|
Evening seeped
through the printed gauze curtains of Um-Nasser's two windows
deepening the color of the yellow stripes and transforming the brown
flowers into occasional mounds
on desert roads.
Ending the third day's
condolence visit, giving out sighs of satisfaction for having
completed
their duties, the
neighbor ladies departed to their homes to attend to their evening
chores.
Only Um-Ramzi,
Um-Nasser's best friend stayed behind.
The
last visitor and the hostess remained seated facing each other from
the two corners of
the
long and narrow European-style couch with its engraved wooden
frames. Um-Ramzi
did
not attempt to change her position although she felt numbness creep
up her skinny legs
which
were tidily folded underneath her. She looked steadily at her
hostess. Um-Nasser's
legs
were crossed underneath her wide skirt, her arms were folded on her
ample breast
and
her large head was sunk on her chest. The poor woman had turned
herself into an
enormous ball of misery since her son's recent death.
Only after Um-Nasser
started repeating what she had said all day long was Um-Ramzi able
to free her eyes and
allow them to circle the tightly designed honeycombs of the couch's
velvet cover. She
stroked the prickly softness of the material as she listened to her
friend's
wailing words
accompanied by the rhythmical back and forth swing of her heavy
body.
Every time Um-Nasser
bent forward, her two large hands hit her covered knees. "It is
because of the olives,
it is because of the good crop of olives," she said.
Having heard it so many
times, Um-Ramzi had come to realize that the insistent repetition
of these words was not
to promote an idle statement. Hers was a call of a mother who was
trying to find a reason
for her son's death, a call asking for an answering echo to help her
with her sudden
loneliness.
During the three days,
every time Um-Nasser repeated these words, Um-Ramzi had a
glimpse of the fearful
fight between envy and guilt in the lowered eyes of the poorer
ladies
of the neighborhood.
Everyone sitting in the room knew that Abu-Nasser had a four donum
orchard with three
hundred fully grown olive trees in the North, close to the Syrian
border of
Jordan, as well as a
smaller one in the south of Irbid.
"God forgive us," Um-Ramzi
murmured subscribing herself to the guilty party, and forgiving
one and all on the
wooden balls of her worry-beads which ran smoothly between her
accustomed fingers. She
was old enough to know that poverty was a valid reason for many
sins, and that Nasser
was the only boy in the neighborhood whose family could afford to
send him to study
abroad.
Um-Ramzi's constant
attendance upon her friend throughout the duration of the three-day
mourning period had
exhausted her modest wealth of formal utterings. She could no longer
interrupt Um-Nasser's
repetitive statement. Her mind could not summon up a single
ready-made formula from
the multitude of utterings that cascaded from every woman's lips
on such occasions. The
only words which she managed to voice were "Hush, don't cry,
hush."
|
