A Girl Made of Dust - Nathalie Abi-Ezzi

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birthday was over.

      Bursting into tears, I ran out of the living room – past Papi and the remainder of my cake, past the Rose Man's present in its glass of water, and through the kitchen door. My face was hot with crying, but at the bottom of the hill the forest was cool.

      The dry stony paths rose and fell to follow the side of the valley. A fistful of devil's snot floated past, thin wisps of cobweb carried on the breeze, white scratches against a blue sky, and then I was under cover.

      There must have been a thousand pine trees, and rock-roses and large anemones that made splashes of colour among the thorny bushes. A centipede wriggled under a stone as I passed, a butterfly flashed yellow, and I heard a thousand buzzes, whirrs, chirps and rustles. Beneath that though was a silence deeper than the one in church. Here time stopped and the world went away.

      I crouched. An ant climbed over my sandal, over my toes and back onto the ground. A tear dripped into the dust.

      A giant moth with an eye on each wing landed on a rock beside me. I watched it open and close its wings. It was like blinking, as if it was looking at me. I put out a finger to touch the large wing-eye but the moth fluttered away.

      Then something made me look up. Amal was watching me, her arms wrapped round a thin tree-trunk. There was that questioning look on her face that she often wore, as though everything were a puzzle.

      ‘What do you want?’ I screamed. ‘Go away!’ But she didn't.

      I couldn't stop my sobs, so I covered my face to shut her out. The light glowed pinkly through my hands, and all around, I knew it even though I couldn't see them, hundreds of brown eyes peered at me from between leaves, from holes in tree-trunks, from behind rocks.

      At last I stood up. ‘What do you want?’ I yelled. ‘Stop spying and go away!’

      Amal's arms fell to her sides. She stared, and for an instant I had the strangest feeling, as though I'd cut her. But before I could say more, she turned and left.

      Later, when Naji came to find me, I asked him if he remembered when Papi was happy.

      He nodded. Mottled light fell through the branches, and somewhere a bird was singing. ‘You were five.’

      ‘Tell me.’

      He bent down to pick up a stone and started to scratch vertical lines in the earth. The stone spattered a fine cloud of dust onto his shoe. ‘He came back from Beirut one day—’

      ‘Wasn't I there?’

      ‘Yes, but you were little – that's why you can't remember. He came back, and someone was crying.’

      ‘Who? Mami?’

      Naji had turned gloomy. ‘I don't know. Maybe. There was shouting too.’ He stopped and scratched at one of the lines until it stood out. Then he gave it a head, arms and legs.

      ‘What happened after that?’

      The pale ghost-head grew thick and heavy as Naji's stone worked round and round.

      ‘You started crying and Teta took you away.’

      ‘Didn't she take you too?’

      ‘No. I stayed.’

      He stared at the ground, examining his work: the head, which was thick with lines, was too big and stood out more than the rest of the man.

      ‘Nothing happened for a long time, no sound, no one moving, as if no one was in the house. They didn't come to me for ages – hours, maybe.’

      I pictured him sitting on his bed all alone, with no one, not even me: the light faded, his stomach made noises from hunger, his lips turned dry, the room grew blue with evening and still he sat.

      Naji carried on drawing lines – two with a roof on them, and suddenly there was a house round the man with the heavy head.

      ‘But what was it that made Papi go that way?’

      The scratching stopped and the stone fell from Naji's hand. ‘I don't know. I don't know what happened.’

       Chapter Four

      ‘You children, wasn't your uncle a friend of the departed?’ asked the nut-shop owner. He and another man with a bushy moustache had been talking about a funeral while Naji and I chose sweets.

      ‘I'm not sure,’ replied Naji.

      ‘Does he mean Uncle Wadih?’ I asked. It was the first time Uncle Wadih's name had ever been connected with something bad.

      Naji frowned at me. ‘He's the only uncle we have, isn't he?’

      The shop owner turned back. ‘I think the departed had business dealings with Wadih Khouri. Anyway, his wife has family. They'll help her sort out his affairs. Not like my neighbour – her son was killed last week, her only son, and she'd already lost her husband. Now she has no one.’

      The customer laid his hands flat on the counter. I noticed the long nail on his little finger, which I thought was for picking his nose but Naji said was to show he wasn't a manual worker. ‘The young Mansoor boy? What happened to him?’

      ‘What happened to him, my brother? What happens to any of them? He joined a militia, they picked a fight with some boys from the Lebanese Army and he was sprayed with bullets. When they're young’ – the shop owner tapped the side of his head – ‘when they're young they don't think.’

      The nut shop was lined with containers full of different sorts of sweets, biscuits and lollipops, while shelves along the back wall displayed large boxes of chocolates, most with pictures of green hills, lakes and cows on the front. Ali was humming and roasting upstairs, and behind the glass counter the bzoorat were separated by type: watermelon and pumpkin seeds, pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, peanuts, in their shells and out, roasted maize, and chickpeas coated with sugar. We were still deciding what to buy.

      ‘Did Uncle really know a dead man?’ I asked Naji, but he shushed me. He was listening.

      ‘We could barely lift him,’ the customer was saying. ‘If his wife hadn't been such a good cook yesterday, maybe I wouldn't have such a bad back today. I'm telling you, a crane would have found it difficult to lift him. Don't think badly of me, I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, and I loved the man, but there was too much of him for his own sake as well as mine.’ He rolled his moustache between thumb and forefinger. ‘My spine was creaking the whole way – and his wife had her eye on us from start to finish.’

      Naji's elbow poked me in the ribs. ‘They're talking about that funeral – the one when we had to get off the bus.’ Some days ago the street had been black with mourners, inching their way to the church like a stream of melting tar so that we'd had to get off our school bus and walk. Women in the crowd had wailed, a pair of hands rising occasionally to the sky. And at the head of all this the coffin had moved silently along, like a boat with no sail.

      As we left, grey clouds were gathering on the horizon like dirty soapsuds. Autumn was coming. The leaves were turning yellow, and humidity built up during the day until steam rose from the sea in the afternoons that made the air thick and rubbed out Beirut so that only its ghost-lines were left. In the evenings people sat out on their balconies less often, closed their shutters at night, and Mami had climbed into the attic to bring down clothes that smelt of mothballs. And behind everything, the growl of shelling had become insistent.

      When we got home, Papi was reading his newspaper and the telephone was ringing.

      Mami answered. ‘Yes, I … I'm well. We're all well.’ Her free hand went to her hair first, then to her skirt, slipped to the edge of the dresser, then hooked onto the phone cord. She glanced at Papi and his paper sank to his lap.

      There was a little more talk, then Mami stopped moving, her fingers strangled in the coiled cord. ‘Of course.’

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