The money of Mariam Haddad's life could be told in a few plain lines, and she told it to herself each evening the way other people say their prayers. The rent had risen, and risen again, and the pension had not. The medicine cost what it cost, and the cost did not fall when the month was hard. The grandchildren needed books and shoes and fees for school, and Mariam helped because that is what grandmothers do, and because Rami's father had died young and Nour's mother worked long hours and the family held together by everyone doing what they could. The crates paid for all of it. Potatoes and onions and leeks and greens and tomatoes, sold one bag at a time, counted coin by coin into a tin cup, carried home in the evening and counted again at the kitchen table. That was the arithmetic of her life, and she knew it by heart.
The rent had been a fair sum when she first rented her small rooms, and she had paid it gladly, because a roof and a yard and a place to keep a cart are worth a fair sum. Then the city grew, and the street grew busier, and the landlord's costs grew, and the rent grew with them, a little each year, never all at once, always just enough to be noticed and never quite enough to make her leave. Mariam paid it. She paid it on the first of the month, in cash, in an envelope, the way she had always paid it, and she kept the receipts in a tin box beside the medicine bottles. The pension came once a month, a small sum for a widow of a man who had worked all his life, and it had not risen in years. It covered the medicine, some weeks, and a little of the food, and nothing else. The rest came from the crates.
The medicine was the part she never talked about unless she had to. Doctor Lina Azar had prescribed it for her joints and her heart, two small bottles and one large one, and the large one was the dearest. Mariam took it every morning with water, standing at the sink, and she did not complain, because complaining does not lower a price. Some months she cut a tablet in half to make the bottle last, and Doctor Azar scolded her gently for it, and Mariam smiled and promised to do better, and did what she had to do. Rami knew, and he left money in the tin box sometimes, money from his part time work at the university library, and Mariam pretended not to notice, and spent it on his books instead, because grandmothers have their own arithmetic too.
The grandchildren's schooling was the part that made her proudest and cost her most. Rami's university fees were paid in parts, a little each term, and Mariam's coins helped with the books and the bus fare and the meals he ate between lectures. Nour's school needed uniforms and shoes and a bag that did not fall apart, and Mariam bought them at the market stalls where she knew the sellers, haggling the way she had taught Rami to haggle, with a smile and a firm voice. Nour brought home good marks, and read her essays aloud at the kitchen table, and Mariam listened as if each essay were a prize, because to her it was. An education, she believed, was the one thing nobody could take from a child, not a landlord, not a complaint, not a hard month.
She kept her accounts in her head and in a small notebook with a broken spine. In the notebook she wrote the rent, the medicine, the school fees, and the takings from each day, in a neat hand that leaned a little to the left. At the end of each week she added the columns twice, once quickly and once slowly, and if the totals agreed she nodded and closed the book. If they did not agree she added them a third time, because Mariam did not trust a sum she had only counted once. The notebook showed what the street already knew: that a woman of seventy four could feed a family from a pavement, if the pavement was hers to stand on, and if the crates kept coming, and if the customers kept buying, and if nobody took the corner away.
That was why the complaint paper mattered so much, and why Mariam stood so still in front of it. The paper did not just ask her to move her crates. It threatened the arithmetic itself. Without the corner there was no tin cup, and without the tin cup there was no rent, and without the rent there was no roof, and without the roof there was nowhere to keep the cart, and nowhere for Rami to study, and nowhere for Nour to read her essays aloud. Mariam understood all of that in the time it took Karim Nasser to fold the paper and put it in his pocket. She held her bag of greens, and she looked at the two officers, and she waited for them to understand it too. The rent had risen. The pension had not. The medicine cost what it cost. The crates paid for all of it. Those were the plain facts, and plain facts, Mariam believed, were stronger than any order, because a life takes thirty years to build.
Chapter Sixteen
The Permit She Could Not Afford to Buy