When the Apricots Bloom

by Gina Wilkinson

Sometimes, Ally’s mother would call for her, extend her twiggy, trembling fingers, and stroke her daughter’s cheek. Ally would hold her breath, waiting for the chance to slink off to the living room, where she’d stare doggedly at the photo of the woman by the river, her real mother, smiling, with the wind in her hair. Where was she going? Ally wondered. Could she come too?

  When her mother died, her father packed them up and moved them to Australia to be near his parents. Somewhere along the way, the photo vanished. When she asked about it, her father winced.

  “It must have gotten lost.” His voice cracked. “Now, go outside and play.”

  He looked so pained that eventually Ally stopped asking about the photo. Or pretty much anything to do with her mother. If she did, her father’s shoulders would crumple, and soon he’d sidle to the fridge, pull out a beer, and start drinking. She’d find him at four o’clock in the morning, passed out on the couch, David Bowie turning circles on the record player, empty beer bottles on the floor.

  Ally learned not to ask questions about her mother, but she didn’t forget the image of her by the river, her long, shining hair loose in the breeze. More than twenty years later, Ally sank to the floor of her father’s bedroom and held that photo close.

  Her father’s front door creaked. Footsteps clomped down the hall.

  “Anyone home?” called Tom.

  “In here,” she called back.

  “You’re not going to believe what happened at work—” Tom stopped short at the sight of Ally crouched by the closet.

  “Oh, babe.” He squatted down and hugged her. “You shouldn’t be doing this alone.” He squeezed her tighter. “Do you want to go home and I’ll finish this?”

  Ally shook her head and passed him the photo.

  “That’s your mom, right? She looks so happy.” He flipped the photo over and read the inscription: Tigris River, Baghdad, followed by looping initials Ally didn’t recognize. Abruptly, Tom sat back on his heels.

  “That’s so weird,” he said.

  “What’s weird?”

  Tom took a deep breath.

  “I got offered a deputy ambassadorship today.”

  “Deputy ambassador?” Ally gasped. “That’s a huge promotion. Where?”

  Tom handed back the photo.

  “Baghdad,” he said. “They want me to go to Baghdad.”

  In that moment, time froze. Packing up her father’s belongings, Ally had never felt so unmoored, adrift without compass. Now, a spark of hope kindled in her chest. It was as if her mother’s ghost had risen, tapped her daughter on the shoulder, and said, Follow me.

  * * *

  With a loud crack, the power went out. The air conditioner wheezed to a halt. Ally wondered how long the cut would last. Two hours? Three? She eyed the phone on her desk. It was a clunky rotary dial, like the one Saddam used on the billboard out front. She pressed the phone to her ear. Silence. She tapped the switch hook. Nothing.

  Ally entered the number for the embassy anyway, hoping that Tom might find time in his hectic schedule to eat lunch with her. After each number, the dial click-click-clacked back to its starting point. The line crackled. A woman’s voice emerged, thin as fog. A man replied, his voice even more distant, rising and falling in a sea of static.

  “Hello?” said Ally. “Hello?”

  The woman didn’t answer. Neither did the man. Their voices grew fainter until finally they vanished altogether. A crossed line? Maybe. The head of embassy security had warned that all their phones were tapped. The embassy was sure to be bugged, he said, and their home too. If Tom and Ally wanted to talk privately, he said they should do it in their garden or outside in the street, away from televisions, radios, air conditioners, even light fixtures—anything that might provide a power source for tiny cameras and hidden microphones.

  Ally put down the phone and flicked idly through a pile of news reports she’d printed up during her last visit to the embassy. Saddam had long ago barred foreign journalists from Iraq. International newspapers, foreign television, and radio were banned too. So Ally had to use the embassy’s secure server to keep track of the news.

  Ironically, Ally used to be a journalist herself, covering drug busts, burglaries, and the occasional homicide for the Canberra Herald. But then, a month before her father died, Rupert Murdoch’s lieutenants retrenched her along with a third of the newsroom. She remembered she’d been futilely scouring the job adverts when Tom brought home their Iraqi visa applications.

  “That’s it?” Ally had eyed the flimsy document. “Just one page of questions?”

  “Count yourself lucky,” said Tom. “Mine was nine pages long. I’m worried they’ll want a cavity search too.”

  “Dependent spouse?” Ally frowned at the form. “That’s my official title?”

  Tom raised his hands.

  “You can always change your mind.”

  Ally smoothed the document with her palm and began to fill in the blanks. At the box marked “occupation,” she paused and chewed the end of her pen.

  “Housewife,” she printed.

  Tom peered over her shoulder. “Housewife? Really?”

  “It asks only for my current occupation, not my whole résumé.”

  After that, all that remained was the citizenship box. She adjusted her grip on the pen, took a breath, and printed, “Australian.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. The form didn’t ask if she had dual nationality, so she told herself there was no need to mention she was an American citizen too, thanks to her mother. She signed the document quickly, a rushed signature that already looked like it belonged to someone else.

  Tom eyed the form like it was Eve’s ruinous apple.

  “I sincerely doubt they’ll give you a visa.”

  “You underestimate the blinding power of misogyny,” said Ally. “I bet those Iraqi bureaucrats won’t check anything—not once they see the word housewife.”

  It turned out, Ally was right. But that was little comfort as she sat in her lonely Baghdad house, scanning some other journalist’s work. She glanced through the barred window. The sky’s friendly forget-me-not glow had vanished, replaced by harsh rays that bleached all the color from the garden. Nothing moved, not a single leaf or a wisp of wind. The heat silenced even the birds. Saddam’s coal-black eyes leered over the stucco wall. Ally could almost feel her world shrinking. Soon, she feared, it would fit into a box on her lying visa form.

  * * *

  Ally eyed her reflection in the mirror by the front door and scraped her long dark hair into a bun. Embassy security had assured her that as a guest of the state, no one would dare lay a hand on her, that she could walk safely in the embassy district and wear her hair however she chose. Nonetheless, Ally found that left loose, her hair transformed into a pirate’s flag that attracted all sorts of miscreants, curses, and lewd invitations. “Russee, Russee,” men cried, mistaking her for an Eastern bloc prostitute.

  Screw it, Ally whispered to her reflection, words can’t hurt. The catcalls of the street were no worse than solitary confinement inside her rented home of marble and concrete. She wrapped a thin cotton scarf around her neck, checked the bulging contents of her handbag, then fished out her keys and set to work on the front door. She turned three locks, pulled aside a bolt, and unlatched a chain, then heaved open the door.

  Heat slapped Ally’s face. She stumbled past a bed of thorny rosebushes as Ghassan, their security guard, shuffled from his hut by the gate. His gray hair was shaved close to his skull. He stared at Ally’s feet, revealing a shiny bald patch on top of his scalp.

  “Where do you go, madam?”

  Ally suppressed a frown. She hated being called madam. But no matter how often she asked, Ghassan couldn’t bring himself to use her name.

  “I’m going for a walk, Ghassan.”

  “Walk? To where, madam?”

  “The embassy.”

  “You must call them first. They will send a driver.”

  “The phone isn’t working.”

&nbs
p; “Then I will get a taxi.” Ghassan headed for the gate.

  “No, don’t,” said Ally quickly. She might be safe out on the street, where the regime was keeping watch. The backseat of a stranger’s car was another matter. “No taxis.”

  “But, madam, you can’t—”

  “I need the exercise.” She cut him off. They’d had this conversation many times before. “I’m going for a walk.”

  Ghassan positioned himself between Ally and the tall metal gate. His eyes skittered briefly across her face, then returned to the driveway. She stepped forward.

  “I’m leaving now.”

  She took another step, wielding her strange foreign femaleness like a force field and compelling Ghassan to retreat. He grumbled under his breath and pushed open the gate. Outside, a knot of plastic bags somersaulted through the traffic circle like a tumbleweed at high noon. High above, golden dates dangled from palm trees. Others rotted in treacly heaps on the sidewalk.

  Ally tugged her scarf above her collar and strode toward a set of traffic lights. They flashed amber. On and off. On and off. No one ever came to fix them, so they shone amber every day, never indicating whether to proceed or to stop, only urging caution, endless caution.

  Unlike the teeming market of Mutanabbi, most of the businesses in Ally’s neighborhood didn’t open until the cool of the evening, so she was alone on the sidewalk, except for a woman wrapped in a black abaya selling newspapers by the traffic lights. A hoot of laughter echoed through the warm air. The newspaper vendor’s three-year-old son slipped from the shadows of a cobbled alley and made a beeline straight to Ally.

  “As-salaam alaikum.” She squatted at eye level with the boy. “How are you, Mohammad?”

  Mohammad immediately launched into their customary game of peekaboo mixed with silly faces. Ally crossed her eyes and flapped the corners of her ears. Mohammad cackled and did the same. After a few minutes, Ally pretended to steal Mohammad’s nose, returned it to him, and continued on.

  At the spot where the newspaper vendor stored her meager supplies, Ally paused and opened her handbag. She removed a plastic bag containing canned tuna, crayons, and a coloring book, and set it next to the newspapers. She continued past a pair of carpet shops, a tired photography studio, and a juice bar. A row of public-housing blocks loomed ahead, the same mustard hue as the desert that lapped at the city’s hem. On pocket-size landings, laundry roasted on lines, socks and undershirts stiff as kindling. A black Oldsmobile cruised past the towers. The wind carried the throb of its engine toward her. The sound held no urgency: the driver had time on his hands.

  Ally pulled her scarf higher. On the far side of the median strip, the Oldsmobile slowed to a crawl. Two thick-necked men with caterpillar brows and matching mustaches eyed her through its tinted glass. The passenger rolled down his window. Guttural snatches drifted across the bitumen. The words weren’t listed in any of the Arabic textbooks Ally studied every morning, but she understood their intent. They were forbidden words, words wrapped in spittle, words that rattled in throats.

  Muttering under her breath, Ally ignored the catcalls and plowed her gaze into the sidewalk. Eventually, the driver gave up, pressed his foot on the gas, and accelerated away. As soon as the car disappeared past the carpet shops, she pulled her scarf all the way over her hair and skittered down a side street lined with well-tended homes.

  The quiet street was scented with lavender from a hidden garden, and Ally tried to flush the adrenaline from her system with a couple of deep breaths. She wondered if her mother had been dogged by sleazeballs too. Her postcards never mentioned it. And while her old photos occasionally featured women cloaked in black robes, most of her Iraqi friends wore platform boots, flared pants, and even miniskirts.

  The wind pulled Ally’s scarf tight around her neck, then eight cylinders growled low in her ear. The Oldsmobile motored around the corner in front of her, as if it had been lying in wait. A mix of a yelp and a groan fled Ally’s lips. Behind the windshield, the men threw their heads back and laughed, baring white teeth and fleshy tongues.

  Ally took a deep breath, then bolted straight toward the car. The men’s mouths opened in surprise. At the last moment, she veered a sharp left into the street housing the embassy. Her sandals slapped loudly against the sidewalk, but the noise failed to drown out the obscenities spewing from the passenger’s window.

  The Oldsmobile drew closer. Ally could hear twigs snapping beneath its tires. She spotted the Australian flag. Moments later, an embassy guard strode out to the middle of the street.

  “Madam Ally?” he called. “Are you okay?”

  She shot an anxious glance over her shoulder. There was nothing but anonymous walls and high gates, and the throb of a V-8 engine lingering in the air.

  * * *

  Tom paced in front of his desk, clutching his blond hair like he was going to tear it out.

  “I know security says it’s safe to wander about, and that might be the case for me and the other blokes on staff, but certainly not for you. We need to hire you a driver. No more excuses.”

  Ally slumped on a cushioned bench by the door.

  “Okay, you’re right.” She wiped sweat from her lip. “Catcalls I can handle, but not this.”

  Tom stopped pacing.

  “So you finally agree, we’ll get you a driver?”

  “He’s got to have an ordinary car, nothing fancy.” Ally scowled at the floor. “I don’t want to look like a pampered princess riding around in a limousine.”

  “If you want a rust bucket, I’m fine with that.” Tom flicked through his desktop calendar. “But let’s try to hire someone before I leave on Friday. I’ll be up north for a week.”

  Ally sat up straight.

  “Did my travel permit come through? Can I come this time?”

  “I called the Ministry of Interior, and they said your application was still being processed. Sorry, babe.”

  “But we sent it in ages ago.” Ally grabbed a cushion like she was going to throttle it. “How come your permits only take a day or two to get approved?”

  “Because I am embassy staff, carrying out official business.” Tom looked up from his calendar. His tone softened. “I don’t blame you for feeling frustrated. Maybe you’d be better off some place where you’re free to do your own thing.”

  “We’ve only been married six months. What happened to ‘till death do us part’?”

  “Plenty of embassy families live apart at times.” Tom’s freckled brow wrinkled. “Why don’t you look for an apartment in Jordan? It’s not so far away, and there’ll be other diplomat wives to keep you company.”

  “Kill me now.” Ally wrapped her hands around her neck and pretended to choke. “I met a bunch of those women in Amman. I thought they’d be cool and smart. Instead, they spent the whole time comparing manicures and discussing which spa gave the best massage with Dead Sea mud. And then they complained about their nannies.”

  Ally twisted her wedding ring around her finger. She didn’t doubt that Tom loved her, but she wondered if he secretly wanted her gone. Then he wouldn’t have to feel guilty about staying late at work, seven days a week, like the rest of his colleagues. At thirty-four, he was young for a deputy ambassador. He felt he had something to prove, so he worked harder, and longer hours, than everyone else.

  Knuckles rapped against the door. Huda entered with a tray of coffee and water. Ally wiped her flushed, sweaty face and clambered off the bench.

  “Huda, I’m glad you’re here. Please, tell me the truth.” She motioned to her long skirt and black T-shirt. “Am I dressed okay? Should I be more covered up?”

  “You are dressed just fine.” Huda gestured for her to take a sip of water.

  “Honestly, do I need a head scarf?”

  “Of course not.” Huda patted her own hair. It was as dark and thick as Ally’s but cut short in a bob and fixed with a crispy shell of hair spray. “This is Iraq, not Saudi Arabia. No woman is forced to wear the head scarf. Here at the
embassy, only one of us wears the scarf. One with. Five without.”

  Ally scrutinized her own body for signs of wrongdoing. Her skirt skimmed her ankles, and her T-shirt was modest enough—not baggy, but not body-hugging either. She glanced at Huda. Her dark trousers sat tight on her hips, and her tailored blouse left her forearms exposed. Crimson toenails peeked from Huda’s kitten-heeled pumps.

  “Do you ever have any problems on the street?” asked Ally.

  “Me? No, not at all.” The Iraqi woman looked her up and down. “I do not see anything wrong with what you wear.”

  Tom blew on his coffee.

  “Would you do us a favor, Huda?” he said. “Ally needs to hire a driver. Can you help?”

  “I have one letter to translate, then I’d be happy to help,” replied Huda. “By the way, you’re due to meet the ambassador in a few minutes.”

  After Tom and Huda left, Ally finished her water, spread the flat cushions over the bench, and lay down. She tried to forget about the men in the Oldsmobile. As the air conditioner above her head hissed like a serpent, she tried to remember only a sky the color of forget-me-nots.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I told you, if you want me to read your coffee grounds, you must be calm.” Huda flipped open her notepad. “Besides, Mr. Tom would like us to concentrate on finding a driver.”

  “I am calm.” Ally set her coffee cup down on Huda’s desk. “Honest.”

  Huda raised a brow. The girl was like a camel unable to see its own hump.

  “Come on.” Ally gestured at her wild hair, still damp with sweat. “Don’t I look like a woman who’d benefit from a little guidance from a higher power?”

  As she spoke, Ally’s hands flew about like birds. Huda found her unfiltered energy hard to resist.

  “Just a quick look?” said Ally. “What would it hurt?”

  “Hurt?” echoed Huda.

  Even though her colleagues always kept Ally at a safe distance, Huda used to believe it wouldn’t hurt to entertain the girl a little, to offer her a drink and a sympathetic ear. It wasn’t against the law. Not really. Now, she asked herself, how wrong could she have been? Huda turned away and searched for a pen. Bryan Adams crooned from the cassette player wedged beside the phone, but for a change, his velvet voice provided no comfort. Huda’s every move, every breath, felt false. Damn the mukhabarat.