Gravel Heart(3)

Our front-door neighbours Mahsen and Bi Maryam lived in a house as small as ours, door facing door like its opposite. Everyone called him Mahsen, without any kind of title, and always called her Bi Maryam. Mahsen was a messenger at the Municipal Offices, a short skinny man who would have been a certain target for bullies when he was a child. Messenger was the official and puzzling name for his work, because he did not really carry messages. He was sent on whatever errands the officers and clerks wanted done: fetch a file, escort someone out, buy a cold drink, a cigarette, a bun, go to the market, take a broken fan to the electrician – the interminable busyness of office life.

Some of the officers and clerks were a quarter of his age but Mahsen never complained. He was always mild, soft-spoken and smiling, a man of endless courtesy and impossible piety. He greeted everyone as he walked home from work, anyone who made eye contact with him received a smile or a wave or a handshake, depending on intimacy, gender or age. He asked after this one’s health and that one’s family and transmitted any news he had picked up on the way. He was up at dawn every morning to go to the mosque for the al-fajiri prayers – not many people did that – and he did not miss a single one of his five prayers every day, devotions which he performed with discretion as if he meant to keep quiet about his doings. If he had not been so modest he would have been mocked as an exhibitionist. He was even polite to children when so many adults spoke to them with belligerence and suspicion, as if they disliked them and suspected them of wickedness and anticipated a challenge from them. Not a shred of evil reputation attached to him although some unkind people wondered aloud if everything was in its place up top.

His wife Bi Maryam did not bother much with discretion, and in many other ways she was unlike Mahsen. She was stout, suspicious and combative. She took every opportunity to draw attention to her husband’s piety and generosity, as if anyone doubted it. A man of faith, she announced when the moment presented itself, the beloved of Our Lord, see how He has given him good health and such looks. He will get his due when his master calls him back to Himself, despite your envy.

She made a living cooking buns and flapjacks for local cafés, and had something to say about almost anything, which she always did and in a robust voice that was meant to be heard by her neighbours and any interested passers-by. She had advice to offer on people’s ailments, had views on people’s travel plans, on how best to grill fish and on the likely outcome of a rumoured marriage proposal. Children hurried past her door in fear that they might be summoned and sent on an errand. Mahsen and Bi Maryam had no children of their own. Her greatest fear was to be misunderstood, which people were always deliberately and maliciously determined to do, so it seemed to her. Her voice and opinions did not seem to jar on Mahsen as they did on other people. My father said that Mahsen had probably gone deaf and could no longer hear her, but other people said it was because he was a saint. Some people said she knew medicines and were wary of her but my mother said that was just ignorance. What she feared was Bi Maryam’s quarrelsome and ill-natured bullying.

For several years, before things went wrong, my father Masud worked as a junior clerk for the Water Authority in Gulioni. His job there was respectable and secure, a government job. That was before I really remember and I only know that time of his life as a story. When I remember him clearly he worked at a market stall or he did nothing, just sat in his room. For a long time I did not know what had gone wrong and after a while I stopped asking. There was so much I did not know.

*

My father’s father was a teacher, Maalim Yahya. I never met him because he left to work in the Gulf before I was born but I have seen a picture of him. Later I went to the same school where he used to teach, and there were several group photographs of the staff in the headmaster’s office. There was one taken every year and they covered most of one wall in the office. The practice must have stopped several years before because there were no recent ones. The headmaster did not appear in any of the photographs nor did any of the teachers working in the school when I was a pupil there. It was like a glimpse of a mythical past: unsmiling men in buttoned-down long-sleeved white shirts or kanzus and jackets. Many of them must have passed away since then. Some were killed in the revolution although I would not have been able to point them out from the photographs. We only knew from rumours that some of the teachers were killed at that time. The headmaster himself had been a student in the school and had been taught by Maalim Yahya. He pointed him out to me.

‘Your grandfather. He was very stern, most of the time,’ the headmaster said. I knew that describing a teacher as stern, or even fierce, was intended as a compliment. Teachers who were not stern were feeble by definition and were appropriately tormented by the children. They called him Maalim Chui behind his back, the headmaster said, because of the way he glared at them and made his hands into claws as if he would tear into them. The clawing threat was so comical that the boys struggled not to laugh but they did not because when their teacher was angry he was frightening. The headmaster demonstrated the glaring and clawing and I could not help laughing. ‘But when you had done something wrong and he looked at you in that certain way,’ the headmaster said solemnly, demonstrating an expression of ferocity as he attempted to retrieve his authority, ‘you felt as if you were about to wet yourself. In those days teachers did not hesitate to hit us, and if you received that look you knew that at the right moment you were going to get a cuff on the back of your head, which actually was not as bad as the way some of the other teachers beat us. You are a spoilt generation compared to us.’