The Land of Gold

The Story of the Month

When Boutros Hammam took ship for Brazil on the morning of that dusky, rainy day, leaving behind in the house his wife Hanneh — still a bride, married no more than six months — no one in the village found in his going any surprise or strangeness. For at least half of them were away in America. So Hanneh could do nothing but dry her tears and accept the matter as it was accepted by the other women of the village — and she was no better than they — some of whom had been left by their men a week after the crowning, and some of whom had been waiting twenty years for his return.

Hardly had Boutros reached Brazil when Hanneh sent him the good news of the birth of a son. He rejoiced at it, and wrote naming him Makhoul after his own father, asking for his picture and confirming to her the promise he had made at her farewell — that he would stay in Brazil no more than three or four years. His letters followed one another after that, carrying to her and to his son and to the whole village his longing, now scattered in prose and now strung in verses of zajal. And between this and that, a check for a sum of money which Hanneh took care to surround with a halo of secrets: she would tuck it into her bosom and go down to Beirut alone and cash it at the bank, so that it became the talk of the village, and in their gatherings the women wove around it a thousand and one legends. If they asked her about it, she dodged the answer and said: "May Boutros bury me! His heart is tender!"

And suddenly Boutros fell silent. No check, no letter, no news. It was the seventh year of his absence. The days went by without Hanneh learning anything of him. She was told at the very first that he had moved to a far village in the wilds of Brazil; then she was told that he had gone bankrupt in a business and fled from his creditors across the border. Then she was told other, dreadful things. And she believed neither much nor little of these sayings.

No one knows exactly how Hanneh contrived to scrape a living all that time and to raise her son. But they would see her — her clothes grown shabby, wretchedness plain upon her — going about her housework, or driving a goat of hers to the field, or coming back from Mass on Sunday with lowered head; and they spoke to her only rarely. If they asked her about Boutros she would force a mournful smile and lie to them and repeat her familiar phrase: "May Boutros bury me!" — then add: "He wants to come back to see Makhoul. His heart is burnt up over his son!"

And Makhoul grew and began to understand. It happened one day that he heard his mother say this, and he flared up, shouting:

— What heart is this that burns for me? I want to go to Brazil to see whether I have a father!

And he stamped the ground. Some laughed, gloating; and some pitied his state and drew near to console him; but he muttered and stalked off headstrong toward home, leaving his mother to run after him, wiping away tears of misery and wishing the earth would split open and take her in.

In vain did Hanneh try to persuade her son that he was still young — he was not yet eighteen — for he stood in her face like a pillar and insisted on carrying out what he had said. She found no way but to yield to his demand: she gave him her bracelets, and he sold them for nearly the cost of the journey, and set off.

Makhoul turned his back on his mother as though he felt nothing. He did not even return her tearful embrace at the harbor, nor look back at her as she pressed up the ship's ladder and nearly fell into the sea. She came home between her brother and her cousin, shattered. And the neighbor women came to wish her that she might welcome back in safety the one she had seen off in safety, and she said: "May Boutros bury me! He sent asking for Makhoul to take over his business — for how else could he come back, if he had no one to take his place?"

But the dear friends exchanged meaning glances. They had known for a long time that Boutros was living with a mistress whom he loved and who loved him. It was said she was of one of the best families of Brazil. Beautiful and rich. How should it occur to him to leave her for Hanneh and her precious self! As for Hanneh, she knew she was lying to them; but she believed herself.

A year and part of a year passed without Hanneh receiving a letter from Makhoul. Not that he had arrived, not that he had seen his father — nothing at all. The village folk had almost forgotten Makhoul as they had forgotten Boutros before him, and it settled in their minds that Hanneh would die — if not of grief, then of hunger. Then one day a piece of news spread through the village, and the jars stood still at the spring, and the hoes in the field, and the mouths passed it on:

— Makhoul, son of Boutros Hammam, has come back. Makhoul, son of Boutros Hammam, has come back from Brazil laden with gold.

Hanneh's astonishment at her son's coming home rich was no less than the astonishment of the others. But the bursting of this spite in the eyes of the village folk filled her head and her heart and her soul all together with an intoxication beyond all intoxication. She set about receiving the deputations of well-wishers, who looked now at her and now at Makhoul, not believing what their eyes saw and their ears heard. She opened boxes of sweets and offered them round, as though thrusting them into their noses — they knowing her stinginess — and slipped sweets into their pockets, and bade welcome to the great among them and the small, wiping away tears of joy and repeating: "May Boutros bury me, God willing!" And she would stare at Makhoul and croon over him and press him to her breast, while he bore with her against his will, feigning pleasure and smiles. Then he would go back to his frowning and his silence, scarcely answering the questions raining down on him about his father and about this man and that man and the other — and they could find no reason for all this, after his assuring them that his father was in the best of health and would return very soon. But Hanneh found his excuse for him in the weariness of the sea, and they rose and asked leave to go.

In the morning Hanneh awoke with her heart laughing. But how great was her amazement when she looked at her son's bed and found it empty. She called through the house, and no one answered her. Makhoul was not in the house, nor behind the house, nor on the roof. Perhaps he had gone in at the neighbors', or gone off to the spring. The mother set out through the village, asking and calling. And faster than the blink of an eye the news spread that Makhoul had disappeared. The tales explaining his disappearance went every which way. All her day long Hanneh went on searching for him and asking, until asking and searching wore her out, and she came back to her house striking hand against hand. She found that she had left her bedding and her son's bedding on the floor, and she bent to gather them up. And there, under his pillow, was a bag tied at the neck. She took it up, and hardly had she opened it when her heart pounded. She hurried to the door and shut it, and came back to the bag: it was stuffed with liras. Tens of gold liras. Nay, hundreds of yellow gold liras. She fell to staring with her eyes and feeling with her fingers. Then all at once she tipped the bag out into her lap and went out the door, running down the road, her hair disheveled, her eyes wild, her dress hitched up over the liras, calling:

Look what Boutros has sent me!
May Boutros bury me!

*

That happened ten years ago, in the village half of whose people are in Brazil. And to this day the passerby in its lanes still sees a woman of fifty, hair disheveled, eyes wild, her dress hitched up over gold liras that flew off in an instant between the earth's hearing and its sight, of which nothing remains but the delusion of madness, repeating her refrain:

— Look! Look what Boutros has sent me! May Boutros bury me!

And perhaps some mischievous ones draw near her and ask her about Makhoul, and she answers that he has gone to the land of gold a second time, to come back from his father with the second installment. And he will go on going and coming back until he has carried over the whole fortune. A hundred journeys and a journey, a hundred installments and an installment.

And they laugh with all their mouths... except the tender-hearted, who shake their heads, pitying the state of this wretched woman, and finding for her, in any case, in her madness a great consolation. For when the police came, fifteen days after Makhoul's disappearance, asking — but in vain — about the young man who had killed his father and his father's mistress in the wilds of Brazil and fled, Hanneh had already lost her mind.