by Alia Mamdouh
12
I listened to the noise and yelling, the crying of children, men blowing their noses, and the shouts of the mothers in the corner of the compartment, passing out objects and snacks. They sat on their old suitcases, which were latched shut with thick, frayed ropes. The women’s heads were covered with black bands, from which twisted threads hung down, new and clean, reaching as far as their eyelids. Some pushed us inside and sat down, crowding near Farida.
Adil and I looked at each other. No face looked like Mahmoud’s. No girl limped like Firdous. No odor from anyone’s mouth was like my mother’s. My grandmother drew out her black prayer beads and began to tell them, paying no attention to her surroundings. My aunt picked at some morsels of food and put the rest in a bag, but my grandmother did not touch even a crust of bread. Her cloak was wound all round her body. She watched Farida, and said, in a soft but firm voice: “Wrap your cloak round your body well.” The men’s and women’s eyes stripped my aunt of her clothing. I looked round at everything about me. The man with the head ropes looked like Hajji Aziz, but his face was older and less bright. I watched the man sitting far away rolling tobacco in paper, moistening his lips, swallowing, and looking at my aunt, lighting his cigarette, sighing, and then raising his voice in an old southern song, in which he was joined by the soldiers heading home on leave. Most of the women looked like Umm Suturi and Umm Aziz.
A voice sounded, alone, from a woman we could not see in all the confusion: “Whoever has not made the pilgrimage to Lord Hussein has wasted his life!”
Laughter, shouting, and singing. The men’s cloaks, and new trousers and jackets. Men’s trousers, wrinkled, ironed, old, colored, long enough to touch the floor, short enough to see holes in socks. We smelled the stink of feet and the odor of sweaty armpits. The women shouted with joy and trilled as they recited the names of Ali Ibn-Abi Talib and his children.
Food appeared: skewers of kebab, grilled goat’s testicles, and flat loaves of bread that had become cold and wrinkled. Onions and green tomatoes. The movements of chewing and swallowing in front of me made me join them, and I asked one of them for half a piece of bread and a skewer of kebab. I reached out and took an onion, sat among them and ate. I did not look at my aunt. Everyone was belching.
The boys and girls wore cheap clothes, and their shoes were scruffy. Their socks were uneven—one high, the other low. The girls’ ribbons hung down to their chests, and their necks were bare and spotted with grease. I did not know what to wipe my hands on, so I left them as they were and looked at my fingers. I got up and walked back to my seat. Farida was wrapped up, but left part of her chest visible. I looked at my grandmother. She had said before we left that “You will wear an abaya when we get to Karbala.” I saw my abaya underneath the containers of food; Umm Suturi had brought it. I saw the men above our heads and around us. The young men were smoking, coughing, and staring. I turned my head toward the window.
My father had come from Karbala the previous year. He placed a quarter dinar in my hand and said reluctantly, “Take Adil and go play on the swings. Hold on to him tightly when he’s on it. If anything happens to him, I’ll kill you.”
Iqbal stood silently at the door of the house. She drew another quarter dinar out of her neckline and buried it in my hand, and pushed us outside without a word.
This was the first holy day I had a new dress. It was yellow and the waist had a shiny belt of delicate satin, a scrap from the cloth of our new quilt. New yellow ribbons adorned my braids. Umm Suturi had stitched my dress in two hours, and Farida finished sewing the hem and the sleeves. I was walking, picking off threads and blowing them into the air. Nuriya had sent Adil his new clothes from Karbala.
Firdous and Mahmoud stood in front of the door to their house, Suturi, Hashim, and Nizar waited in the spacious lot behind our houses. That is where the girls and boys of the neighborhood celebrated.
We walked round the grimy ice cream carts, whose rusty wheels stopped almost as soon as they got rolling, so the ice cream vendor had to hit them to right them. We stood by them. Inside them were large tins surrounded by crushed ice dyed red, yellow, and brown. Small tan-colored plates and old spoons. The man sold us some and we ate it. We crunched the ice between our teeth, turning our lips different colors. We reached in for a second tin of cola in their dark green bottles. We kept the cold in our mouths and went to see blind Umm Aziz, who had enlarged her palm platter and placed colored lollipops on it, and candy floss on thin sharp sticks on another palm-leaf platter. We stood in front of her and started our game here. We wrapped scallop-edged five-fil coins in glossy silver-colored paper; we did this well until we had covered the milled edges, so that when she felt each coin she thought it was a dirham. She was fooled, and we took everything on the trays. A few minutes later, all of a sudden, her voice split the air cursing us and our parents. Adil went back and gave her all his money. Mahmoud, Hashim, Nizar, Firdous, Suturi, and I licked the lollipops and threw the sticks on the ground, putting the candy floss in our mouths, eating and not caring. We went to the fried seed seller and bought dried chickpeas, peanuts, and black and red raisins. We munched them and the ink ran on to our fingers from the words on the old notebook pages in which the nuts were wrapped. The sound of whistles began to lead the way. Paper kites of all colors filled the air. Hands pulled the kite strings and tails, which rose and fell like Euphrates birds as the wind blew. The boys and girls counted their fils and pennies and grasped them tightly. The young men of the neighborhood stood around in new dishdashas and wide leather belts, keeping their money in linen bags between the waist and stomach. They called out to everyone to use the swings. Among the lofty palm trees the heavy ropes waited for our small hands. I placed Adil on one swing and gave him a vigorous push: “Hold the rope tightly, Adouli!” I got on another swing: “Mahmoud, push me as hard as you can—don’t worry about me.”
My feet flew high up into the hot air. I saw the roofs of the houses and the red buses, the laundry lines and the window panes. My braids leaped with me as I pumped myself higher. I saw Firdous, silent and serene. She watched me go up and down. Suturi pushed Adil and I shouted: “Harder, Mahmoud, harder!” The voice of the man holding the rope: “That’s five fils’s worth.” I tottered as I slid from the sky to the ground.
The ground was dirt, pebbles, and broken bricks. We slid along, raising clouds of dust that got into our eyes. Wagons drawn by skinny horses passed before us. The drivers called out, “One ride, ten fils.”
We all got in and stretched our legs out, all crowded in on one another. We all had whistles and brightly colored paper pinwheels that spun in our hands when we blew on them. Our voices rose in song: “We miss you, sweetheart, God, we miss you. It’s been a long time since we parted.” We applauded and made jokes, and shouted in one voice: “Hey! For God’s sake speed it up!” The horses looked like Umm Aziz. The cart took us round. The streets had been recently paved and were crowded with people and automobiles. We rode up the dirt dam and went down Royal Cemetery Street. This was where the first queen of Iraq was buried, the mother of King Faisal II and the sister of the Regent. We stood up in school in the morning and the teacher, Miss Nabila, cried in front of us. We all bowed our heads, and they lowered the flags everywhere for forty days. We cried for the queen, whose photograph we had never seen, and when we went home we were proud to give our families the news: “Queen Alia is dead.”
The sun shone into our ears and eyes. We put our arms around one another’s shoulders, and Mahmoud’s hand went past Firdous’s back and reached mine. I grew hotter; his hand was near my braids. Firdous never opened her mouth or closed her eyes. She was stubborn on the inside and shy on the outside, a little taller than you. Her complexion was wheaten, and a violet green lay deep inside her eyes; they were narrow and bright. Her eyelashes were thick but short, and her teeth were widely spaced, with a layer of plaque. Her lips were dry, as if always parched with thirst. When she spoke, she panted, and when she quarreled, her voice was a shrill
shriek. Her jerky breathing crackled. She charmingly mispronounced the r-sound in the back of her throat. When she laughed, she laid her palm over her mouth. When she walked, she drew her left leg back and heaved it forward. Her pelvis had been malformed from birth. She did not play out in the street until she was seven. They called her Firdous the Lame.
The day they moved to your neighborhood you stood in front of her. You looked into each other’s eyes. She was prettier than you. Her skin was tender, and she was plump—and quiet. At first neither of you spoke. She held an old, small, ugly, frightening rag doll in her hand; around it were the remnants of scraps of colored cloth, charcoal, chalk, string, scissors, and pens. She would draw and sew, smudging and redrawing the lines of the face with the charcoal, changing the angle of the nose. She held a pen and moved quickly across the cloth. She put earrings on the ears, made some of the eyes blind, distorted some of the faces, carved and cut the cloth of the rag dolls. She made the faces look insolent, like monkeys, like beasts, recalling all the animals in her books, the gardens, and streets. Eyebrows disappeared, eyes danced, teeth broke, and blood flowed on to the rags. Hers was a strange toy, one-legged, or with both legs cut off.
You stood, watching, not getting tired, and she did not look at you: “Sit down. Why are you standing up?”
“Why not come out so we can play in the street? I don’t like playing indoors.”
She did not reply. Anything she did not like, she did not reply to. Suddenly she opened up the doll’s mouth as wide as possible, pulled off one leg, and threw it to the floor. “Look, it’s Firdous the Lame, and this is Huda the Shameless.”
“Fine, fine. Come here on the steps, we won’t go far.”
“But stay with me.”
I stayed with her. At first she did not believe it. She did not hate anyone for walking on ahead of her, but she confided in herself, and in everyone around her, that she was Firdous, who never waited for anyone to take her by the hand and walk with her. The days and hours passed but the only thing she worked at was her leg. She lifted her dress in front of you so you could see the thigh with the old flesh. She always listened closely for the voice of her small, delicate cells: “Look, everything’s quiet now, but as soon as I start walking, it’s something else again.”
Firdous was something else again. She was best in the class at school. She was quiet, reasonable, and clever, as immersed in silence as if constantly drunk. She kept her dignity and never relinquished it in front of me, either. In the street, no one ever again dared to call her Firdous the Lame. She abandoned herself to me and I led her, hugged her, and she bore her reputation and mine too. She did not like to make acquaintances or to meet new people. Her curiosity went down to her limbs and stayed there.
Everyone recognized her steps when she came to the house. We went from one class to the next, from secret to secret, and changed. I lifted my arm so she could see the downy hair of my armpit. She looked timidly, then began to count the number of hairs. We stood together, measuring our heights, arms, plumpness or skinniness. The layers of sound and passage of secrets from mouth to mouth. The murmur of breasts, the chastity of speech about the absent children of the neighborhood. She had time for dreams, and assessed the boys of our street: “Mahmoud is yours. Adil is shy and sweet. Cross-eyed Hashim makes us laugh. Suturi the bird boy is a devil like you. And he is just for me.”
He was Nizar, one year younger than she, but taller, uglier, cleverer, and quieter than everyone else. She had not made approaches to him; she did not know how to reveal the secret. She stirred up her imagination with it at first, then hung around him, not wanting to deny anything. She was jealous of everything and anything, in a way that we did not know how to prepare for. He was hers alone. She talked to herself about him every day, in front of me and when I was not with her. Pretending to be talking about herself, not about him. She tried to quantify his soul syllables through the number of letters in his name; she multiplied them by the number of letters in her name, then added the remainder, and Nizar appeared before her like a treasure. She always said, “Him.” She was terribly benevolent toward him, always saying: “He’s sensible. I don’t like good-looking boys. It’s almost that good looks are scary. We’re a lot alike.” I said nothing, and she went on: “Sometimes I wake up at night and look at Mahmoud while he’s sleeping. Mahmoud is nice looking, I know, but I don’t see him that way. Everyone looks nice when they’re sleeping. I only like the quiet ones. Nizar is quiet—as if only I understand him. As if he talks just for me and is quiet for me. Sometimes Mahmoud is like Nizar, and sometimes he talks a lot.”
“When he talks, what does he say?”
She understood you immediately and replied, “He doesn’t say anything. When your name comes up he goes quiet. Fine—silence is better than saying the wrong thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My mother, for example, doesn’t like you. She says, ‘By God, if Huda were my daughter I would lock her in the house and not even let her see the street.’ ”
“And your father?”
“He says, ‘If God had created Huda in Adil’s place, it would have been better.’ ”
“And you?”
“I’m not ashamed of being lame in front of you.”
This was the first time she used the word that made up her title in front of me. I never saw her tears, but I cried in front of her, in front of Mahmoud, and everybody. She left me as I was, crying until I thought my hair and lashes would fall out. I sweated and trembled but she did not come to me. She did not touch me or dry my tears or wipe my nose. She did not think about me, or laugh when I laughed. She was skeptical and high-minded. She stretched her leg out before me, spread her dress out, and covered her knee, moving as if she were feverish. Strangely, she looked like our class teacher, Miss Qadriya. She looked at me and at the other girls as if seeing them for the first time. She laced her fingers together on her chest and did not move. She looked at me as if I were one of her dolls. I did not envy her or hate her, or look at her, or forget her. Before me, behind me, her looks, her breaths, her appearance. Firdous came to me, taking the first step with only her left foot. She showed it to me. She got up, moved, and took her first step with her arm against the wall. When she reached the steps she stood there. She stretched her neck into the lane and took a calm look all round. The neighbors’ houses; muddy streams; the pregnant house cats. Alley cats from other streets. The neighborhood men walking by. Housewives sitting on their stone steps. The street in front of us was important and confusing, crowded with bodies and ideas, radiating fear and illusions. She stood there, leaning her pelvis against the doorway as I stood beside her, hand in hand. Our hands were touching. She did not clasp my hand, but let me clasp hers. She never hurried for anything or trembled before anything. I never saw her afraid. It was as if she had bent the tree of fear under her arm and torn off its leaves, eaten its branches, still waiting in its shade for something greater than fear.
Firdous. This was the first holy day where I had not taken her in my arms and kissed her. She gave me a present of money, saying, “Spend it—buy everything you want for yourself. Only don’t make me play on the swings.”
“What if we play on them together? Would you do that?”
She did not answer. The five boys pushed us and she clutched the rope in one hand, with her other arm around my waist. She never batted an eyelid. She did not falter, but her face became livid and then went pale. We swung up high, and I only looked at her. She looked only up at the sky. We swung down and flew up. I shouted and sang as I watched her feet in the air in front of me. I knocked my shoes against hers and pinched her leg. She did not hit me or push harder against me. She did not frown at me or see anyone before her. Her eyes were fixed. Her lips were dry, and her voice could not sound, no matter what. When the swing swayed, the boys crowded around us and we slid off. Everyone laughed, everyone but she. Nizar came near her, and they looked into each other’s eyes calmly. She took a cold bottle of drink f
rom his hand and said, “Thank you, Nizar.” She walked alone ahead of us. She stopped but did not turn around. I reached her, panting. She said, as faintly as a voice coming from a well, “I wish Nizar had agreed to ride the swing with us.”
This train looked like the swing. We stopped for a long time, then walked along slowly. They boarded and disembarked at the stations. The voices of the peddlers selling cigarettes, chewing gum, and cold drinks. The stations were ruins, workers’ rooms demolished in the middle. The rail employees in their dark blue clothing boarded the train, checked tickets, coughed, and looked at my aunt. I stared hard at them. I got up several times, and Farida pulled me roughly and pushed me down by the window. Adil had not run out of patience as I had. He was tired and fell asleep on my grandmother’s lap. I watched him and thought him to be more beautiful than the birds flying before me, the low houses painted bright colors, yellow, black, and a dirty shade of turmeric. The trees stood alone, naked, and dry, not moving as we passed them. Shops and garages were halfway open. Old overturned automobiles, bicycles boys had dragged through the streams. Iraqi flags, limp in the heat and warm air, hung over police stations and official offices.
My grandmother had still not smoked or had anything to eat. I said to her: “Grandma, I’ll get you a snack. You haven’t eaten anything since last night.”
“We’ll eat kebabs in Karbala, at the shrine. Karbala is famous for its kebabs.”
“What about my father?”
“What about him?” asked Farida crossly.
“Will we go and see him?”
Grandmother stroked Adil’s hair, not looking at us.
“We’ll take you and Adil to him, and we’ll go to the holy shrine.”
“And after?”
“And after?” she said severely. “We are not going to his house. If he wants to see us, let him come to the shrine.”
“But we—”