On that morning, she awoke feeling melancholic. The sun should have been up already, but the sky was dimmed. Had she had a bad dream? No, she had been happy in her dream, but she couldn’t remember what she had seen. Anyway, she got up on the wrong side of the bed. That’s what her mother would have said, though she had never understood the phrase. If the wrong side meant the other side of the bed, it was impossible to do that, since her bed had one side against the wall since her childhood. Or if it was her wrong side, was it her right or her left? It was probably her left side.
She headed for the kitchen, and opened the fridge. There was the mulberry jam she bought yesterday. She had seen this small jar when she was passing by a herbalist in the neighborhood. “Shocking Price” was written on it in red pen. She wasn’t really shocked at the price, but the pleasing configuration of bottles stacked atop one another had caught her eye.
After a short talk, she left the herbalist with a bag in her hand. Was it now the time for the mulberry jam, in this hard times? It was. Because this tiny jar was enough to take her out of the twilight of her street and to the bright mornings of her childhood, to their wonderful garden… She would jump out of bed as soon as she woke up. There were two mulberry trees in the two corners of the garden. The one on the right was hers, the one on the left was her sibling’s. She would perch on her tree and stuff her belly until her absence was noticed. When her mother entered the room to wake her up and couldn’t see her, she would open the window and start shouting: “Look, again! Come quickly, breakfast is ready! Every time we look for this child, she is on treetops, my Lord! Is it possible to eat so much fruit on an empty stomach? She never listens to a word! Was that how we were?” She would return home accompanied by these reproaches. She would wash her sticky hands and come to the table, then be sent to the bathroom again because she didn’t wash her face, and while her brother would heartily eat breakfast, she would hardly have a few bites.
Sometimes they would go out to shake the berries. She and her brother tightly held an old sheet reserved for this job by the ends, and their father beat the branches of the tree with a long stick. At every blow, the mulberries would fall into the cover as fast as hail. A silence until the second blow, then again “Boom!” “Bop, bop, bop!” When the shaking was finished, the ends of the cover would be brought together, the mulberries accumulated in the middle taken away for jam-making. The mulberries that fell to the ground were collected one by one, cleaned and left for the siblings to eat.
Suddenly all these memories were reflected on this jar in the fridge. It was as if a friend had come to this lonely house. In those days when she was forced to migrate, a comrade from the past had become a guest. She sat down at the table, spread the jam on the bread. She was just about to take a bite when her eyes filled with tears. She had not washed her face. Two drops trickled out of her eyes as she went to the bathroom. She washed her face and returned to the table. She recited Al-Fatiha for her late mother. Took a bite out of the bread, and remembered her dream. She and her mother were making jam, mulberry jam…
