Mothballs (9 page)

He came one day and felt assured that when the people saw him they would know that he had sired another son. He walked into the house and knew that everyone would maintain silence, our silence in the face of the newborn baby, and the long absence of Iqbal. Given all this, there was no one to mediate between Grandmother and Mr Jamil. Until the decision by the prison warden to promote him, saying: “This new star on your shoulder is a gift from Saad.”

That sparkling yellow star brought us from threat to fulfilment.

Grandmother did not take a step toward him, and he did not move away from us. She did not deny his marriage and she did not give it her blessing. She did not reject his new fatherhood or oppose it. Now he took long absences from Baghdad and from our house in al-A‘dhamiyya. He sent his monthly salary by courier. His wife sent sacks of luscious Karbala dates in summer and baskets of oranges in winter, chickens and cheese, loaves of bread fresh from the oven, and we all ate it – except Grandmother.

Our aunt arose lazily and went into the kitchen. We heard the sound of water, the glasses, the low murmuring as Uncle Munir got up behind her: “Munir, wait a little, Farida's coming back. So what have you decided?” He sat and grumbled, bumping into the tray and knocking down the bundles of cigarettes. Looking him right in the eye, Iheard my voice say, “Oh, fine! Your eyes are open but you can't see. Good God!” He laughed and restrained himself. “Today I'll let that pass, but I'll cut out that nasty tongue of yours, not now – when I come to live here.”

“You know, Uncle Munir, when you get cross you make me laugh. I swear.”

Adil and I laughed.

“Grandma, why does Uncle Munir want to come and live with us?”

“We'll see when he comes and lives with us. My father never agreed to any stranger living with us.”

“Grandma, an uncle is not a stranger.”

“Living with us” – these are new words which even Grandmother was using.

“Listen, Umm Jamil, I'm going to build a new room on the roof, and renovate both rooms, and paint them. Next week the workers will come. We'll bless the rooms with a reading from the Qu'ran next Thursday. I'm tired of being lonely and alone. My house will be too big for us. I'll live with you. I can keep an eye on the children if Abu Adouli is away. I'll live on the prayers you say for us all. Is this a bad idea or a good one? If you have different ideas, tell me.” For the first time she lifted her head and looked at him. His face displayed every contradiction. This was Munir; he took my grandmother by the hand and led her up to the high roof. She stood there, her head tilted up to the sky, shy and radiant, as beautiful as a fairy. Her dream was before her and relief was drawing near; her joy, though, was postponed for one month.

He kept her there and answered all her questions. She wanted Farida to have virtuous children and constant protection. She wanted to stay with her here, to keep her company and await her first birth. Farida was the last of her children, a lover of new ways and fugitive dreams. Farida and Munir: my grandmother laughed, she laughed loudly, and every inch of her seemed delighted.

“By God, if I knew how to trill, I'd wear out my voice for good, but even if I did know how, my tongue would be bloody for my darling, Iqbal. Abu Adil has no objection; you know him, he's short-tempered, but he has a good heart. He only loves virtue, and God blesses all good things. As far as what you said, I'll do as you say, don't worry, and congratulations, dear Munir.”

He rose from his place, took her hand and kissed it, and she kissed his head.

“Ugh, you smell of arak. You drink in the afternoon. God forbid such a thing.”

“Umm Jamil, that isn't arak, that's the spirit of life.”

“Quiet. You are like Abu Adil, you always have an excuse ready. God guide you and heal you!”

Farida stood before us, the tray of tea in her hands, a tumult of joy on her face. Everything was clear. At last it had been said openly; the female had craved this glory.

Farida smiled with a shyness that did not suit her.

So let males marry females; let your aunt launch her fireworks into the vast sky, and let it show anew in your faces, and the faces of the neighbours, the coffee-house men, the women at the baths, in the faces of the neighbourhood youths and in the street. Slither down on the high wedding throne, children, and read her the thousand commandments. Let Farida, electrified by her constant laziness and long mistakes, walk to Uncle Munir. Let her rock back and forth to the music if her head is bowed or her hand is bound. Let her swallow his saliva, his water and his phlegm; let the first Farida disappear.

Rejoice, now, and strew flowers about her and about us. Sit on the threshold as Rasmiya does, as my mother did and my grandmother does, and wait with the long queues for his bald head and vomit. Go to him. Let Rachel create a wedding outfit for you.

“Take me with you!” Let them take that Huda, and to carry a sack of clothes for you of brilliant colours, white, pink, and violet.

Your grandmother said, “Dear Farida, make a violet dress – you know how much I love that colour.”

We went to the markets in Baghdad, hand in hand, face to face with the city I did not know. We rode the British-made, double-decker red bus. We went to the upper deck. Just look at this limp, effeminate Tigris! I loved only the Euphrates.

The first time I saw the Tigris, I ran toward it. Its torrent ran deep and the mud was thick. The water was cold. Grandmother took us to Ali al-Gharbi and left us there. We visited the old house, and saw the women and children, the girls and boys, the donkeys and chickens. We walked over the cattle dung, picked berries from the tree whose branches drooped to the ground. The faces around us were sweaty and dark skinned. The boys wore short, torn dishdashas, and the girls stared at me as I put shoes on my feet. They touched the ribbons in my hair and laughed, winked at one another, and hung on me. They felt my dress and my hand. I was in their midst, glowing from the crown of my head down to my toes. Grandmother left us and went into one of the houses. I walked among them, and Adil stood as if pinned to the ground, afraid of new places and people. I did not bother with him, but left him standing there and went to play with the boys. I took off my shoes and loosened my hair, and we all held hands and ran to the shore. They drank and I drank, and we splashed water on our clothes and in our faces. We laughed and shouted and waded in. I walked, headed away from them. The water seized me entirely. I spread my arms and embraced it, immersed myself and got knocked over. The boys grabbed at my wet hair and pulled it, shouting. I kept going, still wading, as if waiting for someone to emerge and talk to me.

White birds pursued me, their wings beating in the leaden sky. These were birds I had never seen over the Tigris. They were beautiful and shining; their legs were red and delicate, and their feathers were clean. They moved like dancers. They glided and collided with the water, and the sound of their beaks tearing at the small fish took me to Mahmoud speaking to me, coming down beside me, flapping their wings, slowing down and drinking the water, and looking at me. Everything took me into its embrace; the embrace of the water, of the birds, the touch of those excited hands in the middle of the Tigris. I shouted to Mahmoud.

Firdous said he was ill, and she surprised everyone and went into his darkened room. His mother was at the market, and Firdous was beside me. I was standing at his head, and for the first time I laid my hands on his flesh; he was burning up, and so was I.

Mahmoud, you have suddenly grown two years and waited for me. Leave the fever behind and come with me. Mahmoud, my mother's lungs are diseased, and I am consumptive because of you and me.

I took his hand and folded it, smelled it, and kissed it. These were the fingers of the first man in my life.

Mahmoud did well in school and I failed the exam. What was it about the exam and the school? Answer me, Mahmoud.

I wiped away his sweat and looked at his beautiful face and his fine, curly blond hair. His cheeks were fiery hot and briny, his lips were dry. My tears did not fall. You both agreed that neither of you would cry, and you wrote it with black coal on the public street, on the roofs of houses, on the carvings of the houses. No matter if you both failed in school, or if your fathers died or your mothers went mad, or everybody committed suicide, or if our brothers were killed – we would not cry.

You looked at his arms and entwined your arms around his, and asked him to laugh and be bad. Mahmoud laughed, and Aunt Farida will get married in a few days; Uncle Munir will remove the warts and lance the boils. And my mother was still dying.

I leant over and kissed him. Firdous cried silently:

“Huda, I'm afraid he'll die. Typhoid is killing people these days. All that's from swimming in the afternoon. Tell your grandmother to pray for him until the fever goes away.”

“He won't die.” We had agreed that neither of us would die before the other. We had not actually said that – we did not know how it could be said.

That Euphrates came out of its haughtiness and tied me to its horizon; and this Tigris, behind which I saw no horizon.

Men crossed the old wooden bridge, and women wrapped in black cloaks; girls in school uniforms, children marching behind their muttering mothers. And the bus that is capable of taking you to the end of the earth.

Before going out, my grandmother said, “Buy the household things first, and later on the wedding clothes and gold.”

Mahmoud's mother's voice was behind me, and his voice was before me: “Huda, Huda.”

My aunt pulled me from the high window: “Come on, we're going to the market.”

Every time, one of my mother's or father's sisters came with us. Today it was Aunt Naima's turn, the friend of my grandfather's big house, the companion of her sister Aunt Bahija, and the seamstress for the homes in the other streets.

She was tall and intimidating, and her eyes were as black as charcoal; they were narrow, and their whites gleamed, and their irises were the colour of roasted coffee. Her nose was straight, her lips thick, and her hair as curly as an African's. She had a strong body and moved quickly, and her voice was calm and tender. We loved her when she took us and began to tell us stories and tales, but we could not stand her when she was angry. She changed all of a sudden and went into fits, she shook and trembled, her eyes grew wide and her hair fell loose, her fingers became stiff, and she rent her clothing. We looked at her stretched out on a sofa in our grandfather's big house; everyone but Bahija Khan had vanished before her. She stood at her head, dabbing her with cold water, fanning her diligently. Then she bent over her, took the fingers of her hand and began to massage them. She looked at her as if seeing a creature that had descended from heaven to be her guest alone.

The two sisters stayed that way until everything disappeared, hugging each other in silence. Aunt Naima had never married, and now she was past forty. From the refuge she took a girl to wean, named Zuhur. She was modest, obedient, and tender; she sewed her the costliest clothes and waited for a bridegroom to come for her.

This was the day for scouring the markets of Baghdad. I changed my rhythm, leapt and played, ran away from their hands and stood alone for a bit on the Old Bridge. The buses passed, and I stood listening to the voice of the corpses colliding: the English, Nuri al-Said, the demonstrations, the firing of bullets, bodies lying on the bridge while others fled into the river. Mr Ghanim, the son of the barber in our neighbourhood, was brought here, carried on their shoulders. Bullets had hit him in the back, gone down to his pelvis, and not come out. His right leg was paralysed. He remained sitting in his father's shop, behind the table, collecting money, writing down names, and cursing the English. He had left the school and the street, and ended up in that place, and he was not yet thirty.

They came and went, and I was not quite twelve. Whatever passed away would reappear, and what was to come would not be unknown.

Screams, voices, buses rushing by, taxis stopping and speeding off, small trees thrown down in the middle of the bridge, buildings, structures with dirty windows. My mother hated smudged glass. Faces, statures, clothes, trousers, cloaks and red fezzes, black tarbooshes, headcloths that protected everyone from the lethal heat of Baghdad. The smell of sweat, of rank armpits. The sounds of coughing and blowing snot, of belching and spitting.

A man was pissing against a wall. I surprised them and turned; I stopped and looked.

Your glances were not vulgar. It allowed you to expand the imagination as you accepted the rest: a man pissing, standing still, the wall before him, and all humanity behind him. His legs were apart. His trousers were old, and from between his parted thighs his urine spouted out onto the ground. The stream splashed on the asphalt, yellow, with a sound like radio static. You passed the human urine, you passed the parted thighs, and before he closed the fly of his trousers, he turned to you; he smiled and shook his head.

When your father came out of the bathroom, he drew a large towel around his middle. It reached from his waist to just below his knees. My grandmother sat me down before her and began her rich storytelling. She talked but I paid no attention to her. I was restless and wanted to stand in front of the window. He might pass or stroll slowly by; the towel might fall off, and you would see what my father always kept covered. But Adil was holding my hand, and I did not succeed in seeing anything. He had alertly and securely fastened his trousers and pulled them up higher than usual when we went out. When he slept, he was draped in sheets. When he got up, he stayed with my grandmother and mother; they were the ones who washed him; it was they who made the first inspection.

There was long Rashid Street, broader and cleaner than our street. Its grey concrete lampposts were blotched with dirt, the glass lamps were filthy, the light pallid. This was the Rasafa side; between Rasafa and Karkh, Harun al-Rashid used to listen to riddles and puzzles.