The Bghlt el-Kaboor

Photo: Martin Zangerl, Unsplash

The day before setting out to visit his mother, Ahmed summoned his three daughters to the sitting room. “Before we go,” he said, “I want to make one thing absolutely clear. Whatever you’ve heard about your grandmother, whatever you think you’ve heard, it’s rubbish. Do not call her a bghlt el-kaboor.”

Aziza, the eldest daughter, lowered her face in shame. She’d heard the rumors at school and had not challenged them, but knew she should have.

Malika, the middle daughter, returned her father’s gaze as if to say that he should realize they were much too clever to believe whatever they’d heard at school, and if not all three of them, then at least her, Malika.

Hakima, the youngest daughter, kicked her feet restlessly, waiting for an explanation. When none came, she said, “I have a question. Why shouldn’t we call her a bghlt el-kaboor?”

“Because she isn’t one,” said Ahmed. “Meeting adjourned.”  

That was the end of the matter as far as Ahmed was concerned, but that evening, on the rooftop, the subject came up again. The summer heat was withdrawing from the town, leaving redoubts only in the dried mud of the rooftops, and the metal of the water pump, and the cracked and broken asphalt of the road. Along that road, a car came weaving like a drunken millipede, its driver either intoxicated or determined to avoid every pothole. Farther off, a lonesome donkey brayed. The Maghrib prayer would soon be called, but the sun had not yet dipped below the mountains. In its orange and dusty light, the girls were combing one another’s hair. Aziza was combing Malika’s, and Malika was combing Hakima’s, and Hakima wanted them to sit in a circle so that she could comb Aziza’s, but Malika said this was a stupid idea, they would get themselves all tangled up in a knot, and besides, it wouldn’t be a circle, it would be a triangle, and not a very good one. Malika knew about everything under the sun and then some. She’d come into the world intending to know about everything under the sun and leave it at that, but then she’d discovered that her older sister, who was supposed to know even more than she, didn’t know anything, or was too timid to say what she knew, which amounted to the same thing in the end, so she’d gone ahead and added the and then some.

“I have a question,” said Hakima suddenly. “Why isn’t Grandma a bghlt el-kaboor?”

“Because she didn’t do anything wrong while she was mourning Grandpa,” said Malika.

Hakima sat in silence for a while, savoring the tickle of the comb’s teeth in her hair. “I have another question,” she said eventually. “If she were a bghlt el-kaboor, would it be safe for us to visit her?”

“No,” said Malika. “She would forget who we are when she turns. She would trample all over us and smash us with her hooves. But she isn’t a bghlt el-kaboor.”

“I have another question,” said Hakima. “If she tramples us, will our guts explode out of our butts?”

“If she were a bghlt el-kaboor,” Malika said patiently, “and if she did trample us, then yes, our guts would explode out of our butts. But they won’t because she won’t because she isn’t.”

“I have another question,” said Hakima. “If our guts explode out of our butts, can’t we just push them back in with our fingers?” 

Malika let the comb come to a standstill in Hakima’s hair while she considered the question. “Yes,” she said after a pensive silence. “Yes, I believe we could.”

“I have another question,” said Hakima. “I thought Grandma Kamla killed Grandpa Abdullah. So why was she mourning him?”

“She didn’t kill him,” Malika said sharply, yanking the comb through a snarl harder than was necessary. “And Auntie Amina didn’t help her kill him. And she wasn’t in love with the buttermilk man. Those are just things people say.”

“I have another question,” said Hakima, squirming unhappily away from the comb. “Why do people say things?”

“Because they’re mean and bored and spiteful,” said Malika, “and they need nasty things to say.”

“You know,” said Aziza, “if you think about it, we don’t really know what’s true.”

“Don’t let Daddy hear you say that,” said Malika.

“We weren’t there,” said Aziza. “There’s no way for us to know.”

“Grandpa was the kindest husband anyone could have,” said Malika. “Everyone says so. Use your head. Why would she want to kill him?”

“I have another question,” said Hakima. “Who’s the buttermilk man?”

“She didn’t start her business until after he died, right?” said Aziza. “Maybe that was what she wanted all along. Maybe, with him there, she didn’t feel free.”

“The buttermilk man was her neighbor,” said Malika, ignoring Aziza. “He died in a car crash right after they found Grandpa. A week after. They were friends, him and Grandma, but she never would’ve wanted him to be her lover. He used to go to the Sheikh Al-Kamel Festival every year and dance and cut his arms. He had scars all over him. Big, huge, thick, red scars. Like worms.”

“And Auntie Amina,” Aziza went on, although no one was listening, “she wanted to marry that guy, what’s-his-name. The guy Grandpa didn’t approve of.”

“I have another question,” said Hakima. “Why were they like worms?”

“It’s a tragedy,” said Malika, “what happened to Grandma. A tragedy. And then, having her own family turn against her, that’s a double tragedy. Anyone who says she killed him ought to be ashamed. Turn around. Let’s go the other way.”

Without breaking formation, they rotated on their bottoms so that Hakima could comb Malika’s hair, and Malika could comb Aziza’s, and Aziza could stare solemnly toward the horizon, where the sun was sinking, sinking, almost gone.

“Hey,” said Hakima, tugging gently on Malika’s hair, “no one has answered my question. Why were they like worms?”

So Malika began to tell Hakima about the Sheikh Al-Kamel Festival: how thousands of Aissawa traveled to Meknes every year to celebrate the birth of the Prophet just as their founder, Sheikh Kamel, had celebrated; how they came from all over Morocco, all over North Africa; how they’d been doing this for five hundred years; and as she talked, and as Hakima listened, and as the sun sank lower in the sky, Aziza found herself wondering which was more real—the thing that had actually happened, which only a handful of people had witnessed, and some of them were dead; or the thing that everyone said must’ve happened, which burned brighter for longer in many more minds.

What made something real, anyway?

What was the point in challenging a rumor when you couldn’t know what had happened any more than the rumormongers?

Was telling a story over and over enough to make it true?

* * *

The following morning, they set off for Grandma Kamla’s. The road was long and dusty, and it was made longer and dustier, somehow, by the man who got into the taxi with them. He had four fingers on his left hand and a lazy, blood-red eye. He was the oldest man any of the girls had ever seen. His breath smelled of spearmint, but his hands smelled of Fanta and were sticky like Fanta. His clothes smelled of cigarettes.

“The backseat is where you get carsick,” he said to Ahmed as they waited at the taxi stand. “Especially on these mountain roads. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Me, I have a strong stomach. Let me sit back there and spare you.”

Ahmed didn’t want to let the old man share the backseat with his wife and daughters, but because he wore his father’s kindness like a chain around his neck, he found it difficult to fend off his solicitude. “Thank you, Uncle,” he said. “I appreciate that very much, but fortunately, God has given me a strong stomach, too.”

The old man nodded graciously and took the seat beside the driver, but as soon as they pulled over so that the driver could relieve himself, the old man turned around to face Ahmed. “You’re looking pretty pale, you know. Wouldn’t you like to sit up here instead?” 

“No, thank you,” said Ahmed. “I’m feeling fine.”

The old man ducked his head and faced forward again, but fifteen minutes later, when the driver had to relieve himself for a second time, he turned to Ahmed once more. “Really, you’re looking awful. I can’t let you stay back there. Come, take my seat for a while.” 

“I’m all right,” said Ahmed, “really.” But he was no longer sure. Perhaps he was feeling a bit queasy.

“Suit yourself,” said the old man. “But don’t feel embarrassed. I’ve seen bigger, stronger men than you lose their lunches on these mountain roads.”

This scene repeated itself several more times before they reached Grandma Kamla’s, with Ahmed refusing politely each time for the sake of his family’s honor, but growing progressively less and less certain regarding his own stomach. In the backseat, Hakima was overflowing with questions—Why was her father carsick? And who was this old man? And why did he smell like that? And was he also going to see Grandma Kamla? And why did they have to visit Grandma Kamla anyway? They’d never even met her before. And why did the driver keep having to pee?—but she didn’t know how to ask her questions in the presence of the old man, and she sensed that Malika wouldn’t know how to answer them. Only Aziza found the silence natural. She sat between the car door and her mother, whose silence she wore like a chain, gazing out the window at the barbed wire fences and the brittle leaves that scraped and rustled in the breeze, wondering, if she were Grandma Kamla, would she really want to see them?

The old man insisted on helping them with their bags when they arrived, wrestling them out of the trunk one by one while the driver wandered off to relieve himself once more. Before returning to the taxi, he shook Ahmed’s hand and gave his shoulder a brotherly squeeze, leaving both his hand and shoulder smelling stickily of Fanta.

This may have been why Grandma Kamla’s nose was already wrinkled when she opened her door, and why her eyes were small and hard, like olive pits, and why her mouth was tight and thin, like the strips of barbed wire Aziza had seen by the road. She was not a large woman, but she managed to fill the entire doorway, up-and-down and side-to-side, peering suspiciously out at them as if they were government officials and she was obliged.

“I have a question,” Hakima whispered to Malika. “Why is her face like that?”

“Those are tattoos,” Malika whispered back. “Lots of old women have them. It used to be a popular tradition, but it isn’t anymore.”

When Ahmed spoke, introducing his daughters, he sounded as if he were speaking of three strangers who simply happened, by coincidence, to share their names. The guttural noise that rose from Grandma Kamla’s throat was not a name. It was not even a word. Perhaps it was an invitation. She retreated, melting back into cavernous dimness, seeming to draw Ahmed after her, and with him Salma, and the girls, all five of them strung together like beads on a chain.

Every centimeter of the sitting room was occupied by furniture: shelves and display cases, dressers and armoires, chairs and tables and divans. Draped across the furniture were clothes of every shape and size, and where there weren’t clothes, there were hand-painted dishes and old-fashioned dolls. Through this treacherous landscape, Grandma Kamla moved like a mountain goat, stiffly but forcefully, as if her own arthritic joints were enemies whom she was thrashing in a brawl. In seconds, she was back in her chair in the opposite corner, a dress across her knees. “This is a bad time,” she said. “The vendor’s on his way. He’ll be here soon. I’ve got two more to mend.”

“I have another question,” whispered Hakima. “How come she’s able to move so fast when she’s got all those bangles on?”

“She started with just one,” said Malika, “years and years ago, and she added one every year, and the more she added, the stronger she became.”

“Please, Mother,” said Ahmed. “I understand that you don’t want to welcome me and Salma, but for the girls’ sake, let’s put the past behind us. It’s been eleven years.” 

The fabric drifted greenly on the ancient woman’s knees, a raft of leaves. A silver needle flashed like sunlight in her root-brown hands.

“I have one more question,” whispered Hakima. “What’s that thing coming out of her chin?”

“That,” said Malika, sounding a little less sure of herself now, but doing her best for the sake of her reputation, “appears to be some sort of hair.”

“Then what are you standing there for?” Grandma Kamla spoke suddenly, shattering the silence as if dashing a glass on the floor. “Make a pot of tea, why don’t you? Make yourselves at home. The past is behind us. Let’s get on with our lives.” She set the dress aside and reached for another. “I just have one rule: don’t touch anything. Nothing here is a toy.”

“Do you hear that, girls?” said Ahmed. “Don’t touch anything. Remember, we’re guests in your grandmother’s home.”

“Yes, Daddy,” said Malika. “Yes, Grandma Kamla.”

“I have a question,” whispered Hakima. “Does the floor count as anything?” But no one had an answer for her. No one had heard.

* * *

Two words haunted Hakima for the rest of the afternoon: “anything” and “no.” The first was a cluster of syllables in search of a definition. The second was a definition that could cling to almost any word. Did the clothes she was wearing count as anything? No. Then could she touch the ones on the tables and dressers? No. How about the candies in the bowl? No. And the pitcher on the table? No. Then what would they do with dinner? Eat it off the floor? No. But how would they eat? They’d brought no dishes of their own, and Grandma Kamla’s dishes all counted as anything, didn’t they?

Late in the day, the vendor came. The girls watched as their grandmother fanned out the cash and examined the bills, searching for counterfeits, counting and recounting. Her bangles chattered like teeth on her arms. The vendor waited uneasily, shifting his center of gravity, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue. He worried that he might have miscounted, and the way she licked her fingers with her eyes fixed on the bills turned might have into must have. She would ask for something extra. He would hand it over just to hasten his escape from that cavernous room, where the man and the woman and the three little girls were silently watching, not saying a word.

Only after counting three times did she allow him to gather his boxes and go on his way. Then she shuffled into the kitchen.

“Daddy,” said Hakima, “I have a question. What’s she doing with all those potatoes?”

“Your grandmother is a simple woman,” said Ahmed. “She likes only a few simple foods. One of which is French fries. Instead of asking questions, let’s be grateful that she’s going to share her French fries with us.”

“Okay,” said Hakima, “but I have one more question. Do bghlt el-kaboors not like to share?”

Ahmed’s slap sent Hakima tumbling off the divan. The back of her skull nearly shattered the glass door of one of Grandma Kamla’s display cases. Salma and Aziza and Malika stared in astonishment at Ahmed, who looked even more dazed than Hakima, sprawled on her back on the floor. Ahmed never hit his children.

For several long seconds, the only sound was Grandma Kamla’s knife on the potato skins. When she spoke, she seemed to be addressing the potatoes. “There’s no need for that now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ahmed. He looked miserable. Gazing up at her father, Hakima found that she pitied him, even with the big knot blooming on her skull.

“She’s repeating what she’s heard,” said Grandma Kamla. “It’s not her fault that she doesn’t know better. It’s just a shame that she’ll never get any real answers.”

With lowered eyes, Salma began to clear away the tea things. Ahmed hoisted Hakima up and sat her on his knee. Without a word, he ran his fingers through her hair until he found the knot, which he guiltily probed.

“It’s a shame,” Grandma Kamla went on, “that in this day and age, an old village woman like me knows more about the world than her sons.”  

“Of course you know better than us,” said Ahmed. “You’re our elder.”

“Don’t be a sycophant.” Grandma Kamla dropped the cut potatoes into a pot of water. “I said more. Not better. I’ve been all over the country, you know. I’ve got suppliers in Casa, Tetouan, Tangier. I meet people from all over. They’re not all nincompoops and ignoramuses, like the ones around here. No one around here takes mental health seriously. Your father, you know, was a very sick man.”

“I haven’t said anything to disrespect you, Mother,” said Ahmed. “What my daughter said, she didn’t mean. But I want you to know something. I want you to know that I didn’t come all this way to hear you speak ill of the dead. I won’t have it.”

“I’m not speaking ill of the dead,” said Grandma Kamla. “I’m not insulting anyone. You think the truth is an insult? Go on lying to yourself, then. Just keep your lies away from my house.”

“I won’t be accused of lying in front of my children,” said Ahmed. “Not when I’m on your side.”

“It’s taken you eleven years to figure out whose side you’re on,” said Grandma Kamla. “Who knows? Maybe eleven years from now, you’ll change your mind again. In the meantime, I’ve got a question for you. How could a woman—two women, even—hang a grown man?”

It was Ahmed’s turn to lower his eyes.

“I’ve been asking that question for years,” said Grandma Kamla, “and still no one gives me an answer. The problem with this family is that nobody knows how to think. At least the little one is trying.”

“No one here believes you’re a bghlt el-kaboor, Grandma,” Malika cried suddenly. “We all know you’re innocent! We’re on your side!”

Grandma Kamla lit the bottle gas. From the cupboard, she removed a jug of oil. “What you’ve been told,” she said as the oil glugged into a second pot, “is what you believe. Tomorrow, when you’re told something different, you’ll believe something different. The little one is asking questions now, but later, who knows? Me and Amina, we’d better remember that we’re on our own.”

* * *

There were no extra blankets in the house—why would there be, when Grandma Kamla never had any guests?—but there was fabric everywhere. Using dresses that had yet to be sold, Ahmed and Salma made their beds in the sitting room atop the divans. There was barely enough space to walk between the furniture, much less to sleep, so the girls were given a spot on the floor in Grandma Kamla’s room.

This was the room where the deed had been done, according to the stories the girls had heard. Back then, plastic sheeting and hard-packed earth had covered only half the room. Over the other half, there’d been nothing but a lattice of beams, from one of which Grandpa Abdullah had been found swinging.

Now, the only portion of the ceiling that remained uncovered was the skylight. Through a thin sheet of plastic, put there to keep out the flies and the rain, fell the moon’s accusing finger, smearing its whiteness on the wall like the remains of an enormous lightning bug. The progress of that silvery smudge along the wall and toward the corner where their grandma snored commanded the girl’s full attention.

“I have a question,” whispered Hakima. “What do you think is going to happen when it gets to her?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” said Malika. “Nothing.” But she couldn’t take her eyes off the pale disc of moon.

Into Aziza’s mind, a thought had just descended like an angel, wings spread, sword ablaze. She was not in the habit of sharing her thoughts with her sisters, but this time, she feared what would happen if she let this version of the story go untold more than she feared Malika’s mockery. “Here’s something to think about,” she whispered. “If you were a widow, and tired of mourning, and just wanted to get on with your life—for example, if you loved some other man, or if you just didn’t want to observe all the rituals anymore—but also you didn’t want to be punished, wouldn’t you make up a story like the one about the bghlt el-kaboor?”

“I have another question,” whispered Hakima. “Why does she wear all her jewelry to bed?”

“She just doesn’t like to take them off,” whispered Malika.

“Just to make people afraid,” Aziza went on, though the fear, which had been inside her all along, had regained its composure and was facing off against the angel, whose flaming sword was guttering low. “To make them leave her alone. That’s where the whole story came from, I bet. Not just Grandma Kamla’s story. The whole story of the bghlt el-kaboor.”

All at once, silence fell over her, and over Malika and Hakima, too, answering the silence that suddenly roared at the opposite end of the room. The girls’ eyes bulged from their sockets. Their tongues turned to stone in their mouths. For seven unbearable seconds, the silence had hold of them. Then, from the blankets, erupted a snore.

“I have a question,” Hakima whispered. “Are we going to die?”

“Of course not,” snapped Malika. “Even the bghlt el-kaboor knows not to trample her own grandchildren.”

“Okay,” whispered Hakima, “but I have another question. Yesterday, you said she would forget and trample us. My question is, are we going to die or not?”

“It’s crazy how she still sleeps in here,” whispered Malika, ignoring Hakima’s question. “I would never be able to sleep in the room where I found my dead husband.”

“He was still alive when they found him, remember,” whispered Aziza. “He died in the hospital.”

“Okay, then,” said Hakima. “Mostly dead. Mostly dead husband.”

“Maybe we don’t have to stay here,” suggested Aziza.

“Yes, we do,” hissed Malika. “If we don’t, Daddy will know that we think she’s a bghlt el-kaboor.”

“We’ll tell him we saw Grandpa’s Abdullah’s ghost,” said Aziza. “Or that we couldn’t sleep because of her snores. We can—”

“No.” Malika’s fist locked on Aziza’s wrist. “We’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing to be afraid of. She is not a bghlt el-kaboor.”

“Excuse me,” whispered Hakima, tapping Malika’s shoulder, “but no one has answered my question.”

“Look.” Aziza’s arm jerked free of Hakima’s, pointing. “Shh.”

The finger of moonlight was prodding the edge of the blankets, which were no longer rising and falling with the old woman’s snores. The only sound in the girls’ ears, besides their own heartbeats, was the ever-so-faint clink of metal on metal.

The blankets stirred.

It’s true that an old woman might sit up in bed for many reasons: to go and fetch herself a glass of water, for instance, or to pee. Still, there was something not quite right about the way this particular old woman moved: not rolling onto her side, not bracing herself with a trembling arm, not releasing a rickety groan, but folding up into a sitting position mechanically, like some sort of drawbridge, her hips a great hinge. There was no sound at all when she yawned. Beneath her nose, above her tattooed chin, a black hole opened, sucking sound and moonlight down into her lungs. The old bones in her shoulders and arms, and the bangles that adorned them, and the necklaces that hung between her ancient breasts all clicked like branches in a winter wind, and her arms arced upward, extending in a catlike stretch.

Then she kept stretching.

Three trickles of urine, loosed from between three pairs of thighs, converged beneath three goose-bumped bottoms. Three layers of fabric were instantly soaked. Three ammoniac rivers became a single, steaming stream. Three pairs of eyes locked on the corner where the old woman’s torso was stretching, extending, elongating, reaching upward with the implacability of a tree root forcing open a crack between two stones until her head and shoulders reached the skylight, her legs still concealed beneath the blankets on the floor. Had it not been for the rustle of plastic as she drew it aside, and the clanking of chains, which hung down the impossible length of her torso like serpents of iron, and the crunch of her bones as they cracked and reformed, she might’ve heard the girls’ teeth in their skulls.

Malika’s hands were tight across her sisters’ mouths. She and Hakima could not unhook their gazes from the events unfolding just beneath the ceiling, and so it was Aziza, Aziza alone, who noticed their urine, which was spreading silently and swiftly toward the corner where their grandmother’s feet still rested on the floor.

In a silent paroxysm, Aziza clenched her eyes shut, flung her spine back hard against the wall, and waited for the end. But the end did not come. When she opened her eyes once more, the urine had indeed reached the corner, but their grandma was no longer there. Her head and shoulders were gone through the skylight, her elbows were hooked on the edge of the roof, and her torso was contracting, reeling in her dangling legs like a fish on a line. Her bedroom slippers tumbled from her feet and splashed into the moonlit pool, and her blankets, wafting, settled over them, growing darker and heavier with what they concealed.

The old woman sprang through the skylight and onto the roof, propelled by the elastic snap-back of her torso. The girls couldn’t see her anymore, but they could hear, and what they heard set off bright flashes in their minds, images from stories, nightmares, half-remembered things. With the first violent shudder and the thwock of a flag snapping open, Grandma Kamla’s head and shoulders were transformed. With a second, accompanied by a snorting bray, her torso followed suit. With the third, her bare feet were replaced by hooves. Her cantering shadow briefly blotted out the disc of moon. Then, with a cacophonous clanking of chains, she reared up on her hind legs and sprang from the rooftop, down onto the road.

The girls huddled slickly, stiffly, clammily against the wall. Their silence spread out from them, encircling their grandmother’s bedroom, rising like floodwaters, pouring out through the skylight and into the night, chasing the great mule’s hoofbeats off along the road. They all knew not to spare any hope for the unlucky soul who found himself between her and the cemetery, whose cold stones were calling her, spurring her on.

In seconds, she was gone. The only sound was the quiet rustle of the scrap of plastic she’d left dangling from the open skylight, stirring in the dip and whirl of a breeze.

“I had a question,” whispered Hakima, her voice no louder than its rustle. “Only now I can’t remember what it was.”

Photo Credit: Martin Zangerl