The Bamboo Stalk (32 page)

‘Look for a job, Isa,' Khawla said. ‘Only by working can you assimilate with the people here.'

I told her I was serious about working and that Ibrahim Salam had offered me a job and had taken me to various places to show me what the work was like, but working without speaking Arabic properly was impossible. She advised me to look in the private sector, where many companies depended on English in their business dealings and where the salaries were higher and they gave bonuses to employees who worked hard. The government also subsidised private-sector Kuwaiti workers by supplementing
their income as part of a project called the National Workforce Subsidy, designed to encourage young Kuwaitis to find work outside the public sector. I couldn't help laughing when Khawla finished giving me advice. She looked at me doubtfully. Before she had time to ask, I said, ‘Kuwait's very generous when it comes to money.'

Khawla scowled. ‘Is that praise or . . .?'

‘I have enough money,' I cut in, ‘but I needed something that's more important.'

To change the subject, I asked her about all the papers piled up on the desk. ‘What's all that?' I asked.

I was surprised to hear that she was still reading the novel that Father couldn't finish because he was captured. ‘As soon as I finish the last line, I can't help going back to the first page and reading it all over again. I correct some spelling mistakes and try to understand the things I couldn't understand the first time,' she said. She stopped a moment and looked at the sheets of paper on the desk. ‘It's a difficult novel,' she continued. ‘He says what he thinks about some things very openly, and sometimes he just hints. He speaks about certain things when he means different things.' She stood up from the desk and went to one of the shelves full of books. ‘In order to understand Father more, I'm reading more of the books that he read,' she said. ‘I'm still young. I'm getting older and I have a growing dream of finishing off what Father set out to write, to make his dream come true and publish his first, and last, novel.'

She suddenly shivered as if she had had an electric shock.

‘I have an idea!' she said.

I looked into her face quizzically.

‘When you asked me one day,' she explained, ‘I told you that in his novel Father portrayed Kuwait as he saw it, with tough love.
He wanted to change reality with a novel that was candid and harsh, but his only motive was love.'

I nodded in agreement.

‘You . . .' She paused a moment. ‘You can see many aspects of Kuwait. Why don't you write about Kuwait as you see it?'

‘Me?' I said, taken aback. ‘What do I know about Kuwait that I could write?'

‘That's exactly what you would write,' she said with a broad smile, ‘what you don't know about it.'

I thought before replying. ‘What I might write would be painful for the Tarouf family,' I said.

‘Rashid al-Tarouf didn't care about the Taroufs when he had you,' she said with indifference. ‘So why should you?

Haven't you inherited anything from Father other than your voice?' she added with a smile.

I didn't think seriously about what Khawla said about writing. I'm not a writer and I'm not good at Arabic and I don't think I could write at length in English for people who mostly don't read that language. So am I going to tell Kuwaitis my story in Filipino? Besides, Khawla had already told me that Kuwaitis don't read. Whenever I criticised anything in Kuwait, she'd say, ‘Because we Kuwaitis don't read.'

When I told her that writing a book wouldn't work, she gave me a pleasant surprise by saying, ‘If José Rizal had thought like you, the Spanish would never have been driven out of the Philippines.'

I smiled. ‘After an occupation that lasted more than three centuries,' I said with pride.

She looked at me with no less pride than I felt. ‘And for eight centuries Spain was under the control of us Muslims, many years before they occupied you,' she said.

The part of my patriotism that belonged to the Philippines was in full sway, running strong. ‘We threw them out in the end,' I said.

Khawla was about to say something but she stopped and seemed to be thinking.

‘Why have you stopped talking?' I asked.

She bowed her head and acted shy. ‘We threw them out in the end!' she said.

I burst out laughing and looked at her defiantly.

‘Don't be smug,' she said. ‘If the Muslims had stayed there longer, the Spanish would never have got to the Philippines.'

When the conversation was about Islam, I could hardly tell who I was speaking to – Khawla or Ibrahim Salam.

 

7

A feeling like an electric shock hit me whenever I remembered Merla. When Mama Aida pressed Maria for news of her, Maria said, ‘She's fine but she doesn't want to talk to anyone.' Mama Aida was reassured but I was sure Maria was hiding the truth. Merla didn't answer my emails. I had sent dozens of messages, but it was no use. My last message went:

Merla, you are reading this message from me. You must be. The idea that you never open your email inbox terrifies me. Please answer me, if only with an empty message.

I was unusually frank with Merla, perhaps because I fully believed she had carried out what she had hinted at and couldn't read what I was writing, or maybe because I believed she was somewhere reading my messages. I ended up saying things I had never said before, such as the feelings I had had towards her since early adolescence. I revealed to my cousin everything I used to conceal out of embarrassment. It was just an attempt to confess:

Merla, you may not know how I feel about you deep down. Or maybe you think that your admission to me one day that you weren't attracted to the opposite sex might deter me from coming too close. Mama Aida tried but failed to make me stop thinking about you when she told me, when I was young, that the Church wouldn't allow us to have a relationship. When you made your admission in one of the caves at Biak-no-Bato, you
too failed to make me forget you. You are still the dream that visits me in my sleep and when I'm awake. Many of the girls I walk past every day here move something inside me but they fall short as soon as, unintentionally, I compare them to you.

I stopped writing to read what I had written on the screen. I didn't know what to think. She wouldn't read my confession, so I might as well say more.

Merla, did you know I felt jealous of José Rizal because he had such a strong influence on you? Although I admire him, I get upset when I read references to him in your messages. But in one of your messages you said something that stopped me feeling jealous. I felt very self-confident when you wrote, ‘You're the only man I don't feel hostile towards.' When I read that I wanted to hug the laptop screen.

I had an overwhelming desire to hug her. I remembered her face in our last conversation by webcam. She looked tired but she was still Merla, the woman who came to me in my dreams to make me feel like a man. I would confess everything to her. She would read my confession. I had to say more.

Merla, I don't know whether dead people read emails. But you're not dead, are you? If you're reading what I'm writing, please come back so that I can tell you something I've long wanted to say. I love you.

José Mendoza

*   *   *

Absence is a form of presence. Some people may be absent but they are present in our thoughts more often than when they are present in our lives. Merla's absence was a constant presence. She
visited me in my dreams to tell me things and for me to tell her things. When I woke up, I would continue our conversations awake. When I went back to sleep, in my dreams we would do rather more than just talk.

Death is powerless against the desire to meet, even if the meeting is of a different kind, in another world. We are loyal to the dead only because we hope to meet them again and believe that somewhere they are watching us and waiting.

I never lost hope of seeing Merla again. If I had lost that hope, I would have given up living shortly after she disappeared, just as Inang Choleng died after the death of the hope for which she had lived such a long life – my grandfather, Mendoza.

I didn't reread what I had written in the last part of my message. I clicked on the ‘send' button. I closed the email page and folded the laptop screen on to the keyboard. Behind the laptop there was the bottle with soil from my father's grave. A question came to my mind: if I had to choose which one of them to bring back to life, my father or Merla, who would I choose?

I would choose my father.

Because Merla, a voice in the back of my head told me, was still alive.

*   *   *

For many days I didn't open my email. I was confident, almost certain, that one message among the dozens of adverts would be from Merla.

I no longer thought about her being dead, as long as the hope inside me was still alive and kicking. I set about looking for a job. I would live in Kuwait like any other Filipino expatriate struggling to fulfil his dreams. In the Philippines I expected to
fulfil my dream in Kuwait; in Kuwait a new dream started to take shape in my mind, a distant dream.

The fact that I hadn't finished secondary school made it impossible to find a job in a private-sector company, as Khawla had hoped. After a gruelling search, with help from someone from the flat next door, I got a job in a well-known fast-food restaurant close to where I lived in Jabriya. My Filipino neighbour was working in the same restaurant. Khawla was disappointed when I told her about the job. ‘You don't know what you're worth, Isa. You're Isa al-Tarouf! Grandmother will be shocked if she finds out that Rashid's son is working in—'

I interrupted her. ‘But I was going to serve the guests at Umm Jabir's place, with her blessing. Have you forgotten?'

‘But,' said Khawla. She had nothing to add.

 

8

My work was in the kitchen, which was just behind the counter where they took the orders, and I was paid 170 dinars a month plus the National Workforce Subsidy that the government paid to Kuwaitis working in the private sector. I wore special clothes, like all the other staff. We kitchen staff were different from the others in that we had to wear hairnets and plastic gloves. On ordinary days the work wasn't hard, but at the weekends it was. I worked like a robot, dipping chips in oil, cutting up lettuce leaves and onions and tomatoes, and taking the thin sheets of plastic off the slices of cheese while the pieces of meat were cooking, neatly arranged on the grill.

All the workers in the restaurant were from the Philippines except for two or three from India. The atmosphere at work was cheerful. One day when I was really busy, my colleague, who was also my neighbour, asked me why I had agreed to work there. ‘Kuwaitis don't do this!' he said.

‘You're right. They don't need to do this kind of work,' I replied. ‘But they're missing a great pleasure,' I added in a mumble. I'm not sure I was being serious when I said this.

Some of the customers, many of them in fact, had really bad manners. I didn't like the way they behaved at all, but at the same time I didn't like what the restaurant staff did in response to the bad treatment they received from some people. Some people make themselves look bad by the way they treat others. I often heard
someone shouting and swearing over something trivial, for example if the server had given them the wrong size of soft drink, or forgotten to add a slice of cheese to their burger. The server would apologise for making a mistake and replace the order, but unfortunately the angry customers had no idea they were about to devour something they never imagined. We kitchen staff would often hear people insulting and shouting at the staff who took the orders. The staff would quickly apologise, wheel around to face the kitchen and, red-faced in anger, shout, ‘One chicken burger with cheese special,' for example. The word
‘
special' meant something quite different from what the customer imagined. ‘Special?' the kitchen staff would repeat before starting on the order. The server would nod, wink and say ‘special' again. There's no need to go into the details of how the special burgers differed from the usual burgers the restaurant served. When the mistake was corrected by removing a slice of tomato or adding slices of cheese, other ingredients might be added to the meal.

On the first days there I felt sick, but as time passed and the process was repeated – the shouting, the apologising, the making special meals, I got used to the situation. ‘Bastards taking revenge on bastards,' I said to myself in justification.

*   *   *

My work helped me get over my loneliness. I was in contact with Kuwaitis every day, even if it was limited to observing them from a distance. Although I was busy in the kitchen, I had a chance to observe the Kuwaiti customers, especially the young ones. They seemed friendly towards each other. They were always smiling, provided the smiles stayed within their own circle. Another thing about Kuwaitis in general caught my
attention. Staring at other people seemed to be part of the culture of their society. People stared at each other in a strange way. They would look away into the distance if they made eye contact, then quickly go back to examining each other. I had thought that staring into someone's face sent a message of some kind: a sign of admiration, or disapproval, or curiosity. But here it was none of that. I rarely came across someone who didn't stare into people's faces. I'm not claiming that I didn't do it when I was in the Philippines, but I was discreet. Perhaps I inherited this habit in my genes and it found expression after I came back to Kuwait.

When I told Khawla I had noticed this habit, she smiled. ‘No one does this more than us, and no one is more critical of the habit either,' she replied. People are not unaware that it's wrong. They know, just as they know what's right. But they have no scruples about practising their vices knowingly. ‘Do you realise why the women here use so much more make-up than women in other parts of the world?' Khawla asked me one day. I looked to her for the answer. ‘It's not that women in other places are more confident about their appearance. It's just that no one stares at their faces and counts the number of spots they have, like many people here do,' she said. ‘It's not just staring at other people's faces,' she added with a laugh. ‘If people moved their ears when they were eavesdropping, then you'd see ears flapping like wings when it's crowded.' I laughed out loud at the idea.