A Girl Made of Dust

‘She was an angel,’ said Teta. ‘Haven't I told you how it's because of her that I can read? “Why should my sons go to the school and not my daughter?” she used to say. “Aren't I a daughter?” And so my brothers and I took turns to tend the goats and go to school.’

Teta didn't look like her mother. There was still a lot of black in her hair, she was strong with large hips, and her face was neither soft nor beautiful, just round and wrinkled and wonderful.

As I watched her smiling reflection in the mirror folding and stacking, I fingered the glass eye in my pocket. It was hard and dense, and I hadn't told anybody about it.

‘Naji will have come back. I'm going to see.’ When early afternoon had changed into late afternoon and the shops were reopening, Mami had gone with Naji to buy food and house-things. Only Papi was at home.

Teta's heavy hands shook out a towel. ‘Yes. Go and find your brother.’

My shoes squeaked down the tiled floor of the corridor. Light came in through the doors leading onto the large balcony, but the middle of the flat was as quiet and dim as if it was under water. The bulb above the sink in the corridor was switched on, and in the shadows, the sewing-machine with ‘Singer’ on it was crouched like a black bear. I put up my nose as I passed the bunch of dried lavender that hung from a nail in the wall: it smelt of sleep and open spaces.

Above the wooden double doors, a huge embroidered picture of Christ's head bled and shone out great beams of light, the eyes staring up at the top of the frame so that the whites showed. In the dining room there was another picture of him, only in that one he was eating with a lot of other men. Teta said it was his last supper, but wouldn't say what the food was or where the women who'd prepared it had gone.

The door shivered shut and I headed up the stairs into the white sunshine.

The August sun shone like Jesus, and across the road, large black flies worried the thin dogs and cats that stepped among the rubbish or leapt onto the garbage drums. At midday, sweating shopkeepers pulled down their shutters, went home to have lunch and rest, and the afternoon slump set in. People and plants wilted together; only the pine trees remained upright like soldiers in the heat. Dust rose and settled whenever a car chugged slowly uphill, cats and young women yawned, and the town waited for the shadows to grow long.

I didn't want to be alone in the house with Papi, so I stayed on the veranda that ran three-quarters of the way round the building. Sliding down to the floor, I sat with my back to the wall.

Mami always said that time passed quickly, and maybe it did in other places – in Beirut or on the beach or in the Roman temples at Baalbek that were in our history books at school, or at the top of the snowiest mountain – but here in Ein Douwra, it went slowly. The Rose Man came down the stairs onto the far end of the veranda, smiled at his roses as he walked past them, and carried on up the hill, easing himself from foot to foot, lifting and settling his stick, stopping at every fifth or sixth step to rest and look around. He was slow, and time moved even slower than he did. It had taken for ever to get to 1981, and would take for ever again to reach my eighth birthday.

Finally there was a crunch of gravel and Mami appeared, sweating and red-faced, weighed down with bags of shopping. Naji came behind, carrying two more and stamping his feet in time to a song he was chanting. He followed Mami into the house, and a minute later came back out again. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked, looking at my cuts.

I turned first one way and then the other to show Naji the best ones.

‘What happened?’

‘I fell down that ledge in the forest, the steep one.’ I pointed the short distance down the slope to where the trees were singing, their chirps stitched together in an endless row. The forest was the best place to be, with its green pine needles and grasses, its brown trunks and rock, its bright coloured flowers, gleaming insects, thorn bushes, and the dry red earth of its narrow paths. ‘The skin tore as I slid down. There are still bits of grit in, see?’ I poked at the black specks on my knee.

Naji's eyebrows rose as if he didn't believe me.

‘I did! I tried to get hold of some roots but I couldn't.’

‘What was at the bottom, if you fell?’

‘There were all sorts of things – twigs and a rusty can and pine cones.’ My fingers still smelt of the young cones that had been all hard and green with a silver diamond on each scale. ‘And then I found …’

His eyes lit up. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. When I got back and you and Mami weren't here, I went to Teta's, and she touched me all over to check that every bit of me was still there. It tickled! And there was blood on my shirt from the cut on my shoulder. It looked like a flower – it got bigger…like a rose! – and then Teta put spirit on my scratches, which hurt even more than falling over.’

But Naji was two years older than me and wasn't interested in such things. He went inside. When he came back he was carrying a Matchbox car, his bag of marbles and the blue tin box that lived on the top shelf of his bookcase where I couldn't reach. He kept his most precious things in it.

‘Teta said it was the Virgin who stopped me dying when I fell.’

He stroked the little white sports car. ‘It's a Lamborghini. Look.’ He flicked the doors so they opened upwards, then closed them again.

‘Do you think it's true, Naji?’

He ran the car quickly across one palm so the wheels whizzed. ‘No. The Virgin Mary's not here at all. Didn't you hear how they saw her in a building site in Beirut?’

‘Who saw her?’

‘Just people. Gabriel's mother told us. She said miracles were happening just twenty kilometres down the road from here in Beirut.’

‘But Teta doesn't lie.’

He shrugged.

A rumble of shelling was coming from somewhere as Naji emptied his pockets to see if there was anything precious to add to the box. There was a long piece of string with knots tied in it, his old penknife, a little block of wood with a hole bored through it, a round of caps and some more marbles.

‘I've got a marble too,’ I said.

Naji's black eyebrows lowered. ‘Where is it? When did you get it?’

‘Today. I found it.’ It was still in my pocket, warm from being against me all afternoon. ‘Here!’ I plopped it into his hand.

He gasped. The glass eye jumped up and down twice in his palm, and I sat on my heels and laughed.

‘Where did you get it?’

I told him how I'd found it in the forest, and he turned the eye over, examining it closely. It looked funny lying in his hand without a body round it, and I thought about people being made up of separate parts – ears and fingers, hair and belly-buttons.

‘Do you think it's hers?’

He glanced up. ‘Whose?’

‘Hers!’

He peered more closely, as if it might have her name on it. ‘The witch?’

I nodded.

‘Probably.’

Ever since we were old enough to think, we'd known she'd put a spell on Papi to make him the way he was.

‘I know!’ I cried. ‘It's the evil eye!’

Naji looked doubtful. ‘Maybe.’

‘She's probably got more than one so she can swap them round depending who she wants to put the evil eye on. Big eyes for big curses and little ones for smaller curses – a drawer full, all rolling about when she opens it!’

Naji sighed, which meant he didn't think I knew anything. ‘There's only one evil eye,’ he said, ‘but if it is hers she can't put a curse on us because we've got it.’ His face lit up. ‘Like a miracle. Miracles are always happening.’

‘What other miracles happen?’

He put the glass eye to his, maybe to find out if he could see with it. ‘Mar Sharbel.’