منتديات نور الأدب

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We found each other across time and a map and through a song – an ancient tune hummed by women in my country as they carried water home from streams, rocked babies to sleep, or squatted by clay ovens patting loaves of bread. My mother sang it while she worked around our house. “Malek, Malek, Maleki, mal ayunik an tibki…” (Malek, Malek, Maleki, what is making you cry?).

I was the one who tried her patience the most. On those occasions she would order me to stand with my back to her. The house would fall silent while she scrubbed furiously. I would hang my head and wait. As soon as I heard her singing again I would dance out of my corner. But that was long ago…long before that frozen night in Calgary.

Before I got on the plane, my mother hugged me and begged me to pray and stay out of trouble. My sister Fatima – who had only recently started wearing the hijab – slipped a pocket-sized Quran into my bag. My brother Talal – whose ambition was to seduce the Scandinavian stewardess of his dreams – sent me off with this advice: “Find a nice Canadian girl to marry.”

When I arrived at the City Taxi office in Calgary for my first night on the job, I was still wearing the clothes from my country – thin fabrics made for a Mediterranean climate. No one told me I would need to get boots, a hat and gloves almost immediately. After all it was only late October. So I showed up wearing the shoes I had worn when I got off the plane and the beige winter scarf my mother had given me, along one edge of which she had embroidered the Traveler’s Prayer.

At the City Taxi office, Hussein Gupta ushered me in. He was a small man with a pockmarked face and a few black strips of hair slicked across his head. His office smelled of the curry he had been eating when I walked in. “You vill be driving Number 64. Your shift is from 7:00 pm until 5:00 am.” He handed me the keys. “Good luck my friend.”

Around midnight I was returning from the Dalhousie area after having dropped off a drunken university student at his home. The guy had obviously thrown up before he got in my cab. When I opened my window so I wouldn’t gag, he yelled from the back, “Hey, shut the fffucking window. It’s fffreezing back here.”

Luckily, he was not so drunk that he couldn’t tell me which way to get to his parents’ home. A castle it was, each window lit with a soft warm light. I watched him throw up a long yellow stream into the bushes a few feet before the handsome wooden door.

It was also the first week of Ramadan, a time I would have spent in the company of Fatima, Talal, my other siblings and their children. We would all gather around the table at my mother’s home and wait for Sheikh Hassan to come on the radio to announce that the imam in Mecca had been unable to distinguish between a white and a black thread held up to the evening sky. It was now dark enough to break the fast. The muezzin would chant the call to prayer: Allllaaaahu Akbar. After the prayer we would take our first delicious sip of apricot juice and dive into a plate of steaming rice.

I was hallucinating like a man lost in the desert. I had fasted all day. Earlier in the evening, when it was time to break the fast I had pulled the top off a can of Primo chicken gumbo. I was in such a rush to get to my job that I had barely heated it. Now as I sat in my cab under a tree laden with snow trying to find my way back to the main road, I could smell the aroma of my mother’s kibbe. My stomach felt as if it was glued to my ribs.

I squinted at the map in the dim light. The interweaving roads all seemed to lead back to one another like a spider’s web at the center of which was my passenger’s house. Dalhart, Dalridge, Dalrymple, Dalcastle. Maybe I should not have taken this job. I never was good at orienting myself. Alright. It looked like Dalrymple Gn led to Dalrymple Hill, which led to Dalhousie Drive, which ought to get me back on to a main road. I had just turned on to Dalrymple Hill, the back of my cab slithering unnervingly on the icy road.

Headlights. Coming directly towards me. I braked and slid slowly, inexorably into a mound of snow as the car that had been heading towards me whirled around and came to a hard stop in the trees across the road, its headlights facing the opposite direction.

I tried opening my door but it was stuck hard in a snow bank. I slid across and opened the passenger side door. A swarm of snow particles attacked my face.

I crossed the slippery road towards the Camarro and peered into the driver’s window. All I could see was dark lumps and some hair. I tried the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Bracing one hand on the side of the car I pulled. The door opened with a loud crack that echoed down the empty road. The driver, a woman with a tangle of dark hair slid awkwardly toward me, her head coming to rest against the door. One bare hand swung to the ground, the fingertips grazing the snow.

I bent down and saw a trickle of blood tracing its way from her slightly parted lips to the snow below where it drilled a small hole beside her fingertips.

I stepped back. My heart was pounding so hard the blood in my head was blinding me. I looked up and down the street. A streetlight shone listlessly at one end but otherwise blackness stretched on either side of me as if into oblivion. I was utterly alone.

I walked back to my cab. I slid inside and sat looking at the dispatch button. I knew I had to call the office. But I also knew this was the end of my brief stay in Canada – a place from which I had promised to send home enough money to buy my mother a new house. This was the end of my dreams of traveling as a Canadian citizen across the border to see my grandfather’s orchards in Jericho – of traveling as a free man, my newly embossed passport next to my heart.

No, I had done nothing wrong. But who would believe me? A Palestinian, newly arrived with the suspicious odours of my homeland still clinging to my clothes.

I pressed the button. “Hello? Mr. Hussein please. I am Car 64.”

Gupta came on the speaker phone. “Omar? Where are you Man? We’ve been calling you for the past 20 minutes.” (It’s true I had turned the volume to mute because I hated hearing the dispatcher’s drone.)

“Mr. Hussein. There is accident.”

“What happened? Did you call 911?”

“Not yet.”

“Where are you?”

“I am lost. I drop off the man at Dalhart. I turn on to Dalhousie…but I am lost. I cannot see street sign. There is a woman in other car. She need help.”

“Don’t panic Man. I will call an ambulance. Just stay right where you are.”

I went back to help the woman slumped halfway out of the car. Only her mouth and chin were visible under the tangle of hair. Her fingers were almost as white as the snow they grazed. Digging in my heels so that I would not slip, I lifted her back onto the seat. The snow blew viciously into our faces. She groaned. I unwrapped my scarf from my neck and placed it around her shoulders. Music was still playing on the car’s sound system. It was quiet for a moment. Then my ear focused. “Malek, Malek, Maleki…” I shook my head. Fasting can cause hallucinations, but of the ears?

I wrapped the woman’s hands in the two ends of my scarf making a bundle that I hoped would keep them from freezing. There it was again: “Maal eyunik an tibki?”

Definitely I am hallucinating. I stepped back. What more could I do? The wind was blowing a little twirl of hair on top of her head and across her face. As I pushed the heavy door closed, I heard clear as if my mother were singing it, “Shufna shaalik aal burki.”(We saw your shawl beside the fountain.)

Just then I heard the siren. Before I could step towards my car, lights blinded me on all sides. I was done for.

Instead of yanking my hands behind my back, handcuffing me and shoving me in a cell to await deportation, the police officer drove me back to the office. As I sat waiting for Gupta to hand me my fate, Linda, the dispatcher, came in and offered me a mug of hot chocolate.

Gupta sat down beside me and shook his head. “Next time answer back when we call you. I was getting worried. It was only your first night. You take the rest of the night off.”

The next three months I spent trying to make enough money to pay the rent. One evening when I arrived at work, Linda said, “There’s someone here to see you.” In the waiting room was a woman with dark hair in a braid down her back. A red scar ran crookedly from her left eye to her chin pulling down the corner of her eye so that it looked half closed. She wore a moss-coloured sweater over an Indian print skirt, and I noticed silver threads through her hair and at her temples.

She stuck out her hand. “I’m Sarah.” Handing me my folded scarf, she said, “I believe this belongs to you.”

“Thank you. It is kind of you...There was no need.”

“I had to return it.”

“Thank you.” I turned to go.

“You saved my life.”

“I only…I did not know.” I looked at her. She had a kindly face that reminded me of the Irish Aid workers who occasionally appeared in our village when I was growing up.

“You must have seen my MedicAlert bracelet,” she said, pushing up her sleeve to show the metal tag. “If you had not called the ambulance I would have died.”

“I am glad to help you.”

“Umm, could I ask you something?”

I turned back. “What do the words embroidered on it say?”

I was confused. “Here.” She took the scarf from my hands and pointed to the edge. “Oh, it is something my mother, she make it for me.”

“I don’t mean to … I mean I was just curious. I spent time in Jordan last year, that’s why.”

“You were tourist?”

“No. I was on a trip organized by Dentists without Borders. We were treating people in refugee camps. After my husband left me I had time to –“

“You are dentist then.”

“A dental hygienist. The dentist I work for organized the trip.”

I looked at my watch. I was supposed to be in my cab in five minutes. “I am sorry I must go. My boss will be angry if…”

“Absolutely. I should go too. My daughter is waiting for me.” I ushered her to the door where I could see a car idling, its exhaust creating a blue plume in the cold air. She had just stepped through the door when she hesitated and drew something from her purse. I reddened at the thought she might give me money and quickly turned away. With awkward abruptness she said, “I have a favour to ask you. You are the only Arabic-speaking person I know. Could you translate this for me?” She handed me a CD.

I looked at the cover: Rim Banna. I’d never heard of her. “My English is not so good.”

“Please. It would mean so much to me.”

I must have had a question in my eyes. “It was given to me by the family I stayed with. I would so appreciate it. Here is my card.” I put the card and CD in my pocket and hurried to my cab.

For the next two months, my life in Canada became one long cold night. I had time for little but to keep body and soul together.

One morning at 10:00 am the phone woke me. My landlord said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, Omar, but we are raising the rent for everyone in your building.”

“Yes. I will send you new check.” I threw myself on to my bed. A toothache that had throbbed dully for days now raged, spreading pain like a claw up the back of my head. I had no money for a dentist. I could not drive with such blinding pain.

Deportation sniffed at my door like a hungry wolf. I paced my room that had become like a prison cell and smashed my fist into the wall. “Hey!” That was my Sikh neighbour who worked the night shift cleaning buildings.

Then I remembered. What was I wearing that night? I rummaged through the pile of clothes on the floor, feeling the pockets. Aha. I sat back on my heels. But wait. She’d asked me to do what? The CD. Where had I tossed it?

It had ended up underneath a stack of magazines. I looked at the cover: a woman with seductively kohled eyes wearing silver bangles in her ears. I had no CD player. My neighbour! He seemed a decent enough guy. I’d heard music coming from his place.

I knocked. “Excuse me. Very sorry to disturb you. Could I….?” I explained what I had been asked to do. “No problem,” said Vikram. “I must go out but you are velcome to stay as long as you want.” He adjusted his turban and pulled a coat on over his shalwar qamees.

I sat cross-legged in a pool of sun and slipped the CD into the player. The throbbing in my jaw subsided a bit. Rim Banna’s voice – pure and urgent – filled the one-room apartment.

“Malek, Malek, Maleki, shufna shaalik a’al burki,” (Malek, Malek, Maleki, we saw your shawl at the fountain.) “Mindeelik hareer eshamm, ma’a attar bi Mekki.” (Your handkerchief of Damascus silk is scented with the perfume of Mecca.)

I closed my eyes. Was she waiting for me? We hadn’t seen each other since we were kids. I would find her again. Yes. And together we would return to Canada to make a new life.

My tooth flared again. I pulled out the card. With one hand cradling my aching jaw, I punched the numbers on my cell phone.

“Hello?””

“It is Omar. I translate for you the CD.”

“Omar! I was hoping you would call.”

Jan.9,2008

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================================================== ================================================== what anice story from anice lady and great writer thanks God much for y work Egypt greats you0

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