A God Who Hates Read Free Page B

beauty as a child is dazzled by a toy. He was about twenty-five years older than she was. She was younger than his eldest daughter. He treated her well, but even this could not bring a smile to my mother’s face. The age difference between them was too great and their betrothal had not been her choice.
    My father was a businessman who was respected and well known in the town where we lived. He was a grain merchant who sold the product of crops grown in eastern Syria to buyers in the coastal area. He provided us with a standard of living that many families in our region could not even dream of at the time. His day began at four o’clock in the morning when he would get up and make the morning coffee. Within a few moments the scent of Turkish coffee would pervade every corner of the house. Still half asleep, I would see him approach my mother’s bed and whisper quietly in her ear, “Coffee’s ready, dearest.” But she would thrust him away with a shove and he would go back to his chair on the veranda overlooking the sea, and, on most occasions, drink his coffee alone.
    One of my happiest memories of him is of his return from a long journey at his usual dawn hour, when he would run to his family and wake us all up shouting, “Come on out, and bring bags with you!” We would run outside, pushing and shoving, and then race to the grain truck that stood blocking the street in front of our house. The driver would help us carry in the bags full of sweets, fruit, and vegetables. In the melon and watermelon season, we would compete to see who could carry the most.
    My father spent very little time at home. He would leave in the morning before sunrise and come home after dark. In his absence my grandmother reigned supreme. Our town suffered from a shortage of schools. To solve this problem, each school had two shifts of pupils. On Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, the girls went to school from seven in the morning until noon, while the boys started their school day at half past twelve and studied until five o’clock in the evening. This arrangement was reversed on the remaining three school days, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, when the boys started school in the mornings, while the girls studied in the afternoons. On the days I went to school in the afternoon I would accompany my grandmother to the local market in the early morning to buy the day’s necessities.
    My grandmother’s village, where she lived until the day she left her brother’s house for my father’s, is about seven miles away from the town where we lived. For twenty years after the day she left it, she never set foot there again. I remember the first time she went back after those twenty years, to attend the funeral of one of her sisters. My grandmother clearly loved the village she grew up in, but she had an astonishing capacity for concealing her feelings. Occasionally, I would get a glimpse of these emotions when I accompanied her on her morning excursions to the market in our own town.
    Near the market there was a bus station and taxi rank where people gathered to wait for transport to the surrounding villages. In one of the corners stood a kiosk that sold falafel sandwiches, plates of hummus, and fava beans. It was owned by a relative of my grandmother’s who came from the same village as she did. My grandmother loved falafel and she would make straight for the kiosk every morning. Then she would begin to chat with her relative Muhammad the falafel seller and embark upon a long conversation with him, in the course of which he would inform her of every incident, large and small, which had occurred in her village. The time my grandmother spent in these conversations with Muhammad gave me some of my most precious moments.
    That rubbish bin behind Muhammad’s kiosk was the first school I graduated from. Muhammad would wrap the falafel sandwiches in pages torn from magazines, books, and newspapers that he bought for a trifling sum from people who had