Hadi? Habibi?”
I shouldn’t have called. In the background, someone shouts:
“Khalti! The onions are burning!”
I can hear and smell the sizzle.
“Harkihon! Turn the fire down and stir. Sorry, Hadi, habibi. The neighbors are here, the Haffars, and Umm Omar and Miriam. Bless them, they brought lamb.”
Falling off the bone, silken, into its own juices. Toasted pine nuts. Rice, fluffy, steaming, with gold sha’iriyeh.
“Hadi, habibi. Ya ‘omri… keifak?”
I am… suddenly starved, for that micro world I can hear in the background. Voices, bits of meat and onion sputtering in a pot. The price of leaving it resounds through the phone, in my ears, my stomach. Hollow.
Clanking plates being set on a kitchen table dressed with a plastic cover and a glass bowl of green olives. Baba’s olives, in the olive oil he pressed—how many jars does Mama have left? Mama, in an apron, wiping a wet brow with a kitchen towel.
“Keifik inti, Mama?”
In Baba’s brown coat, shivering in the morgue. Mama without Baba, smaller than I remembered, shoulders hunched, a widow waving like a child from the window of the bus that took her back to Douma without visa, husband, son.
“How are you? How is the wad’ outside?”
The “situation,” that eerie euphemism for the clashes, arrests, abductions, shortages, torture and death rates.
“The wad’ is the same,” she says. “People keep visiting. Umm Omar comes every day”—a grieving mother comforting a widow—“and did you know, Miriam is pregnant?”
Miriam’s long licorice hair falls like a veil in front of my eyes. “Inshallah, a boy this time!” I hear Umm Omar say. Inshallah, Umm Omar…
“Mabrouk, but, Mama, how are you? Do you have water, electricity? Is someone bringing you—”
“They cut the water all over the city. You should see the lines at the wells. People freezing for hours, but the Haffars’ boy has been filling plastic bottles for me every couple of days. And Abu Riad brings bread. Everyone has been kind.”
She is silent a moment.
“Can you talk in the living room, Mama?”
Slippered footsteps.
“It looks like there are ghosts in here. I covered the furniture, except for the piano.”
“Why, Mama?”
“The house is too big, habibi. I’m alone. I don’t need such a large room, and the kitchen is easier to heat. I may sell the house. The orchard—”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
For a moment, in Amman, she was the child and I took care of her, of the ugly papers that clung like leeches to Baba’s death. I tried to salvage her visa appointment. I took her to dinner at the nicest restaurant I could find. She tried to pay, then said she didn’t want coffee and was too full for crème brûlée. I ordered two of each, and the next day pulled all the cash I could from the ATM. I waved and promised at the bus pulling out of the station, in diesel fumes and mist, but now…
“Ya habibi, ya Hadi, don’t cry…”
“Mama, I’m so sorry… Don’t sell anything! I’ll send you money. I…”
Can’t lie anymore.
“I can’t go back to the US, Mama. My status is revoked for good.”
Mama is silent.
“I can’t get you a visa. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was all for nothing…”
Years and forms and DNA tests and medical exams, paperwork and fees and the promise of “family reunification,” and Mama and Baba all the way to Amman, so he could die, waiting, and she…
“It’s all right, habibi. Shh, it’s all right, ya zghir.”
“I’ll come back! Don’t sell the orchard! I’ll—”
Care for the four plum trees, the apple tree.
“Don’t you dare! Istarji, Hadi! Majnoun? They’ll kill you!”
Her voice drops to a whisper.
“You want to be a martyr, like Omar? That will kill me, habibi. I can’t…” She breaks off. “Baa’dein, your place is with your wife and child. You will find a way back.”
“Mama, I—”
“Find a way back to them, Hadi.”
She is silent in her darkened, cobwebbed room.
“I’m tired, Hadi.”
“Khalti! Come eat!” Miriam calls from another room, one where I once had a seat at the table. In this disintegrating world, there is a kitchen with towels on which my mother painted birds…
“I’ll send money,” I say.
“Don’t worry about me, habibi. I don’t need anything. Noshkor allah, I have a roof over my head, food…”
Lamb and rice she will barely touch, and yesterday’s bread, which, when everyone goes, she will eat, hard, sprinkled with salt. She will save the crumbs to scatter under the terebinth tree for the birds, if there are any in February. If not, the crumbs will wait for spring.
“Don’t worry about me, habibi,” she says softly, small and fragile as the douri she loves.
“Yalla, khalti!”
And Mama hangs up.