Three Daughters: A Novel

  ALSO BY CONSUELO SAAH BAEHR

  100 Open Houses (a novel of a woman on the edge)

  Softgoods (a novella of fashion and murder)

  Nothing to Lose (a fat girl urban romance)

  Best Friends (romantic suspense)

  The Obesity Study (short stories)

  Report from the Heart: 24 Hours in the Life of a Mother (non-fiction)

  Thinner Thighs in Thirty Years (a monologue) (a Kindle single)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Consuelo Saah Baehr

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477826195

  ISBN-10: 147782619X

  Cover design by inkd

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014941654

  In loving memory of my grandparents, Farida and Musa

  Heartfelt thanks to Uncle Issa and to my beloved Aunt Mary and Aunt Julia.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE: HEARTS HIDDEN AND HUMBLE

  1. I’VE NEVER HEARD HER SAY A WORD.

  2. WE MUST HAVE A BATH.

  3. A BOY CAME TO THE STAND TODAY.

  4. YOU MUST MARRY SOMEONE.

  5. COME TO BED.

  6. IT’S TIME FOR US TO MOVE.

  7. I WILL HAVE TO CLOSE THE SHOP.

  8. IT’S JUST MYSTIFYING TO ME TO SEE YOU JABBING THAT NEEDLE INTO THAT INFERNAL CLOTH, HOUR AFTER HOUR, DAY AFTER DAY.

  9. IF YOU WANT ME TO GO, JUST SAY SO.

  10. I WISH VERY MUCH TO EAT.

  11. YOU LOOK DIFFERENT.

  12. WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO HOME, MATE?

  13. A BIG HEALTHY GIRL.

  14. THEY BEAT THE DRUMS FOR WAR.

  15. MY POOR, POOR DARLING . . .

  16. MIRIAM, WHAT ARE THESE PAPERS? THERE’S A DEED HERE.

  BOOK TWO: HEARTS BURNING AND BRAVE

  17. I WAS DIFFERENT, TOO, AS A CHILD, AND IT WAS MY MOTHER WHO MADE FUN OF ME.

  18. THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO. WE CAN’T MAKE HER PETITE.

  19. IS THERE SOME MAIDEN THERE THAT HAS YOUR HEART?

  20. I KNOW WHAT HE SEES IN YOU.

  21. AH, LOVE . . .

  22. I WISH YOU WOULD JUST RELAX AND BE YOURSELF.

  23. YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH HIM, AREN’T YOU?

  24. MADE ANY FRIENDS?

  25. MISS NADIA SOON MARRY ENGLISHMAN.

  26. I WAS AFRAID OF NEVER BEING LOVED BACK.

  27. HIDE THE BABY. MARY THOMAS IS COMING UP THE HILL.

  BOOK THREE: HEARTS WOUNDED AND WISE

  28. DO YOU WONDER WHO I AM?

  29. THE ONLY REALLY GOOD THING THAT’S HAPPENED IS THAT BABY. AND NOW HE LOVES HER MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF.

  30. IN THE MORNING, IN THE EVENING, AIN’T WE GOT FUN?

  31. I’VE NEVER SLEPT WITH A STRANGE WOMAN BEFORE.

  32. HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU CAN TRUST ME?

  33. THERE IS A MAN WHO IS BOTH CULTURED AND ACCOMPLISHED . . . A DOCTOR.

  34. MY SISTER IS MAKING A PARTY FOR ONE OF THE HALABYS, WHO’S COME FOR A VISIT FROM AMERICA.

  35. YOU ROTTEN BASTARD! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

  36. HAS ANYONE HELPED YOU GET YOUR BEAHRENS? MY WHAT? YOUR BEAHRENS. HAS ANYONE SHOWN YOU AROUND?

  37. OH, JAMES . . .

  38. I’D LIKE YOU TO BE EXCITED, TOO.

  39. YOU MARRY AMERICANI? I’M SURPRISED.

  40. WE HAVE THE ONLY WROUGHT-IRON GARDEN GATE. I KNOW IT WON’T KEEP ANYONE OUT, BUT IT’S A NICE TOUCH.

  41. YOUR WIFE WAS ADMITTED AS I CAME IN.

  42. RASHID WANTS TO DO SOMETHING HURTFUL TO ME.

  43. JAMES HENRY SHERIDAN SAAD, WILT THOU HAVE THIS WOMAN . . . ?

  44. I WANT PAUL.

  45. OH, SAMIR . . . YOU CAN’T THINK OF HER AS YOUR LITTLE BURDEN ANYMORE.

  46. I HAVE MORE CHOICES IN AMERICA. I CAN MAKE A FULLER LIFE FOR MYSELF.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  For four centuries, from 1517 until World War I, the Holy Land was part of Turkey’s vast Ottoman Empire and was governed—sometimes well, sometimes cruelly—from Constantinople.

  Palestine, as the country was then known, hugged the shores of the Jordan River from Galilee to the Dead Sea, a land easily traversed in two days by horse, bordered on two sides by vast desert and on the other by the sea.

  Hardly a house stood outside Jerusalem’s walls, whose seven gates were closed shortly after sunset by Turkish guards. In winter, rooms were warmed by little sheet-iron stoves burning olive wood. Cooking was done over charcoal. The food was mostly rice, cracked wheat, vegetables, chicken, and mutton.

  The 1860s were watershed years. Jerusalem began to spread out beyond the Old City. Russia purchased ten acres northwest of Jaffa Gate and there arose a cathedral and a complex of hotels, offices, and a hospital to care for the Russian pilgrims who came by the thousands. In 1865, the telegraph bureau was installed in the Old City. Foreigners were permitted to own land and Jews began to build a suburb outside the old walls. By 1869, the road was laid from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The pasha’s wife gave weekly receptions attended by Christian women and ladies began wearing French toilettes.

  Out of the beautiful Damascus Gate, Suleiman Street led to the Nablus Road, which led to the town of the same name located about thirty miles to the north. At the time, Nablus had the finest bazaar and was known for its fine soap and silverware.

  In 1876, Abdul Hamid acceded to the Ottoman throne and it seemed he would be a progressive and democratic ruler. The Consular Postal System was completed and the first steam flour mill was operating in Palestine within the year. By 1892, a railroad line opened from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The locomotives came from America and the engineers and surveyors from Europe.

  Just ten miles north of Jerusalem, on the pilgrim road to Nazareth, lay the Christian village of Tamleh. The vista showed enclosed courtyards approached by narrow dirt passageways and surrounded by several stone cottages joined together for safety. Safety was the first concern. Most of the inhabitants carried guns, swords, or daggers.

  There were dunghills visible in the village and smoke from the bakery ovens and often—because there were no civic laws governing the slaughter of animals or the disposal of refuse—there were repulsive odors. Still, Tamleh was ten times more beautiful than the neighboring villages and its progress was swift. By 1900, the village had nine provisions shops, four shoemakers, two weaving rooms, four butchers, and a silversmith.

  The villagers loved their orchards and wheat fields. They lovingly named each cut and crest in the road: this rise was “the bosom of pleasure,” that depression was “the valley of the dog.” As sacred as the land was loyalty to the family. Optimally, they married within the clan, and a cousin had first right—a right often exercised—to any girl relative and could take her off the horse on the way to the church to marry another.

  Though sophisticated Jerusalem was only ten miles away, the peasants lived simply. They used the fireplace both to cook and keep warm. They used wood for fuel. For light, they laid a wick in a dish of olive oil. They stored their clothes in trunks. Baskets that they made were ready container
s for food and household items and clay utensils that they also made were used for cooking and to hold food and water. The peasants drank sage and chamomile tea, coffee, milk, and wine but those who drank alcoholic drinks were ill considered. The women embroidered during every spare moment and the village was known for their fine handiwork. When the kaiser visited in 1869, he requested a sample.

  The offspring of the five original settlers cooperated with each other in order to survive. They cleared the land, built terraces on the slopes and planted grain, groves of grapes, olives and figs. They raised domestic animals, especially sheep and goats. An acre of land yielded six bushels and a peasant needed fifty dollars yearly to support his family of six.

  There were many denominational schools in the village, but the finest one was the elite Girls’ Training Home run by the Society of Friends. As early as 1889, the beautiful limestone building opened with fifteen privileged boarders. A companion building for the boys’ school was completed in 1914, a year when the Ottoman Empire was in turmoil. The lovely, airy structure had to be left to the fortunes of war. The dining room on the first floor was used as a stable for horses of the Turkish soldiers. The upper floors served as a hospital for the armed forces, first of the Central Powers—Germany, Austria, Turkey—and then, as tides changed, of England.

  In the 1880s there was a craze of revivalism and waves of foreigners passed through Tamleh. They walked to the shrines on rutted roads, often sick and at the mercy of robbers. The largest number of pilgrims came from Russia, sometimes as many as ten thousand a season traveling overland through the Caucasus or in sailing ships across the Black Sea.

  Tamleh wasn’t tropical like Jaffa. The higher altitude that dried the Mediterranean air also brought harsh wet winters. In November of 1881, it snowed continuously for two days. The flakes fell so rapidly that they obliterated the familiar night sky with its countless stars. The villagers lay shivering in their beds thinking of the packs of homeless dogs that would be exhumed from beneath the piles of snow. They had no idea they would also find a group of half-frozen Russian pilgrims, foolishly clothed, returning from the shrines of Nazareth. One of those Russians fell ill and remained for a time. Without ever knowing it, he caused a death and a birth and altered three women’s lives forever.

  BOOK ONE

  1882–1920

  HEARTS HIDDEN AND HUMBLE

  1.

  I’VE NEVER HEARD HER SAY A WORD.

  From the beginning Miriam was shy. She had a habit of tilting her head so that it touched her shoulder, believing in her childish way that this made her invisible. She squinted even indoors, which was too bad because her eyes were her best feature. They were widely spaced, large and dark, a disturbing blue—the last visible color of the evening sky. By age five she hadn’t spoken.

  Grandmother Nabiha was the first to mention it. “I’ve never heard her say a word. Not even ‘mama.’ Not even ‘papa,’ ” she added and then wished she had remained silent, for her daughter stopped washing her twin sons and gave her a miserable look. “Take her to the doctor,” she finished lamely. “Let him at least comment on it.”

  “What can the doctor do?” answered Jamilla. She disliked these conversations. “He can’t make her talk.” She sighed and paused and then, as if making an admission that should have been made long before, she said, “She wants to be deaf and dumb. Like him.”

  “But it’s not right. It’s not natural,” said Nabiha. And then more softly, “It’s not possible.” She turned the palms of her hands toward heaven. “It hasn’t turned out badly.” She was looking for reassurance. “You have these golden, perfect boys.” She stooped to kiss the matted reddish curls of the babies, who were making nonsense sounds and splashing in the shallow metal tub.

  “No,” admitted Jamilla. “It hasn’t. I thought it was the end of my life.”

  Nabiha, whose eyes had begun to trouble her, narrowed them against the sun and looked off into the distant hills. The memory of the day she had dragged her beautiful daughter to the hostel to inspect the deaf man who had agreed to marry Jamilla was fresh in her mind. They had passed the dispensary on the way and Jamilla had clung to the doorway and begged her mother to let her see the doctor first. “Hush, hush,” Nabiha had hissed. “The doctor can do nothing. Everyone will know. Our shame will be made public.”

  “But Mama, I can’t marry him. I can’t.”

  “You should have thought of that before you let that Russian put his child inside you.” Her own words shocked her and she stood rigid. That Russian whom she had nursed so diligently had also infected her husband, who died. So much damage from one act of charity. So much damage from a stranger who had entered her life by chance. But she couldn’t think of that. She had children to raise.

  “Come along,” she urged her daughter. “Mustafa is a decent man. His face is pleasant. He doesn’t look ignorant, as you’d expect. His eyes are lively and a good color. And he’s strong. His back and shoulders are developed. His head is well shaped. Come on, come on. If people see us arguing in the street, they’ll start to gossip.”

  Jamilla didn’t give in easily. For several months after the simple, unheralded wedding, she refused to look at her husband.

  The day her labor pains began she was out far beyond the cultivated fields gathering brush and had a good hour’s trip home. She was a young untried girl and full of indecision. Should she leave the wood and run or simply lie down amid the sweet-scented gorse and yellow thistle and take whatever violence was sure to follow? The pain intensified and she crawled to a patch of tall, waving reeds, thinking they would protect her from the blazing sun. She scanned the vast fields for a human presence. Then, out in the distance, she saw her husband approaching. Mustafa. In that field, as he worked over her, she thawed toward him. She felt his strength and his confidence. He would always take care of her.

  “How did you know to come? How did you know?” She kept asking it over and over as if nothing else mattered. He couldn’t hear her. He smoothed back her unruly curls and helped bring their daughter into the world. Perhaps it was because he had aided in her birth that he loved Miriam so.

  “He’s the only man in the village who values his daughter more than his sons,” commented Jamilla with exaggerated annoyance when the twins were born. Privately, she couldn’t explain it. The thin, withdrawn child was not easy to love.

  One morning when Miriam was little more than three, she came upon her mother rubbing the twins with oil and singing a nonsense song to the plump, naked babies. The words were silly enough to interest a little girl. “There was a little mouse who built a little house and in it was a louse. Here it comes, here it comes, oh, oh, oh!” Jamilla’s fingers went running up the babies’ chubby sausage arms to catch the louse. She dug between tiny pink toes, routing out that pesky louse. The twins were squealing with delight and Miriam, enticed by the scene, took off all her clothes and climbed up on the bed to receive the same.

  Her mother laughed and yanked Miriam off the bed, brought her upright and swatted her bottom. “You’re too old now. Yullah, put on your dress. You want to be a baby again? There are enough babies. You’re a big girl.”

  Miriam went outside, digging her fists into her eyes to hold back the tears. A large hand pried one fist loose. It was her baba Mustafa. She wouldn’t look at him but he placed her hand first against her own heart and then on his. There was the same steady thump in both places, hers a little faster. Reluctantly she watched as he drew a heart in the dusty ground with a stick and then pointed to his chest. He entwined a smaller heart with the large one and pointed to her chest.

  They sat together on the dusty ground and she opened his mouth as she did every so often, put one of her fingers between his lips and thumped his shoulder. No sound came out. Mustafa pointed again to the dusty hearts and brought one shoulder up to meet his head as if to say, “Well, that’s how I do it.” Then he plucked a fig from a nearby bush, put
it behind his back and brought it out again hidden in his closed hands. She chose three times before she got it right but he kept smiling and rushing to give her another chance. When she found the fig, he picked her up as if she were a bag of feathers and held her out in front of him and then in his arms.

  Baba was calm and patient. His eyes and hands played out what he wanted her to know and the little drawing stick told her the rest. He was forever silent, but she understood him perfectly. Which was the day she decided to be mute, too? Perhaps it wasn’t one moment but many moments.

  The spring of Miriam’s sixth birthday, her muteness was forgotten for more worrisome things. The ground had a dead brown look. There had been no downpours to bring back health to the plants and hasten the ripening of the oranges. Wheat was selling at famine prices and all the pains of drought had taken hold. Nabile, Nabiha’s oldest son, could no longer drive his wagon to Jaffa, for there was little produce and goods to export. The younger boy, Daud, barely nine, took their small herd farther and farther into the wilderness looking for greenery. Even Nabiha’s richer relatives weren’t doing well, or at least not doing well enough to help her.

  Mustafa, however, was resourceful in finding work. He took Jamilla and Miriam to the lowland village of Philistia to assist the farmers there who had a wheat and barley crop to harvest. He and his wife would receive wages and Miriam was allowed to follow them and pick up any wheat that fell. Miriam was fastidious in recovering every grain, for she saw that when her basket was filled her mother’s face had such a look of relief.

  April in the plains was like late summer in the mountains and the field flowers were plentiful—crimson iris, variegated lilies, and wild roses. Parts of the ground were black with ants that invaded the wheat stores, making each grain appear as if it had legs. The farmer set fire to the ant cities and rubbed the wheat with quicksilver and egg white to protect it from insects before storing it in cisterns.