21. From the Bear into the Pit

I had heard that Umm Ṭannūs wished to return to the homeland, yet nearly a year passed and she did not budge from her place. I asked one of her relatives, “Why has Umm Ṭannūs not traveled, after assuring me she was going to see her husband and children when more than ten years have passed?”

The man told me the matter had a long and wide story, and that if he tried to tell it, he would split with laughter before reaching the end.

“You have only increased my desire to know the truth,” I said. “Tell me.”

He said: You know that Umm Ṭannūs gathered a great deal of money through enormous diligence and marvelous thrift. She put her coins to work in a Syrian commercial establishment whose owner came from the same village as she. Each year he added ten percent interest to the money he held for her. Thus, whenever she saved fifty or a hundred dollars, she sent it to that establishment so that her money might turn itself over at interest. Her money kept turning until it turned over the edge: the establishment went bankrupt, and the egg disappeared with the shell.[76] Umm Ṭannūs was left with nothing but sound health, determination, and a desire for revenge upon the merchant who had devoured her money.

After that incident Umm Ṭannūs trusted no one. Even if she was told that so-and-so possessed millions and that there was no harm in depositing her money with him to earn interest, she answered that one’s bosom was the best bank: “When trusts are lost, make your bodice your storehouse.”[77]

For years Umm Ṭannūs labored with great diligence to replace her former losses. She walked from one town to another with a pack on her back and a bundle in her hand, bearing the heavy heat of the sun with perfect patience. Whenever she saved a few paper dollars in denominations of ten or more, she hoarded them inside her bodice. It never occurred to her to count how much money she had gathered, lest the blessing fly away. Her dollars, pressed against her flesh, accompanied her on every journey and remained with her in bed as she slept. Not for a single moment did Umm Ṭannūs part from her bundle of dollars.

The time came when people learned that Umm Ṭannūs had resolved to return home. She sold her goods, her trunk, and her wooden bed and prepared herself for travel. She came to New York to buy a passage ticket and exchange her American currency for liras.

Allow me to abbreviate whatever can be abbreviated. The affair has lengthy explanations, but I shall content myself with its essence. It seems that in all those years Umm Ṭannūs had never moved the dollars away from her body or brought them out for even a moment so that they might breathe a little air and preserve their health. As you know, dollars are material things and are liable to wear and rot. Moreover, in the company of the honorable Umm Ṭannūs, they swallowed an abundant quantity of the sweat her ladyship produced amid her labors and hardships—and how much sweat she produced!

So it happened. When Umm Ṭannūs first wished to bring out in New York what she had hidden in her bodice, her heart quailed. She crossed herself three times, put her trust in God, and pulled out the bundle. At first she felt her body grow cold, as a person does after taking off a woolen shirt. Then she placed the bundle before her with a trembling hand.

Here the man telling the story began to laugh. I could no longer make out the result. He could not master his laughter long enough to explain what had happened. Once his soul had taken its fill of laughing, he continued:

But the poor woman could separate only two ten-dollar bills from the whole bundle. The rest was like a mass of paper cooked over a fire. In vain she tried to recover what she had lost this time, because whenever she complained of her plight, the listener laughed at length and told her to seek compensation from God.

And so Umm Ṭannūs returned to the interior to gather a little money after all her toil had gone with the wind. I do not know how she is storing her dollars this time. Perhaps, when she wishes to move from one town to another, she takes the streetcar in order to preserve the dollars’ health.[78]

NOTES

[76] Arabic dhahabat al-bayḍa maʿa al-taqshīra, literally, ‘the egg went with the shell’: both capital and profit disappeared.
[77] The ʿibb is the opening or fold of a garment at the breast. Women peddlers sometimes carried money against the body for security; Haddad turns the practice into grotesque physical comedy.
[78] The title invokes the proverbial movement from danger to worse danger—roughly, ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire.’ Umm Ṭannūs moves from losing her deposit in a bankruptcy to destroying the replacement savings through distrust. Her taking the streetcar would spare the notes the heat and sweat of walking.
