Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (13 page)

“Yes, Father,” I said, even though I was picturing his words in my own way more than really understanding what he meant. As far as I was concerned, these were startling images, like the ones Grandfather etched in our imaginations about paradise. I mixed my father’s descriptions into Grandfather’s until they seemed the same to me. The only difference was that what my father described was present on earth while what Grandfather described was found in heaven.

When the donkey went up the mountain, my father would put me in front of him so that his enormous body wouldn’t lean on my small one. And during the descent, he would set me behind him so that I would lean against his back. The moments when I would wrap my arms around his chest and embrace him were my favorite of all since I felt so close to my father, as though I were at one with him. I felt a wonderful tenderness, trust, and warmth because these were the times of my closest contact with him. I felt a great love for him, and I felt his love for me. As though he were the one embracing me and not the other way around.

When we got to the highway, he would get down and take his bag out of the saddlebag and then say, “As you well know, God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents. I am satisfied with you, Saleem, no matter what you do. But you must try hard to please Grandfather and your mother too, okay?”

I would nod my head in agreement and murmur, “Dad, don’t forget—”

Smiling, he would cut me off, “Yes, I know. I’ll bring you the glossy German magazines. Don’t worry.”

Without taking me down from the donkey, he would wrap his arms around me and kiss me. These were the only times that he would kiss me, for he would absolutely never do that in the presence of anyone because Grandfather rejected an indulgent upbringing for boys.

“Go, now. Goodbye, Saleem.”

I’d pull on the donkey’s rope to turn it around. “Goodbye, Dad.”

As I got further away, I would keep turning back toward him until he had gotten into one of the cars. If we were still close enough to see each other, he would wave to me from the car window, and I would wave back. I would keep watching the car as it got further away until it became a small dot moving along the black line of the road and disappeared. Afterward, heading back home along the same path, I would think about him and the glossy German magazines he’d bring for me. I would cut out the pictures and glue them in my notebook to show to Aliya, promising her a dream similar to those pictures.

My relationship with my father was one of emotion and spirit while my relationship with Grandfather was one of intellect and rules. I wasn’t different from any of the other children in Qashmars Village with regard to my feelings and my total adherence to the system that Grandfather created for us and bound us to. Especially since that system was comfortable and successful in the first two years. At that time, contentment and harmony prevailed in the lives of everyone. Our most joyous moment was the Friday prayers, when we would all gather together, young and old, the males forming the front rows with the women in rows behind them. We would wear our best clothes and put on perfume. In the spring, we would spread our prayer mats on the pebbles and sand outside the mosque, and Grandfather would
stand in front of us, using the external stairs as an elevated platform to preach to us. We felt our complete unity, our brotherhood, the purity of our spirits, and our closeness both to the sky and to God. When our “Allahu akbar!” pealed out during the prayer and we uttered “Amen!” in unison, our voices resounded together with the lapping of the river’s waves and the rustling of the trees, producing a distant echo from the foot of the mountain. Such moments filled us with a mythical awe, similar to what we imagined for the day of resurrection.

Those were the moments when we were most unified, most at peace, and most spiritually pure. We truly felt that we shared one spirit. On the intellectual and conceptual level, we felt complete concord. It was as though we had one shared mind, with which we thought, or which would think for us. Was this not Grandfather himself?

He would undoubtedly have realized his dream of an ideal village, had not the roar of bulldozers surprised us one morning on the top of the mountain. They were plowing a wide road toward our village, following the course of my father’s small footpath. The government came along this road with their officials and their power lines. They gave us televisions and built a school for us out of concrete. All Grandfather’s efforts to prevent these things met with failure, and he became all the more sad, angry, and emaciated.

The war on the Iranian front intensified, so the government sought additional young men and adults from all corners of Iraq for the draft. Grandfather’s health collapsed even more as he saw the further failure of his dream. He vomited blood when he learned that the government had recorded our village in its official papers under the name of Faris Village, meaning ‘knight’ and referring to the dictator. For that reason,
Grandfather resumed his emphasis in subsequent Friday sermons on our holding on to the name of Qashmars until the day we avenged our dignity, the day when we would exchange that name for the awaited name, such as Freedmen.

The front against Grandfather grew wider. Nevertheless, he didn’t stop fighting what he was up against, and his strongest means was his sermon after the Friday prayers: “Television is the devil in your homes. It will corrupt your women against you! It is the one-eyed Antichrist spoken of in the Qur’an. That’s why it has only one eye! The government school teaches your sons unbelief and godlessness. The police are the dogs of the tyrant. The war against the Muslim nation of Iran is an aggression that God does not accept. This is a hard time, when holding fast to your religion is like grasping a live coal. Be patient! Hold fast to your religion however much the burning coal of your times sears you. For that is easier to bear than entering the tormenting fire in the hereafter and remaining in hell for all eternity!”

But the people feared the government’s violence more than they feared Grandfather’s threats, which were postponed until the world to come. Thus, even though the people in the village still showed him deference and obedience, the threads of control began to slip from Grandfather’s fingers.

The government was able to conduct a new census of us after they came with a police force that outnumbered us and was better armed. They issued us new identity cards, omitting the nickname Qashmar as well as our old surname, leaving us in their records with just our first names and our fathers’ names. After they established the number of young men and adults fit for military service, they ordered them to join the army. The men refrained, however, after a vengeful sermon
from Grandfather. Therefore, the government decided upon a sudden nighttime raid to seize them one by one. So Sheikh Mullah Mutlaq prepared them to resist and distributed the men—armed with rifles, pistols, multi-pronged fishing spears, axes, clubs, and knives—out on the roofs of the houses, in the ditches between them, in the middle of the thickets, and behind the boulders at the foot of the mountain.

On that night, which would have led to ruin and a real massacre, my father got credit for saving the village when he managed to cut the electricity at the main converter in the center of the village. This made the government give up on their night assault on the village. They came by day to the houses, one by one. The men were then forced to go willingly with the police in order to avoid being shamed in front of their women and children.

Grandfather had no remaining stratagem. He could only promise imminent relief and insist that the people be patient. As a response to what had happened, he increased the frequency of his lessons with the children at the mosque, competing with and correcting what the government school was attempting to teach them. He kept on in this way until the decisive blow came and utterly crushed his spirit.

That was the day when, a little before sunset, a convoy of government cars came, like red ants, crawling down the black road’s switchbacks. It stopped in the middle of the village, and seventeen coffins wrapped in flags were lowered to the ground. These coffins contained the corpses of the young men of the village who had been killed in the latest attack on the front. Among them were Ahmad, Fandi, Salih, Nasser, Qays, Hasan, Jamal, Mahmoud, Mudhi, Khayrallah, Abdallah, Sirat (my sister Istabraq’s beloved), and my brother Hakeem. They
put them down and departed, disappearing up the foot of the mountain in their convoy of cars. They left our village with the blackest night, stricken with bitter lament. The women tore the flags because they needed to tear something out of anguish for the dead, especially after Grandfather forbade them from rending their garments. The village square around the coffins was transformed into a scene of weeping hell.

Grandfather sat silently on his chair, suppressing his tears until midnight, when sorrow burst the dam of his endurance. He exploded in tears and fell down unconscious. We carried him to his bed in the corner of the mosque. There, after we had splashed cold water on his face and sliced an onion under his nostrils, he revived a little and ordered the men huddled in a circle around him not to bury the corpses this time until they had been avenged. Then he drifted away, sinking into his final stupor.

For a whole week, the corpses were rotting. Their odor spread everywhere despite the efforts of the women, who sprinkled them with perfume and piled bouquets of flowers on the coffins. The men returned to where Grandfather was laid out, repeating their request for permission to bury the corpses. Given that he knew better than they did, none of them dared remind him that Islam stipulated speedy burials for the dead. Nevertheless, and without opening his eyes, he refused with a shake of the head.

No longer able to bear the odor and the people’s anguish, our village morphed into a suffocating nightmare. Conversations between people dropped off. Silence reigned, except for the wailing of women. Children stopped playing and were content to pass their free time wandering about aimlessly, staring. My father didn’t go to work. Instead, he remained beside
Grandfather, washing him before every prayer and turning his face toward Mecca. He saw Grandfather praying with his eyes. At least, he saw Grandfather’s closed eyelids flicker and his lips move. That was when—after spending the final days wandering about, visiting Aliya’s grave, our nest, and the shore where she drowned—I decided to leave.

I wasn’t able to sleep the night I made the decision. I tossed and turned in my bed. Then I got up, wandered out around the village, and came back to the house. In the end, when the night was hastening toward dawn, I resolved to inform my father and then go. I set off in the direction of the mosque’s main hall because he was sleeping there beside Grandfather. As soon as I passed near the window, I heard his voice in a fierce debate. I stopped and looked in the window, but I wasn’t able to see anything because of the shadows. Nevertheless, I remained nailed in place, trembling to hear my father’s voice with this strange tone for the first time in my life. His voice was powerful and confident, as though rupturing all inhibitions, and it contained a bitter reproach. He directed his words toward Grandfather, whom I didn’t hear make any response.

My father was actually shouting in Grandfather’s face, if they were in fact face-to-face in this darkness. I heard the following words, which were strained by tears and anger: “Father, put aside your loftiness and your arrogance. Ease just a little the weight of your righteousness upon us. As the Qur’an says,
You will not tear open the earth, nor will you reach the height of the mountains.
You will not fix the world by yourself. The world will not be as you want it, nor as anyone else wants it. Stop looking down on our weakness, for we are mortals and rotting corpses. Have mercy on our weakness, on our situation and our mistakes.

“Father, as far as I’m concerned, you are a god, or else the Lord’s agent here on earth in front of me. But I am a mortal ruled by his limitations, and mortals rebel against their gods in moments of weakness or moments of strength.

“Father, I’m choking from your chains around my neck. I can no longer endure your commands and prohibitions. My spirit takes strength from being bound to you, but it longs to breathe freely, far from your control.

“Father, sometimes I love you in a way that surpasses my love for myself. But at other times, I wish you were dead.

“Father, I’m speaking to you in the dark because I am unable to see you. I have never looked you in the eyes my entire life, and nevertheless, they are more real to me than my own eyes. I see through the eyes of no one but you, even though I haven’t looked at them. My own eyes long to exist on their own before they rot away. Our corpses are rotting, Father! Have mercy on our weakness. You are leading us to ruin!”

As dawn was breaking, I began to see my father leaning over Grandfather’s body, their faces close together, and his hands on Grandfather’s chest or to either side of it. I found myself shaking on account of what I had seen and heard. I hurried to leave, returning to my bed. I was trembling and uncertain as to whether I was asleep or awake. Sweat drenched me, and my throat was dry. I curled up in a fetal position under the covers, and I began to open and close my eyes in the shadows, listening to the beating of my heart and the racing of my breath.

Then I heard my mother start wailing and crying out, “The mullah is dead!”

My father gave the call for the dawn prayer from the roof of the mosque.

I got up and packed as many of my belongings as I could fit into my bag. Then I hurriedly slipped over to the bed in the next room where Istabraq was lying, sick with sorrow over the loss of Sirat. I whispered to her, “My dear Istabraq, I can’t stand it here any longer. I’m going to leave the village. I’m going to leave the entire country. I’m leaving everything here behind, and I don’t know where I’m going or how. I’m going anywhere but here, and I don’t know when I’ll come back. But the one thing that I know is that I can’t stand it here for a single moment longer. I’m choking! I’m choking to death!”