Before crashing into the bedroom door, little Fuad grabs hold of the handle and pushes hard. The slow gliding motion is deeply satisfying; it is the toddler’s first triumph of an otherwise unexceptional morning. Tentatively he enters a silent room. Muna, in one of the single beds, gives the impression of being fast asleep.
Tiny juddering steps take him to an opened suitcase in front of a table between the beds. For someone still honing his rudimentary motor skills, stepping over something no matter how sleight is akin to scaling a mountain. He crouches beside the suitcase, then without warning hurls himself into it face-first. He uses a tartan miniskirt to pull the rest of himself inside. Muna, amused, raises herself on her elbows and watches.
Meddlesome fingers trawl buttons and zippers. Unable to find anything suitable to suck in his mouth, the child considers his options. Ignoring a natural inclination to pull a strand of Samira’s long dark hair escaping from a nearby pillow, he grabs a convenient table leg and pulls himself upright. He’s still not tall enough. An erratic sweep of a small hand brings that which glitters enticingly on the surface within reach. Plopping down, he prepares to taste each contact lens package and family snapshot, when he is inexplicably removed from his heart’s desire. The intrusion is so rude and unexpected that he falls backward into Muna’s arms and screams. The more she soothes him, the louder he becomes. Once he sees that Auntie Samira is awake, he insists on going to her, bawling and kicking. An indifferent shake of her head sparks another outburst.
The aroma of coffee and cardamom signals his imminent rescue.
Mother Fadhma had left Fuad for only a moment. As quickly as her ailing physical condition allows, she enters Samira’s room and places a steaming tray of Arabic coffee on the table. “Shame on these girls for treating you badly,” she scolds, and takes the little boy in her arms. Safe with his jadda, Fuad swallows deep, long gulps.
“Mamma is his favorite,” Samira says, and yawns. “The rest of us are fed up with babies.”
Sitting next to Muna on her bed, Fadhma retrieves a handkerchief from her apron pocket and wipes the tears from the child’s blotchy face.
“I didn’t mean to…” Muna is embarrassed but her grandmother raises a hand.
“Nobody can be held responsible for a tantrum.” As she rocks baby Fuad, she remembers Muna’s father, Abd. Her special affection for him began the instant she saw him, seconds after a difficult premature birth. Fadhma had been a teenager at the time—probably a decade younger than Muna now. She took the tiny dark baby from her fifteen-year-old sister, Najla, and fell in love. It was Fadhma who had given him his nickname. In any other mouth Abd, which means “servant” or “slave,” would have been derogatory, but in those few moments she could tell his future: he would be dedicated in the service of his family. Although she couldn’t foretell her own: after her sister’s death and Fadhma’s marriage to Al Jid, she would raise thirteen children.
After the inappropriate playthings have been safely retrieved, the suitcase shut and Fuad prowling with a newfound swagger on all fours, Mother Fadhma takes the photos Muna brought from America and looks through them again. She’d glanced at them last night, but in the harsh morning light they tell a different story. The sons of her sister dominate the pictures as they do the family. There are no proper images of Mother Fadhma’s beloved daughters—Magda, Loulwa, and Hind—even though they too live in Cleveland. Sometimes the camera catches a shoulder, back, or side view showing more hair than face, as they cook and clean in the houses of their half brothers and husbands. Her fourth daughter, Katrina, and her two sons, Abdul and Sharif, don’t appear at all: they settled in Chile with Najla’s eldest, Yusef.
In the United States, her sister’s boys have grown old. Mother Fadhma looks twice to pick out Farouk in his businessman’s suit and tie. Qassim lost all his hair, but he remains the comedian, still joking with the others outside one of the garages he owns. Boutros, a medical technician, appears quietly content as the father of four girls. Abd has an even darker complexion now that his hair has grayed. Mother Fadhma wonders whether it is his scientific career or his stormy marriage that is to blame.
The men stand beside cars or in stiff family groups, or play ball with their sons and daughters. Everyone looks smug and overfed, even the children. “Like fattened calves,” Mother Fadhma whispers to herself. In their rush to assimilate, her stepgrandsons in their Cleveland Cavaliers jerseys seem to have lost any connection to Jordan.
Normally the old mother would not have expected gratitude. She has long been accustomed to unrewarded work. She was the one who scrimped and saved; she had even sold her few pieces of gold jewelry to pay for their travel. While they didn’t have to constantly thank her, she wouldn’t mind being remembered once in a while. Mother Fadhma becomes aware of Muna’s eyes on her. The girl had been remarking on one of the pictures, but the old woman had been far too engrossed in her own thoughts and hadn’t paid attention. It occurs to her now that Abd’s daughter shouldn’t be blamed for her father’s and uncles’ apathy, just like she cannot be faulted for a toddler’s tears. It really is time, Fadhma thinks, to rid herself of this burden of resentment. Ever since Muna’s arrival the Jordanian family has been too preoccupied with their own troubles to be truly hospitable. Leaning over, Mother Fadhma wipes the sleep from her granddaughter’s foreign eyes—her first act of intimacy toward the girl—then returns the stack of pictures to the table. She pours out two demitasse cups of Arabic coffee and tells Muna and Samira to start without her, as she gets up, albeit painfully, from the bed and moves slowly from the room.
She returns with a battered cardboard box and declares proudly, “Every piece of correspondence the family sent over the years.” Inside, neat bundles of papers and letters are tied with brown string. At the bottom lies a faded powder-blue airmail envelope, as dry as onionskin. It contains extra passport photographs taken before each of Al Jid’s children—her sister’s and her own—left the country. Fadhma wants her granddaughter to see her aunts and uncles when they were young and starting out in life, full of hope.
At first Muna doesn’t recognize the two yellowed snapshots of Magda and Loulwa. “Look at them!” she exclaims, somewhat baffled. The middle-aged, overweight women in Ohio bear little resemblance to these two rouged, willowy girls. The next picture is easier to identify: “It’s Hind,” she cries out. Muna knows Mother Fadhma’s second-youngest daughter well. At age sixteen, Hind was sent to live with Muna’s family in Cleveland. She was only two years older than Muna. It took a while, but eventually the two girls became close, Fadhma knows through Hind’s letters home. She also wonders if Muna agrees with her daughter’s assessment that it was during this period that Abd and his foreign wife fought most bitterly.
As Muna leafs through the old photos, Fadhma unties the string around Abd’s correspondence. “The freak pockets of snow at home did not prepare your father for the severity of American winters,” she tells her. In Greenville, Illinois, his German landlady, Mrs Schneider, had given Abd the clothes that belonged to her deceased husband, a man who had been over six feet four inches. “‘Not all the loaves of Wonder Bread and peanut butter and jelly I eat during the night shift at the town’s cafeteria,’” Fadhma starts reading, “‘are ever going to make me taller.’
“Then he found work in an extremely dirty kitchen,” she says, grimacing at the next letter. “‘I got rid of ten-day-old pork chops—eight big bags of stinking garbage!’ But your father wrote that this job was not without its benefits. The owner, it seemed, sewed better than she cooked and cut down the dead man’s clothes to fit him.” When Abd was hired as a hospital ward orderly, he paid his landlady for his new wardrobe and sent home to the family whatever cash he could spare.
He had also written about a very shocking incident. One evening, after he left work and went to a bar. Mother Fadhma’s voice rises in excitement. Her eyes still grow wide with the horror she felt all those years ago. Fadhma still can’t imagine the dens of iniquity that are American bars—do the women walk around naked? Is this how all the young Arab men become ensnared, end up forgetting their families and staying abroad? Pushing aside her fears for the sake of her guest, she says brightly, “After your father ordered a beer, your grandfather appeared to him: ‘As real to me as the bottle in my hand, and all Al Jid kept saying: “So I’ve sent you all the way to America to drink alcohol?”’”
Feeling as though she is holding a precious time in all of their lives, Mother Fadhma smiles gratefully at Muna for allowing her to share it. “I can’t tell you the excitement these letters caused when we first received them.”
Samira, who has been watching quietly and listening all along, interjects, “Whenever an airplane passed in the sky, all us kids used to point up and call out, ‘Abd! Abd!’”
“And one by one,” Muna inquires, “all of them left home?”
“Yes,” Fadhma affirms. Why pretend otherwise? In the beginning she thought of her husband’s children, both home and abroad, as two equal halves of the same whole. But as one place claimed more than the other, it simply wasn’t true anymore. Apart from the letters and the funds that were sent home, they disappeared. By the time her own children were old enough to travel, Fadhma understood she was losing them for good.
“Their lives are better there,” she sighs. What she wasn’t going to say was that during those days she still clung to an unreasonable belief that Abd, the son who was destined to care for them, would not desert her and Al Jid completely. She continued feeling that way even when her stepson’s financial contributions began to arrive less frequently and his letters exhibited a marked change in tone. Instead of reporting minute details of his day-to-day life as a way of including his parents, he seemed to be building up defenses. Occupied by his intense studies for a college degree in chemistry, he had little to write about. The personal news he included was ominous. He was becoming friendly with another foreign student, a young woman and fellow immigrant to the United States from the Philippines. Then, without warning, they married.
It was a blow to the family. No one in the Sabas family married a stranger. Abd had not only wedded outside his tribe but outside his culture. And who could predict the consequences of such reckless behavior? Fadhma feared the worst, but it was Al Jid who took the news particularly badly. He had already mapped out his son’s life. He had chosen a suitable woman to be Abd’s wife and even made the initial approaches. The young couple would have probably ended up in the Gulf, where his son, the chemist, would have worked to support the rest of his siblings. When that was no longer feasible, Al Jid accepted the inevitable and sent his blessing… even though it was not asked for.
The second eldest’s brazen independence humiliated his parents, but there was worse to come. Another letter in Fadhma’s box, one that had been folded many times and shoved to the bottom—never referred to but never forgotten—had been written in English. It arrived after Abd’s wedding. But with no English speakers in the village, it remained unopened until business called Al Jid to the capital. That night he returned home clearly depressed. Mother Fadhma thought it was the low price for barley, but when she inquired, he pulled from his pocket the letter with a translation written in Arabic. In an expressionless voice, he read, “‘All you do is write and ask for money. How dare you bastards keep bothering us! I’m pregnant, and your son wants me to give you the little money my family sends to me. Go to hell.’”
Not even this message completely destroyed Mother Fadhma’s confidence in Abd. Her illusions were finally shattered a few years later, when a snapshot arrived in the mail. The picture was of a little girl in a grass skirt and Hawaiian halter top, with an orange lei around her neck. Her hands were held to one side and a bare foot pointed forward. It was Muna, aged three and a half, poised to dance the hula. The accompanying letter was simple and direct. Fadhma recites it as though it arrived yesterday:
“‘My dear family, I am writing to you from my lab, the only place I can find peace. I have a good job with a big company that makes plastics. My wife and daughter are well. As you can see, the child does not look Arab. This is the problem of a mixed marriage. Neither she nor her mother would be accepted in Jordan, and all of our lives would be miserable. So I think it’s best for us to remain here. God bless you.’”
Saying nothing, Fadhma hands Muna the picture of herself when she was small. “I don’t remember this,” her granddaughter grins uncomfortably. After a long, hard stare, she passes it to Samira before asking Fadhma, “Why did you give your children Muslim names, Jadda?”
The old grandmother again regards the girl in a new light. At least Muna isn’t unintelligent. Fadhma smiles proudly. “It was your grandfather’s idea.”
In the hopes that Muna’s interest in family history is greater than Samira’s or Laila’s, she begins slowly. “Hundred of years ago, Christians dedicated to Sabas, the patron saint of our family, waged war against the pagan gods of the desert. After those battles, they settled in the Crusader fortress in the country’s south and would have gladly stayed there, if not for a dispute over a local woman—”
“There’s always a woman,” interrupts Samira with a laugh. “Someone looks at someone. Someone’s father gets upset. So-and-so’s brothers become involved, which pretty much all the time leads to murder.”
Fadhma refuses to acknowledge her daughter’s comments and continues: “It would have ended in a sectarian war, but the church leaders in Jerusalem petitioned the Turkish governor in charge of the region and the Christians were given permission to come to the mountains here”—Fadhma twirls a finger in the air—“and settle in the ruins of an abandoned Byzantine city that had been destroyed seven times by earthquakes. When the tribes arrived, they took shelter in a cave by a spring, which they thought was God’s gift to them. It belonged to someone else. Inadvertently our relatives traded one fight for another, and your great-grandfather was killed in a battle. It was devastating for the family. But at the young age of ten, Al Jid made a solemn vow not to avenge his father’s murder, something remarkable considering the code of honor among the tribes. Once he married and had children of his own, he called them not by Christian names but ones that were either Muslim or considered neutral. That way they could live unmolested among strangers.”
She pours herself a second cup of coffee. “Your grandfather believed Islam and Orthodox Christendom were a large and small tree that had grown into one. The leaves were different but the shade the same. He also taught himself to read and write.” She could see him now, spending hours in the window alcove at the front of the old house, where he sat in the natural light with his books. “He was in love with the history of Arabia. Our daughters were named after great Islamic women, some of them warriors. Would you like to hear his favorite poem? It was their bedtime story.”
Mother Fadhma sits up and recites a little self-consciously:
We are daughters of the morning star,
We tread on pillows underfoot,
Pearls adorn our necks.
Musk perfumes our hair.
If you fight, we will embrace you,
If you retreat, we will abandon you.
And say farewell to love.
“This was the song of Hind and other rebellious Meccan women on the field of battle,” she goes on explaining. “They banged their drums and urged their men to kill Muslims who had come from Medina to steal Mecca’s profitable pilgrim and caravan trade.”
Finally Mother Fadhma feels like she is enjoying herself. Since Hussein’s troubles, she has been denied a favorite pastime, taking morning coffee with the elderly women of the town and telling stories. Neither Muna nor Samira displays the wit or feistiness of her old friends, but the young women are a reasonable audience. Fadhma would have told them all she knew about the bravery and savagery of Hind on the battlefield and her run-in with the Prophet Muhammad; the conversion of the pagans who first fought the Christian saints and the brutal dawning of a new era belonging to the One God. It would have been a history lesson that her husband would have been proud of, but he was oftentimes oblivious to the repetitive nature of his stories. Already Fadhma can sense the tedium rising from Samira’s side of the room, so she leaves her tales for another time and asks, “What are your plans for today?”
Muna eagerly nods at Samira’s reply: “We might go to Amman and come back early for the wedding feast tonight. Or we can spend the afternoon at the Internet café. I’m sure something will come up. We haven’t decided yet.”
“Don’t go far,” her mother warns. “Guests are expected this afternoon.”
“Guests?” Samira echoes incredulously.
“Some of the townspeople are coming to meet Muna,” her mother proudly exclaims.
“Well, maybe we should try to get a SIM card for my phone,” suggests Muna evenly, “but it probably won’t work. I’m told the town has bad reception”—she sounds almost apologetic—“because of Jebel Musa, but the mountain isn’t the problem. It’s me. I’m addicted to the Internet.”
Samira appears sympathetic, although Fadhma doesn’t know why she should be. The young speak a different language and Fadhma can’t ignore the feeling in her tired old bones that her daughter is hiding something. Where has she been going these past few months? Whom is she spending time with? A man? Just because Muna is visiting, Samira shouldn’t think she can take advantage. Fadhma is keenly aware this is not the right time. She would rather sew her lips together with coarse straw than cause a scene and create a trail of speculation that finds its way back to Cleveland, Ohio. Suddenly the room feels hot and claustrophobic. Wordlessly, Fadhma packs the letters back into their box.