by Alia Mamdouh
He wore the high woolen sidara, which was similar to a garrison cap, on his head and a single star on his shoulder. His khaki uniform showed off his slimness and height, and his high black boots were always shiny—he avoided the rubbish and puddles of filth. He walked like a peacock. He was graceful and good-looking and brown-skinned, and his brown eyes were wide, piercing, and reckless. His nose was long and high like the noses of the fathers in the other streets. His lips were narrow and prim and always red. He had high cheekbones, and his hair was the color of old silver: fine, smooth, and combed back.
Before he arrived, my grandmother covered us with blankets and a recitation of the Sura of Ya Sin. When he asked about us, she answered him, “Let the little dears sleep.”
4
The top was thrown in a ditch. My father trampled the mud houses. The beads were scattered from my waist and strewn in the ditches and corners. He trampled the rest underfoot. The girls stumbled confusedly as far as their houses. The boys took shelter behind the telegraph poles. Adil and I crouched between his arms, poisoned by the fury he exhaled from his pores. His voice rang out, reaching the farthest houses. He threw us in the middle of the house: “The little bitch dances and sings in the street and the boys hug her! I don’t know what’s going on behind my back!”
My mother stood in the doorway of her room, terrified. She coughed and pounded her chest, noiselessly. My grandmother and my father’s sister came out of the room and stood in front of him. Like a sick bird, Adil clung to my mother’s clothing, and I got up and stood up, between his kicks. I grabbed my father by his shiny boot and used it to crouch between his legs as he moved me around, grabbing me on one side and pushing me in the other. The floor of the house received me. I was trapped by his voice, which came at me like bullets.
Whenever we saw him coming or leaving he would change from being the image of a father to a mighty god. We found the only way he relaxed completely was when someone was in front of him. It was always me. I provided an outlet for his talents, from his uniform to his lethal weapon, to his boots, which abolished all dreams: “No, Daddy, no, please God, just this once.”
He did not frighten me the way he frightened Adil and my mother. At moments like these my brother went mute, not even breathing. He peed himself, and when my father heard the sound of his peeing he roared with laughter. He left me for good, as if there was nothing wrong after all. He went to Adil, lifted him up high like a doll, and threw him up in the air and caught him, the drops of urine flying on to his hair and the tiles. My grandmother prayed and breathed on everyone.
When your father saw her, he changed; he calmed down. He loved and honored her, and weakened in her presence. His sister too was scared of him. She went into her room, muttering, “If he knew how to raise children, he’d have raised himself first.”
My mother was still standing there. I do not know who supplied my grandmother with all her authority, God alone, perhaps, or else she had assembled it all in her own special way. Adil was still flying up and down like one of his paper kites. My father’s voice changed: “Look, the little devil is the only one who’s not afraid. That’s my little Adouli, his father’s son!”
I was thrown on the floor, moaning but not crying. My hair was disheveled, the ribbons falling out, my braids undone. I looked at my leg and rubbed it with my hand, and gazed at the squares of cheap tile. This one was a dirty blue; that one, a lusterless white. I calculated the number of tiles. I saw the anthills and the salty soil surrounding those little caverns. The floor surface was cold and damp. The shining boots stopped. Now Adil was in front of me and came to me and, burying his chest against me, he burst into tears. I tousled his hair and looked at his locks. I hugged him and he trembled, then broke into a new burst of crying. We cried together, giving it our whole voices, and my father pulled at me again.
“Be quiet. I’ll get the belt and break your ribs.”
He pulled Adil away and lifted him up, kissed him, and gave him five fils. He approached me, tugged at my hair, and lifted my head to face him. He took my hand and gave me five coins as well.
“Sweetheart, go and comb your hair.”
Whenever his voice softened, the sound of my crying got louder. He pinched my cheek.
“God, if you don’t be quiet—”
He kicked and slapped me. “This girl is a strange one. Does she want me to plead with her?”
Adil pulled me and got between us. My grandmother had not said a word. That was her; it was her way of pacifying him. My mother, in the back, took my father’s attack in silence, a mythological creature stripped of all her roles.
Adil and I went into the bathroom. My father went into his room, his voice still ringing with every form of vituperation.
Adil shook my arm. “Huda, take this money as well, just be quiet.”
I pushed him and he fell before me, got up quickly and stood in my face, pleading: “Huda, Daddy will be asleep soon, and we’ll go to the blind woman, Umm Aziz, and we’ll buy hot chickpeas and sweets.”
I gasped and blew my nose. My grandmother was behind us. She stroked my hair and tilted my head to face her. I looked into her eyes, then buried my head in her concave stomach and hugged her round the waist. “Granny, what have I done? Why didn’t Firdaw’s father hit her for playing in the street? Why my daddy, why?”
This grandmother was the center of the circle. I do not know where she concealed her strength. When she walked her footsteps were light and hardly audible. When she spoke, her voice was clothed in caution and patience, and when she was silent everyone was bewildered by her unannounced plans. She was strong without showing signs of it, mighty without raising her voice, beautiful without finery. She was beautiful from her modest hem to her silver braids. She was slim, of medium height, a narrow black band round her head, whose ends dangled by her thin braids. She was light-skinned. I never saw anyone with a white complexion like hers. It was a white between bubbly milk and thick cream. Her eyes were gray with dark blue, wild green, and pure honey-colored rays.
When we saw her in the morning as we got ready for school, they were honey-colored, and by the time we came home in the afternoon they were blue. But at night they were gray.
She was a well-organized woman; she loved justice and set great store by it. She rebuked my father and scolded him behind our backs, suddenly setting upon him, taking all her time, scattering him and tearing him apart, exposing him anew to us. She dazzled us every time she told us, in a clear, distant voice, as if coming from an abandoned cellar, a story of my father which she had never told before. She wiped the dust from the photo album and opened it. At the beginning was a picture of our venerable, terrifying, handsome, harsh, skeptical grandfather, who was in love with her, was jealous, and who never once in his life told her “I love you.” He wore a tasseled fez and went to work in an office in Ali al-Gharbi, a village on the Tigris River. He walked around with a superior air, like an Ottoman pasha. When he went to work everyone scuttled out of his way.
Her fingers rebraided my hair. I was sitting on the carpet in our room. I turned my back to her, and she enclosed me between her skinny thighs: “Relax a little. You keep moving. Are you sitting on a fire or something?”
Adil was in front of us, holding the basin of water in which my grandmother was soaking the wide wooden comb. She began to comb my hair and talk: “Your father fell on his head. His horse threw him while he was training—this was in Ali al-Gharbi—with your grandfather. The weather was fine, and it was a new horse.
“He used to take him out every day, before sunrise, and have him lead the horse and ride him. The first day he went, and then the second, and the third. For two weeks he trained and came back. He had changed, I do not know how, but he was different. His flesh had become firm, his voice had changed—he was like a beast of prey. His father sent him out at night and he wasn’t afraid.”
I interrupted: “Granny, you mean if a boy trains on a horse he becomes nice looking?”
“Not just n
ice looking! He becomes a man!”
“And if a girl trains on a horse will she become more beautiful?”
“No, a girl’s beauty is in her silence and modesty. Do you want to ride horses as well?”
“Where are the horses now? I get nothing every day but beating, and having my hair pulled.”
“What happened then?” Adil interrupted.
I looked into his eyes. He was smiling, and I pushed him with my hand. The water basin spilled on his clothes and the floor. He did not get angry, but replied, “Stop asking so many questions.”
“Fine. Where were we?”
“My father was like a lion,” was Adil’s prompt response.
She sighed a little and went on.
“He was not afraid. He was a little man. When he came back at night his eyes were still watching the sky. When the moon rose and the sun went down. He said the sky had many gates, all of which were open to him, and that only he could count them. He predicted so many strange things.”
Adil interrupted: “What does ‘predict’ mean?”
“Imagine! You don’t know?” I said. “Predicting means telling the future.”
“Fine, my little Adouli, the sky was open, and he could read everything written there. He said your grandfather would die of drowning, and believe it or not—two years later the ship sank with six employees on board, in Basra. He said he would marry several times—he said that when I was running after him—I wanted to beat him. Oh, those days are gone. Only misery is left.” Her voice changed and trailed off, to the Shatt al-Arab, and her first nights of watching over her son. She took the ribbon from Adil’s hand and continued: “He was fifteen, and the things he said frightened even me. I began to be afraid of him, but the third week they brought him carried on their shoulders. He was unconscious. He was sallow, stricken, like someone shocked by electricity, neither sleeping nor dead. There was a little wound on the top of his head—the skin was broken and the flesh had opened, but there was not a single drop of blood coming out of it. He was different from that day onward. He entered a new phase. He was even scared of his own shadow. You know your father married before your mother; his first wife was with him a year and then died in childbirth, she and her son.”
I asked her: “How did that happen? I don’t understand you. You mean he went mad?”
She yanked my hair sharply.
“Oh, if only someone would cut off that gabby tongue of yours. No, he changed when his wife died, he changed completely. He used to stand around and lecture people, and curse the Regent and the English.
“And he got used to drinking alcohol. At first he drank secretly—he was afraid I’d find out and get cross with him. When I found out, he began to drink in his room or in the bar nearby. At night, the local men brought him home to the house.”
Adil moved off a little, leaning against the wall in front of us. My grandmother took the second ribbon and grasped my hair, and in a tone of voice I had not heard before, Adil asked: “Who gave him the pistol?”
“I asked him to enroll in the police academy. It only takes a few years, and they graduate you a police commissioner, then they promote you to assistant police director. It took him a while to finish middle school. He was failing only the easy classes. Adouli, dear, everyone who goes to the police academy must have a pistol. Huda, sweetheart—”
She took my head and turned it toward her. She held my face in her palms and looked into my eyes.
“He is ill, and your mother is ill. We are all ill. You hear the way your mother coughs at night and spits blood. God forbid if—God forgive my tongue!—I’m not afraid of death, God created us and he takes us back. But there is no longer any patience. Your mother will travel to Syria for a little rest and breathe some good air. Your father’s sister is still young. We are all waiting for Munir Effendi. Munir’s father died and left him the farms and shops, and he’s starting to fritter away the money. He has no brothers or sisters. He is lazy and idle, and the girl cannot marry a stranger. You and Adil are the apple of my eye—you’re the children of that dear sweet woman who has never said an unkind word. Poor thing, Iqbal!”
She hugged me, her arms tight around me. I kissed her and hugged her, burying my head beneath her ribs. I felt her belly, her soft breasts, and her long, narrow neck. I raised my face to her calm, sorrowful, inspired one, which never scolded when I was bad, but which was always responsive when I was sorry.
She tamed us one after the other, without our shedding a single drop of blood. She shared her thoughts with everyone, trained us without threats and took us to her bosom without menace. She prayed over us when we were ill, and fetched us from the end of the road if we ran away. She stood guard at the gates to our souls when we erred. She changed us with every passing hour. She did not interrogate or cross-examine us, or get defeated by our youthful misdeeds. She always said: “If you do a good deed for someone, don’t talk about it. No matter what happens here at home, tell people, ‘We don’t know.’ If someone tells you his secret, don’t ever repeat it. A secret is like a treasure, and has to be hidden in a well.”
And so on and on. When she went to the market, all the shopowners opened up their secret rooms and new sacks of merchandise. They gave her the finest grains and the freshest vegetables, the whitest sugar, the purest rice and shelled lentils. They put all her groceries in clean bags and sent them after her. She did not have to pay the price of all she bought, nor did they put her name on their list.
She paid on the first of every month. She was never late, and never haggled or procrastinated. She hated debt: “God does not want any of us in debt to another. Debt shortens your life and blinds you.” Nestling up to her I mixed her good with my evil.
I gave voice to all my sorrows and dreams, and never feared any punishment from her.
I might disguise myself in other clothes, but to her my bones did not lie; my soul could not deceive, and my head would not bow.
“Dear Huda, she just kisses you, and has never once told us ‘I love you.’”
“No one knows my Huda as I do. God keep you and keep evil far away from you. Now come iron my clothes—tomorrow I’m going to the General Retirement Directorate.”
I did not know what this end of the month would bring. But my grandmother, my father’s sister, and my father knew very well. My grandmother dressed up in her best clothes and combed her hair carefully. We brought her a large basin of hot water and the wide wooden comb that she pulled through her fine, flowing locks.
“Every day a hair falls out of my head. That’s all because of sorrow.” She switched her eyeglasses with the old black round frames for her gold-rimmed ones. We knew all these rituals from previous days. Everything was familiar; the new cloak came out of the bundle and was ironed, along with the only silk dress, with its design of graceful trees. It was ironed last. The high-heeled slippers were taken out of their box hidden in the bottom of the closet. That night my grandmother was transformed into a princess. Everyone was waiting for her blessings, her gifts, and money. The General Retirement Directorate in the crowded Baghdad neighborhood of Bab al-Mu’azzam was waiting for her.
When we set out for school in the morning, we knew that the retirement pension had been distributed. There was a chicken in golden gravy and red rice, fried aubergine, and plates of radishes, cucumbers, mint, and lettuce placed all over the serving platter. There was a tall pitcher of fresh laban. The delicious smell of the cooking made me raise my voice. In school I told Firdous, “We have chicken and red rice at our house. You love it—come and eat with us.”
We did not have one time for dinner and another for lunch. We ate when we were hungry. We knew that money was scarce. Our father gave a share, and our grandmother had to provide the rest. With this and that, we had curdled cream for breakfast every day. We had eggs once a week. My father’s sister arranged all the vegetables on the platter, saying, “These vegetables purify the blood. Look at your face, how sallow it is.”
We wanted more blood, whet
her pure or foul. It was not important, knowing that my mother’s blood was infected.
I was not afraid of my grandmother’s stories about her. Despite her absences and coughing, to me she still seemed young and strong, and a little older than my father’s sister.
Whenever I asked my grandmother how old my mother was, she laughed and answered, “By God, I don’t know. When she married your father she was in her twenties. She came from Aleppo with her brothers and her mother. Her father died when she was a girl. Her brother Shafiq was a doctor at the clinic in Karbala. He was affectionate and gentle. Your grandmother did not let him enjoy life. She was strong and had a sour disposition, God rest her soul. She always said, ‘My son is a doctor and I must marry him off to a woman with money.’ God rest his soul, he listened to her and worried that she’d get upset with him. Shafiq died a sudden death, before he turned forty.”
“And my Uncle Sami?”
“The day we had the betrothal to your mother, he shouted and cursed. He said the girl’s marriage was a shame, but Shafiq, God rest his soul, he said, ‘Jamil is a nice boy from a good family.’ Your grandmother died three years after he did. She suffered a lot—she thrashed about like a fish. She didn’t die until God took her two months later. That left Sami, Widad, and Inam, and they stayed in the house as if they were his servants. He beat them and cursed. Your mother was the sweetest of all, like a rose. She spoke little. She was gentle and calm and never harmed an ant. Be merciful to her, dear God, most Merciful of all the merciful.”
5
My mother followed my father to her room. They were face to face. The air in the room boiled with his shouts. She was standing, worn and weary; if she approached a sensitive point she would get burnt, and if she retreated she would be choked. His words came in a torrent, like a tumultuous wave: “You’ve all turned my hair gray. That daughter of yours is going to drive me mad. Everything is against me. I’m alone in Karbala. In the morning my boss shouts at me, and in the afternoon there are the screams of the prisoners. At night I do the screaming alone. Listen. I am going to get married. I have no more patience for this situation. I want more children. You stopped having children after Adouli. I want a real woman. I’ve given you my best years and my heart’s blood, but all in vain. Go back to your family. Go back where you came from.”