29. Hope and Pain

Abū Ḥannā emigrated to America with Umm Ḥannā two years after God had granted them Ḥannā. He hoped to sweep several baskets of gold from America and bring them home, build a palace, buy his neighbor’s orchard, and live with Umm Ḥannā and his children on its abundant income, free from care and misery.

Just before resolving to abandon the homeland, Abū Ḥannā contemplated the happiness he would obtain if he returned from America successful, having put hundreds—indeed, thousands—of dollars to sleep in safety. He stretched his gaze into the distance and told himself, “If everything beneath my sight becomes mine while I sit in my palace smoking my hookah, without labor or work, and my tenant farmers bring me more than my expenses every year—what a life of ease!”

Abū Ḥannā set out for America after mortgaging his house. He brought the mother and child after great suffering in Beirut, Marseilles, and New York, where he met terrors at the island because of the lady’s illness.[101] Fortune served him a little: in New York he found an old friend from his village, who interceded for him with the immigration administration. After two weeks in the hospital, Umm Ḥannā emerged from quarantine into the world of movement and trade.

For a week Abū Ḥannā remained his friend’s honored guest, learning something of the work and taking hold of commerce at its beginning. His host bought him a peddler’s pack and filled it with pins, needles, scissors, several pieces of toweling, and other things. He trained Abū Ḥannā to lift it onto his shoulder and lower it. With great effort he taught him how to knock at doors, remove his hat and offer a greeting, and ask people to buy from him and show him kindness.

Throughout these lessons Abū Ḥannā swallowed his saliva and pressed upon his wound. He felt that his old hopes had been in one valley and reality in another. The streets from which he had hoped to sweep baskets of gold were either clean of everything or filled with mud and filth. He did not dare object aloud to what he saw, contrary to what he had hoped. Or, rather, he was ashamed to tell his host anything about the disappointment he had felt on arriving. His secret remained in his heart. He shouldered the pack and all that followed from it in order to support Umm Ḥannā and his child in the land of exile.

There is no need for lengthy explanation: the first ten years Abū Ḥannā’s family spent in America were a mixture of enormous labor and little success. During them, however, the family grew. Abū Ḥannā had four children in addition to Ḥannā. None of the five experienced a home upbringing. Because he and their mother both worked at peddling, he was forced to lie to orphan asylums. Each time he placed a son in one so that the child might be educated and reared without charge, he declared that the boy was an orphan without a mother. Sometimes the mother went and swore before the asylum superintendent that her son was an orphan without a father.[102]

Thus the parents removed from themselves the hardship of child-rearing and attended to their trade. They worked together and became capable of meeting their own needs with several dollars left over each week. Umm Ḥannā took the surplus and hoarded it in the money belt she had brought from Syria, saving it for the day God permitted them to return home. Do not ask about the thrift they practiced throughout this period, for the couple’s thoughts were confined to gathering money for a return to the homeland at the first opportunity.

But the days did not preserve their serenity for Abū Ḥannā. One day all five children returned at once. The asylums had learned that their parents were alive, well, and comfortably situated. After long argument and great trouble, Abū Ḥannā was forced to take his children back into his house.

He felt no paternal tenderness toward them. His knowledge of English had never advanced beyond what he learned from his New York host and fellow villager during his first week in America, while his children seemed American through father and grandfather and knew not one word of Arabic. Abū Ḥannā had to seek the help of a Syrian young man to stand between him and his children as interpreter, carrying his paternal will from him to them and carrying back their thunderbolts over the evil fortune that had thrown them into a filthy house like their father’s, when they had grown accustomed to cleanliness and propriety in American schools.

Umm Ḥannā was nimbler than her husband in English, so the children inclined toward her and away from their father. They were even ashamed to be called his children, especially when children in the streets learned that they were Syrian. If their father did anything that displeased them, they insulted him with the word “Syrian.” He continued to restrain his anger until his patience was exhausted.

The mother took the children’s side. Sometimes she wept from oppression, bent tenderly toward them, and treated them gently. Little by little they felt drawn toward this woman; later they felt that inclination toward her as their mother. From their father, however, they only recoiled and withdrew further, as though he were not their father at all.

Conditions in Abū Ḥannā’s family deteriorated. It became two hostile parties: the father on one side, the mother and children on the other. At every clash the shouting rose. Abū Ḥannā liked nothing but Arabic food, while the children yearned for “steak, ham, roast, and the like.” The mother’s taste inclined with her husband’s, but she accommodated the children and berated the father, calling him a peasant who had remained one even in America, the land of civilization and culture.

Abū Ḥannā asked inwardly what he might do to escape the hell of the house. Sometimes she advised him to abandon his habits and learn American customs from his educated and well-mannered children. Shaking his head, he answered her and himself with the proverb: “When he was grown and gray, they put him in primary school.”[103]

The situation worsened until, because of the quarrels, the children and mother hated Abū Ḥannā so much that they did not sleep a single night with full eyelids. In truth, the poor mother was the most wretched. Caught between two great afflictions, she chose to stand beside the pieces of her liver and left her poor husband to suffer the bitterness of life’s many forms. He did not understand the children and the children did not understand him. In the end he was forced to abandon the house without bidding his family farewell, in order to escape his circumstances.

In one of America’s great cities, Abū Ḥannā was seen wearing a white suit. He held up a large pole tipped with a bundle of long straw, and before him he pushed with his left hand a box on two wheels. The witness was the fellow villager who had taken him and his family in during their first week in New York. When he saw him, he said hesitantly, “That is Abū Ḥannā. By God, it is he. Are you not Abū Ḥannā?”

“Yes, friend. How are you?”

“What has happened to you? What are you doing here? Where are Umm Ḥannā and the children?”

“You know, friend, that I brought Umm Ḥannā and Ḥannā to this country. During these years I had four children besides Ḥannā. When I arrived in America, I was ashamed to tell you that I had not found what I had promised myself. I had hoped to sweep several baskets of gold from its streets, but—”

“What happened to you?”

“We came to sweep gold. We lost the woman and the children, and we began sweeping dirt and filth.”[104]

NOTES

[101] The ‘island’ is Ellis Island, where immigrants underwent inspection and could be detained for illness. Haddad calls the hospital quarantine al-maṭhar, literally ‘the place of purification.’
[102] Orphan asylums and institutional schools in the United States also housed many children with living parents who could not support or supervise them. Haddad turns the family’s repeated false declarations into a severe satire of migrant thrift.
[103] Arabic lammā kabur wa-shāb ḥaṭṭūhu bi-l-kuttāb, literally, ‘when he grew old and gray, they put him in the elementary school.’ The proverb mocks instruction attempted too late in life.
[104] The Arabic title al-Amal wa-l-Alam, ‘Hope and Pain,’ is nearly a graphic and aural pair. The final image makes the opening fantasy literal: instead of sweeping gold from American streets, Abū Ḥannā sweeps their refuse as a municipal cleaner.
