Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun

Author:Rania Mamoun [Mamoun, Rania]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905583720
Published: 2019-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

A Woman Asleep on Her Bundle

I didn’t think her that tall or slender when I saw her sitting by the mosque wall. At night she was curled up, and in the morning she sat with her skinny legs outstretched.

I saw her carrying an old-fashioned bundle, oil-soaked and dark in hue, as she walked down the street, her legs long like crochet needles, taking lengthy strides. When you saw her, you forgot everything you knew about steady steps and straight lines. She seemed to have her own rhythm, her own sense of harmony: she leant to the right for a moment, then swerved to the left, in syncopated steps. She carried the bundle in her right hand and tucked the corner of her dress under her left arm, which swung freely by her side.

She took up residence by the mosque wall out of the blue, making a home under the neem trees with their dense foliage, trees whose leaves stand up straight and shade the area around them. There was lots of talk about her. Everyone had questions and everyone had answers, and while the answers differed, the stories all started the same way.

People who had lived in the neighbourhood for a long time said that she’d owned a house not far from the mosque, and that she’d once had money. But then ‘Madame Cash’ tricked her and took her house... although some people said she’d bought it. ‘Madame Cash’ earned her nickname because she had lots of money and gold, which her granddaughter once tried to steal to give to her father.

A lady whose name I don’t know told me that the woman by the mosque had children, one of whom was a composer. When I asked why they let her live like this, she said the woman runs away from them: every time they take her back home, she refuses to stay.

I often saw her speaking to people that no one else could see, sometimes arguing with them or raising a threatening finger. On rare occasions she laughed and chatted amicably with them, but mostly she scolded them. Perhaps she contained too much anger, and that was the only way she could let it all out.

Many a time I tried to understand what she was saying by neatly sorting her words and storing them in my mind, but I never succeeded. From her expression and intonation you could tell that she was speaking to an apparition, but you could never truly understand what she was saying. She had created her own world with them and immersed herself in it, unable to find her way out of their labyrinths, and uninterested in us curious passersby.

One of my sister’s friends told me that children made fun of her, they cursed and threw stones at her because she often launched stones at people herself, and that one time she chucked rocks at a group of young girls just because they said hello. But since I’d never seen this myself, and since it seemed unlikely, I carried on greeting her every day, and she never threw a stone at me.

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