The Inheritance Read online

  Here she was lying, covered with a disgusting comforter; had her sister-in-law had any concept of good manners she would have given her a clean comforter and clean sheets, but she was an owl whose lowly origin gave her no concept of good manners. She loved food, however, and was generous in serving her guests. She would fill the table with all kinds of dishes, fried and battered cauliflower, eggplant pickled with walnuts and garlic, radish, lentil soup, bisarah, and pluck with parsley and heaps of onion floating in fat and clarified butter. The children would delve in the food helping themselves directly from the serving plate, their fingernails too long, their noses running, and their skin chapped from dryness and colds.

  How disgusting and cold the house was! Can Nablus be so heartless! There are peasants, city dwellers, immigrants, and migrants in this city, but she, who is she? A migrant? Migrants don’t own anything, while she does. She has a bank account in dollars and another one in dinars, a piece of land in the Makhfiyeh region and a second one in Jericho bought before the Oslo Conference. Yet, despite all that, she was humiliated in her brother’s guestroom. She felt embarrassed despite his warm welcome, his generosity, and the greasy food he piled up on her plate, choosing a piece of delicious cauliflower, a pickled eggplant, and some breaded cauliflower that he insisted she should eat. He offered her red radishes, and many other foods until she was full and her stomach felt like a gourd. Then there were the gases and the trips to the bathroom. What an ordeal, she thought, by God, what a mess. She spent the night going back and forth to the toilet because of the food and the cold, the exhaustion and her anger at this bad omen. The house where she was expecting to live with the realtor must be an object of envy. He had built it for his children and their mother, then changed his mind and rented it to a Canadian professor teaching at al-Najah University. The professor transformed it into an Eden, built a cement wall around it and added iron bars that were almost as high as the roof. He covered them with climbing plants and ten kinds of mallow that bloomed throughout the year, even in January. She loved their sight, their beauty, and their colors, but wondered at the walls and the creeping plants. He explained that the professor was a specialist in agriculture who feared the Intifada, the stone throwing, and the young people. The professor wanted a safe fort that would protect his family from the abuses of the army the children and the neighbors He worried about the neighborhood residents their curiosity and their interference in his life They were watching them his wife in particular who wore shorts and girdles and sunbathed He built the walls to protect her from their gaze.

  Following the visit to that house the realtor asked Nahleh, “What about you fair woman, do you have shorts?”

  She laughed at his words, and he laughed pinching her in the back of the neck. She kept rubbing it until they left the house, the bad luck house, the one she begrudged.

  Her stepmother said to her, “He built the house for her but she never lived in it. She still covets it. He’s very stingy, he’s never satisfied with any amount of material wealth.”

  Nahleh thought to herself, “No, he’ll be satiated, I’ll make sure of it.” She remembered the story of the woman wearing shorts and sunbathing in her backyard. She thought that the sun would burn her fair skin, however, and that she’d look like a peasant. The realtor was attracted by her fair skin, as was obvious in his flirtatious words to her, “You fair one, you duck, you balouza.”

  Balouza, balouza, what a blessing, she will take care of her balouza, enrich it, embellish it, and improve it until she dies. But she won’t die because she will live with all her senses, she will make up for what she lost in the past and she won’t give up. If his children won’t accept her, let them go to hell. If his wife will be upset, let her be upset. Her father will go crazy, but why? It will be a legal marriage according to God’s commandments. Is it a sin? A crime? All the madhahib approve or it as long as there is a marriage contract. She will answer her father as she usually docs, “So what?”

  He remarried, although he is older than she. She was doing the same thing he did. She will marry and have a home of her own and a husband. What a pity, if she had been only ten years younger she could have become pregnant and given birth to a baby boy. But now it’s too late, what a pity. Well, what could she do, this is better than nothing, as the proverb goes, “Better the smell than nothing.”

  Her stepmother told her, sounding her out, “Anyone who takes a second wife while married isn’t a human being. Your father waited many years before he remarried and he did it because he was lonely. Your engineer brothers were in Germany, you were in Kuwait, Mazen was in Beirut, and Said had married and lived in Nablus, while your father was left alone at home. Destiny brought us together, it was a coincidence, and were it not for loneliness, he wouldn’t have remarried.”

  Nahleh neither looked at her nor replied, pretending not to have understood or even heard her, making her stepmother carry on, saying, “A man who isn’t good to the mother of his children isn’t good to anyone in the world. Anyone who takes a second wife while married isn’t a human being.”

  She felt like telling her, “Very well, I understand, enough, enough,” but she didn’t utter a single word and went on cutting the green beans slowly, pondering. She recalled her youth spent reading and educating herself during the 1950s. She tried to remember the names of the most prominent writers of that time, Khaled Muhammad Khaled, Rose al-Yusuf, and other thinkers. She was full of ideas, some forbidden, others permitted, some pure, others impure. She was conservative, strict with herself, and judgmental. She considered sacrificing herself for the happiness of others a great quality, and selfishness a vice. The love of one’s country was, according to her, the noblest and the greatest feeling in the world, while the love of good deeds was part of her love for God and so was her love for her family. It brought about her parents’ blessings, the utmost blessings in the world.

  Nahleh lived for others, doing good deeds and showering her family with her love and affection. She gave to her family generously and promptly, never expecting anything in return. She believed deeply that giving was an expression of kindness and a form of payback. She gave her homeland what she could, donating significant amounts of money. Once she even donated a bracelet worth two hundred dinars and never regretted it. She wept for the wounded, the orphans, the failed revolution, and for Mazen, her lost brother who traveled aimlessly between airports and in the trenches. She felt that her donations were inadequate because while the fidai gave his blood and soul, she gave only a piece of paper. She cried and regretted not being a man so that she could join Mazen in his struggle for the homeland. She would have given everything and held nothing back, like him. She and Mazen were always different from their siblings, and her father used to say, “Nahleh and Mazen are not only brother and sister but they are made of the same stuff, God be praised!”

  It was during those moments that Said used to ask his father, “What about us, what stuff are we made of?”

  His brother the engineer usually replied, saying, “You are made of a special and unique substance.”

  A fight would usually ensue, which would soon settle down with everybody admitting that Nahleh and Mazen were superior to the others, made of a stuff that valued honesty and self-sacrifice above everything else.

  Where was Mazen now? Where were honesty and self-sacrifice? “Both you and I paid for them, brother,” Nahleh thought to herself, buried her head under the blanket, and cried bitterly.

  Nahleh felt an even greater sense of suffocation on the second day with her brother’s presence in the house due to the curfew. He gave orders and behaved like a sultan. He was insufferable as he sat before the television and began his list of orders, asking for coffee, tea and sweets, specifically ‘awwameh and zunud al-sitt. He wanted everyone to eat with him. His wife went back and forth, moving with great difficulty, muttering angrily, “Damn this life, how disgusting it is. When your brother stays home I suffocate. He gives orders and bosses me around, reducing me to a shuttle
at his service.”

  Then there were the children. Oh the children! The children of the genies and the devils must be quieter than them. They raised hell in the apartment and the building. Their mother, Ni’meh sent them out to play in the stairwell to get rid of them, but they Uttered the stairs with banana peels, pistachio skins, and torn pieces of paper. They tried to make a kite but didn’t succeed: the tall got caught in the rail and when they tried to free it, one of them fell on the glass and broke the solar heating system’s reflector. The young brother with a perpetually runny nose rushed in to tell on his brother, saying that Tareq had broken the tub on the roof. Said went crazy with anger, swearing at the children, at their religion and that of their mother and father. Back from inspecting the roof and still huffing and puffing, he sat on the couch and began complaining. He compared his wife to an owl and her children to dogs, like their maternal uncles. He ranted against a slow-market and the dire economic conditions in the country.

  “May God be praised!” said Nahleh, “I thought you were fine and the factory-was doing well, with a lively market. What’s happening? You’re complaining like in the past. Is this more of the same old tune: my beloved sister, Nahleh, I need a few bucks? Well brother, no more of this talk. I’m not a stupid girl anymore, leave me alone, you’ve bankrupted mc. Get off my back. You’ve milked me like a cow. I’m not the Nahleh of Kuwait, like you all I live on the West Bank now. I’m not even like you, you have families, wives and children, you don’t need anything. It is I who has needs, so don’t talk to me about compensation, my compensation is in a saving deposit account and won’t be broken, no matter what you say.”

  Nahleh’s words didn’t put an end to his complaining. Both he and his wife went on talking Nahleh didn’t hear a word they said, she wasn’t listening. She acted as the proverb says, as if she had an ear of mud and another of dough. She complained and told stories about the Gulf War, the aggravations of life in Kuwait and unemployment. She carried on, saying, “Λ spring that is not fed dries up, and brother, you are well aware of the situation on your father’s farm and your brother Mazen’s condition. As for me, I spend the whole day doing nothing, I’m not used to being at home, all my life I’ve worked and I’ve been active. Now I find myself doing nothing but housework, sweeping and cleaning, washing and making pickles! I’m about to explode, this kind of life is killing me. Am I going to stay home after having spent a lifetime working?”

  Her brother looked at her with deep ire, angered by her tactic—instead of sympathizing with him and listening to his complaints, she reversed the situation, making him listen instead of whining. What a scheming creature, he thought to himself, but he didn’t say anything. When it was time to eat, however, he didn’t give her special attention as he had yesterday. He neglected to overfill her plate, refrained from giving her the best piece of meat, and the most delicious pie. He was gloomy, didn’t talk, and opened his mouth only to eat, burp, and admonish members of his family. He threw disagreeable words at his wife, and addressed a litany of commands to his children, telling them to eat without making noise to stay still and be quiet He swore at them and threatened to smash their heads He slapped one of the children making him cry. The room was in an uproar for a short time then fell into total silence it felt like a grave.

  What a gloomy place. What an atmosphere, thought Nahleh—a place more akin to a prison cell. Her sister-in-law was staring at her, angry but curbing her resentment. She blamed Nahleh for irritating her husband and putting him in a sullen mood. Had she offered to give him money to solve his financial crisis, he wouldn’t have been so irritable and wouldn’t have taken it out on his family. She was stingy and greedy despite all her money. Whom was she saving it for? She had no children and she won’t have any. Who would inherit from her, her father with his failing projects or her womanizing brother surrounded by scandals? Had she had children she would have understood, but she isn’t married and has no experience with children. She sits on a treasure leaving her family at the mercy of” the sun and the rain. Our apartment is supposed to be a home, but is it really one? A room on the roof, even a concierge’s room, a bird’s nest would have been better. The apartment drips and floods and there’s stone only on the faççade, but the rest of the building is made of brick, which leaks all winter. Had she been kind she would have given her brother money to buy an apartment to protect him, his children, and the mother of his children. But the Hamdans are good for nothing, except feeling haughty. Damn this family, they think they are somebody, why? Because their name is Hamdan? So what?

  That evening her sister-in-law did not make up the guest bedroom but told her, with a sullen face, “I left a mattress for you in the living room, and I have no more gas for the space heater.”

  So Nahleh spent the night in the living room and couldn’t go to sleep until everyone went to bed and the television was turned off.

  When Nahleh returned home to Wadi al-Rihan she experienced indescribable joy. First, she had escaped Said, his surroundings, and his disgusting family life, and then she was pleasantly surprised by the unexpected visit of her brother, the engineer who lived and worked in Frankfurt. He didn’t seem happy to see her, however. She wondered what was the matter with him? Did he know about her story with the realtor? Had he been told about the compensation she’d received for her work in Kuwait, and had he come to tell her, like Said and all of them had done before, “Beloved sister, I need some money”?

  Or was he here to study the situation in the country like other businessmen, and catch the worm before the veterans arrive? Of course he had, he had come to be the first to take advantage of the promising conditions for the future. The conferences of donor countries presaged great benefits for some. There will be those who give and those who collect as a result of such promises and generosity. Λ time of solace and manna looms at the horizon. All one had to do now was stretch out under a tree and wait for the fresh honeydew to drop into one’s lap, in abundance. More important was the realization that one had returned to the homeland, the promised land, and the land of rendezvous. The returnees would usually bend down and touch the earth with their forehead, and declare before the cameras and the journalists with tears in their eyes, that the homeland was like the lap of a mother and without it they were nothing. They would stay with family members and be treated like sultans, eat msakhkhan, mansaf and tamriyeh, and knafeh on top of all that. Between invitations they would go to the city to study the conditions of the market and make sure that the family was holding its own. They would ask about the price of the land, the cost of a dunum, that of an apartment, the rent for a storage place, and a shop. They would ask about the down payment and be shocked by the amount, wondering why a storage that looks like a stable in a street that resembled a dump was rented for thousands of dinars. They wondered whether people here thought the returnees owned a bank, or printed banknotes, rather than being humans. They had endured hardships, labored like everybody, and gave as much as anybody did. While some gave their blood, they gave money, and the revolution took away everything. Now, they wanted a share in the cake.

  Incensed, my uncle said, with a smile, “A cake? A cake! Is this what the homeland represents for you? Is this what we’ve come to?”

  The engineer said, by way of an explanation, “Father, why do you want to turn it into a tragedy? This is reality, this is life. Did you want us to give our money and our capital to the occupier? Ha, ha, ha, look who’s coming!”

  When Nahleh entered she hugged and kissed her brother. They exchanged news about Nablus, the security belt around the city, and the demeaning experience of being cooped up in Said’s house with his wife and his unbearable children. She whined and sighed and praised God for her recovered freedom and leaving the house with her sanity intact. She had never seen children like them, filthy and lacking good manners. She wondered how he could live in such conditions, having been raised in a clean house.

  “Let’s not go on about him, let’s return to our discussion of
the market,” said her brother. He then turned to his father and asked him, seriously, “If we want to start a project, such as building a factory, would you join us?”

  His father replied smiling bitterly, “Me, join you? I have no money and no capital, I have nothing but my farm, and as God is my witness, the farm is not a help, but a source of worry.”

  The engineer replied in a realistic and intelligent manner, “Then sell it, and with its price we can build a factory, a very good factory.”

  His father shook his head and said sadly, ‘This is crazy, at my age and after all I’ve seen and endured for the land, do you want me to sell it on the open market? I would rather die. As long as I’m alive on this earth, this land will not be sold. This farm has been in the family from father to son, it belongs to us, to the Hamdan family, whoever sells it will incur my anger. I will curse whoever sells it from my grave.”

  Mazen said reassuringly, “No father, who would dare sell it? Kamal is only joking.”

  But Kamal turned to his brother explaining his intention, “No, I’m not joking. Good people, be realistic, nothing will pull this country out of its mess but industry and industrialization. You’re holding on to the land as if it were something sacred! Let’s see, what does the land bring you during the cucumber season or the cabbage and the tomato season? As for honey, the Honey of the North, do you sincerely consider it honey? It’s far from being honey! You live here in this camp on the West Bank and you don’t know what’s happening in the outside world. People have gone to the moon and reached Mercury. They’ve built hydroponic farms and produced tons of vegetables through infusion. The sapling is placed inside a bottle and it becomes as big as this house producing a ton of cucumber, and here you are talking about the land of my ancestors, the Hamdan’s farm. Forget the farm and all this nonsense, a small factory would be better, or if you want, we can have a farm with a greenhouse.”