Elias Khoury stood in the doorway of his shop and looked at his shelves, and the shelves looked back at him, empty in places where they should have been full. The shop had been his father's shop before it was his, and his father had built it shelf by shelf, with wood he had carried himself, and with a sign he had painted by hand. Elias could still remember the smell of the paint, and the pride in his father's voice when the first customers came through the door. Now the paint was faded, and the customers came less often, and Elias felt the shop slipping away from him, a little more each week.
The rent was due. The rent was always due, and it never waited, and it never listened to explanations. Elias had paid it late twice, and the landlord had been patient twice, and patience, Elias knew, was a thing that ran out, like flour, like oil, like money. He sat at night with a small book, and he wrote down what came in and what went out, and the numbers did not meet, and he added them again, hoping he had made a mistake, and he had not made a mistake. The shop took in less than it spent. That was the plain truth.
He did not hate Mariam Haddad. He told himself that, and it was true, and he told himself again, because the street had begun to look at him as if he did, and the street was wrong. He had bought tomatoes from Mariam himself, in other years, when his own shelves were full and his heart was lighter, and he had liked her tomatoes, and her plain way of speaking, and the way she counted change slowly, as if each coin mattered, which it did. He did not hate her. He feared what she stood for, which was a different thing, and a harder thing to say aloud.
What he feared was simple. He feared that every customer who stopped at the crates was a customer who did not come into his shop. He feared that the crates, bright and cheap and right on the pavement, took the eye before the shop doorway did, and that the feet, once they had bought potatoes and onions and greens, had no reason to step inside. He feared that his shop, which sold many of the same things, only dearer, because a shop had rent and light and shelves to pay for, could not compete with a pavement and a tin cup. The fear was ordinary, and it woke him at night.
The complaint had not begun as a complaint. It had begun as a question. Elias had gone to the permits office, months before, and he had asked what the rules were, and whether a vendor could sell from the pavement in front of a shop, and the clerk had said no, not without a permit. He had gone home and thought about it, and the thought had grown, the way worries grow, until it became a paper with his name on it. He had not filed it in anger. He had filed it on a bad day, after the landlord had knocked, and after a supplier had refused him credit, and after he had stood in his empty shop and listened to the street buying from the crates outside his door.
He watched Mariam that morning, from his doorway, and he watched the officers, and he watched Karim Nasser pick up the tomato and smell it, and he felt something turn in him, something he did not expect. He had expected to feel relief. Instead he felt shame, hot and sudden, because Mariam stood steady behind her crates, and she held her bag of greens, and she looked old and tired and brave, all at once. He remembered that she had sold on that corner for thirty years, and that she had buried a husband, and raised grandchildren, and counted coins into a tin cup to pay for medicine. He had not known about the medicine. He had not asked.
That night Elias did not sleep well. He lay awake and thought about his father, and the shelves his father had built, and he thought about Mariam, and the crates she had set out before sunrise for thirty years. He wondered whether his father, who had been a kind man, would have filed the complaint, or whether he would have gone out with a chair and water, and sat with the old woman, and asked her story. He did not know the answer, and not knowing troubled him more than the rent did. In the morning he opened the shop early, and he swept the pavement in front of his door, and he swept a little further than usual, almost to the edge of Mariam's pitch.
He did not yet go to Mariam. He was not ready. But he stopped watching her as an enemy, and he began watching her as a neighbor, and the difference, though small, was the beginning of everything that followed. He saw Rami carry crates for her, and Sami Barakat warn her when officers were near, and customers greet her by name. He saw she was feeding a street his empty shop could not feed alone. For the first time in many months, Elias thought that perhaps the street was wide enough for both of them, if only they could share it.
Chapter Nineteen
The Mother He Lost and the Kitchen He Remembered