Alone before the morning crush, he crouches down behind the counter and reaches behind one of the refrigerators. Making sure that no one sees him, he surreptitiously extracts an ordinary jar, unscrews the lid, and drinks, long and slow. The neat arak is like fire in his throat, but with the burning comes the savage calm he always finds, temporarily, at the bottom of a bottle. People like Abu Za’atar and Mrs. Habash shouldn’t have a monopoly on a decent future. He wants the same opportunities not so much for himself—it is too late for that—but for his sons. So he did what many would have found inconceivable: he sold his father’s land. Through his own initiative his family resides in a new house. But no amount of money, as his uncle continually reminds him, is ever enough. Hussein glances around again before quickly reaching for the jar and taking one more potent swallow.
From the moment Abu Za’atar showed him the pig, Hussein knew it was not going to be an easy road to riches. He had not really thought any further than the first litter and assumed the piglets would be fattened up for a one-off bonanza sale. Then the business would end. He had not reckoned on the pigs’ natural behavior. No sooner were the young boars weaned than they acquired the mounting reflex. First they tried their mother, then each other, and finally turned their attention to their own sisters. Hussein watched them and began to wonder whether there might be more to the project than he thought.
He knew castration was the best way to ensure that the boars fattened up properly, but he decided to spare two of them from the knife. He left them with their mother and five of their sisters and moved the other thirteen piglets into different pens. The males mated with an uninhibited, libidinous indulgence, reveling in their thirteen-minute orgasms. Fascinated, Hussein timed them on a fancy Taiwanese stopwatch (accurate to one-tenth of a second) borrowed from the Marvellous Emporium. The experiment paid off. At the end of the fifth month, the mother and three of her daughters were pregnant. The rest of the litter was ready for market, but Hussein made a peculiar discovery: he did not have the heart to kill them. It was strange that the son of a farmer, accustomed from an early age to the necessities of slaughtering animals, should be so squeamish; stranger still that a former soldier schooled in the accoutrements of death, from small arms to switchblades, would be incapable of cutting a pig’s throat. Irrationally, he had developed affection for the creatures, born out of respect for their intelligence. There was no question of going to Abu Za’atar; his uncle would not have understood.
Hussein wondered whom he could safely approach with his problem. Then he hit upon the idea of asking the head of the family who rented his father’s mud brick house. Hussein had overridden strenuous objections from Laila when he originally leased the building to one of the oldest Palestinian refugee families, who had arrived in the town during Al Jid’s lifetime. His wife could not understand why he charged so little rent or why, when there was a surplus at the shop, he took gifts of meat to his tenants. It was more than welfare relief on Hussein’s part. By using his father’s house to benefit the less fortunate, he hoped to atone for selling off Al Jid’s beloved land.
Whatever the reason, the family was grateful for his kindness and the husband, a man of about sixty, was more than willing to care for the pigs and get one of his sons to slaughter them for a small remuneration. In this way Hussein took on his first employees, and Ahmad proved to be a capable worker. Nine months and a hundred piglets later, there was more to do than ever before. The retail side of the business was growing, and it looked as though Abu Za’atar’s prediction of easy wealth had not been unfounded.
There remained, however, one apparently insurmountable problem. Hussein scrupulously examined each new litter. He measured each piglet’s weight and size, inspected hooves and tails, and checked eyes, looking for signs. So far he had been lucky, but he knew that his chances of producing another generation without some evidence of inbreeding were very slight. As Laila put it: “Who would want to eat a two-headed beast with six legs?” The gold mine would have closed prematurely if not for Abu Za’atar’s intervention.
The wily emporium proprietor had already made numerous contributions. He provided, at only a fraction above cost, feed, antibiotics, a large and rather noisy freezer, and even an electric prod that Hussein didn’t have the heart to use; but the solution he devised totally eclipsed his previous efforts: through his cross-border contacts Abu Za’atar managed to discover a supply of frozen boar semen. Hussein had not been too keen on the idea—there was something unnatural about it that made him feel queasy.
When the first consignment arrived aboard a Damascus-bound truck, Hussein’s misgivings multiplied. Both the label on the box, which contained the vials of sperm, and the instruction booklet that accompanied it were written in Hebrew. Although there was also a religious prohibition of pork on the other side of the river, it was marketed as basar lavon—“white meat.” At first pork was sold secretly in butcher shops, but when eight hundred thousand Russian immigrants arrived in Israel after 1989, pork was practically on every street corner. To many in Hussein’s town, the very idea of artificial insemination was outrageous enough, but Hussein knew that if the origin of his latest secret were to become public knowledge, then everything he had worked for would go up in smoke.
Abu Za’atar was, of course, thrilled by the prospect of such technological innovation. With his good eye and magnifying glass, he studied the thermometer and other equipment with giddy enthusiasm. Poring over the instructions, he displayed a knowledge of Hebrew that shocked Hussein. As Abu Za’atar assembled the catheter, he airily explained that when no one in the wider Middle East was allowed to say the word “Israel” in public without being arrested, he wanted to learn the country’s language as an act of youthful rebellion. His dream was realized after peace was made between Jordan and Israel in 1994 and cheap Hebrew correspondence courses became available from the Knesset in Jerusalem. Then he brushed aside his nephew’s fears once and for all by declaring, “What’s good for pigs is good for politics.”
Bolstered by his uncle’s confidence, Hussein reluctantly agreed to give the procedure a try. They restricted themselves to working on the big pig until the method was perfected. The first two attempts were not successful, but by carefully monitoring the signs—a certain redness around the genitals in the presence of one of the boars, a rise in body temperature—Hussein was able to choose the opportune time for the third attempt. The resulting litter was small—eight piglets—but it was clear that the benefits of introducing new blood far outweighed a temporary slowdown. As the litters grew in number and frequency, it was Ahmad who christened Abu Za’atar’s pig. When he groomed her, he whispered to Umm al-Khanaazeer, Mother of All Pigs, how she alone had brought them good fortune.
In any event, there had been a period during the early days when production outpaced demand. This troubled Abu Za’atar, who hated to see waste, particularly if there was a way of turning it into profit. The freezer he supplied was not large enough to contain the surplus, and the fuel costs of running the generator proved to be unnervingly high. So the old man urged his nephew to find some other way of preserving the meat.
Hussein started visiting culinary websites at the town’s relatively new Internet café and found one that detailed various methods of producing ham. He arrived at the farm with two aluminum pots. To ensure against trichinosis, an incomprehensible but nevertheless unpleasant-sounding condition, the meat had to be treated at high temperatures. Hussein was by no means confident in the small fire Ahmad had built, so he compensated by insisting that the meat be steeped in a brine solution and then subjected to several prolonged applications of salt, sugar, potassium nitrate, pepper, and spices, all of which was supplied from the emporium. The result was then dried in the sun. These hams were hard and waxy; Abu Za’atar was not persuaded.
Next, Hussein scoured the Internet for smoking techniques. He left instructions for Ahmad to build a small hut out of corrugated iron while he set about finding the right fuel himself. One site called for oak and beech, woods guaranteed to give the meat a golden hue, but not only were these particular species unavailable, Hussein lived in an area where it was hard to find any wood at all. So he sent Ahmad’s sons to comb the countryside. The assortment