My Mother’s Rooms
My Mother’s Rooms
Even my mother is startled by how fast I learn her skills.
I learn to read at a pace that astonishes her and yet it is her jars that help me.
I have only to unstopper one, to smell its contents and look at the label, the shapes marked there coming to mean that smell so that even now, I can read a word and at once inhale its scent from the empty air.
My mother teaches me to read as she does everything: with a slow care but when she sees how fast I outstrip her, how I do not need to trace each stroke to know its sound, she allows me to touch her precious books and soon enough it becomes my task to read aloud to her.
She only has to tell me once the properties and uses of a plant and I remember it.
She tests me over and over again, uncertain whether I have been lucky in my guesses, whether perhaps I have cheated her in some way but eventually she accepts that my memory does not lie.
It takes her a while, however, to notice my other skills.
“Why did you give her that?” I ask.
My mother looks up. Her patient has left us, clutching a small pot to her. “The swelling may be helped by the application.”
“But she is dying,” I say, with all the hard truth of a child’s tongue.
My mother gazes at me for a long time. “Why do you say that?”
“She smells sick,” I say.
My mother’s eyes narrow. “Smells?”
I nod, shrugging. Surely my mother can smell what I smelt? “It made me feel ill,” I say. “It was like honey mixed with rotting meat.”
My mother does not reply. But after each patient visits her, she looks to me and asks, “What did they smell of?”
Sometimes they smell of the food they have been cooking, or of the black olive soap from the hammams, sometimes of the rose perfume that Kairouan is famous for.
Sometimes I smell the strange smell again.
But I smell other things. I smell fear, happiness, despair.
I smell anger, need, desire. Each has its own smell and sometimes it is so strong I cannot stand it and must open the windows in my mother’s room.
When I do this, she watches me and then she speaks with more care to her visitors, asks them more questions, until, often, they tell her what I had already scented in the air: their fear of a husband’s fists or his belt, their desire for a person forbidden to them, their desperate need for a child to hold in their arms. They come for minor ailments, but they soon confess to greater wounds.
“You have been given a gift,” says my mother, and she does not say it with smiling praise for her little daughter, she says it with the respect due to a fellow healer and perhaps a little fear at how easily her own skills fade beside me.
Perhaps she expects me to show some pride, even arrogance at how easily I learn her skills, but when she says ‘gift’ I think only of the slave woman’s cup, hidden in my room and I fall silent and bow my head.
Now a little room is set aside for me beside my mother’s and here I am made to grind down roots and leaves, to preserve berries and flower petals.
I take my place beside my mother when her patients visit and listen to their whispered confessions or groaning complaints.
My mother will look to me, to see what I suggest, and I will stand before the tiny jars and choose one and another and my mother will nod, perhaps point to a third, or shake her head a little and suggest another choice.
But she does not often have to correct me, as time goes by.
We visit the souk together and wander its narrow mazelike streets to find the stallholders who keep the items we need.
Fenugreek, to make a woman’s breasts swell with milk.
Argan oil to make blood flow within the body more freely, black cumin to father a child.
Sometimes we go to meet traders who have newly arrived in one of Kairouan’s many caravanserai.
They bring fresh supplies of ingredients but also powerful amulets and living plants for my mother’s herb garden, which I learn to tend.
The courtyard of our home is stacked everywhere with pots of plants that the slave girls are not permitted to touch, for some can bring death. Only my mother and I may care for them.
When I am free of tasks, I pore over my mother’s books.
She has only three, but they are huge and beautiful and she treasures them.
Sometimes I take up her reed pen and try to draw what I see, the shapes of leaves, the petals curved like so, the tiny roots like hairs, creeping across the page.
My mother nods at my efforts and allows me more paper, even though it is costly, as well as ink, although I have to make my own supplies, from the burnt-up wool and horns of sheep.
She allows me to sit in her place, to hear her patients’ stories and they look startled at such a young girl taking on her mother’s work so soon, but she only says, “She has a great talent, greater than mine,” and they hurry to agree, hoping that perhaps there is healing in my hands.
***
When the first headache comes, I think I am going to die. The pain is so great that I cannot stand. I stagger to my room and fall onto my bed, my mother following me.
“My head,” I say, and I can hardly speak above a whisper.
My mother makes the room dark, gives me the correct herbs, holds cooling cloths to my head and murmurs words of prayer.
But the pain goes on so long I begin to weep.
It feels as though a giant has a hold of my head and is slowly trying to pull it apart, as my father can split a ripe pomegranate in two with his bare hands.
The pain goes on and on. I try to sleep but it is impossible. At last, there is a faint lessening and I cry again, from relief.
***
It is my mother, older and wiser than I, who notices the pattern after a while.
“Do the women’s pains enter you, Hela?” she asks.
“When they are afraid, I feel the fear,” I tell her.
“And all their other feelings?”
I nod.
My mother sighs. “Too much for one body, to sense the feelings of a hundred others,” she says. From that day she tells me to sit further away from the patients and I do not touch them if I can help it. The windows are kept open, no matter the weather. Slowly, the headaches lessen.
I grow taller than my mother. The years pass and my body forms into a woman.
I am not beautiful. There is a stockiness about me, not the kind of womanly curves that other girls my age are beginning to flaunt, but a wide-shouldered solidity, like a working beast. My eyes are large but somewhat hooded rather than wide.
My hair is good enough, long and dark, but I twist it up and wrap a cloth about it when I work and so its lustre is rarely seen.
***
At fifteen, I begin to build up my own tools and ingredients in my small work room.
My mother allows me to go and purchase ingredients alone.
When I walk the streets of Kairouan’s souks, the traders nod and smile to me, each trying to court my attention, for if my mother and I purchase from them they can boast of having us as customers.
Sometimes I stop to examine their wares, to sniff roots and touch leaves, but mostly I walk onwards, to the trader from whom my mother has been buying ingredients since before I was born.
He is an affable man, rotund in body and offers a pleasant smile when he spots me.
“Ah Hela,” he calls out. “I have freshly picked caper buds if you have need of them for stomach pains.”
I nod, looking over the contents of his stall. Ginger, rosemary, saltbush, ruta, pomegranates, cinnamon, cloves and many other ingredients are neatly laid out. I smell a few items and look up to see Moez, the trader’s young son, hovering.
“As-Salaam-Alaikum, peace be unto you,” he says, stumbling a little over his words, though he must say them a hundred times a day.
“Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, and unto you be peace,” I say, my mind elsewhere. “I need anise and lemon balm, if you have them.”
Moez hurries to serve me and I notice his fingers trembling.
I meet his gaze and see him blush and half-smile to myself.
It is always a little pleasing to a young girl to be desired, though shy Moez is not quite what I dream of when I dream of marriage, he is a little too young and awkward to make much of an impact on me.
Still, I smile and nod as I depart, leaving him beaming.
One day I take the now-dusty red cup from where I had left it years ago in an old chest, clean it and place it on a shelf above me.
I am not sure why, but it seems to me to be something connected to healing.
I wonder if the slave woman was a healer herself and knew that it was my destiny.
I do not use it at once. I tell myself it has no special properties and indeed five years ago is a long time now, long enough for me to question whether what I remember of my encounter with the slave woman was true at all.
But still, I do not use it. It is only on a day when I am very busy, when the slave girls have not yet cleared away the many bowls and bottles I have been using that a young woman comes to see me.
She says that my mother is busy and there are several women waiting but that she is willing to be treated by me, if I have time.
She needs to be back home soon, her husband does not know she has come here.
I nod and she sits in front of me. Hesitantly, she confesses that she has been unable to have children, even though she is of fertile stock and young. She is afraid that her husband, whom she loves, will turn away his gaze and bring home another wife if she cannot bear him a child.
It is a common enough complaint and I have barely finished listening to her when I am already collecting the right jars and bottles to mix her a draught which she must take each day.
It does not always work but occasionally a woman bears a child after she has seen us and so they all come.
My mother shakes her head when we are alone and says that only Allah can grant a child.
Still, I grind the ingredients, mix up the concoction until it has the right consistency and bottle most of it.
The first draught, she must take now. I look about me for a cup but the only one to hand is the carved cup.
I hesitate for a moment but, feeling her questioning gaze, I take it and pour the drink into the cup before passing it to her.
As our hands touch the woman gasps. The cup rocks, neither of us willing to hold it alone until I slowly release my grip and the woman holds it, her eyes wide.
“What did you do?” she asks. “I saw a baby in my arms, I heard it cry and knew it was mine.”
I shake my head. “I do not know,” I say truthfully. “It must be that your desire for a child is very strong.” I improvise. “Drink,” I add.
The woman nods and quickly drinks every drop, clutching at the cup as though she is afraid that the brew’s efficacy will go if she hesitates.
When she has gone, I turn the cup over in my hands and wonder at what has happened. I wash it with care and replace it on the shelf. I do not use it again. I have so many others, I excuse myself.
But the young woman is back when less than two moons have passed and she brings me more silver than I have ever been paid.
“I am with child,” she says. “My husband sent you this. He says he is the happiest man in Kairouan. He smiles all day.”
I take the silver and murmur something in reply, I am not sure what.
“It was the red cup, wasn’t it?” she says, looking eagerly up at it on the shelf, where it has sat unused since her first visit. “It has a special power, does it not?”
I do not look at the cup behind me. “The herbs will have done you good,” I say.
She nods and thanks me again and goes away but she has a busy mouth, for now one and then another woman asks if I will use ‘the red cup’ when I treat them. If I try to dissuade them, saying that one cup is much like another, they insist that they must drink from the cup.
And strange things happen when they do.
Often as I hand them the cup something passes between us, a shock as though a power jumps from one to the other, a pale copy of the jolt I felt from the slave woman so long ago.
One woman recovers even though my mother shook her head when she saw how ill she was and I had already smelt the smell of death upon her.
A child who had not spoken before speaks.
Woman upon woman finds herself with child when they had lost hope.
My mother asks me what I give them and I shake my head and say that I give them what we have always given them.
My mother frowns and says she has never known it to work so well.
She asks about the red cup and I mumble something about it coming from the Dark Kingdom.
My mother turns it in her hands but does not seem to feel anything when she does and shrugs, saying that it is my own healing abilities that the women are benefiting from and that their nonsense about a cup is only superstition. To which I do not reply.
By the time I am seventeen I have amassed a sum of silver that would mark me as rich, for a healer.
Women give me their jewellery, their husbands send coins, as many as they can spare, for my name is now known across the city of Kairouan.
Now it is my mother who grinds ingredients for me, who washes the pots and cups, the pestles and mortars, who tidies the workrooms. I am too busy, there is a never-ending line of people who wait, squatting on the stairs leading to my consulting room.
And always, always, I must use the red cup or face their disappointment.