Naphtalene

by Alia Mamdouh

  My grandmother coughed as she turned on her mattress, then got up and walked to the roof. She looked at our beds and lifted her face to the sky. She murmured, and emitted a hacking, staccato cough. She turned to me but did not see me. After several breaths, she began coughing harder, then tossed away her cigarette and stepped on it.

  We came up here, Adil and I, every long, hot summer month. We carried our thick mats up from the little room, aired the sheets and pillows, swept the floor, and sprinkled it with water. The dirt smoothed out, sending up a pale yellow dust that made us sneeze for a long time. We ran around and played, flexed our arms, bent our fingers back. We put out the old chairs and the broken bricks and stood on them to catch a glimpse inside the homes, the roofs of the houses, the dove nests, the bathrooms and their chimneys, and at the colors of the cars and trucks passing by at a distance.

  Adil rode the iron beds, jumped up and down on this one and ran circles around another. He looked up at the sky. He jumped in front of me, the pillows in his hand, throwing them at my head one after another and shouting, “Look at the sky! It’s the same color as our grandmother’s face. I don’t like winter—water leaks through the roof. We can’t play in the street because of the mud, and the cold makes grandmother ill. Look at those birds—when they fly high, they might want us to wait for them. Huda, don’t you like birds?”

  Grandmother was now standing over me. I looked into her eyes but she could not see me in the dark: I took her hand, and she took mine: “Huda, when did you get up?”

  “Whenever you move I hear you. I haven’t slept like you.”

  She sat on the edge of my bed and laid her hand on my head and face. I kissed her and hugged her hand: “May God give us all patience. My tears are dry—grief will blind me. Today we’ll be traveling. In a little while we’ll go to the cemetery and then we’ll go to Karbala.”

  “Why Karbala?”

  “Today is a holy day. Have you forgotten? We are traveling to see the absent ones—God, I do not oppose your will.” She burst into a fit of slow sobs, and then I did as well. She resumed in a grief-choked voice: “Iqbal is gone, and Jamil has forgotten us. He has forgotten his mother, his sister, and his children. But we must be patient.” She wiped her tears and went on. “Yes, we will go. I want to weep in the presence of the Lord of Martyrs, Hussein, may God honor his face. We will ask him to soften Jamil’s heart and heal him, and I will ask him for patience. If there is enough time, we’ll visit Najaf as well.” She stood up, repeating, “Lord, strengthen my faith and help me not to complain too much. You are our helper and our protector. Help me to need no one—not Jamil, not Munir. Lord, may I not seek help from any but You. Take me before my strength and sight are gone.” I rose and stood before her; she took me in her arms and stroked my hair.

  “Who will go with us?”

  “All of us are going.”

  “Even Uncle Munir?”

  “Munir is gone. No one knows where he is. He did not ask or drop in. And he didn’t listen to what people say about his uncle’s daughter.”

  She left me and went away. I saw her like a tidy angel, ill and utterly encircled.

  Dawn had begun to pierce the skin of the night sky. The doves fell silent, and the open-eyed crows came. My grandmother always repeated when we were going to sleep on the roof: “If a crow settles near your head and caws, it’s a bad omen.”

  Our sky was a dwelling place for all the crows. They nested near our houses, and competed in cawing. They flew so close to my head that I could hear their wings beating. They shrieked and flew higher, and I began to shudder. The crows did not come until Iqbal had gone; only the doves could be heard venturing out of their nests. They began singing to us as soon as we opened our eyes: “Mother, my sweet, my comfort.”

  “Little dove of mine, where have you gone?”

  Farida woke up gloomy, muttering, her voice heavy. She did not say good morning to anyone. I got Adil out of bed and took his hand, and we went downstairs; he was still sleepy. We splashed water on our faces and put on our old clothes. It was still dark. The family left the house. Adil grasped my hand but I slipped away from him. The women of our grandfather’s big house were looking out at the edge of the neighborhood, and the winds from the cloaks newly come from the dye-works reached our noses. The mothers of Mahmoud, Suturi, Hashim, and Iman were utterly silent. Dawn in Baghdad was like the foam in Umm Suturi’s tub: the clouds were enormous, as if wearing gray and black cloaks.

  Great Imam Street was quiet. The coffeehouses were locked up, the lanes were secretive, and the rubbish caught my attention. I saw only bags strewn around in front of the steps of the houses and closed shops. Skinny dogs stood bewitched before the steam rising from the bags. Big tomcats fought and licked their wounds, and scattered the whole mess, violated by their claws and spittle, pulling remnants from it into the corners. Grandmother coughed timidly. Her asthma came and went with the rhythm of a pendulum, never varying by an hour.

  The dim streetlights made the shadows bigger and longer before us, so that Adil stopped shouting at me as he ran behind me: “You’re quiet like them. Aren’t you afraid of the dark? Say something!”

  “Keep walking and be quiet.”

  “Who are we going to see there?”

  “No one.”

  “This is the first time I’ve gone with you. Is everybody quiet when they go the cemetery? Fine—what if a genie comes at us?”

  “We’re all with you, don’t worry.”

  “You talk and I’ll be quiet.”

  The walls of the mosque were surrounded by standing figures. Women and men with their arms outstretched. Their sleepy voices rose in prayer. A light, cool breeze brushed my head and rippled the pores of my skin combining with the shaking of Adil’s fingers as they gripped my hand: “Do you remember when you took me to the cemetery? We were young and we played round the tombs. It was hot and sunny, and there were people about, and I laughed to myself and said, ‘Huda will be afraid and take me home. But, I wish we could go on playing, you and I. We wouldn’t eat or sleep, we would only play. It would be fine even if you ‘scared me.’ Huda, I’m telling you the truth, don’t be cross. That time I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to see your fear. Huda, aren’t you afraid?”

  “You can’t stop talking today! Pretty soon the sun will come up and we won’t be afraid.”

  “When either one of us goes quiet, my fear comes back. When people die they go quiet.” He trembled more, pulling at my hand. We stopped together and I hugged him, but he did not hug me back. His hand was still gripping mine and his body was shaking, though his tears did not fall.

  Men came out of the lanes and intersections, clearing their throats and spitting on the ground as they walked by.

  I heard everyone coughing as if they were tuning their vocal cords before entering.

  As soon as we set foot in the cemetery we heard verses from the Qur’an. The reciters sat among the tombs on bamboo chairs. The tombs of people from the other streets brought the reciters. People from the little culs-de-sac recited for themselves, and wept.

  The women of our neighborhood were before me, their eyelids open, gazing at the writings covered with rainwater, soil, and oblivion. Every woman prayed and wailed at the low, compact, covered grave. The young men collected around the graves, looking at their weeping mothers, and wept with them.

  The cloaks opened to reveal vast sweaty bodies. Sighs coursed from their chests to their throats. The soil crumbled between their fingers. Ants, large and small, black and red, crept out of anthills onto our fingers.

  The war of lamentation began.

  Grandmother’s voice gathered strength, bit by bit, as she paced and then sprawled out on the ground. Her tears glistened like stars hoarded in a cave. She prayed, though all we heard were the ends of the words. Then her tears started, quietly and regularly; she wept until the whole grave was covered with tears. She passed through Aleppo and Mecca; she pronounced the Prophet’s name as if washing herself with it. She fel
t her pain light the incense for him, and distributed it equally among all. She did not forget us, those who stood round her: “Pray the fatiha. Huda, breathe on your mother’s soul. Adil, my boy, don’t make any mistakes as you pray; send them to her pure soul. The soul can hear, and feel, and get upset as well. This is where we will all be buried.”

  In front of the tomb of our grandfather, Ahmad Maarouf, she bowed, murmured, and prayed. No one stood near her in her journey. She looked at the ground as if she wanted to rip it open with her bare hands. We saw the trembling of her fingers, the tapping of her palm and an anonymous lamentation depart from her chest, going with the movement of the waves of the Shatt al-Arab. Their sound seeped into the crevices of the boulders and buoyed the small boats moored in the river. She passed by the small boats. She was stung as she pursued the large ships. She passed the clumps of palms. She exchanged glances with the upright fronds. There she curled up every day among the soil of the walled gardens, densely packed with trees, hoarse and spent. She cursed calamity and the crows, and waited for the blessing of the water as it spoke to her. She prayed the dawn prayer facing the shore. She picked up some of the salt with her tongue as she trembled in the night. She smoked fifty cigarettes and camped on the riverbank and allowed no one near her. Alone, she opened the line of sand and waited for the man’s tie in case he should come up to the roof or a wedding ring should appear on her hand.

  Grandfather’s boat sank in the Shatt al-Arab, and the Shatt was crowded with the names of the six adventurers. The employees were: the inspector of the administrative district, Mr Ahmad Maarouf, the police delegate, the director of the treasury, the precinct physician, and two guards. Their muscles relaxed in the rise of water, they grew heavy and sank beneath the crabs’ legs and the jaws of the electric eels. The bed of water took them, and there they fell asleep forever.

  Facing the shore she set up a large tent and said, “Here we will mourn for seven days. Here we will await their bodies.” She drew her cloak around her and spread out her carpet on the waves of sand when the tide pulled out. She opened her arms and hugged herself, and went inside when the islands appeared. She walked, wiping her spectacles clean of the sea spray, and went down on her narrow white feet. She had drawn her wedding shift tightly across her middle, and in her hand she held a lantern whose wick flickered whenever the night air stirred. She wailed: “I have come to you belted with your sash, Abu Jamil! I want to bid you farewell here. You have been gone too long this time. When will you return?”

  She waded into the water which rippled, and called out: “This is your belt, Abu Jamil. Come, look at me. It’s the first time I go out with my head uncovered. Don’t be late, Abu Jamil. Alas, poor Jamil and Farida! Pity Wafiqa after you’ve gone.”

  She did not grow weary; she did not grow angry. She pursued the water and waited for some sign of the missing man: his striped broad-cloth jacket or gray trousers. She waited for her whole life to pass in front of her eyes as she caught sight of a round thing far off, dented, now floating, now sinking, now visible, now not. It was not a person; nor was it any sort of animal. Its color was somewhere between black and violet. Mysterious, it floated slowly.

  She screamed, then fell silent. She paced slowly and moaned. The water flowed over her, and she splashed at it and beat her palms against its surface. Everything round her flapped and fluttered: the birds, the water, the fishermen’s boats and their ancient nets. The local people’s faces looked on as she stood on the shore. Jamil’s voice was nowhere to be heard. Farida stumbled about and cried, wanting her mother. No one interfered with what she was doing; no one was worried about her. They said prayers for her but did not dare invade her watery kingdom. They threw prayers and hurled supplications at her. She disappeared and emerged. She rose and grabbed the water in her hands, her tears mingling with the sand and the threads of the short, twisted, limp hat. She pulled at it and released it, and her muscles relaxed a little. Grandmother’s body, arms and legs, carried on. The men and women came. They entered the embrace of the water and embraced her and lifted her. The water wet their faces and streamed down like drops condensing on a cold jug. She was livid and pale, and frightened, but still radiant. She coughed and wiped her face with the black cloth. She kissed and smelled it, and slept with it in her hand. In the morning she took it up to the roof of the house and laid it in the sunlight, spreading it out, drying both sides, combing its velvety fabric clean of dirt, mud, and sand; then she shook it. She kept on talking to it and calling to it. She raised it on to the empty coffin herself and they carried it through the narrow, filthy lanes of Ali al-Gharbi. They wound through the streets near the municipality building. She led the way, walking before them, with Jamil to her right and Farida, tiny, bored, and troubled, to her left. They all walked, the widows of the six men, the women of the neighborhood, their sons, their daughters, and their old men.

  Six coffins, one with the hat like a banner, swaying and shaking, stopping when the crowd stopped before the front door of each dead man’s house. The funeral procession walked to the cemetery. They dug up the earth and its cold, damp smell rose. Suddenly, before the burial she removed the hat and held fast to it: “No, I’m taking this to Baghdad, and I’ll bury it there.” She made a glass box for it and put the black hat in it. She closed the box, lifted it with her hands, and placed it before her. She greeted it before going to bed, touched it first thing in the morning, and moaned at it at night.

  The day they left for the capital, she carried the box next to her chest. She distributed all the things to the people of that area. They rode in a taxi. Her children were silent, and in her hands she held the missing man’s only remaining words.

  My grandmother’s family had a large crypt. It was clean and spacious, with several levels, located near the entrance to the cemetery. It was surrounded by a thicket of oleander trees, dusty from hanging in front of the large opening on to the main street. The family tree was hung at the entrance, all the boughs and branches going down to the earliest roots. My grandmother’s forebears came from the Hejaz, and my grandfather’s from central Iraq. This crypt belonged to my grandmother’s tribe’s kinsfolk, and no strangers were to be buried here.

  My grandmother chose a spot behind the crypt. She called for Muhammad the builder, and he opened a new grave, surrounded by a cheap metal barrier painted white. Trees of a sort I was not familiar with were planted flanking it; they had short but plentiful branches, and a mysterious, penetrating smell on hot summer nights, a smell like laughter and tears. The hat was buried there, and every year the grave was repainted, the stones and mud were rearranged, the boughs were trimmed, and the plants were watered. She stood, tall, pale-skinned and sobbing, blotting him out with supplications and sending him prayers.

  Farida stood this whole time, looking waxen and rigid, as if venturing into a trap. She did not lament or cry, sob or wail. Her lips moved slowly, and her face showed the shock of terrible sorrow. Grandfather had loved her so much, Mr. Jamil had isolated her for a long time. Munir had vanished and not come back anywhere near her. She stayed inside the house for three days. She struck her head and her voice sounded with all its hoarseness and power, echoing through the rooms, even reaching other houses.

  All the voices lamented and fell silent, and Farida never grew weary. Iqbal was before her and Munir and Jamil behind her. The neighbors; the women; the rumors whispered from mouth to mouth: “Munir is never coming back.”

  “They say he knew a week before the wedding the news of the deceased.”

  “Why didn’t he say so?”

  “We really don’t know.”

  “Every day he and Abu Iman got drunk. They set up a table in the bar then Munir would bid Abu Iman farewell on the street and disappear.”

  “No, Abu Iman says he’ll get married when he’s past forty.”

  “They say Umm Jamil has fallen apart completely, with Iqbal and now with Farida. Abu Adil has deserted them—this new woman and the children have taken him.”


  Grandmother went down into the crypt. Farida hesitated, then followed her down. Adil wiped the dust off the oleander, pulled off some leaves, and threw them on the ground. Behind the window, I looked at my grandmother as she offered her prayers to the dead.

  It was the first holy day with Iqbal absent. We waited at the door to the crypt. The women of the neighborhood, aunts and sisters, their faces slack, their complexions changed, eyelids dewy, eyes meek, their cloaks dusty; but they stood on tiptoe. Their hands clutched the arms of their little sons and daughters. The poor sayyids waited for their holy day donations, holding out their hands and murmuring prayers as they waited for the sacrificial meat of the feast. The sun did not keep Adil waiting; it rose swiftly and was hot. The sky dispersed its clouds. Umm Suturi stood before us, a palm leaf basket in her hand: “Here’s some homemade bread, eggs, and boiled potatoes. Eat them in the train, and remember us when you pray to the Lord of Martyrs. May the sorrow be lifted from all our souls. God be with you.”

  I carried the basket on my shoulder. We took the bus to the station at Bab al-Muazzam. The trains stood there, rusty and peeling. People were smiling. The peddlers shouted. The boys and girls boarding before us wore colorful holiday clothes. There were brief goodbyes and stifled weeping, and then we went up the steps. We sat facing one another.

  Adil and grandmother, and Farida beside me. The train filled up with soldiers and luggage and the smell of food. My aunt pulled her bags in. We had our first bite, and the sound of the train as it began to move relaxed my bones and made everything I was experiencing seem small. From the wide iron window spattered with grease and the remnants of dried snot, I saw creatures—creatures whose faces appeared double, and faces stripped of features, passed before me. I waved to them with a morsel of bread in my hand, knowing that I would never see them again.