LITMIR.BIZ

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long sigh like the sea when she sat down at the end of the day. She even talked to the chicken when she was preparing it for the oven, sympathetically as if she was sorry. And then there was the sound of her: the rustle of the underskirt against her legs, the clack of her wooden slippers, the tinkling of her two gold bangles, the click of her hips as she shifted from one foot to the other, the tiny tick when she bit down on hairpins while coiling her hair.

      Papi didn't make these noises. He was as quiet as a stone.

      Perhaps Mami liked to cook because the kitchen talked back to her: the bubble and hiss of the pots, the crushing and chopping that came from the board, the clatter and tinkle of knives and glasses, the creak of the table, the whirr of the fridge, and the tlup-tlup-tlup of the dripping tap.

      Naji must have left footprints when he left to go to Gabriel's because the stretch of kitchen floor between the dining room and the veranda door was newly cleaned and wet. I almost sent a tray crashing to the white-tiled floor.

      ‘Be careful, ya Ruba!’

      There were trays everywhere – along the counter and gas hob, on top of the fridge, on two chairs Mami had brought in from the dining room – all covered with pastry dough.

      ‘Why are you cooking so many?’

      Mami's face was red from the heat as she wiped her hands on a cloth. ‘They won't make much in the end.’ Sweat had settled on her upper lip, and she wiped it off with a downward sweep of her forefinger.

      ‘Are they all the same?’

      She nodded and started to roll out a new square. Then she lifted it onto her knuckles and, elbows spread sideways, stretched it so thin I could see her face through it. Three times it tore and had to be mended, but finally she cut it up and piled layers of dough on top of each other, brushing them with butter and sprinkling nuts as she went. Several ripped, and a ragged ball of useless skin-like pastry grew.

      ‘Here – chop these nice and fine.’ Flour smeared her face as she brushed her hair back with her arm.

      It was hard to chop the pistachios. One flew up and hit the saint on the calendar that hadn't been turned for two months. Another spun out onto the floor.

      ‘Patience. Patience will extract sugar from a lemon.’

      I rolled a nut between my fingers. ‘How?’

      But she didn't answer. Two trays came out of the oven and two more went in, the layers of filo like dragonfly wings that crackled when I touched them.

      Mami wasn't taking any notice. Bent low, she was arranging more pastry on a tray; like that, her hair looked like a giant snail sitting on the back of her head. Then, as I stepped up close, her eyes widened. ‘Ruba, what happened?’ A loose strand of her hair tickled my cheek as she leant down, her eyes round and black-rimmed. The light from the window showed specks of flour floating next to her ear in the thick heat.

      ‘I fell. It's all right, Teta put spirit on them,’ I explained.

      She checked me quickly, then carried on working and moving among the jigsaw puzzle of trays. The green of her dress was dark under the armpits, and her arms wobbled in the heat from the oven.

      From the living room came the faint tack-tack-tack of Papi's worry beads passing through his thumb and finger one by one, again and again and again.

      ‘Mami, why do you cook all the time?’

      ‘It keeps my thoughts busy.’

      ‘Is that why you didn't notice my cuts?’

      She looked worried. ‘Yes.’

      After the cooking came the washing. Then the clothes were hung out on the veranda and Mami watered the fuchsias, marigolds and geraniums set out against the walls. She flickered in and out of the sun as she passed behind the hanging clothes, and water spilt out dark from the bottom of the pots. Mami was good at taking care of things, at making sure they had enough food and water. Thin streams slid across the veranda and into the gutter. They oozed out from the bottom of every pot except for the leaning cactus tied to a pole that stood alone in the corner. Mami didn't like it and kept hoping it would die, but it wouldn't. She didn't want to throw it away yet I knew she didn't want to water it either. Perhaps her heart had dried out and withered in the heat like a fig. For a moment I pictured it, purple and shrunken, inside her chest. ‘Mami, when will you water the cactus?’

      She glanced over her shoulder. ‘I don't know. Soon.’

      ‘How soon?’

      The plastic washing-line creaked but there was no answer. She gave the last few drops to the fuchsia, while further along the wall, the earth round the cactus stayed cracked and hard.

      Papi watched silently from his armchair as I crossed the living room, his large dark eyes fixed on me; except for them, he didn't move. A woman was singing out of the little radio he kept on the shelf near his chair.

       ‘They put up roadblocks, They dimmed all the signs, They planted cannons, They mined the squares. Where are you, love? After you we became the love that screams.’

      I found a book and sat on the sofa. Above my picture of Ali Baba with the forty thieves, Papi's face looked even more square than usual – a big brown square with a funny reddish mark on his forehead like shoe polish that I had always wanted to rub off. And all the time, the tack-tack-tack of his worry beads.

      The woman was still singing – ‘It is the second summer, the moon is broken’ – and Papi was staring at the cuts on my legs.

      ‘I fell, that's all. It didn't hurt much.’

      There were black hairs on his arms where the sleeves were rolled up, on the backs of the hands and above each knuckle; and below that, on his toes in their black leather slippers, on the big ones and the smaller ones lined up in a neat row beside them.

      ‘You must be careful.’

      ‘O love of days, they will come back, Beirut, the days will come back …’

      The reddish mark over his eyebrow seemed bigger now. It reminded me of what Soeur Thérèse had said last time she came in to school to teach us about God and the Bible, watching through her glasses with eyes that saw everything, ready to use the telling-off voice that came straight out of her nose. She talked about Cain and Abel, and how the bad brother had a mark on his head.

      In the vase on the table the plastic flowers were dusty, and the smell of burnt pastry hung in the air. Papi had turned into a statue with its eyes fixed on the floor. When he lifted his head again he seemed surprised that I was still there. As I left, it came to me that he was like the cactus. He sat in the corner all hard and dry, as though someone had forgotten to water him.

       Chapter Two

      The following Sunday, Mami tried to hurry Naji. As we waited for him, she undid her hair and re-coiled it, but it must still have been wrong because she frowned and did it again. ‘Nabeel,’ she said finally, to Papi, ‘won't you come to church with us?’

      Papi was still eating his breakfast. ‘Don't bring up religion, Aida.’

      ‘For my sake, Nabeel.’

      ‘I have no wish to see people and be stared at by them. To appear in church for the first time in years, like a fool.’

      ‘No one will look. And what do you care if they do?’

      Naji's Sunday shoes clacked down the corridor.

      ‘Do what you want, that's between you and your God, but there's no place for me in a church.’ He cut a piece of cheese and wrapped some bread round it. The cicadas in the valley throbbed on and on like blood pumping round an aching head.

      We went ahead of Mami and Teta. Outside, dust lay over everything.

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