The Blue Between Sky and Water Read Free

patting Mamdouh’s shoulder.
    In truth, Mamdouh could never have such a visceral connection to beekeeping as his mentor expected. True, he arrived early to work every day and stayed late listening to the beekeeper for hours. But Mamdouh’s enthusiam and attentiveness was born from the wound of fatherlessness, and from a desire deep in his thighs. He heard very little of the beekeeper’s tales, absorbing instead the warmth of being there and scanning his surroundings for a glimpse of Yasmine, the beekeeper’s youngest daughter. And as memory will often succumb to the insistence of longings, Mamdouh invented a memory of a father, whose features took on those of his mentor and his character that of a beekeeper, sitting down to tea after a meal to speak of honey while Mamdouh searched the room for wafts of love.
    Before Mamdouh became the apiarist’s apprentice, his family had lived on whatever he could peddle or earn from small jobs and what charity they got from mosques. But it was never enough, especially when his mother’s strange cravings grew. Once, during Eid when Mamdouh was not yet twelve years old and the mosque had given their family half a lamb, Um Mamdouh got a frightening appetite that no amount of food could satiate. Mamdouh had to slap her before all the meat was gone. The Quran says that heaven lies beneath the feet of mothers, and everyone knows that to slap one’s mother is to make a reservation in hell. But surely Allah would forgive him because he had acted not as her son, but as the man of the house who needed to ensure the family might have meat to eat. That was when Mamdouh and his sisters started to turn against Sulayman, the other family secret, because they knew their mother’s appetite was his fault. They knew when he was near, by their mother’s voracious appetite, her transported eyes that showed only the whites, or by the singed odor of smoke Sulayman brought wherever he was.

FIVE
    People who knew my great-teta Um Mamdouh eventually learned of Sulayman. Or they learned of her after they heard of Sulayman. In those days, they all recalled a verse from the Holy Quran (Al Hijr 15:26–27): “And indeed, He created man from sounding clay of altered black smooth mud. And the djinn, He created aforetime from the smokeless flame of fire.”

    On a Dark, Cloudy December evening in 1945, Um Mamdouh wandered in search of the moon until she found it, a thin crescent tangled in the stars over Beit Daras. Sulayman was with her. He always was now. As she gazed at the night sky, she heard moaning and muffled laughter behind a wall of ruins from a Roman bathhouse. She moved toward the sounds and saw outlines of four teenage boys, their skin glistening with the juices of moon and starlight. Shivering and panting in the cold dark, the boys’ galabiyas were pulled up over their waists and each was masturbating, not with pleasure, but in competition, it seemed. She began to curse them, damn them to hell for such sin. The boys went instantly soft with fear and scrambled to pull down their galabiyas, until one of them saw who it was.
    “It’s the crazy Um Mamdouh,” he shouted, and they sighed with relief, then laughed with malice.
    “Go back to the Masriyeen neighborhood,” yelled one boy. “Crazies are not allowed here,” said another. “Are you going to pull up your thobe and shit in the river again?”
    Um Mamdouh retreated, frantically waving her hands. “Stop it! Sulayman is getting angry. He never gets angry. Stop it! You must stop.”
    Their laughter intensified. “Who is Sulayman? Is that your sissy son’s nickname? Is he going to shit in the river, too?”
    Suddenly, before she could stop him, Sulayman began to emerge through her face. Specks of stars from a black sky glistened on the contours of her head as his presence grew. It expanded to the width of her shoulders, a dark immensity with raging eyes of red fire. It spat gibberish in a voice that thundered from all directions, and a