Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

A yellow blanket had been thrown over her shoulder and Aroush, but Mrs. Mansour herself was not covered. “We are very sorry to be late, Teacher,” she said, hurrying in from the gate. She wore a pale green caftan over trousers, and no veil. Her black hair was gathered in a low ponytail. I saw that she had skipped her makeup, too, from the pallor of her lips and the naked circles around her eyes, which resembled stains. The rest of her skin, from her long neck to her hairline, still had its soft alabaster clarity.

Aroush was already asleep. Mrs. Mansour laid her on the nap mat and sat on an armchair close by, catching her breath. “We rushed so not to be late,” she said.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked. I had never offered Mrs. Mansour coffee before, but I would have offered it to any woman in my house who looked as pale and exhausted as she did that day. “It isn’t strong like Arabic coffee. But you are welcome to some.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Yes.”

In the kitchen I fixed a tray with two cups of hot water and a jar of the instant Nescafé that Ed and I usually drank. The spoons rattled on the saucers as I brought the tray to the living room. I was strangely shy, like a child heading to the master bedroom on Mother’s Day. “It isn’t Arabic coffee,” I repeated apologetically, setting the tray down in front of her.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mansour, reaching for the jar and spoon. It appeared that she had drunk instant coffee in the homes of foreigners before. She sipped at great length, closed her eyes, then looked across the coffee table at me and smiled.

Again I felt apologetic, this time for being caught staring. “I’m not used to seeing you without the veil,” I explained.

“Nor I.” She laughed. “I never veiled until nineteen years old, when I married and came to Bahrain. Now I feel strange without.” She touched her hair and looked wistful.

I began to stir my own cup of coffee to direct my eyes elsewhere.

“My staff have gone on strike,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Three servants left to do the work of twelve. On the weekend I could not go to London. I have to stay with Aroush. That is why we are so tired.”

“You could have called me,” I said. I was surprised to learn the union had gone radical after all. I hadn’t opened a newspaper or spoken to Minnie in days. All weekend long, it was Ed who had required all my attention and reassurance. Had things changed, he wanted to know, since I started working for Mrs. Mansour? Between him and me? Did I feel that he had changed? No, I virtually pleaded with him, nothing had changed; I wanted him to believe, as ever, that I was on his team. “You never wanted a child,” he said again, as proof. At first I tried to claim I had never said anything about a child. Then I admitted that I had said it, but hadn’t meant it — I had been sleepy and half-dreaming, like him, at the time. All the while I reassured him, I tried not to watch his mouth, forming its receiving O toward the food on his fork, then closing when the food fell back onto his plate with a splash. All the while I tried not to consider what it would mean if I did want a child, but not with him. And all the while I longed for Saturday, the start of the workweek, when he would be back at the pipeline and I would be alone with Aroush.

“I could have watched her for you,” I said to Mrs. Mansour. “I would have taken Aroush off your hands this weekend.”

“Oh, Teacher, I did not think of it.” Mrs. Mansour looked genuinely surprised at the idea. “You are Teacher, not baby nurse.” Was I flattered by this distinction, between my work and a servant’s?

From her cot Aroush snored once. We both looked over. She stirred but did not open her eyes.

“Teacher, do you believe in tests?”

“Tests?” Again I panicked, thinking of standardized tests, the kind that would evaluate Aroush’s progress under my teaching. She’d found me out. And now Mrs. Mansour wanted to measure how much improvement fifty dinars an hour bought. “Of course tests will be important,” I said, “to gauge her development in the future. But we don’t want to place too much emphasis, too early, on—”

Mrs. Mansour shook her head. “For example, God, He takes away everything that you have. Or oppositely, he give you riches and gold. Tests.”

“Oh,” I said, “tests from God.” I took a sip of coffee. “You think the workers’ strike is a test?”

“Not the strike. Aroush,” she said. “My husband, he says she is a test. A trial from God, which one day He will reward us for this difficulty. My parents, they think she is adhab. A punishment. Pentance, Teacher, in your Book.”

Whether she meant penance, or penitence, or repentance, I understood.

Mrs. Mansour said she no longer spoke to her parents. Having a child like Aroush served her right, her father had said, for marrying into the wrong sect, for following her nose to the vulgar smell of oil money, for abandoning her war-torn country to live an easy life of leather floors and marble ceilings in a mansion on the Persian Gulf. “I am happy most days,” said Mrs. Mansour. “Most days Aroush, she is my little miracle. But sometimes…this weekend, she cried and cried. She would not stop. And I…” She paused, then whispered, “I wanted to be in London. In the shops. Away from her.” I could hear a hot tremble in her voice. “So maybe it is true. Maybe I am being punished.”

“No.” I meant this, though my voice rang false. Lately I’d been dreading when Mrs. Mansour might catch me in my lies and scold me, as any boss would a dishonest worker. But she treated me like a god. As a teacher in the Philippines I’d often felt myself at the mercy of mothers; Mrs. Mansour was the first mother I had known to put herself at my mercy. I saw more clearly how much power she had given me, the damage I could do, her dependence on what I chose to say.

“Tell me, Teacher, what kind of mother thinks her daughter is punishment?” Mrs. Mansour turned up her hands. The henna had faded to the slightest of traces. She seemed to be exposing to me some raw layer underneath the jewelry, designer clothes, and potions: her flesh, not an idea. Deceiving Mrs. Mansour had revealed to me a Mrs. Mansour who was not so easy to deceive. And loving her child made it harder still. No better moment to come clean with her than now.

But “you can be forgiven for thinking that” was all I offered. Then I added, softly, “No one ever sat with a howling child and didn’t think for a moment she might be in hell.”

Mrs. Mansour set her half-finished coffee cup on the tray. “Thank you, Teacher.” Her voice had cooled. “You say the perfect words to give me hope always.” She stood and bid Aroush and me a good day. By the time she returned for her daughter in the afternoon, she had put on her sunglasses and her veil. Her lipstick and henna had been freshened. Hard to imagine, then, the wan, depleted woman who’d accepted coffee in my living room that morning.

—

A Filipina maid ended the strike by jumping from the third-story window of her employer’s home in Riffa. She had been new to the country, said the Manama Times, and so had no local friends to suggest reasons for her suicide. She left no note. The “union” organizers refocused on finding the girl’s family and raising the funds to fly her body home for burial. Eleven workers who had walked out of their employers’ homes were dismissed for breach of contract. Six went home to the Philippines.

As for Minnie, she had changed her mind at the last minute and gone on working. “I got scared,” she said. “It’s not just the money. Of course I thought of the people back home, but also: what would I do with myself if I wasn’t working? What would I do with my hands? It’s for young people, these rallies, this strike.”