'Maryam Keeper of Stories’ by Alawiya Sobh | Excerpt

Everything changes, and nothing changes.

🐼A human being forgets that he has been murdered, and so the murdered must learn how to become a murderer. Many things had been put to death inside Mother, and even so she tried to kill the rest in order to forget that she was alive. The kitten opened her eyes to some things and kept them shut to many others. But one day she could not keep them closed any more to the humiliation.

ﷺFather had a cow called ‘bride’ whom Grandmother Ghaliya had given him to plough the land alongside the donkey he owned. One day, the cow wandered away from him and went to graze at the green wheat stalks in a nearby field.

🐓‘How was the cow to know?’ said Mother when she told me the story. Father called her from a distance, ‘Ya Fatima, keep the cow away from the wheat.’ At first, she didn’t hear him since he was standing at a distance. So, Father shouted louder. ‘I said, you daughter of a whore, keep the cow away from the wheat.’

꧃His voice resounded throughout the valley for all the peasants to hear in nearby plots of land. Mother answered for the first time, ‘Your sisters are the whores, not my mother.’

🌳Among those who had overheard was Father’s aunt who was picking corn nearby, so she shouted in her loudest voice to her nephew the Good Hassan, ‘Will you stand for that, ya Abu Ahmad? Your wife is saying that we are all whores.’

꧅Father crossed the distance separating him from Mother in a blink. He pulled her by the long hair under her scarf and began to beat her with a switch that he had picked up from the field.

🌳She hurt so much from the beating that she fought back taking hold of him with all the strength in her arms and pushing him onto the ground. He tripped on a big stone and fell, and the villagers who had hurried to a cliff overlooking the field to watch the fight started laughing and giggling. Among them was a man called Naeem Yihya who was tall and ‘beautiful like the moon’ as Mother described him to me—his face tanned and his eyes green and ‘this big’ she’d say, showing me with her fingers.

🍒That day, Naeem Yihya smiled at her and she smiled secretly when she thought of Naeem Yihya watching her push her husband and throw him onto the ground, as if she were a champion among champions.

She smiled again as she told me the story.

🧸But Father did not smile that day. He set about her again, this time with his sister, and they beat her together. Her uncle too did not smile when he heard about it from Father. But before her uncle could subject her to more beating, she started hitting herself, slapping her- self until her fingers marked her face for days to come. She punished herself in order not to be punished by him, for her cheeks preferred to take her own slaps than those of her uncle.

🐓God bless his soul, and the souls of all believers.

💎‘But he wronged me and I’ll never forgive him,’ Mother said. ‘Forced marriage is the greatest wrong. They’ll get no pardon from God for it—neither him nor my other uncle. Even if I were to pardon them, God wouldn’t, neither in life nor after death. Marriage is blessed—but to force a child to marry? That’s a sin.’

Those were Mother’s words.

🍸Mother, who had mastered the ways of survival from the lessons of her life and misfortunes—she, who had learnt to deny in speech what she approved in her heart or approve in speech what she denied in her heart—she, who sang and danced the Dabka with that pure pleasure of one singing solely to herself. Many years later, in Beirut, she would still hum that song:

To the aubergine, to the aubergine,
I love him with all my heart,
Though I’ll deny it with my tongue . . .

♔That was the only song I heard her sing when she wasn’t cursing while she laboured over our laundry or dirty dishes. Mother sang after her life had become a vast distance between the tongue and the heart.

***

💟Father did not like to upset Mother’s sisters Tuffaha and Runjus. They were Mother’s sisters, from her father and mother, but he was the one to raise them after her uncle found a husband for her step- sister Samiyya, and her other sister Naziha fled from the village with- out leaving a trace. Naziha would reappear twenty-five years later, at the beginning of the Lebanese war.

🌊My aunt Tuffaha’s apple-like form lived up to her name. Very early, the little girl became a woman; her mouth blossomed into a red rose and her breasts grew from two sesame seeds (like those of her sister Fatima when Father had married her) to two budding flow- ers under her dress—‘God’s glory’ as the villagers said. Luckily, her sister, my mother, knew the meaning of a forced marriage and her brother-in-law, my father, was a kind father to her.

🙈Tuffaha’s eyes were meadow-green and her skin tanned by the days behind the plough. When she moved, her body spoke its own language, and when she slept, she curled up on one side of the bed that Father had made for her with his own hands. He sawed the base and legs from some lumber and joined the pieces together firmly with iron nails. Mother sewed a thin mattress for the bed and stuffed it generously, then made pillows out of all the colours of flowers and scattered them over the mattress. She put the bed in the living room and Tuffaha would sit on it, resting her back against one of the pillows, her breasts protruding and her smooth belly tucked in. She would gaze up at the sky, sighing and daydreaming, while the breeze tickled her face playfully and cooled her from the constant heat.