Roots of my fears, p.10
Roots of My Fears, page 10
Outside, the wind howled.
THE SAINT IN THE MOUNTAIN
NADIA EL-FASSI
Last night I dreamed about eels, feasting on the milky flesh of some unfortunate, lesser fish. When I woke up my period had come, red smeared on my thighs. It was my second one, and despite the pain, I was no longer afraid of the blood. I cleaned myself and put on a sanitary towel that I had bribed the maids to hide from my mother as they brought in the shopping. I didn’t want her to find out I was bleeding. Before I went down to eat, I sprayed a heavy floral perfume across my legs, collarbones, wrists – it was sickly sweet but necessary to mask the blood.
She found me in the kitchen, drizzling honey onto a stack of baghrir.
“Are you sure you need all that honey?” My mother stood at my shoulder, swiped a red-nailed finger across the top pancake and sucked it into her mouth. “Come and eat with me.”
I did, squatting down to perch on the low sofa in the morning salon. The maids hadn’t opened the shutters yet, but my mother preferred it that way. Even in the dim light, she cut a striking figure in her green gondora, curls piled on top of her head in a way that looked artful and elegant on her, but would have made me look a mess. She was the kind of woman people wanted to compliment, to be seen by. The girls at my madrasah copied her hairstyles and make-up and always asked me what shade of lipstick she wore. They cared more about her than me, and they made sure I knew it.
“You’re awake early?” she said.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“The heat?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t like this small talk. She never spoke to me like this without an ulterior motive. I could sense it coming, perhaps one or two sentences away, clawing its greasy way into the space between us.
“You should turn your fan on, so you don’t sweat, Mina, it’s ruining your skin.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
She clicked her tongue and reached across the table to help herself to my breakfast. As she leaned close, I felt her stiffen.
“You smell different.”
Guilt closed my throat. “It’s a new perfume.”
“No. You’re bleeding.”
“No, I’m—” She grabbed me by the base of my skull, nails scraping my scalp. I stifled down a pained sound as a cramp bruised my abdomen.
“Don’t lie to me, Mina. You got your period. When?”
“Last month.”
Her fingers eased a little, but I could already feel a stinging at my hairline where her nails had broken the skin. This close, my mother smelt of brine and cigarette ash and honey.
“Good. It’s not too late, then.”
“Too late for what?”
“Silly girls ask silly questions,” was all she said.
* * *
My mother and father argued in the grand salon after dinner. I had only picked at my part of the tagine plate, nibbling at the beef shin that my father broke up and placed in front of us. When I hadn’t finished my food, my mother had eaten it for me. She could eat and eat and never put on weight.
“You’re not driving there on your own, Rachid can drive you both,” my father said. He had adopted the pleading tone I often heard him use when speaking with my mother, when he knew he was fighting a losing battle.
“No.” My mother’s voice was raspy, lower than normal. “I am taking her home, and we’ll be back next week. Don’t push me, Abdel.”
It dawned on me that when she said “home”, my mother meant to take me to her village. To H_____, where she’d been raised. She barely ever spoke about it, and I had learned not to ask.
Why now was she taking me there?
I peeked around the corner, careful not to lean on the creaking door, and saw my mother standing over my father. It wasn’t right… that’s the best way I can put it. She was too tall, too straight. I must have leaned on the door anyway, because her eyes flicked to mine, her mouth opened wide in one of her feverish smiles.
* * *
My mother said I could sit in the front seat, now I was nearly a grown-up. My father waved goodbye to us from the doorstep, telling my mother to drive slowly. Her red nails kept clicking on the steering wheel and the car was hot, but when I tried to open my window, she reached her hand back and wound it back up, saying I couldn’t open it until we left Salé, so her skin wouldn’t take in the fumes.
I thought back on everything I knew about my mother’s village. It wasn’t much. H_____ was somewhere in the mountains, and once, when I had complained about my walk to school, she told me I should at least be grateful I had a school within walking distance, so it must be a small village too.
I wondered if I still had family there. If my mother had siblings. I’d heard her on the phone in the kitchen a couple of times, late at night, when she thought no one was listening and the maids had gone to sleep, talking to someone down the line. Her voice would change to a low hiss and I could never make out the words.
I shifted in my seat, earning a glare through the rear-view mirror. The bleeding was worse than yesterday; everything I ate had made me bloat and all my clothes clung to me awkwardly.
After an hour we streamed out of the city and onto the open road. Zeboul shrubs lined the road, the fruits hanging heavy and sweet. The car kicked up dust, but I didn’t care, sucking in deep breaths with the window down; the air smelt of asphalt and oranges. She’d finally let me breathe, and like every morsel of affection she gave me, I gobbled it up.
“Are we going to see your family?” I asked. I had picked my questions carefully, as I always did with her.
I fell under her gaze. “In a way.”
What way? I almost said, and bit down on my tongue to stop myself.
“There’s an important part of our family history up in the mountains, in H_____. It’s time for me to finally show it to you.”
“Why now, not before?”
“You weren’t a woman before, they would have had no need of you.”
Who was “they”? Was I only a “woman” now because I had my period? I tried to ask more questions but she didn’t like it.
* * *
We hadn’t passed a car in a while, only the occasional farmer with a mule and wagon. There didn’t seem to be any towns this far into the countryside, only small villages cut into the hillside that my mother sped through in seconds. I saw flashes of a few tin roofs, a grocer, a gaggle of hajjis sitting in the shade drinking tea. If there were women and children, they were out of the sun and in the cool, shaded indoors. It was the hottest part of the day. I wished we could stop so I could use the bathroom and wash my face.
The mountains loomed around us, previously indistinguishable from the yellow haze of sky. We cut through them on winding, steep roads. Pink shrubs and heather, olive groves, and further in the distance, the squat white arches of graves poking up from the earth like decaying molars.
My mother didn’t even wipe the sweat or dirt from her face, beads of it rolled into her eyes and I watched her blink them away. Her pin curls were coming undone. She drove fast, gripping the steering wheel with a fervour, the map forgotten.
I remained as still as I could so I wouldn’t draw her attention even from the corner of her eye. When she was in these moods it was best to make myself as small and still as possible. Not a threat.
I played a game with myself, keeping my burning eyes open as long as I could until my vision swam and blurred like I was underwater, then I’d allow myself to blink. When I grew tired of that, I practised my English in my head. I go, you go, he goes.
I fell into my favourite daydream: I would get accepted for a travel-abroad scholarship, just as my cousin Fatiha had done. I would travel to England or America, and I would have oceans and thousands of miles between me and my mother. We would speak on the phone sometimes, because that was safe. She wouldn’t be able to reach me in America, and if she came to visit I would have time to prepare. I would go to school, I would have friends that didn’t know me only as my mother’s daughter, I would shine. Maybe, if someone asked me about my mother I could lie, and tell them that she had died and I would bathe for a moment in their sweet, pitying expression as they imagined me to be a child who had lost a loving mother.
The daydream helped pass the time.
Late afternoon came, the shadows reaching across the side of the car, and we still hadn’t eaten.
“Please can we stop? Just for a minute?” I whispered.
Eventually, we saw a man on the side of the road, pulling along a cart piled high with zeboul and oranges and watermelons. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother lick her lips. She wouldn’t stop for me, but she would for food.
We pulled over and paid for a watermelon and some zeboul. I ate a few, my mouth filled with honey, almost too sweet, and the soft mounds of the seeds. Like beetle shells. I tried not to bite down, though it went against my instinct.
I watched my mother, in her pretty French-style dress, crouch down on the side of the road and gorge herself on the red flesh of the watermelon until her mouth was stained with it.
“Go buy me another,” she told me, and I gave the man five dirhams for another watermelon.
“Where are you both going, then? Don’t see many new cars around here,” the old man said.
“We’re going to H_____,” I told him. He flinched, as if I’d spat on him.
“Why H_____, benti? Don’t you know what happens there?” His voice had quietened to a whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“Strange, ancient things live up in these mountains, benti.” He said, leaning in. “They say H_____ is home to a djinn,
an old and powerful one, that takes many shapes. Strange people live there. You should turn around and go home.”
“But we’re going to visit family? My mother—” A shadow loomed behind me, and my mother snatched the watermelon from my hands.
“What has he been telling you?” she hissed.
The old fruit seller staggered back, made a gesture with his hands. It took me a moment to recognise it, it was something I had seen my maid Maha do on occasion, to ward off evil. My mother grinned, spitting out a watermelon seed at the man’s feet.
“Superstitious old bastard,” she laughed, and grabbed my wrist, pulling me back to the car. I waited until my heart slowed, unsure why it was even racing in the first place. Djinn were meant to be children’s tales; my father used to tell me about them when I couldn’t sleep, but his stories only gave me nightmares. They weren’t real.
“Mama, the man said—”
“—ignore him. He was talking shit.” The words sounded crude in her mouth.
“He said something about a djinn in the mountains.”
My mother looked back at me in the rear-view mirror, her expression feverish with anger. Brine scented the air, even though we were miles and miles inland.
“I said ignore him, Mina.” She spoke, but her lips barely moved, the sound instead vibrating from within her body. I didn’t like the way she said my name. “There is no djinn, there is only the Saint.”
* * *
We hadn’t passed any more villages in over an hour. I rolled my window back up; the mountain air was biting. I really wished we could stop and rest. I wanted to wash; I managed to change my towel earlier but I didn’t feel clean. I needed water.
My mother hadn’t elaborated on what she meant by the “Saint”. Was it just a term of endearment she used for some old grandmother figure? A hajja we had to go and pay our respects to?
It was almost dusk when my mother turned down a side road. I gripped the handle of the side door as the car swerved, tossing dust in our wake. It was barely a road at all, more like a dirt track, only there if you knew where to look. Cacti lined it on either side as it switched back up the hillside. If you were driving past, it would be impossible to tell there was a road here at all.
“We’re not far now,” my mother said.
“Close to the Saint?”
She nodded and smiled at me with all her teeth. We must have reached the top of the hillside, because evening sunlight blinded me in a sudden rush, and the road flattened. When I could see again, I glanced around.
All the way up here, hidden from view, was a village. No shops, but small houses with thatched roofs, walls made of the same blood orange stone as the ground they stood on. A few donkeys, their ribs on show, were tied to an olive tree. My mother pulled to the side of the road and got out. I reached for my bag.
“Leave it. You won’t need it,” she said.
I got out of the car and followed her. The air up here was clearer, blowing in from the west. For a moment, I caught a salty, oceanic smell, the same one that had been following me since yesterday, and heard running water, but the mountain around me was shrub dry.
People came out of their houses, keen to see who had driven up here. Strangely, they were all women. Some young, some holding babies against their chests or slung around their backs. You wouldn’t know it was the modern world; I couldn’t hear the buzz of a single radio, nor were there any cars lining the path.
I didn’t like the way they looked at me, those quiet, shiny-eyed women, with the disinterest of a predator that knows its prey will tire eventually. We passed an old woman sitting on her stoop, sifting through lentils for rocks. I recognised the act, because my mother made me do it as punishment when I’d misbehaved. Sometimes, she asked me to eat the little pebbles, and would bend closer to listen to the way they crunched in my mouth, slicing my gums.
My mother grabbed my hand and tugged me further down the main path, the only path. No one spoke to us.
“Can we go? Please,” I whispered, pulling at her sleeve.
My mother looked down at my hand on her sleeve as if a small, dirty bug had latched on to her, and shook me off.
“Why would we leave? We’ve only just got here.”
I pulled my hand back, started turning back to the car, but she dug her nails into my wrist, the skin breaking.
I felt in my core then, how wrong this was. I didn’t want to meet this Saint, that elicited such fervour from my mother. She was here with me, but I was alone.
There was a white house at the end of the path, behind it only sky. I had a sense of being at the edge of something, a maw that would swallow me up. All around us were more graves, the same shade of bone white.
“Can you feel that, Mina?” my mother said, hushed reverence in her voice.
“Feel what?”
“The Saint, all around us. Be a good girl now and do what I tell you.”
I nodded.
“Are you scared?” my mother said, looking down at me. “You don’t need to be. I visited the Saint when I was your age too, it’s completely natural.”
I huffed to myself how all these “completely natural” things felt anything but.
My mother knocked at the door of the white house, and a middle-aged woman opened, a white headscarf wrapped around her hair. Brine and damp hit my nose immediately, coming from inside. Something wet and dark and fishy.
“Khalti.” My mother exhaled, and the woman pulled her into a tight hug. After they broke apart, the woman looked at me.
“This is my daughter, Mina.”
“Mina,” the woman said, tasting my name on her tongue. Like she wasn’t accustomed to speaking. She pressed a kiss to each of my cheeks, but her own cheek was clammy and gritted with dried salt.
“Come inside.” The woman beckoned us in. I followed my mother, doing as she did and taking my shoes off at the door. The inside of the house was much colder than outside, raising gooseflesh on my skin.
There was very little furniture: a small sink in the corner, and a couple of chairs. My focus was drawn to the centre of the room where a pool was cut into the earth, round as a bulbous eye. I couldn’t see how deep it went, nor was I inclined to step closer. There was no lamplight either, the room only lit by the fading sun that came in from one squat window.
“What is this place?” I asked.
My mother turned to me, flashing me a smile, and I caught sight of the other woman. A similar smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“Welcome to the door of the Saint,” the woman said. “Sit down, over here.” She gestured at some woven mats near the pool.
“The door?” I said.
The woman’s eyes flicked down to the pool of black water. When she spoke again, it was in a voice of ritual.
“We are but a humble entrance, a place of crossing. You are blessed, Mina, to be in the presence of such a wonder.”
“The Saint is here? Are we going to see them?”
“No, Mina,” my mother said, reaching out and patting my hand, “you are going to see the Saint. They are waiting for you.”
That feverish gleam was back in her eyes, the same expression she had sometimes when I saw her eating, or when she would watch me consume the lentil stones. She knew I couldn’t leave; she had me under her thumb.
I told myself that there was nothing to be afraid of, I wanted to believe that she would not do anything to me. There was no way out from here, only the single door behind me and even if I managed to leave, there was only the village at my back, and the silent women.
I wanted to shout at her to save me and take me home and end whatever this was. But more than that, I wanted her to look at me, for once in my life, with something other than loathing. As always, I would do what my mother wanted. Maybe this time it would be different, and I would make her proud.
“Alright. How do I meet the Saint?”
The woman reached for me and pulled me to standing. Without ceremony, she began unbuttoning my dress.
“Stop. What are you doing?”
“Let her, Mina. Or do it yourself.” My mother waved a hand.
“Can’t I keep my clothes on?”
“No,” the woman said, “they would only get wet.”
I understood then that they wanted me to get into the pool. The pool that, now I looked again, seemed to writhe in its blackness, too dark to be water, shapes moving just out of sight. I could swim, I wasn’t afraid of that. I spent most summers by the sea, staying out in the water as long as I could until my mother dragged me back to sit under the umbrella, scolding me that my skin would become too dark to be pretty. But this was not the clean sea with its brightly darting fish. No water should smell like this or appear so olive black.
