Three Daughters: A Novel (2 page)

1.

I’VE NEVER HEARD HER SAY A WORD.

F
rom the beginning Miriam was shy. She had a habit of tilting her head so that it touched her shoulder, believing in her childish way that this made her invisible. She squinted even indoors, which was too bad because her eyes were her best feature. They were widely spaced, large and dark, a disturbing blue—the last visible color of the evening sky. By age five she hadn’t spoken.

Grandmother Nabiha was the first to mention it. “I’ve never heard her say a word. Not even ‘mama.’ Not even ‘papa,’ ” she added and then wished she had remained silent, for her daughter stopped washing her twin sons and gave her a miserable look. “Take her to the doctor,” she finished lamely. “Let him at least comment on it.”

“What can the doctor do?” answered Jamilla. She disliked these conversations. “He can’t make her talk.” She sighed and paused and then, as if making an admission that should have been made long before, she said, “She wants to be deaf and dumb. Like him.”

“But it’s not right. It’s not natural,” said Nabiha. And then more softly, “It’s not possible.” She turned the palms of her hands toward heaven. “It hasn’t turned out badly.” She was looking for reassurance. “You have these golden, perfect boys.” She stooped to kiss the matted reddish curls of the babies, who were making nonsense sounds and splashing in the shallow metal tub.

“No,” admitted Jamilla. “It hasn’t. I thought it was the end of my life.”

Nabiha, whose eyes had begun to trouble her, narrowed them against the sun and looked off into the distant hills. The memory of the day she had dragged her beautiful daughter to the hostel to inspect the deaf man who had agreed to marry Jamilla was fresh in her mind. They had passed the dispensary on the way and Jamilla had clung to the doorway and begged her mother to let her see the doctor first. “Hush, hush,” Nabiha had hissed. “The doctor can do nothing. Everyone will know. Our shame will be made public.”

“But Mama, I can’t marry him. I can’t.”

“You should have thought of that before you let that Russian put his child inside you.” Her own words shocked her and she stood rigid. That Russian whom she had nursed so diligently had also infected her husband, who died. So much damage from one act of charity. So much damage from a stranger who had entered her life by chance. But she couldn’t think of that. She had children to raise.

“Come along,” she urged her daughter. “Mustafa is a decent man. His face is pleasant. He doesn’t look ignorant, as you’d expect. His eyes are lively and a good color. And he’s strong. His back and shoulders are developed. His head is well shaped. Come on, come on. If people see us arguing in the street, they’ll start to gossip.”

Jamilla didn’t give in easily. For several months after the simple, unheralded wedding, she refused to look at her husband.

The day her labor pains began she was out far beyond the cultivated fields gathering brush and had a good hour’s trip home. She was a young untried girl and full of indecision. Should she leave the wood and run or simply lie down amid the sweet-scented gorse and yellow thistle and take whatever violence was sure to follow? The pain intensified and she crawled to a patch of tall, waving reeds, thinking they would protect her from the blazing sun. She scanned the vast fields for a human presence. Then, out in the distance, she saw her husband approaching. Mustafa. In that field, as he worked over her, she thawed toward him. She felt his strength and his confidence. He would always take care of her.

“How did you know to come? How did you know?” She kept asking it over and over as if nothing else mattered. He couldn’t hear her. He smoothed back her unruly curls and helped bring their daughter into the world. Perhaps it was because he had aided in her birth that he loved Miriam so.

“He’s the only man in the village who values his daughter more than his sons,” commented Jamilla with exaggerated annoyance when the twins were born. Privately, she couldn’t explain it. The thin, withdrawn child was not easy to love.

One morning when Miriam was little more than three, she came upon her mother rubbing the twins with oil and singing a nonsense song to the plump, naked babies. The words were silly enough to interest a little girl. “There was a little mouse who built a little house and in it was a louse. Here it comes, here it comes, oh, oh, oh!” Jamilla’s fingers went running up the babies’ chubby sausage arms to catch the louse. She dug between tiny pink toes, routing out that pesky louse. The twins were squealing with delight and Miriam, enticed by the scene, took off all her clothes and climbed up on the bed to receive the same.

Her mother laughed and yanked Miriam off the bed, brought her upright and swatted her bottom. “You’re too old now.
Yullah
, put on your dress. You want to be a baby again? There are enough babies. You’re a big girl.”

Miriam went outside, digging her fists into her eyes to hold back the tears. A large hand pried one fist loose. It was her
baba
Mustafa. She wouldn’t look at him but he placed her hand first against her own heart and then on his. There was the same steady thump in both places, hers a little faster. Reluctantly she watched as he drew a heart in the dusty ground with a stick and then pointed to his chest. He entwined a smaller heart with the large one and pointed to her chest.

They sat together on the dusty ground and she opened his mouth as she did every so often, put one of her fingers between his lips and thumped his shoulder. No sound came out. Mustafa pointed again to the dusty hearts and brought one shoulder up to meet his head as if to say, “Well, that’s how I do it.” Then he plucked a fig from a nearby bush, put it behind his back and brought it out again hidden in his closed hands. She chose three times before she got it right but he kept smiling and rushing to give her another chance. When she found the fig, he picked her up as if she were a bag of feathers and held her out in front of him and then in his arms.

Baba was calm and patient. His eyes and hands played out what he wanted her to know and the little drawing stick told her the rest. He was forever silent, but she understood him perfectly. Which was the day she decided to be mute, too? Perhaps it wasn’t one moment but many moments.

The spring of Miriam’s sixth birthday, her muteness was forgotten for more worrisome things. The ground had a dead brown look. There had been no downpours to bring back health to the plants and hasten the ripening of the oranges. Wheat was selling at famine prices and all the pains of drought had taken hold. Nabile, Nabiha’s oldest son, could no longer drive his wagon to Jaffa, for there was little produce and goods to export. The younger boy, Daud, barely nine, took their small herd farther and farther into the wilderness looking for greenery. Even Nabiha’s richer relatives weren’t doing well, or at least not doing well enough to help her.

Mustafa, however, was resourceful in finding work. He took Jamilla and Miriam to the lowland village of Philistia to assist the farmers there who had a wheat and barley crop to harvest. He and his wife would receive wages and Miriam was allowed to follow them and pick up any wheat that fell. Miriam was fastidious in recovering every grain, for she saw that when her basket was filled her mother’s face had such a look of relief.

April in the plains was like late summer in the mountains and the field flowers were plentiful—crimson iris, variegated lilies, and wild roses. Parts of the ground were black with ants that invaded the wheat stores, making each grain appear as if it had legs. The farmer set fire to the ant cities and rubbed the wheat with quicksilver and egg white to protect it from insects before storing it in cisterns.

The harvesting party was gay and there was much laughing and singing, but the living conditions were harsh. The tent for the women and children was overcrowded. They were huddled together with no privacy and no relief from the constant noise. The donkeys fought and brayed and kept it up all night long. The odors accumulating from unwashed bodies were horrific. When they first arrived, Jamilla had foolishly inquired of a woman where she could bathe. “Hah,” the woman had sneered, happy to get the better of a mountain dweller. “There is no water for bathing. We use sand. Perhaps it will ruin your fair skin,” she added maliciously.

“What do we drink?” Jamilla persisted.

“Drinking water is for sale. Someone will come twice a day.”

Jamilla, who was sensitive to smell, often left the tent and slept outside. Many of the women cried out in their dreams and Miriam would awaken, frightened and disoriented, to find her mother gone. She developed a persistent cough from the damp night air that penetrated her bones. It was followed by the day’s exhausting heat. Yet nothing deterred her from following her mother and retracing the furrows that had been abandoned as picked clean, hoping to find a few extra grains. She kept her precious sack with her at all times, placing it under her head when she slept.

One night Miriam was awakened by what felt like ants crawling over her body. Her skin throbbed as if bruised and scratching brought no relief. By morning the throbbing had abated but the itching continued. Several times in the next few days Miriam nudged her mother, pointed to her arms and beat her chest over her dress, but Jamilla was too fatigued or unwilling to understand. She searched for Mustafa but he was gone.

Some of the men left the fields to work in the brick-burning kilns of neighboring el-Mesmiyeh. That work paid fifty cents a day instead of thirty, and Mustafa joined them. They put him in a vaulted room to feed the fire with stubble collected from the cornfields of nearby plantations. The room was suffocatingly hot and only by stripping naked could he endure the heat. In compensation el-Mesmiyeh had an inexhaustible well and four stout mules raised cool, sweet water.

When the family returned to Tamleh, they were so tanned the twins cried as if they were strangers. Nabiha was shocked at Miriam’s condition. “Look at her hair,” she said reproachfully.

“The comb won’t go through,” said Jamilla, kissing and inspecting her babies, who were toddling around. “It would take hours to untangle it and my arms are too weary. It’s the tangles that hold the dirt.” Seeing how thin her daughter had become and the deep circles around her eyes stopped Nabiha from scolding her over Miriam’s condition.

“Come.” She took Miriam’s hand. “That body needs scrubbing and that hair . . . that hair.”

Miriam slipped her hand out of her grandmother’s grasp and began to scratch.

“
Ya Allah
,” said Nabiha. “She has a rash, too.”

She undressed her granddaughter and found her covered with oozing welts and ran to find Mustafa. He stared at the bony, infested body and his eyes filled with tears. He picked her up and carried her across town to Spiridum Rascallah, who was permitted to dispense pharmaceuticals. She gave him a soothing salve that Mustafa spread over the infected bites.

Miriam’s muteness affected each family member differently. Her father taught her a few hand signs but mostly they communicated by pantomime and drawings. Jamilla, busy with the twins, distanced herself from the problem and never urged her daughter to talk. Nabiha prayed daily. Nabile asked Miriam privately each day to just say, “Good morning.” Daud, the younger uncle, who had been displaced by her birth, detested her muteness and was determined to end it.

One day Miriam hid an abandoned pup at the edge of the yard. Dogs were too numerous to arouse sympathy but this one had rounded ears and large eyes. Each day she fed him with a rag soaked in milk, but one morning the tangle of vines hiding him was pushed aside and the crate was empty. Her face, still pale from sleep, crinkled into an anxious squint.

She walked back to the house and Daud appeared with a covered basket. He was noticeably short and she had almost caught up to him during the winter. “Is this what you’re looking for?” He lifted the cover briefly and she reached out. “Oh, no. When you say, ‘Uncle Daud,’ I’ll give him back.” He poked a knife through the basket’s weave. “No talking, no dog.”

She went to the far edge of the yard to look down the western road where her father appeared on Saturday. He came home filthy with ash residue from the soap making in Ramleh. He traveled with his own old dog to warn him of noise and danger, and the dog’s collar beat against itself, making a familiar sound. But today wasn’t Saturday.

Daud moved to the vegetable patch. A slight breeze blew and he lifted his face. Then he sighed, held the dog up by his ears and put the knife against its throat. “Speak!” he ordered sharply. “You bloody little liar. You can speak as well as anyone.” He grazed the throat from ear to ear and a necklace of blood drops appeared. The dog yelped pitifully. The second motion was swift, deep, and sure and the small round head fell back.

Miriam heard the gurgling before the dog collapsed. She tipped the head back to a normal position but the rest of him sagged pathetically. “Dead,” she said.

“What?” Daud heard it.

“Dead.”

“You little fool. Why speak now?”

Her mother found her holding the dog in her lap. “What happened? Are you hurt?” She called to Daud, who was a few yards away pitching stones at the herds.