Black Book of Arabia (22 page)

I did not like this woman who made fun of my teddy bear, my pretty clothes, and my loose hair. She thought my
hair should be braided. Sometimes she braided it herself, so tightly that it would leave me with a frozen, surprised look, elf-like eyes, and a headache. I was scared of my mother. I began crying whenever it was time to see her. I was told she loved me, but I did not need this particular kind of love—an hour of yelling and sharp one-way conversations that left me traumatized. She was a mess, and ours was the personification of a difficult relationship between a mother and her daughter. She would sometimes speak of her life, which often would end with her crying and me feeling scared. She showed me marks on her body where someone within her household had hit her and left a mark on her pale skin. The stitch marks she showed me looked like visible marks drawn in by a child. I had nightmares from the scars alone. My father demanded that our meetings be supervised and that only appropriate conversation be shared with me. The court rejected the appeal, and I continued to suffer through my weekly meetings.

One day, my father arranged for my mother to have an all-day, unsupervised visit because he had to attend a convention during the day and stay for dinner in the evening. As soon as he left, my mother went up to his room and opened his safe, the pass code for which was my birth date. Even I, a mere five-year-old, knew the combination. I saw her take out passports; she selected mine and set my father's on fire in the metal dustbin. There were wads of cash in the safe, which she dropped into her open bag. She looked through the papers, found
my medical file, and pushed it into her big brown bag. It was all over in minutes. She called someone from the bedroom phone and then grabbed me and walked hurriedly out of the apartment and across the street toward a car with Uncle Adam in the driver's seat. As we drove off, I grew scared, asking to speak to my father and beginning to cry. I wanted to go home, which I began requesting in a higher tone with more fear, over and over until my mother gave me a pinch on my thigh that made me scream with pain.

“We were supposed to stay home,” I cried. “Nanny Delphine will be worried. She will notice we are gone and tell Papa. I could just stay home.”

“Be quiet and don't you dare create a fuss,” said my mother. She had her hair cut in a short, neat bob. She wore a hat over it because the weather was frosty cold that winter. She put a long, thin finger with a ruby ring on it to her lips and shushed me. “I don't want to hear a peep the whole trip.”

She was being especially rough that morning, even for her. I whimpered and felt scared. Tears ran down my face and I slowly began bawling. She slapped me on one cheek, and then Uncle Adam yelled that my cheeks would show signs of physical abuse. So she hit me again on the other cheek with less anger because she needed both cheeks to look a dark rose color to not attract attention to them.

“Don't miss the turn and don't get stuck in traffic,” she snapped at her brother.

Cars honked. Uncle Adam lowered the window and yelled at another driver. I was in the back seat biting my tongue and trying to hold back the tears. Mother fished through her bag for something and then asked Uncle Adam for a cigarette. He passed her one, but she could not find a lighter so she used his cigarette to light hers.

“Mother, where are we going?” I asked, worried I was going to be smacked.

“Home,” she huffed.

I had no idea what she was talking about. We were going farther and farther away from anything that looked familiar. I would tell Papa everything: that Mother hit me twice and yelled at me, and that her smoke made my eyes itch, teary and red.

I did not realize we were on the way to the airport. My mother gave me a pill to take. She said it would help with motion sickness, but it made me so tired that I soon drifted off to sleep. My mother carried me through the security checkpoints where of course I was unable to protest my kidnapping or create a ruckus.

I was drugged for the entire flight. When I awoke, I was in a hot, noisy car that was being driven very fast. My stomach was churning and I needed to use the bathroom. I noticed that one door was held to the vehicle with a plastic rope. I could see the sandy road pass by quickly underneath. White sand covered the floorboard. I counted seven people, including myself, scrunched in the car. Uncle Adam was not among them. It seemed that he had stayed behind in New York.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Please.”

I began trembling. I was afraid if I wet myself she would hit me again. There was a truck ahead of us painted more colors than a rainbow. The car pulled over, and Mother took me by the hand and walked me down the dirt road. When we reached a tall tree, she told me to stop. She expected me to go to the toilet then and there, but I was too nervous. I had never gone to the toilet on an open field of sand, stones, and a few trees. We headed back to the car. I asked when I was going home.

“Enough!” she snapped. “You are staying with me now.”

“But what about Papa?” I asked. I thought about how Papa used to call her and would then come to collect me. That always pacified me, and I always went home in the end. As much as I was scared, I just as much expected someone to come collect me and take me home. My mother did not answer, and we got back in the car.

The scenery outside the windows was a never-ending desert of stark white. The road seemed to go on forever. Then there appeared on the horizon a metropolis that looked just like the skyline of New York and I thought we were still in America. Or perhaps in California. I fell asleep and when I awoke, the road still looked the same. I recalled the story of Hansel and Gretel and tried to leave marks along the way, but this road was simply too long for me to remember. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I realized I was far from home and might never see my father again.

As an American girl, I only spoke English and I could not understand the language of the people in the car. The
driver was wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and smoked continuously.  A large, brunette lady holding a baby in her fat arms sat across from him. She must have gotten out whilst I was asleep. I thought I was in Texas due to the terrain and believed that if I went to a police officer he would take me back to New York. The “Texans” spoke loudly and my mother yelled at them whenever she would pay and haggle. I kept looking for a police officer, but I could not see any.

After several hours of driving we arrived at a small hut made of mud, wood, stone and hay. A large cow and an ox with exaggeratedly long, curled horns grazed outside. My mother ushered me into the hut. This, she said, was my new home. The floor was dirt, covered with straw mats. Dark curtains blotted out the sunlight. There was no air conditioner, only a fan that buzzed loudly. Flies flew in and out under the loose-fitting door. My mother did not seem to mind. Back home, she would have killed them with a flyswatter while complaining bitterly about their filth. Here she did not even bother to shoo them away. The roof had holes, and during the afternoons the rays of sunlight would reveal the swirling dust circulating inside the hut. During the winter months, we would add an extra layer of mud to the outside of the hut to help keep us dry, but the cold was a biting frost that knew no mercy. The blankets did not keep me warm, and I took comfort in the cats sleeping in my bed, as I was grateful for the warmth from their fur and body heat.

I kept hoping that it was all a bad dream and that I would eventually wake up in Central Park. The days
dragged on. With time, I realized that the language spoken was not English or Spanish, but Arabic. This was a whole new alphabet. I finally realized that I was all the way in Egypt, the land of mummies and pyramids, and I was afraid of both.

We lived close to a river that stemmed from the Nile, but there were no proper roads, only sandy trails left by people going back and forth for their livelihood. Our electricity came from a wire buried a few inches under the earth. People dressed colorfully and smiled with big teeth. Many people had crooked or broken teeth that my father could have easily fixed, but he was far away—another life away. I had originally hoped that Mother's visiting day would end. But months passed. I prayed when I woke, I prayed when I ate, and I prayed before I went to sleep for my father to call, to come and save me. I stopped asking when I would go home after Mother broke my rib by kicking me. I had a purple-and-blue bruise on my body for weeks afterwards. I became a regular patient at the hospital, and my mother would make fun of what a clumsy girl I was.

I began to learn how to treat my wounds myself because Mother's beatings got harder as financial times got tougher. Every day I expected my Papa to show up at the door, at the fork in the road, at the fruit seller's. Every tourist looked like Papa, and I would try speaking to them in English. My mother would follow and laugh me off as too much of a dreamer, saying, “We used to live in the States, and now my daughter thinks that just because she was born there she is an American.”

No one believed me. I felt like I was drowning, with no one acknowledging that I was slowly sinking into a cold, dark, murky grave. It took me some time until I learned to speak Arabic. Only the sellers at the large villages spoke English along with several other languages spoken by tourists. Some were even illiterate but still spoke like music in different languages.

Someone in the playground told me that pyramids were gigantic graveyards for the kings—the pharaohs of Egypt. Egypt scared me, and my biological mother scared me even more. She sometimes hit me so hard in public that I would bleed. God forbid if someone should interfere, because she would lose her mind and say to me, “You are forcing my hand! Why could you not be a good and obedient child?”

Only, I was. I listened to what she ordered me to do but, being a child, when hungry I could not help but cry. Crying would multiply my beatings. She used her hands at first, then shoes, sticks and sometimes a metal bar, but that would make me bleed and left marks so she stopped after the village elder interfered. She tried to explain why she would act so aggressively with me to the villagers, but I was a young, gentle, and scared child and no one ever interfered because “Mommy knows best.” Even if it meant I had to go to school with a cut lip, black eye, or a limp. Once she broke my finger in the morning when I dropped my spoon. I was afraid to cry at home, but I cried in writing class in school.

My mother's mother lived a few houses down and came to see us every day. She had brilliant blue eyes and came from “old money,” which according to Mother meant that she was penniless and lazy. Whenever she visited, she would end up arguing with my mother about her behavior. Still, she was excited about meeting me, and I tried to explain to her that I needed to go back to the United States and to Papa. I even invited her to join me in my home in the States. She would laugh and say she was home, that Egypt was home, too. She tried to convince me to stay, but when she became upset would begin speaking sternly, so there were limits to what I was comfortable expressing with her.

For the most part, she was patient and kind with me and we would sit for hours reading stories from the three books we had for children. One was
Little Red Riding Hood
, one was a picture book of Cinderella, and the third was
One Thousand and One Nights
. That was a big book with no pictures, so I never bothered opening it on my own. Yet, I did not mind it being read to me at night. It was my whimsical haven, a sanctuary away from the mud hut. I would shut my eyes and imagine taking Aladdin's flying carpet to go shopping with Papa at the big toy stores, or saying “Open sesame” and being able to go back to my bedroom with crispy sheets and a bed of fluff. Nighttime was my sanctuary away from poverty, insects, and beatings.

School was a short walk away in the village and I was quick and hardworking but soon fell behind in my studies
because I was not native to the local dialect. I desperately asked teachers, shopkeepers, and even people on the street to contact my father in America, but my pleas landed on deaf ears. People did not understand my pain. How could they? They were staring at this scrawny child who was always whining that she wanted to go to Amreeka and thought her own origin was a mistake. Eventually, I made friends with other children in the school who calmed my fears by playing with me. They were kind and chatty once I deciphered the language with hand gestures and expressions. They ended up becoming a blessing.

Still, I felt like a lost tourist with no passport. Once, I saw young American tourists dressed in military clothes and I went to them, begging them to take me home. “Please tell my Papa I am in Egypt! He is looking for me. I swear.”

I was so excited and hoped that they would reach him. I told them his name was Dr Sammy Saad; he was a dentist on the Upper East Side of New York and drove a black Chevrolet. I was his daughter. My mother had taken me away from him, and I had not seen him in years. I said that I needed to go home and that I missed him. My mother showed up and quietly and firmly took my hand. I froze and went quiet.

“My child is a little excited that she has seen Americans,” said Mother. She smiled weakly and continued chatting lightly with the tourists. “We went to Disneyland and we had a wonderful time. We hope to go back when she is older.” She offered them a cigarette as she helped herself to one. They instantly became her friends. I saw my
hopes go up in smoke. They dismissed me as an excited and eccentric child and walked away, thanking Mother for the cigarettes and wishing to see me in America once again.

She waited until we got home and then smacked me with a clay bowl. The bowl broke, and I fell on the floor and could not stand up. My eyes were semi-opened and she thought me dead. I was frail, thin, and already my head had been hit one too many times. It did not hurt. I had stopped feeling anything. I felt cool and collected, as if I were floating on clouds. I stopped caring and just blanked out. She yelled, but I could not comprehend what she was saying. She kicked me, and I think she expected me to get up, but I could not. My grandmother entered to witness Mother kicking the small, frail, unmoving body of her grandchild with a slowly growing pool of blood seeping from her tightly-braided head. I was bleeding from my ears and nose.