in astonishment at the finality of solitude, his heart ready to embrace the first curious look, the first hand touching, willing to touch.

Whenever Wadih had something of beauty to show me, the sea rushing and indifferent, the magnificence of mountains in winter or the distance in a blue sky, he would place a hand on the back of my neck and absently rub the skin there until I felt whatever I was looking at move up my spine, down my arms and into my fingertips.

The day before I left for the village we went for a walk on the beach.

‘It’s not just about the fighting, is it?’ he asked me.

‘That house is where everything began, Wadih,’ I whispered.

‘And what about me, Maysa? What about me?’

He walked past me then, another lone figure in the sun, vulnerable and fiercely strong both, as we all are.

* * *

My world feels so small now, the house, the garden and the shadows in between. On the rare occasions when I go down to the village, I encounter no one who can lift my spirits. When she comes to see me, Selma tells me people have begun to talk. Your belly, she says, is going to be difficult to hide soon.

I tell her that I am not afraid of village talk.

‘And the child,’ she retorts. ‘What about the child? What about its father?’

I stand in front of the dressing table and stare at my figure in the full-length mirror. My dark hair looks long and unkempt, and my face is forlorn. I place my hand on my belly and rub gently. I am nothing like my former self, less poised and more vulnerable.

To comfort myself I think that my child will be different from the rest. She will have my dark hair, the sultry green eyes of her father and her skin will glow somewhere between gold and olive. I shall call her Yasmeena and dress her in shades of blue and yellow, and she will grow up to recognize the scents of pine and gorse just like her mother.

It is winter and I am resigned to my fate. My concern for the wilting vine will not be silenced. I fetch the ladder and climb up high enough to touch the trellis and the ropelike, dry branches of the once luxuriant plant. Looking up through the netting at the distant sun, I am overcome by dizziness and fall off the ladder. I lie on the ground for a moment or two, breathing in the mixed smell of earth and dust, and feeling a tingling through my body.

Selma arrives but she is less than sympathetic.

‘I found blood.’

‘Lie down and let me look at you,’ she says, gently pushing me onto the bed. ‘What made you do it?’

‘The vine is dying.’

‘Dying? It’s coming on to winter. Of course it’s dying. It’ll come back to life next year.’

I turn my head to the wall, fight back tears and hope she does not notice my distress.

‘Yes,’ she says abruptly after completing the examination and walks into the bathroom to wash her hands.

‘Yes, what?’ I call to her with alarm.

‘The baby may have been affected by the fall. We’ll have to call in a doctor.’ She comes back into the room.

‘You know I don’t want a doctor, Selma. You know that’s why I have you.’

‘I know that you care about this baby more than about your pride.’

This house, this old, dilapidated house, was once a castle, alive and spilling over with energy. My grandmother sat in a wooden-backed chair at the southern window, watching for the last of her children running home from school, and now there are shadows where she has been, shadows without sunlight, clouding my vision, filling me with fear.

The doctor is a small man with a smooth face and delicate features. We do not talk during the examination.

When he is done, he sits down on the edge of the chair opposite my bed, his brown doctor’s bag placed by his feet. His voice is soft. ‘Yes, well, the baby is alright, but you’ll have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’

Outside, the morning is well under way. I can hear the revving of engines and the children who use my front garden as a short cut on their way to school. The smell of pine cones burning in the stove fills the room with a soft scent and I cannot stand this man’s clinical distance.

‘You think I should be having this baby in a hospital, don’t you, doctor?’

He looks taken aback. Then he stands up and prepares to leave, holding a piece of paper in one hand and his bag in the other. ‘I’ll ask Selma to fill in this prescription for you. If you notice any more bleeding, please call me.’

Selma sees him to the door and returns to my bedside. ‘I’ll go and get that medicine for you now.’ She pulls the bed sheets up so that they almost touch my chin. ‘Do you need anything else?’

The defiance rushes from me and leaves a sudden fluttering fear behind it. I reach for my friend’s arm. ‘Why can’t I be more like Alia?’

Selma’s reply is gentle. ‘Do you think Alia never had moments when she felt unsure of herself?’

‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ I say with a sigh. ‘I’m trying so hard to understand.’

‘What is there to understand? Your grandmother was capable and dutiful like most women had to be at that time.’ Selma pats me on the shoulder and stands up. ‘You have no way of knowing all these things now, Maysa,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘But I can imagine, can’t I?’ I call out as she walks out of the door.

My woman’s body carries itself from this doorstep along the dirt road beyond and falters by the apple tree where children played it seems a hundred years ago. Like the yolk of an egg, I am alone and sheltered. I shift around on stiffening hips and wish for summer. I know that this journey I take, I take without guidance, without searching, without hope. I walk alone and into the sun.

* * *

I am wakeful again and feel regret inching its way into my resolve. I get up to feed the wood stove and place a concoction of flowers and herbs into a pot to make a hot drink.

Outside, there is unqualified silence. I begin to wonder if I would not manage to rest easier if I moved into another room. I wrap a thick blanket round myself, light a candle and tiptoe to the other side of the house where the four boys, my father and his brothers, once slept.

The room is spacious and bitterly cold. I can see them, Salam, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel, lying one against the other for warmth on mattresses placed together to accommodate their growing bodies. I hear their breathing and see the shadowy figure that makes her way into the room, and feel the gentle kisses she gives them on flushed cheeks.

‘Boys may grow soft if shown too much affection,’ my grandmother whispers. ‘My boys will be men.’

I sigh and wrap the blanket more closely round my shoulders. I want to have worn a different history, begun a different past. I want to have been a Chinese warrior, a rounded Eskimo, or perhaps a Scottish prince. I want to have looked up at wider skies, walked through thicker forests, waited for longer winters. Anything but this weighted, haunted longing for a distant past.

I move to the large cupboard at one end of the room and pull at its rickety doors. I have been planning to clear it out for weeks. When I get it open, a cloud of dust rushes into the room and I step back for a moment. The cupboard is empty except for a pile of books on its bottom shelf. There are story books and school books, Arabic, History and Mathematics, each with a child’s name inscribed on the inside front cover. I open a literature textbook that once belonged to my uncle Rasheed and imagine his small head bent over in reading, a pencil in his hand and his heart somewhere hopeful.

I lift my head and savour the infinite silence of the night. Memories and imaginings mix together in my mind so that I can no longer tell which is which. My breath becomes uneven. I return the textbook to the cupboard and just as I prepare to get up notice a thick, leather-lined notebook on top of the pile. I pick it up and blow some of the dust off its cover. When I open it, I realize that it is some kind of ledger, its yellowed pages lined with black and bold red ink. I leaf through it and in my excitement tear off one of the pages. The notebook is empty, no words to comfort or inspire me.

I crumple the torn paper in my hand, make a ball with it and throw it up in the air. I begin to tear out other pages from the notebook and scatter them around the room, then stop. I get up and return to my room, hugging the notebook to my chest. Its smell intrigues me, stale, musty, with a hint of the sharp scent of virgin paper. I sit on my bed, look at it in the weak light of the candle on the table beside me and reach for a pencil. I open the front cover of the notebook and turn to the first page where I write Alia’s name in big letters across the top.

I once asked my grandmother if when they were very young she had ever wondered what her children’s future would be. It was only months before Alia’s death and she was very frail, escaping into a vast silence when she could, waiting patiently on her invalid’s bed. I looked into her eyes, her skin was white and transparent, and her face, under the thin white veil that she still insisted on wearing, looked small and clean.

She placed her hand on my arm and pulled herself up slightly. ‘I knew,’ Alia said.

‘You knew what they dreamed they would be?’ I asked.

She shook her head with impatience and gripped my arm. Then she suddenly let go and laid her head back on the pillow. ‘They were my dreams too,’ she said before turning her head to the wall.

Late into the night, I lie down on the bed and close my eyes, the notebook resting loosely in my arms.

Alia

Alia mistook her dissatisfaction for sorrow. Taking a moment’s breath from children and home, she would stand at her doorstep and imagine she saw a tall ghost of a man walking towards her, striding as though he led the people behind him. Although he would vanish before she could make out his features, Alia guessed it was her husband, Ameen, forever in Africa, missing her, finally coming home. Wearing a long black skirt and top, her head covered in a diaphanous white veil that fell across her shoulders and down her back, Alia would see herself running towards the figure like a gull to the sea, wrapping him in wings and comfort.

Yet, on Ameen’s infrequent visits home, with the children’s excitement and the stir of his presence in the village, he seemed no more real than that figure she always imagined, so transparent was his touch, so short their time together. Between his coming and going, another baby would be made and she, left like Mother Nature, would have to fend for herself. Then her heart would sit inside her with nothing to lighten its dull, insistent thud.

On Alia’s wedding day, crowds of men stood in the front yard of her new home, surrounding her husband Ameen, shaking his hand and wishing on him a dozen sons. Alia sat on a pedestal in the living room, the women around her in a neat semicircle, their voices echoing through the still new house like future memories.

At nineteen, Alia had been ready for marriage, ready to discard a transitory adolescence that had left her no wiser to the mysteries of adulthood. Ameen was her mother’s choice, a second cousin whose enthusiasm for life and strength of will would lead to greater things. There was no courtship, little need for negotiation between the two families and, when the wedding day dawned on a bright summer morning, Alia felt her spirit soar at the possibil ities before her.

They would continue to live in the small mountain village their families had inhabited for hundreds of years, a quiet haven balanced on the side of Mount Lebanon and named after the refuge of ancient gods.

Their new home, a one-storey stone cottage near the village centre, was Alia’s comfort. She marvelled at its spaciousness and delighted in the opportunity to make her mark on its rooms, to fill its corners with the little knickknacks she could not keep as a child. She placed seashells and coloured stones on window ledges, and embroidered tiny flowers wherever she could: on bed linen and tablecloths, and even on the small cloth sack she used for making yogurt cheese. She especially loved her bedroom, revelling in the smooth texture of freshly laundered sheets and fluffy down pillows.

During the early morning chores that she carried out under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law, Alia would often linger at her bedroom door and contemplate the rays of sun that shimmered on the newly painted walls, then sigh with a secret delight. But she did not reckon on the weight of sudden responsibility. Left to her own devices for the first few months following her marriage, Alia woke one morning to her husband’s expectations and felt herself turn into the diligent and obedient wife she was bound to be. The children arrived in quick succession.

The first son, Salam, the peaceful one, was born after two agonizing days of labour. The women in the family spent the weeks following his birth serving generous portions of sweet brown pudding garnished with pine nuts and almonds to all who came to congratulate them. Alia was glad it was a boy, praise was more easily received than the commiseration that would have followed the birth of a baby girl.

When Salam was two years old, Ameen told her he would leave for Africa to join a distant cousin who had made there a fortune in trade. Alia kept the fear that gripped her heart following Ameen’s unexpected decision to herself, spending the last few nights before his departure in sleepless worry. Moments before leaving for the city to catch the boat for Africa, Ameen held her briefly to him and murmured a quiet goodbye. Though she did not know it, that was to be the most tender moment of her married life.

Salam grew into instinctive gentleness, loving his mother as he did the sea he had not seen, not understanding his father’s long absences.

‘He has gone to Africa to make our fortune,’ his mother told him. ‘Across the sea. Across the sea.’

The Mediterranean became for Salam a blueness that swallowed men and spat them out onto distant, hostile shores.

Three brothers came after him, Rasheed, Fouad and Adel. Alia saw in each of her sons the potential for des tinies beyond the confines of the village they so loved. She groomed the three younger boys for future careers in law, medicine and engineering, and left them to revel in childhood. Salam, she knew, would follow his father as all first-born sons did. In the absence of Ameen, Alia was afraid to show the boys too much affection. She wanted them to grow strong, disciplined like their father, and would reproach them for weeping. She was convinced the emotional distance was more painful for her than for the children and did not waver from her resolve in their wakeful hours. But on long, quiet nights when her loneliness seemed too much to bear, Alia would steal into the boys’ bedroom and, standing in the hollow of the open doorway, would watch the four of them as they slept.

Whenever their father came to visit, the children were wary of him until he shed his air of strange lands and smelled like them of the mountain. They would sit around him in the winter room, warming yogurt sandwiches on the stove, waiting for him to speak, to ask for something that they might obey. Wrapped in a greatcoat made from the finest camel hair, he looked as magnificent as an Arab prince, his skin darkened by another sun. Though he never spoke of Africa, they knew he was as great a man there as he was in the village.

My father this, my father that, Salam boasted to other children, until he turned eighteen and went to work alongside his father in jungle dampness. There he saw the making of men’s fortunes, travelling to and from tribal settlements and selling what he could of his goods, an apprentice in trade. As the years passed and his work expanded, Salam would take the time to sit on the porch of his wooden house enjoying the coolness of the evening, gazing at the stars that visited the skies of Africa and were so unlike those at home, dreaming of his return and leaving the dream to rest in a quiet corner of his heart.

Alia thought Rasheed the most beautiful of her children, with his evenly spaced eyes beneath gently arching eye brows, his straight nose and small mouth that smiled in a graceful upward motion as if in quiet amusement. His demeanour suggested an aged serenity that, in a child, inspired awe in some, disbelief in others. In conversations with his mother, Rasheed would sometimes stop in mid-sentence and appear to give himself an almost imperceptible shake before suddenly picking up where he had left off. Alia began to fear that while blessed with the looks and manners of a patrician, Rasheed did not have the wisdom to cope with life, until the day he came to her as she sat on the edge of the bed, a letter from Ameen crumpled in the palm of her hand, the pain of disappointment clutching at her heart.