A Girl Made of Dust

We went ahead of Mami and Teta. Outside, dust lay over everything. Cars passed, their engines noisy, their tyres sticking to the hot tarmac and squeaking round corners. Across the road from the church, a man was carrying crates of fruit and vegetables out of a dark store and setting them down in front: huge red apples and tomatoes, bananas, apricots, flashing pink pomegranates, hills of okra, beans and lettuce, while inside big bags of round flatbreads hung from hooks that shone as they caught the light.

‘Papi used to come to church,’ said Naji.

‘When?’ I asked, fingering the glass eye in my pocket; I'd decided always to carry it for protection.

‘Before. But everything was different then. Remember Jamila who used to cook for us?’

‘A little. She was soft and hot when she carried me, and her neck always smelt of parsley … and tiny balls of water popped out along her head where her hair started.’ I saw again the long cloth wrapped round Jamila's head and the long, thin black plait snaking down her back. ‘Did she make nice things?’

‘Nicer than Mami's food,’ he whispered, ‘and she played with us.’

‘Why did she go?’

‘Because of Papi. It was when he stopped working and we didn't have enough money. When she had to leave she cried, and kissed us so hard it hurt.’ He made smacking noises with his lips. ‘That's when Mami first started cooking.’

‘I remember.’ After Jamila left the house, Mami had stood alone in the middle of the kitchen squeezing her hands. It was around the time that she'd stopped going out so much. That was when the curse had begun. ‘The witch is still setting curses,’ I said. ‘The last time she went into the nut shop, they had a whole batch of bad ones. Ali said he'd never seen it happen that way before.’

‘Let's go and ask him,’ decided Naji, and we crossed the road and walked along it. My fingers touched everything on the way: rough leaves covered with the smallest white hairs, flowers that grew out of cracks in a wall, the ledge of the local shrine, the hot dusty bonnet of a car, a rough stone wall and, finally, the cool sharpness of peeling paint on metal railings.

The shutters of Papi's shop were closed, and inside everything would be in the dark – the pots and frying-pans, glasses and knives, step-ladders and cloths, plates and smiling porcelain statues, some of which had been standing in the same place for years.

As we went past, Naji gave the metal shutters an angry kick, but he brightened as we stopped in front of the nut shop. ‘If only Ali owned it,’ he said. ‘he'd always give us things.’

The brilliant colours of sweets, chocolates and drinks made it the prettiest place in town. Naji sniffed the smell of hot nuts that drifted out before he called up to Ali. A moment later Ali appeared behind a metal grille above the door in his white cotton vest, looking out as if it was the first time he'd ever seen the world.

‘It must be so hot up there,’ I called. ‘You're soaked in sweat!’

He waved. His round face was gleaming, the left eye pointing slightly outwards, the wide mouth a solid, straight line. ‘There's no one but me to roast the nuts. It's hot for them and it's hot for me: they're roasted and I'm roasted!’ He laughed at his joke and repeated it to himself.

‘Isn't it true about the nuts, Ali?’ I shaded my eyes. ‘Isn't it true the nuts got spoilt when the witch came in?’

Ali nodded, eyes widening in fear. His hands were caked with salt, his face red from the heat of the fire. ‘Couldn't sell them. A whole batch.’ He shook his head sadly.

‘How did she spoil them?’

‘He wouldn't know that,’ said Naji. ‘I don't know what he thinks about, but not about such things.’

‘Ali,’ I called, ‘what do you think about up there?’

Ali smiled. ‘Up here I can see everything so I think about everything.’ He vanished, then reappeared and threw down some sugared almonds for us to catch. Two purple ones came my way: he knew I liked the purple ones best.

We stood beside the church, gazing down at the terraces of olive and almond trees. Naji said the Phoenicians made them, but when I asked who they were, he wasn't sure. Below and further away, Beirut lay spread out along the coast like grey and white Lego, the sea glinting beside it.

A queue of traffic formed. A driver had stopped to speak to someone in the road. There was more hooting, and things shouted about one man's sister and another's mother.

Mami and Teta had finally made it up the hill. Teta, in her best black, was huffing to catch her breath. ‘It's proof to God that I'm devoted, an old woman like me climbing all this way,’ she muttered as she went slowly up the church steps.

It was warm and dim inside. The stone floors were lined with wooden pews in the main part of the church, while chairs were set out in rows down the left and right sides. The tall stained-glass saints looked hot and red-faced in the brilliant light that shone through them and fell on the congregation, making pale outfits glow pink and blue like cartoons. The pews were filled with stiff suits and gold jewellery, the air thick with cologne.

We sat near the aisle, Teta and Naji in front of me and Mami. Beside me was a fat lady with a clinky bracelet and a man with a fleshy roll of neck.

‘Sit quietly,’ whispered Mami to Naji, who was humming and knocking his heel against the pew.

A priest in black robes and a puffed-up hat stood at the pulpit. Like all priests, he had a long beard he chanted through. Then it was our turn and the grown-ups chanted back to him.

Naji glanced back and rolled his eyes, but I was trying to guess when Mami would bow her head, and when the priest would turn round to speak to the altar and the big gold cross again instead of to us. He spoke a foreign language a lot of the time, maybe so God could understand, only I didn't think God would be interested if He'd heard the same thing every Sunday for a hundred years.

The lilies and carnations near the altar were wilting, and the pages of the Bible belonging to the lady next to me stuck sweatily together. Up on the right, a stained-glass saint looked like Uncle Wadih, except that Uncle didn't wear a long cloak. Or blush.

It seemed Mami and Teta had plenty to pray for. They knelt on the cushions with their eyes closed and their lips moving while the priest walked about swinging incense in a container he held by gold chains.

I heard Teta begging God and Jesus to keep a long list of our relatives safe and to bless the souls of her husband and mother. Most of all, though, she wanted ‘the children and my sons and daughter-in-law to be happy’. I didn't think God had much work to do with Uncle Wadih, though, because he was always happy.

Mami was praying too. ‘Give him back to us. Oh, Allah, please make Nabeel come back to us.’

I prayed too: that the curse on Papi would be lifted, that Uncle would come in time for my birthday, and that I would never have to wear grandmother pants like Teta's.

Outside again, I could almost hear the sun beating down. The men took off their jackets and stood in groups smoking and talking while the women crossed the road to the nut shop to buy boxes of chocolate for Sunday visitors. One gave money to the man in the wheelchair who was always waiting near the steps after church. He had a pair of tattered boots at the ends of his shrivelled legs, and crutches laid across his knees.

‘How did the priest swing that incense so high without any falling out? It was over his head.’

‘He does that so that God can hear our prayers,’ said Teta. ‘So they go up to heaven with the smoke.’

They went on ahead.

‘The Rose Man says it's no use,’ I told Naji, ‘that we're like plants – we're here and then we're not. Why do people go to church anyway?’

‘I don't know. Perhaps they want something from God. That's when most people go and pray. The rest of the time they don't care much about it.’

The leaves hung loose on the trees, and white morning glories spilt down a wall.

‘What does Mami want, then?’ I thought of her hardened, dried-up fig heart.

‘To be rich, probably. That's what everyone wants.’

But I hadn't heard her pray about that. ‘Doesn't God get annoyed because people only go there for Him to fix things that are wrong, the same way they go to a doctor when they're ill?’

He left a wavy finger line along the side of a dusty car. ‘Well, He'd be annoyed if you bothered Him when everything was fine, wouldn't He?’

‘Taste this.’ Mami held something in either hand between thumb and fingertip for each of us to taste. It looked like a piece of stuffed meatball, or it might have been fried cauliflower.

Once it was in my mouth I didn't want to swallow it, but Naji was good at lying about the things that came from Mami's hands.

‘Mm.’ He smiled, then hurried away.

Mami pounded meat using a stick with a wooden block at the end. She hit the thin piece of meat so hard and for so long that the animal must have hurt even though it was dead. A warm sweet smell of frying onions and pine nuts came from the large bent pan, and a soft khrish-khrish-khrish from the wooden board where she was chopping parsley. Her green-specked fingers stopped as she glanced up at the petunias on the window-ledge.

‘Why do flowers die in winter?’ I asked.