The Mother

Story of the Month

Ismail was born fatherless, in a wretched house in a little village of the countryside, where he lived alone with his mother — and the flies!

But from the day he was born the world smiled upon his mother, and livelihood came to her, she knew not from where — as though with his coming there had risen in the sky of the house a star of good fortune that never set.

She took to buying a share in a calf, and the year would not come round before it had grown, filled out, conceived, and been sold for many times its first price.

And she took to buying chicks as others bought them; but of hers only a few would die, while of anyone else's only a few survived.

The house filled with ghee and laban, and life stirred in it with the lowing of the calf, the bleating of the ewe, and the clucking of the hens.

Ismail grew up, and the star of good fortune grew with him.

He would rent barren, salt-crusted land for the least money, and it would turn green for him and laugh, yielding under his hand and giving generously. Blights would spread through most of the village's fields, leaving the crops withered, stripped of flower and leaf; then they would pass over Ismail's field, touch it gently, and leave it, on the whole, ripe and blessed in its fruits.

And on the day he sold his harvest, prices would rise in the market.

He married... He asked neither money nor position, and thought of nothing but a partner for his life, to help him at his work in the field and to help his mother at her work in the house. But God would have nothing less than to complete His favor upon him, and He bestowed on him a shapely maiden of the village's maidens, whose uncle was the village headman, whose beauty was the talk of the people, whose good name was among the sweetest of names, and whose love for him was pure, unmixed with falseness or flaw.

The women used to ask her about her mother-in-law, and she would tell them: I have no mother-in-law.

Nor was Ismail blessed in livelihood alone; God blessed him in friends as well.

Ismail was loved by all the people of the village, and he loved them all, and helped them wherever he could find a way to help; he might even prefer them over himself in good things, without ever holding it over them. He was of contented temper, his soul clean of every stain; people were safe from his hand and his tongue; there was no coarseness in his word or in his deed; and if he was wronged without intent, he did good to the one who had wronged him.

He was a copy of his good mother.

And though the mass of the village folk were his dear ones and his friends, they never ceased talking of his lucky star. They did not begrudge him what God had given him; rather they kept interpreting his luck, going every which way about it — each singing of his own Layla.

One of his neighbors said it was a blessing from the prayers of his righteous parents.

Another said that Ismail was sworn brother to the jinn, and swore that every night he heard his jinn "sister" knocking at the door!

The marriage registrar said that Ismail prayed and fasted and gave alms from his money many times over, and helped people, so God blessed everything his hands touched — and that is the bounty of God, which He gives to whom He will.

A fourth man said that he had taken a pledge from a sheikh of the people of God in Zagazig. So the villagers vied with one another in making pilgrimage to Zagazig, and in taking pledges from the sheikh who was there!

Then came a fifth man, who claimed that Ismail carried a talisman written by a Bedouin shepherd boy whom he had taken in as a guest one night and lodged generously — and that in this Bedouin there was a breath of the spirit of God. So the villagers went out seeking the shepherd, and hurried to him with eggs and ghee and chickens, begging him to write them talismans like the one he had written for Ismail. The Bedouin swore to them that he was unlettered, that he could neither read nor write; but they thought he was playing coy, so they pressed him harder and gave more generously; and he began handing them folded scraps of paper covered with cloth, bartering them away at the steepest of prices, saying to himself: the fool's provision is upon the madmen!

Ismail's good mother saw all this and heard it, and every night she would ward her son against its evil with incantations over his body, and with alum which she burned; then she would make out, in the fantastic shapes of its brittle remains, the faces of those who talked most about her son. She did not curse them, but asked God's forgiveness for them; and she would crush those shapes at the heels of her son as he slept, and sleep at peace, because she had crushed the spirits of evil beneath the feet of her beloved boy.

But the spirits of evil do not die!

For one day there appeared on Ismail's face and body flat red patches, verging a little toward black, which neither pained nor troubled him.

He waited for them to go away, but they did not; they grew larger and spread, and little by little they veiled the kindly features that had made the villagers love to look upon Ismail's face.

With the days his cheeks and his ears swelled; his nose broadened, thickened, and sank in; his voice grew hoarse; the hair spread over his face and fell away; and his eyes grew dull...

And his mother knew that it was the disease that had killed his father...

It was no longer hidden from anyone that Ismail was stricken with leprosy.

Yet for all that, Ismail never ceased going to the field, planting and pulling up, loving people, and fighting the disease that crept through his body with a giant's strength.

But the people began whispering among themselves what the registrar had said of him:

"Speak to the leper with a spear's length between you and him." And as the tale passed from mouth to mouth, the spear became two spears, then three, then ten, until at last they scattered from around him... none would speak to the leper.

He would go to the mosque for the Friday prayer and find himself the center of a widening circle in which there was not a living creature; and when the prayer was called and the worshippers formed their rows, he would find himself in a row by himself. So he took the arrow in his liver and hid it, and he went no more to the mosque to pray...

Then the registrar said: "And among men is he who worships God upon an edge: if good befalls him, he rests content in it; and if a trial befalls him, he turns over upon his face... he has lost this world and the next."

Yet in his house Ismail never ceased from prayer....

He began to thank God for leaving him his devoted friends, who visited him and spoke with him — a spear's length between them and him — and then departed in haste... Then he thanked Him for leaving him his faithful wife and his good mother, whose two hearts were torn with grief over the beloved whom the eyes of women had conquered in the end.

The mother turned to the Bedouin shepherd — the villagers' exaggerations had by now made of him a physician, a soothsayer, a settler of needs, and a summoner of jinn without a rival — asking him to make an amulet for her son; and she gave him half of what she had saved through her long life to make the pilgrimage to God's Sacred House.

And the wife turned to the sheikh in Zagazig, asking him to bless her husband and to intercede for him with God for a cure. So he came to the village in a grand procession of followers, and stayed as a guest with her uncle, the village headman, who was one of his disciples. He prescribed for the sick man an infusion of henna, to be drunk with chicken broth for seven days, and an anointing for forty days with myrrh mixed with pitch and tar!

He said it was a prescription from the Tadhkira of Dawud, the manuscript copy of which had come down to him from his grandfather. And the sheikh went out of the village with a camel-load of the villagers' gifts!

The people of the village had long since forgotten why they had taken the pledges and had the talismans written; and in spite of their disappointment in courting good fortune, they went on believing in the shepherd and in the sheikh in Zagazig... and calling on them for help in easing what was hard and relieving the distress of the distressed...

Even Ismail's mother!

The public-health doctor crossed no one's mind, for in the villagers' eyes he was... the one charlatan among all those trustworthy men of learning!

The disease, the shepherd's handiwork, and the medicine of the sheikh in Zagazig joined forces, and they put out most of the bright candles in Ismail's eyes.

The nodules and swellings began to spread through his body; Ismail's nerves began to tire and give way; and the disease began stealing in like a practiced thief, snatching from him a finger here and a finger there, until Ismail the strong lay helpless, able to do nothing.

The man who used to see the jinn "sister" knocking at his door by night said that she had quarreled with him because he married, and had taken the most evil of revenges upon him.

And the man who used to claim that his success was a blessing from the prayers of righteous parents said: I had thought his father a righteous man. There is no power and no strength save in God. Truly, people are mysteries.

But not one of the villagers wavered in his faith in the power of the shepherd, or in the secret of the sheikh in Zagazig!

The patience of the devoted friends wore out; they began heeding the registrar's new counsels and fleeing from Ismail the leper as they would flee from a lion...

And Ismail lost all his charm over them...

He became like a grave: "visited much, then less than much, then scarcely, then forgotten as though it had never been visited!"

Yet there remained to him his devoted wife, who had not lost her hope in God and in the sheikh in Zagazig — that her husband would be given back to her strong as he had been, handsome as he had been; and let her be the light of his eye if he had lost some of the light of his eye, and let her be his limbs if the disease had ravaged his limbs, and let her be a bondmaid to her master Ismail. And there remained to him his mother, selling the calf and the ewe and the hens and spending lavishly on his treatment at the shepherd's hands.

And Ismail, as he lay before the house warming himself in the winter sun, never lacked some villager who had lost his way and, passing by this forbidden house, felt shame and offered him a greeting.

Sometimes the hand of one of his old friends would open toward him in greeting; then he would turn away his face and his mist-veiled eyes, ignore the outstretched hand, refuse the alms his friends bestowed upon him against their will, and send that generous friend away with a kind word...

The disease went on to its end, cruel and unmerciful, mocking the incantations and the talismans, the supplications and the prayers; and his sight failed until he no longer saw the light.

From the house there vanished the bleating of the ewe, the lowing of the calf, and the clucking of the hens.

And the star of good fortune set in a muddy spring, and its setting seemed to be forever.

Despair crept into the wife's heart of any cure for that impossible body...

When he asked for a drink of water in his mother's absence, she took to putting her hand over her nose, going in to him with the jar, setting it down at his side, and darting off like an arrow.

She began telling the women of the village of her ill luck, weeping for her wasted effort and for her earrings, whose price had gone to the sheikh of Zagazig — and she remembered that she had a mother-in-law!

And in the end she too fled from her leper husband...

Ismail had lost his charm over his wife, as he had lost it over his devoted friends, and as he had lost it before over the hoe and the plow.

But he did not lose his charm over his mother...

She remained to him: giving him drink while she went thirsty, feeding him while she went hungry, kissing the lips that the angel of death disdained to kiss; selling all her world to buy him back, and asking God to make her the ransom for her poor beloved boy.

And in the end there remained to him his mother and the flies... and the angel of death hovering over him from afar.