Three Daughters: A Novel (21 page)

“Nadia, come here.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“Come here, Nadia.”

“I don’t want to. You’re going to comb my hair.”

“And . . . is that a crime?”

“My hair is fine like this. You don’t have to comb it.”

“Your hair is not fine.” Nadia’s reddish birth hair had not darkened. It was thick and curly and difficult to comb. “If we don’t comb it today, tomorrow it will be twice as tangled.”

“It’s my hair and I want it messy. It doesn’t bother me that it’s tangled. It doesn’t bother Baba. Why should it bother you?”

“I don’t know,” Miriam answered honestly. “But it bothers me a great deal.”

“Well, it’s my hair and it doesn’t bother me.”

Miriam stared at the small prominent chin set in a combative thrust and the thin arms crossed resolutely across the narrow chest, defying coercion. On Nadia’s face was Max Broder’s mouth—a unique configuration that was so vulnerable it inspired a need to protect. Through her frustration—for this scene was repeated almost every morning—she admired her daughter’s bravado and her adult vocabulary. She had never spoken in a babyish way. “I’ll do it gently and try not to hurt you.”

“You always say that.”

“I don’t have time to argue anymore. Just let me comb your hair.” She tried to keep her voice from rising.

“I don’t want it combed. I don’t. I don’t.”

Miriam moved toward her daughter, grabbed the slim wrist—the hand was in a defiant fist—and pulled her between her legs so she couldn’t escape. A seven-year-old girl, yet she was more exhausting than the boys at any age. She had prayed for a girl. She had fantasized about a sensitive, tender girl who would be a calming influence on a household full of males, but Nadia was anything but a calming influence. She had a nervous energy that made her fidgety when indoors. She was a poor guest wherever they visited, unwilling to submit to any graceful act of affection. “Why do I have to kiss everybody? Why can’t I just say hello?” What was worse, she had the determination and poise to assert herself. It didn’t help matters that Nadeem was her willing slave.

Now, in her mother’s grasp, Nadia became stonily silent. Even when the comb caught and pulled painfully, she didn’t cry out. When Miriam was finished and the long copper braids were laid side by side against that straight back, there was no acknowledgment that, yes, she looked better.

“There now, that’s better.” Miriam tried for a reconciliation, annoyed with herself for feeling guilty. The hair fights were a daily fact of life. If she allowed such a young child to rule, soon there would be chaos. The hair had to be combed, if only for health reasons. So why did she feel ill at ease? “Don’t you feel better?”

“I felt fine before,” came the stony answer. “Can Hanna help me with the horse now?”

“The horse? You plan to ride the horse now?” She needed brush for the fire and had planned to send Nadia, but Miriam didn’t have the energy for another fight. Nadia knew it and looked for the familiar signs: first her mother would sigh, a quick faraway look to hide her eyes, then a reluctant yes. “All right,” said Miriam, “but only for half an hour. I need kindling.”

She would ride for an hour because her mother would lose track of time. As she was leaving, however, she caught a glimpse of her mother’s profile. A few strands of hair had escaped from under her scarf and in trying to tuck them in, she had made the scarf sit at an odd angle. It made her mother look helpless and sad and Nadia felt a sudden rush of love. “Mama.” She rushed to Miriam’s side and hugged her so fiercely they almost fell over.

Miriam was still feeling all the ambivalence that Nadia created. Why should it be like this? She had been prepared to love this child beyond reason. The night of her conception was still a vivid memory. But Nadia was as complicated as the love that had created her. Nadia clung to her mother. She pumped her arms as if to remind Miriam that she was not responding to this expression of love. On the third pump, Miriam gave in. She tilted her daughter’s face upward, smoothed the pale cheeks, touched a finger to her lips and then to each of Nadia’s eyes.
Well, Max, this is all I have of you. The mouth, the forehead, the coloring—a shadow, but enough to keep you safely in a corner of my heart.

Hearing Hanna come in, Nadia let go of her mother abruptly. “Please help me with Gala. Just help me mount her and then you can leave me alone.”

“You know I won’t leave you alone on that horse,” said Hanna. “I have to stay and lead you around.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t.”

“I do, I do,” he answered softly, following her outside.

The horse had come in a cart with a note two months after they had returned to the village after the war:

Please, could you board this horse for me? I find it difficult to keep him here and lately, there is little time to ride. I will arrange for food to be sent, and if there are additional expenses, please let me know.

A postscript told the real story:
If your little girl wishes to exercise the horse for me, I would be in her debt.

Miriam knew the horse would never leave, but what still puzzled her was Nadia’s passion for riding. Had he passed that down? She longed to tell him how much Nadia loved the horse, but it would have been an expensive fulfillment of desire. From time to time, the old longing returned—as if his touch were hovering inches away and all she had to do to relieve her need was to reach up. Such moments always passed. No. Her resolve was still intact. No matter what. She would not contact Max.

When Nadia had her eighth birthday, Miss Emily Bailey, the headmistress of the Friends Girls’ School, came to the house and asked to see Miriam. “Could we take a little walk down the road, Mrs. Mishwe?”

“Of course, but wouldn’t you rather come in and have some coffee?”

“Thank you, but I think our discussion is better served by the open air.”

Miriam put a shawl around her shoulders and they started down the road in the crisp January air. When they were well past the house, Miss Bailey began: “Every year, the Friends schools have a few scholarships to dispense to worthy students who could not otherwise afford to attend. The money for these scholarships usually comes from grateful alumni—some of whom have immigrated to America and made their fortunes. Less often, the money comes from local personages out of the blue, for a variety of reasons. We received such a fund recently from the estate of Dr. Max Broder, a German physician who worked at the French hospital in Jerusalem.”

Miriam stopped walking abruptly. Her legs trembled and her heart was pounding furiously. “Estate? You said estate. Was Dr. Max . . . Broder . . . is he . . . did he . . .” She couldn’t say the word. “Is he dead?” she asked finally in a voice so strained that Miss Bailey held her arm for support.

“He died three weeks ago, according to his lawyer. He fell from a horse and broke his neck.”

Oh, no! No! No! No!
Had she cried the words aloud or merely thought them? “I must return . . . my children . . . the baby . . . Nadia will be coming home from school.”

“Mrs. Mishwe, please. There’s something else. Obviously, this news has shocked you, but what I have to tell you is very important. One of the stipulations of the bequest is that a scholarship be made available to your daughter.”

“Nadia? For Nadia to go to the school?”

“Yes. To board there. It will cost you nothing. She will be brought in on an academic scholarship. She’s a very precocious little girl, according to the lawyer. It seems Dr. Broder was impressed with her intelligence when she was his patient and made a notation to do something for her. I suppose his death speeded up the process. He instructed his lawyer to see to it that she is educated. He specified two other children besides your daughter and left the rest of the bequest to our discretion, with a stipulation that Nadia stay at the school as long as she desires.”

Miriam kept her eyes straight ahead, hearing bits and pieces but not trusting herself to respond. She felt such an overwhelming sense of sadness for Max and, underneath, a black wave of grief. He had included two other children in the bequest to put Nadia’s scholarship above suspicion because he loved her. He had loved his little girl. A broken neck!
Oh, Max! My poor, poor darling.

There are times when life is kind in a peculiar way and it was kind to Miriam that winter of 1921. She caught a cold that developed into pneumonia and was feverish for so many weeks no one suspected that all the wetness on her pillow was tears of sorrow, of regret for the unfathomable wellsprings of attraction that made one human being desirable above all others.

BOOK TWO

1924–1935

HEARTS BURNING AND BRAVE

17.

I WAS DIFFERENT, TOO, AS A CHILD, AND IT WAS MY MOTHER WHO MADE FUN OF ME.

M
iriam waited three years before accepting the scholarship offer to the girls’ boarding school. She knew Nadeem wasn’t crazy about the idea and that held her back. “She’s already a handful,” he said with rue but also underlying pride. “She wants to disassociate herself from all the things her parents do. Our relatives annoy her. She thinks we cook too much and eat too much and talk too much. A fancy school isn’t going to make her more tolerant of the life she has and”—again his tone was rueful—“it’s the life she has to live.”

“It’s true,” said Miriam, “but when I think of denying her that wonderful opportunity . . . even though I know she’ll use it against us . . .”

“Precisely.”

“On the other hand, she’ll be cultured and educated. That will give her confidence. Sometimes I feel she’s not confident at all and that’s why she’s stubborn.”

“Yes, she lacks confidence.”

“She needs the advantages the school will give her.”

“Do you have your heart set on sending her?”

“I thought it didn’t matter to me, but it does. I want her to have it.” Max had wanted her to have it. She couldn’t face the guilt of denying his last wish for his daughter.

“Then send her,” said Nadeem quietly. “We’ll make the best of it.”

On her daughter’s last night at home, Miriam made a steamy bath and over Nadia’s protests—she was embarrassed to sit naked in front of her mother—scrubbed her. “They’re going to put a lot of ideas in your head.” She dug the sponge into Nadia’s back.

“Isn’t that why I’m going? They’re supposed to put ideas in my head.”

“Just remember where you came from.” Round and round went her hand.

“Mama, you’re hurting me.”

When Nadia’s belongings were folded in the brand-new suitcase, Miriam took a napkin full of cookies and laid it on top. “Don’t put food in. They have food there.”

“It’s only sweets. Give them out and perhaps you can make some friends.”

When Nadia arrived at the red-roofed palace and got a look at the confident, well-groomed princesses who would be her classmates, she slipped out and left the cookies under a mock orange bush and prayed no one would trace them to her.

There were thirty boarders (including eight from England and Europe). For tuition of fifteen French gold lira yearly, they were taught to think, recite the classics, and “sit quietly each morning and wait upon the Lord.”

The school was oriented toward excellence through discipline. In 1889, the founding faculty had read like a directory of straight-spined Yankee conservatism: Henrietta Strong taught English. Adora Leighton was the general matron. Belva Farquhar, a lady physician from Iowa, offered herself for medical work. That stalwart group had reached land by jumping off rope ladders into the erratic waters of Jaffa harbor.

Fifteen affluent Christian fathers had to be persuaded to give their daughters to a handful of pale foreigners in upswept pompadour hairdos and dimity blouses so they could be radicalized by Western ideas. No traffic jam materialized at the mission gate, but finally one “cuckoohead” came forth and asked, “Please accept my daughter into thou’s school.”

The Friends had come to educate girls (and boys), not make snobs of them. The values they encouraged—the very idea of cataloging one’s values was egregious—resembled the prep schools of England and America. They played soccer on a well-tended, even field and learned tennis (who even knew what it was!) on private courts. Students were required to do chores, but that was considered charming, something to excite the bourgeoisie: “What? Paying all that money so Camilla can sweep floors?”

In the Quaker schools, there was a unique way of taking attendance. Each girl announced her presence by responding to a line of Scripture. Miss Amelia Smythe, in a starched, tucked shirtwaist, still unbruised by a day of teaching, pulled open her Bible with the colored string markers. “Violet Abdo,” she began. “ ‘A soft answer turns away wrath.’ ”

“ ‘But a harsh word stirs up anger.’ ”

“Rose David—‘God is my refuge and my strength.’ ”

“ ‘A very present help in trouble.’ ”

“Elisabeth Eden—‘for behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.’ ”

There was no response. Elisabeth sank into a somber silence that made the blood coagulate.

“ ‘And the former things sh . . . sh . . . shall not be remembered or come into mind.’ ” Elisabeth stuttered and the class slumped with relief.

Miss Smythe went to Proverbs for the
G
s and
H
s, which were numerous. To Isaiah for two
L
s and to the Psalms for Nadia Mishwe. “ ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ ”

The room was cold and the short hairs on Nadia’s neck crackled like wires. The school had no central heating and she was never warm enough.
The fullness thereof.
It could mean anything.
Dear Jesus, please help me.
“ ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the sky and the sea is his, too,’ ” she said hastily. “ ‘And us, the people.’ ”

The laughter was hideous. Miss Smythe held up a grayish palm. “Your thought is accurate, Nadia, although the Bible’s phrasing is different: ‘the earth and those who dwell therein.’ ”

“Jasmeen N’am—‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?’ ”

At FGS, as in any school, there was a tough core of girls, secure but fresh out of charity, and they feasted on Nadia’s answer for a week.

“This spoon is the Lord’s and my shoes and the table.”

“That dog is the Lord’s. And the stick. And us, too, the people.”

“You are so stupid,” someone whispered in her ear. The words cut deep, but Nadia wasn’t brought to tears as they’d hoped. She was twelve years old but she was no fool. She wasn’t like the other girls. They made fun of the way she ate. The way she walked. Even her thinness was a disadvantage. She felt rage toward her parents.

She knew two things. She knew she wasn’t stupid. And she wasn’t a crybaby. There were two other girls who were worse off. Nejwa, one of three Muslim girls, didn’t like the food and would shift the contents of her plate around and around. Then there was Willie, an overweight American girl with the scars of a cleft palate, who slept next to Nadia in an identical white metal bed. Her speech was so muffled and phlegmy you had to guess at her words. “Whyahyhha ga humm,” Willie would suggest when the girls picked at Nadia like crows over a dead mole. “Ga humm. Ga humm,” she repeated, as if Nadia were in the path of an oncoming bus. Willie, whose puckered scarred lips couldn’t utter a single untortured word, was urging her to go home.

“Shut up, Willie. Just shut up. I’m not going home,” she said, cutting the air with the side of her hand. “I belong here. It’s all paid for. I can stay as long as I want.”

Willie, who always looked hopefully at Nejwa’s plate because she was never quite full, and who was intimidated by the Bedouin sheiks in full regalia who occasionally visited, was flabbergasted by Nadia’s love for the school. “Ghu lock et hgea?”

“Of course I like it. This is the best school in the world.”

When Willie urged her to go home, alarms went off. She would never consider leaving. Through the morass of pain and uncertainty, there was something here that made her feel as if she belonged. The Anglo-Saxon reserve suited her just fine. There was none of the loud laughter and constant singing and kissing and general fuss that was always going on at home. She didn’t feel suffocated here. From the six o’clock morning bell, the day was planned. There was, in everything, a seriousness of purpose. Best of all—opportunity for personal success. There was a piece of embroidery in her mother’s kitchen drawer that was soiled and frayed from being undone and restitched many times because Nadia couldn’t learn to embroider. The rag told the whole story of what went on between her mother and herself. By some miracle, she had been taken into this school. They would have to hack her up and mail her out piece by piece to get her to leave.

At Christmas there was a short vacation and she went home. Her mother tore a piece of bread and innocently dipped it into gravy and popped it in her mouth. Nadia wanted to slap her. Aunt Diana bit into a piece of fruit and allowed the juice to dribble down her arm; Nadia felt a gagging loathing. Khalil was too fat and his pants bunched around his buttocks. Hanna chewed with his mouth partly open. Her feelings were chaotic.

“Perhaps you don’t want to return?” her father said hopefully.

She almost screamed. “Of course I want to return.”

In the spring of Nadia’s thirteenth year, Mr. Kimble lined up seven girls on the tennis court. No one had an advantage here. The game was a mystery to one and all.

“I want you to take this ball,” said Mr. Kimble, “throw it a few feet above your head with the left hand, then hit it with the racket while it’s in the air so that it lands in that right corner.”

He might as well have told them to hold the racket between their teeth while drinking a bowl of soup. Three girls didn’t hit the ball at all. The other three dribbled it on the wrong side of the net. Then came Nadia’s turn. Her hands were large and strong from years of gripping horses’ reins. She threw the ball in the air and slapped it securely, hooking the racket to direct the shot to the right corner. Mr. Kimble wiped his glasses and asked her to do it again. She did it so accurately that he made her repeat it eight times. Everybody stared with the interest reserved for the bizarre. Nadia Mishwe, the girl who had barely mastered the correct use of a fork, was good at tennis. She was great at tennis.

“You have the makings of a good serve,” said Mr. Kimble. She had no idea what he was talking about but she felt supremely happy.

By spring her table manners were exemplary. Her mother caught on. Aunt Diana caught on, too, and didn’t like what she saw and what it implied. “He fasted and fasted and had breakfast on an onion” was her bored response, implying that Nadia’s fancy education would get her nowhere. “When you marry, you won’t need to know how to play tennis,” she said. “That won’t help.”

“It makes Aunt Diana angry that I go to FGS,” Nadia said to Miriam.

“Angry? I don’t think she’s angry. She’s not used to a girl like you. We used our hands to dig rocks out of the soil, to gather wheat and beat the olives off the trees with sticks. Your life is too different from what we’re used to and perhaps not realistic.”

“But you know how to read, Mama.” She had always cherished that curious difference in her mother.

“Yes. I was different, too, as a child, and it was my mother who made fun of me. But I didn’t achieve enough to make people envious. They excused me because I was the mute man’s daughter. They thought I had calamity enough.”

Whenever her mother spoke of the past, it brought back a dim but tantalizing memory of their visit to Jerusalem during the war. When they had met him.
Oh, Max
, her mother had sighed. Two simple words, but it had sounded as if she had been waiting, holding in all her feelings for him.

Nadia had liked Dr. Max, too. He was handsome, tall, and strong, and he’d helped the sick. People were always kissing his hands and thanking him for saving their lives. He had been thrilled that Nadia liked horseback riding as much as he.

“Don’t you remember that doctor who told me the dog was making me cough and sneeze?” she would ask Miriam, hoping her expression would reveal something.

“You told him he was being silly.”

“No. Did I?”

“You were just a little girl.”

“He gave me a bag of honey drops and told me I had two choices: to live without the dog and stop the dripping and wheezing or to live with the dog and get used to the dripping.”

“You remember all of that?”

“Yes.”
You remember, too, Mama. You don’t want to forget either.