Last Night in Brighton by Massoud Hayoun

Author:Massoud Hayoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781850773511
Publisher: Darf Publishers
Published: 2022-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

21. Waiting Room

غرفة الانتظار

Sam(a) ate great, big mouthfuls of bread-crusted fish kofta in a tomato and cumin broth. One only feels their mouth full and actively tastes a morsel of food for seconds at a time; that’s science. But Sam(a) was resolved to change this — to feel herself to be completely immersed in a state of taste — of culinary rapture for the whole duration of her Shabbat meal.

In New York, Sam(a) had used Japanese パン粉 - panko -breadcrumbs to bread the Shabbat fish kofta dinners that she prepared for herself and her grandfather. She gave the otherwise light-flavoured tomato-cumin broth a kick with sriracha. The Egyptian version of fish kofta — which is a bit like saying the Italian version of pizza or the Arab version of hummus — was not at all spicy, but beyond that, the flavour was entirely different. Sam(a) reckoned it was the purity of the tomatoes, free of GMOs. She felt herself to never have tasted a tomato before. It was as though — at least judging by the tomatoes — her time in New York had been only a faint aftertaste of living.

‘Easy, girl. Do you have someplace else to be?’ Lilia asked. Sam(a) looked up, embarrassed.

‘Let her eat her meal in peace, for Heaven’s sake. Always a word to say,’ Hawa told Lilia. ‘She has an appetite like a man, our Sama!’ Hawa added. Hawa looked at Sam(a) with a proud smile. Sam(a) looked at Hawa, wondering how much she knew and how she knew it.

‘Ghozala, my daughter, give her rice — The girl has no rice, poor thing!’ Hawa continued.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t eat rice,’ Sam(a) said.

Hawa looked at Sam(a) with a blank stare, mouth agape.

‘Are you one of the Moroccan girls? You eat stew with the semolina?’ Lilia asked.

‘Don’t pry into her life. Let her eat,’ Hawa insisted.

‘I just don’t want to get fat, so I eat less bread and starches,’ Sam(a) told Lilia.

‘All of the children today are like this. Insane,’ Adam said. This had been the first time Sam(a)’s stern, galabeyaclad great-great-grandfather ever verbally acknowledged her existence. She was relieved that he saw her. Sam(a) was uncertain of the rules of science in this alternate reality. In that moment, she discovered Adam to be a man of few words. Sam(a) wondered if it was perhaps because of religiosity that he avoided speaking to or looking at young women whom he thought to be non-relatives.

‘Ghozala, my love, give Sama her rice,’ Hawa said. ‘Sama, my dear, listen to me: Eat the rice with the kofta, together. Without the rice, the kofta is too salty. My rice has almost no fat. Very healthy.’

Sam(a) nodded in defeat. Ghozala, who had been sitting beside Sam(a), held out her hand for Sam(a)’s plate. When Ghozala returned Sam(a)’s plate with a large pile of glistening rice, Sam(a) nodded to thank her and noticed that Ghozala still had a twitch in her left eye, like Doctor Fahmy back in Brooklyn. Sam(a) returned to her koftas and her thoughts.

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