Leon Uris (21 page)

‘Oh no! I would never do that!’

‘The button is evil,’ Ramiza said. ‘It makes girls do things against their will.’

‘Oh ...’ Nada whispered. ‘But don’t you have your button?’

‘No, it was taken from me. I did nothing wrong, but it was removed to take away temptation. They will take yours too. Once it is gone you will not care about boys and you will be a virgin for sure when you marry and can never dishonour your family.’

Nada’s blazing curiosity faded to a rising of fear. She had always liked it when she rubbed against a boy. She liked it when she knew she would be working at the threshing floor or when she carried water to the fields for the men. Hagar had warned her a dozen times a day during the threshing season about touching boys. She did not realize it had anything to do with the pleasure button. ‘What happened to you?’ Nada finally brought herself to ask.

Ramiza patted her large belly and told the baby to be still. She was quite uncomfortable and it was difficult for her to work, but she did not want Haj Ibrahim yelling at her. ‘They come at night,’ Ramiza said. ‘You never know when they will come. The daya, the midwife of the clan. She is the one who takes the button.’

‘But my own mother is a daya,’ Nada said.

Ramiza grunted an ironic little laugh. ‘Then they will use another daya. She will come with your aunts. They always come for it when you are asleep. They put something in your food to make you sleep so you won’t be alert. There will be six or eight of them. They will grab you by the arms and legs so you can’t move. One of them will cover your eyes with a black cloth and another will stuff something in your mouth so you can’t scream. They will carry you to a secret tent they have prepared. Your aunts will hold you fast on the ground so you can’t move and then they will spread your legs apart as wide as they can. At the last moment I managed to fight my hands free and screamed for my mother and pulled off my blindfold. When I looked up, I realized that it was my mother who was holding my head down. The daya has a very sharp knife and while they hold your legs apart she hunts for the button with her fingers until it pops up, then she cuts it off!’

Nada screamed. I wanted to run to her but knew that would only cause trouble, so I scrinched up into a ball so I wouldn’t be discovered.

‘I’ve made you very upset. I didn’t mean to do that. They made me swear I would not tell any of the other girls or they would cut my tongue out ... only, that was when I was living in the desert. I thought it would be all right to tell you.’

Ramiza grunted up off the stool and waddled to Nada and patted her head. ‘Poor Nada,’ she said.

Nada’s great brown eyes looked up to Ramiza hauntingly. ‘Does it hurt much?’

Ramiza shook her head and sighed. ‘I bled much worse than the worst menstruation. For several seasons I was in pain every time I tried to pass my urine. I was very sick from it. Finally I was allowed to see a British doctor in Beersheba. My father wanted to keep me alive so he wouldn’t lose my dowry.’

‘Did ... did it make you stop thinking about boys?’

‘Yes, and I obeyed from then on, whatever they told me.’

‘Do you have any fun with my father?’

Ramiza went back to the stool and churned. ‘At first it was fun just to see what the mystery was all about, but you are not supposed to have fun. You can pretend to have fun because that makes the man feel very important. After a few times, there is no fun. It really doesn’t matter whether Hagar sleeps with Haj Ibrahim or I do. I wish she would sleep with him more.’

Nada and I were the youngest and I was still allowed to sleep in the same little cell with her because my three brothers were already too crowded. I didn’t know how much she slept anymore. Any tiny little noise would bring her up trembling in the night. By day she would doze off during her chores and large circles of weariness formed beneath her eyes. When she did sleep at night she twitched all the time and often she cried out.

She would not eat except out of the common plate and not until Hagar or Ramiza ate first. She became weak and frightened to such an extent that I finally told her I had heard the conversation. I begged her to speak to Hagar about it. It came down to a question of Nada feeling seriously ill from exhaustion and fear. One day I threatened to tell Hagar myself. In order to spare me a beating she finally went to Hagar. I waited in the barn.

She came out to me after a time, her face wet with tears and sweat and still trembling.

‘What did mother say?’ I asked anxiously.

‘I don’t have to have mine cut off,’ she sobbed. ‘They only do it here to girls who have dishonored the family. I promised I would do nothing to shame us. I promised I would never look at a boy or let a boy touch me until my wedding night.’

I guess I started crying too. We held each other and sobbed until she realized we were holding each other, then she pushed me away and a look of terror came to her. ‘It is all right, Nada,’ I cried. ‘I am your brother. I will not harm you.’

I
F IT TOOK
R
AMIZA
time to gain acceptance within the family, it took longer to win the approval of the village women. Until her period of trial was over she was accused of carrying the jinn. Any misfortune in the village was blamed on her, for bringing the evil spirit to Tabah. She had a lot to overcome. Since Ramiza was the only second wife, the village women generally sympathized with Hagar. Ramiza had the unfortunate fate of being very young and exquisitely beautiful as well.

At the communal ovens family intimacies were exchanged by weary, bored, and frustrated wives. Women fled to the ovens for shelter from fights with their husbands. While there was some release in this place of female social privacy, the endless cycles of monotony and labor often exploded into violent quarrels, with obscenities filling the air and spitting and slapping and kicking commonplace.

Ramiza was a ready-made target for slurs. Their jealousy of her could be added to her suffering. As Ramiza’s time to give birth drew near, acceptance of her was grudgingly given. Childbirth was one of the rare occasions when women were allowed to congregate and celebrate without serving the men. When Ramiza’s time came due, my mother once again left Tabah for an extended visit with her family.

The word spread quickly that Ramiza was feeling her first pains and our house became the center of an occasion. All of the village women gathered, except those who were menstruating, for their blood was unclean and they were not permitted over the threshold. During the time of a woman’s period she was also forbidden from entering the mosque, visiting the graveyard, or fasting during Ramadan.

Ramiza was taken into the living room for the delivery. She appeared to be little more than a child herself. The daya sat her on the floor on a goatskin rug. One of her aunts, who lived in Tabah, sat on a stool behind her, holding her head and bracing her between her legs. On either side she was attended by cousins. The room was in general chaos, with women and little children running in and out at random. I was still young enough to watch it all from a careful distance at the kitchen door.

The lower half of Ramiza’s body was covered with a quilt, although she still wore ankle-length bloomers. The daya made several inspections under the blanket, feeling about after greasing her hand with sheep’s fat.

With each new sharp pain the women would shout in unison for her to ‘heave’ and ‘bear down.’ After a pain diminished they would chatter about the problems they had had when they had given birth. As the pains grew sharper and came more often, Ramiza began to scream for her mother. I could not understand why she wanted her mother after her mother had helped take away her button of pleasure. It was Nada who took a place alongside Ramiza, held her hand, and washed her perspiring face.

After several hours and many inspections the daya drew back the quilt and removed Ramiza’s bloomers. A quiet swept the room as the tension mounted. In a burst, a blur, and a scream, it was there! I had a half brother! The daya wiped off all the blood and mess and cut the cord. While the baby was still naked and screaming, it was passed around from woman to woman for everyone to gush over.

I ran to the café to tell my father. He basked in his new glory. Ramiza’s baby came just before the circumciser made his annual visit, so the baby’s foreskin and first soiled diaper were placed in the transom over the front door, just as my foreskin and diaper and those of my brothers had been placed and still remained.

Ramiza’s stomach was tightly bound and she was given the traditional forty days to abstain from sex. Hagar was ordered back immediately to comfort my father and cook for him and Ramiza was left in her room with her son.

It was not as though she had given birth to a baby, but more like she had acquired a playtoy, something of her own. She had never really had anything of her own before. Hagar became impatient, for it was soon apparent that Ramiza was not too capable of caring for an infant. However, my mother was not allowed to interfere.

When Ramiza was able to get up and about, things went sour, quickly. Her milk did not satisfy the baby, so a wet nurse had to be brought in. The baby screamed constantly and Ramiza’s confusion turned to panic, then constant weeping. Hagar was still not permitted to get things under control.

When the forty days of sexual abstinence passed the situation worsened. My father was once again passionate to have Ramiza, but she was still in pain and unable to have sex. One night my father forced himself into her, but she bled profusely afterward. Ramiza and the baby were usually left alone and they stayed in their room all day. Nada brought her meals, but my father was so angered he insisted no one pay attention to her.

He uttered aloud now that he wished he had never married her. We all knew the only reason he didn’t terminate the marriage was out of fear of insulting Sheik Azziz.

The baby was three months old when the rainy season came in full blast. It poured outside and it was the third night running that the house was to get no sleep from the infant’s screaming. Haj Ibrahim was spending more and more nights away from Tabah. The gossip at the ovens had it that he was visiting prostitutes in Ramle.

This night he was home and in a fury. He yelled to Hagar to go to Ramiza’s bedroom and restore order. Neither Nada nor I had been able to sleep and followed Hagar into Ramiza’s room.

The scene was appalling. Ramiza was propped up against the headboard, her hair askew, her eyes like those of a mad woman, and she bit at her fingers and grunted like a wounded animal. The baby shrieked, coughed, and gagged. Hagar rushed to the crib and threw back the quilt. It was a filthy mess. The baby had not been cleaned, perhaps for days. There was a hole in the bottom of the crib where excrement was dropped into a pot, then later dumped outside. It had not been used. The baby was covered with his own shit and had eaten some of it. Hagar feverishly cleaned everything up and tried to make the baby vomit. Although she was a keeper of herbs and potions of the clan, she knew she had nothing to alleviate the situation. Then she, too, became hysterical after she reported to Haj Ibrahim that the child was very ill, running a high fever, and obviously having terrible stomach pains.

Haj Ibrahim cursed Ramiza abusively for allowing jinn to enter the house through her. Nada joined the hysteria as my brothers cowed out of the house. The elder daya was called in to see if she could exorcise the jinn, but she was equally helpless.

With Hagar and the daya both screaming at my father, he relented and ordered me to take the donkey and go to the British police fort at Latrun. From there I was to get one of the soldiers to telephone Ramle for an Arab doctor.

I begged my father to be allowed to use his horse, as it would be much faster, but he angrily cursed me for even suggesting that I take his horse out in such a downpour. I remember the donkey ride to Latrun only in blurs, kicking the animal and begging it to move faster.

I covered my face as a spotlight blinded me.

‘Halt! Who’s out there!’

‘I am Ishmael, the son of the Muktar of Tabah,’ I cried.

‘Corporal, get the duty officer. There’s a little Arab kid at the gate and he’s soaking wet!’

I remember being led by the hand to a large frightening room where an officer of obvious power sat behind a desk. Other soldiers took off my wet clothing and wrapped a blanket around me and brought me a bowl of hot soup as I tried to get out my story in my poor English. Then there were telephone calls.

‘The doctor at Ramle is out at a distant village and they don’t know when he’ll return.’

There were more phone calls.

‘One of our doctors will come down from Jerusalem. It may take a while in this rain.’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘It must be an Arab doctor.’

‘But Ishmael—’

‘No! My father will not have it!’

‘Try Lydda, Sergeant. Radio our police station there and see what they can do.’

The report from Lydda was no better. The doctor was not to be found and the small hospital only had a night orderly. The nearest Arab doctor was in Jaffa and in such a storm it would be early morning before he could reach the village. The soldiers offered to hold the donkey and to drive me back to Tabah in a truck, but I was now frenzied. My clothes had been drying over a stove. I dressed and ran out of the office and the building and pounded on the gate.

‘Come back here, boy!’

‘Let him through. He’s frightened of his father.’

It was utter blackness outside. Water from the rains gushed down from the Bab el Wad, covering many parts of the road. It was very difficult to see where I was going. Although I tried to stay on the side of the road, several times I was almost hit by passing cars that sprayed me like buckets of water flung into my face. The only time I could really see anything was from the headlights of the cars, and I would quickly move to the ditch of the road for safety and try to get a glimpse down the road. It seemed like the whole month of Ramadan had come and gone before I was able to make out the first white houses on the hill of Tabah.