Raba'i al-Madhoun - The Lady from Tel Aviv

She used to speak to her house all the time, complaining to it, listening to its complaints. Each night, she would dream of laying tiles across its old floor. She dreamed of painting its doors sea-blue, and its walls such a bright chalky white that on moonless nights the house would light up the entire alley. One day, she watched as her dream awoke and came true. The Nasrite boys made their aunt’s vision a reality — tiling the floor, painting the walls and its little wooden door exactly as it had been in her dream. Her house became a wedding gown. That is, until an Israeli missile threw a mourning shawl over it. The roof was thrown to the wind. Parts of the walls collapsed. Most of the sparse possessions inside went up in flames.

Umm Walid abandoned her house for internal migration — it was the fourth such time she had done so in her life. During this time she went back to collecting all the old stories, making them into a single master narrative: ‘Our first house, where Walid was brought up, was razed by Sharon’s tanks in 1970. The Jews did that to widen the streets. They did that so they could use jeeps and armoured cars to hunt down the resistance. An Israeli shell fell on our second house during the Sharon era. I cleaned up all the rubble, shrapnel and splinters — then I rebuilt the place and plastered it. Not six months went by when an Apache helicopter fired a rocket into it. It landed right in my flour sacks. Every piece of furniture was destroyed, and a white cloud of flour filled the sky. As God is my witness, the place stood there empty, without a roof or furniture, until my brother’s sons rebuilt it for me. Abdelfettah, Emad and Shafiq put in the floor, they painted it and fixed it up. I went back to live in the house. Four months later I was sitting on the front doorstep when all of a sudden that Apache comes back. It’s hovering over us and making a racket. I say, “Lord, protect us!” Where do you think he’s going to shoot this time? No one’s around, except for a couple of Hamas twerps. One of them’s got a rifle, the other’s carrying something like a water pipe. They’re trying to hide themselves right in front of me in the alley — so I start yelling at them, “What do you think you’re doing, boys? Don’t you have any better place to go? People live here, you know — and now they’re going to shoot at us!” As soon as I say this, the missile hits. I watched myself do two somersaults through the air and land far from the house. It was God’s mercy that the missile landed inside the house, or I would have died along with those two boys. This was the fourth time that my house was destroyed by Sharon. God damn Sharon and everything to do with him — does he think my house is a military post, a training camp? Every time I build a new house, he blows it up — does he think that Hamas leaders follow me around each time I move?’

In the last bachelor pad, Umm Walid spends the night with no one to keep her company. She tosses and turns in bed for hours, and the hours toss and turn with her. Just before midnight, Emad, the last of them to go to sleep, hears her voice as he walks by the apartment door — and it makes him freeze where he is standing. ‘Abu Nasreen, may God keep you safe tomorrow morning when you go to pick up Walid at the Erez crossing. Please let them leave us in peace. Just for a little bit. My heart’s been full of worry ever since he went away. I want my heart to be as clean and bright tomorrow as the laundry I washed for him the day he left.’

Emad closes the apartment door behind him. In silent obedience to Umm Walid’s wishes, he takes his leave.

She shuts eyes heavy with images of the past. Shadows from that last day come rushing back to the surface.

His mother had finished washing the clothes he would take with him back to Cairo. She was getting ready to hang them on the clothesline when her question halted him in his tracks: ‘Walid, where you going this morning?’

His whole body tensed and a sudden sense of dread made him stop at the front door. God — what does she want from me this morning? The subtext of her question would always come out, eventually.

‘If you’re going out, boy, why don’t you take a couple of rabbits with you to sell at the market?’

He hated rabbits. He hated buying rabbits and he hated selling them. He hated slaughtering them and he hated eating their meat, even when it was served, Egyptian-style, in mulukhiyya soup. Most of all, he hated this question: ‘Walid, where you going this morning?’ He thought of that day, not so long ago, when his mother had sprung that same question, only it was a different time of day. ‘Walid, where you going this evening?’ He stood there then, as he stood there now, waiting. That night she had not hesitated for a moment to ask him to come with her to visit the family of another relative, Amin Dahman, who had just passed away. She wanted them to offer their condolences to his many children and grandchildren, even though they needed no consoling. That night, Walid listened to what was said — what had already been said hundreds of times at other services. ‘He was — may God have mercy on him — a such and such kind of man. He did all this, and he did all that …’ However, Amin Dahman was not a person about whom anything good could be said. The man was a total cheapskate — stingy and spiteful until his dying breath. He was a pathological liar. He lied more often than the average Arab leader, especially the kind who claimed he would stop at nothing to liberate Palestine. He was the kind of man to whom no one should show mercy when he died. The kind of man about whom you might say, ‘God, please send the old fart straight to hell!’

Despite all this, men thronged to offer their condolences when Amin Dahman died. On the way to the service, they began revising the scripts they were reading from and whispering among themselves that the dearly departed deserved the compassionate thoughts of one and all. They prayed that he would be granted forgiveness and mercy in the hereafter.

Umm Walid offered her condolences to the departed’s womenfolk: a handful of sobs pouring into a lake of tears shed by other women. These were women who wept in genuine grief when others suffered loss.

That day, Walid vowed to himself never to attend the funeral of his own father when he died. It would be enough for him to offer and receive his own private condolences. He did not want to have to hear hollow platitudes about his father. When his father did die, he remembered none of these promises. For three straight days, Walid sat submissively listening to every nice word that was said about his father.

Walid turned to face his mother. ‘Mama — I’m not going anywhere.’

A smile appeared on Umm Walid’s face. She knew that he would not leave the house before listening to what she had to say.

She bent over the laundry tub, taking a big cotton towel in her hands and wringing it out. A scented cloud of lye detergent wafted up through the house. From a cotton bag, she took out two wooden clothes pegs, putting one in her mouth while throwing the towel onto the clothesline. She put the other peg on one edge of the towel. With her tongue stuck behind her teeth, she said, ‘Yefteyay, uh fawhhh youyy faffer imm a drumm.’

He laughed at the sound of her tongue tripping over the clothes peg. She snatched it out of her mouth and clipped it onto the other edge of the towel. ‘Yesterday, I saw your father in a dream. God bless the man. You know, he was asking about you.’

Thank God my father hasn’t forgotten me , Walid whispered to himself.

‘He asked about you three times.’

Walid tried to shift the subject away from the dream. ‘Did you tell him it’s my last year in college and that I’m going to graduate?’