The Milk of Birds (11 page)

Meriem screamed when Umm Ali began her work, and all I could do was cluck and cradle her face, still soft and fat in the way of babies. The womanly smell of her blood startled me.

•   •   •

This girl's scream stops suddenly, as on a wedding night.

On wedding nights in Umm Jamila men laughed and women trilled their tongues. They said Umm Ali was a good midwife, for it was rare a husband had to summon her in his shame to cut the stitches on his bride.

I used to wonder about the business between a man and a woman. One day I found my mother with a handful of frankincense and myrrh. “It is time for you to learn,” she said. She showed me how she tossed the incense in the fire and squatted naked beside it, her robe spread open behind her like a bird's wings to trap the fragrant smoke against her skin.

She smeared herself with fat until her skin glistened, smooth and sweetly smoky. “You will do this for your husband,” she said.
“Inshallah.”

“And after I have babies,” I said. “When the visitors come.”

“Inshallah,”
she said, smiling. She laid her hand on her belly. “I have another baby coming. A boy,
inshallah
. Give birth to male babies to support your house.”

So I was the first in the family to hear of my brother Ishmael, though I had guessed it as my mother squatted by the fire.

She showed me her jars, opening them one by one. I sniffed. “Sandalwood,” she said, “dipped in sugar. To burn for another
scent. You must find what your husband likes. Make him happy, and he will do the same for you.”

Another jar held grayish lumps. “Grind potato with sorghum,” my mother said. “If you do not have fat, mix it with oil. If you do not have oil, mix it with water.”

She picked a lump between her fingers and laid it in my palm. From a tall, thin bottle she poured a drop of oil.

“Rub it together,” she said. “Make it warm.” She smiled her teasing smile. “One hand is the wife, the other the husband.”

The paste was thinner, smoother than I expected.

“Good,” my mother said. “Now rub it in, on your arm.”

My skin turned dark and moist, like the earth when a bucket spills.

“It is time we found you a good husband,” my mother said. “He who is wise marries for his children. Your father does not want to lose your work, so he has been slow in this. But it is time.”

•   •   •

The girl screams again. She must be giving birth.

I wonder which girl. I have seen others like me, with no husband. Is this one spoiled meat too?

She has no midwife, for there is none. In the spring, the
khawaja
sometimes sent for one from the village. The midwife traveled and spent the day, seeing some of those who could walk to the clinic. But she comes no more, either because of the rains or the fear on the roads.

Perhaps in the dark my mother is remembering my brother Ishmael's birth. That day she sent Muhammad alone with the herd, and together we weeded, my mother, Kareema, my sisters, and I. In truth Meriem was no help, prattling on about Aisha,
how beautiful she was, and why did our uncle Fareed marry her in the rainy season.

My mother said to Kareema, “Fareed is no fool.”

To Meriem she said, “Your uncle will get to spend many days inside with his new bride.”

“How boring,” Meriem said.

My mother started singing. Then she stopped.

“Should I send Nawra for Umm Ali?” Kareema asked.

“Not yet,” my mother said. She closed her eyes.

“Are you sleepy?” Meriem asked.

My mother did not answer. Finally she opened her eyes. “I am listening to the baby. He is knocking at the door.”

Saha worked quietly. I loved to watch her do anything with her hands. With her long, thin fingers she scooped a circle around each weed, loosening the dirt, then pinched the leaves and plucked the weed straight from the ground, as if it were a hair.

•   •   •

Again the girl screams. I hear fear.

In Umm Jamila, if a woman did cry out in pain, giving birth or holding one dear as he died, the cry was cushioned by many other sounds, voices of those giving comfort or drawing lessons, children and animals stirring and shushed. It was not this terrible sound, ripping the coarse fabric of the night.

Here girls scream surrounded by people and yet all alone.

My mother did not scream. In Umm Jamila, most women did not scream, for though they say man is the molar tooth, really it is women who tolerate the sweet and the bitter. Finally she had me fetch Umm Ali, who came with her rope. Sometimes Umm
Ali tied it under a woman's arms and pulled her back, away from the baby. But for my mother, Umm Ali tied her rope to the roof, a rope so long my mother could hold it while she kneeled. It was not long before my mother pushed Ishmael into Umm Ali's hands. By then my aunts had arrived, Aisha and Selma and Raja. When Umm Ali caught the afterbirth, my aunts planted it by the door, with some seeds of millet and watermelon. From those plants they made medicine for stomach pains or flux.

My mother rested for forty days, but the household did not. My aunts and grandmother were cooking, ordering us, “Bring this, stir that.” I did not go back to the herd for more than a week, until after Ishmael's naming. Aunt Raja was in charge of the
kissra
, for all said she made the pancakes so thin and light they could float on a breeze like a feather.

She brought her own spatula of date palm leaves. “This one is three months old,” she said, “but it stays supple because I leave it in a little batter. We will use that batter to start another batch.”

We prepared a huge bowl, and by the morning the sorghum smelled like yogurt, sweet in its sourness. We heated oil on the iron, and the batter sizzled as Aunt Raja spread it with her spatula, one, two, rounding strokes, the edges crisping brown. The first pancake she gave to Abdullah, for all knew she had her eye on him for her daughter Laila.

“If your relative eats your meat,” she said, “he will never break your bone.”

“Too hot,” Abdullah cried, tossing the
kissra
from hand to hand.

My aunt laughed at his tenderness.

•   •   •

Again the girl screams, from a place deep inside. But her voice breaks. She is tiring.

Perhaps she has a husband. Perhaps he is running now, searching for a midwife.

I dreamed once to have a husband.

The mother of Tahar came to call. She drank tea and talked long into the afternoon with my mother. But that night my mother told my father, “Say he is too young. That boy is like his mother, much noise and no flour. He is not good enough for Nawra.”

My
khal
mentioned another boy, but my mother said to her brother, “That family finds bones in butter!”

It felt good then to be a girl too good for idle and unlucky boys.

It felt good to have aunts and uncles looking and a mother choosing, to have a shade to pull over my head.

I dreamed of squatting by a fire burning sugar-coated sandalwood. Often I smelled the spices on my mother and saw my father leave her shelter, and for many days something existed between them. On those days, my father became a teaser.

“Do not keep your stick away from these three: a woman, a drum, and a female donkey,” he said.

“If you hit me, Papa, I make tears,” Meriem said. “But if you hit a drum, it makes music. Wouldn't you rather dance?”

My mother clapped at that and started singing. Then she stood and did a few steps. That was a happy afternoon, as my father drank his sweet tea and my mother danced to her own song. Meriem was not so silly as she often played.

“A she-camel will kill you if you hit her,” Muhammad said. “She will carry her grudge, and then one day when you are sleeping, she will crush you beneath her breastplate.”

Abdullah told a hadith about the Prophet, God's blessing upon him, who saw the fires of hell crowded with women. People asked if the women were unbelievers, but the Prophet said they were ungrateful to their husbands and ungrateful for the favors they had received. Even if you do many good things for a woman, she will remember only the one bad.

But I wondered then, as my mother danced, what if the one bad thing is very bad? I do not think the Prophet would say a woman should be grateful for a man's beating.

•   •   •

Panic edges the girl's scream. Something is not right.

“Put a stick in her mouth!” someone shouts.

“Put a stick in yours,” Adeeba mutters.

I laugh, even here. What if I had not met this girl?

“Remember the night the unlucky and the hopeless got together?” I whisper.

“I remember the night you almost bashed my head in with a rock!” she says.

“I was hoping you were something good to eat,” I say. “Thrashing around. ‘It's a big animal,' I whispered to my mother. Do you remember that, my mother?”

She does not answer.

I slid my mother off my shoulders that night and crawled on the ground, groping. My knee found the rock before my hand. Then I stood. I remember how good that felt, standing straight, unburdened, just the rock in my hand. The darkness clothed
me, and for a moment I was strong and unashamed. A hunter. Man has only to think and God will take care of him. With the rock I was going to kill the animal that God had provided.

“Thanks to God I was not a soldier with a gun,” I say to Adeeba.

“You were scarier than any soldier with a gun,” Adeeba says. “A starving, naked girl with a rock.”

“You were skinnier than any bush rat—no meat there!” I say.

“One day we will roast a lamb together,
inshallah
,” Adeeba says. “We will pull the meat off the hot bones with our teeth and the spices will sting our lips, and we will lick the grease from our fingers before we roll over and fall asleep.”

“Inshallah,”
I say. “A friend is God's gift.”

“So is meat,” Adeeba says.

The girl's scream has faded to a whimper.

“Do you recognize who?”

“No,” Adeeba says.

The girl is pleading now for God's mercy.

“If I could help her,” Adeeba says.

“You will have your chance to help.”

“That is your mother's place,” Adeeba says.

We listen to my mother's silence.

“I hope K. C.'s letter comes,” I say.

In the dark, we imagine ourselves in Richmond, USA, visiting K. C.'s house, which stands so tall we must climb stairs to reach the room where girls sleep. My mother is with us, and she and K. C.'s mother sit by the fire and sing songs of yesterday as her brother plays his guitar.

J
ULY
2008

We can't just drive into Washington. No, no, we have to park in the East Falls Church lot and ride the Metro. Never mind that it's eight thirty a.m. and already a thousand degrees. You'd think on Saturday at least I could sleep in. Even Golden Boy Todd isn't thrilled—we figure it has to be a museum, since they're free in D.C.—but Mom bribed him into the car with doughnuts. If he were a rat, all the exterminator would have to do is bait the trap with Krispy Kreme. Todd ate half the box, and it still didn't sweeten his disposition.

Inside the station, Mom hands me her credit card and the SmarTrip cards. “Add ten bucks to each,” she says.

I hate this wall of directions.

“Read, moron,” Todd says. He points to the numbers—1, 2, 3 sprinkled all over the place with a hundred little messages in between. Usually the one good thing about numbers is that they line up. I'm like Nawra's brother with his sheep.

At this hour, the Metro car's not too full, so we find seats by the door. At Rosslyn, a bunch of geezers boards. They're all wearing matching black baseball caps that say
UP AND AT 'EM
, which reminds me of Grampers. Missing him stabs me right in the heart. I stand up and point to my seat.

“That was nice of you,” Mom says as we get off the train.

Todd gags. “Where
are
we going?”

“To a lecture about Darfur,” Mom says.

“Lecture,” Todd says flatly. He scowls at me, but it wasn't my idea! “Lecture.” He stretches out the word like Silly Putty, whining all the way up the Foggy Bottom escalator.

“I'm planning to take you out to lunch, too, if you quit bellyaching,” Mom says. She ignores our unenthusiasm by playing tour guide—hospital, residence hall, academic center. We're right in the middle of George Washington University, which she wants Todd to put on his college list even though Dad thinks state schools are good enough and all he can afford.

Money. Now that love's out of the picture, that's all my parents fight about.

Mom leads us to the social policy building, where we file into a classroom with seats like a theater, only hard and mostly empty. Todd chooses a different row from Mom and me to sulk. On the stage, two people sit on stools chatting, a woman who might have had her hair done at a car wash and a guy who looks Indian—India Indian. Finally the woman stands up and introduces the man, a physicist from a big lab in California. Todd, across the aisle and four rows ahead, straightens in his seat. Mr. Physics invites the audience down front.

“When molecules come together in a small place, you get a critical mass for a chain reaction.” He's making a science joke so we won't feel embarrassed for him about the lousy attendance.

Todd deigns to let us sit with him.

The government sent Mr. Physics to Darfur with a colleague to look at the stove problem! I nudge Mom, and she nudges back because we're both thinking about Nawra's mom crying
from the smoke before she ran out of tears. This guy interviewed women in a bunch of camps. Basically the countryside's running out of trees . . . and bark and twigs and grass, and once the land loses all its vegetation, the desert creeps in the way shopping malls do here. He says women spend something like twenty-five hours a week gathering fuel. Unless they buy it, but then they have to sell half their food.