Between A Kingdom and a Country, S. G. Sawaged [free e books to read TXT] 📗

In my earliest memory, I am five years old walking up and down the hallway of a Chicago hotel, holding hands with my father, a man I have not seen in well over a year. I just arrived here, to America. I feel lost and I want my father to take me to see Jiddo, but Jiddo is six thousand miles away.

Babba buys me candy, so that I will stop crying.

In our hotel room, I draw a rainbow on a pad of hotel paper to give to Jiddo as a present. It is afternoon and pouring rain outside our hotel window, and then suddenly the rain stops, evaporates, like a human soul into the cotton shaped clouds. I run to the window while Babba is resting in one of the beds. I think I see a rainbow, like the one I saw from the plane, but it is only a trick of light.

Outside, the world looks strange and haunting.

I tuck the rainbow into the desk drawer, as if tucking away a dream.

From the journal of Suzanne Rasheed June 12th, 1982

1.
It was my fault they fought that night. It was a school night and I should have been in bed already. Instead, I was outside on the patio showing Frankie and Mindy my new Dachshund puppy. I held Buddy in my arms while the twins were touching the dew on his nose and giggling. Momma said I could take Buddy to school to show my class sometime, if Mrs. Leahy didn’t mind.

It was a Thursday evening, in the spring of 1998, when the leaves of the maple trees were just beginning to bud and the setting sun cast a soft glow behind the clouds.

It was just past 8 p.m. when my father arrived home from work. He had been agitated all week, snapping at me for leaving toys on the floor of my room, or barking at my mother when she asked why he left the garden hose uncoiled on the deck for fear someone might trip. He didn’t smile when he saw me, he didn’t ask about the puppy. He asked if I had taken a bath. No. He asked if I knew it was past my bedtime. No. He asked if my mother was inside. Yes. Time for your friends to go home, he said, and you go to your room.

I followed my father inside the house, through the kitchen and living room and down the hallway to my room.

My mother was washing dinner dishes. I heard my father light into her, about why Samuel was still outside when it’s past his bedtime, why he hadn’t had his bath yet, why those kids are always over and don’t they have parents. I could hear his voice rise in decibels, questioning her through gritted teeth.

He was using bad words, words that my mother said before were shameful, aib

as we say in Arabic, when she would hear the teenage kids in the neighborhood yelling them across to each other as they rode their ten speeds in the middle of the street.

My mother tried to explain she was late from work, she was delayed with dinner and cleaning the kitchen after, but he cut her off as she spoke.

I huddled in a corner of my room, knees bent to my chest. Buddy was near me pouncing on a squeaky dog toy. I gently placed my arm around him and pulled him closer to me.

I heard dishes break and my mother begin to cry. I cupped my hands over my ears. I tried to imagine my mother and I were still at Standing Bear Lake, as we were the Saturday before, watching Buddy take curious steps into grass that at times was taller than he. I tried to imagine this wasn’t happening again.

Then I heard the back door slam, and the soft groan of the van’s engine. The house fell quiet. My mother came to me, she came to my room, her face red and flushed. I could see the harsh imprint of fingers across her left cheek. She scooped me up from the corner and I wrapped my legs around her waist.

She held my head close to her, combing her fingers through my hair. We sat on the bed and she began to slowly rock forward and backward. I felt her trembling.

“I am afraid someday you’re going to leave Momma, I’m afraid you’re going to leave and not take me with you.”

I had this reoccurring dream that seemed to coincide with the frequency of their arguing. I dreamt that someone was lurking behind the curtains of our living room while I was on the floor building skyscrapers out of Legos. I always expected someone to come out and tell me they were going to take my mother away and I would be left in the house alone.

“No, habibi

, my darling, never”, she said. “I will not leave you. Momma is right here, I’m not going anywhere.”

Her eyes began to tear and her voice quavered. She made me promise again never to say a word to Jiddo or Tata, my maternal grandparents, or to my friends or anyone at school.

“What happens in the family stays in the family, it’s our secret, right?”

“Yes.”

“Scout’s honor?”

“Scouts honor”, I said softly.

Seeing her cry always made me cry. I sniffled, then slid the knuckles of my forefingers across my nose, and wrapped my arms tightly around her neck. I could feel her tears fall on my cheek like little raindrops.

“You’re a very good boy, Samuel, and I love you very much, don’t ever forget.” She cupped her hands around my cheeks, kissed my forehead, and then wiped her eyes with her hands.

“Come now, let’s get your bath.”


After Momma tucked me into bed that night, I heard the phone ring. Her cousin Reem called from Arizona. Aunt Reem must have been talking about her son Rami because I overheard Momma say mashallah

, I can’t believe he is growing so fast. And then, elhamdallah

, we are doing great, we are doing just great.

To those around us, we were always doing great, even when we were not.

2.
Sometimes I’m hopeful they have left for good, but then they return, the demons and their blank stares…

I do not blame them, my mother and father.. who would have imagined…and besides, what were they to do? there were only two bedrooms, they in one, I in the other…this was before the other kids came and more bedrooms were built in the attic..

He was fifteen years older than me..he would have been twenty six then....my mother brought her brother here so he could finish his education, work, make a living…Majid – “noble”- …..his work friends called him Mikey…

Shoof keef mahlaha he said when he saw me for the first time...look at how lovely she is....

My bedroom had two beds, one in each of the furthest corners of the room..I would sleep in one bed, he in the other…when the house was quiet and dark and my parents asleep, he would call for me, he would call my name…. come lay with me Suzanne, he would say…come lay with Khalo..

I lay in his bed with my back to his chest… he buried his chin in my neck..I could smell the clean sweet scent of his cologne…

a shadow was cast on the west wall from the dim light peering through the window above us..

I felt him pull down my pajama, exposing my buttocks..I tried to pull them back up but he would remove my hand..I thought he would teach me to ride a bike. I felt something hard press against me. Or better yet, he would teach me to swim. I closed my eyes and then opened them again..the shadow was still there…..I felt something wet and warm.

I peed myself..

I squeezed my upper thighs close together to stop the flow..but I couldn’t understand why it was wet on my backside…I raced to the bathroom..his scent lingered behind me..

He called for me again the next night, and the night after that..

finally, I moved my bed a few inches away from the wall and I slept in the small crevice on the floor so I would not hear him calling for me again.

I never told my mother…by then I had already developed a habit for keeping secrets...

3.
“That mother of yours has no sense of time”, my father said to me in the van on the drive to school the next morning. He stayed out all night and came back in the morning. He always came back in the mornings. “A household needs order, and I don’t see how she can manage that house with no sense of order”, he added, shaking his head. I would not tell my father I didn’t like how he said this about my mother, the stern tone he took when saying this. I listened dutifully. Although I feared my father, I was happy he always came back. I was happy he took me to school and Momma picked me up. I was happy for Mrs. Leahy, and Frankie and Mindy and that Buddy was beginning to recognize his name.
I looked down at the watch that I received from my parents as a Christmas gift the year before. Seven- four – three it said. School began at eight and got out at three. Dinner was at six. Bed was at eight. I woke up at seven. Buddy was fed at four.
Dad always waited outside school with me until the first bell rang. He would chat with Mr. Berg while Garrett Berg told me his older brother Shane was taking him to see A Bug’s Life at the cinema on Saturday. Garrett was a wry little boy, with blonde unkempt hair and beady brown eyes, like the bugs in the movie previews. Garrett got in trouble at the beginning of that school year for applying waterproof tape to the water faucet in the boys’ bathrooms so when we turned on the water it sprayed up in a burst from the space left by the tape and drenched our faces. Frankie my neighbor caught him when he went in to pee and told Mrs. Leahy, who then gave Frankie a prize from the Prize Chest and sent Garrett to see Principal Gillen.
I think Garret got in even more trouble after telling Principal Gillen, “Don’t have a cow, it was only a joke”, which he didn’t find amusing. So for the next two weeks, Garrett was grounded and his father hid all the waterproof tape on a high shelf in their garage.

Of all of my grade school teachers, Mrs. Leahy was my favorite. She had taught first grade at St. Stephen the Martyr for twenty two years. She was a slim woman with blondish brown hair pulled back into a bun. She wore oval shaped glasses with red rims and she seemed to love scarves because she always had one coiling around her neck, at times solid color, at times paisley. She told me once