The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami Read Free Book Online

Jew, a man by the name of Benhaim al-Gharnati, whose reputation had extended throughout the city in just a few short years. (Knowing of my father’s resentment of refugees, however, no one told him that his doctor was originally from Granada.) Benhaim wore the customary black and had a long beard, white save for a few strands of dark hair. Unwrapping the haik my mother had used to tie the wound, he cut through the jellaba and undershirt with scissors. The wound was very deep, the sword having gone through all the way to the other side, and strips of skin were floating in the puddle of blood. The doctor cleaned the wound and dressed it, but warned that my father was showing signs of disease. This muscle, he said, pointing to the shoulder, is becoming rigid. This is not a good sign. Not good at all.
    It surprised neither of my uncles to hear this diagnosis. If there had been even a small chance of getting an infection, my father, they knew, would not miss it. In spite of the torrential rain, the doctor returned every day for a week to check on my father, the expression on his face getting grimmer each day.
    On the seventh day after our return to Azemmur, our house filled with guests to celebrate my birth. The men gathered around my father, read verses from the Qur’an, and asked the Most High to bring His blessings upon me. The women gathered around my mother, painted her hands with henna, and brought her amulets to protect me against evil and injury. But the following morning, the doctor returned, this time to amputate my father’s left arm. And so my mother spent the next few weeks attending to her men folk, both of them helpless and wholly dependent on her.
    The first time my mother told me this, the Story of My Birth, I was only a boy of five, still prone to hide in the folds of her caftan, reluctant to leave her side and venture out alone into the streets of Azemmur. She said that I was born on a river, which could only mean that I was fearless then, and that I should be brave now. I should run to the stall around the corner and buy her the lamp oil she needed, even though it was getting dark.
    But the second time she told me this story, it was many years later, when she had despaired of making me listen to reason, when she had lost hope that I would remain in Azemmur. She said I had been destined for a life of travel. But she could just as easily have prophesied that, having been born on the day my father stood up to the Portuguese soldiers, I had been destined for a life of war, or that, having endured a riot before my arrival, I had been destined for a life of survival, or that, having been born to a crippled father, I had been destined for a life of loss. If only I could see her now, I would tell her that all these destinies were mine in the end, and that God, in His bountiful mercy, had sent multiple signs, though in her desire to prepare herself and me for what was yet to come, she had noticed only two.
    O F THE TEN YEARS that followed my birth, I can only say that they were happy, maybe even the happiest of my life. We lived with my uncle Abdullah and his family in an old house with whitewashed walls and a creaky blue door, down the street from the gates of the medina. The airinside smelled of bread and wood, and it was full of a constant, comforting noise—someone was always calling out for a child, or grinding herbs in the mortar, or running up the stairs in slippered feet, or sharing a story around the evening brazier. My uncle Abdullah was older than my father by five years, though he treated my father with the deference and respect due to an older sibling. My uncle Omar, the middle brother, had recently gained admission into the carpentry guild and lived with us, too, occupying one of the four rooms around the center courtyard. He had never married, a fact that filled both my mother and my aunt Aisha with disquiet. They often wondered out loud what was wrong with him, why he had not taken a wife.