Rania’s nose itched as plumes of incense spiraled upward, collided with the thatched ceiling, and spread out in a myrrh-scented mushroom cloud. An old woman with dark skin and the scarred cheeks of a former slave brought in a coffeepot and a dish of dates. The guests watched on as Rania’s mother and her aunt each accepted a small porcelain cup. Aunt Muna sipped first. She swallowed, cleared her throat.
“What a lovely home you have.” She sipped a second time and smiled at the new mother. “How are you faring, dear? You look well, alhamdulillah.”
And so began the ritual compliments, the round of questions and answers, the drinking of coffee, the snacking on dried fruit and nuts, a few jokes, and some gossip. In the plastic bathtub, the baby snored, its top lip quivering and pink. Thick kohl lined its eyes to keep evil spirits away.
Rania didn’t know if the new mother had other children, but if she did, they would have been dispatched to stay with relatives. In general, children weren’t welcome at these visits. They woke the baby and knocked over coffee cups. They messed about with the guests’ sandals, took them outside and pretended they were swords, or set them sailing on the stream like tiny canoes. Rania was permitted only because she was an emissary of the sheikh.
As the maid refilled the coffee cups, Rania snuck toward a smaller room off the side of the sitting area. Often the hosts arranged for a woman to paint henna on guests’ hands or to sell clothes or pots and pans. This time they’d hired a perfume vendor. The middle-aged merchant was plump as a fig, nestled amid her stock of jewel-colored vials. Pale twigs of arak lay in neat rows beside cones of incense. She eyed Rania’s frilly dress.
“You must be from the sheikh’s family?”
Rania nodded.
“Come here, dear.” The woman hooked her finger. “Come smell my perfumes.”
“I don’t care much about the smell,” said Rania. “All I want is a red bottle and a blue one too.”
The woman cocked a brow.
“You want frankincense? And jasmine too?”
“As long as one bottle is red, and the other blue.”
“I’m at your command.” The woman showed her long teeth. “Now tell me, how much money did your mother give you?”
A few minutes later, perfume in hand, Rania crept out the back door. She wandered past rows of okra, cucumber, and eggplant. Hens clucked in a coop. Drawn by the burble of the swift-flowing stream, Rania slipped out the back gate. She strolled toward the bank, rolling the vials back and forth: red in one hand, blue in the other. Rays of light hit the curve of colored glass and emerged from the other side bright as cloth dying in a vat. She raised her hands and cast red and blue stripes across the fine sand.
Rania propped one hand on top of the other. The two beams merged into one thick band of purple. She wiggled the red vial and kept the blue still, creating a pulsing purple stripe with a rippling ruby frill. It reminded Rania of an exotic sea snake or an eel, like the one she’d spied on her ninth birthday poking from the rocks of the Basra corniche.
That was a big day, her ninth birthday. Her father had taken her and her mother to eat ice cream at the Sheraton Hotel. Then he’d hired a man at the pier to take them to the playground on Sinbad Island in the middle of the Shatt al-Arab river. Her father spent the fifteen-minute journey reciting Sinbad’s adventures battling serpents and devil birdmen. Meanwhile, Rania had hung over the side of the boat and searched for more neon-striped eels.
A bead of sweat ran down her back, and she crept under the shelter of the fat palm tree. Below her, the stream frothed and hissed. She raised the red vial to one eye and the blue to the other and made bicolor binoculars. Then Huda swept into view, mid-river, crouched on the pointy-beaked bow of the mashoof.
Huda’s grandmother sat in the middle of the skiff, a squat figure enrobed in black. Huda’s ten-year-old brother, Mustafa, stood at the stern, steering the vessel with a punting reed thicker than Rania’s arm. Whittled to a point, it doubled as a spear for hunting ducks or dark-scaled bunni fish.
The stream was running high and the current twisted like a startled snake through sand. Mustafa leaned his weight on the punt. The canoe’s nose turned, and the vessel cut a foaming line to the bank. Huda leaped from the bow, her long apricot dress fluttering behind her like a goldfish tail. She landed with a thud, and her bare feet sunk into the sand. Mustafa followed and the two children hauled the mashoof onto the bank beside the other skiffs.
Huda’s grandmother passed the girl a brightly woven saddlebag. Mustafa held the boat steady as she climbed from the vessel, one short, plump limb after the other. She reminded Rania of a black-robed teddy bear. The old woman straightened the purple dress she wore under her abaya and adjusted her scarf over her hair. She stepped into slippers that Huda had removed from the saddle bag, then waddled toward the women’s quarters.
Once his grandmother left, Mustafa raised the sharp end of his punt.
“I spotted a pheasant’s nest back up river.” He looked in his sister’s direction, but Rania had the feeling he wanted her to hear too. “I’m going to get us a bird for dinner.”
“Can I come?” said Huda.
“Girls don’t hunt.” Mustafa puffed out his chest. “It’s a man’s job.”
Huda scowled at his back as he waded north along the narrow bank. She peeked at Rania from the corner of her eye.
“You’re the sheikh’s granddaughter, right?”
Rania smoothed her starched dress.
“And who are you?”
“The fortune-teller’s granddaughter. Of course.” Huda wedged her hands on her hips. “Didn’t you recognize my jaddah? She visits the sheikh’s home twice a month, sometimes more.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.” Huda picked a pebble from the bank and hurled it into the water. “Haven’t you ever noticed the henna on your jaddah’s temples?”
“The spirals?”
“The sheikha suffers terrible headaches, right? Well, my jaddah cures them with henna and special prayers. She knows how to ward off the evil eye and how to make potions for stomachaches and broken hearts. She can read coffee grounds too.”
“My father says fortune-tellers trade in ignorance.”
Huda snorted.
“Well, he is a man. They don’t know everything.”
“If your father hears you talk like that, he’ll beat you for sure.”
Huda eyed her evenly.
“My father is dead.”
“Oh,” mumbled Rania. “I’m sorry.”
Huda shrugged.
“He died when I was a baby. I have two brothers though. Of course, they would have to catch me to beat me, and I am too fast for them.” She tossed another pebble in the stream. “I’ll show you. Come on, let’s race.”
“I better not . . .”
“Afraid I’ll beat you?”
“Of course not,” lied Rania. Huda was a village girl. They were always fast.
“Then to the chicken coop and back. Let’s go!”
The two girls sprinted to the coop and back, then twice ran a looping circle around the house. Huda outran Rania, but not by much. The girls collapsed on the riverbank, panting, skinny legs splayed out before them. Huda’s bare soles were painted red. Rania eyed them curiously.
“Did your grandmother cast a spell to make you so fast?”
“No, silly. The henna cures any cuts on my feet. Don’t you know anything?”
Rania tossed her hair.
“I know how to add and subtract. I can do my times table. I can count to one hundred in English and French. I can read and paint and draw. Can you?”
“Well, I can draw. . . .” Huda picked up a stick and dragged it through the sand. “See?”
“What is that? A crow?”
“It’s my water buffalo! Can’t you see his horns?”
“They look like wings to me.” Rania stuck her hand in her pocket and removed the tiny perfume bottles. “Here. Hold these to the sun.”
The tw
o girls took turns shining red and blue light on the sand, then Rania uncorked the vials, and the girls daubed themselves with jasmine and frankincense.
“These are my magic potions,” boasted Rania. “Strong enough to defeat even the smell of that stinky chicken coop. They cost me five dinar.”
“Five dinar? You paid five dinar for perfume?”
“It’s not so much.”
Huda’s eyes widened. She rifled through the pockets of her dress.
“I have magic too. I can tell the future. Want to see?”
She opened her fist, revealing a jumble of tiny bones, a seashell, and a few glass beads.
“These are my tools.” She inflated her chest. Rania saw the resemblance to her brother in her round face. “My jaddah is teaching me all sorts of things, like how to read bones and coffee grounds. If I see a peacock in the grounds it’s good news for the future. Rats are bad. I would be inside now, helping her, but you know kids like me aren’t welcome at the birth visits. Not that I mind. It’s so boring.”
“My whole life is taken up by these visits,” grumbled Rania. “I feel like I’ll never be free.”
“Hah!” Huda sat up straight. “Let’s see.” She cupped her tiny talismans in her hands and tossed them onto the sand. “Wait, that’s what my jaddah says. Give me time to look. When I am ready, I will tell you what I see.”
The two girls were on their hands and knees, charting the future in wishbones and shards of shiny oyster shell when Rania’s mother emerged from the house.
“My mother is going to Baghdad for a month,” whispered Rania. Overhead, a white-tailed hawk turned circles in the sky. “I will stay at my grandmother’s house. Come find me when your jaddah visits next.”
* * *
High above Basil’s garden, a hungry hawk prowled the sky, as if it had flown out of Rania’s memory and taken root in the present.
“So who is this woman?” demanded Basil. Rania knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with tales of birds and boats and village girls with oyster shells.
“Her brothers were killed in the uprising,” she said. “She knows I used to be involved with the opposition. She thinks I influenced her brothers to rise up.”
“Do I know these men?”
She shook her head. “Mustafa and Ali were village boys.”
He eyed her curiously. “Village boys?”
Rania dragged her hands down her face. Of all the memories that had come back to her, the one that hurt the most was of the last time she saw Mustafa. He was in the hallway of her apartment in Basra, his face lit by yellow lamplight. A photo of her dead husband hung in a frame on the wall. To Rania, it seemed he was watching them: his widow and the village man, alone, at night. Out in the street, gunfire had crackled and spat. A helicopter thudded overhead. More than ten years later, Rania could still recall how her heart kept time with the thwack, thwack, thwack of its blades.
“Ten thousand men died during the uprising,” said Basil. “Why does this woman blame you? What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing.” Rania stared at her feet, barely daring to breathe. “Clearly fear has driven Huda mad. She’s so desperate to save her son, she’ll turn me in if she doesn’t get what she wants.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“A passport for her son and an exit visa. She thinks the opposition can get it for her.”
“What opposition?” spluttered Basil.
“You can’t have lost all of your contacts. There must be someone.”
“Who? Tell me, who?” Basil threw his hands toward the sky. “Rami was killed. Raed was executed. Sami and Kareem fled and never came back. Naseem disappeared in Abu Ghraib.”
He drooped like a marionette with severed strings.
“If your friend thinks the opposition can save her, she’s living in a fantasy.”
“If we don’t give her what she asks, both of us will suffer.”
Basil’s eyes snapped toward her.
“What do you mean, both of us?”
“You know the mukhabarat and the lengths they go to.” Rania dug her fingers into her scalp but that wasn’t enough to banish the visions of power tools, branding irons, and fizzing electrical cables.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. “I lack the strength of a martyr; I don’t have the courage of Imam Husayn. I wish it weren’t so, but I know in the end the mukhabarat would find a way to break me. And then I’d have to give them names.”
The wind dragged a tear across her cheek.
“I’m sorry, Basil, but if you don’t help me, one of those names will be yours.”
* * *
On the way back from Basil’s farm, on the highway between Ramadi and Fallujah, a road train appeared in Rania’s rearview mirror. She watched it grow: an oil-stained truck dragging two grimy trailers. She steered her shuddering Volvo toward the edge of the blacktop. Burnt-out cars sprawled on the shoulder of the desert, their twisted chassis like dinosaur skeletons protruding from an archaeological dig.
The road-train soon caught the old Volvo and pulled out to overtake. As Rania battled the pull of its slipstream, her muscles knotted all the way up her spine. Yet even when the tanker sped on ahead, Rania remained hunched over the wheel, shoulders aching, while shrapnel from her past exploded all around. She wondered, Was Basil still out by the grape arbor, cursing her name? Or was he already seeking out his long lost contacts in the opposition?
Rania rolled her aching neck from side to side but her muscles stayed tight as a bow. Dead men’s faces flashed before her eyes. She tried to empty her mind, told herself that mourning the past was a luxury she couldn’t afford. A poisonous treat. When another road train appeared in her rearview mirror, she was glad for the distraction.
As she sped on, Rania caught an occasional glimpse of the Euphrates River, wending like a green ribbon through the Mesopotamian floodplains. Mostly it was scrubby desert, but every now and then she passed fields of rolling wheat, just like in the old days of picnics and swimming parties. The Volvo clattered past a sign pointing the way to the ancient ziggurat of Aqar Quf. The mud-brick pyramid was built three millennia ago to honor the ancient gods. Many times, invading forces had hacked at its crumbling sides, but it remained over 150 feet tall, weathered into the head of a great stallion overlooking the wide desert.
If she was a loyal Iraqi, Rania would have kept Aqar Quf and the glories of Mesopotamia in mind, but on the inky highway, returning from Basil’s farm, she allowed herself to revisit Iraq’s other history. The history absent from school textbooks. The unspeakable, unprintable, unthinkable past. The damage done by their own. She sucked it up. Swallowed it down. Over and over, a bulimic on a sorrowful binge.
Rania’s eyes were veined and swollen by the time she reached the first of the sandbagged machine-gun nests on the outskirts of Baghdad. She removed her ID card from the glove box and rested it on her lap. It took two hours to negotiate the multiple checkpoints. The process required everything she had: her languid smile and cooing voice, her family name, her charm. At the third checkpoint, a young man with oil-black eyes took the last of the money she’d earned selling her father’s books.
By the time she turned off the smooth highway and onto the potholed backstreets, Rania was hollow as a drum. The Volvo puttered past concrete apartment blocks, moldering mansions, and graceful mosques, until, finally, Rania pulled up outside her gate. As she slid her key in the gate, insects turned frantic circles under the streetlight. Once inside, she secured the latches and bolts behind her. Only then did she notice the front door was ajar.
“Hello?” Rania’s voice wobbled in the gloom.
She pushed the door wider. At the far end of the hallway, yellow light leaked from the kitchen.
“There’s nothing worth stealing,” she cried. “Unless you want a painting for your wall.”
The kitchen door creaked. A shadow flickered, then morphed into flesh.
“Hello, Mother.” Hanan extended her arms. “Are you going to welcome
me home?”
CHAPTER 12
Huda’s eyes watered as she waited on the bench in Abu Nasser’s photography studio. Khalid pressed his nose into her shoulder.
“The smell from the darkroom is worse than rotten eggs,” he muttered. “Almost as bad as Bakr’s farts after a lunch of lentil stew.”
“Hush!” Huda pinched his arm. “Abu Nasser may have lost all sense of smell, but he’s not deaf.” She leaned close to Khalid’s ear. “And remind me never to serve Bakr lentils.”
She gazed at the photos that filled Abu Nasser’s walls. Among the obligatory portraits of the president, there were families with baby girls in frilly frocks and boys in tiny bow ties. A soccer team held aloft a gleaming trophy. A folk band hugged lutes and goatskin drums. But mostly there were wedding shots: grooms and young brides with henna-painted hands and trepidation twinkling in their eyes.
A mirror hung on the wall for Abu Nasser’s clients to check their hair and makeup. The spotty glass caught the reflection of Khalid lounging against Huda’s side, like a young pasha resting on a plump cushion. Another wave of vinegary gas seeped from the darkroom. Khalid wrinkled his nose and scrunched his eyes, and for a moment Huda imagined she saw Mustafa in the cloudy mirror, chasing her along the riverbank with the rotting carcass of a freshwater crab.
“Perhaps Abu Nasser has a side business in pickled onions,” she whispered.
“Or maybe he keeps camels back there.” Khalid grinned. “Camels that eat lentil stew.”
Huda went to pinch his arm. Instead, she tickled his ribs.
“How long will this take?” He wriggled away. “I’m supposed to play soccer with Bakr.”
Before Huda could answer, Abu Nasser hurried from the darkroom.
“Sorry for the wait.” The old photographer herded Khalid to a carpeted stage at the far end of the studio. “Can I interest you in adding one of my deluxe settings?”
He dragged a floor-to-ceiling backdrop of alpine mountains behind the stage.
“Oh, no,” said Huda. “That won’t do.”
“If you don’t like Mother Nature, I have plenty more.” The old photographer unveiled a vista of the Eiffel Tower. Next came Piccadilly Circus, and then the Roman Colosseum.
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