My Brother in God’s Book

MIFTAH HAD FAIR SKIN and blue eyes, I had dark skin and almond eyes, and Aunt Sabriya was a Negro. But we lived together under the same tinplate roof, and we felt like family.

Miftah had been my playmate in the Slave Yards for as long as I could remember. When I got tired, he’d pick me up and give me a piggyback ride. He was so attached to Aunt Sabriya that he tagged along wherever she went. He used to help her with things, and sometimes he even gave her advice. Miftah was lanky and handsome, and there was almost always a smile on his face. He did everything fast, he had a loud, hearty laugh, and there was a blue vein in his forehead that would stick out when he got mad. He was brave too, and from the time he was a little boy he guarded our humble little shack as if it were a palace. Famine and drought struck when he was little, so from a young age he went to work in the salt flats. Like other kids in those days, he wasn’t free to choose the life he wanted. It was basically a choice between homelessness, thievery, and death, or the most menial, grueling jobs you could think of to keep yourself alive.

Miftah would bring us something to eat on his way home from the salt flats. He’d take what he’d earned slaving away from dawn to dusk and buy a watermelon, or a couple of tomatoes and a loaf of bread. When he got home, he’d collapse exhausted at the door to our shack. The minute he put his head down he’d fall fast asleep, and bugs would go crawling all over him without his feeling a thing. I used to step on his legs while he was sleeping, but instead of blowing up at me he’d just grumble groggily, “You’d better cut it out, Little Blackie.”

Whenever Aunt Sabriya had time, she’d massage his feet, stroke his head, and sing him old ditties. She loved Miftah and worried about him as if he were her son from some white man who’d taken off and left her. When he fell asleep in front of the shack, she would pull him inside, lay him down on the bed, and put a pillow under his head so that he could get a good night’s rest.

It wasn’t unusual for children to work, and since he wouldn’t be able to go to school, Aunt Sabriya had to help him find a job. He had to get ready to face life early by learning a trade. Children who start working from a young age develop a sense of responsibility, and they grow up before their time. Their mental age outstrips their chronological age, and before you know it they’re fully formed human beings.

Miftah knew how much I loved watermelon. So on summer days when he had the money, he’d buy a little watermelon, stuff it under his clothes, and bring it home to the Yards. He’d come rushing back and, while he was still some distance away, he’d call out to me, “I bought you a red watermelon! Come help me bury it in the sand next to the shore!” That was what people did back then to chill their watermelons. We were on top of the world, knowing we had a “refrigerator” that half the residents of the Slave Yards didn’t have.

Aunt Sabriya taught me to thank him by kissing him on the head, so I did it even though I didn’t think a brother should tease his sister by calling her “Little Blackie.”

“Don’t call me ‘Little Blackie,’ Fattouha!” I scolded.

“All right,” he’d say with a laugh. “I’ll call you Farina, then, and you call me Ubaidi!”¹

And that’s what we started to do after a while: he’d call me Farina and I’d call him Ubaidi. He laughed at most of the things I did, especially when I played dress-up with myself. I’d put this on and take that off. I’d borrow my aunt’s belts and dresses and arrange them in a way that suited me.

“Farina’s lost her marbles!” Miftah would tell my aunt with a giggle.

Then, as if he hadn’t made enough fun of me already, he’d go out looking for something to “complete my look,” as he put it. He might bring me the black poker from the oven and say, “Hold it in your hand the way a queen holds her scepter.” Or he might pull some stripped palm branches out of a broom and say, “Put these on your head—they’ll make your hair look softer by comparison!”

I’d get all mad and tell Aunt Sabriya to make him leave me alone. But all she’d do was smile and say something in his defense—either that, or pretend to make him stop.

Never once did Miftah disobey Aunt Sabriya or give her any trouble. He loved her so much that he’d get sick himself if she came down with pneumonia, and he wouldn’t go to the salt flats. She didn’t ask much of him. All she ever wanted him to do was to keep an eye on me. Whenever she asked him to watch me, he’d just say, “Yes, ma’am,” and stay on the job till she got back. Then he’d take off to play with the other boys. Miftah was older than me, but not by a lot. When we lay down on the seashore on hot summer evenings and looked up at the sky, he would ask Aunt Sabriya serious questions, as if he were thinking about his identity. He’d ask her to tell him about his family—what they’d been like, who he looked like, and lots of other things. No matter how naïve or incredible her answers sounded to us later, she always made sure to answer all his questions, as if she didn’t want to let a single one go on worrying him.

When Miftah asked about his origins, Aunt Sabriya told him his family had been from the outlying desert region of eastern Libya, and that like most other people, they’d run away because they couldn’t pay the taxes they owed the wali, or Ottoman governor. Fleeing with their little boy from cruel punishment and from the spread of hunger and disease, they disappeared into the Yards, where it would be hard for the wali’s tax collectors to go after them. Hiding hadn’t been difficult since Miftah’s family was small: two sisters, his father, his mother, and him. But he’d lost them all when, during a certain high-tide season, the sea had rushed into the Yards in the dark of the night and inundated it, sparing only a few souls who’d been destined to survive. Their dog had drowned, and so had their only milk goat. A small group of survivors later rebuilt the Yards, and Miftah had been among them.

When Miftah asked about the flood, he’d found people who could confirm the story. It was an actual event that had left a huge death toll.

“But how did I make it out alive?” he wanted to know.

“Well,” Aunt Sabriya explained, “what happened was that, as the waters were rising, your mother lifted you on top of her head and cried for help. We were neighbors, and I heard her screaming. So, since I knew how to swim, I went and got you from her. Then I put you on my head and swam with you until I found a wooden plank to set you on. Then you and I kept on going till dry land appeared.”

“And where was Atiga then?”

“She hadn’t been born yet.”

“Was I older, or were my sisters?”

“You were the youngest.”

“What were their names?”

“Your mother’s name was Fatima and your father’s name was Muhammad. Your sisters’ names were Salima and Maryouma.”

“And why is my last name Daqiq—‘Flour’?”

“It might have been passed down in your family from earlier generations. Maybe one of your ancestors used to load flour onto carts for transport. Or maybe he was as white as flour—like you!”

Then, to make her hypothesis more convincing, she added, “You know, the Al Sifiniz family name comes from the fact that one of their ancestors used to make sifiniz—or he really liked it, at least, and the family name Al Huwwat, which means ‘fisherman,’ comes from the fact that one of their ancestors used to catch or sell fish, or that he just ate a lot of fish. So, as you can probably guess, the family name Al Iyat, which means ‘crying,’ comes from the fact that somebody in the family used to cry a lot!” Then we tried out the same idea with the family names Farina and Ubaidi, and we laughed till we cried.

Then the two of us would get really quiet. Aunt Sabriya would yawn and, muttering a prayer for God to forgive her, say to Miftah, “Ask God to have mercy on them. A lot of people died the year of the flood.”

So, lying wearily on his back after slaving away all day in the salt flats, he’d lift his hands heavenward, intoning reverently, “Oh Lord, have mercy on them, and make Heaven their resting place!”

His curiosity satisfied, Miftah would ask Aunt Sabriya to tell us a story.

“What story do you want to hear?” she’d ask.

“Anything make-believe.”

Then Aunt Sabriya’s stories would take us away to another world that little children love.

When she started telling the story of Umm Basisi, Miftah would sneakily walk his hand over in my direction and brush my arm as if it were a crab. I’d scream and nearly jump out of my skin. When his dastardly deed had been exposed, Aunt Sabriya would tweak his ear and say, “If you spook her, you’ll make God angry, and the stars will get sad! A real man doesn’t scare his sister—he protects her and sticks up for her!”

Miftah was friends with Aunt Aida’s kids, and with Yousef too. When Aunt Sabriya and Aunt Aida got together to talk, they’d say things like, “God’s the one who’s raised Miftah.”

The only times Miftah would leave us were when he had to go work in the salt flats. But then, one day, some lady from a notable Benghazi family came to the Yards. It seemed she’d come looking for Aunt Sabriya so that she could buy Miftah from her. It came as a huge shock to me. Never in the world would I have expected Aunt Sabriya to sell her own son, the son she loved and had raised herself! She insisted that she hadn’t sold him to anybody, and that she was just going to leave him at the lady’s house to work as a servant there. She said domestic work would be a lot easier on him than salt extraction had been. But I’d seen the woman give Aunt Sabriya some money. When I asked her about it, she told me she’d hired him out to the lady.

I was devastated over what she’d done, and I secretly hated her for it.

Miftah didn’t want to go with the lady, but he didn’t object, either. He didn’t say anything. As Aunt Sabriya worked to persuade him of the idea, his eyes showed how he really felt. He was a good actor, and he pretended to be convinced just to please her, but in his heart of hearts, going to that woman’s house was the last thing in the world he would have wanted.

I didn’t like what Aunt Sabriya had done one bit. I was furious with her. I told her that from then on I wasn’t going to love her too much, just in case there came a day when she sold me off the way she’d done to Miftah!

Even so, I think she suffered as much as I did on Miftah’s first night away. I cried and talked about how much I missed him, while she just hung her head and made no reply to my reproaches.

When she did finally say something, she reassured me that we’d go on being one family and facing life’s trials together. She told me Miftah would come back to live with us when we had a little money and could afford to buy a house in the city. In fact, she went on, if she lived long enough and saved up enough, she was going to have him bring his wife and children to live with us in one room of the house, and she’d go with him on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

I could tell from the way her voice sounded that she wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself break down in front of me. Her talk of a house, a family, children, and the pilgrimage comforted me temporarily, and I gave myself over to her big dreams, surrendering to the magical vision of what time would bring once Miftah had become a man.

Miftah ran away from the lady’s house a few times and came to stay with us. He said she was nice, and that she loved him and treated him like her own son, but that he liked his life with us in the Yards more. He said he didn’t know anybody there. Everybody was always looking him over and asking rude questions like, “Where did this orphan come from? What a shame that a boy like him would lose his family!”

Knowing full well that he could hear her, a certain old lady with penetrating eyes asked, “So did he lose his parents or was he a foundling?”

Some people made fun of his name. “So,” they’d ask with a snicker, “is he daqiq qamh (wheat flour), or daqiq sha‘ir (barley flour)?”

Sighing in resignation, Aunt Sabriya would console him with the thought that when people got used to him, things would get better.

“Don’t you pay any attention to what people say!” she told him. “You’re all that matters! Life is hard, and you’ll have to learn a trade to support yourself. Once you’ve done that, everything will change, and you’ll have a craft that wins people’s respect.”

She didn’t tell him the other half of the truth—namely, that when people keep doing obnoxious things, you get used to them, and they turn familiar and ordinary.

To our surprise, the lady who had taken Miftah to live with her came after him when he left her house. She promised Aunt Sabriya that nothing would ever happen to upset him again. She said she’d spoken with a relative of hers who was a coffeehouse owner who would hire Miftah as his assistant in the evenings, and that she thought the job would suit him. I was trying to figure out why this woman was so determined to keep Miftah at her house, so I asked Aunt Sabriya about it. But instead of offering me an explanation, she put me off, saying, “Hard times lead people to accept things they couldn’t accept before.”

My big mistake wasn’t in my understanding of the overall situation—that is, the fact that Miftah gradually got used to growing up in that family—taking on their customs and getting comfortable with their acquaintances and relatives and the kinds of things they did. Rather, my mistake lay in the angle I took on things because of my lack of experience with life and people. There are realities that, in order for us to understand them, time has to pass, not so that the realities can grow up the way we do but rather so that we can grow up to the point where our heads are on their level. And Miftah—my brother and my dear soulmate—was one of them.

1. Farina being Italian for “flour,” and Ubaidi Arabic for “my little slave.”