Mama Hissa's Mice Page 2

  I call Sadiq. “The number you have dialed is not available.” I try Fahd. “I’m not here at the moment. Please leave a message.” His recorded voice is followed by a clip from an Abdulkareem Abdulqader song: “Between you and me a whole world, long and dark as the night. No longer reminded of where we met, there you go with oblivion and here I go with Canopus, no longer a day left for you in my heart.” Every time he uses an Abdulkareem Abdulqader song as part of his voice-mail greeting, I can detect his mood and how things are going with his wife. This song transports me to our old street, to when his grandmother was still alive and to her folktales about the Canopus star. Back to a time when my eyes were transfixed on the faraway, silent sky teeming with secrets, a hideaway for the answers to my Gordian questions. A beep cuts through the song. I leave my message in a voice that I wouldn’t know as mine if it hadn’t come out of my throat.

  “Hi, Fahd . . . please call me.”

  I make a third call.

  “Hey, Ayub, any news of Sadiq or Fahd?”

  He answers my question with one of his own, asking about what happened.

  “Nothing. I’ll speak to you later,” I respond.

  I find hope in the answer to my fourth call: “Dhari . . .”

  “Where are you?” he asks before I can do the same. “Your mom called from London, asking about you. Where are Fahd and Sadiq? They’ve been MIA since morning!”

  “I don’t know where they are,” I answer, my mouth dry and tongue bitter.

  He sighs deeply before reassuring me with his usual refrain: “God will bring the rain. He’ll take care of it.”

  This triggers the lyrics in my head: “And the cows want grass . . . and the grass wants rain.” I tilt my head up to the sky, which is empty except for the sun and the corpse-catcher that hovers over me, a grim omen of looming death that seems to follow me more and more, always in my mind’s eye. The corpse-catcher spreads out its wings, circling high above, looking for reasons to land on the ground. Its aquiline body is topped by an owl-like head—both crow-black—ready to extract life from the death of others. I look around. People here are like horses with blinders on, pulling carriages. Or cows being driven through irrigation ditches, their peripheral vision blocked. They only look straight ahead. I gun the engine. The radio suddenly roars to life. “God is great! God is great! You’re listening to the Lions of Truth,” a rugged voice booms, enunciating every letter as if delivering a sermon. My chest tightens. I look at the small digital display on the car radio. The station’s frequency reminds me of the songs and different programs it used to play before it transformed into this. I twist the dial. The interrupted whispers of the transmissions, cut off by my flicking through frequencies, become the voices of a large audience intoning, “No way will we be humiliated. No way!”

  “Argh!” I thump the radio with my fist and silence it. I stretch out my fingers, failing to shake off the pain. I apply pressure and draw in a deep breath. I turn the radio on again, searching for a station that broadcasts in a low voice, the one based out of the Fuada’s Kids headquarters in Jabriya. My palms tremble like those of an addict looking for his next fix. The static from the radio makes me more irritable. Finally, I land on a station that’s broadcasting. Despite the garbled noise, my ears prick up at the sound of familiar music. Holding my breath, I close my eyes. The sound becomes clearer. An old song comes to the fore: “This Country Demands Glory.” I nod my head slowly, grief-stricken. I let out a long sigh and wearily sing along with the voice on the radio, lamenting how the country races against time. I rest my head on the steering wheel and burst into bitter sobs. And the children’s voices keep chiming in my head: “And rain comes from God!”

  I drive my car, my eyes fixed on what’s in front of me, staring straight ahead—like those around me—not just out of fear but also because there’s nothing around worthy of our attention. Ubiquitous gray soil has changed the country into a giant ashtray. Smoke rises from fires. I see rubble. Stray dogs. Black feathers. Serpentine lines of asylum seekers in front of the European Commission branch in Rawda. Sandbag barriers border both sides of Damascus Street, accentuated by filth that has piled up since the street cleaners fled the country. It’s as if an enormous fist has plowed into Kuwait, leaving it in ruins. I ward off all these images by turning away from them. But my God, the stench! A text message from my mom jolts me back to reality. “Dad and I are worried sick about you. Please call.” I leave my phone on the passenger seat. I take the Fourth Ring Road at the roundabout. Rawda is on my left. On the sidewalk between the two streets are withered, leafless buttonwood trees. I take a right toward the Surra area. My heart constricts. Mom’s words come back to me: “By God who raised the heavens—you won’t go back to Surra as long as I’m here!” Except she isn’t.

  How time has flown, Surra! You’ve become a ghost town. With its shattered windows, the deserted McDonald’s to my right resembles its brother in Rawda. To my left is a house that was a set for Hayat Al Fahad and Suad Abdullah’s popular TV series Rest in Peace, World. How can this area stir up such memories even though nothing looks at all like it used to? The old marble monument on the right brings me to a halt. It’s close to the now-neglected local pizzeria that fell into the hands of the Pizza Hut conglomerate. The black lettering on the monument has faded, obliterated by the sun. Maybe out of protest, maybe out of pity. Or maybe out of fear that the words would live on in what is now a squalid place. A memory sparks in the dark recesses of my forgetful mind. I retrieve the words that had been inscribed on the polished surface: “O God, have mercy on the martyrs: Jasim Mohammed Al Mutawwa and Abdellatif Abdullah Al Munir.” If they had known thirty years ago how things would end up, would they still have sacrificed their lives for our sake? I push away the intricacies of a bygone era; otherwise, it’ll swallow me whole, isolating me from everything beyond it. A window to my yesterday cracks open and shows me the child I once was. I feel for that kid, how he was then and how he is now. My eyes fall on a young boy in a threadbare dishdasha with a carelessly wrapped ghutra around his head, seated on a chair next to the marble memorial. Spread out on the ground in front of him is a cloth covered with merchandise, like that of the Yemeni vendors of yesteryear. I roll down my passenger-side window. I wave him over with my empty cigarette box. He bounds over to me, carrying different brands. I choose one.

  “Eight dollars.”

  I hand him 400 dinars.

  “You don’t have dollars?” he asks, irritated.

  I shake my head, looking at my now-seemingly-good-for-nothing dinars.

  “The dinar isn’t worth much anymore.”

  He takes the money, counting it silently.

  I keep driving, passing the roundabout at the junction. On the right is Sabah Al Salim High School, my alma mater. I was proud to be a student there, the first curriculum-based high school in Kuwait. We were the ones racking up excellence points for our school district with our high grades. Here in Surra was the first high school with a college-style curriculum. Here in Surra was the first supermarket to have a parking lot on the roof. Here in Surra was the first pedestrian walkway for those fitness-driven walkers, and the first street ending in a bridge linking our neighborhood to the next one. I look at my high school now; my memory scoffs at its now-unrecognizable shell.

  I don’t know who you are anymore.

  I’m Jaber Al Mubarak High School.

  I don’t ask how it has become that, why, or when.

  I go past my high school, but the memories don’t leave me alone. At one of the bends in the road, in Block 3 where I used to live, is a middle school that used to be called Al Najah. Like everything else in this area, the name of my middle school was changed. Its new name, HUMOUD BARGHASH AL SA’ADOUN, is emblazoned on the signboard towering above the fence. I joined the middle school’s ranks in 1987, thirty-three years ago. I stop the car in front of the school. Why, I don’t know. This is where it all happened. With no windshield in front of me, the empty frame seems to hold a scr
een where scenes from times past are replayed. There, next to the building that houses a generator, I lost a tooth and some buttons from my white school shirt in my first school brawl. I run my finger over my top teeth, counting them. There’s a new gap after today’s events. I scrutinize the generator building. The vulgar words and crude drawings that I became familiar with as a student are now the residue of letters and words, an H and an F, masked under neutral-colored spray paint. I manage to make out the beginnings of a war of words etched into the building’s facade in turns by Sunni and Shia extremists:

  AISHA, MOTHER OF THE BELIEVERS, DESPITE WHAT THE HATERS SAY

  DAMN THOSE WHO GO AGAINST THE PROPHET’S HOUSEHOLD

  DEATH TO THOSE WHO REFUSE TO ACCEPT THE PROPHET’S COMPANIONS

  DIE YOU WAHHABIS AND MAGIANS

  I can’t make out the other words. Scattered all over the generator building’s walls are images of crossed-out mice and warnings that have proliferated since we started our group:

  THE MICE ARE COMING . . . PROTECT YOURSELVES FROM THE PLAGUE!

  Fuada’s Kids had done the tagging.

  How can simply passing by a place from our history resurrect the memories buried deep within us? My sense of time is now warped. One day, during the morning lineup, we were in the school courtyard, shivering from the cold despite our dark-blue coats. Our voices thickened in unison as we sung to the flag like every other day, “Long live Kuwait. Long live the emir.” Something different happened that morning. A boy who towered over Sadiq jeered at him as we chanted: “Long live the Arab nations.”

  “You guys are Ajam!” he said. “Are you even Arab?” he challenged Sadiq. I didn’t understand what he meant. We repeated the chants together: Fahd, Sadiq, and I, along with our classmates, who included Awad the Yemeni, Abdl Fadhil the Sudanese, Hatim the Egyptian, and Samir and Hazim the Palestinians. I only remember Sadiq’s silence and his ears reddening. After the final bell rang, I had my first school fight close to part of the school wall I see right now. It was the winter of 1988, and it was a Tuesday I’ll never forget. I heard someone yelling to someone else, “The zoo is in Umairiya, you animal!” Hearing this as I passed the school gate, I turned to the source of the voice. The strapping boy who had jeered at Sadiq that morning was yelling at him again, and Sadiq remained tight-lipped, as he usually did when he was agitated. His red ears betrayed his ruffled inner state. Two other boys had grabbed Fahd, preventing him from helping Sadiq after his tormentor threw him on the ground. Seeing Sadiq being kicked around, I couldn’t hold back. I wavered at first, but the sight of blood on Sadiq’s shirt drove me to do something. Anything! I shoved my hesitation aside. I charged toward them, fist raised high. I flinched momentarily before bringing it down on my target. I flung my body on the ground across Sadiq’s. I shielded him with my arms. I put myself between the kicks and his body. Instead of him, I bore the brunt of one kick after another. I lost my tooth and blacked out.

  A day later, I was in the Egyptian counselor’s office—at a time when non-Kuwaitis had a place in this country. The only foreigners here now are the blue-helmeted UN Peacekeeping forces stationed around the oil wells and some conflict zones. There are also the Peninsula Shield Forces—drawn from those countries that haven’t yet seceded from the Gulf Cooperation Council—that came to settle the conflict between the two warring factions, as well as the extremist groups that arrived from outside after we opened our doors to them. Sadiq’s tormentor—let’s call him Hercules—gave the excuse that Sadiq had provoked him first by saying, “You don’t belong in school. You belong in Umairiya, in a zoo!”

  “And that’s why you broke his arm and knocked out his friend’s tooth?” the school counselor asked incredulously.

  Hercules stayed silent.

  “Because of the zoo?” asked the counselor in a raised voice that scarcely masked his disapproval.

  “No,” Hercules responded, head bowed.

  The counselor looked at him, urging him to go on.

  “Mr. Desouky, the zoo is in Omariya.” Hercules stressed that the name was not how they were mockingly pronouncing it—Umairiya.

  “Who are they?”

  The boy didn’t answer. Mr. Desouky’s voice boomed in Hercules’s face as he interrogated him on whether he lived in Omariya or Umairiya, or whatever it was called. The boy shook his head. The counselor’s thick lips gaped in surprise. “So, who was it that your classmate was making fun of?” he asked impatiently.

  Today, behind my steering wheel, in front of the wall of my former school, an old building with a new name, I still remember. I repeat unconsciously, like an echo, Hercules’s answer: “Omar . . . Omar.” Back then I didn’t know that Hercules’s utterance was referring to the second caliph after the Prophet, a Sunni symbol, and that Umair was short for Mus’ab Bin Umair, a Shia symbol. I shake my head now, chasing away memories that I hate returning to. I turn the steering wheel, abandoning those thoughts along with all the other lessons I failed to learn within the school walls. Except for one so difficult to shake. Before driving off, I look to the sign above the school gate for confirmation of where I am. I accept what it says; this is the Humoud Barghash Al Sa’adoun School. This isn’t my old school. Not Al Najah. What I was recalling just now didn’t happen here. I must be mistaken. I so want to be wrong. I take a look around. Houses have sprouted up on both sides of the street. It looks different from when I used to live here. Years ago, walking to and from school, Sadiq, Fahd, and I used to cross the narrow side streets and dusty, empty plots of land. This overpowering stench sure wasn’t here back then. The thin lanes have disappeared between houses that are now competing to touch the clouds. The empty plots and dusty playgrounds for soccer that I knew through and through are now buildings weighing heavily on the area. Buildings that had one or two floors now have three, four, even five; cramped houses with no yards. It was this very sidewalk that I came to after being pummeled by Hercules and his gang; it was from here that we started running away from those hoodlums, looking behind us as we went, afraid they were tailing us. At the scene of the fight, on the cold sidewalk, traces of us left behind . . . a tooth, some blood . . . our dignity.

  Had I not left our old neighborhood, I probably would’ve formed some better memories in it. For years, I didn’t dare return to the old stomping grounds. After we left our house, I avoided going by it, anxious that I’d taint the beautiful picture I carried within of my childhood, a beautiful picture set against the abhorrent backdrop of the 1980s. I wish that I’d stayed away from Surra, leaving never to return, like one cut off from his umbilical cord. I had promised myself since my family and I moved to Rawda to never again go back or visit our street out of sadness for the place I’d once loved—a place where I no longer had a home—to avoid feeling jealous of the people who’d bought our house from my dad. I made it a point to never go back. I had Mom make the promise for me because she never went back on her word. On this very corner, the turn leading to our old neighborhood, was the Syrian butcher Adnan and his rented corner shop in the Al Awaidel house that overlooked the street. And over there, in that large run-downbuilding—which back then was the Al Anbaiie Mall—were a number of stores looking out onto the street: the Indian restaurant and its owner, Shakir Al Buhri; the shawarma place, where Jaber the Egyptian would slowly twist his spit around in front of the fire, just how we liked it. One day lamb, one day chicken, or as he used to say with his Egyptian flair, “One day lahma, one day firakh.”

  Jaber would make the most delicious macaroni sandwiches with ketchup. He’d blame us if we skipped his restaurant in favor of Shakir’s joint: “Just like that you’re going to buy from the filthy Indian boy over your Arab brother?” After Jaber’s reproach, we boycotted Shakir—not because we thought his Indian restaurant was dirty but rather to stand in solidarity with our fellow Arab. Between the two restaurants, Shakir’s and Jaber’s, Indian and Arab, was the Iranian grocer Haydar, as well as Salim and Mushtaq, the Pakistani tailor and barber. There was also Al Budur
Bookstore, and its old Kuwaiti owner, Uncle Abu Fawaz. The youth in the neighborhood would flock there to buy magazines like Al Riyadi and Al Arabi, Famous Five books, and the banned novels of Ihsan Abdel Quddous. “You shouldn’t be selling such trash to our daughters!” some would chastise Abu Fawaz, to which he was content to respond, “The government hasn’t banned them.” Here, in this other house, was a store to wash and iron clothes—a rented store in an old house. Today, it is a garage at the base of a colossal new house, crowned with tiles. No trace of the traditional handwashing laundry, or the three steps out in front stained with betel-brown spots from the spit of Alameen the Punjabi, as if pockmarked by rusty water. His name was Alameen, even though we discovered some years later that his name was actually Ali Ameen. But in his heavy accent, it came across as Alameen, such an old-world name that it seems he picked it himself. I still remember him: ebony skin, white hair, slim build, and a tatty wraparound. He wouldn’t respond to us if we called him by any other name. Alameen, whose letters used to tower above the store on a large signboard: ALAMEEN FOR WASHING AND IRONING. He was lucky to keep the name that he chose. Eventually, he left. He left us behind in a country that renames any place as soon as it forms a memory or an identity. Sadly, they have all left. O hapless old street, why are you no longer how you once were?