The Haj - Leon Uris [4]
After many, many nights, when my father’s initial passion for Ramiza had been spent, he invited my mother to return to his bed. But something had left my mother. She was cold to him and he could no longer arouse her. This infuriated him. In anger, he virtually cast her out of the house.
The Village of Tabah was a two-hour donkey ride to the town of Ramle and a three-hour ride to Lydda. Each town had two market days a week and the family owned a stall in the marketplace. Until my father took his new wife, my second brother, Omar, tended the stalls. Now Hagar, my mother, was ordered to Ramle and Lydda four days a week to sell our surplus produce. She started out after the morning prayer at sunrise and returned very late in the evening after dark.
Hagar was one of the two best dayas, or midwives, in the village. She was greatly respected as a keeper of the formulas of herbs and medicines. These days when she went to the village water well or the communal ovens, there was snickering behind her back and cruel insults in passing.
As in any society where women are the chattel of men, they seek the path of revenge through their sons, and my mother selected me. Four days a week I rode on the donkey cart with her to Ramle and Lydda.
It was in the stall at the Lydda bazaar that I first saw someone use an abacus, a wooden frame holding sliding beads for adding and subtracting. The man was a leather merchant, a maker and mender of harnesses, and he allowed me to enter and play in his booth. We became friends and together we fashioned an abacus like his by using prayer beads. Before I was nine I could count to infinity and became faster than the merchant in addition and subtraction.
‘Learn to count,’ my mother had been saying repeatedly.
At first I didn’t realize what she meant, but she pressed me to learn to read and write as well. The leather merchant was semiliterate and helped me greatly, but soon I surpassed him again. After a time I could read all the labels on all the crates in the entire bazaar. Then I began to learn words in the newspapers we used for wrappers.
When I was free to play at home, Hagar ordered me to count all the houses in Tabah, all the orchards, and learn who farmed each field. After that she dropped me off in the outlying villages where my father collected rents and she told me to count their houses and fields as well. A family could own or sharecrop as many as ten to fifteen separate plots scattered from one end of the village’s land to the other. With continued intermarriages, dowries of land to new brides, older people dying off, and dividing the land among many sons, it was extremely difficult to have an accurate record of who farmed what. Since most of the land was sharecropped, the farmers always tried to work an extra plot that was not accounted for or in other ways tried to cheat on their rent and taxes.
My father was barely literate himself and unable to contend with all the official documents, with their adornments of stamps and seals that spelled out boundaries, water rights, inheritances, and taxes. Uncle Farouk, who was partners with my father in the village store, the khan, and the coffeehouse, was far better able to cope with the mysteries of the documents. Farouk was also the village imam, the priest, and keeper of the official records for my father. My father didn’t fully trust him and so he sent my oldest brother, Kamal, to school in Ramle as a precaution.
When my father collected the rents, he turned them over to the great landholder Fawzi Effendi Kabir, who lived in Damascus and who visited the Palestine district once a year to collect.
My mother had always suspected that Kamal and Uncle Farouk were working together to cheat my father, who got a percentage of the Effendi’s rents as his agent.
When I had