The Bamboo Stalk (20 page)

Another maid came in, older than the first, wearing the same
white uniform. She looked Indian. She offered us some fruit juice, then withdrew. Then a woman came down from the first floor, apparently in her late thirties. She looked serious and practical. She had black hair, cut short like a boy's. She put out her hand to shake Ghassan's hand, then she shook mine and sat down opposite us with her legs crossed.

‘This is your youngest aunt, Hind,' said Ghassan as he introduced me to her.

I nodded and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, madam.'

She nodded but didn't quite smile. She and Ghassan spoke in Arabic, while I watched their expressions and noticed how serious they looked. She raised her eyebrows when she was speaking to Ghassan. She snatched a glance at me, adjusted her glasses with her finger, then went back to chatting with Ghassan. I noticed that he didn't look at her when they were talking. I was silent, looking from one to the other. I felt like I was watching a film in a language I didn't understand, with no subtitles. Although Ghassan and my aunt gave nothing away through their facial expressions, I interpreted their conversation the way I wanted it to be. I imagined her saying, ‘We promise him a private room when he comes to live here with us' or ‘We're very happy he's come back to his country and his family.'

Then an old woman appeared at the top of the stairs, leaning on Khawla's arm and holding the banister with her other hand. She had to be my grandmother, Ghanima. She wasn't looking at us in the sitting room. Her eyes were on the steps by her feet. She was having trouble bending her legs and was coming down slowly. She had covered her hair loosely with a thin black shawl, quite different from Khawla's
hijab
. Some of her hair showed from under the shawl. Because she was concentrating on making her way down the stairs, I had an opportunity to take a
long look at her face without her seeing me. With every step she took I discovered something new in her face. She was old – the wrinkles in her dark skin showed that. Her lips were thin, or she didn't have lips, if I can say that – just a horizontal slit under her nose. She had thick eyebrows and a large, protruding nose that was hooked at the end. Her eyes were small and bright, with black pupils so large that hardly any white was visible around them. She had a keen gaze, as if she could see through things. Her crooked nose and her bright eyes gave her the look of a golden eagle.

As my grandmother approached, leaning on Khawla's arm, Ghassan and my aunt Hind stood up respectfully for her. I stood up too. She nodded in greeting to Ghassan. I was at a loss. I didn't know what my role was or what I should do. Should I bow, take her hand and press it to my forehead as we do in the Philippines? In her presence I stood there confused, like someone meeting the leader of a tribe and ignorant of the social conventions. Ghassan turned to me and said, ‘Kiss your grandmother on her forehead.'

My heart raced. I looked at her forehead as if I were about to kiss a hot piece of metal. She wasn't looking at me. I stepped towards her, encouraged by Ghassan's smile and the happiness on Khawla's face. I was standing in front of her, but as soon as I moved my face towards her forehead she raised her hand, which was stained dark brown with henna presumably, and put it on my shoulder, preventing me from coming any closer. I pulled back. She looked me straight in the eyes. My lips began to tremble and I bowed my head. She took her hand off my shoulder and involuntarily I examined the part of my shirt where her hand had rested, in case the tribal leader had left a mark there as part of a ritual recognising me as a member of her tribe. But nothing in this
little fantasy of mine came true. I looked up to her face. She was still staring at my face. Her eyes were glistening – was it a sign of intelligence or did it mean that tears were gathering and about to flow? I bowed my head again.

‘Kiss her forehead, Isa,' Ghassan repeated. The hot piece of metal seemed even hotter now. My lips were trembling even more than before. I moved my face towards the metal to kiss it, but my grandmother turned her face away towards one of the sofas in the corner and asked Khawla to help her reach it. Grandmother sat down, after resting her hands on her knees and bending her legs with difficulty. Khawla brought her a stool on which to rest her legs, and everyone but me sat too.

Khawla looked at me standing there. ‘Please sit down,' she said.

The Filipina maid came in with a tray of tiny glasses for tea, rather like shot glasses but with handles and little saucers. I didn't look at the maid. I didn't smile. I didn't utter a word. Even when she gave me a glass of tea, on a saucer with a tiny golden spoon and two cubes of sugar, I found I couldn't say ‘thank you', though everyone else did. Grandmother was looking around, sometimes at me and the maid, sometimes at Ghassan and Hind, examining our faces with her keen gaze. She was on guard and I didn't feel comfortable in her presence. Sitting in front of an interrogator as a suspect makes you feel uncomfortable, even if you're innocent. How much more so if you're a rat in the presence of an eagle?

‘
Salamuuu alekooom
,' cried the parrot. Then two women came in, one in
hijab
and the other without. They greeted Ghassan and kissed Hind and Khawla. then bent down to kiss Grandmother's forehead. Khawla introduced me to them: ‘My aunt Awatif and my aunt Nouriya.' They sat down next to each other on a sofa in a corner of the large sitting room. They didn't
look a bit like each other. Awatif, the eldest, was wearing a black cloak and was clutching her handbag with both hands. Her legs were pressed together. She wasn't wearing any make-up and she had a pleasant face, though she wasn't pretty like Khawla and Hind. She was smiling all the time and seemed friendly. She had big eyes set far apart and a broad and prominent forehead. All in all, including her cheerful face, she reminded me of a dolphin. Nouriya was the complete opposite. She sat with her legs crossed and seemed very self-confident. She had a fair amount of make-up on and was noticeably elegant, with sharp features. She held her chin up and raised her eyebrows when she spoke. She seemed arrogant. I looked from one to the other, making a quick comparison.
How did a dolphin and a shark come from the same womb
, I wondered.

They were talking, each in her own way, while Grandmother watched them quietly. She looked at Hind if Ghassan was speaking, and then switched to Ghassan if Hind was speaking. They talked loudly and interrupted each other. Sometimes they looked at me and sometimes they pointed at me. Khawla was looking at me with the same smile she had had since she came into the room with Ghassan. They had a discussion that went on more than an hour. Ghassan nodded. Hind was tense, swinging one of her legs and speaking quietly. The dolphin smiled naively. The shark spoke excitably. The old eagle silenced everyone with a shake of her head. In the meantime the rat that was me was speechless, looking from one person to another in confusion and without understanding anything that was happening around me, except for the kind looks from a gentle little bird called Khawla.

 

8

When we were back in Ghassan's flat after the visit to Grandmother's house, I finally found out what had happened in the meeting. Ghassan had two options: either to hand over his charge, in other words me, to the Tarouf household, thereby fulfilling my father's wishes, or to make arrangements for me to go back to my mother's country. Khawla was happy to have discovered her new brother because, as she put it, if her mother had another child with her second husband her new brother or sister wouldn't be as close to her in age as I was, so she insisted on me staying. ‘I'll teach him Arabic and I'll look after him. Don't you worry about him, Grandmother,' she had said.

Awatif, my eldest aunt, was very happy. She didn't see a problem, and she was enthusiastic about me staying in Grandmother's house because, as she put it, ‘He's our son.' Although the others ignored her opinion, she had insisted on recognising me. ‘He's my brother's son. God wouldn't like it if we disowned him,' she had said. Ghassan made me happy when he told me what she said. I was delighted to hear that God was present at the meeting to hear what was going on. Even if I hadn't seen Him, I was reassured that He was present in Awatif's heart, because that meant He was nearby. I asked God to enter my heart as well.

Nouriya was totally opposed to me being around and had got angry with Awatif and warned her of what might happen
if her husband, Ahmad, found out about me. Awatif wavered a while when her husband was discussed but she later relented. ‘My husband is a God-fearing man and would not take a negative position if he found out,' she said. Nouriya had grown angrier and raised her voice. She said that, if there was no other way out, my full name should be just Isa Rashid Isa and the Tarouf name should be removed from my official papers. They should look for somewhere that could put me up, away from the Tarouf house, or settle the matter by offering me some money and sending me back to the Philippines, she added. She lost her temper. ‘Kuwait's a small place and word spreads fast,' she said. ‘If my husband and his family find out about this boy, it will change the way my husband sees me. I'll lose the respect of the Adil family and I'll be the laughing stock of Faisal's sisters and sisters-in-law.' Angrily, she had picked up her handbag to leave. Before she stormed out, she said, ‘I have a son and a daughter of marriageable age and I won't allow this Filipino to wreck their prospects.'

I didn't understand what Ghassan said about Nouriya's attitude. Why was she so upset? What was it that threatened her reputation and made her the laughing stock of her husband's family? Why did my presence complicate marriage for her son and her daughter? Those were the same words Grandmother had said to my father years earlier when she found out my mother was pregnant: ‘And your sisters, you selfish, despicable man. Who'll marry them after what you've done with the maid?' These were things I didn't understand. When I was in the Philippines my mother couldn't explain them to me. I asked Ghassan what it all meant.

‘It's impossible to explain such things to you, Isa,' he replied, ‘and it's hard for you to understand.' I was in a difficult position, caught between support from Khawla and Awatif, and categorical rejection by Nouriya.

Hind was unsure where she stood. She was a rights activist, well-known as Hind al-Tarouf. ‘My credibility is on the line and so is my name,' she had said. She would have to sacrifice one of them – either her credibility or her name. If she upheld my rights as a human being when people found out that her war hero brother, Rashid al-Tarouf, had married a Filipina maid, she would have to sacrifice the way people saw her illustrious name. Sacrificing her principles and taking a stand against my human rights would preserve the prestige of her name and society's respect for her. Or she could try to preserve both her own reputation as a person of principle and the reputation of her family by sacrificing me before anyone found out about me. But would it be any sacrifice on their part if they disowned me and turned me away? If that was the case, I would have been happy, because choosing to sacrifice me would mean that I had some value in their eyes. Real sacrifice means giving up things we value, something irreplaceable, for the sake of something else. But as far as I knew I had no value. They didn't need me. If I disappeared it would be no loss to them, and they wouldn't need anything to make up for my disappearance.

‘And my grandmother, Ghassan, my grandmother, what did she think?' I asked, after he had briefed me on the conversation I couldn't understand when I was with them. He blew out some cigarette smoke and said, ‘Auntie Ghanima has the first say, and the last say.' Then he paused to think.

I looked at his face with interest. ‘And what did she decide?' I asked.

‘Did you hear her say anything at the meeting?' he asked.

‘No, she was silent, just looking at people's faces all the time,' I replied.

He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and looked at me. ‘Why ask me now what she thinks? Maybe she needs some time to think,' he said.

He paused, and smiled to reassure me. ‘Leave things to Khawla,' he added.

*   *   *

There were many things my mother hadn't told me about the paradise I was promised. She told me a lot about making dreams come true, securing a safe future and many opportunities that weren't available to anyone in the Philippines. For years I had lived on Mendoza's land listening to what my mother had to say: ‘One day you'll go back to your father's country.' Yet when I did go back to my father's country I found that I posed a dilemma for his family. They wanted me but didn't want me. Some of them were happy I'd come back. Others were undecided and others wanted to pay me off and ask me to go back to the Philippines. In the meantime I was in a country I didn't know, looking for somewhere that would take me in, torn between Kuwait and the Philippines.

As soon as I learned to live with my new name, Isa al-Tarouf, and shook off my old names and nicknames – José, ‘the Arabo' and ‘the bastard' – I found there were people who were offended that I shared their name. I'm not Mendoza, who didn't have a father. I'm Isa, and I have a father called Rashid al-Tarouf.

 

9

Three days after the family meeting I was in Ghassan's flat feeling cold, though the weather was mild as far as he was concerned. I was wrapping my hands around a cup of coffee, toasting my feet in thick socks against an electric fire and watching one of the foreign film channels. Ghassan was reading a book. His mobile phone rang. He put the book upside down on his knees and looked at the screen of his phone. ‘It's a call from your family,' he said.

In a single leap I was on the sofa where he was sitting. ‘My mother? Or Mama Aida?' I asked impatiently.

He didn't answer. He put the phone to his ear and said, ‘
Wa aleekum as-salam
.' The conversation went on for more than ten minutes, and throughout it Ghassan didn't say a single word. He just nodded and murmured ‘Mmm' every now and then. Then the conversation ended.