Small KingdomsBy Anastasia HobbetThe Permanent Press |
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In this novel, set in the Middle Eastern country of Kuwait between the two Gulf wars, a young American doctor, Theo, has recently arrived in the country to work at a public hospital. Unable to speak Arabic, he pursues his boss’ recommendation that he hire a tutor. In this scene, he shows up at his tutor’s apartment house for his first lesson in Arabic.
Theo turned into a sandlot to park. This was the right building as far as he could tell, although it lacked an address. Through the eddies of dust on his windshield he saw a decaying cement blockhouse in a warren of buildings just like it, an expanse of mean existence that looked as though it had been lightly shelled during the war and forgotten. Trash lined every windward wall. A single sidr tree, lean and staggering, rose up out of the earth to offer a pittance of shade, its leaves jaundiced with dust.
As he got out of his car, the guard for the building, armed with a push broom and dressed in a tattered gray salwar kurta, met him warily at the low wall of crumbling tile that surrounded the property, his dark moustache curled down in a scowl. The broom couldn’t have been put to much use lately.
An obligatory greeting. “Salaam al leikum.”
Theo closed the door and let his hands drop to his sides. “Al leikum salaam.”
“You come Arabic lesson with lady?”
“Yes.”
The man’s unfriendly scrutiny deepened. A lined face, a flat-footed stoop. In the U.S., he’d be fifty. Here, given his experiences in the clinic, Theo judged him thirty-five.
“Go.” He flapped a hand at Theo’s car so there’d be no confusion about where. “You go now.”
An order or a suggestion? Theo tapped the face of his watch. “I have an appointment.”
The man advanced slowly on stiffened knees as though Theo might be a land mine. Except for his black and wary eyes, he looked made of dust. “Shu ismak?”
Theo knew this much. “Theo. I’m glad to meet you.”
The man blinked at this alien lisp of a name. “Theo?”
“Yes. Theo.”
This flummoxed the man for a moment. Then, seeming to decide that this was a matter requiring sympathy, he held out a hand. “Abdullah my name.” He pronounced it slowly for Theo’s edification. “Ub-dull-luh. I from Cairo. You go this lady, learn Arabic?” He indicated the crumbling house with a tilt of the head. “This lady, sir. She no good teach Arabic.” He made a poisonous face. “She Palestine.”
“Abdullaaah!” A woman’s voice, powerful as a trumpet.
Abdullah drew back, cringing, his push-broom head-up before him like a useless umbrella, as a torrent of Arabic fell on their heads from a window of the building.
“She!” he said to Theo under the barrage, which broke now into English.
A young woman with long, black hair leaned far out over a sill on the second floor. “Ignore this stupid man,” she called to Theo. “He wants you to tip him. You’re Mr. Girard? I am Hanaan, your teacher. Come up.”
Theo gaped. On the phone she’d sounded dry, brisk, aloof, leading him to expect a Kuwaiti schoolmarm swathed head-to-toe in black.
Abdullah gave Theo a warning flick of the eyes. In the corner apartment on Hanaan’s floor, an older, beak-nosed woman in a scarf was throwing open a window to investigate the noise. Spying Hanaan, she screeched out an indictment, jabbing a finger at every phrase. Hanaan joined the fight with eager acrimony, flinging back what sounded to Theo like insults of the blackest hue. The old woman leaned over the sill to pitch her voice with more energy, throwing out an acid bath of abuse—You and your little dog too!—then abruptly withdrew and whammed her window shut.
Hanaan recovered in an instant. This was old hat, apparently. She smiled down upon Theo’s head, a font of benevolence, her black hair flowing.
“Come up, come up,” she said, her voice now melodious. “We must begin.”
Theo made his way slowly up the uneven steps to the second floor, surmising as he went. The old woman had given Hanaan hell for taking male students into her apartment while otherwise alone, little doubt about that. Given her youth and obvious beauty, it surprised him too. Even in his old laissez-faire apartment building back home she’d earn some huffy indignation from the neighbors if she hallooed men in the street from an open window. Here, knowing what little he knew about the culture, it seemed downright dangerous.
Sunk in thought and a newborn doubt about his instructor upstairs, he ran headlong into an overhang at the landing. It came only to his shoulder, an architectural absurdity that nearly cleaved his skull.
When Hanaan opened her door she found him bleeding, hand to brow. “What’s happened to you?” Her eyes shot over his shoulder, “It’s this Abdullah. He’s hurt you!” and tried to charge past him in pursuit.
“No. I ran into a chunk of concrete, the underside of the stairs going up to the next floor. Your builder apparently didn’t plan for anyone more than five and a half feet tall.”
Expecting some degree of solicitude he got instead a cool and measured gaze from Hanaan. Without a word she waved him into her flat, closed the door behind him, and disappeared down a short, tiled hallway into the darkness beyond. Trailed at a cautious distance by two well-upholstered cats, she came back with cotton swabs and a bottle of antiseptic, which she plunked into his hands.
“You speak of plans,” she said, settling her arms across her chest. “Many glorious things in the Arab world have been built with no planning. Muslims allow God to design their lives, not human beings. You Americans want everything according to plan, a plan you make. But the plan is God’s.”
Theo felt a droplet of blood oozing between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to show me to the bathroom. I can’t see what I’m doing.”
Perceiving then the awkward task she’d thrust on him of holding the bottle, pushing his hair aside, and daubing the wound all at once, she took the cotton swab from him brusquely, “I’ll do this,” and tended it herself with a gentleness her tone didn’t predict. She went on with her lecture.
“The great seagoing dhows of our history carried thirty pearl-divers.” It might have been a thousand such was her pride. She sloshed more antiseptic onto a fresh swab and turned him toward the wan light of the small living room, giving Theo an impression of cement walls and battered furniture under a low ceiling. “We built these boats hour by hour, with great love.”
She was standing so close as she pressed the swab to his brow that he could see glints of light in her dark eyes, and the deep soul of the pupil, wide with concentration. “The master shipbuilder—we call him al Ustad, the professor, the master—let the grain of the wood inspire him. Compare the beauty of such a ship to those gray American monsters like sharks in the Gulf. I wonder, what is there of God in them?”
With this, she looked down from the wound on his forehead and into his eyes, a moment that embarrassed them both. She stepped away, her hand at the delicate cup of her throat. Even now she wasn’t wearing a scarf. Her dark hair fell shining across her shoulders, and she wore a dress rather than an abaya, simple and modest, but not black, and not entirely shapeless. Through the constrained grace of her movements he saw a slender voluptuousness.
He nodded. "From now on I’ll think of this building as a great dhow," he said, which won him a fleeting smile.
“Your neighbor,” he said, thinking she would launch an immediate explanation. But she shrugged, waiting for more.
“She’s . . . noisy.”
“Nosey is the correct word,” Hanaan said, dismissing the topic. “I call her the old goat.”
They sat at a battered folding table set up near the window, loaded with newspapers and books in Arabic, French, and English. Her fit of pique had dissipated without a trace. She asked about his work, how long he’d stay in the country. He didn't know. He’d go back to practice in the U.S. but he didn’t know when or where. He surprised himself by telling her that he’d felt rootless for a long time, and more so since his father died.
“I’m sorry your father is dead,” she told him quietly. “I love my father very much. He’s worked very hard for his children, all his life. You see, we are withouts.”
He waited for this to make sense to him.
"A without," she said. "A bidoon. A stateless person. That is what we’re called."
“Beduin, you mean?"
“No, no. Beduin is the plural of Bedu, the desert people, a tribal people. Bidoon means 'without.' You’ll learn this in your lessons: coffee without sugar: qahwa bidoon sukkar."
He’d assumed that she was a native, but her family was Palestinian, she’d said, not Kuwaiti, and everyone who lived here knew the difference. She’d been born in Kuwait, but this didn't make her a citizen. Her father, an immigrant in the sixties, and a proud man of mixed Palestinian and Syrian blood, had arrived after oil changed the fortunes of the region and the Kuwaitis had closed all doors to naturalization, securing the largesse for the lucky few. Accorded almost none of the rights and benefits of sanctioned citizens, denied even the state-supported health care given to workers from non-Islamic countries, a bidoon was an official nobody.
“We’re very low class here,” she said. “They think of us as stray animals, especially since the war. No one wants to own us.”
“Someone else mentioned this to me, something about the Palestinians,” Theo said, trying to recall it. “The husband of my real estate agent, Jane Scarborough.”
“Jane and Hamid? But I know them! Jane sends me clients from time to time. Hamid is a distant cousin of my father’s.”
Another cat, this one long-haired and elegant, a Persian—how many cats were there?—leaped onto the table and with great purposefulness sat down directly in front of Theo, tail flicking, its snub-nose giving it an expression of mild, persistent disgust. Theo didn’t touch it.
“Have you thought of leaving?” She looked as if she’d gone blank on the meaning of the word.
“Going someplace else. To another country.”
“But this is my home. My family is here.” There was stiff offense in her voice again. “Or do you mean that all of us should go?”
What a volatile woman. “I meant for a job. Like me coming here.”
“But I have a job. I will teach you Arabic.”
“I meant at a university, for instance. Dr. Chowdhury called you a linguist. You have to be well-qualified or he wouldn’t have recommended you. He’s not easily impressed.”
“Ah.” She shrugged off this compliment but her tone gentled. “I did teach at the university here. Until the war. But I wouldn’t work for an Iraqi and so I stopped my job then. After the war, I couldn’t get it back. It’s my Palestinian blood, you see. That fool Arafat supported Saddam. All bidoons, since the war, have even more troubles than before. The Kuwaitis don’t trust us.”
She rose from her chair and strode restlessly away from the little table. “The university isn’t a good place anyway. Not anymore. My department is run by the Egyptians. It’s like in Italy. You know this thing they call the Mafia, la cosa nostra? It’s the same with Egyptians there. Egyptians for Egyptians, and everyone else is in danger. They can’t even speak their own language. Like Abdullah outside.” She shut her eyes against the thought of him. “That’s why I was rude to you, because I’m angry with him.”
This was probably as close as she ever came to an apology. He didn’t need one.
“Anger works in this way,” she said, “to go in every direction, you cannot control it. If you could hear him speak Arabic! It hurts the brain to listen.—Why are you smiling so?”
“He said the same about you.”
“Me? He said the same about me!”