Qissat Read Online Free PDF Page B

alone. She takes off her wide trousers and bundles her dress into her knickers. She smiles, seeing herself with a triangular stomach and distended bottom like her cousin. Her cousin is pregnant, and her stomach tapers to a point. Nuwwar feels her own stomach, but it’s soft. A cottonwool stomach, not hard and protruding like her cousin’s. With her foot she pokes the bundle of underpants lying in a corner of the room, and keeps prodding at them until they reach the middle of the room, then kicks them hard so that the neat bundle bursts apart like a split football. She feels foolish. That’s a silly way to behave, she thinks. She picks them up again, this time sorting them into pairs, then puts them into the plastic washbowl. She sits on the floor, spreading her legs wide, and turns on the tap fixed low down on the wall, putting the washbowl underneath it and holding it between her legs, her thighs pressing tight against it. Her mother always tells her to be economical with the washing powder. Why should she be? For whose benefit? Who’s going to count how many packets of Surf she uses? She could swallow a whole packet with no questions asked. Her father buys it for only eight
piastres
a packet, that is four and a
half piastres
less than it costs in the shops, because he gets it from a friend of his in the army. Everything in the army is cheap. For more than three years now they’ve bought most of their provisions from the army: chickpeas, beans, tins of tomatoes, whole lentils, split lentils, pasta, sesame pastries, perfumed soap, tins of sardines, matches, army biscuits (even though they taste disgusting).
    ‘Oh, the naughty boy! It’s useless.’
    Nuwwar rubs at the dried shit on the small underpants. He’ll never learn to clean himself. He doesn’t even want to learn! She scrubs the pants. The white foam gradually billows upwards, rising above the surface of the water and overflowing onto her thighs. Transparent, purple-looking hemispheres rise up like dough and fall away again almost at once, to slither down either side of her thighs in a thin trickle of water which comes to a halt at the edge of her underpants, or maybe sneaks beneath them and goes inside. Her eyelids droop: a flash of coolness, then a prolonged sensation of warmth, and at last the shit breaks up.
    Her father’s pants are large. Their elastic is loose, and the opening at the front enormous. She puts her hand in it. Should it be that big? She scrubs. Underpants. Three. Four. Five. Six. Nine. All with big openings. Her own pants don’t come clean easily. The milky mucus remains stuck on them for a while, until soap and water and scrubbing finally shift it. They reach her waist, covering her navel. Umm Shihab buys frilly ones embroidered with little hearts for her newly wed daughter, hardly big enough to cover a clenched fist.
    Her mother’s shrill voice urges her on again: her father’s on his way. Nuwwar hurriedly wrings out the pants and hangs them on a small washing-line. The smell of garlic being fried with basil reaches her from below. Her heart races. In half an hour’s time Ibrahim will walk past on his way back home from the building site to have a bite to eat and a couple of hours’ rest before returning to his work once more. The lad’s a hard worker and – a man! The thread begins from far away. Nuwwar feels it taking shape. It grows longer, but comes from far away, very far. Her mother calls her: ‘The jug, Nuwwar! Your father’s home!’
    She’s got half an hour then. Nuwwar rapidly empties out the washing water onto the cement floor of the roof terrace. She descends the steps, carrying the washbowl. Minutes pass. She goes to the bathroom. She holds the jug under the tap and waits. The tap is choked and the water comes out haltingly, and Nuwwar waits. And the minutes pass.
    The jug is filled. Nuwwar squats at her father’s feet.
    ‘God give you strength, Dad.’
    ‘And you, Nuwwar.’
    She turns up his trousers and places