The smell of frying nudges me out of sleep. The sun is not yet up. I get out of bed and walk into the kitchen. Mama is at the stove, stirring sliced onions in olive oil on a low heat.
“Good morning, sleepyhead, you’re up early.”
Her tone is gentle, not yet hardened by the day. I give her a kiss, ask her what she’s cooking.
“فاصولياء. Tata will prepare the rest,” she says, “I’m just getting it started.” “When did you get up?”
“I’ve been up since four thirty. I couldn’t sleep.” “You wake up so early,” I yawn.
I go back and shake my brothers out of their sleep. We get ready for school and my body tenses. I put out my hands in front of me, raise four fingers on each. The number of hours I will be gone, I think to myself. I can take down one finger each hour. And I do, hour on hour, throughout the day, so that by the time I get back home, eight hours later, I put two fists in front of me. Two big zeros. I walk straight into the aroma of the green bean stew that Tata has cooked. Both she and Mama are in the kitchen. Mama is frustrated, I can tell, no longer the calm presence I had encountered at dawn, when the house was still and asleep. She is dressed in her work clothes and has an apron covering her skirt. I ask if she’s OK.
“Yes.” She is curt with me, and I know better than to prod. I give Tata a hug.
“How was school?” she asks. I shrug and let my head rest on her shoulder.
“اتكل ابني، يا, ‘Lay your worldly burdens at my feet,’ Jesus Christ had instructed his beloved apostles,” she says, rubbing my back.
I nod and leave the kitchen with the salad bowl. Baba is seated at the head of the table where we gathered every day at a time that was neither lunch nor quite dinner. I put the bowl down and give him a kiss. Mama follows with the rest of the food and takes her place to his right, close to the kitchen. Tata, seated beside me, reminds us to say grace. We clutch our hands in front of our faces and bow as Laith, the eldest, mumbles a prayer, the same one we turn to at every meal, reciting words that comfort only in their repetition, having lost all meaning over the years. “Rima, can you get the salt?” Baba, dressed in his pajamas, ready for his siesta, mutters as soon as Laith finishes.
Mama, having just sat down, gets up. Laith begins talking about his basketball game at school, which I caught glimpses of from the landing above. Nadim watched the game and wants details. Baba listens, waiting for the salt, which he grabs from Mama, whose eyes meet mine. Laith is recounting how, close to the end of the first half, he was blocked from a perfect shot by his best friend, who was, unusually, he tells us, playing on the other side.
“He knew I was going to try that shot. He knows my moves too well.”
“The food is too hot,” Baba grumbles, pushing the plate away from himself in exasperation, making his fork and knife clatter. “Why can’t you just take it off the stove twenty minutes before we get here?” he snaps, looking at Mama. “Is that so hard? Ufft.”
Ufft. The mother of all expressions. A word so versatile it can be as innocuous as a casual exclamation of surprise, or—as was frequently the case with Baba—a threatening declaration of fury. A biting ufft from him could silence us for the remainder of the meal, or sometimes even condemn us to an evening of hushed conversations. The air crackles. Mama looks confused and says something about having turned off the stove a while back—as soon as she walked in from work.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ll serve it cooler next time.”
Baba, placated, pulls the plate closer to him again. The conversation tentatively restarts. It meanders, from the basketball game to Nadim’s classes to mine. I mention a comment from our elementary English teacher about my comprehension skills, and Mama nods proudly across the table. We move on to Baba’s day, which went well, to Mama’s, which would often include some funny story about Ziad, her manager, a sweet but incompetent businessman who depended on her to do almost everything in the office without ever giving her credit. This time, she recounts how she had to sit down with a potential client while Ziad was out picking up his dry cleaning, having forgotten about the meeting, and of her almost closing the deal. Just as she was about to get a commitment from the client, she beams, Ziad burst into the office, flustered, with hangers and shirts flying about, and—
“Rima, you changed this recipe. I liked it more before,” Baba interrupts her, holding his plate out for more.
Mama shoots an exasperated look across the table. She offers him a stiff serving of food and says something in defense, a futile effort, like “It’s the same recipe” or “Have you noticed anything different, boys?” inviting one of us to protest Baba’s verdict, to rally to her side. A practiced exchange; we have been here before. Our home is مكهرب, electrified, with a current that runs through our daily lives, as present and constant as the couch in our living room or the food we ate. I put my palms under my thighs and look down at my food. Next to me, Tata stiffens and works to dispel the tension, gently offering an antidote.
“I added more pepper,” she says. “It needed spice.”
I follow her lead, trying to inject levity.
“Hmm, really? I love this recipe. It’s yummy. What did Ziad do, Mama?”
The conversation falters. Mama shakes her head as we eat the remainder of our meal quietly, our cutlery clanking against the plates.
“دايمة,” Baba chirps after a few bites.
He gets up, leaving his plate on the table. The tension defuses, like a balloon losing air. I help Mama clear the dishes. Her frustration, palpable before lunch, does not erupt. She never fights back or lashes out at Baba, at least not in our presence. Instead, her anger is stoked, an ember that only occasionally—unpredictably—bursts into flame: at Amman’s dust as she manically cleans the house; at shop attendants and strangers in the street; at everyone and everything around her that is doing something to ruin her day. A rage that has become a part of her being, one so essential that, without it, she would be lost, a traveler without a compass moving through an unforgiving life.
***
“My fighters,” Baba called my brothers and me every time we gathered around him, whether on my parents’ bed while they flicked through the papers or out on the balcony, where he lost himself in thought well into the night. “I’m running ideas through my mind,” he would tell us. He would contemplate work challenges and assess family affairs, make financial decisions, and play out tactical maneuvers to close this or that deal. His mind whirred tirelessly, and often, he would interrupt conversations with a question that bore no connection to the present moment, revealing that his mind was constantly elsewhere, navigating possibilities to expand and protect his kingdom.
He invited us, his fighters, to prod and challenge. What if this happened and that did not? He took our sparring seriously; we were all equal, from Nadim at barely seven, to Laith, who was about to graduate high school, and me in between. We were collectively engaged in shaping our future and had to play on his terms; to be logical, unemotional, and, if successful, our pushback would indeed alter his mind. Never was there a sense, however, that this democratic fraternity dissolved hierarchy. We revered Baba, and this grounded our interactions with him, even at their most informal. We saw his wisdom as formidable, and if decisions failed to make sense to us, we still trusted blindly, because there was a vast reservoir of love that underpinned his pragmatism.
As he held court, his contentment at having his three boys around him was unmissable. “I am raising tough men,” he would declare, “men who know when to fight and when to stand back. Never to pick fights or prey on the weak. But to protect what is right: one’s beliefs and the honor of one’s family.” Early on, bookishness absolved me of manliness. “He’s too smart for that kind of behavior,” Baba started saying at some point, speaking just as proudly as he did of Laith’s fistfights, which became bloodier and more frequent in high school. “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” he even asked Laith once.
Nadim and I run into my parents’ room. I jump onto the bed and steady my breath, open the paper in front of my face, and stare at it as the text blurs. Nadim, dressed in his pajamas, hides behind the door. We can hear Baba’s footsteps approaching, and I am trying hard not to giggle. Nadim is failing miserably. I glance from behind the paper and see him crouched on the floor, his hand covering his mouth, his whole body shaking.
“What are you doing reading my papers?” Baba asks, playfully upset. “Boo!”
Nadim shouts prematurely, jumping out as soon as Baba crosses into the room.
“Aaah!” Baba yells, pretending to have been startled as I dissolve into a fit of giggles, primarily at the thought that anything could scare Baba.
Before I know it, Nadim is on the ground, screaming; Baba is bent over, tickling him to tears, until Nadim begs for mercy. Baba lifts him up, gives him a peck on the cheek, and throws him onto the bed, crumpling all the papers. They settle down. Baba reclines next to us and picks up the Jordan Times. Nadim and I mimic him. A few minutes pass before I return to the same question I always ask these days.
“How were you going to class when Mama was protesting?” I blurt out, incredulous.
He grins.
“We’ve been over this, over and over again, Tareq.”
“I know, Baba, but I want to hear the story again. Please!”
He sighs. Another act for my benefit.
“Your mother was crazy, Baba,” he says in a tone both resigned and boastful. “She was constantly getting herself into trouble. Those rallies for Palestine were not going to get us anywhere.”
“OK, but weren’t you also angry?”
“I was angry, Baba. Of course I was angry. But Haifa had already been lost. What student could bring her back? Our leaders were looking out for their own interests. You think they cared about the refugees in Lebanon or the protests on the streets? You think they cared what college students in Beirut thought? All your mother was doing was bashing her head against a brick wall. It was causing trouble for nothing. But she had fire within her, Baba, what can I say? She had fire within her. There was nothing she could do about that.”
A protest had erupted during their student days at AUB, near the green expanse of the Oval, in the corridor connecting it to the main gate of the university on Bliss Street—the same one we entered on our first trip there after the war. A major artery of the campus, this was where all the student organizing took place, one of the few places where political activity could happen in the city without the army intervening. “This campus is considered American land,” Baba had explained, “so protests took place here all the time.” The corridor walls were covered with layer upon layer of posters, calls to action, leaflets, statements, student declarations, political manifestos. Some protests had to do with domestic politics; others with university affairs, like the tuition fees that students were struggling to meet; still others with regional politics. During the war, students mobilized around Palestine, especially when Israeli bombs landed in the south. Before that particular protest, tensions had been simmering on campus for days, and everyone knew that an eruption was inevitable.
“It effervesced,” Baba says, “unplanned. It escalated so rapidly that the Lebanese army had to be called in. I was walking up from the business school, which as you saw is further down, closer to the sea, and I heard all that shouting. I could not believe it; I had never seen anything like that before. Uniformed and heavily armed soldiers swarming in through the main gate and into the courtyard, their batons out and ready. They were not meant to be there, you know? They were not allowed on campus. My heart sank. I just knew that your mom was going to get hurt.”
On the far end of the corridor, Baba looked over the heads of his fellow students, searching for her as the troops circled them. He shoved his way through; some students were standing listlessly, others had their fists in the air, shouting. There was so much noise that he could not make out what was being said on the loudspeakers. But when he got close enough, he saw her standing on a podium, in the middle of the corridor, shouting through a megaphone. Of course, he thought to himself. Of course she’s the one with the megaphone. The soldiers moved in.
“Within seconds,” Baba recounts, “I saw them surround that rally and begin beating the protesters. Rima kept going, as if she did not notice the soldiers coming in closer. How could she not? She saw them. I’m telling you, Baba, she saw them, and she made the decision to stay put, not to run away. I was so angry at her. How irresponsible could she be?! They were closing in, the protesters were scattering, people started screaming. And she just kept going. Kept going until one of them, الكلب ابن, got to the edge of the podium where she was speaking, grabbed her leg, and dragged her down. She kicked and screamed and pushed and shoved like a madwoman. Not once backing down. That’s when I realized, Baba, that she had been waiting for them to come for her. Waiting for them to grab her. She finally had someone to beat up, finally had a landing spot for all her rage. Baba, I thought she would kill them, not the other way round! And then she was on the floor. Boots rained on her as she crawled into a ball under their feet and made herself smaller. I ran. Baba, I ran like my legs were flying aboveground, shoving people to the floor around me. I don’t know how I got to her; there were so many arms and legs flailing about. So much chaos. I got to her and pulled her out, somehow. Pulled her out. She did not even want to be pulled out, your crazy mother. I had to drag her out of there.”
I shake my head as he finishes speaking, marveling at this story. “Then what happened?” I prompt, knowing full well how it ended. “Well, I got her out,” he sighs. “But an army officer caught me. Grabbed on to my leg and pulled me back. One body for another. They beat me up and threw me in a jail cell with eighteen other protesters that night.”
“You were in jail?” Nadim asks, engrossed in the story, too.
“I was. Just for the night. My head was killing me, and all I could think of was your mother, and how I was going to strangle her the next day for landing me there!” He laughs suddenly and lunges at Nadim, tickling him again.
We go back to reading the papers spread out on their bed. After some minutes, he interrupts the silence.
“I was looking out for her, Baba,” he mutters, his eyes on the paper.
“I had her back. But for what? She got beaten up for what?”
