The Carpet (A Story)

Now the sun's rays are all but flooding the whole terrace facing the sea at the house of Saada, Umm Jamil al-Haddad. And there stands the mistress of the house beside the window, waiting for the mail carrier to pass, hoping he may bring her a letter from her son, who has been abroad in Brazil these six years. Though the son writes only two or three times a year, she has grown used to standing there every day, a little before noon, at the hour when the carrier passes. “He is brisk and good-hearted, this carrier,” Umm Jamil thinks as she listens to his heavy steps on the asphalt road. “Every day he passes by here on time, without delay, and if he brings me no letter, the fault is not his.”

Then she closes the window and hurries to the kitchen to busy herself preparing her simple lunch — a piece of meat with a few of the vegetables produced by her one garden, which stands beside the house. When she has finished her work in the kitchen and eaten her meal, nothing remains for her but to sit in her room and rest, for her supper amounts to a little cheese, bread, and olives and needs no preparing. As for the garden, she has finished weeding and watering it, and tomorrow the shopkeepers will come with their baskets, and she will pick for them what oranges and sour lemons remain there.

It is springtime, and she finished hoeing the garden last week, but she does not begrudge it a visit every day, to cut a dry branch here and there a weed sprouting in the walls or in the trees' watering channels. For this garden is the source of her livelihood: in it she plants all the greens and herbs she needs, and she sells the fruit it yields and buys what provisions she lacks, and stores away the money that is over and above her need.

Umm Jamil sits beside the window and watches the lemon buds, which have lately begun to open, their refreshing scent spreading abroad. The Great Feast is at the door, and before long she must set about what she calls “the feast clean-out,” the great cleaning she gives her house every year. She begins by cleaning the cupboards and chests, taking out of them the colored bundles and parcels and the piles of sheets, covers, and blankets, wiping away the dust inside the furniture, and then returning the bundles, the parcels, and the piles to their places. But her hardest labor comes with cleaning the “buffet,” or china cabinet. For this cabinet is very tall, almost reaching the ceiling, and she must climb on a chair to bring down from its shelves the colored glasses, the engraved flasks, the pitchers and basins and silver candlesticks, the narghiles with copper hearts, and the other precious things she inherited from many people who died before her. And despite the fatigue it costs her, she feels an exceeding pleasure when she washes the glassware with water and soap and scours the copper pieces with sand and lemon and sets them out, row upon row, on the terrace to dry in the sun and grow bright as gold. She rejoices in the sight of these things, though she never once uses them in her life. She drinks from an earthenware pitcher and leaves the colored glass tumblers where they are. She sleeps on an old patched sheet and keeps the new sheets clean and folded. She takes her food in morsels with her fingers and leaves the silver spoons and forks wrapped in paper in the drawers. For Umm Jamil has her own philosophy in the matter: that belongings and pieces of furniture are things a person acquires and heaps up in his house to enjoy the sight of them, not to use them for his needs.

“Everything is better off than the son of Adam,” Umm Jamil repeats, remembering the owners of these vessels who have died. “Everything is better off than the son of Adam.” No doubt she loves these vessels because they are more enduring than human beings and longer-lived. This chest full of bundles she inherited from her mother, dead these many years. As for the big “buffet,” her late husband inherited it from his aged mother, and at that time it held only half of what is in it now; the rest she bought piece by piece with her toil and her thrift. She would gladly have bought other things and realized those wide hopes that had kept her company since her girlhood, but luck betrayed her and fate turned against her. For who would have thought that her husband, the blacksmith of the huge frame, whose arm was harder than the iron he worked — who would have thought that death would snatch him away between one night and the next morning and leave her alone and broken in spirit, when she had always believed that she would die before him and that after her he would marry a woman who would bear him many children, for by her he had been granted only a daughter and two boys. The younger of the boys died in childhood, the girl married at an early age, and her other son, Jamil, remained alone, working at the smith's trade with his father. And when he saw that work had slackened, it came into his head to travel to America like his young companions; and his father implored him

to give up the journey, and the two of them tried to persuade him, now with tears, now with shouting and reproach, but he was not persuaded; rather he insisted on going, and before long he left them and traveled to Brazil, with no pity for her loneliness and her old age. The father died a little after that. A deep despair seized the woman, and she would almost have died of grief had she not found some consolation in her daughter Asma, who comes to her every Sunday with her children and spends an hour of time with her.

But Umm Jamil has another consolation, which she finds in the money she has gathered from what she saves of the garden's yield and what she has stinted herself these five years past. And after perplexity and reflection her resolve was fixed: to buy with that money a large Persian carpet, to cover with it the greater part of the hall in her house. She had seen such a carpet at her neighbor Anisa's, and from that moment the scorpions of jealousy stung her, and she determined to buy from Beirut a carpet of the same size and adorn the house with it.

And were she asked why she wants the carpet, she would be at a loss for an answer — she wants it to boast of it before people, and so that her son Jamil may inherit it when he returns from America. As for her daughter Asma, she never entered her mind. Had her daughter known of this resolve of hers, she would have charged her with madness and cried in her face, saying: What need have you of a Persian carpet? Is Emir Bashir coming to visit you? You need a set of false teeth — spend what you have on making the denture, or on replacing the wood of the stairs you go down by to the garden. Her daughter would say this and more, and no doubt she would be right in what she said. For Umm Jamil needs necessary things before the buying of the carpet — she needs a denture, and a new wooden stair in place of the broken-down stair beside the garden. And she needs a coat for winter, and a new head-veil, and shoes, and many other things.

And yet she puts all her needs out of mind to save up the price of the carpet. A few months ago, as she was going down the wooden stairs, one of the steps broke under her, and she fell and broke her arm and suffered from the fracture a long while; and even so she did nothing but patch the broken step, for she would not spend anything of what she had put by as the price of the carpet.

The Great Feast drew near, and Umm Jamil finished cleaning the house: she wiped the dust from the walls with a palm frond, washed the floors and the thresholds, and cleaned the pieces of furniture until everything about her was clean and shining, gladdening the eyes. And in the evening she counted the money in her bundle, and behold, it came to about eight hundred liras — that is, more than the price required.

And no sooner had the morning of the feast come than she surprised her visitors with a large Persian carpet she had spread

in the hall of the house; and when they asked her where she had come by this carpet, she answered that her son had sent her a sum of money so that she might buy it from Beirut.

For a time Umm Jamil remained taken with the beauty of the carpet. She cleaned it every morning with a special brush and sat long hours contemplating its patterns and its colors, and she feared to tread on it with her feet; and when her daughter's children came to visit her she kept them from entering the hall and made them come into the garden by the back door, lest they romp beside the carpet or touch it with their feet. And she wrote to her son telling him of the purchase of the large Persian carpet, and wishing he would soon come back to the homeland, that she might show it to him and pass with him what remained of her life.

His answer reached her a little later. He told her that he was ill and that he wished to return to the homeland; but he was penniless, and he asked her to send him money so that he could return.

Umm Jamil wept the night the letter arrived, and shed tears she had not shed since her husband's death. She must send her son the sum he asked. That is, she must sell the carpet on whose price she had spent so many years of gathering, denying herself necessary things in order to buy it. But children are not to be weighed against livelihood or money. Her son must come back, whatever it cost her. She would live with him content with a bare sufficiency, and his companionship would make up to her for every loss.

Early in the morning she went to Beirut by the bus and sold the carpet, and other precious vessels besides, of what she had stored in her house; and there gathered in her hands about a thousand liras, which she sent to her son, and she stayed waiting for his answer.

And she waited long before the answer came. In it: that her son had recovered and his financial circumstances had improved; and that he intended to marry a Brazilian girl, and did not know when he could come back to the homeland.

Was the son truthful in his claims, or was he a liar, deceiving his mother and trading on her tenderness? We do not know what passed through the mother's head; but from that time on her circumstances changed and her plan of living altered. She saved from the garden's yield enough to have a denture made and to buy a coat to shield her from the winter cold. And she spent the rest on making a new wooden stair for the garden and on buying shoes and a kerchief. She put the matter of the carpet out of mind, and gave up standing every day beside the window waiting for the mail carrier to pass.