Cinnamon by Emily Danby Page A

thought that his eldest daughter would pass the short remainder of her life bedridden didn’t even enter his mind. From then on, her mother would wash her and wrap her with towels around her pelvis, just as she had done when she was little. She would wipe away the excrement and urine and pray to God that she would wake up in the morning and find that the Almighty had answered her call; that He had taken her daughter’s soul and released her from her torment.
    A year after the incident which left her sister crippled, Aliyah was born. She was given another name, which her mother forgot after Aliyah Senior’s death when, as a good omen, she took to calling the younger girl by the name of her dead sister, overwhelming her with a level of care that not one of her five children – whom sickness would soon reduce to three – enjoyed.
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    Aliyah set out on her way again, far from Hanan al-Hashimi. She would take on her big sister’s role as her mother’s helper, she had decided. She cursed the mistress, spitting with every step. The weight of the bag – or the memories – was too heavy to bear. Aliyah sat down and dried herself of the cold sweat, wondering how long it would be until she found sleep like her sister had. When would her father’s next fit of fury come? When would she meet her death?
    Aliyah with her bag: the black speck which Hanan al-Hashimi spotted from the gap in the curtains covering the tightly shut window. She started to walk again, slowly and laboriously, or so Hanan imagined as she retreated from the window, gasping for air between sobs. The girl’s hesitance wasn’t a sign that she was waiting for Hanan to call her to come back; it only showed her reluctance to head in the only direction there was. For Aliyah there was only one destination: al-Raml.

    The little one realised she had awoken from the dream and there was no way to get it back. Hanan too had lost a lot to forces beyond her control and now she was alone in her wide bed, biting her nails in regret over that moment when she had expelled her maid.
    Who was Aliyah? Hanan wondered. Her servant? Really? Who is she? Aliyah was the mistress of the house and Hanan knew it, but at what point their roles had reversed, she couldn’t recall. When had Aliyah proceeded forward with her princess-like majesty to claim the throne? And when was it that Hanan seized it back from her, turning her back into nothing but a skinny, char-skinned girl?
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    In the beginning, Hanan had attempted to act particularly tough in front of the petrified maid as she helped her to arrange her belongings and showed her how to act properly. Back then she would spend most of her days out of the house, not thinking to return except to sleep. How had Aliyah made her prisoner to this room? After her mother’s death, Hanan had lived without family. Her uncles had moved to the ends of the earth, scattering over North and Latin America and taking the entirety of the family’s riches with them. Out of all of the family members, two brothers had remained. They owned a few shops in al-Bazouriyeh, a stall selling cotton garments in Souq al-Hamidiyeh and several houses in ‘Ain al-Kirsh in al-Salihiyyeh district. Their collection of businesses grew gradually, until the brothers became two of the biggest businessmen in Damascus. The elder of the two had one son and a wife who had already passed away, while the other had just one daughter whom he raised as though she were the family’s only son. Because of the love he had felt for his wife, the elder brother never remarried; a decision that the cold-hearted members of his family could not come to understand, having never much approved of their scion’s affection for his wife.
    When she was still small, Hanan would hear her uncle tell everyone that his brother’s wife was the boss of him, day and night, in the bed and out of it. At the time, Hanan felt nothing against her