Mothballs (5 page)

“And who would marry her? She's weak and pale. She's skin and bones. Look, Farida, I'm afraid she has her mother's illness. What about examining her?”

They examined me. One day Mahmoud said to me, with a street light separating us, at the top of our street, “Your mother has tuberculosis.”

I chased him, a stone in my hand. He did not run away from me like the other boys. He stood there. I held the stone in my hand, my face a fountain of flame:

“Son of a bitch!”

He did not disappear from my path. We stood together, face to face. I was smaller than he. I was a female and he was a male. It was I who chased him – something he was unable to do. No, but he was able to do many things: run, play, escape from my father's face when he saw him in the street. He taught me arithmetic with his sister Firdous. The first time, I stood and dropped the stone and asked him, “What is consumption?”

“I don't know. My mother says her chest is pierced with holes like a sieve.”

I bowed my head, then raised it. “Maybe everybody's chest has holes.”

“No, just your mother's. My mother says, ‘Don't play with Huda – she'll infect you.' ”

Infection, tuberculosis, isolation! I wanted to raise my head again in front of Mahmoud, but was unable to. He was the bravest child in the neighbourhood. I chose him for myself. This would be my first man. That is how free I was throughout all those years. We spat on the ground and looked at our spittle – was there any line of blood? And when we saw nothing, we shouted and screamed and ran through the streets, we hit some people and made jokes with others, we pulled off women's cloaks and knocked men's hats off, and knocked on the front doors of houses and ran away.

He was always saying, “My mother says ‘All the girls in the neighbourhood are like your sisters,' but you're nothing like Firdous. She's sensible and you're like the Devil!”

“Are you afraid of the Devil?”

“No.”

“Listen. Do you like Hell or not?”

Since that time Mahmoud kept his nose clean. He changed his long dishdasha once a week. He wore sandals, and the fair skin of his face grew red and sweaty from playing, jumping, and running. We played from three o'clock until five in the afternoon. We went into our houses, drank water, peed, and then went back out to the street.

The girls played “hide the beads.” We made piles of dirt and sprayed them with water to make little houses in which we hid the coloured beads we had stolen from our grandmothers and fathers, red and yellow, blue and black beads. A few metres away, our voices split the air: “Huda, you're cheating!”

My success in the street was a form of cheating. I usually guessed the number of beads buried in the mud so I took all the girls' beads. I put them in the bag I had tied around my waist. Winning put me in front. Mahmoud on the other side played with a top and won – his top turned, and turned, and turned, as if it would never stop. It never tipped, it never shook, and he pulled the string tightly before whipping it out on level ground. We all stood to watch, while others did as he had done: Suturi, Nizar, Hashim and Adil too. We watched and shouted to one another. We sang to Mahmoud's top, chanting for it not to stop, and mocked the other boys' tops. Our blood was up – our shouts nearly broke the neighbours' windows. We acted like lunatics. Adil and Firdous were with me.

“Oh, God, don't let his top stop, Oh God!”

Mahmoud's top stopped when my father appeared.

Every two weeks my father left for Karbala on the dawn train, and came back to us in the afternoon. His shadow, his name, and his voice went right through us. We huddled together like terrified puppies. It was no use burying our heads under a pillow or wriggling up against our grandmother – he could hear our pulse as soon as he entered our street, and we could hear him muttering between his teeth – we were about to drop to the ground. He carried a small, old valise, the colour of an old boot. Everyone greeted him, standing up as he passed by, utterly quiet. The police officer's emblem entered the street in silence and anticipation. A pistol hung in a holster at his belt, between his waist and thigh, a tool that did its work in the house and in the neighbourhood; with it he killed our repose; through it he became complete, generating terror and respect, thus disposing of his anxiety and sense of struggle.

When he passed, women opened their cloaks so he could see their bodies undulating and their winking eyes, and their teeth poised on their lips. Men tightened their belts over their blue, white, or striped dishdashas. They adjusted their headgear, determined to stand up and greet him. He passed, looking only straight ahead.

He wore the high woollen
sidara
, which was similar to a garrison cap, on his head and a single star on his shoulder. His khaki uniform showed off his slimness and height, and his high black boots were always shiny – he avoided the rubbish and puddles of filth. He walked like a peacock. He was graceful and good-looking, and brownskinned, and his brown eyes were wide, piercing and reckless. His nose was long and high like the noses of the fathers in the other streets. His lips were narrow and prim and always red. He had high cheekbones, and his hair was the colour of old silver: fine, smooth, and combed back.

Before he arrived, my grandmother covered us with blankets and a recitation of the Sura of Ya Sin. When he asked about us, she answered him, “Let the little dears sleep.”

The top was thrown in a ditch. My father trampled the mud houses. The beads were scattered from my waist and strewn in the ditches and corners. He trampled the rest underfoot. The girls stumbled confusedly as far as their houses. The boys took shelter behind the telegraph poles. Adil and I crouched between his arms, poisoned by the fury he exhaled from his pores. His voice rang out, reaching the farthest houses. He threw us in the middle of the house:

“The little bitch dances and sings in the street and the children hug her! I don't know what's going on behind my back!”

My mother stood in the doorway of her room, terrified. She coughed and pounded her chest, noiselessly. My grandmother and my father's sister came out of the room and stood in front of him. Like a sick bird, Adil clung to my mother's clothing, and I got up and stood up, between his kicks. I grabbed my father by his shiny boot and used it to crouch between his legs as he moved me around, grabbing me on one side and pushing me in the other. The floor of the house was my master. I was trapped by his voice, which came at me like bullets.

Whenever we saw him coming or leaving, he went from being an image of a father to being the Lord in his prime. We found the only way he relaxed completely was when someone was in front of him. It was always me. I provided an outlet for his talents, from his uniform to his lethal weapon, to his boots, which abolished all dreams: “No, Daddy, no, please God, just this once.”

He did not frighten me the way he frightened Adil and my mother. At moments like these my brother went mute, not even breathing. He peed on himself, and when my father heard the sound of his peeing he roared with laughter. He left me for good, as if there was nothing wrong after all. He went to Adil, lifted him up high like a doll, and threw him up in the air and caught him, the drops of urine flying on to his hair and the tiles. My grandmother prayed and breathed on everyone.

When your father saw her, he changed; he calmed down. He loved and honoured her, and weakened in her presence. His sister, too, intimidated him. She went into her room, muttering, “If he knew how to raise children, he'd have raised himself first.”

My mother was still standing there. I do not know who supplied my grandmother with all her authority, God alone, perhaps, or else she had assembled it all in her own special way. Adil was still flying up and down like one of his paper kites. My father's voice changed: “Look, the little devil is the only one who's not afraid. That's my little Adouli, his father's son!”

I was thrown on the floor, moaning but not crying. My hair was dishevelled, the ribbons falling out, my braids undone. I looked at my leg and rubbed it with my hand, and gazed at the squares of cheap tile. This one was a dirty blue; that one, a lustreless white. I calculated the number of tiles. I saw the anthills and the salty soil surrounding those little caverns. The floor surface was cold and damp. The shining boots stopped. Now Adil was in front of me and came to me and, burying his chest against me, he burst into tears. I tousled his hair and looked at his locks. I hugged him and he trembled, then broke into a new burst of crying. We cried together, giving it our whole voices, and my father pulled at me again.

“Be quiet. I'll get the belt and break your ribs.”

He pulled Adil away and lifted him up, kissed him, and gave him five fils. He approached me, tugged at my hair, and lifted my head to face him. He took my hand and gave me five coins as well.

“Sweetheart, go and comb your hair.”

Whenever his voice softened, the sound of my crying got louder. He pinched my cheek.

“God, if you don't be quiet – ”

He kicked and slapped me. “This girl is a strange one. Does she want me to plead with her?”

Adil pulled me and got between us. My grandmother had not said a word. That was her; it was her way of pacifying him. My mother, in the back, took my father's attack in silence, a mythological creature stripped of all her roles.

Adil and I went into the bathroom. My father went into his room, his voice still ringing with every form of vituperation.

Adil shook my arm. “Huda, take this money as well, just be quiet.”

I pushed him and he fell before me, got up quickly and stood in my face, pleading: “Huda, Daddy will be asleep soon, and we'll go to the blind woman, Umm Aziz, and we'll buy hot chickpeas and sweets.”

I gasped and blew my nose. My grandmother was behind us. She stroked my hair and tilted my head to face her. I looked into her eyes, then buried my head in her concave stomach and hugged her round the waist. “Granny, what have I done? Why didn't Abu Firdous hit her for playing in the street? Why my daddy why?”

This grandmother was the centre of the circle. I do not know where she concealed her strength. When she walked, her feet, wooed with calm, did not touch the ground. When she spoke, her voice was clothed in caution and patience, and when she was silent everyone was bewildered by her unannounced plans. She was strong without showing signs of it, mighty without raising her voice, beautiful without finery. She was beautiful from her modest hem to her silver braids. She was slim, of medium height, a narrow black band round her head, whose ends dangled by her thin braids, which were white. I never saw anything as white as her complexion. It was a white between bubbly milk and thick cream. Her eyes were grey with dark blue, wild green, and pure honey-coloured rays.

When we saw her in the morning as we got ready for school, they were honey-coloured, and by the time we came home in the afternoon they were blue. But at night they were grey.

She was a well-organized woman; she loved justice and set great store by it. She rebuked my father and scolded him behind our backs, suddenly setting upon him, taking all her time, scattering him and tearing him apart, exposing him anew to us. She dazzled us every time she told us, in a clear, distant voice, as if coming from an abandoned dungeon, a story of my father, which she had never told before. She wiped the dust from the picture book and opened it. At the beginning was a picture of our venerable, terrifying, handsome, harsh, sceptical grandfather, who was in love with her, was jealous, and who never once in his life told her “I love you.” He wore a tasselled fez and went to work in an office in Ali al-Gharbi, a village on the Tigris River. He walked around with a superior air, like an Ottoman pasha. When he went to work everyone scuttled out of his way.

Her fingers rebraided my hair. I was sitting on the carpet in our room. I turned my back to her, and she enclosed me between her skinny thighs: “Relax a little. You keep moving. Are you sitting on a fire or something?”

Adil was in front of us, holding the basin of water in which my grandmother was soaking the wide wooden comb. She began to comb my hair and talk:

“Your father fell on his head. His horse threw him while he was training – this was in Ali al-Gharbi – with your grandfather. The weather was fine, and it was a new horse.

“He used to take him out every day, before sunrise, and have him lead the horse and ride him. The first day he went, and then the second, and the third. For two weeks he trained and came back. He had changed, I do not know how, but he was different. His skin became tight, his voice had changed – he was like a beast of prey. His father sent him out at night and he wasn't afraid.”

I interrupted: “Granny, you mean if a boy trains on a horse he becomes nice-looking?”

“Not just nice-looking! He becomes a man!”

“And if a girl trains on a horse will she become more beautiful?”

“No, a girl's beauty is in her silence and modesty. Do you want to ride horses as well?”

“Where are the horses now?”

“What happened then?” Adil interrupted.

I looked into his eyes. He was smiling, and I pushed him with my hand. The water basin spilled on his clothes and the floor. He did not get angry, but replied, “Stop asking so many questions.”

“Fine, where were we?”

“My father was ‘like a beast of prey,' ” was Adil's prompt response.

She sighed a little and went on.

“He was not afraid. He was a little man. When he came back at night his eyes were still watching the sky. When the moon rose and the sun went down. He said the sky had many gates, all of which were open to him, and that only he could count them. He predicted so many strange things.”

Adil interrupted: “What does ‘predict' mean?”

“Imagine! You don't know?” I said. “Predicting means telling the future.”