Bint Aamir came back to the home of Salman and Athurayyaa after the longest trip she had ever taken in her life, this journey to see Dr. Thoms. As she entered, she noticed two pairs of wooden clogs lined up carefully at the threshold of the reception room, which opened onto the courtyard by means of an archway. She was puzzled, and the sight of those clogs left her feeling uneasy. She pulled off her ragged footwear and called for Mansour, wanting to give him the little hoard of milk chocolate she had bought for a half-qirsh at the Muttrah suq. But instead, in response she heard an unfamiliar, high-pitched voice. “Mansour isn’t here.”
She did not move. It was her first encounter, face-to-face, with this pair who would fast become her adversaries. Two thin, feeble-looking women emerged from somewhere inside. As if twenty years had not passed since they boarded the ship to Africa, Bint Aamir knew immediately who they were. Already, sweat was pouring from her face. The blazing midday heat felt like a brutal slap. She was almost gasping for breath, as she stood there clutching the little bag of milk chocolate. But the severe heat did not keep her from noticing the hard, determined flare in the eyes of Rayyaa and Raayah. She noticed the tiger skin, too, which now hung on the wall. It was all perfectly clear, without need for a word of explanation. This was war.
The three women stood still and silent in the reception room of Salman’s house: Bint Aamir towering and rigid, the perspiration gleaming on her brow; Rayyaa, her sickly thinness accentuated by the hump swelling and rounding her back; and Raayah, so strikingly skeletal that she appeared almost weaker, even, than her feeble-looking sister. Her eyes were half-obscured by a thing Bint Aamir now saw for the very first time: prescription eyeglasses. The tiger skin looked down on them, witness to their battles, from this first one on to later triumphs and defeats. That tiger skin was arbiter of every advance and every retreat.
The sisters inched forward cautiously. They greeted Bint Aamir formally. Bint Aamir said nothing. Her response, instead, was to dive straightaway into the whirlwind of activity that was her accustomed life. The sisters slipped along on the fringes of this storm. The first thing that Bint Aamir did, upon her return, was to fill with dirt the nests of scorpions Mansour had worked hard to maintain and tend all the while she was away. Next, she strode to the falaj, walking back balancing on her head the big clay jugs filled with water for cooking. Then she cleaned and washed the rice, slaughtered a rooster, and made the midday meal. When she set it all out on a cloth on the floor, Rayyaa and Raayah emerged again, to gather around it with Salman, Athurayyaa, and Mansour. On that particular day, Bint Aamir did not eat. She was remembering her father, slapping her brother’s hand so hard that the grains of rice he was bringing to his mouth flew in every direction. She sniffed at the air, heavy with the smell of wet dirt after rainfall, and silently she repeated the words that had expelled the two of them from her father’s care: “Eat from the toil of your own arm!”
The war broke out, silent but fierce. Bint Aamir set the limits of the sisters’ movements through the household. She did not allow them to enter her kitchen, or to touch her trees, which she had planted and had kept alive with her constant care. They were never to criticize or chide Mansour, her son. Ever. Rayyaa and Raayah responded by trotting out their perfumed clothes and making certain that the clip-clip of their fine wooden clogs was heard constantly. They told endless stories about Africa—rain forests and grasslands, tigers and rituals, gigantic snakes and long grasses, domed houses. . . Their vivid narratives held the attention of Salman and Athurayyaa, Mansour and the neighborhood women.
The silent war could have gone on for a very long time. But the twins’ life in the Congo had taught them not to wait for attention from whatever body in God’s creation might chance to offer it. They could not have been in that household for much more than two weeks before they began searching out the haphazard pile of mud bricks in which they had spent their childhood. They were quick to see that the drought had receded from the villages and hamlets; the barrenness they remembered vaguely from childhood was no more. Once again, the falaj was pouring water into the orchards. They began working to strengthen their ties with the women living nearby, who volunteered to teach them sewing and helped to spread the word that these twins were available for hire to fast as substitutes for those who could not do so themselves, or for those who wanted to employ them to fast as an act of atonement in memory of a dearly departed one.
On this particular morning, Bint Aamir was washing Mansour’s clothes. She slapped them hard against the wide stone edge of the falaj, and plunged them into the water again. She repeated her actions again and again, and not until she was convinced that the garments were pure clean and no longer held any traces of the pungent smell redolent of an adolescent boy did she squeeze out the water and hang the clothes to dry on the palm-fiber rope. She was completely absorbed in her laundry when the twins came to stand over her bent head. Straightening her eyeglasses over her nose, Raayah said, “We came to say goodbye, Bint Aamir. We’re leaving Salman’s home for our home.” Our: a swift and sure arrow, guaranteed to put a puncture wound in Bint Aamir’s chest.
Rayyaa and Raayah had made plans to transform the dilapidated dwelling into a one-room sheltered space suitable for habitation. They figured out how to redirect the course of the falaj so that it would water their dead little orchard. Putting together all the money they had made from fasting on others’ behalf and the coins they made from sewing, they bought the mud brick they needed to repair the walls, and then the palm seedlings to populate the orchard. Neither Rayyaa’s lump nor Raayah’s weak eyesight kept them from working night and day. They finished building the room in one corner of the collapsed old house, and that was enough for them. They planted bananas and mangoes and tomatoes, lemon trees, onions, and clover in addition to the palm trees. Within two years they had a cow that gave them milk. They sold that milk, and samna and cheese; they continued to take in sewing and to fast for hire. They made an independent life.
“Ma sha Allah!” you could hear the women exclaim to one another. “Rayyaa and Raayah work like men and they don’t need anyone.” Envy tormented my grandmother, even though she had always been extremely wary of its scorching flames and considered it the worst of all possible sins. When people described the twins as independent, my grandmother muttered to herself, “Yes, and how proud they have let themselves be!” Her dream of having a plot of land and living from it—from her own earnings—had come to an end, just as earlier, her dream of having one perfectly sound eye had ended, too.