WEARY AND NUMB, Niam Khabbaz trudged through the streets of Rising Sun. Her heart was pounding for no apparent reason as she made her way through the narrow passages she knew so well. She paused briefly when she noticed the police cars and ambulances outside her house, and as soon as she spotted her neighbors shooting uneasy glances in her direction, Niam understood in a flash that a catastrophe of unknown size and scope lay in store for her.
It was difficult to count all the various calamities that had occurred in this neighborhood, nor was the full number of their casualties ever truly uncovered.
When she entered the house, Niam Khabbaz found her firstborn son, just turned nineteen, lying face down on the ground. The bullet that had pierced his brain had blown out the back of his head and embedded itself in the wall. His huge body was lying in a pool of blood that hadn’t even had time to congeal.
Ten months ago, a similar disturbance had taken place in her neighbor Susanna’s house. Susanna’s daughter Yolanda had been murdered by shots fired from her boyfriend’s gun before he turned it on himself. The two bodies were whisked away in an ambulance before anyone had time to process that beautiful, eighteen-year-old Yolanda was dead. They had known her as a little girl playing in and around the jumble of wooden houses with the other neighborhood kids. They had watched her body as it blossomed, perfect and ripe, like a goddess of joy in the old myths. Then they watched her tragic exit from life.
Some observed how Susanna wept bitterly at the loss of her oldest daughter but then resumed her usual activities: cleaning houses and opening her blouse for those compassionate men who were tireless in their kind attempts to soothe her affliction. The beautiful girl died, and Susanna remained in the same house. She simply wiped away the bloodstains, then flung the windows open as if nothing had taken place behind them.
A short time before that, Rising Sun had also witnessed Oscar’s murder. He had been messing around with the ATM next to the gas station, opposite the pavement crammed every morning with laborers hoping for a day’s work.
At roughly eleven at night, when everything seemed quiet, a bullet was fired and ended up in his head. By the time everyone came outside to see what would happen next, young Oscar’s body was lying motionless in front of the ATM. At first they couldn’t work out how much he had bled, because of his red jacket. Nor could they confirm whether the bullet had come from the police car seen speeding away.
Dwelling on such details wasn’t important; people fell to stray bullets all the time in these hills, although it usually happened inside one of the wooden shacks: a suicide or a domestic dispute, the types of conflicts that materialized in Rising Sun, whose consequences people swiftly forgot, so soon were they entangled in the next set of clashes.
Shootings broke out all the time in unexpected places. A few months earlier, one of the primary schools had seen gunfire in the head teacher’s office during a PTA meeting. The alarms went off immediately, and the students ducked under their desks while they waited to be evacuated. In the meeting, a Black construction worker who could probably trace his roots to one of the Caribbean islands, and who spoke a language no one could understand, had been furious about something. His rage had reached alarming proportions as he realized that the people around him couldn’t understand him. After a burst of outrage, he pointed his gun at the head teacher’s face and repeated wildly, before and after every phrase, “You understand me? You don’t understand me.” The head teacher pissed his pants as he assured the man sincerely, “Yes, I understand you. I’m really trying, sir.”
In the valley, shootings became serial tragedies of a seasonal nature, like wildfires. No one knew how they began or where they would end. The most recent occurred at Mountain Lake High School, one morning when a student decided to fire off a volley at the walls. He wounded himself and killed a few others who were passing at the time. The school closed its doors for a few weeks, then opened back up again, as it became clear that shootings were now a part of life in this land, one of the local customs expressing boredom and rage—rage that would explode suddenly and discharge itself in a way that couldn’t easily be erased.
Niam Khabbaz had believed that shootings happened to other people. They happened to Yolanda, to Oscar, and to Susanna, but couldn’t happen in her house.
On that autumnal evening, a stifled gunshot rang out, and she saw Jamal’s body lying in a pool of blood. Then, what always happens happened. A police officer wrote a report summarizing the facts: Gunshot through the mouth and skull. Bullet landed in the wall. Victim was bare-chested and wearing black exercise shorts. His mouth smelled of marijuana. He held a red Nokia phone. A search is being undertaken into motives for suicide.
During the autopsy, the people who managed the Islamic corpse-washing for Shari’i burial arrived. The imam, Abu Abdelqadir, spoke about the deceased, how to wash the body, the funeral prayers, the burial procedures, and the location of the grave. A group of women trooped over as well, friends of Niam Khabbaz, including Fatima, Susanna, and Crystal, all clad in black and white. They spoke to her about patience, reciting verses from the Quran alongside prayers to the Lord to send down tranquility, and then the worshippers scattered.
The house smelled of incense, spices, and the flowers that had been laid on the ground where the body had fallen. The body now rested in the nearby graveyard they called the Garden of Souls.
At night everyone left, and Niam Khabbaz locked her door, but the smell of death lingered for months. Not even the deepest-cleaning chemicals could erase it; it continued to lay siege to her, even after the neighbors clubbed together and replaced the old rug with a pine-green carpet in the hope that the change would disperse the smells that clung to her memory. But the drab rug only made the setting bleaker. The blood stayed spilled, and the bullet in the wall became a second corpse on the scene. With time, Niam Khabbaz became absorbed in her other pains, and Rising Sun too became absorbed in fresh disasters: Mimi Dong’s drowning, the time Lucy lost Amy’s cat, Niam Khabbaz’s other son Omar running away, the wounding of Saleem Najjar, and the attempted rescue of the children from the ill-fated ship Ain Al-Hayat.
Rising Sun dozed at the foot of the Scarlet Mountains on the western coast of the country, reclining meekly at the crossroads that led to the mountain retreats in the north. From space, it looked no more than an earthy depression among a ring of rocky outcrops and desert elevations. Its southern borders brushed up against an arid desert that was, and still is, a border crossing for those seeking unofficial ways to enter the country. Eastward, it looked out over another range of basalt forms in shades of gray, whose shadows danced over the hills like phantom heads. To the west, a huge cliff, a destination for rock climbers, stood between it and the coastline. This outcrop was to blame for severing Rising Sun’s connection to the ocean; the village’s link to the west coast was restricted to a trench, a gully that widened and cut a path parallel to the outcrop. They called it “the Gulf.”
Due to this unique topography, the people of Rising Sun were accustomed to breathing in the dust of the encircling hills and resigned to the fumes of the shallow Gulf, which smelled of dead dog after the pitched battles of mating season, then of mucus from the laboring bitches who deposited their young in pockets of warm water.
The breezes of summer blew over the town, bringing dust from the mountain and slapping it against windows and glass frontings. Then the rain fell and ran over the accumulated filth like bitter tears, tracing the wrinkles carved into the layers of cracked paint. The seasonal showers stripped the wood from the meager houses and inflamed the lust of the white ants and red spiders, who emerged, dancing, from cracks in the earth, climbing up the wooden slats and over the roof tiles, creeping their way from underground lairs to the flowerpots hanging from the balconies.
Rising Sun was a small colony, the remnants of a half-abandoned border town. They said that in earlier times it had been a flimsy collection of wooden cabins inhabited by workers of the now-exhausted copper mine. The workers had left a long time ago, leaving behind a dilapidated chain of small huts that trembled and swayed in the mountainous space—isolated, huddled together, and exposed to each other. Over time, the human colony expanded, and additional neighborhoods and domestic extensions sprang up between the rocky knolls. The village turned into a waystation for illegal workers trying to reach the mountain plantations in the north.
Busloads of cleaners and garden laborers emerged from this colony every morning, lumbering up the mountain paths toward the distant hills where the resorts of Eternal Eden slumbered high among the peaks. The workers carried tree loppers, lawnmowers, palm clippers, and garden decorations to these elevated sites. Minibuses bore the logos of various cleaning companies: Clean Home, Susanna Clean, Matilda & Sisters Domestic Cleaning.
The buses followed the winding roads between the mountain passes, climbing ever higher, eventually stopping in Eternal Eden, where the distant resorts shimmered, and their passengers laid bare the interiors of those luxury villas, whose owners were in perpetual need of cleaning ladies and handymen.
The gaps in the southern border that had originally spat out Niam Khabbaz and the other residents of Rising Sun were no longer considered safe for crossing attempts; border guards were now responsible for securing the immense desert where many perished of thirst, their journeys ending before they began. The coastal borders were secured too, the entrances to the Gulf barred by iron stakes and hammers over large distances inland. But these measures didn’t entirely stop attempts to smuggle people over the border, either in lorry shipments or on foot through the vast desert. Over time, because of its position, the village became the first stopping point for these illicit crossing attempts. It saw fugitives hiding in its backstreets for days before seeking out a safe route north through mountains. They were trying to escape to the distant vineyards, or to regions where no one would ask where they came from—as long as they could avoid the cars deporting illegal workers, of course, or the security patrols that occasionally descended on the mountain roads and succeeded in forcing some of them back across the border. Still, some did manage to disappear into the north, dreaming that good fortune was smiling on them and would allow them to be forgotten for a while.
Niam Khabbaz didn’t fall into that bracket in any case. She had acquired permanent legal residency so long ago that she had forgotten how she arrived. But in her view, which was imprecise and perhaps somewhat fictional, God had compensated her for her miserable childhood by casting her unexpectedly into this country. She had come as a carer for the elderly and had worked in retirement homes in the northern resorts for more years than she could remember, and she was certain that she had been brought over legitimately, without a whiff of criminality. Because of this, many considered her lucky, until the cursed moment she lost her son. But that was not the first disaster she went through, nor the last.
At four years old Niam had fallen onto a brazier, leaving her with deep scars on the right side of her worn-out brown face. The marks enhanced the gleam in her small eyes, so like those of an angry fox.
Niam made no effort to conceal those scars, which had faded a little, thanks to wrinkles and the detritus of time. But she made use of them as required, as proof of heartrending misfortunes endured in childhood.
As she recalled, the accident had taken place on a winter’s day when the narrow alleys were covered in mire and the children’s extremities were frozen after spending all day tearing through the lanes of the village that dozed on the west bank of the delta. On that day, her father’s first wife (whom they called Rayyisa, the Chief) had lit the brazier and set it in the middle of their gathering, preparing to smoke her shisha pipe.
Rayyisa was first lady and original owner of the house and bakery, and in the family she alone had the freedom to arrange the affairs of this life. Also present was Niam’s father, Jaafar Khabbaz; he sat in the center of the family group but was overshadowed by the physical presence of Rayyisa, who, with her luxuriant smoking, gave a rough impression of womanliness; every few hours, she would light up a heap of coals in a clay pot, both to warm herself and so she could smoke without interruption. She would pull in smoke through the shisha pipe until her chest was packed full of tobacco and brimming with phlegm, then spit in every direction. In the evening, Jaafar Khabbaz would lie down exhausted next to Rayyisa on cushions in the courtyard of their house, to enjoy partaking with her in the smoke that grimly enveloped their life. Rayyisa would lay her huge haunch down, he would rest his head on it, then she would hand him the shisha pipe. The dense, treacly smoke accumulated into a cloud over the crumbs on the empty dishes and the leavings of the offspring who bounded around the scene at the end of the day.
The evening Niam fell onto the glowing coals, Jaafar Khabbaz, as usual, had his head in Rayyisa’s lap and was slurping doglike at the shisha while Niam’s mother massaged his feet and his third wife was busy preparing tea on the small gas cooker at the edge of the family group. The fire that evening was rosy and vicious, its flame the center of the gathering. The rain was pattering against the window, and the young were drawn to the circle of warmth, exchanging stories, curses, riddles, and laughter, a scene of domestic harmony rarely seen in the Khabbaz house—until Niam Khabbaz’s sobs and the disfigurement of her charred face extinguished it.
Jaafar Khabbaz was tall and thin, with the eyes of a mountain fox: watchful, with a gleam of ferocity and full of the wisdom that comes from deliberation, eyes that disclosed many and varied capacities for cruelty. Niam had inherited these eyes but not his delicate features, inconsistent with their Iraqi roots. She had neither the thick, blond hair that tumbled from beneath his turban, nor his Caucasian features or white skin. His handsomeness was entirely unblemished, apart from the minute tattoo just beside his right eyebrow.
Jaafar Khabbaz, in Niam’s memory, was leaning back on the cushions in his Kashmiri jilbab, his legs extended into the center of the tribe of children. He was smiling and flushed, content that his three women had produced numerous male progeny who had been funneled into the bakery at early ages to share the responsibilities of carrying sacks of flour, kneading, cutting, baking, and lighting the ovens.
Work at the bakery proceeded according to Rayyisa’s instructions. She divided up the tasks without showing fear or favor to the offspring of Jaafar’s other wives. Jaafar, since marrying her, was content to sit beside her on the brick platform next to the mouth of the oven. Rayyisa was always busy: counting the bread rolls, following the movement of sales, counting the money that ended up in a cloth wallet dangling between her prominent breasts beneath the collar of her rose-scented thobe. She would unbutton it and lean over, her breasts drooping hugely, ignoring the glances of passersby.
Rayyisa ran her world with a masculine spirit gained through experience and helped by her sharp features, rough voice, and talent for double entendres. True, few were the battles she plunged into to assert her status, but they were enough to distinguish her skill in the art of obscenity; she would swear oaths on her sexual organs, snort with relish, use her middle finger, and wiggle her huge behind like a duck being mounted, all to convey paralyzing messages to her adversaries.
Rayyisa could draw on her fertile imagination to measure everything around her against its sexual and reproductive capabilities. Sitting next to Jaafar Khabbaz, she would joke that someone or other was “Monkey Face,” someone else “Shitter,” so-and-so “Patched-up Pants,” and someone else again “Rusty Pole.” She never disguised the innuendo behind every word of her performance.
This talent guaranteed her standing in the kingdom of males (who avoided her tongue), along with her position beside Jaafar Khabbaz, who thought of her as the Lady of Resplendence. He would bellow with laughter and hunch over her thigh in delight whenever she leaned to his ear to describe a passerby, male or female, drawing on the carnal imagination that tickled his sensibilities.
Rayyisa believed that the world was constructed between the thighs of women, and insemination was the essence of life itself. Thus, she was careful to marry off Jaafar’s many daughters as soon as they reached puberty. Some were married into the neighboring villages of Suwarka, Gharabwa, or Bahr. Others were married in towns farther away, too far for anyone to know the way there. Rayyisa believed that every girl and every woman was capable of creating the world she wanted from between her legs.
Jaafar Khabbaz, for his part, would quickly lose patience in the engagement negotiations and never questioned the dowry or marriage arrangements. He simply examined his daughter’s backside to confirm that his new kinsman would have an incentive to take proper care of his bride for the rest of her days. When a daughter left Jaafar’s house, better that she stayed wherever she went and didn’t think of returning, even for a visit.
Jaafar did not acknowledge his grandchildren. He cared for nothing but his own life, which was regulated according to daily prayers, which he performed diligently in the mosque next to the bakery. Jaafar spent half his life in the yard behind this mosque, which was maintained by a Sufi order that authorized its members to consume intoxicants, such as hashish and opium, believing they either put the worshipper in relative isolation from existence or released his spiritual energy.
Jaafar Khabbaz alternated his shisha pipe with his mystics, dividing his private devotions between morning and evening. In his fantasy world of smoke and prayer, he felt unique, and saw himself ascending to where Rayyisa sat alone on the throne, managing the young girls, who seemed as if they were not his but only pretending to be.
Untrusting of what he saw in these wondrous visions, he could only see that he was created to circle the axle that was Rayyisa in perfect contentment.
Every morning he would diligently take his place beside the Lady of Resplendence at the entrance to the bakery. He received greetings from the workers and scrutinized the passersby, sipping all the while from a cup of coffee laced with opium. In the evenings, still next to Rayyisa, he would sit in the courtyard of the house attached to the bakery and preside over the family gathering, reclining on his elbow, replete and fainting away amid the phantoms that danced around him.
Jaafar Khabbaz lived on those mouthfuls of opium-scented coffee. These sips allowed him to swim constantly in a region somewhere between life and death, quiet, invisible, and ready, orbiting the station of Rayyisa beyond which he could never venture, even in his wildest fantasies.
Niam occasionally recalled this world, which she left behind the moment Jaafar said she must. It was the first and last thing he said to her, or about her: “You and your lot, Niam… May God decree good for you, my girl, wherever you end up.” He was thinking that his daughter was merely ruined stock in the marriage market, and that she would have to follow other paths in life in order to survive. Rayyisa twitched her hip involuntarily as she took a deep pull of smoke, then she patted Niam on the back, pulled her over by her trousers, and pinched her close to her crotch; laughing, and perhaps advising, Rayyisa declared, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Then she let out the snort that brought Jaafar to his knees.
Niam’s mother didn’t feature in this final scene. She was busy elsewhere, perhaps birthing a new daughter or washing a pile of dishes in some corner. Niam could not recall this mother’s face, while Rayyisa remained eternally present in her mind, embodying every attribute of power, cruelty, and authority that Niam herself aspired to.
One morning, Jaafar took her to Amr Allah’s house. That was how Rayyisa, Niam’s mother, the many siblings, the oven, and the house all disappeared from her life. Niam Khabbaz became a maidservant, sleeping at the feet of her mistress, “Many-Pained”—the mistress who needed a young girl-child to comfort her at night after her own children all left her and dispersed throughout the country.
Niam bounced around the employment agencies that tossed maids into trains, ships, faraway cities, and strangers’ homes. Some chose her because she was young and nimble and could endure hardship. Others chose her because she was maimed and wouldn’t arouse the appetites of husbands or sons whose senses blossomed after hitting puberty.
Niam Khabbaz recalled several of her employers with considerable bitterness, a bitterness that stuck to her even after she wound up in Rising Sun.
No one knew exactly when or how she had arrived, how she crossed the sea or settled in this country. It seemed most likely that she had come in the company of one of her elderly employers. Some miles north of Rising Sun was a huge sanatorium for the aged, or at least for the aged rich, and any who were able headed there from godforsaken lands. In earlier times, female workers or maidservants had been permitted to accompany them as permanent companions.
The sanatorium was still a small, sunny resort, renowned for its mountain breezes and multinational medical teams. Probably Niam, like others at that time, had passed through the sanatorium in the company of one its residents; or perhaps she fell off a boat that landed in the narrow Gulf, from whose inlets hordes of fleeing laborers (and potential citizens) flowed into Rising Sun.
Kiss my ass was Niam Khabbaz’s favorite expression in the face of obstacles. If anyone looked down on her, she would use it to convey her disdain, disgust, or indifference. This occurred frequently, because of how people treated each other in Rising Sun, as well as Niam’s general attitude. Her behind was still beautiful and firm, rounding out underneath the tight trousers she liked because of the way they hugged her body in all the right places, emphasizing her femininity. But the rest of her appearance only provoked pity. Her clothes reflected a mixture of outmoded tastes, since she relied fundamentally on cast-offs, whatever the rich dumped on their doorsteps, and her own taste tended toward the chaotic and awkward. She preferred bulky trainers, usually cheap and secondhand, to suit her heavy footsteps.
Over her tight trousers, Niam would wear cotton tops printed with ridiculous phrases. She chose them because they were free or cheap, not because they were to her taste or to anyone else’s, and most bore slogans like “Doctor Seuss for Whiter Teeth,” “Holy Heart Guarantees You a Free Meal,” or “Together Against Hunger.”
Niam also liked T-shirts that reflected a bit of local character, ones that showed cactus plants, depictions of Kokopelli (who symbolized life and renewal for some of those tribes on the verge of dying out), or other magical symbols mingled with hawks, snakes, and ancient gods and demons.
Niam didn’t believe in any hidden magic power in these drawings. She just found this type of clothing abundant. Tourists who visited the northern hills usually threw them away in garbage bins or donation boxes, and afterward they made their way into Niam’s hands, skilled in scrabbling among scraps. In any case, these clothes were consistent with her nature in that they were a mixture of all the ingredients of Rising Sun: anger, wretchedness, and ugliness.
When Niam first tumbled into this land, like other migrants, she was incapable of holding a simple conversation in the language. But she was bold enough to swap phrases with supreme confidence, heedless of the results. These exchanges usually ended with smiles, and the mutual belief that the other was unable to communicate for cultural reasons, or perhaps lack of intelligence. As time passed, the strangers gained enough fluency to get by in that many-accented vernacular.
Within a few months, Niam became quick at managing short, cheeky, even unforeseen conversations. She’d learned enough to make a precise selection from the lexicon of curses. Perhaps she didn’t entirely understand everyday slang, but she pronounced it correctly and eloquently and could employ it to hit her target efficiently.
Niam Khabbaz saw herself as part of a generation of pioneers, not just in her appearance, but in the very fundamentals of her experience—which was repeated every day, in a sad and frightening way. Hers was one of the luckiest generations, those who came early and could acquire social security cards, food stamps, unemployment benefits, and generally make a success of migration. She came from the golden generation that was able to amass a little wealth from trading in baby formula and smuggled goods; the generation of welfare and bank loans. It had been a long time since the crossing was easy or work opportunities available, since immigration bureaus were sympathetic to tragic stories, whether true or invented. If you asked, “Why did you come here, Niam?” she would reply, in the manner suited to the official bureaus, that she had fled from a kind of hell. “God grant my father exactly what he deserves. I hope he starves.”
The mark of the old fire on her dark skin was a document that established her a victim, of violence, war, or racial persecution. Niam knew how to make good use of these effects when she wanted. The disfigurement may have covered half her face, but the other half was more sour. It was the face of a woman who wanted to love and be loved, to be desired by men, but hadn’t been able to realize these fantasies, despite her many and varied abilities to grab what she wanted from life.
Niam had an overwhelming appetite for the garish. She desired the roles of lover and beloved but didn’t manage to embody them in reality. She adored large sunglasses and handbags splashed with logos, and she loved collecting jewelry, silk scarves, and aristocratic clothes that had been in fashion decades ago, along with Mexican fans, photos of rich families in old frames, and oil paintings of Eternal Eden by unknown artists. Eager desire sparked from her eyes as she bent over her cleaning equipment in the lavish houses where she offered her services, houses filled with treasure: ceramics, overflowing kitchens, luxury cars, closets stuffed with clothes.
Leaving Rising Sun in the cleaning buses and traveling over the mountains was a sacred rite of passage to the Eternal Eden she hungered for, where there was no place for her kind. It was this yearning, this hope, that attracted her to lucky gemstones. For these stones, she made long journeys between the Santan and Senora mountain passes, or to the Valley of Returning Spirits, where she would frequent the gemstone markets on the Southern Gold Mine Road. She would linger in these markets filled with women who closely resembled her, each one sullen and alone, hunting out stones of luck, envy, and love.
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Miral al-Tahawy is an award-winning Egyptian novelist and short-story writer and an associate professor of modern Arabic literature at Arizona State University, where she is an affiliated member of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
Leri Price is an award-winning translator of Arabic literature. A three-time finalist for the National Book Award, she is the winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
Photo by Gabriele Loffredo on Unsplash
