by Alia Mamdouh
This was Aunt Farida’s day. She would put into the palm leaf bag a bottle of water, some pears, a small melon, the black pumice stone, a box of depilatory cream, the black glove, her blue perfume bottle, clean clothes, and a cake of cardamom perfumed soap.
Your grandmother whose asthma had troubled her lately, your mother, ill in her chest, and Adil, who had grown up a little, would all stay at home. The bath at home was old and broken down, but was being repaired. Your father painted it first, replaced the old punctured barrel and paved the floor with new brown cement. He used to go in first and your grandmother would be the last to leave it.
Your aunt was the only one to frequent the public bath. The taste of the journey from the house to the bath, walking through the alleys, calling out to friends encountered by chance, scrutinizing new faces, and before this, leaving the house. We spent the whole day there. We boiled eggs and potatoes, fried kebabs, and grilled onions, then covered the food with flat, warm loaves of bread and packed it all into paper bags. The day Thursday arrived, I held my breath, my skin peeled there, and my blood ran clear. There I was devoured by the muscles of my aunts, the sisters of my father and mother: Najia, Farida, one-eyed La’iqa, and Umm Satturi, opening their layers of pores and putting me in the trap. I stumbled about amidst the tons of flesh and breasts, bellies and buttocks.
The bath in the Safina district was far from us, in the other neighborhood. We went through alleys and emerged in streets. We turned to the right and then to the left, and from the beginning of the street came the smells of women and children, mothers and grandmothers. Their cloaks fluttered, they were blooming and alert, their cheeks were flushed, and no matter where you looked they all busily chewed gum. Women came and went. Their heads were covered, their feet were blistered, and their nail polish was cracked. And you could scarcely hear their voices.
In front of the great door, painted a dark gray, the boys played marbles. Black wooden benches were set in the four corners. Warm breezes blew from inside, and a tall woman in her fifties, slender and ugly, was standing in front of a wooden partition. Her chest was bare, and her breasts were like two withered pears. A damp shawl was pulled around her middle. Her hair was long and hung in her face. She was shouting at everyone.
“You want someone to rub your back or not? Put your things down! How many of you are there? Five? Five costs thirty fils.”
Your aunt stripped off your clothes; she was in her underclothes. She looked to the right and the left. Your aunts came in, one after the other, and languidly undressed. Everyone looked at everyone else. You saw everything here seized by the fever of these features: eyes without kohl, cheeks without cerise, slack lips, and yet flawless bodies. Skulls and bones.
The broad meters of the bath became a source of play and activity.
The first place was not very warm. Children and women dried their hair and limbs. Iraqi style noisy commotion, the drone of aged women talking. Women massaged one another. When we went into the second room, the clouds of vapor were rising. Aunt Najia’s voice:
“Listen, Farida, I can’t walk inside. I can’t catch my breath—I can’t breathe. We’re better off staying here.” Aunt La’iqa answered: “Go on ahead. As soon as you’re there you feel numb. The steam will absorb the cold and damp.”
Umm Suturi walked ahead of everyone. She knew the way, and she knew everyone: Aunt Najia’s neighbor, Aunt La’iqa’s friend, the neighborhood seamstress who charged little. She sewed men’s dishdashas and pajamas, which they bought for circumcisions, funerals, and weddings when they would trill and click their fingErs in celebration.
Aunt Farida did not know what to decide. She was the youngest of all, eighteen years old. The women’s eyes scanned her body attentively.
“Where is Huda? Come here—even in this fire you’ll make friends!”
There you saw the whisper of skin soaked with steam, water, and perspiration. The smell of armpits and buttocks, of urine, mutters, and grunts escaping their lips, and shouts across the water barrel.
Everything passed before you: hands took you and cuddled you between their legs, calling the names of everyone you know, undoing your braids. You were showered and soaked, and bowls of hot water were poured over you, on your head, over your delicate frame. You wailed: from there you sent the first speech recorded with anger, you cursed, paused, sniffed, paused, and asked.
You looked with loathing at all these details. Women, all naked, as if they had just been raped or tortured. They laid old towels over the low wooden stools and squatted on them. The floor of the bath was as hot as a grill, and they cried out to one another and shrieked, and brawled with one another. There were no partitions in Iraqi baths, the borders were open, and the one language in which everyone conversed was physical touch. As if they had all been detained beyond the sky and today they had descended to the floor of the bath. There I made my first discoveries and won my first arguments, and shouted “No, no” among the long “Yeses” you heard from everyone else. Only there you were given the bloody title of Huda, a flaming fire.
I slipped away from them all, glided between their legs, and the cakes of soap pushed me far, and I landed in the lap of one woman, her face covered with soap lather. She shrieked, “God Almighty, God damn you and damn the bloody day you were born!”
I hid the cakes of soap in the big buckets, dunked the bowls into the hot water and poured it over their heads, burning their scalps and skin. I pissed in the great tank. I clamped some of the children between my legs; I kept this one away from that one and began to massage their heads with the pumice stone until they were bloody. Before the huge quantities of clean, hot water I observed my first innocence and united with it, drew on it with a pencil and confessed: as if I were saved from the flood today.
My resistance ripened on the oil fire and the wood logs, blazing and transforming into a creature I have just come to know; Huda, covered with sin, affliction, and ruin, was dragged like an animal to complete the first blessing; and after I am left for a short while between the waters; the offspring of Iraqi women reach the perfection of their beauty.
Umm Suturi emptied the bowls of hot water over my head, and soap went from hand to hand among my aunts. They rubbed and twisted my braids. I died among these women’s fingers; my eyes were blinded by the soap lather. Aunt Najia clutched my thigh as if she were holding a chicken leg. My aunt sighed and leaned over her knee, her breasts putting me into a stupor. The soap, steam, and all that noise; I was an egg thrown onto the ocean. I was moved from one lap to another and I see.
There, crying, wailing, and kicking were useless. After a round of washing, you were left alone and free. They stuck their tongues in your ear and sucked out the water left there. They braided your hair into ponytails, and you watched them all. The steam at the end got into your eyes, ears, and mouths.
Laugh and look well: the hair on the limbs is delicate, fine, coarse, long, short, plucked out. Then all these limbs descended at once and removed their underclothes. You gaped at that continent of femininity. The black bag sewn with big stitches in white thread first appeared on their backs. Every woman turned her back to her neighbor, and every one who let down more coils of dirt than the other proved her strength and youth.
You turned around with them when they stood. Their height blocked the walls, which were spattered with waterdrops. Sweat stimulated the appetite to drink water and eat fruit. The talk was of neighbors, children, and husbands. Rachel, the Jewess, whose second son was aborted at the hand of Rasmiya—the “needle lady,” the midwife. There were no great scandals in our street, nor any great abominations in the houses. The men intensified their glands in obedience to women, and the women waited for their husbands on the benches, on the iron beds, on the ground, on high roofs, half asleep, half dead, half . . . half.
Your aunt hurried behind you. She wanted you to stand in front of her:
“I swear to God I’ll kill you, may God take you and give me a break!”
Aunt Najia answe
red her: “Come here—I’ll finish washing you.”
I slowed down, and stood among them. All the vapors and odors made me dizzy. Aunt Najia, standing near me, released a fart. I raised my head toward her and laughed loudly. Suddenly she struck me on the face with the bag: “Laugh, you impudent thing. Just wait, I’ll teach you.”
She lifted me up as if I were as light as a punctured ball. I was squeezed by her arms; she began scrubbing my forearm, panting, “Why do you make me smack you? Aren’t you afraid of anyone? God Almighty. Don’t you get tired?” She slid down to my belly and thigh. “She’s weak, like her mother, like she’s eating on credit.”
She curled me up between her thighs. Her hair was loose, long, and wet, sparse and fine. She did not see very well; her eyelashes had fallen out, and her eyelids were swollen.
You gave in and slept. Your skin was now vacant, emptied of its secrets; filth too was a secret. Thus far death had not come to any of you. Until you were nine you did not know what death meant to you.
All the people you knew and loved were alive, in front of you: your brother, your mother, your father, your grandmother, and the neighbors’ children. Mahmoud, who moved to middle school, you used to call him Mahmoud Snotnose. He used to chase you and try to hit you, and when you ended up face to face you laughed at him, and he wiped his nose with the hem of his dishdasha. The mothers of your friends were still alive, and their fathers too. You did not know what death would do if it came.
On religious holidays, you all went to the cemetery behind the mosque. You visited the grave of your great-grandfather. Your grandmother stood before it; she did not cry, nor did she wail or smite herself in grief. She murmured verses from the Qur’an, her voice hovering over the dust.
She read aloud, and her voice rang out, painfully sharp. It floated over the expanse of the cemetery, moving the women to sob. You used to watch her as she filled your head with the dark side of death, as if she were opening up all the holes in all the heads, land, and souls. There she used to exercise, standing at her medium height, her slenderness, her clean cloak, her heavenly face: how did the wing of life droop to death?
When your aunt called to you, “God take you,” she did not go into details. “Take you” perhaps pushes you beyond death, and you begin to ascend. Your height, the muscles of your thighs strengthened, and your chest began to thump from within—your heart, too, wanted to ascend.
You did not know what had happened to you. You saw yourself on a wooden bench in the huge, cold dressing room, Umm Suturi was over your head blowing warm, foul breath on you from her big mouth, her thick lips murmuring a few verses from the Qur’an. You knew it was the Sura of Ya Sin, which you knew by heart. She kept breathing on you and started to pull your hair, smacking you gently and rapidly on the temples. She rubbed your chest, the flesh of her creased belly touching your belly, leaving her lower half tightly wrapped in a sarong of delicate Indian material. Her soft breasts brushed against your inflamed cheeks.
She dressed you quickly, squeezed your hair dry, draped you in large towels and put another under your head. You stayed that way until everyone left. You slept like the dead. From there, you conjured up the bodies, the thighs, breasts, braids, basins of hot water, and the soap lather. You entered all of them in that hell and began your first resurrection. You invited them to shriek at one another, to leap about, to be consumed by fire. Their voices cried to the heavens. You opened no window for them, you read them no sura of the Qur’an. That was your place. You became sovereignty in all its magnificence and power. You did not intervene or even appear; you did not threaten or menace. You let them plunge into one another. You cut off the electric current, you scattered snakes in the baths, tore the clothes out of their shiny bags, and smeared them with mud or buried them in cesspools. There, my virginity shone. When I reached this point in my sleep, Aunt Farida was by my head, her complexion peach-hued, her nose shiny, her eyebrows drawn in kohl, her eyes exploring the sleeping girl. She sighed and gasped, leaving me to sit nearby with a white towel around her bosom and hanging to her thighs. Her head was tense, and I did not move—it was as if I was nailed down. I opened and closed my eyes, looking at the water drops on her silken back. I swallowed. Aunt La’iqa went over to Aunt Farida, plump and flabby, her belly like a barrel and her thighs rubbed smooth with fat: her skin was a waxy yellow color, and the hair on her limbs was blonde. She did not cover her body: “I’m dying of thirst. Where is the water?” She leaned over and took out a bottle of water and some pears. Umm Suturi and Aunt Najia were in front of me. The voice of that aunt shrieked in my ear: “Look at this poor animal—she’s still asleep! I hope she never wakes up!”
She looked aside at Aunt Farida, who had begun to put her clothes on: “God guide her. She’s still young.”
“No,” was Aunt La’iqa’s answer. “She has been impossible from the day she was born. Remember when we were giving her khishkhash and she wasn’t yet forty days old. God help us when she comes of age! Marry her off quickly, before she disgraces us.”
Amidst the steam and the sounds of drinking Umm Suturi’s gruff voice sounded: “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 neighborhood. 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 neighborhood 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 colored beads we had stolen from our grandmothers and fathers, red and yellow, blue, and black beads. A few meters 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 neighbors’ 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 arrived home 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 color of stale beets. 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 neighborhood; 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.