Al-Hajja Hanifa (A Story)

Few are those who give and do not take (1)

She died hungry, so as not to carry on her shoulders a hundred favors, nor to be the creature of anyone's kindness or charity.

She was proud and disdainful, and she was generous and hospitable, even in the hours of her ordeal. She showed tenderness to the wretched, and gave — though the spring of her provisions had run dry — of what kept her last breath in her, and did kindness with what held her to life.

She took charge of a wretched old man in her earlier days, and she died leaving a small orphan, bound to her by no kinship or lineage. She had cared for him and spent on him in her last days.

She was pious, poor of hand, rich of heart, proud within herself, lowly in her station.

I knew her when I was a child, entering certain houses to serve in them and receiving as her wage a few counted dirhams, which she accepted with thanks and blessings. She was then at the height of her strength and her youth.

She refused to share her employers' food, however much they insisted and pressed their insistence. She always found excuses to offer so as to escape their invitations with pride, preferring the hardness of her own living to the delicious food in the hands of those people. They all admired her greatness of soul, revered her, and took care not to wound her.

She always covered her head with a sheer white veil, and wore simple, light clothing even in the coldest, most biting days of winter.

I do not recall ever once seeing her adorn herself as women adorn themselves. It was as though she found in that a pettiness she disdained and scorned. Except when she came back from the pilgrimage, when she would put on the robe of honor that my mother would get for her. She would wear it for a few days, then go back to her light clothes, as she went back to her work and her perpetual motion.

(1) From her collection of stories, "With Life." See Recently Published Books.

When I first knew her she was married to a peddler who sold safuf or lafitiyya. He carried his sweets on his head on a wide tray of tinned copper, and held in his hand a small, high table on three legs, on which he would set the tray whenever a buyer drew near, or whenever he tired of his rounds and wanted to stop and rest at the bend of an alley or a turning of the road. But she bore him no child, so he divorced her.

The houses she entered were only those of certain families she loved, and perhaps in the end she confined herself to my family, for the love she harbored for my mother and my brothers and sisters.

The sellers of green chickpeas — in their seasons — would send her enormous loads of them. She would put them in a corner of the courtyard of her dwelling, then begin to tie them into small bundles, binding them with special fibers, until these bundles piled up before her; then the sellers would come and carry them off in special sacks to roast them in the ovens and then sell them, borne on their heads, ranged in order on trays of wood or straw. They would go about the streets crying:

— Umm qlaybani khadra!

announcing thereby their delicious wares, which grown-ups love as children love them.

And Hajja Hanifa had other work besides this. Some would send her bales of Aleppo pistachios. She would soak the pistachios in great cauldrons of water, then pound them in the mortar to strip off their dry red skin, then clean them of it and spread them on the roof of our house until they dried. Then she would gather them and split them open, nut by nut, with the pistachio cracker, with a strange deftness. Then she would put them in big sacks for their owners to carry away for salting, roasting, and sale.

And the pistachio sellers would not send this precious nut of theirs except to careful, trustworthy, honorable hands. And God knows that for all the times I stood watching the Hajja at this work of hers — I was a small child — I never once saw her taste a single nut, for all that lay piled before her.

And had she wanted to hide away a portion of it, no one could have known; for the shells carry off quantities of its weight that can be neither fixed nor estimated.

The means for this work of hers were not then at hand. She had to carry a jar on her hip to fetch water from a well in a garden some little way from her house. So she went and came, gathering the water she needed for her work in a great earthen vessel set up in the courtyard of the house in one of whose rooms she lived.

Then she had to carry these pistachios — swollen with water and grown heavy — up to the roof on the second floor. Up she went and down again, making light of winter's cold and summer's heat, scoffing at fatigue like a wheel turning, or a machine in motion.

She would wake in the gray of dawn and not rest until a late hour of the night, keeping vigil beside her lantern, passing from one task to another.

She married a second time — a seaman, dark of skin and huge of frame, who often kept to the house when he found no work.

Then he died after a few years. And the Hajja remained alone, living in a room fronted by a narrow porch, with a shared kitchen which she used together with the other dwellers in the rooms adjoining hers.

These rooms all opened their doors onto a spacious inner court, with wide, high windows on the northern side that lit it and made it cheerful. And it had a large door onto a small open yard belonging to the Hajja's room.

She never followed her husband to where he lived. The first, then the second — each came in his turn and lived with her in that side room which she loved and would not leave, or move far from, all her life.

And it would please you to sit in that room, or before it on that small porch, for the cleanliness of them both; and it was sweet to drink coffee at her place after she had seated you on two small, clean cushions and set a comfortable bolster behind you.

In one corner of that spacious court there was a wooden plank laid across two wooden trestles, over which was spread a ragged mattress, and on it slept an elderly man called: Khalilo.

Who is this Khalilo? Where did he come from? What is his origin?

No one can answer with any certainty.

Only, everyone pitied Khalilo's condition.

He was an old man, hunchbacked, bearded, wearing threadbare, worn-out clothes, and on his head a tar-blackened skullcap whose color had faded.

He spoke as a child speaks in its earliest years, and he could make you understand what he wanted only with the greatest difficulty. But at times he had strange looks, as though a deep well of secrets and riddles — nay, of understanding and intelligence too — reflected its meanings in those looks. Yet most of the time he looked at you as if his mind were lost, or as if he were a simple child.

Some said he had been struck by an incurable illness, after a great calamity that befell him, and rose from that illness having lost his memory, knowing nothing of his own affairs; and that he walked on unknowing until he reached Beirut and settled there.

Some said he was from Sidon, and that he went to sleep after a great grief and rose in the morning in this state.

And others said he was from one of the far mountain villages, that he had a wife and children, that he had been comfortable and moneyed, and that he left his children and his money for a reason not far removed from his wife.

And they said... and they said... and nothing of all they said could anyone easily confirm.

For he could not speak. And very often, when they pressed him hard with questions, his face would darken, his eyes would bulge, foam would rise at the corners of his mouth, and he would utter sounds that sometimes frightened his questioner and more often filled him with dismay; so they would leave him, pitying him and grieving for him — above all when the Hajja came at them in anger, scolding them and shouting:

— You have no fear of God!

There is no doubt that this man was not created in this state; rather, events had toyed with him until he became a wanderer in the deep waters of life, drowned in its darkness, lost on its roads.

And yet you found him loving, loyal, truthful, trustworthy. He played with the children tenderly and served the neighbors faithfully, fetching them from the market the makings of their meals, meat and vegetables. But whoever wanted to send him to buy something had to write what he wanted on a slip of paper; he would take it to the seller, and the seller would read it and give him what was wanted.

And often the children of the alleys would follow him, chanting sing-song phrases at him.

As for him, he loved the little ones and did them no harm. And they likewise loved him and did him no harm. I never once saw him laugh except with a child; but I often saw him motionless, sitting on the edge of his bed, his eyes fixed on the far unknown.

And many times I wondered: was he weeping, as he wiped his eyes and his nose with his palm?

And Hajja Hanifa went on scolding anyone who offered him harm. She was tender with him and gentle: she washed his clothes and his bed-cover; she warmed water for him and urged him to bathe from time to time; she pressed him, sometimes, to eat of her food; and she brought him everything he asked of her without complaint.

Until one night passed, and Khalilo slept and did not rise. He slept that deep sleep, and a thick curtain fell upon a moving story whose beginning was never known.

And people asked: were his mother and his wife and his sons somewhere, weeping for the poor, stricken outcast? All of them pitied him. But the Hajja wept for him and mourned him as if she were his mother, though he was years older than she.

And she kept recalling incidents of his that had astonished her, and that proved to her the goodness of his stock, and confirmed that he had been a gentleman, honored and used to comfort.

★

Time passed, after which we left our dwelling for another. So Hajja Hanifa was far from us. How my parents pressed her to move to where we lived! She refused; but she went on visiting us, and often I heard my mother urge her to stay with us. But she would refuse, giving thanks and calling down blessings on us.

As though in her room there were a treasure she stood guard over and could not leave for a single night. Or as though that room were a sanctuary to which hidden, sacred bonds held her fast.

And years passed, after which we rarely saw her. She had grown old, and her condition had worsened. She no longer had work.

She had taken to selling lupine seeds at a corner of the road, preparing them herself and selling them to the children of the alleys.

Until one day my husband came and said:

— A resolute lady came to the school today with a child she wants to enter in the school so that he may learn. She asked me about you, and said that the boy is an orphan; his mother died when he was a few months old, and his father is a breadwinner with little work, little livelihood, and many mouths to feed; and that it is she who cares for this child and spends on him. So I entered him in the school free of charge. And I marvel at an old woman, in straitened circumstances, taking charge of an orphan, when she herself has more claim to care.

— Did you learn the name of this lady who knows me?

— Hajja...

— Hajja Hanifa?

— Yes. How did you know?

After that the Hajja began to visit me from time to time, bringing with her flowers and thin flat bread. That was to return kindness for kindness.

God, how self-denying that soul was! When she came to me with her gift I was at a loss what to do: she is poor, and I must not take from her what, by taking it, would deprive her of her sustenance.

And this proud soul — I must not wound its pride by refusing its gift.

And how sweet she was, hiding away what was offered to her, to give it to the little orphan.

And time passed, and then her ward knocked at the door of the house, saying — in a state to be pitied:

— I am the Hajja's son.

— And where is the Hajja?

— She died.

— And when did she die?

— A month ago.

God have mercy on you! As you had mercy on a strange, wretched old man, and took charge of a deprived orphan child, and gave them both what you refused yourself and denied your own self. Nay, you gave them of that very soul, and of that very self.