I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops (22 page)

Then he turned to the nun and asked her where they’d been rounded up. “The cemetery at Sinn Al-Fil,” she answered disapprovingly.

My father swung around to the women again, telling them in that same loud, harsh voice that they must be stupid if they preferred graveyards to the red light district, whose advantages he then listed for them: apart from regular examinations by him, there were clean, tidy rooms with hot running water, and as if that weren’t enough they had the best baker in town just across the street.

My father hitched the woman’s nightdress up so high that I could see her large stomach. The lower part of it wasn’t like mine, but more like my mother’s, covered with little hairs. He moved in on her with a spyglass; the woman brought her legs together and he forced them roughly apart, then asked the nun to have a look. But the nun turned away in disgust and so did I. My father bent closer as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He told her she was a filthy cow and warned her that she’d die if she didn’t do as he said and take the medicines he prescribed. Then he moved on to the next one and got ready to examine her, when his eyes fell on the last bed. Maybe he was calculating how many more examinations he had to do, and suddenly the tiny red veins in his nose looked as if they were about to explode. He
called out a name, “Nafisa,” and swore and spluttered as if he didn’t know what to say.

He rushed over to the last bed and pulled the blanket away from the woman’s pretty face, accusing her of turning her back on everything good, telling her she had no conscience, nothing, only what she carried between her legs and hawked around the streets. Then he stopped and looked about him and remembered that I was still there. He said soothingly that we were going on the best outing ever, and took my hand, turning to the nun: “I’m going to get her husband.”

Letting my hand drop he returned to Nafisa’s bedside and shook her furiously by the shoulders, shouting, “How could you? Men are your protection. Why didn’t you stay with him? You’ve had it now. Your brother’ll get to hear about this in no time, and then you’ll be sorry!”

He took hold of my hand again and hurried to the door, closely pursued by the nun, who was trying desperately to persuade him to finish examining the other women. He assured her that he’d be back but he had to find Nafisa’s husband before he vanished too.

We were almost gone when Nafisa’s voice stopped us. “Can I have a word, Doctor?”

“To hell with you! I know exactly what you’re going to say.” He mimicked her voice. “Never again, Doctor. I’ll never do it again.”

“Doctor! If only he had just given me a roof over my head and forgotten about my past! Everything I do and say is an excuse for him to bring it up. He threatens to send me back where he got me. If I wear lipstick he goes crazy. ‘So you miss whoring?’ he says. When I went to visit his sister in hospital, he thought I’d gone back on the game and went and checked with her and she swore I’d been there. He still didn’t believe it, though, and dragged me all around the other patients in the ward. Some of them could scarcely breathe, but it didn’t stop him from asking them if they’d seen me visiting his sister.”

My father muttered, “God help us,” and nothing more, but I sensed that he was no longer so angry with her. She burst into a fit of sobbing and said jerkily between the sniffing and gulping, “He was convinced I was lying. So I said to myself, ‘Right, girl! You might as well go back and earn a pound or two.’ ”

We went off in the car again and I didn’t risk asking my father any questions. He was driving fast and lighting a cigarette, forgetting that he had one lit already. He sighed and muttered to himself, cursing because we were going to be late and the chicken would no longer be fresh.

“What did Nafisa do that made you so cross?” I demanded at last.

Instead of answering me, he turned off at a steep slope. That was the end of my last feeble hope that we might be
going past the shops for him to buy me something, but I didn’t care.

Me stopped the car and told me to follow him. We made our way along a muddy path across the grass. I couldn’t help stepping in the puddles even though he kept warning me not to. The cars on the road below looked tiny and far away. I wasn’t used to being so high up and my heart sank in terror at the thought of slipping and rolling all the way down onto the road. I clutched my father’s hand tightly.

The path took us right to the top of the hill, where there was a broad, open space like a fairground at holiday time, but it was full of sheep instead of children. They were everywhere and I wanted to rush up and stroke their wool and sing, “Little lamb, little lamb, how beautiful you arel”

But when we got nearer, I changed my mind and stood motionless, as never before had I seen sheep in such numbers and at such close quarters. Their wool was mud stained, with shreds of old newspaper and garbage clinging to it. They called out like small children as if they were in pain or had lost their mothers, not like in the picture in the reading book, where they are happily grazing. Perhaps the thin, straggly grass wasn’t enough for them and they were crying out in hunger. Their owners were strange-looking men, unlike anyone I’d seen before: short, with scowling faces and gold teeth flashing through the smoke that came
in puffs out of their mouths when they spoke, even though I couldn’t see any cigarettes. They wore high black boots and black fur hats.

My father began asking for Amin from Aleppo, Amin the sheep trader, leading me from one noisy group of men to another, sometimes cutting straight through the middle of the flocks of sheep and other times skirting around them. Finally he stopped in front of a thick-set man. When this man noticed my father he muttered, “Hallo, Doctor,” in a very cold voice.

My father immediately kissed him on both cheeks and whispered something in his ear. The man stepped backward but my father took hold of him by the shoulders and tried to talk to him again. Amin’s lambs bleated at the tops of their voices. He moved back, trying to escape my father’s words. Then he stuck his little finger in his ear, scratched vigorously, examined the piece of yellow wax on his long fingernail for some time and wiped it off on his jacket. At last he spoke, loudly so that he could be heard over his flock. “What I ought to do is take her to the slaughterhouse and cut her throat.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of a building I hadn’t noticed before. “I’d be well within my rights.”

Cut Nafisa’s throat? I couldn’t take in what he was saying and didn’t dare ask either of them to explain.

I was quite sure that silence was necessary on this occasion
and, rather than fidgeting impatiently as I normally do when grown-ups talk together and leave me with nothing to do, I stood absolutely still, eager to catch each word.

“Take it easy,” advised my father.

“What do you think I’ve been doing?” the man burst out viciously. “If I hadn’t made myself calm down, she’d be dead by now. Believe me, when I heard they’d caught her I grabbed a knife and started out to look for her. I was out of my mind.”

So people could be slaughtered just like chickens and sheep. Was that possible? I looked over to the slaughterhouse, filled with fear and confusion. They couldn’t kill Nafisa. I watched men carrying dozens of fleeces and sheep carcasses slung over their shoulders and loading them tonto a lorry, and convinced myself Nafisa wasn’t going to have her throat cut, because I couldn’t imagine her dangling down a porter’s back like that. I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw my father hand the man a cigarette and reach out to light it for him.

The man clapped my father on the shoulder and I stared at the outer wall of the slaughterhouse. It was stained with the reddish-purple color that we learned the Phoenicians had discovered in snail shells. The bleating grew louder as a new lot of sheep was driven toward the building. They must have known that this building was the afterlife, the hell which the teacher is always telling us about.

Their cries grew louder and I pitied them and found myself reaching out to touch a woolly tail. “Little lamb, little lamb, how beautiful you are!” I chanted under my breath. It turned to look at me. Had it heard me? I smiled but its eyes were unseeing like glass.

My mother
always threatened me when we had a visitor. She wagged her finger at me if I refused to follow her into the kitchen to receive her threats face-to-face, and gave me a look that I understood meant I wasn’t to talk too much. If I ignored her and sat down comfortably with one leg crossed over the other, giving my opinion on everything that was discussed, talking rashly about subjects I didn’t understand, my father would come quietly across to me and put a big towel over my knees. I heard him saying, “Azrael,”
under his breath: I knew this was the name of the Angel of Death, but I didn’t know if he was scolding me or praying for me to be spared.

My father was a devout man and the sight of my bare knees pained him. He had tried without success to make me cover my head and arms, then channeled his piety toward my legs.

When he covered me up with a towel, he didn’t know that he was also gagging me and reducing me to silence. I would freeze, wishing the ground would swallow me up, and soon slink away to my room.

He was only pious about physical things. Otherwise he was broad-minded and allowed me to talk and joke with my brother’s friends. He was pleased to see me borrowing books from young male neighbors, and when he heard me arguing a point he would announce to the assembled company that he was going to put me through law school. My brother used to ask him what was wrong with dressmaking, and he would smile kindly, not realizing my brother was joking, and say, “Shame on you! She’s the most intelligent girl in the world!”

Although my brother moved north to teach in a government school, his friends continued to visit and stay overnight, as some of them lived down south. For some reason, in the presence of these youths I felt like a toy with a new battery. I paraded my knowledge on any subject, talked at
length about Jurji Zaydan’s stories and the Rock Hudson film
Never Say Goodbye
, introducing a few English words into my conversation, which I mispronounced. I made them laugh with my impersonations of movie actors. My talk was peppered with lies and exaggerations. Whenever I sensed that my openness was making them awkward. I plunged on without a pause, even using my new surge of power to hide my embarrassment sometimes.

I was twelve when the piano became my obsession. Nobody escaped my question: “Do you know anyone who plays the piano?”

I didn’t ask them if they could play themselves, as I knew the answer in advance. I kept repeating untruthfully that the music teacher had told me that a brilliant future awaited me if I learned the piano.

Among those to whom I put my by now habitual question was a boy from the south called Khalil, who stayed with us when he came to Beirut to collect his monthly salary. He was so shy and taciturn that I used to wonder how he explained the lessons to his pupils, and if he ever cracked a joke in class or shouted at them. When we talked to him, he lowered his head and didn’t reply and when my parents asked him a direct question, he would answer with his eyes fastened on the toes of his shoes. I don’t remember him ever talking to me before that day, still less answering one of my questions.

My mother used to make up a bed for him on the sitting room floor after supper. As soon as everybody was in bed, and the rooms were dark and silent, he switched on the radio and listened to it until late into the night. This annoyed my mother so much that she considered asking him to pay half the electricity bill. Although I knew how shy and awkward he was, I asked him the question that preoccupied me more than any other. I was sure he didn’t know anyone who played the piano, but when he ignored me I asked him again, and he merely raised his eyes from the floor in response. For the first time I noticed his long black eyelashes and wondered how he could be so timid when he had such beautiful eyes. The third time, to my surprise, he answered me, or asked me a question in return: “Why do you think I’d know someone who plays the piano?”

His answer-question disconcerted me. “I just thought you would,” I said lamely.

My inhibitions didn’t last, and the next time he came, as I was setting out the dishes of
zaatar—
thyme and olive oil — and cream cheese and olives for his breakfast, Í asked again. He looked away from me. He began staring hard at the piece of bread he’d taken and crumbling it in his fingers. Before I could press him further, my mother called me in a voice that broke the sound barrier. Although I was standing before her in no time, she didn’t lower the volume. “To hell with you and your piano,” she shouted. “You’re driving us
all crazy. Stop pestering that poor boy. I hope they put a piano on your grave so that you can strum it in eternity till you’re sick of it.”

It didn’t often bother me when my mother shouted at me, but this time was different. Khalil must have heard. With her shouting, my brightly colored hula-hoop socks, my jingling bangles, the English words I knew, all evaporated into nothing. I stood paralyzed outside the door of the living room, with an empty tray in my hand. My mother gave me a push and told me to hurry up and get the plates off the table, or else. I found myself in the middle of the room, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t have heard. But he had, because he cleared his throat self-consciously. I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t even breathe. Í went discreetly up to the table, and to my amazement I heard him say consolingly, “I’ve got a friend who studies music at the Conservatoire. I’ll try and bring him with me next time I come.”