Three Daughters: A Novel (9 page)

A month after Nadeem left for Damascus, Miriam was almost comfortable in her routine. Although deeply worried about Nadeem and the future, she felt a certain pleasurable freedom walking to the shop on those golden mornings, carrying nothing in her hands, no child tugging at her skirts. She was doing without the elaborate headpiece with its row of coins and constricting understructure, in exchange for the simple linen shawl draped becomingly over her head. Father Alphonse had readily given her board and, in return, she cooked breakfast and lunch for the few monks at the monastery on Ethiopia Street. Affiliation with a church or a foreign consulate was a life belt in the treacherous limbo of the new government.

Jerusalem was sobered by the oppressive climate but still busy. The square outside Jaffa Gate held many more Europeans. The “new” city had expanded wildly, stretching not only along Jaffa Road, but to the east and north. There were new hotels, cafés, banks, libraries, and post offices. Steamship lines and railway and tourist offices were interspersed among the specialty shops within the arcades of hotels. Peddlers shouted hoarsely in the streets, hawking mulberries, dates, old clothing, and sesame cakes. All of the nationalities—Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Muslims, and Christian Arabs—traded, worked, and lived side by side with the Europeans. The square-faced houses of the Old City, all built of mellow golden limestone, huddled against the churches. When she saw the men and women farmers still sitting outside the walls selling produce, she felt nothing to bind them to her. She was a different woman now.

Her chores fit together like a mosaic. She rose at five thirty, downed a small cup of coffee, swept the yard in front of the church, shopped early at the various suqs for the necessary provisions for lunch, and prepared everything but the finishing touches. From nine to twelve she was in the shop arranging merchandise, selling items that were in stock, and writing orders from samples, which always gave her trouble. She tried to be efficient, counted all the linen sheets in different sizes—so many in narrow, so many in wide, so many pillowcases, so many summer spreads, three with such and such initials, four more with a different border. She was never confident she had it right and she delayed mailing orders to M. Freneau.

She had imagined that the hotel employees and guests would stare disapprovingly at a woman proprietor but the political climate had softened social attitudes. Sometimes, however, the customers acted haughty, especially the servants sent by their mistresses. They delighted in denigrating the quality of the goods even though they had no idea of the quality at all.

At noon, she hurried to cook lunch for the monks and to visit for an hour with Esa at the orphanage, bringing him a plum or an anise cake. He was always jubilant, but she doubted it was her appearance. His disposition was as bright as his beautiful face.

At night she dreamed of piles of sheets in a tangle and also of Khalil. Though she saw him only on Saturday and Sunday, Khalil was often in her thoughts, like a burden. Still, each morning the stylish clothes of the Europeans and general bustle of the city took her mind off herself.

One day a middle-aged Italian man with a goatee entered the shop as she was battling with her orders. She was close to tears of frustration. “Bonjour, monsieur,” she greeted him. French was still the most prevalent second language.

“Madam.” He inclined his head toward her. “I am in need of a trousseau for my daughter.”

A trousseau! A trousseau was complicated. It involved garments for the bride as well as linens. “I’ll show you our samples,” she said demurely and then retreated while he inspected the peignoirs and silken nightgowns.

When he had made his selections and Miriam had laboriously written each item in the column, she tried to total the order repeatedly, but without success. She would write down a number and cross it out and the more often she changed it, the more uncertain she became. As he stared, her clumsiness grew until she couldn’t put down anything at all. The man, Mr. Pavotti, shifted uneasily, but his expression was compassionate. “Can I be of help to you, madam?”

“I beg your pardon,” apologized Miriam. “I’m not well schooled in mathematics but there’s little I can do about it. There’s no one else to run my husband’s shop.”

“Excuse me, madam, but why can’t your husband run the shop himself?”

“The Turkish army has taken him. I’ve had to put one of my children into an orphanage and the other two are with relatives, but I don’t think I can keep it up.” She was embarrassed to blurt out her troubles to a stranger, but it was also a relief. “I’m so confused by numbers. Perhaps I’m cheating someone. Or someone has cheated me.”

Mr. Pavotti was a man who greatly enjoyed sounds and although he was listening casually to Miriam’s litany of problems, he was also enjoying the unusual but beautiful sound of her voice. “You are another victim of the Committee of Union and Progress,” he offered sarcastically. “The Committee of Chaos and Regression is more apt.” He took the order pad from her. “Please, let me help you. As a young man, I taught mathematics in Turin. You see”—he began to draw vertical lines on a piece of paper—“the entire numerical system is based on units of ten. Like so.” He brought her attention to the columns on the paper. “We’ll put one number in each of these columns. You can add one to the other or you can deduct a lesser from a greater. But first, you must calm yourself and not resist. What’s your little boy’s name? The one in the orphanage?”

“Esa.” She was ashamed to have revealed so much.

“And how old is little Esa?”

“Four. Soon he’ll be five.”

“And how old are you, madam?”

She had to stop and think then count back to her wedding day. “Twenty-nine.”

“Aha. You’re twenty-nine and little Esa’s four. So how old were you when the boy was born?” She looked blank and then reddened. “No need to be embarrassed,” he said kindly. “Momentarily, you’ll know how to find the answer.”

He went out to a stall and purchased a bunch of grapes, took them from the stems, and proceeded to teach Miriam addition and subtraction with the grapes by placing them in a row, then taking some away and then replacing them. “This is an emergency lesson to help you until you learn how to do the real thing.” He wrote out ten problems for her to solve and promised to return on the following day. Even though she was heartened by Mr. Pavotti’s interest, she had to face the fact that the bright promise she had shown at Miss Clay’s school had been buried over the years. She went to Father Alphonse with her problem.

“Would you be embarrassed to sit with the children across the street?” He was referring to the orphanage run by the Ethiopians for older boys, which conducted classes in reading and mathematics.

“Father, I’m more embarrassed to make so many errors in my business.”

She found another ninety minutes in the day and spent it in the classroom with a teacher who had a face full of boils but taught her how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide and how to read haltingly. Mr. Pavotti reinforced what she learned when he dropped in, but soon after, Italy descended on coastal Tripoli and demanded the Young Turks’ government to surrender it. With his homeland now considered an aggressor, Mr. Pavotti was recalled back to Italy.

Each day, hurrying from activity to activity, Miriam gained confidence and began to feel a certain happiness. She took pleasure in her surroundings. Ethiopia Street, the most charming block in the “new” city, began at the Street of the Prophets and meandered northward. Its sidewalks were a mere foot in width and were bordered by stone walls, a necessary precaution during the time when any building outside the walls was considered a target for marauders. Many of the fine houses had been built in the 1890s, when Miriam and Mustafa had sold their vegetables outside Jaffa Gate, and housed wealthy Muslim families, some prominent Jews, government officials—the Husseinis and the Nashashibis—as well as community leaders, teachers, and the intelligentsia. At number five was the German Evangelical Institute. At number six, the American School for Oriental Research. Dov and Gad Frumkin published the
Habazeleth
at number eight. Just two short years ago, the paper had urged young Jews to study Arabic and Turkish so they could be involved in the new political life of the Ottoman Empire. But it was now the victim of the government’s oppressive censorship.

On one of those fine mornings, Miriam remembered what Nadeem had said about the army: it was an opportunity to learn of the world and have new experiences. This was precisely what was happening to her.

8.

IT’S JUST MYSTIFYING TO ME TO SEE YOU JABBING THAT NEEDLE INTO THAT INFERNAL CLOTH, HOUR AFTER HOUR, DAY AFTER DAY.

T
he first time she saw Khalil’s leg, it didn’t look infected at all. It was swollen and distended and the wound appeared as a jagged marking, but by morning the area around the opening was discolored—a frightening yellowish green—and the slightest pressure brought an ooze of pus that made Zareefa cry out, “I should have done something. This is terrible. I didn’t realize he was taking rides on the back of the carriages. And then he didn’t tell me he was hurt. He said nothing and I’ve been so busy with the little ones I didn’t look at him so closely. I didn’t realize he was limping. I’m so sorry, Miriam.”

“Shh, Zareefa. Don’t blame yourself. We’ll go to Spiridum and get a salve to draw it out.”

Spiridum lanced the wound and gave them a poultice of dried figs, urging Miriam to keep the wound open and moist. “If it closes, the infection will go inward and the bone will be affected.”

Miriam applied hot cloths all night, watching Khalil’s face. He seemed delighted with the attention and feverish enough to welcome bed rest. “I want to go back with you to Jerusalem,” he said. “Leave Hanna here and take me with you. It’s better with you.” Miriam smoothed the hair off his face but made light of the request. She couldn’t imagine coping with Khalil in the shop or the monastery. “Oh, you’re deciding Hanna’s fate? Leave him here but take you with me? Very nice. And what about Esa? Shall I stop seeing him, too? Just you and I will steal away. That’s your dream, is it?”

“Mama,” he said, ignoring her comments, “my leg is moving inside. It’s jumping around under the skin. It doesn’t feel good.”

“What do you mean, jumping around?” Concern now became a nagging worry. When she awoke from an hour’s nap at dawn, the leg was back to its bloated condition and even more gravely discolored. When it was light, they hobbled together to the clinic of the Sisters of Mar Yusef, who told her that he required a hospital immediately. “Take him to the French Hospital. St. Louis, at the foot of Suleiman Street,” said Sister Ernesta. “Don’t wait until tomorrow. This must be treated today.”

Throughout the carriage ride, Miriam held the leg on her lap while Khalil slumped against the corner of the seat. The leg seemed to worsen with each mile. The bumps on the road brought moans from Khalil, and the other passengers winced. “Madam, why have you neglected this boy?” asked a well-dressed man from Nablus. Miriam shot him an angry look but felt the pang of conscience. Perhaps she should have had Khalil with her. Father Alphonse might have allowed him to stay with her. Or she could have put him at the Spafford Home with Esa. Had she not wanted him with her? “It’s not for you to decide who’s been neglected,” she said to the man and they continued the ride in silence. The stranger’s rebuke was mild to what was awaiting her at the hospital.

She sat on the wooden benches, which were arranged around an entry corridor that separated two wings and faced a heavy door with a window insert that gave a miniscule view of the Dome of the Rock. She tried to arrange Khalil in a comfortable position and summon help, but he wailed so loudly she stayed with him and waited for a medical person to come by. A woman in dusty black clothing crouched in the corner, muttering in distress and weeping softly.

The room held a mixture of unhealthy odors and Miriam’s empty stomach rebelled, but in a moment all that was forgotten. A tall, vigorous man in a doctor’s coat strode into the room with such authority she unconsciously sat at attention. He looked around, staring momentarily at the weeping figure in the corner before turning to a small girl sitting with her father. He lifted the girl in his arms and she immediately put both fists over her eyes.

“I want you to take your hands away from your eyes,” he said calmly. “You may do one at a time, if you like.” The girl took both hands away at once, revealing a row of small pustules along the rims of her eyes. “Those hands can’t go to your face anymore. Will you promise me that?” The girl nodded and the doctor turned to the father. “Why haven’t you brought her in before this?”

“I’ve been working in another village.” The man looked down at his hands, too shy to look up.

“And your wife? Your brother? Your cousin? Your ten brothers? Your hundred cousins? Your whole bloody clan? Couldn’t they bring her? Couldn’t they notice that there isn’t one healthy millimeter around her eyes?” His words bounced around the room, reverberating against each wall. “Silence,” he mused. “Whenever I ask a question, I’m answered with silence.” Again his eyes rested on the figure in the corner. He went to her and pulled her gently to her feet. “Come, Yasmine, no more tears. It isn’t as bad as you think and it must be done.” Yasmine, for whatever reason, continued weeping and refused to look up. “I’m not going to hurt you. I want to fix your eyes so you can see the world more clearly.” If he had been sarcastic with the father of the girl, now his voice was all gentleness. Everyone was thinking the same thing: Why is he speaking so reasonably to an ignorant peasant?

He made such an impression in the room it was difficult to consider anything else. He didn’t look like a doctor, neither bald nor bearded. His hair was a sandy brown, parted to the side and spilling over his broad forehead as if he tugged at it often. His jaw was prominent but his mouth was so innocent and soft it reminded Miriam of Esa when he was about to cry.

“Is it the operating room that frightens you?” he asked with
genuine concern. Yasmine shrugged her shoulders. “Then I will
look at your eyes right here.” He pulled her by the hand to the light coming in through the small casement window. He took an instrument out of the pocket of his long white coat and held it to her eye. “Look straight at me, Yasmine.” He held her face tenderly in his massive hand, tilted the chin as if he were about to kiss her and bent over her with only the width of the instrument separating them.

Miriam was overcome by the intimacy of the pose and, in a stab of emotion that she didn’t understand, wished that she were the afflicted woman so that he might be holding her chin in his hand. Immediately she recovered and turned her thoughts to Khalil’s leg and wouldn’t look at the doctor again.

The examination over, he looked around the room to see who else needed assistance. When his eyes fell on Khalil’s leg his reaction was swift and violent. “Why are you just sitting there?” he shouted at Miriam. “Don’t you see this leg is an emergency?” He lifted Khalil and walked out of the room. Miriam trailed after him, too shocked to speak.

He put Khalil on a narrow table covered with a blood-streaked sheet and immediately cut a one-inch cross in the center of the wound. Foul material streamed out in a quantity that made them both cry out. At the sight of it, the doctor took Miriam by the shoulders and shook her until she lost her scarf and almost fled in horror. “Stupid!” he shouted. “Stupid, willful neglect. Are you the mother? Are you the mother?”

She tried to speak but the first attempt brought no sound. She managed a nod but that enraged him further. “This boy will lose his leg today. He won’t walk unaided again. Why did you wait?”

Khalil began to cry and reach for Miriam and this stopped the harangue. The doctor called for a nurse. “Isabel.” A plump brown-haired woman, barely five feet tall, clad in a spotless white bib apron and starched cap, appeared. “We have to prepare for amputation.”

Nurse Isabel looked from Khalil to Miriam with compassion in her brown eyes. “Him?” she asked softly, nodding to Khalil.

“Yes.”

The word struck terror in Miriam and with the terror came an overwhelming desire to protect her son. How dare this madman even think of cutting off his leg? “Your head will come off first,” she managed to shout. “Your head will come off before his leg.” He was surprised by her vehemence but no less surprised by the quality of her voice. That deep, silvery resonance was so unexpected. He stopped and stared at the woman who had created it.

“You don’t wish to save your son?”

“You’ll save him without cutting off his leg. You won’t cut off anything.”

“That might be the only way at this stage.”

“You’re a doctor. You must know another way.”

He exhaled deeply, exasperated and fatigued. “Isabel,” he called again and the nurse returned. “The mother forbids amputation. We’ll hold off for a day and let her see the damage. For the time being, create a poultice and a drain line.”

She didn’t know where she got the courage to dispute a doctor. A doctor had been like a god to her and to every villager. In the complicated matchmaking rites of the clans, a doctor was preferred over a cousin and could ask for any girl he wanted even if he were an old man and wanted a very young girl.

“There, you see,” he said, as if vindicated, “even in these few minutes, the leg has stopped draining and continues to swell. We must apply a new hot poultice every half hour without fail.” He turned to Miriam. “Are you prepared to stay up all night?”

“Yes,” said Miriam. She had begun to cry.

Throughout her long vigil, the day’s events played in her head, especially that moment when Dr. Max Broder—that was his name—had placed his large hands on her shoulders and shaken her so violently. She felt two welts where his thumbs had dug in. When he appeared at her side at four thirty in the morning, his manner was subdued. He poked at the leg, thumped and pressed all around, oblivious to Khalil’s moans. “Good. Good. Don’t stop the poultices. Isabel comes at seven. She’ll relieve you or assign an aide if you wish to nap for an hour or two.” Miriam nodded dumbly. Her fatigue was so sodden it was impossible to think beyond the next boiling cloth.

For a day and a half, with constant attention, the leg improved in appearance and size. But Khalil developed a high fever and, in a matter of hours, the leg darkened and became dangerously swollen. Nurse Isabel bathed it repeatedly with carbolic acid but it didn’t improve. When Miriam saw the worried look on Max Broder’s face, she steeled herself for bad news. He pressed gently on her shoulders to sit her down.

“The infection is spreading inward to the bone. We now have osteomyelitis. We’re draining plenty but we can’t see the devastation beneath. It’s keeping ahead of us,” he ended bitterly, as if the infection were a human willfully bedeviling him.

“I’m against amputation,” she said stubbornly.

“We’re taking a chance of infecting his entire system.”

“Let me have one more day.” She had no idea what she would be able to accomplish in one day, but she couldn’t condemn her boy to a life as a cripple.

“Twenty-four hours,” he said succinctly and walked away.

In midmorning, Mustafa, who had heard of Khalil’s wound, came to the hospital. After hearing the news, he signed to Miriam that before any thought of amputation, the doctor should introduce maggots to the wound.

“Maggots?”

“Yes. They will eat all of the putrefied material more quickly than any medicine.”

“This doctor won’t listen to any such thing,” she said bitterly. “He thinks we are ignorant peasants. Please, Baba, you get them for me.”

Mustafa returned several hours later with a small tin filled with legless larvae that he placed inside the wound. Incredibly, they swarmed through the tissue and disappeared. Miriam stopped using the poultice and slumped on the bench to wait.

About eleven o’clock, Max found her fast asleep. He shook her gently. “Come,” he said. “You sleep in my room for the night. Help yourself to the bathing facilities and sleep in a real bed. You’ll need all of your strength tomorrow and Khalil will need you, too.”

“I couldn’t do that. Where would you sleep?”

“There are plenty of cots in the men’s ward. I’ll find something. Please. Do as I say. I want you to get a good night’s sleep.”

His apartment consisted of two rooms and a private bath with a sizable tub that Miriam filled with scalding water and soaked in for twenty minutes. She slipped into a surgical gown that he had insisted she take and padded about the rooms, shyly inspecting several photos—a middle-aged couple in heavy winter clothes, their faces almost obscured by their hats; a young woman with the same upswept curls as the customer who had so unnerved her in the shop that first day.

In normal times she would have run through the streets naked before sleeping in a strange man’s apartment, but life had become bizarre and frightening. She was exhausted. When she swallowed she tasted lead. What did it matter where she slept? Her firstborn son was gravely ill. Her husband was hundreds of miles away. Her life had been turned upside down. She had not once thought of Hanna, for which she was deeply ashamed. She often imagined his little figure as it looked walking away from her down the road, the feet turned in, the gait slow and labored. Yet his shoulders were high. Self-sufficient Hanna was paid with neglect. She had no hope of opening the shop soon. Where was the money to come from? Fatigue saved her. Within seconds of touching her head to Dr. Max’s pillow, she was asleep.

She slept for twelve hours and awoke disoriented to find herself in this strange bed. Rest had partially dissolved the tension and dread of the last few days and, as she lay there for the last few luxurious minutes, she couldn’t help but fix her mind on the man whose room it was. Why did the sight of him always change her mood? He caused her spirits to rise in a complicated way. He made her feel peculiar, uneasy.

When she investigated she was relieved to find that Khalil still had his leg and it was much improved. The swelling had receded, the skin around the wound was shrinking, and the color was no longer yellow. Dr. Max was not around to comment on it and she was too proud to ask for him.

“He’s gone to inspect a horse.” Nurse Isabel was collecting bedpans in the children’s ward, to which Khalil had been moved, when Miriam entered.

“Who’s gone to inspect a horse?” Of course she already knew and was more relieved than she cared to admit. She had thought perhaps he had left forever.

“Dr. Max. He removed the appendix of the Adwan sheik, whose main line of business is breeding horses. Now the sheik wants him to have one of his wild stallions so Dr. Max can break his neck.” Her mouth twitched in disapproval but her eyes were filled with affection. “He’s as excited as a boy. He rides for an hour at dawn, as if he didn’t have enough here to sap his energy. He does all the surgery, you know.” Isabel sighed, looked at the pan in her hand, and shrugged. “Anyway, he won’t be back for a while.”