I was nine or ten, most likely, when I heard the name Kaaffa for the first time. I was in the courtyard, jumping rope. I didn’t miss a single jump, I didn’t stumble, even though my eyes were on Sumayya. She had stuffed her dress into her sirwal and climbed up the wall. She was swaying on the edge, gathering momentum to jump. Sumayya always competed with the neighborhood boys to see who could climb the fastest and jump the farthest from one wall to another. I tried once or twice to imitate her but the only results were cuts on my face and hands and knees. By now, I was satisfied with watching her and egging her on in those climbing races.
Sometimes Sumayya charged me with guarding the graveyard, which sat on a neglected bit of land a few meters from our house. As the sun beat down, I would have to stand there, and then stand there some more, guarding the tiny domes that Sumayya had built out of mud. We were afraid that one of the boys might attack them by riding his bike over and pulverizing them with the wheels. Or one of them might dig into the little mounds and extract the bird corpses and the lizard bodies and the “Abu Zayd” beetles that Sumayya took such pains to collect, burying them in tiny straight rows. She always arranged her bodies according to the type of corpse they were. I never did find out whether Sumayya had killed these tiny creatures so she could perform her rites on them, or whether she found them when they were already dead.
My grandmother had given up on scolding Sumayya. As usual these days, she was sitting quietly in the shade of the bitter orange tree, holding little Sufyan. He wasn’t yet two. She fed him rice soaked in milk. Facing her sat Shaykha. Those were the days just before Shaykha lost her mind. My grandmother was trying to make Sufyan finish the bowl of milky rice, and he was trying to wriggle out of her grip. Shaykha was muttering, irritated, “Leave him, Bint Aamir. You’re nearly seventy. You don’t have the strength anymore to teach the little ones to mind you.” My grandmother didn’t react, leaving Shaykha to go on with her usual narrative. “We teach them to mind, we wear ourselves out for them, and then they go away. Look at my boy. I raised him, I lost sleep taking care of him, and where is he now? I don’t know if he is alive or dead, but—may evil keep away from us—surely he’s alive. He’ll come back to me. Bewitched, ya habbat ayni. That infidel jinni woman snatched him out of my arms, apple of my eye! Ya habbat ayni! I never had any luck in my life, Bint Aamir, no, I didn’t. My family made me marry a man who was already sick. I lived with that man for six months and then he was gone, and he left me pregnant with that boy. Didn’t leave me nothing else. No money, nothing, no one. La maal wa-la haal. He was a fine man, zayn, zayn! But he died. The fellow was snatched away from me, like he was a dream I only had once. That’s what it was like, Bint Aamir, I tell you. He took me under his wing, and when I woke up he was gone. Like a dream at night, Bint Aamir, it’s there and then it vanishes. Just there and gone, that’s all I ever got from men.”
Finally Bint Aamir snapped. “Well, at least he was there before he was gone, wasn’t he!” she wailed into Shaykha’s face.
Shaykha was silent. She made a show of trying to go after little Sufyan. The boy had perfected his skills, teasing the two women by tottering off and hiding, and rubbing his little food bowl in the dirt.
Sufyan was born at long last after my mother had had another two miscarriages. But, just when everyone around us thought for certain that now, finally, my mother would be delirious with joy, instead she went nearly mad with anguish. She never slept. It was the worst possible attack of postpartum depression, to the point that she could not even pick up the newborn, and she certainly could not nurse him. All night long she wandered from room to room in the darkness. During the day, she cried, and between her sobs she was terror-stricken by the thought that she might be harming the baby. So my grandmother took him from his fright-stricken mother, moving his white bassinet into her room.
The neighbor women whispered among themselves that Bint Aamir was nursing the baby boy in secret as she had nursed his father, Mansour, before him. That her age—nearly seventy now—hadn’t prevented the milk spouting from her nipples the moment she had a baby in her arms. But, just as my grandmother had raised my father, Mansour, in silence, now she raised my brother, Sufyan, in silence. She didn’t offer a word of explanation to anyone.
By the time my grandmother and Shaykha were going after Sufyan with his bowl of milky rice, my mother had recovered from her depression and accepted the child. But things remained as before. My mother was absorbed in her own private occupations and my grandmother was immersed in the children. My grandmother never knew any happiness of her own. All her contentment was drawn from the happiness of the people for whom she cared.
Having managed to flee from my duties as guard over the bird-and-lizard graveyard and finally exhausted by my jump-rope exertions, I had collapsed onto the ground nearby. And so I heard what Shaykha said next. “If only your son, Mansour, loved his poor wife the way he loved that ingrate Kaaffa then she would never have gone mad like this after having a baby. Praise be to God, that God showed His grace to her, and healed her.”
Suddenly I was all ears. My whole body strained to hear. But Gran just muttered something, her voice stifled so that I could barely hear. “Don’t start talking about Kaaffa,” I think she said. “May God return your boy to you safe and sound.”
A long sigh was Shaykha’s only answer. She did not like it when my grandmother tried to bridle her. When my grandmother tried to prevent her from spreading news around, to keep things alive in people’s memories as she liked to do.
I had to wait several more years before I learned anything of my father’s love story, which was like nothing so much as a legend.