Mama Hissa's Mice Read online

  PRAISE FOR SAUD ALSANOUSI

  The Bamboo Stalk

  (translated by Jonathan Wright)

  “Absorbing.”

  —New Yorker

  “A page-turner with depth.”

  —Guardian

  “Alsanousi is a voice of conscience.”

  —Independent

  “A force to be reckoned with.”

  —Arab Times

  “Ambitious, cultivated and brave.”

  —Financial Times

  Mama Hissa’s Mice

  (translated by Sawad Hussain)

  “Imagine the dreadful cultural holocaust which would ensue, were the Mongol ruler Hulagu Khan to step out of the pages of history and set fire to the entire corpus of Kuwaiti fiction. If I were asked to select one book to be saved from destruction—just one book to pass on to future generations—I would choose Mama Hissa’s Mice.”

  —Bothayna al-Essa, Al Sada Magazine

  “I consider that Mama Hissa’s Mice is no less valuable and significant than The Bamboo Stalk, which won the so-called Arabic Booker prize. Indeed, it may be intellectually and artistically deeper. It is a multi-layered, richly allusive novel.”

  —Mahmoud Abdel Shakour, El Tahrir

  “With daring frankness and clarity, Mama Hissa’s Mice reveals the full extent of the crisis of identity in Kuwait and in many Arab countries. It tackles the subject of this impending danger head-on, not hiding its head in the sand.”

  —Ali Kadhim Dawood, Al-Quds

  “Perhaps if a dim censor read Mama Hissa’s Mice, he would catch an early glimpse of what Alsanousi has seen with the clarity of the legendary seer Zarqa’ al-Yamama.”

  —Nedal Mamdouh Hassan, Kotob Wa Kotab

  “The novel is a scream of protest to the entire world, that there is no benefit to humanity and no way of saving it unless we are united.”

  —Ibrahem Adel Zeid, Altagreer

  ALSO BY SAUD ALSANOUSI

  The Bamboo Stalk

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Saud Alsanousi

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Sawad Hussain

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as by ASP/Difaf in Kuwait in 2015. Translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain with edits by Mona Kareem. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542042178 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542042178 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542042161 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 154204216X (paperback)

  Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo

  Interior illustrations by Meshail Al Faisal

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK

  Noon Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL (Chapters 1 and 2 removed by the publisher) Chapter 3

  12:36 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 4

  12:43 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 5

  1:08 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL (Chapter 6 removed by the publisher) Chapter 7

  3:10 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 8

  3:50 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 9

  4:20 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 10

  4:34 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 11

  4:42 p.m. Present Day

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 12

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 1

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 2

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 3

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 4

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 5

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 6

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 7

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 8

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 9

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 10

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 11

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 12

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 13

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 14

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 15

  THE SECOND MOUSE: BLAZE THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 16

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS

  4:56 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL (Chapter 1 removed by the publisher) Chapter 2

  5:02 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 3

  6:52 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 4

  7:15 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 5

  8:00 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 6

  8:34 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 7

  9:16 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 8

  9:27 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 9

  9:42 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 10

  9:53 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 11

  10:05 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 12

  10:28 p.m. Present Day

  THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 13

  THE FOURTH MOUSE: ASHES

  11:05 p.m. Present Day

  THE FOURTH MOUSE: ASHES THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL Chapter 1

  11:30 p.m. Present Day

  THE FOURTH MOUSE: ASHES THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE THE NOVEL The Final Chapter

  Midnight Present Day

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PROLOGUE

  If my mother began her sentence with “By God,” that meant it was a divine decree. I was seven years old when Dad gifted me my first bike f
or good grades. Mom forbid me from riding it in our courtyard during the afternoon. She was worried about the high temperature, which sometimes soared to over 120 degrees. That’s what she used to say anyway.

  Mom had changed. Dad used to lightheartedly describe her as “the principal at school and at home.” But she had become anxious, trembling whenever the wind beat against the courtyard’s iron door, its echo sailing down the street. She would yelp if one of the neighborhood boys set off firecrackers to celebrate a soccer victory, or for some other reason, or for no reason at all. She’d be glued to the TV for hours, nervously anticipating what the news would bring. In the course of one day alone, she would call Dad ten times. She would bite her fingernails, mumble, wipe away her tears when no one was looking. This is what my mom was like after the 1985 café bombings, one month before I got that bike. Our elderly neighbor had been among the victims.

  “He left his house and never came back,” Mom said. She bawled over him for a week. “The poor guy’s dead.”

  That’s how Mama Hissa became a widow.

  After my father had given me the bike, I would wait for my parents to wake up from their afternoon nap so I could get the house key from them and go outside for a ride. One afternoon I knocked on their shut door.

  “What?” Mom barked after my repeated knocking.

  “When can I ride my bike?”

  “When the sun sets,” said her voice, heavy, laced with sleep.

  I brought my lips closer to the keyhole. I promised her I wouldn’t ride it beyond the courtyard wall. She didn’t answer. I went back to my room and looked out the window at the reason for my house arrest. The sun was always relentless, beating down on us whenever I wanted to go out. I looked at its bright face with half-slit eyes—it didn’t budge! I knew the sun was just an excuse, and that Mom was scared about me going outside while she slept—that I would fall prey to an accident like our neighbor, never to return, even though the bombed-out café was far away, toward the sea; even though trying to ride there on my bike would be a fool’s errand.

  I turned my back to the window. I sat on the floor, playing with VHS cases. Nothing held my interest, not the cartoon movies or the children’s series I knew by heart. I ignored Mickey Mouse on the small TV screen and built towers out of the videotape cases, with tunnels running in between them. I grabbed my Hulk Hogan action figure and tucked him inside the makeshift city before swiftly crashing it down on his head. Whenever I was bored or upset, I built cities simply to knock them down on the unsuspecting heads of my action figures and plastic animals. Minutes crawled by like hours. I went back to staring out the window. Everything was moving in the sky: tufts of clouds, starlings, pigeons, the tail of the blue kite caught in the neighbor’s thorny tree. But the sun stood still. In our neighbor’s yard, I caught sight of Fahd. He was holding a tennis-sized ball, bent over collecting stones—perhaps preparing for a game of anbar with the other kids on our street. In another part of the courtyard, Sadiq cracked an egg on the metal sewer cover, watching it slowly fry, sizzling on the sunbaked surface.

  I left my room and went back toward my parents’ room. I knocked on the door again.

  “Hey, Mooom! When can I ride my bike?”

  “Uff!” was her muffled response.

  I pressed my ear to the door. Her voice slipped through the wood, surging with the hum of the General Electric air conditioner, as if she were stuffed inside a seashell.

  “You better watch yourself if you ask me about that bike while I’m sleeping,” she threatened. “By God who raised the heavens, if you ask me one more time, you’ll never ride it again! Wait till the sun sets!”

  Some minutes passed. I stood frozen in front of the door. Gripped with fear, I nearly swallowed my next question. I knew her only too well. When she swore by God, that was it: He’d signed and sealed it, and for her, there was no coming back from that—ever.

  But my patience with that unblinking sun had worn thin. I went right back to knocking.

  “Now what?” she shouted.

  I gulped. “Mom?” I paused a moment. “When does the sun go down?”

  My dad’s laughter rumbled from behind the door. I heard their bed creaking.

  “No chance of sleep. Nope, no sleeping here,” I heard her mumble, exasperated.

  She yanked open the door and looked at me, her eyes swollen; a tight smile played across her lips in spite of herself. “You sure are good at asking questions. Here.”

  She held out her palm. On it sat the key.

  THE FIRST MOUSE: SPARK

  Don’t make sparks

  Don’t divulge secrets

  For you’ll stir up endless storms.

  Serenity is in your hands

  And glory is yours.

  Wisdom is found in silence

  And our hope, sought after . . . upon death!

  —Ahmad Meshari Al Adwani

  Noon

  Present Day

  I regain consciousness. Sun rays, directly above me, morph into a red infinity behind my shut eyelids. Liquid oozes from where my tousled hair is parted into a pool at the back of my head. I slowly open my eyes, only to tightly close them again to block out the piercing sun. Gravel jabs my back. My throat and lips are bone-dry, and there is a taste of dirt in my mouth. Something returns me to a final scene, a moment suspended between dream and reality. Pain throbs above my left eyebrow. I dab at the pool beneath my head with my fingertips. “Blood?” I bring my palm to my face, casting a shadow against the sun. Carefully, I open my eyes to inspect the color of the liquid on my fingertips, hoping that it’s something other than red. I sigh with relief. “Sweat.” I shut my eyes again.

  The numbness in my shoulder and the tingling in my back speak to just how long I’ve been here like this. I stretch my arm to grope for the right pocket of my dishdasha. My phone and an empty pack of cigarettes. I pat down the left pocket. Relief floods me when I feel my car keys. “The chest has no key”—I hear that song echoing in our childish voices. What reminded me of it?

  I struggle to stand, so instead I sit up straight. I nearly swallow something. A pebble, I think. I spit out brown blood, like the color of the betel-nut juice that stained the spit of the Indians who had once lived in our country. I cough. A tooth caught in my throat shoots out. The kids’ voices in my head fade in and out. “The key’s with the blacksmith.”

  My legs are outstretched, unmoving, as if they belong to someone else. My dishdasha is bunched above my knees. I look at my feet, one with a sandal, the other without. The image of my lost sandal, flipped over—one of the last things I can remember—is seared in my mind. I draw in a deep breath. Putrid air fills my lungs. I let out a long moan. I shake my head. I survey the dirt square around me to see if my memory still serves me well. I find myself opposite Gamal Abdel Nasser Park. What’s left of the McDonald’s is in front of me. Well then, I’m in familiar territory, in Rawda. I nod my head, assured of this. The singing voices return. “And the blacksmith wants money.”

  My car is over there, a pile of scrap on wheels. I barely recognize its new shape, in a spot not too far from Fahd’s car, although I can’t find Sadiq’s. People are going about their business without a care for me, despite the hours that I’ve been splayed out unconscious on the ground. I vividly remember an old custom that no longer exists—people used to huddle around victims of fights or accidents, spurred on by their curiosity, wanting to help or take photos with their phones. But people don’t behave as they used to; with things as they are now, no one wants to get caught up in any incident. “The cowards stay safe,” Mom would always say. As for Mama Hissa, she hated cowards. The first woman survived. The second didn’t.

  I take a look at the state I’m in; afraid, people are looking straight ahead, their heads unturning. Even so, despite their fear, no one in this country is safe. With my hand pushing against the dusty ground, I raise my body up. Once upright, I clap my hands to clean them before swiping my butt to remove the gray dust from my clothes. I squee
ze my knee to numb the pain. I hobble toward my car. There’s an unbearable pain in my left leg. The children keep singing in my head. “And the money’s with the bride.”

  Kuwait, the so-called Bride of the Gulf. I look around. Nothing resembling a bride here. I’m running away from this old moniker. I’m running away from everything. I look again at my car. “And the bride wants a family.” Maybe Fuada’s Kids would count, the group I started with my friends. I stop. I wrestle my foot free from its sandal and keep on hobbling. I open the car door. Sparkling glass shards—the remains of my windshield—cover the seat, reflecting the sun. I lurch over to the trunk and open it. I look for something. Anything. Empty except for the spare tire. After prying off the thick leather cover for the spare, I return to the driver’s seat. Carefully, I remove the large pieces of glass and spread the leather cover over the remaining shards before sitting down. The windshield is still in one piece, but I can’t see through the spiderweb of cracks.

  I get out. I look for a rock to knock out the glass. In this country, at this point in time, rocks are the easiest things to find. All that’s left after the destruction are rocks that aren’t even fit for construction. Big ones and small ones like those we used to collect as kids to play anbar. Or the ones we carefully selected to be the heads of Jews when we’d pretend to be Palestinian children throwing stones; when all Jews, according to Mama Hissa, were Israeli; when according to everyone, Israel was our shared object of hatred.

  “And the family wants milk . . . and the cows have the milk.” An image forms of Kuwait: a cow in a bridal veil, her udders dry. It seems that the knock to my head is partly to blame for these visions and voices. I bend over. I grab a suitably sized rock from the ashen soil. With both hands I heft it up and smash it down onto the windshield . . . again . . . and again.

  “That’ll do,” I say after the job is done.

  Back in the driver’s seat, I find windshield fragments strewn atop the leather tire cover. This isn’t any better than when the seat was completely covered in glass. Frustration flares up, yet a cackle of laughter escapes at the same time. Gently, I pull off the cover and shake it out. I lay it back on the seat before taking my place behind the wheel and looking at the windshield-free view. There’s no escaping this stench, is there? I feel around for my phone in my pocket. Dozens of missed calls and messages from friends. From my parents in London. From strangers asking about our radio broadcast and why one nationalistic song is looping instead of our usual daily show. A text message from my publisher in Beirut: “We’re done with the cover design for Inheritance of Fire. You’ll need to get rid of four chapters. It’s for your own good, and in our best interest, too. I’ll wait for your approval before I send it to print.” Some of us so afraid of the censors have become censors in our own right. I disregard the text, the calls, myself. I turn a blind eye to everything.