Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

“Mumma, what’s Turkish delight?”

“It’s nasty.”

“Oh.”

Cape Breton Island is not a pearl — scratch anywhere and you’ll find coal — but someday, millions of years from now, it may be a diamond. Cape Breton Diamond.

“Mumma, tell us about Jitdy and Sitdy again.”

“Your jitdy was my daddy. He and my mother, your sitdy , came here with nothing and they worked very hard. They had many children and they prospered.”

“Why didn’t they stay?”

“They missed the Old Country.”

“Someday we’ll go see them, eh.”

“When you’re a grown woman with children of your own, you can go there.”

“Mumma, tell us about the good Muslin lady again.”

“Muslim.”

“Muslim.”

“She was a good woman. Her name was Mahmoud. Many years ago, when your jitdy was a baby, the Turks came to his village in the Old Country. They were looking for Christian babies to kill. The Mahmoud woman took your jitdy and put him among her own children. When the Turks came to the door and said, ‘Are there any Christian babies here?’ she said, ‘No! All these children are my own.’ And to convince them, she put your jitdy to her own breast and suckled him. The Turks went away. When he grew up, your jitdy took the Muslim lady’s name out of gratitude. Even though he was really a Christian.”

“Oh…. Mumma, can we see the picture?”

And Materia gets out the picture of her and James in front of the painted Roman arch from that long-ago day at Wheeler’s Photographic. Mercedes and Frances pore over the photo: when Mumma and Daddy were young. In Frances’s mind, the arch leads sometimes to the Old Country, sometimes to The War.

“When’s Daddy coming home?”

“Soon. We must pray.”

Materia has heard from her sister, Camille. Camille waited outside the Mahmoud kitchen door for the Jewish butcher to finish his weekly cup of tea with her mother. When he came out, Camille handed him a flat square parcel. She asked him to give it to Materia and, without waiting for a reply, hurried away. Benny passed it on to Mrs Luvovitz, who gave it to Materia. Materia cried when she opened the gift. An Arabic record. Its paper cover bore a water-colour of Beirut by night. She looked inside eagerly for a note — half-expecting the childish printing of years ago, smiling at the memory even as it hurt her heart; my little Camille, “you’re the prettiest of all of us, ya Helwi.” But there was only a scrap of brown paper and the words, “I’m married now.”

At least once a week, Materia takes the record from the hope chest, carries Kathleen’s gramophone down to the kitchen and winds it up. She aims the brass bloom and places the needle on the spinning wax:

First the antechamber of snowy static, airlock to another world, then … open sesame: The deerbeki beats rhythm, ankle bells and finger cymbals prance in, the oud alights and tiptoes, a woodwind uncoils, legless ancestor of the Highland bagpipe, rising reedy to undulate over thick strings thrumming now in unison. It all weaves and pulses into a spongy mesh for the female voice to penetrate — no words yet, a moan between joy and lament; the orchestra suspends itself below, trembling up at the voice, licorice, liquid, luring, “dance with me before I make love to you later, later, soon”.

Materia gets up and dances the dabke . Her mother taught her this dance, and Materia has taught Frances and Mercedes. The dabke is a continuous series of small lilting steps in quarter-swirls which sway your hips, laze your shoulders back and forth and breeze your arms like treetops over your head. Your hands are supple seaweed, waving on unresisting wrists, encircling, grazing, flirting with each other.

This dance works best if you are buxom but anyone can do it, it’s that kind of dance. And although officially a man is supposed to lead a line of pretty girls, the dabke is for everyone. At weddings, at baptisms, with children, grandmothers, anyone. That’s why the eyes are so important. Because the whole point of the dabke is to get up and do it in the centre of the gathering, where you acknowledge everyone until you pick out the person you will invite into the dance. Then you lower your arms towards them, hands still weaving to the music, and you lure that person until they get up and join you because they can’t refuse. Then they become the centre.

The dabke is all about hips and breeze whereas, if you find yourself at a ceilidh , Celtic step-dancing is all about feet and knees. Both can be danced in a kitchen by anyone.

The dabke is a big favourite with Frances and Mercedes. They’ll do it as long as Materia can hold up, which, in these early days, is a long time. She teaches them a whole bunch of Arabic songs, as well as the way to wail them while dancing. The trick is that the dancing and singing are unrepeatable. Once you know this, you’re ready to start learning.

When the precious record wears out, Frances innovates with a comb and wax paper to approximate the reeds and strings. Far from thinking it a sacrilege, Materia considers it ingenious, and it is.

Put the shell to your ear. You can hear the Mediterranean. Open the hope chest. You can smell the Old Country.

Perhaps her requirements were too great, or her indulgence for human weakness too small, for her attempts to form a friendship had always ended in disappointment .

CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E.

Sister Saint Monica’s class is decorated with a map of the world, a chart of a volcano in cross-section, a collection of fossils and a colour print of her namesake. It hangs above the blackboard. In it, Saint Monica holds a book open on her lap, but she is not reading; she is gazing off, seemingly unaware of another pair of eyes peering up from the book itself, one on each page.

When she is overcome by boredom, Kathleen’s eyes often stray to this picture, it being the one focal point for covert day-dreaming not disapproved of by Sister Saint Monica, who is given to impromptu anecdotes on the lives of the saints in amongst lessons on the earth’s crust and its chief capitals. The girls all know that the Prairies are the bread-basket of Canada and that Saint Monica was the mother of the greatest of all Church fathers, Saint Augustine. In his youth, Augustine lived in sin with a heathen African woman. His mother prayed for his redemption and one day, when Augustine was strolling in a garden, he heard a child’s voice sing out, “Take it, read it!” It was the Bible talking. Augustine deserted his African concubine, converted to Christianity and became the scourge of fornicators. And Rangoon is the capital of Burma.

This afternoon, however, Kathleen’s eyes are not on Saint Monica’s picture. Kathleen is far far away in the English countryside, where she lives with her widowed father in a manor house —

“Kathleen!”

Kathleen jolts at her desk and looks up into Sister Saint Monica’s towering wimple.

“Yes, sister?”

“What could possibly be more engrossing than the formation of glacial moraine?” Sister Saint Monica does not wait for an answer, but seizes Kathleen’s novel from behind its camouflage Geography of the British Empire .

“Claudia , by A.L.O.E. Who” — scathing tones — “is A. L. O. E.?”

Kathleen feels herself blush. She looks down. “… A Lady of England.”

“I beg your pardon? You have a voice, don’t you?” — titters from the class — “Use it.”

Kathleen looks up,

“A Lady of England.”

“A Lady of England, what?”

“A Lady of England, sister.”