Mother of All Pigs Page 12

  He explained to Samira that the office, which produced nature magazines for children, was a cover for group activities. He was impressed by the work of Zeinab and the women’s committee, and had become their most vocal supporter inside the group, which had many small units and cells spread across Syria and in the countries hosting the refugees. Mr. Ammar, pleased with himself, explained that for strategic purposes, the left side didn’t know what those on the right were doing. This prompt delivery of Samira’s parcel gained her entry close to those operating at the top.

  “Don’t be surprised if we are familiar with you and your family,” he added, “including your brother’s, let us say, unconventional business. From our perspective we need to take precautions and know our friends and enemies alike.”

  He went on to discuss the decision-making process at the beginning of the uprising, when everyone in the front had a say. If one person disagreed, the group was paralyzed. “This changed once the fighting became more intense and we were forced to respond more quickly. When you live for so long under a dictatorship you become suspicious of anyone making a decision for you, no matter how pure his or her motives might first appear.”

  Unsure of how to respond, Samira surveyed the view from a grubby window: parched urban grayness interrupted by shiny glass-and-steel skyscrapers. In times of wars, preferably those taking place in other countries, Jordan always enjoyed a building boom. As quickly and politely as she arrived, she took her leave. The next time she and Zeinab were alone by themselves, Samira broached the subject of Mr. Ammar. If she was expecting an explanation, she was disappointed. All Zeinab said was “He has a tendency to crop up unexpectedly. You never know where he’ll be. I rely on him, and you should too.”

  So Samira suppressed her misgivings and continued her involvement. Over the course of the last several weeks, she came to realize that Zeinab was busy with assignments more advanced than her own. She once gave Samira a clue when she explained that the modest scarf was the best form of camouflage: “Everyone thinks I’m quiet and submissive—nicely nicely Muslim girl.” Samira knew that they made an odd couple, herself always heavily made up and the intense barefaced Zeinab in somber black. Through her, Samira learned to appreciate the deceptive nature of first impressions.

  The most difficult part of the enterprise was not being able to confide in someone. Her family was out of the question, and although she loved the twins like sisters and from time to time discussed politics with them, she could only go so far. She never told them or anyone else about the women’s committee or her work. When Samira first heard about Muna’s trip, she considered her cousin as solely a means to an end, a new way of getting out of the house. After so many months, she was running out of excuses. Her family, while not as strict as many others, was starting to press her about where she was going and whom she was spending time with. Surely her mother or Laila wouldn’t object to her showing Muna various historical sites, and on the way Samira could easily run her political errands as well.

  She surveys the view from the terrace once more. In the past the sight of Walid’s house would have caused her pain; now her mind glances over it as though it doesn’t exist.

  Last night’s storm gathered sand and grit in the desert, fields, rough tracks, and town streets, depositing a fine film of dust over the furniture and floors, even in the rooms where the windows and doors were shut. Whether visitors are coming or not, Samira has to clean. Before she began working politically, she tended to start her housework slowly, lose interest in the middle, and finish only before Laila scolded her. These days she cleans energetically; her services may be required later on. Although the women’s committee views domestic work as another form of enslavement, Zeinab’s observations are never far from Samira’s mind: “A maid is as important as a politician. In most countries, they get more work done.”

  Humming distractedly, Samira fetches a broom and duster from the cupboard in the hallway. Laila and her mother are both naturally fastidious and tidy up after themselves, so their rooms are the easiest to do. Her nephews’ shared bedroom is not so neat. She collects the dirty socks and arranges the toys on top of the chest of drawers, out of the way of her dust cloth and broom. She decides to leave her own room. It seems somehow discourteous to disturb Muna’s things since Samira feels she has interfered enough. After clearing away the previous evening’s wrapping paper and the bows from the living room, the floors are ready to be washed.

  No matter how much water remains in the house, this is something Laila always insists on and can become particularly nasty if it isn’t done thoroughly. Samira has become adept at carrying out the task with minimum wastage. She fetches about a pint of water from a container in the bathroom, goes to Laila’s room, sprinkles a small amount on the floor, and then spreads it around with a squeegee-mop, picking up any of the grimy excess with an old towel. When she finishes the other bedrooms, she steals more water from the supply under the bathtub and starts on the living room.

  She has just finished wetting the floor when a loud crunching of gears and the rattling of an impossibly antiquated engine resound through an open window. The noise brings baby Fuad crawling excitedly into the room, closely followed by Muna, who doesn’t realize that the floor is damp until it’s too late. She stops midstep as Samira scoops the toddler into her arms, removes his sticky hands from her hair, and gives him to Muna, calling out, “Ta’ale, Mamma, come quickly!”

  Pushing back her glasses, Samira goes to the window, throws open the shutters, and leans all the way out. “Where have you been all these weeks? What did you expect us to do, drink dirt?”

  The driver climbs out of the water tanker and shrugs apathetically, which only exasperates her more. Before she has a chance to cuss him out, Mother Fadhma appears at her shoulder and pulls her inside.

  Roughly handled and trussed up, the tiniest exertion on her part—even a breath—nearly suffocates. Flat on her back, she’s engulfed again, her engorged belly moving, as she relives trauma: the searing and bruising of delicate skin, her imprisonment and fear. It is not loss of control but none whatsoever: soiling herself in the heat and a deep, abiding shame as diarrhea swills between her legs, rises beneath her belly, and fills a crate she’s been stuffed into. Filthy, twisted rags have been pulled tight over her head. Impossible to move, bloated, disgusting—all she can do is hate, hate, hate herself.

  Umm al-Khanaazeer remembers everything: her kidnapping and containment; each quivering turn in the road; the jolt of the rickety pickup truck grinding to a halt, followed by the wheezing inky exhaust of an uncooperative engine.

  Erratic stops make up the first leg of the journey, as larger pieces of recyclable electrical waste are summarily dispatched before the truck moves on. As the stench of her beloved Zabbaleen recedes, she leaves behind an extended family fattened by Cairo’s mega-waste, from the raw—the skins and seeds of tropical fruits—to cooked leftovers of grains and pastas made with the baharat medley of cloves and cardamom pods, coriander seeds, cinnamon, black pepper, smoked paprika, nutmeg and cumin. The lack of smell tells her of lessening human habitation as she and the truck trundle southward. She is utterly alone, the only one of her kind for miles around, a novel experience for a young sow who has spent every waking moment running in a pack of inquisitive pigs.

  Without warning, another stop in a way station reeking of diesel, rancid old falafel, and human piss. A rapid changeover of vehicles takes place. Squeezed this time on the floor of a speeding station wagon, hidden beneath heavy boxes and overfilled bags, she feels the ground taking off all around her like sickening g-force. Half curses and unfinished sentences uttered by the man who stole her drift toward the back and get lost in the road’s thunder—sounds that might as well be coming from the moon.

  She loses track of time. After hours of forever, and stationary again at last, she is extracted from the crate. Her hood is wrenched free and an entire bottle of water is shoved down her throat. Coughing, choking, and dry heaving, she nearly dro
wns. Shitting herself, she manages to break free and crawls as far as her shackles allow before passing out. When she comes to, she is starving, unable to move inside the crate.

  At another rest stop, guttural Arabic bursts in through an open window like a knife, a reminder of a bad end drawing near. No matter her agony, bribes are taken, a forward route planned. There’ll be no going back.

  Ear-splitting music from Radio Tel Aviv beats in her brain until a dial is flicked and classical quarter notes of infinite sadness fill the air. The prisoner is transported to a kinder, gentler time, when a woman singing melancholy love songs fed food sifted from trash to the beasts in her care.

  On one occasion she’s left behind—there’s business that doesn’t involve her—and is tied to a pen of camels, cousins of sorts due to an evolutionary glitch. Both are even-toed ungulates, but here the similarity between them ends. Pigs are naturally empathetic, while camels, resentful of their long-standing servitude to man, barely acknowledge each other, let alone a poor relation in their midst. Their disdain only confirms her own feelings of inferiority, enforced by a watery gruel left beyond her reach no matter how hard she strains at her ropes.

  Sweltering sun barbecues tender flesh behind her ears. Dehydration makes the steps she is still able to take slow and deathlike. When the driver returns and finds her gasping, he scolds the camel keepers for their ineptitude. With bottled water, he pours a puddle so she can wash herself, and when she doesn’t move to do so he wets a rag and pats the blisters on her skin. Afterward he applies sunblock to the most affected parts. After being mistreated for so long, she can no longer tell if the hand of the abuser offers salvation or is just pretending to. Either way, they have reached an understanding. She struggles no longer when rags are secured around her head and she is folded like a pillow back inside the crate.

  In the dark, beyond the watchtowers, a floating bridge has been surreptitiously erected, one from a raft and ropes that will be dismantled before first light. Money always exchanges hands. Crossing of the Jordan River, her handler has been informed, should never be hurried—noise travels far in the dead of night. After the cargo is secured, her crate is separated from the rest, its top prized off. Head freed, she is encouraged to look around.

  “It won’t be long now,” her torturer promises.

  As the raft pulled by the ropes glides across water, she nearly starts to cry. The ordeals of travel and changes to her body have taken their toil. Along the way she doubted whether she and her children would ever find a home, yet despite all that has been done to her and to them, inexplicably she feels they may be getting closer to one.

  She can almost taste it in the sweet grasses along the banks and in the swell of the current, the man by her side as quiet and watchful as she is. Together they share a moment of the essential timelessness under the stars. She had forgotten of their existence. When she wakes, she feels rested and at peace.

  9

  In school, Laila passes rows of students and a few teachers on their knees, praying, in one of the larger classrooms. Instead of lessons continuing with a percentage of the pupils absent, she and most of the teachers take a lunch break in the staff room, where a single ceiling fan clatters overhead.

  Usually Laila sits by herself, but today she feels isolated despite making little effort to socialize herself. Longing for a kind word or trivial exchange, she settles in an empty corner chair among her colleagues, and she is reminded that the new headmistress expects the staff to be above reproach. So far Hussein’s name has not yet been mentioned.

  She rests her eyes. While some of her coworkers bring a sandwich from home or buy a snack from the school canteen, Laila avoids eating in public. Successive small cups of industrial-strength Arabic coffee from Amina, who’s in charge of the teachers’ hot drinks, will hold her until she returns home. She takes out student exercises from the folders she’s been carrying and starts to grade. When the hubbub of voices around her diminishes she knows, without looking, that the headmistress Mrs. Salwa has entered the staff room. As she gazes up from the exercises in her lap, Laila feels the slow, dull breeze from the overhead fan on her face and sees the headmistress coming straight toward her.

  Laila immediately stands, papers in hand. She is convinced this is the moment she has been dreading. “Mrs. Salwa.” Laila glances at her watch but the numbers blur.

  The headmistress, a stout woman in her fifties, smiles pleasantly, which only confuses the teacher. “I’ve only come to say that I’m off to the Matroubs this afternoon to greet the bride.”

  Laila, recovering herself, smiles. “Of course.” She can’t stop her eyes from straying to her wrist. It’s easier to look down than at Mrs. Salwa. This time the numbers appear stark and vivid. She would like to emulate the headmistress’s easygoing manner but blurts out instead, “I have a few things to do after school and probably won’t be able to stay long. I hope I don’t miss you.”

  “Looking forward to it.” The headmistress stops and talks to other teachers on her way out.

  In a daze Laila returns to her grading. She would like to go to the Matroubs, if only to show her face for a few minutes, while the neighboring women offer advice to the new wife-to-be. Perversely she enjoys those sorts of outings, but one obstacle prevents her: she was not invited. In any other circumstances this might have been an oversight, for Laila and the bride’s mother, Warda Matroub, are close friends. Everyone knows that, even the headmistress, who has been invited to the Matroubs as a matter of form.

  Although Warda is nine years older than Laila, she and her family moved to the town the year Hussein brought his new wife home. Warda’s husband had been working as a structural engineer in Jeddah and took the unusual course of taking his wife with him to live there rather than leaving her in Jordan. She therefore spent most of her marriage in seclusion. Women aren’t permitted to drive cars in a country as religiously observant as Saudi Arabia. So Warda—from a large, boisterous Muslim family in Amman—occupied herself by reading romance novels published in English. She attributes her survival in the cultural wilderness to the potboilers of Jackie Collins and Barbara Cartland, supplemented by countless afternoon teas taken in the hermetically sealed, marble-encrusted reception rooms of other women living in purdah. By the time she, her husband, and three daughters returned to the town of his birth, she told Laila she was set in her ways and planned to spend her afternoons receiving guests. However, she found her husband’s female relations as tedious as the townswomen. So when she was introduced to Laila, she latched on to the modern Christian teacher who taught English at the government school. She told Laila they had much in common, and not just their love of Wuthering Heights.

  The basis of their friendship was the shared alienation they felt in the small, conservative town. Laila has always talked openly with Warda, even when Hussein’s growing business venture was not to the liking of some members of her friend’s community. Warda vowed to be “unadulterated and completely honest” with Laila, borrowing a cover line from one of the romance novels. Despite the pact between them, Laila is sure that Umm al-Khanaazeer has something to do with her exclusion from the women’s get-together.

  Warda’s daughter Anna, the bride-to-be, had overheard the two of them talking about the pig’s fecundity, and she became so physically ill that she began retching in the toilet. As they ministered to her, Warda made light of the situation: “Honestly, Laila, many women would be thrilled if their daughters-in-law were as productive and gave birth to eight or twelve children at a time—preferably all boys!”

  Anna, objecting, cried out in pain, “Ya, Mamma!”

  Warda had sympathetically glanced down at her daughter and then rolled her eyes at her friend, who was laughing so hard she hid her face in a towel.

  Laila hopes that Anna—and not her mother—was responsible for the lack of invitation. Warda would never succumb to the growing climate of suspicion in the town. Whatever the reason, Laila knows that by not attending the get-together her social s
tanding will be further eroded among people like Mrs. Habash—the type of tired, blind minds Laila is constantly warning her students and their parents about. She has too much consideration for Warda to arrive unannounced. That would be too embarrassing. Proud and unbending, Laila finishes grading, then flicks through the plans for the next lesson, the composition of an English letter. Once midday prayers are finished, she heads into the maelstrom of the hallways.

  Maps, photographs, and school projects cover the walls of a room duplicated throughout the school. Behind thirty desks wait fourteen-year-old girls. School has changed since Laila was a student. Teaching no longer involves a brisk rap across the knuckles—punishment for a wrong answer. Laila is strict, but she would never hit her pupils. She finds a sharp word or disapproving gaze adequate enough. Sometimes she wonders whether her students have grown more docile or she has become more intolerant.

  She is writing “dear” on the chalkboard in English and Arabic when a hand shoots up. Reema is one of Laila’s more precocious students. Lately she has become outspoken. “Miss, in our letters we open with ‘Thanks be to God,’” she says. “Don’t the English or Americans have a similar greeting?”

  The atmosphere in the classroom is suddenly charged. Reema’s friends who pray and study together are not the only ones listening closely to their teacher’s reaction. Girls who aren’t necessarily religious but feel the pressure to conform to the sheikh’s teachings are also curious.