Brooklyn Heights Read online

  Brooklyn Heights

  MIRAL AL-TAHAWY

  *

  Translated by Sameh Salim

  Contents

  Title Page

  1: Flatbush Avenue

  2: Bay Ridge

  3: The Green Cemetery

  4: South Slope

  5: Coco Bar

  6: Tango

  7: Atlantic Avenue

  8: Fulton Street

  9: Pluto in Capricorn

  10: Prospect Park

  11: Brooklyn Bridge

  12: The Cold Season

  About the author

  Inserted Copyright

  1

  Flatbush Avenue

  She had found it on a Google map of Brooklyn, a narrow strip making its way up towards the long, arching span that connects the two islands. She watches as sparkling new cars zoom across the Brooklyn Bridge, pedestrians stream down the walkway, and tourists admire the setting sun from its heights. They gaze in awe at the tip of Manhattan, which looks from up there like a birthday cake ablaze with candles, a round and luscious apple, brilliant with lit skyscrapers. But she turns her back on the spectacle and heads for Flatbush Avenue, chosen from amongst all those myriad streets because it becomes her: a woman shouldering her solitude, a couple of suitcases, and a child who leans into her whenever he grows tired of walking. She carries a few manuscripts of unfinished stories in a small backpack along with the other important documents: birth and vaccination certificates, residence papers, copies of degrees, employers’ letters of recommendation, bank papers, and a signed rental contract for an apartment she’s never seen.

  All she knows about her new home is that it’s located on the corner of Flatbush and Fifth Avenue near a big public garden in the heart of an old Brooklyn neighbourhood called Park Slope. She looks up ‘slope’ in the dictionary: a rim or bluff – a place of descent. She likes that; somehow it fits. She walks down Flatbush, which extends from the bridge to the eastern borders of Brooklyn, looking for her building. The avenue stretches out before her long and wide, abruptly intersected by other avenues and streets that twist and turn into different numbers and names. She picks her way along it slowly and carefully because it may well take her into the heart of a world with no pity, because she is afraid most of the time, and because she leads a young child by the hand. She lingers in a peaceful plaza where the smells of children and milky coffee waft out from cafés and where dark-skinned nannies push baby carriages with one hand and hold cell phones to their ears with the other, their high-pitched laughter drowning out the whimpers of their trapped, squirming charges. The side streets are full of restaurants and cafés that give off an aura of mellow sophistication with their heavy wooden furniture and faded oil paintings. She walks past streets that exude an evident passion for everything old, a passion that spills into the aroma of coffee, the gleam of thick-framed spectacles, and the rumble of insomniac scribbling. She watches people sprinting down sidewalks in order to lose a few pounds, people walking elegant and spoiled dogs, people lost in deep plotting of some poem or musical score in the final stages of composition, or perhaps just relaxing before a reiki or yoga session.

  She’s sure now that she has come to the right place. Everything around her invites nostalgia. She is surrounded by people who seem to be busy with some act of cosmic creation. All of them are writers, as she herself dreams of becoming. They carry backpacks stuffed with hopeful manuscripts. They hunt for agents and publishers and court young magazine editors who will discover their talent by chance and review their work in a few favourable, well-placed lines. And so their dreams come true all at once. She feels at home here in this place where, from a distance at least, people seem to reflect her own image. She, too, dreams of writing, but her one collection of poems – ‘I Am Like No Other’ – is still a sheaf of loose paper stowed away in an old white handbag inherited from her mother.

  *

  She is dragging the suitcases up to the entrance of the new building when he suddenly stops and tugs on her hand: ‘Can I buy something to eat?’ Before she can answer, he runs into the store next door and straight up to the man behind the counter (who is of Yemeni origin, as they will later discover) and says to him with a speed and succinctness in English that astonishes her: ‘A toasted bagel with cream cheese and a strawberry-cranberry juice smoothie.’ The order sounds as long and as wide as Flatbush Avenue. It takes her a while to parse out each word. She often has trouble understanding his English in these situations and now she is struggling to count out the coins whose value she still hasn’t memorised. She carefully searches for the right words to make him see sense and ask her first before ordering things they might not be able to afford, but he barely gives her the chance to finish her sentence.

  ‘Darling, what if Mama doesn’t have enough money with her?’

  ‘I just ordered a cheese sandwich and a glass of juice, Mom. What’s the big deal?’ he replies testily. His sharp retort reduces her to silence, and the bitter memory of the bagel ‘incident’ will stay with her for a long time after. Flatbush Avenue has many temptations.

  The apartment they move into is not sized to fit the boy’s dreams either. It is no bigger than a small matchbox with a window looking out onto the street. When he complains, she tries to convince him that she has chosen the nicest view of Brooklyn just for him. She tells him that he can wave from the window to the nice man who runs the Egyptian diner across the street, who is in the habit of sitting outside his restaurant on a large chair between two life-sized painted wooden statues of King Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertiti. Every morning he carries the two statues outside to welcome his customers and every evening she watches him take them back inside when he closes the shop. Of course, neither she nor her son ever dares to pass between those statues because the nice Egyptian sells his sandwiches at ten dollars apiece. They content themselves with watching him open and close from their window on the third floor and smiling at him as he sits between his pharaonic companions.

  One day they visit a small, dingy Chinese restaurant for lunch. It is an especially unpleasant meal. They sit for a long time at a rickety table and drink glasses of water from a tin pitcher carelessly placed in front of them. As always she listens as he speeds through his complicated order. His aptitude with menus no longer amazes her. She only watches him as he pronounces the words quickly and with mystifying confidence: ‘Vegetarian noodles with black mushrooms and zucchini.’ She nods to the waiter in confirmation. The strange words arrive piled up in a large bowl that he digs into irritably, after drenching the contents with soy sauce. She is foolish enough to open up one of the small clear plastic wrappers that contain oddly shaped biscuits and bite into its brittle, tasteless crust. She spits it out quickly.

  ‘What is this?’

  The boy giggles furiously. ‘You’re not supposed to eat it, Mom. You’re just supposed to read the fortune inside.’

  She is ever eager to read her fortune in anything and everything: horoscopes, tarot and playing cards, sometimes her palm, even her forehead, if she could have found someone who knew how to interpret its mysterious lines, but she would never have thought to discover it written out on a scroll inside a biscuit. She opens it up with the trepidation of a woman about to learn her inexorable destiny. That which awaits you is no better than that which you have left behind. She tears up the paper into tiny pieces and throws them into the pitcher of water.

  She gets up to leave, and he hurries out behind her.

  ‘Mom, are you angry with me? Did I spend a lot of money, Mom? Are you mad?’

  She keeps walking and he runs after her in the direction of the small box that is now their home.

  *

  At night she thinks about how she has begun to forget so many t
hings – addresses, events, the whereabouts of documents. She worries that her keen memory is getting mouldy. She, who once believed that forgetting was a great blessing, is now hunted by oblivion, a monstrous shadow.

  She tries to remember the shape of her past homes and fails. She knows that the apartment is somewhere that gathers all streets into itself, like a glass box. People look in and see her, she looks out and sees them, jogging, drinking, embracing their lovers. It is a place that confirms her solitude and verifies her talent for escaping. She often takes long walks up and down Flatbush Avenue. She studies the places where others have lived and tries to chart a map with which to replace the memories she has fled, the memories that have left a blank space in their wake.

  Lefferts Historic House is close to where they live. She discovers that, long ago, a wealthy Irish landowner by the name of Busch once owned the entire street and all the houses on it. She takes her son by the hand and they go inside. The mansion has been preserved in its original state. It has a large garden that borders Prospect Park. Together they examine the ground-water pump, the tea room and the upper-storey bedrooms, the fireplace and the walls covered with portraits of the owner and his children, their servants and slaves standing behind them in the shadows, polishing the wood floors and pouring tea from silver pots. The servants slept there, in the stables, on piles of straw that have been carefully recreated for visitors.

  She inspects a few antique paintings of Brooklyn in the days when it was an island of farmers and a harbour for docking ships: barns full of straw, vast farms and open fields strewn with the ruins of deserted vessels. She thinks about the warren of narrow streets that they call Fort Greene – home to the largest community of African-Americans in Brooklyn. If she were there she would see dark-skinned women sitting on their stoops and chatting together in shrill voices, though she wouldn’t understand a word of what they were saying in between the deep-throated laughter that sounds much like her own. They speak at breakneck speed and puff on cigarettes to the strains of loud music coming through the open windows – music that drifts through a neighbourhood rich with the African caftans, chilli and spices, oils and perfumes and colourful jewellery of the hot, brown continent that is also hers.

  Night falls and from the apartment she can hear the sound of exploding fireworks and popping balloons and shouts full of sudden, cataclysmic enthusiasm in Fort Greene. A deep chant rumbles along the length of Flatbush Avenue and wakes it from its slumber. She opens her window, laughing out loud and clapping her hands like a madwoman. Hundreds of people open their windows to watch the fireworks and those funny balloons with images of Obama stamped on them floating in from sleepless Red Hook. After the fireworks, people stream out onto the streets waving old maps of Brooklyn in the days before the great bridge was built. In those days the neighbourhood was made up of small wretched shacks occupied by freed slaves and poor whites looking for work in the iron foundries and glass factories or working as day labourers in the fields. The big blue signs have been visible everywhere on the avenues and streets since her arrival: Change. She pins a button printed with that word on her chest as a token of her own soon-to-be-fulfilled dreams. Her son has the same button pinned to his school bag. They wear them because, like everyone else, they too crave change, and its sister declaration: Hope; words that make them feel that they have become a part of this map, a part of its deepest aspirations. Her son emerges from under the blankets and opens his eyes wide.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Obama won.’

  He smiles, then closes his eyes and goes back to sleep while she stays at the window watching the fireworks, the joy, then the fatigue, then the light of dawn breaking on the avenue littered with empty beer bottles. She listens to the noise made by the giant street-cleaning trucks, then the pregnant silence that rises with the sun. A while later the express bus to Manhattan passes under her window. She watches the office workers hurrying to the subway station and breathes in the aroma of coffee drifting out of apartment windows and cafés and doughnut vans. Later that morning he taps her on the shoulder and asks the same question again.

  ‘Did Obama really win, Mom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He trots after her from the small bedroom to the even smaller kitchen and begins to tick off his laundry list of Obama-inspired wishes. She faces him with a grave expression and gives him her undivided attention because he often complains that she ignores him. She nods her head and restricts herself to a single word, ‘Yes,’ a word he has grown to hate, a meaningless word conveying nothing, but it’s the only one she’s got these days.

  ‘I’ve got to tell Obama that a lot of things have to change.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The boy picks out his English words with care. ‘He has to change the environment and the rain forest and go green everywhere and change Egypt too. Can he do that?’

  ‘Let’s hope so. Everything will turn green.’

  ‘Can I be in an election and win like Obama?’

  ‘Anything is possible.’

  ‘And be the President of the United States?’

  ‘Anything is possible.’

  ‘Now? Now? ’

  ‘There’s a time and place for everything, my love.’

  She feels like she’s getting old. She realises that she has been repeating the same resigned, cautious, and ultimately meaningless words her own mother used ad nauseam (‘God willing . . . It’s all up to Him . . . Who knows? . . . There’s a time and place for everything . . .’) and that she’s beginning to resemble her mother more and more as time goes by, especially after she cut off the long, coal-black hair that now smells of her mother’s favourite Japanese dye. Her walk has also taken on the same listless gait that her mother had at the end of a long day; her mother who constantly brandished her dictionary of essential and incontrovertible truths in order to shackle her dreams of becoming an airline hostess, or an astronomer. ‘All knowledge belongs to God, dear, and He commands all,’ she would laughingly instruct. So she lets the boy write a long letter to Obama. She remembers that she used to write long letters to God. He never once replied, of course, but that didn’t stop her from believing that He would make all her dreams come true.

  *

  She takes him by the hand and walks. She walks and walks because she has no work and because the apartment she lives in is stifling and because she can’t sleep at night and because her buried anxiety gives a frightening cast to the placid expression in her eyes. When they come home at the end of the day he will lie next to her and watch TV and she’ll bury her head even deeper under the covers and dream about them; about the life that she can no longer remember, the life that is slipping through her hands.

  Her name is Hend but her nicknames were many. She remembers certain ones: ‘Gap-tooth’, when her milk teeth were falling out; ‘Bucky’, because of her protruding upper jaw; ‘Thumbs’, because her hands weren’t able to grasp things properly, as hands should. Objects would slip away from her and shatter because her mind was always far away. Those cruel names turned her into an obstinate mule and made her relationship with her mother a living hell. She would brush her hot tears away with a final sob before exploding into the same insistent stream of questions: ‘Why don’t you love me? Are you really my mother?’ Sometimes her anger drove her to excess: ‘I hate you, I hate you!’ she would scream. Someone would usually intervene at this point to teach her better manners and she always emerged from the subsequent battle with a brand-new set of wounds.

  She was never able to beat a prudent retreat from these battles. Her childish insolence and the feeble scratches she meted out were met with a few fierce slaps that made her long, crooked nose bleed. She would run away to hide under the low wooden bed and cry bitter tears. After a while she would stifle her sobs to listen for the approaching click of those dainty feather slippers that she so coveted. From her spot under the bed she would glimpse a shiny red heel and the hem of her mother’s lace nightgown. Night would have fallen by
then and she would smell the smoke from her father’s cigarette as it wafted in from the room next door. After drawn-out negotiations she would emerge from under the bed, her mother’s arm reaching out to smooth her hair and draw her close (‘Come here, princess, come to me’), but Hend would resist, gnawing her lip and brushing away the last traces of her tears and whimpering, ‘You don’t love me.’ She remembers her mother hugging her tight. ‘Are you crazy? How can a mother not love her daughter? You’re the most precious thing in the world to me.’ In a flash of clarity, those wistful words reveal to Hend the true extent of their shared despair.

  In spite of all of the attempts to break her in, Hend never managed to become the gentle and obedient girl capable of thriving in a jungle of men that her mother hoped and prayed for; all the meticulous and chary instructions (‘You’re a girl, how will you manage to survive with that stubborn head of yours?’) didn’t do a bit of good. After all those years, after learning the meaning of suspicion and jealousy and desertion, she now understood that the woman forever pacing the living room in a honey-coloured robe was her twin. They both had the same long nose, worn down by endless nights of crying. She recalled her mother’s habit of clutching at her lower back to soothe the chronic pain left behind by many childbirths. She would apply one hot water bottle after another to still the ache while she waited long into the night for Hend’s father to come home – if he bothered to come home at all. She refused to believe the many stories that the servants told her about her husband, and the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes told a story of their own in the morning.

  Hend knew that if her mother woke up in one of those states a domestic volcano was sure to erupt and that, as the only daughter, she would be its first victim. She would scurry back to her place under the bed yet again, whimpering and listening for the torrent of threats to smash in her stubborn head. She wasn’t an entirely innocent party in these battles, for she was more than capable of challenging her mother with her defiant, intimidating eyes. She was also quite good at single-handedly provoking her anger by poking through her private things – her make-up cases and bits of paper carefully shut away in drawers, like the clippings that her mother collected from Your Personal Doctor and Eve and a host of other magazines specialising in domestic and marital problems. There were articles about how to monopolise your husband’s love by putting perfume in your bathwater and sweet-smelling mastic in the folds of your underwear, or how to make sticky caramelised sugar paste to depilate unsightly body hair. She devoured all this in an excess of curiosity, not paying the slightest attention to her mother’s warnings. The only thing that saved her from her mother’s wrath was that she was a model student. Hend’s mother took comfort in the hope that her daughter would make something of herself someday, perhaps by getting an education. In the meantime she didn’t bother to hide her anxiety about Hend’s future and would often remind her that she was not pretty and therefore shouldn’t count on her looks to get her through life. It didn’t help that she was no good at housekeeping and so God only knew who would be willing to marry her.