Mother of All Pigs Read online

  To divert Mrs. Habash’s attention, he remarks blandly, “I sell so much goat these days—”

  “I suppose it’s cheap meat they want for all those children,” she declares. “You can see why they have no money.”

  Hussein suddenly feels drained. The morning has already taken its toll. There are too many lines of division between those who have money and those who do not. Hussein sees himself scrabbling in the middle, attempting to grab whatever he can for his family but feeling like a failure most of the time.

  Tiredness overrides his better judgment. “All of us like a lot of children, Mrs. Habash, whatever our religion, don’t you agree?”

  The mayor’s wife has no offspring; it is the one weakness in her social armor. Hussein doesn’t care that he is being reckless. Lower than refugees are barren women. Everyone agrees: they are without purpose. Christian, Muslim, and Jew alike, they have failed their families and their gods.

  Mrs. Habash’s composure instantaneously toughens, as she aims for Hussein’s most vulnerable spot: “By the way, how’s business?”

  Before he can answer, Khaled appears behind the counter, his clothes flecked with chicken feathers. He proudly holds up a freshly plucked chicken.

  “Wonderful.” Hussein slaps the boy on the back with more enthusiasm than is necessary. He wraps it up, saying, “Fine, Mrs. Habash, just fine,” and hands it to her.

  She has already counted out the change. “I only ask because there are rumors, you know.”

  As she leaves she holds the butcher’s door wide open. Hussein is sure she is going to remark on the sorry state of the van. So to save himself the embarrassment, he turns his back toward her. Without a ready audience, the screen door slams shut. The sound brings Khaled in from the back with the speckled bird he loves clucking in his arms.

  The boy might not be so dumb, Hussein thinks, but his satisfaction doesn’t last long. “Put it back. We’ve wasted too much time.”

  Together they pack the mutton into clear plastic bags. The meat is destined for the kitchen of Hussein’s friend Matroub and tonight’s feast celebrating his eldest daughter’s wedding.

  Normally Hussein reminds Khaled not to stray on his errands. Today Hussein promises more kindly, “If you hurry they’ll give you ma’amoul.” Khaled’s face lights up at the prospect of semolina cookies. Hussein follows the boy out of the shop and stands on the main street.

  The other stores and stalls have opened, as a queue forms outside the bakery. Down the street in front of the pilgrims’ hotel, baseball caps and sun visors board one of the Holy Land tour buses. In front of him, on the other side of the street’s only asphalted section, looms the Marvellous Emporium, a storehouse of untold proportions owned and operated by Abu Za’atar. Hussein wants to go over immediately, to demand his uncle’s attention and pour out his troubles, but the sight of a large truck from Iraq parked beneath the emporium’s neon display stops him. He is all too familiar with Abu Za’atar’s priorities. Drivers bringing loads of potentially profitable goods take precedence over family matters. This truck has an added bonus. It comes from a place known for its American swag—recycled military attire, packaged food beyond its sell-by date, even spare parts from defunct air-conditioning units—which is highly coveted and requires Abu Za’atar’s undivided attention. For it is in the few minutes between refreshment and unloading that a deal is struck. “What a hungry man clings to a full belly gives away” is another of his uncle’s cherished aphorisms.

  In the past, Hussein would have been amused. However, since their business venture has become troublesome, he finds himself wondering whether he is just another victim of Abu Za’atar’s avarice. In any commercial transaction his uncle always takes more than his fair share of the profits—that is to be expected. In this one he has managed to avoid both the inconvenience and the social stigma enveloping Hussein. The butcher purses his lips in disgust, mainly with himself. He knows there is no point in being annoyed by Abu Za’atar’s behavior. The new uneasiness in their relationship is not his uncle’s fault. He’s always acted exactly the same way. The problem is that Hussein is finding it harder to accept his relation’s philosophy of profit above all else. Sighing, he retreats back into the shop.

  Alone before the morning crush, he crouches down behind the counter and reaches behind one of the refrigerators. Making sure that no one sees him, he surreptitiously extracts an ordinary jar, unscrews the lid, and drinks, long and slow. The neat arak is like fire in his throat, but with the burning comes the savage calm he always finds, temporarily, at the bottom of a bottle. People like Abu Za’atar and Mrs. Habash shouldn’t have a monopoly on a decent future. He wants the same opportunities not so much for himself—it is too late for that—but for his sons. So he did what many would have found inconceivable: he sold his father’s land. Through his own initiative his family resides in a new house. But no amount of money, as his uncle continually reminds him, is ever enough. Hussein glances around again before quickly reaching for the jar and taking one more potent swallow.

  From the moment Abu Za’atar showed him the pig, Hussein knew it was not going to be an easy road to riches. He had not really thought any further than the first litter and assumed the piglets would be fattened up for a one-off bonanza sale. Then the business would end. He had not reckoned on the pigs’ natural behavior. No sooner were the young boars weaned than they acquired the mounting reflex. First they tried their mother, then each other, and finally turned their attention to their own sisters. Hussein watched them and began to wonder whether there might be more to the project than he thought.

  He knew castration was the best way to ensure that the boars fattened up properly, but he decided to spare two of them from the knife. He left them with their mother and five of their sisters and moved the other thirteen piglets into different pens. The males mated with an uninhibited, libidinous indulgence, reveling in their thirteen-minute orgasms. Fascinated, Hussein timed them on a fancy Taiwanese stopwatch (accurate to one-tenth of a second) borrowed from the Marvellous Emporium. The experiment paid off. At the end of the fifth month, the mother and three of her daughters were pregnant. The rest of the litter was ready for market, but Hussein made a peculiar discovery: he did not have the heart to kill them. It was strange that the son of a farmer, accustomed from an early age to the necessities of slaughtering animals, should be so squeamish; stranger still that a former soldier schooled in the accoutrements of death, from small arms to switchblades, would be incapable of cutting a pig’s throat. Irrationally, he had developed affection for the creatures, born out of respect for their intelligence. There was no question of going to Abu Za’atar; his uncle would not have understood.

  Hussein wondered whom he could safely approach with his problem. Then he hit upon the idea of asking the head of the family who rented his father’s mud brick house. Hussein had overridden strenuous objections from Laila when he originally leased the building to one of the oldest Palestinian refugee families, who had arrived in the town during Al Jid’s lifetime. His wife could not understand why he charged so little rent or why, when there was a surplus at the shop, he took gifts of meat to his tenants. It was more than welfare relief on Hussein’s part. By using his father’s house to benefit the less fortunate, he hoped to atone for selling off Al Jid’s beloved land.

  Whatever the reason, the family was grateful for his kindness and the husband, a man of about sixty, was more than willing to care for the pigs and get one of his sons to slaughter them for a small remuneration. In this way Hussein took on his first employees, and Ahmad proved to be a capable worker. Nine months and a hundred piglets later, there was more to do than ever before. The retail side of the business was growing, and it looked as though Abu Za’atar’s prediction of easy wealth had not been unfounded.

  There remained, however, one apparently insurmountable problem. Hussein scrupulously examined each new litter. He measured each piglet’s weight and size, inspected hooves and tails, and checked eyes, looking for sign
s. So far he had been lucky, but he knew that his chances of producing another generation without some evidence of inbreeding were very slight. As Laila put it: “Who would want to eat a two-headed beast with six legs?” The gold mine would have closed prematurely if not for Abu Za’atar’s intervention.

  The wily emporium proprietor had already made numerous contributions. He provided, at only a fraction above cost, feed, antibiotics, a large and rather noisy freezer, and even an electric prod that Hussein didn’t have the heart to use; but the solution he devised totally eclipsed his previous efforts: through his cross-border contacts Abu Za’atar managed to discover a supply of frozen boar semen. Hussein had not been too keen on the idea—there was something unnatural about it that made him feel queasy.

  When the first consignment arrived aboard a Damascus-bound truck, Hussein’s misgivings multiplied. Both the label on the box, which contained the vials of sperm, and the instruction booklet that accompanied it were written in Hebrew. Although there was also a religious prohibition of pork on the other side of the river, it was marketed as basar lavon—“white meat.” At first pork was sold secretly in butcher shops, but when eight hundred thousand Russian immigrants arrived in Israel after 1989, pork was practically on every street corner. To many in Hussein’s town, the very idea of artificial insemination was outrageous enough, but Hussein knew that if the origin of his latest secret were to become public knowledge, then everything he had worked for would go up in smoke.

  Abu Za’atar was, of course, thrilled by the prospect of such technological innovation. With his good eye and magnifying glass, he studied the thermometer and other equipment with giddy enthusiasm. Poring over the instructions, he displayed a knowledge of Hebrew that shocked Hussein. As Abu Za’atar assembled the catheter, he airily explained that when no one in the wider Middle East was allowed to say the word “Israel” in public without being arrested, he wanted to learn the country’s language as an act of youthful rebellion. His dream was realized after peace was made between Jordan and Israel in 1994 and cheap Hebrew correspondence courses became available from the Knesset in Jerusalem. Then he brushed aside his nephew’s fears once and for all by declaring, “What’s good for pigs is good for politics.”

  Bolstered by his uncle’s confidence, Hussein reluctantly agreed to give the procedure a try. They restricted themselves to working on the big pig until the method was perfected. The first two attempts were not successful, but by carefully monitoring the signs—a certain redness around the genitals in the presence of one of the boars, a rise in body temperature—Hussein was able to choose the opportune time for the third attempt. The resulting litter was small—eight piglets—but it was clear that the benefits of introducing new blood far outweighed a temporary slowdown. As the litters grew in number and frequency, it was Ahmad who christened Abu Za’atar’s pig. When he groomed her, he whispered to Umm al-Khanaazeer, Mother of All Pigs, how she alone had brought them good fortune.

  In any event, there had been a period during the early days when production outpaced demand. This troubled Abu Za’atar, who hated to see waste, particularly if there was a way of turning it into profit. The freezer he supplied was not large enough to contain the surplus, and the fuel costs of running the generator proved to be unnervingly high. So the old man urged his nephew to find some other way of preserving the meat.

  Hussein started visiting culinary websites at the town’s relatively new Internet café and found one that detailed various methods of producing ham. He arrived at the farm with two aluminum pots. To ensure against trichinosis, an incomprehensible but nevertheless unpleasant-sounding condition, the meat had to be treated at high temperatures. Hussein was by no means confident in the small fire Ahmad had built, so he compensated by insisting that the meat be steeped in a brine solution and then subjected to several prolonged applications of salt, sugar, potassium nitrate, pepper, and spices, all of which was supplied from the emporium. The result was then dried in the sun. These hams were hard and waxy; Abu Za’atar was not persuaded.

  Next, Hussein scoured the Internet for smoking techniques. He left instructions for Ahmad to build a small hut out of corrugated iron while he set about finding the right fuel himself. One site called for oak and beech, woods guaranteed to give the meat a golden hue, but not only were these particular species unavailable, Hussein lived in an area where it was hard to find any wood at all. So he sent Ahmad’s sons to comb the countryside. The assortment of zizphus scrub they managed to collect gave the meat an unhealthy blue-gray tinge and made it smell rank and bitter. “No wonder these bushes produced the thorns in Christ’s crown,” Hussein said, disgusted. He was prepared to give up the project altogether but Abu Za’atar urged him on. Through his infinite contacts, the old man learned of an olive grove in the occupied territories that was about to be destroyed to make way for a new settlement. He procured a truckload of olive wood and, at his own expense, arranged for it to be transported to the farm. Hussein protested about the political implications, but his uncle was unimpressed.

  “Surely Al Jid told you the story about the sacred olive,” his uncle explained. “Each leaf bears the words ‘Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,’ ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.’ If a tree does not pray five times a day, God forsakes it and its fate is to be cut down. Is it my fault the Israelis find every Palestinian olive grove impious?”

  Hussein let the gnarled branches weather outdoors to reduce the tannin in the bark and then carefully built a fire in his smokehouse. At last, he was rewarded. The meat, everyone agreed, gave off the aroma of bitter olive, a rich mellow flavor that became instantly popular with the customers. However, consignments of wood arrived too infrequently for smoking to be economically viable. Apart from one man who provided his own juniper twigs and berries—he had a cousin who sent them from Germany, which enabled Hussein to produce a perfectly acceptable Westphalian ham—he was forced to go back to boiling his commercial product. After much trial and error he hit upon the method of coating the cooked hams with honey, anise, and dried nana mint. The real breakthrough came when he made a thick coating of Mother Fadhma’s za’atar spice mixture and a very Arab ham was born.

  This required time and space and necessitated the construction of a processing house to keep the meat out of the sun and away from flies. Although Hussein scrupulously never tasted the meat himself, judging only from its density and feel, he was not as satisfied with the texture of the boiled hams as he had been with the smoked variety. So he was pleased that Abu Za’atar was able to arrange for most of the farm’s processed meat output to be exported. Hussein made a point of never asking its destination. If frozen boar sperm and olive wood were easily smuggled across the river, there was no reason a cargo of hams couldn’t go the other way. He just didn’t want to know.

  Anything that was not made into processed meat was taken to the sausage machine in the other part of the processing block. Even before the arrival of the machine, Abu Za’atar had insisted that any leftovers too unappetizing to sell be partially cooked, minced with stale bread, and stuffed into intestines. He reasoned that the sheer novelty would ensure sales, and he was right. It was a labor-intensive process by hand. Ahmad’s sons helped out, but it was still too much work. Hussein complained to Abu Za’atar, who responded by turning to his mysterious friend Hani, a former Palestinian fixer and purveyor of the improbable. He had managed to smuggle Umm al-Khanaazeer across four hostile borders, the first of his magic tricks. The second was the unexpected delivery to the farm of an ancient German Wurstmeister.

  The sausage machine was a thing of baroque beauty. Pipes, bowls, pistons, mixers, drums, shakers, grips, and pots exuded a futuristic, functional elegance. The power unit looked like it could drive an ocean liner, and when the machine was working it rattled alarmingly. But it performed its task with flawless efficiency. Brain and brawn, ears and jowls, lungs and trimmings, and Hussein’s failed hams were placed in a large hopper above the primary grinding assembly. Once grou
nd, they were mixed in a moving bowl by a rotary knife blade and then transferred to the emulsifier, a large drum where bread, cooked grain, herbs, and spices could be added gradually from their own separate hoppers. When the mixture reached the required consistency, it was forced by a screw mechanism through a small opening into the casings. The skins were washed, scraped, and treated with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar in a different part of the machine. An automatic tying arm twisted the links into two sizes, breakfast or cocktail.

  The sausages were more popular than the hams. In fact the only by-product that met with outright consumer resistance was the blood pudding. It simply would not move until Ahmad came up with the novel idea of dyeing the casing turquoise, a color that traditionally warded off the evil eye. After that, it sold steadily. The processing building was a monument to Abu Za’atar’s cheerful dictum that there was a use for “every part of the little piggy.”

  Swept along by his uncle’s enthusiasm and seduced by the money he was making, Hussein focused on the positive benefits and suppressed his apprehensions. The morning’s incident outside the mosque caused all the old anxieties to resurface. He would have liked to think of it as an isolated occurrence, but it was clearly more serious than that.

  4

  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.