The Haj - Leon Uris [60]
My Village of Tabah, like most Arab villages, was built on the highest ground for defensive purposes from Bedouin raids or attacks from enemy tribes.
My earliest memories of Tabah were its smells. As I walked barefoot in the dirt street, there was an ever-shifting current of aromas, of the sharp food spices, of cardamom in the coffee from the café, of incense at night.
Mostly I remembered the smells of dung. Any child of three can tell the difference between the dung of donkeys, horses, cows, goats, sheep, and dogs, all of which littered the streets, paths, and fields and only disappeared during the winter rains. Then the streets were always muddy.
Dung was very important for us. We not only used it to fertilize our fields, but Hagar and the village women, made large brown flat cakes of it and dried it on our roofs. It was the principal source of heat for cooking and warming our houses. Wood was scarce and gathering it was a long and tedious chore, left mainly for older women who had no families to take care of.
Every year in the springtime after the houses had dried out from the winter rains, a new layer of mud and whitewash was applied to the cottages to replace wear and mend cracks. The mud was mixed with dung to give it firmness. Extra dung was traded to the Bedouin, who did not have wood or enough of their own dung for their needs. My father and a few others in the village were wealthy enough to burn kerosene, but this was a very luxurious item.
Every house in Tabah was built along the same lines: square with flat roofs for collecting water in the rainy season and for drying out crops in the warm weather. Mr. Salmi told me it was the same look that the villages had thousands of years ago. The houses of the poor, which was most of the village, were made of mud brick, and after the annual whitewash a light blue color was used to outline windows and doors. This was to ward off the evil spirits.
The houses were very close together, for defensive purposes. There were five clans from the Wahhabi tribe in Tabah and each clan had its own section of the village and each also had a separate part of the graveyard where the men were buried. Women were buried separately.
My father and Uncle Farouk had stone houses, as did the clan heads and certain other prominent villagers like the carpenter, the potter, the sandal maker, the basket weaver, and the cloth weaver.
There was one other stone house in Tabah, which was most unusual because it was built and owned by a widow. Her name was Rahaab and she was the village seamstress. In all Arab villages everyone is expected to marry and have children. Childless couples were looked upon as tragedies. Widows were taken care of by the sons, usually the oldest, who inherited their father’s land leases and debts. Every village had some kind of widow like Rahaab who had no one to look after her, and there were always a few unmarriageables—cripples, idiots, and blind ones—and if they had no family the clan was responsible for them.
Rahaab was old and fat and toothless, but she owned a handpowered sewing machine that had come all the way from England with the name ‘Frister & Rossmann’ on it. The village women were jealous and afraid of Rahaab. It was not only that she made a good living, for her machine was going all the time, but it was rumored that she fornicated a lot. The Koran is very strict about the punishments for fornication, and those who do it are apt to go to the fire on the Day of Resurrection. My father turned a blind eye to Rahaab’s fornication because she only did it with widowers and unmarriageables.
As ugly as Rahaab was, there were