The Tribe by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Author:Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo

The Mother of Ehud

I was only eleven when this happened but it always feels like right now. Just before I have to leave for school Mum tells me to go and sit with my grandmother. I’ve been ignoring Tayta for the past couple of days. She’s up every night screaming that her legs are aching. They’re brittle and brown, with red scabs all over them. Tayta makes my younger sister, Yocheved, sit on her legs to put her at ease. Yocheved still runs around for our grandmother. She sleeps in the same bed. At night, at 1am, Tayta whispers to Yocheved that she wants her water bottle and Yocheved runs to the freezer to get it for her. There are always three bottles of frozen water for Tayta in the freezer. Yocheved goes to bed when Tayta goes to bed. She leaves Tayta to go to school and comes back to Tayta in the afternoon. My grandmother’s bed is old. I imagine it’s the bed she’s had since she first came to Australia with my grandfather, my jedoo, but I’ve never really asked. It’s a heavy steel bed with a wooden headboard that’s been painted pink over and over. Tayta sleeps on a long double-sized pillow. Yocheved often puts her head on this pillow too. She smells just like Tayta, like mixed Arab spices.

Yocheved walks out of Tayta’s room and past me. She carries her school bag on her back and a towel in her hands. Her long black hair is tied up in a bun. She’s short and compact, like a little woman. She looks excited. I know why.

‘Okay, but just for a minute,’ I tell my mum. ‘I have to get to school early. We have a swimming carnival.’ I cross the corridor. It leads from the front door to the living room. It’s mostly kept empty except for a smoke detector on the ceiling and a clock hanging off the picture rail. Neither the clock nor the smoke detector has batteries in it. The clock came from a Muslim bookstore in Lakemba. It has a picture of The Kaaba, which is the most sacred site in Islam, watermarked in the background and it’s shaped like a mosque. When it used to work it would deliver the Call to Prayer every hour, but it always sounded cheap and muffled, like a car had run over it. The battery going dead was the best thing that ever happened. Every night it would drive us insane but no one ever said anything because it might have seemed blasphemous. On the right-hand side of the corridor is my parents’ room and on the left-hand side is my room. In our Lakemba house I only have to share it with my one-year-older brother, Bilal. At the end of the corridor the house divides between Tayta and Yocheved’s room and a large living room. The bathroom is right next to Tayta’s room. Even this is too far for Tayta. She has to use a bedpan.

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