Fava Beans For Breakfast Read online

  Fava Beans for Breakfast

  Suzanne Salem

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  For my family

  I’m leaving my clothes behind

  My flesh is falling away on all sides

  And my skeleton’s putting on bark

  I’m turning into a tree

  How often I’ve turned into other things …

  VICENTE HUIDOBRO,

  from Poetry is a Heavenly Crime

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Recipes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  There were things Nayeema knew about ears. They were wondrous. They were as unique to an individual as a fingerprint. But the fingerprint was inert whereas the ear had the capacity to change through a person’s life. Very incredible that the showy fingerprint was enthusiastically celebrated while the humble ear quietly mapped life’s victories and travails.

  Nayeema’s own father’s ears had steadily thickened at the top like warm bread dough rising. Just before his death she had started to notice a sprouting of grey hairs from his concha and tragus, at the entrance of the ear canal. Her mother, Soraya, had earlobes that had lost their elasticity over time and drooped terribly as her heavy gold-hooped earrings had caused the punctured hole in her lobe to expand to the size of a watermelon seed.

  The individualism of the ear was something to behold, a real wow-baby. What made Nayeema breathless though, was the act of piercing the earlobe: the point of puncture, the breaking of flesh, the prick of the skin, and the subtle popping sound made by the needle as it journeyed through the fat of the lobe. She had watched as her younger cousin Dalia had had her ears pierced. Little Dalia was no more than two years of age when the needle went through her tiny unsuspecting earlobe. Her pain-pitched well of shrieks and tears lasted for ten minutes. A hurricane of emotion ripped through Nayeema, her skin ached and temples thrummed. Hot adrenaline charged through her body like a windstorm, like the Khamaseen at its torrid peak.

  There was no doubt in Nayeema’s mind. She loved to pierce. On the edge of pleasure and pain, which came with the puncturing of the ear, she felt a pulse of joy in the precise moment where metal united with flesh. There was no longer needle, ear and hand but one wondrous continuum of energy that directly connected her, as the piercer, to the recipient and to that moment.

  Then there were the rituals, bound to hygiene and to flair, which Nayeema found irresistible. The preparation of the ear, the sterilisation of the needle, the dabble of alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, the positioning of the cork behind the ear to provide stability, and perhaps the most celebratory of all the rituals, the dot to mark the placement of the piercing. Few things in life could be more wow than a precise piercing.

  And yet here she was in this village-town of Burraboo. In the white glare of the morning, Nayeema squinted down Hungerford Place and cursed. She cursed the flies for using her face as a diving board and her arms as a trampoline. Go to the hell. Stupid bugger-off flies. Get lost. She cursed Fawzy for his big dreams and this deathly quiet village-town that he’d chosen for his union of science and commerce. Oh, he was a big man of science, her Professeur.

  The air was as sticky as halva, as thick as toffee. Light rippled in a haze above a cluster of banksia bushes. Her thighs were already clammy beneath her pencil skirt, and the scent of her favourite cologne, ‘Green Apple’ by Max Factor, sluiced off her body. She patted her head. Damp curls were forming defiantly above her forehead and she knew that in twenty minutes these damp curls would sprout into an unkempt frizz that would cover her entire head like a bloated, furry slug. Her hair was a madman and every day was full moon.

  So. This was it. This was her home for the next two miserable years. Burraboo. She let the strange word flit around her mouth. Burraboo, where men carried full bushy beards and refused to wear blazers, where women let their grey hairs grow unchallenged through the gates of middle age. Very incredible, very wow, that so many women had never considered henna.

  Their friends in Sydney had all laughed at their sudden decision to move to Burraboo. ‘Eh? Burraboo? What is a Burraboo?’ they’d teased. The men had hooted and slapped Fawzy’s back and took turns shouting various mispronunciations of Burraboo. Nabil suggested that it sounded like a type of fish, best eaten fried.

  Her chest tightened as she tried not to think of their friends in Sydney, in the Paprika Triangle where she and Fawzy had lived for the past three years, where people and noise and dancing and music and naughty children decorated every corner. She tried not to think about her older brothers and their despicable scramble for wealth after the death of their parents, or her escape from their heartless greed to this distant continent, Australia. Most of all, she tried not to think about the prick and prickle that seared from her birthmark.

  Her birthmark. How she wanted to scratch it, feel her skin savaged underneath her fingernails. This no good shit prick and prickle should get lost. Go to the hell. Sitting below her collarbone, her birthmark sprawled cruelly over her right breast like a puddle of spilt soup. The wretched pomegranate stain was a magnet for the human eye, a distraction during conversations with strangers; it was the reason she avoided wearing sharply plunging V-shaped tops, so wow-baby, which exposed the soft, fleshy crescent of breast. All the girls her age paraded their crescents.

  During episodes like this, the surface of her skin formed tiny bumps like rice pudding; worse, her right nipple became as hard as a lemon pip.

  Little duck, ‘ya butta,’ said Fawzy. ‘Let me cover your birthmark with gauze,’ he had suggested this morning. ‘You’ll be scratching it all day, I know you will.’

  She had refused the gauze. El professeur’s face had puckered with concern in all the right places but his voice shimmered with happiness.

  Nothing could puncture his good mood since they’d arrived in this stupid bugger-off town of Burraboo. Unbelievable! How his bliss seemed to seep out of his very pores to give his skin an unexpected succulence. How he now pressed his lips together in such a deliberate, maddening way that dimples suddenly kissed his cheeks. Leaving Sydney and coming to Burraboo had ignited her husband like a sparkler that had just been lit: dazzling and fun, sure; but crazy too, like someone who had eaten too many eggplants and gone slightly mad. Like eggplant indigestion, she hoped that this, too, would pass, together with the little scraps of Goethe that he liked to recite, first in Arabic, then in English. ‘We must do. Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do,’ he solemnly repeated.

  Applying. Doing. Hard work. Oh, her Professeur had plenty to say about the virtues of hard work. Yet, with this move to Burraboo, her own perfectly formed dream of opening a piercing parlour, her very vision of future happiness, was slipping into the crease o
f the horizon. The piercing of ears was delicate work, important work. She knew that a pierced ear could transform a face: there was a kind of radiance from the sparkle of an earring that could transfigure the very bone structure of a woman, enabling her to transcend the gifts accorded to her face at birth.

  Nayeema felt a shiver of pleasure shoot down her neck as she gently scratched her scapha, that exquisite part of the ear that sat furrowed beneath her helix, the curved exterior ridge. She felt an extra element of pleasure when she applied the correct anatomical names to the ear, and in doing so, gave the ear the respect it deserved. She discovered early on that ears were one of the few conversations that she and Fawzy could keep returning to with equal excitement.

  After several feverish scratches of her birthmark, she reached the intersection of Hungerford Place with Main Road. The steep elevation offered a clear view of the long stretch of road as it gently descended towards the town centre. The downhill walk into town was not too bad but the return trip was a sharp, uphill horror. The prospect of another gruesome, sweaty walk home almost made her turn around and go back. Almost.

  She’d spent an hour getting ready for this outing. What else had she to do in this village-town? The girl with the crystalline green eyes on the February 1974 cover of Cleo, with her shiny windswept hair, would never comprehend just how Nayeema suffered to copy her unattainably wispy locks. In the end, Nayeema had tied her thick hair away from her face, into a tight chignon that she wound into the back of her head. She couldn’t turn back home, now. She had fava beans to buy. And if there was somewhere in Burraboo where a perfectly respectable young married woman infatuated with The Carpenters might listen to some music and tap her toes, then she’d find it.

  Coarse grass rose to her mid-calf. She tried not to look down or think about the bugs that consorted by her feet. Better to stare at the distant treetops sprawled beneath the sky, like the helix of a thousand ears overgrown with fluffy hair. She picked her way carefully along the knotted verge with a delirious nostalgia for the greasy food shops that she used to complain about when she lived in the Paprika Triangle. She would have happily eaten a skewer of lamb or a handful of roasted pistachios right now. But there was nothing. There were no noisy children to dodge, no trains rumbling by. Even the road was empty of traffic. Occasionally a car would pass by, the driver’s head craning to get a look at her.

  She shouldn’t have minded. In Egypt, the familiar and the strange were eyeballed without equivocation. Curiosity was perfectly normal among Alexandrians and she shared the view that scrutinising others was a great way to alleviate boredom. But here, there was something about the lingering glances she’d been receiving that made her uncomfortable. More than curiosity, she felt these gazes singled her out. Her tight pencil skirt, which she had always felt smart wearing, seemed out of place in Burraboo; the black kohl around her dark eyes was too heavy-handed; the thick gold hoops on her ears were too conspicuous. In this new landscape she felt like a zebra in a paddock full of sheep.

  When she reached the small knot of shops she patted down the top of her hair and smoothed the frizz on her hairline. The Burraboo Pharmacy was a few metres from the Super-S Supermarket, nestled between Ted the Butcher and a branch of Australia Post, long closed for business. She stared at the doors of the pharmacy from the street and half considered paying Fawzy a visit.

  Very busy man, hah, too busy for hello, hah? He had instructed her to visit him only during his lunch break. She chewed on her bottom lip. If she saw Fawzy’s cheeks pressed into coy dimples right now, it would put her in a bad mood for the rest of the day. The way he paraded his ‘Fred’ name badge made her dizzy with irritation; but worse than the dimples and the name badge was his new way of speaking. Since arriving in Burraboo, the clarity of Fawzy’s speech was a marvel. His consonants were as crisp as the crease in his trousers. No way was she going to visit him today.

  Instead, she focused on the meal she would cook tonight in their landlord’s kitchen. The cooking kept her occupied in the afternoons and each meal was becoming more elaborate than the one before. She would soon be down to the skinniest supplies of cumin, coriander seeds, fava beans, chickpeas, chillies, and olives. Her trip to the Super-S Supermarket three days ago had been a rubbish waste of time. When she’d asked the uninterested woman at the cash till where the olives and fava beans were kept, the woman had barely dragged her eyes away from the magazine in her hands. ‘Best you ask Wendy or Stan. They’ll be back on Thursday.’

  Nayeema had been right to ignore Fawzy and bring her favourite dried beans and ground spices from Sydney. What did he know about these things? Fawzy had laughed at her when she’d suggested that it would be difficult to buy food in a small town like Burraboo.

  ‘This is nonsense talk. It’s 1974, not 1904. Who tells you this nonsense talk?’ he’d said.

  ‘Lots of people tell me. Jehan and Leila … even Nabil warns me that in many parts of Sydney it is difficult to find spaghetti that doesn’t come in a tin.’

  Fawzy had pulled a face. ‘You shouldn’t listen to Nabil. He is all talk and no trousers.’

  ‘I’ll miss my friends.’

  ‘Ah. You’ll make new friends.’

  ‘It won’t be the same as the Paprika Triangle.’

  ‘Just wait, ya butta, you’ll see.’

  Heat pressed down like a dirty hand on Nayeema’s head. She was in no hurry to shop at the butcher’s after yesterday’s humiliating encounter with the butcher’s son. Her hands went clammy at the memory and she stood motionless for a moment. The butcher’s son wouldn’t survive a day in the Paprika Triangle with his antics. Someone would have clouted him over the head or pulled aside his father with a complaint.

  She sighed and walked towards the Super-S Supermarket. A few cars were parked on Main Road. Under the faded green awning of The Royal Hotel, a dog barked at her. A clump of woodland was followed by a petrol station, then more woodland. All this empty land, Nayeema thought, so much space. Sydney was only a couple of hours south of Burraboo by car, but felt as distant as Alexandria.

  After arriving in Sydney, she and Fawzy had moved into an apartment block in Petersham that sat below the airport’s flight path. It was a red brick building and every apartment block that surrounded them was also built of the same red brick, so Nayeema had named their neighbourhood the ‘Paprika Triangle’. It was the golden mile of Petersham because there was always something to remind her of Alexandria: old women with arthritic ankles who wrapped their scraggly hair in black scarves; Nino who roasted his almonds in such a way as to rival Emil’s on Ruml Street; and the men who congregated for hours on the street on warm nights, smoking and sharing a laugh.

  Apartment balconies were stacked, one on top of the other, like dirty dishes. The drone of traffic from nearby Parramatta Road rose and fell like a wheezing troll, and the train lines at the rear of their apartment block made a rattle that snaked through the belly of the building. Below Nayeema and Fawzy’s flat were the Omars. Next to them were the Faraks. The songs of Abdel Halim Hafez swaddled her. Scents lingered: fried garlic, chilli and tomatoes. Anatoli’s deli, a few blocks away, sold olives out of large barrels. Aniseed, cloves, nutmeg and sesame seeds were sold by weight from large casks. Lebanese bread came three times a week from a bakery on the other side of Sydney; Fawzy refused to eat the Lebanese loaves, insisting that the only bread he would touch would be white and fluffy, pre-cut and sandwich ready. ‘No need to cling to the old ways. What is the point of coming here?’ he would scold. She loved the Paprika Triangle the way she had once loved Alexandria, before her bitterness towards her brothers had set like burnt caramel left to cool.

  In the Paprika Triangle, Jehan spoke constantly of her desire for a single piece of baklava from a tiny sweet shop in an obscure laneway in Alexandria; Nabil often reminisced about his brothers. During these outpourings of remembrance, Fawzy would catch her eye and they’d smile at one another, neither uttering a word.

  Nayeema pushed open the glass do
ors of the Super-S Supermarket. Chill slapped her face as she stepped inside. Goosebumps rose on her arms. There was a woman sweeping the cracked linoleum floor near the entrance. She was wearing small silver-hooped earrings that were barely visible beneath her long red hair; redder than Shirley Bassey’s in the Diamonds Are Forever poster that Anatoli tacked up on the wall of his deli.

  ‘Hot enough for you, pet?’ said the woman. She had blazing cherry-coloured fingernails on all but one bereft nail, which was unpainted and ragged. She stopped sweeping to look at Nayeema.

  Was this an actual question or one of those ironic declarations that Australians liked to make when they wanted to be funny? Irony, Fawzy had told her, was an Australian trait that she had better start enjoying.

  Nayeema smiled, nodded politely to the woman and entered the aisles. Her leather sandals made a sucking, indecent noise on the sticky linoleum floor. There were three aisles in the supermarket and after a quick lap of all three she could still find no evidence of dried beans. She made her way back to the front of the store. Be clear. Be concise.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Nayeema said to the woman, who was now seated at the cash register and appraising her mangy fingernail. ‘Have you the borlotti beans?’

  ‘Yeah pet, we got baked beans. Second aisle.’

  ‘Not baked. Borlotti.’

  ‘Bilotti? What’s that?’ She pushed her hair behind her ears as though this might improve her comprehension of the borlotti bean.

  Nayeema smiled appreciatively. She could now see the woman’s entire ear. Her generous lobes were plump and crimson like a carnation in bloom. They were significantly detached, without any drooping. Was that …? Could they be mismatched? Yes, the left ear was decidedly larger than the right ear. This woman had spectacular ears. She cleared her throat. ‘Is bean. Is a kind of bean.’

  After a pause, the woman at the cashier said, ‘Never heard of it. We got baked beans, but.’ Her face was a crumpled sheet of lines and folds.