When the Apricots Bloom

by Gina Wilkinson

  But all the fabled enemies they’d fought—the sea serpents vanquished, the forty thieves outwitted—weren’t enough to prepare them for what was to come. Real life in Iraq was far more perilous than a storybook monster. And their friendship was one of its many casualties. Rania eyed her empty backpack and took a deep breath. Like her father’s precious book collection, Huda belonged to the past. No matter what she wished, neither could be reclaimed.

  “When did you arrive in Baghdad?” she asked Tom and Ally, fixing a smile on her lips. “I hope you’re enjoying our city.”

  “We arrived about a month ago, and I’m afraid it’s been nonstop work since then.” Tom threw his wife an apologetic glance. “I’d probably be at the embassy now if Ally hadn’t insisted I take the afternoon off.”

  “I’ve wanted to visit Mutanabbi market ever since I first saw it on an old postcard. I would’ve come earlier, on my own, but I wasn’t sure if I should.” Ally pulled a square of black silk from her handbag. “I’ve been wearing this out in the market. But I see you’re here without a male escort or a head scarf.”

  “There’s no need for a scarf in Baghdad,” said Rania. “But I can see how the market might be a little intimidating for a foreigner on her own.”

  Ally glanced up, and Rania thought she saw a touch of her own mournful nostalgia reflected in those cobalt eyes. In a blink, it was gone. If Ally had regrets, she knew how to hide them. Foreigners and Iraqis, Rania thought, they weren’t so different underneath.

  “You obviously appreciate fine books,” said Rania. “Are you interested in other art forms? I have a gallery; it’s nothing fancy, but we have an exhibition at the moment sponsored by the German Cultural Center. They are having a gathering next week, some drinks and so on in the garden. I would be honored if you came.”

  She slipped a business card from her pocket and handed it over. A door opened at the back of the shop. The bookseller emerged and squeezed past a column of encyclopedias. A pimply teenager trailed behind him, carrying a tray of steaming tea. The bookseller spotted the two foreigners. Within seconds, he had a tea glass in Ally’s hand and another in Tom’s. Rania slipped her empty bag behind her back.

  “I regret I must be going,” she said.

  “Please stay.” The bookseller’s eyes did not leave the foreigners, not even for a moment. “Have some more tea.”

  * * *

  Rania emerged from the darkness of the narrow stairwell and found Adnan Nawab waiting on the sidewalk. A young boy skipped past them with a foot-long block of ice balanced on his shoulder. Only a thin T-shirt and a scrap of cardboard separated the dripping cargo from his skin.

  “The boy’s errand is not so bad on a day like today.” The old man wiped his forehead. “I could do with something icy myself. If you don’t feel like tea, Rania, how about a juice?”

  Rania nodded, and the two of them made their way to nearby Rashid Street. They waited side by side in the shade of a crumbling portico while a red double-decker bus rumbled past, then they dashed through the traffic and claimed a table outside a small juice bar. Two doors down, on the steps of a boarded-up bank, a shoe shine boy was doing brisk trade, his brushes flying back and forth. A wrinkled man shuffled by, carrying a pole slung with bagel-like rings of sesame-seed simit.

  “I saw a couple of foreigners climb the stairs after you,” remarked Adnan. “Did you meet them?”

  “Let’s pray the bookseller leaves a few coins in their pockets, because I invited the young woman to visit my gallery.” She swirled her juice. “With luck, she’ll buy a painting or two.”

  “Here’s to that.” Adnan raised his glass in a toast.

  Rania clinked her glass against his.

  “So, how is your daughter?” said Adnan. “I heard you’d sent her to stay with your mother. I’m sure she misses you.”

  Rania rolled her eyes.

  “Hanan is a fourteen-year-old girl—she does not miss her mother. Her grandmother drives her from the farmhouse into Basra city every weekend for shopping and ice cream. The rest of the time she keeps her busy by taking her on the rounds out to the villages. There are many new babies, and the congratulatory visits must be made. Not that Hanan likes it. I called her last night, and believe me, she was not shy about letting me know I’d ruined her life.”

  Rania sighed. She’d spent forty-five minutes, dialing and redialing, before she got a working phone line to Basra.

  “I’m dying stuck down here,” Hanan had moaned to her. “The DVD player is broken. And Grandma expects me to join her while she visits every new baby in the province.”

  “It’s not every baby. And it’s only a few villages. Count yourself lucky. In my day, our tribe was bigger, and I had to do twice as many visits.”

  “It’s not fair. I miss my friends in Baghdad.”

  “Come on, it’s not so bad.”

  “All these years I had to listen to you complain about how Grandma would take off to Baghdad for weeks on end, and pack you off to stay on the farm.” Static crackled down the line. “But it’s fine for you to do it to me?”

  Phone pressed to her ear, Rania stared at the kitchen ceiling where water stains formed a map of a derelict world.

  “It’s hardly the same,” she replied crisply. “Your grandmother went to Baghdad to go water-skiing and wear miniskirts. I’m having no such fun. Anyway, don’t fret. Basra has a very nice high school. When the school year starts, you’ll make some new friends.”

  “I don’t want new friends. I want to come home. I want to go swimming with Ghada and Ban at the Alwiyah Club.”

  “All in good time, my dear.” Rania winced, knowing eventually she’d have to admit to Hanan that she could no longer afford the club’s membership fee.

  The phone line sizzled like fat in a pan.

  “Hello? Hanan? Can you hear me?”

  She gripped the phone tight.

  “Habibtee, are you there?”

  Static hissed.

  “I love you!” Rania’s words bounced off the kitchen walls and echoed in her ears.

  Her chest had hurt when she hung up the phone, from love, but also from a strange premonition that time was fast running out, that events were slipping out of her control. Was it the impending sale of her father’s books, the fact that Hanan was turning into a young woman, or something more? Rania didn’t know, but she’d tossed and turned all night.

  Out on Rashid Street, another double-decker swooshed by, nudging her back to the present.

  “I’m sure your daughter misses those fancy cafés on Arasat Street.” Adnan set down his glass. “Did you know there’s a new restaurant with an outdoor pool and little cabanas with silk cushions? At night, you can see the blue water glowing from the footpath. I couldn’t afford a thimble of tea in a place like that, but I ended up idling on the curb, a little beggar boy beside me, both of us unable to tear our eyes away.”

  Adnan glanced over his shoulder. The boy at the juice counter was slicing oranges. Adnan scanned the busy sidewalk, then leaned in close.

  “I was outside the restaurant for just a few minutes.” He lowered his voice. “Then the yellow Ferrari pulled up by the curb.”

  Rania’s juice suddenly tasted sour. She pushed her glass away. Adnan pressed his lips together in a grimace.

  “You were right to send Hanan away. If I had a teenage daughter, I would do the same.”

  Rania’s chest constricted, just like it had at the end of her phone call with Hanan.

  “Sometimes, I fear even Basra is not far enough.”

  “I imagine you heard that Madam al-Houri passed away last week. She stopped eating. At the end she would not even take water.” Adnan hunched over the table. “She never recovered from the shock, you know. To have your daughter taken—from her very own wedding banquet—and then defiled in the most offensive way. It is incomprehensible.”

  “Uday Hussein is the spawn of the devil,” whispered Rania. “He must shock even his own father. And who would have dreamed that was
possible?”

  A teenage hawker strolled the sidewalk, towing a flock of helium balloons tethered to a shepherd’s hook. Rania and Adnan fell silent as he passed by. On the far side of the street, near the entrance to Mutanabbi market, a man whistled: a loud, looping note full of lechery. Heads turned. A street urchin cried, “I love you, baby!”

  The balloon vendor loped across the street, toward the commotion. Rania spotted Tom Wilson, scowling, hands jammed on his hips. Behind him, Ally fumbled through her pockets. A silk scarf unfurled in her hands like a black flag. She draped it over her hair. A man next to her puckered his lips and made kissy faces.

  “You see this disgrace?” said Rania. “What is wrong with the men of today?”

  “I blame the cinema and the television.” Adnan scowled. “Have you seen the posters outside the movie house on Sadoun Street? They make it look like Western women will lie down with anyone, anytime. Too many of our foolish young men believe that’s true.”

  They watched the two Australians climb into a taxi and motor away.

  “Ally must be a brave girl to follow her husband here.” Rania fished a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “Or foolish. Perhaps a bit of both.”

  Adnan eyed her quizzically.

  “Would you not have followed your husband? Allah protect his soul.”

  “Hashim has been dead fifteen years,” she mumbled, and pulled a cigarette lighter from her pocket. “Sometimes I wonder, if not for his photographs, would I be able to remember his face?”

  “Don’t feel guilty, my dear. Living a full life, not dwelling in sorrow, that’s the best way to honor the dead.”

  Rania lit her cigarette absentmindedly. She’d been married less than a year when Hashim’s jet was shot down during a bombing run over Tehran. She was strolling in the garden when the news arrived. Her mother-in-law’s wail escaped through the open window of the kitchen and lifted the birds from the trees.

  For Rania, that moment was preserved like an insect caught in amber. But most of her memories were blurry—or trivial—like her distinct recollection of the slurping noise Hashim made while eating fried eggs. Theirs had been a traditional union, matchmade by their parents, but it was far from the barbaric arrangement her fellow students at college in Britain slyly questioned her about. They imagined Iraqi girls like Rania were sold off in chains to old, ugly strangers, when in fact that was far from the truth.

  Rania’s and Hashim’s families were old friends, and the two of them had played together as children, although that stopped once they neared puberty. The daughter of a sheikh, Rania had plenty of handsome, well-connected suitors, but she knew Hashim would treat her kindly, and, importantly, so would her future parents-in-law. When they got engaged, she didn’t love him in the romantic sense favored by Hollywood. Nor did she expect to. But she was confident that given time, she would grow to love her husband, just as her mother had, and her grandmother before her.

  Rania and Hashim only had a few months to adjust to their new life together. They butted heads on occasion, but once the bedroom lights dimmed, they were always eager to make up. When Hashim was called up to fight in the war with Iran, Rania was six weeks pregnant. Five months later, she mourned his death. She grieved sincerely, as a wife should, struggling to accept that Hashim would never see his daughter. And Hanan would never know her father. But as the years passed, she began secretly to wonder, what would her life have been like if she had remained married?

  Like Rania’s father, Hashim had been a traditional man. He would have demanded final say over all their important decisions. Would he have allowed her to move away from his family home and to open a gallery in Baghdad? That was unlikely. She’d tried many times to imagine her life if Hashim had lived, but she simply couldn’t picture the details, or how it would have flowed from morning to night, from breakfast to supper, year after year. Sometimes when she talked of her marriage, it felt like someone else’s story. She was just mouthing the words.

  An old woman hobbled by with a roll of newspapers tucked under her arm. Rania wondered, How many widows felt the same? Were their memories as thin as hers? Charcoal sketches, a line here, a shadow there? Rania had resisted all offers to marry again and managed to build a good life for herself and her daughter. At least she had, until war and sanctions destroyed the flow of visitors to her art gallery.

  She sucked on her cigarette and thought of the book merchant stroking his pudgy fingers over the last vestiges of her father’s library. She glanced at her empty bag and winced. When she had handed the final book over, the calfskin binding had felt as warm as her own flesh.

  CHAPTER 3

  The window behind Ally’s desk squealed as she pried it open, startling a trio of pigeons from the palm tree in her courtyard. In a flurry of wings, they flapped toward a traffic circle dominated by a hand-painted billboard of Saddam Hussein chatting on an old-fashioned rotary telephone. With rosy cheeks and a twinkle in his eye, he looked like a kindly uncle catching up with his favorite nephew. More likely, Ally thought, he was ordering someone’s execution.

  Ally hoped the squawking birds might pause, perch on the billboard, and deposit a few pasty droppings on the dictator’s mustache. The birds knew better. They flew on through the bright blue sky, past tall gates and squat, sand-colored shops, in the direction of the Tigris River. As Ally eyed the billboard, a familiar clang-clink-clang drifted through the bars on the window. It was the neighborhood gas vendor—a skinny boy, about ten years old—beating a scrap of pipe against one of the gas canisters stacked in his sea-blue donkey cart. He followed this route every morning, banging out a melody to advertise his wares. In the past month Ally had learned his tune by heart.

  When the peals faded, Ally sat down at the desk and picked up a yellowed postcard of Mutanabbi book market. On the back, a scrawl of faded ink told of parties and picnics by the river. There was a joke about a humorless boss, a pledge to write again soon, and three kisses marked XXX. Like the gas vendor’s tune, Ally knew it by heart. It was written by her mother, Bridget, on June 12, 1970, and addressed to her father, Robert. Ally wondered, Did she already suspect her pen pal would one day become her husband?

  Back then, Western nurses like her mom were paid handsomely to work in Baghdad. Inevitably some found the heat, and their homesickness, too much to bear. Not Bridget. Who would have guessed that Baghdad possesses the world’s biggest, bluest, most flawless sky? It’s paradise!

  Ally liked to picture her mom as a female Marco Polo, adventuring in foreign lands. But cancer claimed Bridget early, before she could share her daring exploits with her daughter. Those untold stories had gnawed a hungry hole in Ally. She raised her eyes to the enormous expanse of forget-me-not blue outside her window and imagined her mother doing the same. For a fleeting moment, she could almost understand how someone might mistake that sky for paradise.

  Now that Ally was seated, only Saddam’s eyes were visible, peering over the courtyard wall topped with glittering shards of glass. She poked her tongue out at him, then flipped open her laptop. In the corner of the screen, the Internet Explorer icon sulked uselessly—its connection to the outside world severed by Saddam’s censors.

  She clicked on Microsoft Word. Three paragraphs stared back at her—the measly sum of all she’d produced yesterday. She reread her description of the boy on the donkey cart, his song traveling through the streets like the jingle from some dystopian Mister Softee truck. She hated every sentence. Stuffed full of adjectives, starved of plot.

  Ally straightened her shoulders and tapped at the keyboard. A few minutes later, she stopped, then hit the delete key. The cursor blinked, mocking her. She tapped out another line, frowned, and erased the sentence. The cursor moved forward, then reversed again, like a backhoe crushing her words into flat, lifeless rubble.

  Ally sighed at the wreckage on-screen. Back in Australia, Tom had warned her that contrary to popular belief, the biggest danger in Baghdad was dying of boredom. Ally thought she’d keep herself busy
writing a book that retraced her mother’s trailblazing path. Turns out that was easier said than done. Her mother’s apartment building had been torn down, her favorite riverside café went up in flames ten years ago, and the hospital where she worked seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  Ally eyed a framed photo on her desk, of her mother laughing with the Tigris rippling behind her. She’d discovered the photo and the postcards only a few months ago, at her father’s home, a week after his funeral. She’d been sorting through his closet, folding suits for the thrift shop, breathing in the odor of his Old Spice and fighting off tears, when she found a manila envelope tucked on a high shelf. She lifted the flap. The photo of her mother stared back.

  Ally’s heart had lurched like a runaway car. She hadn’t seen the picture in decades, not since she was five years old. Yet somehow, she remembered every detail: the joyful wrinkles at the edge of her mother’s eyes, the sun gleaming on her dark hair. The wind had pushed a long strand across her face, and she’d raised her hand to pull it away, almost like she was waving.

  Last time Ally saw the photo, it had been above the fireplace in a small row house in Boston—the house where her mother died. To her lasting shame, Ally had always felt closer to the smiling young woman on the mantel than to the woman being consumed by cancer in a darkened bedroom. At some point during her mother’s illness, Ally convinced herself that there’d been some mistake. How could the woman in the photo—her mother—be the same melancholy patient who smelled of cold sweat and despair?