by Alia Mamdouh
“Hello, uncle.”
“Hello, my girl.”
You wanted to throw yourself on his chest and sob into his shirt. The great lock on the door to his shop gleamed, and our eyes gleamed.
“Huda, where are we going? I’m not tired, just tell me where we’re going.”
Walk, Adil. Turn over the new visitors in your hands: doubt, remorse, and our friends who have stayed behind. Everyone walks, sleeps, closes their eyes, restores their bodies, and you alone are a traitor. Walk and don’t be afraid of the muezzin’s voice, or the stories of forgotten friendship. Don’t sigh or move too quickly. Stay beautiful and quiet; stay mournful and afflicted, listen to Suturi’s birds flapping their wings in this bloody sky. Spread your hands out and smell the sandstorm in the spring evenings as you fill your pockets with fragrant orange flowers, and throw them at Khulud’s house. Smile, Adil, if the stones gilded with dreams shout, if the concrete immersed in moaning lies, if the tiles are laden with fever, fear and pain grow weary. Do not apologize for your nostalgia, Adil. Wafiqa once said that we were all sick. The books are sick. The table and love are sick. Do not bend or turn. Stay where you are. There is no time left in the world, and spending an hour here is uncanny. Laugh, Adil, at your wandering father, your absent mother, your proud grandmother, your diabolical aunt, and your sister who did not love only you.
We stood in front of the dirt dam, pointing to the pessimistic Tigris and Khulud’s house behind us. We looked at all the people there: You and Firdous will not meet again. She was the one to leave you. All those whom I loved left me, and all that time retraced its tracks to its original place. It went past my old dress and the ugliness of others and said, ‘This far and no further. Do not turn back to pursue me, and do not look at me.’ The dark mocking Tigris—I never do anything in front of it with ease. I was savage and cursed it with obscenities. But my thoughts turned to my father. I understood fatherhood, and instantly my father became precious. In our street, only my father was real. He never concocted stories or lied, never won or remembered.
Come and let me into your world. Give me the instruments with which you once beat me. Beat me, father, use electricity cables. Beat me, then sew up my wounds. Beat me and leave your marks on my flesh and face. Beat me and I will obey you a little.
We were attacked by pebbles and the fishermen’s nets. The distant houses packed with lies attacked us, but they looked young and pretty.
I learned lying early. I lied as easily as washing my face. Lying consumed me, and I memorized it. In the street we did not examine the truth or have time for it. We only told the truth when we were quarreling, ill, or had failed. When our truthfulness piled up, we agreed to wash it out of our mouths.
After six years or six months, take up the axes and chop up the flesh of memories. Do not shout or resist. Begin the parting now, but do not think of farewells.
They took us to the new house. You did not examine anything, not the guest room or the guests of this pain, not the little dead garden. You looked in silence and spat on the ground. The trees lined the street in a different pattern, “You will grow up anew here,” grandmother said.
“But I don’t know anyone here to grow up with,” Adil replied.
“Here things will be completely different,” grandmother said.
“But the fence is low,” said Farida.
“We’ll raise it,” said my father.
Umm Mahmoud struggled like a fish.
“Our new house is bigger. Mahmoud will have his own room and so will Firdous. There will be room for guests and for new neighbors.” She sighed, coughed, and added, “The boy’s school is close by. He’ll graduate from secondary school this year.”
Firdous withdrew, becoming remote and cruel. She did not come or speak. You were the one who went to her. Your first parting was like your first meeting. You did not speak. You did not look at each other. You both fell silent. You did not touch. The suitcases were ready, and I could hardly recognize the house. Mahmoud’s and Firdous’s rooms seemed to me like a slaughterhouse. Everything was tied up, the beds and covers, the carpets, the kitchen utensils. Do not withdraw, do not cry, do not laugh. “Is it possible that I’ll never see Firdous or hear her voice again?” I felt as sour as vinegar that had gone bad. I did not take a step or offer my hand. I did not want to see what was in front of me. I approached her and she stood before me, her head erect as if she had defeated me. I took her by the arms and shook her, but she did not shake. I bowed my head and looked at her legs. She was ready to fall down. I sensed that she was struggling to hide her emotions, then her gratitude toward me surged forward with her tears, without words. We tried to make the time pass quickly by filling it with small talk.
“My mother knows your new house and your aunt knows our new house.”
“Give my regards to Mahmoud, but don’t say any more to him than that.”
My tears did not flow. They found a different way of expressing themselves, and they held themselves back.
I did not stay long. When they left, when they took their suitcases and dreams, when they took all the streets, those things would be the only things that had power over you. I slammed the door behind me and went out.
I went to everyone in his house and told grandmother: “We won’t go until everyone else has gone.”
Everything in our house was being packed. The chaos and confusion, and our very bone marrow. You go up to the roof and attack this universe. You put the legacy of the wedding into wooden boxes. You worked slowly, coughed, but did not cry. You looked at what was left in your hands. Anthills and cocoons, the trails of black and gray spiders, and dead locusts. There was no sign of Suturi’s birds in the sky.
My father became effusive with his compassion. He became tender and indulgent. But my imagination had not killed his old cruel self, and my dreams had not conjured up such an honorable gentleman. He got his sister divorced from her cousin, and sorted out the new house. You had never known him to be so weak and in such a state. We feared for him more than before and our spirits were troubled.
Every week they took us to the new house. All the houses there were the same: two stories, with bright exterior colors and sparkling windows. The children wore long trousers and clean shirts. All the girls walked confidently. I saw no lame children on my way, or any cross-eyed like Hashim. I did not see, on any of the fences of the houses, the title “nurse” scrawled in black coal, or stone steps. The entrances were roofed and the garages were spacious, the gardens were terraces with rosebushes and orange and tangerine trees. Each house was separated from its neighbor by fences painted white and light blue. From outside, the curtains looked very thick, and I could see no one behind them.
When we went home in the evening, we immediately went to bed. When everyone was quiet, I dreamed that I was walking. I turned on the taps and gathered up the soap in Baghdad to wash tongues and intestines. I forgot speech and swallowed its remnants. I shook, and stamped on the floor, and Mahmoud and I ate warm bread fresh from the oven. We divided it in half and watched each other fearlessly. When we saw the airplane in the sky, we laughed and smacked each other. Mahmoud thrust his face into mine as he said: “When we grow up, Huda, we won’t beat our children, and we won’t pull their hair, and we won’t make them run away to the shore in the afternoon. We’ll go and swim with them. We’ll ride the trains, and who knows? Maybe we’ll ride in that airplane. Perhaps we won’t see each other much. That’s not important. I will see you when I grow up; I’ll wait for your news from far away. Don’t worry—I won’t change.”
I learned to write those expressions—I won’t change; don’t worry—every day of the week. Every hair on your head enters the race that is life. The runners tremble. The banners are wiped clean of writing: yellow, red, and black. You run alone in the public squares. You do not listen to orders, you fall and you get up. You emerge from the crowd a zero, a fraction. Mahmoud was gone in the first round. He never said good morning or good night. Between the “good” a
nd the “morning” came this wave of walking crowds. Do not ride it until the sand comes up. Do not befriend it until everyone joins you on top of it. Go in the opposite direction, and stop crying. What you are searching for you lose, and everything that you touch flies away. The neighbors lied to you, so you went to Rasmiya, Abu Masoud, Umm Suturi, Abu Hashim, and Umm Aziz. You went round that whole part of the neighborhood. I went out into the vast square, skipped among the dirt and dry, fallen dates, and lifted my arms up to the date palms, felt the laughing tree and the beloved fronds, and brandished in my hand the bunches of golden fruit. I did not see anyone I knew. Everyone had gone far away. There was no weary advice or serious threat, no marvels erupting from the box of the world; no wonders poking their head out of ancient sacks. They left you no key and no wisdom to hang on your ears like earrings. On whose breast will you fling yourself? Who will dry your tears?
Your grandmother and Farida getting ready, arranging things and measuring the height of the walls, the ceilings, and the roofs. They shopped, changed things, sold, and managed, tired themselves out, and came back more delighted. Jamil came off the train, not riding a car or falling off a horse; he comes as blessed as the corpse of a prince, and goes as pure as a hymn.
My grandmother told him: “Jamouli, why don’t you remarry? Leave Nuriya to her children and come here. There are a thousand girls who’d want you.”
He did not look at her. It was as if he were breathing his last breath: “You mean Nuriya can’t come into this house either?”
“You know that. Why do you torment yourself and me with you?”
“All that just for the late Iqbal?”
“And the children. Or did you forget your son?”
“No, I didn’t forget. But Nuriya is pregnant now. Mama, shame on you and me. I won’t divorce her.”
“We’ll look round for you first, and when you get the new star and get transferred to Baghdad and become a police captain, all the families will want you.”
My father disappeared. Liquor incubated his torment. His house in al-A‘dhamiyya was gone. He did not resist, or talk about it, or forgive. He was alone before his uniforms: the hated boots, the sad sidara, the silent pistol, the olive-green color of his uniform, and the prisoners’ cells, all stung him.
Sometimes he visited them. He looked into the little peepholes at night and smiled. He called to them, one after the other. He got some names wrong but did not care. He poured it out before them and told them about the star he had been promised. No one knew what to say to him in reply. All that red dust, those gleaming pebbles and interrogations by night and silence by day flew before him as he tried to escape from the family’s talk and the children’s talk, and the unknown words which would lead him he knew not where. He got drunk and chattered and cursed, longing to be heard.
He needed a different mouth and tongue. Everything before him was silent and forbidden, dreadful and different. He knelt on the ground before the closed doors and wanted to eat the dirt. He patrolled the courtyard, his vision confused by the night. Was this Karbala or was it Iqbal’s original sensuous voice and her cheap perfume?
It was his drunkenness driving his mother and his children, his wife and his sister, his illness and his temptation, and he slid down. He stood and probed his body and limbs. The savor of intoxication was strong, and his body was deranged, and smelled, and waited for the moments to come.
He had doubts about the stars as he gazed up at them in the sky, neither shining nor extinguished, he scratched his throat and groaned. He stood in the prison yard, repeating his children’s names one after the other, and the name of the one living in his wife’s belly.
Nuriya was gaunt, pale, and quick to flare up. She loved him and excited him. When she laughed, she looked at his body, which knew nothing but nightly arguments.
He told her: “If it’s another boy we’ll call him Najm—star.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“I don’t beget girls.”
“But—
“Huda is a boy. She’s not afraid of me or anyone else.”
He looked ahead of him and sunk inwardly. Nuriya’s body gave him vertigo. When he entered it he forgot everything except the star. He had not counted the columns and rooms of this courtyard. Why had he forgotten to? Its surface was like her thigh, and those eyes inside the peepholes followed him; their breathing, their sighs, and their silence. His legs tensed up. He wanted to piss on the ground. Even his urine sounded intoxicated. He walked and pissed, ran and pissed, not screaming or laughing. The sky appeared perforated to him; like Iqbal’s sick chest. Nuriya and Iqbal. He raced as if the clouds were a silken bed, he flew through the air, the prisoners eyes followed him. He did not open the doors or move away from them. The sidara fell from his head, and he bent over to pick it up, and ran with it.
Alone, he dripped with sweat. No one came near him, neither Sergeant Jasim or Master Sergeant Sadiq. He was like a little star, alone and twinkling, which had slipped from the horizon and landed on a waistcoat.
Suddenly he began to scream. A long cry, a frightening snarl, and drawn-out sob. Alone, he ran, smiting his head with his hand, not seeing the wall in front of him. The walls had all been here. The prisoners had been here with him. Where had everyone gone?
He runs to the big, faraway store room. He kicks in its door and lifts up the jerry cans of gasoline. He walks with them and puts them in front of him in the middle of the yard. He opens them, and a carnelian-red cataract gushes out. Within seconds, it vanishes into the ground, digging little holes that subdue the surrounding earth.
He dipped the sidara into the can and ignited it. He was working like a gravedigger. His hands went to work, undressing himself. His trousers were on the ground, in flames, and he laughed.
“That’s for Adil.”
The fire blazed and flared up into a fountain of light. His jacket was in his hand.
“This is for Iqbal.”
He grasped the three stars in his hand. His hand was in flames. His fingers went into the fire as he pulled the stars from the shoulder of the jacket. He put them in his mouth. His wounds became unintelligible as the fire entered his mouth and burned his cheeks. He threw the gold stars high into the air, one after the other, and screamed: “Take them! Give them to someone else! Take them and sell them at the public market. Take them and free me from their color, shape, and weight. Take them, aren’t you listening?”
He put his hand inside the can and stirred up the clothes with the sidara.
“They were too heavy on my shoulder. They were ugly in my neighbors’ eyes. They were—”
He pulled his boots off and threw them into the rising flames: “And that is for the head of police.”
The flames spread from the neck area down to the blazing sleeves. His undershirt was on the ground, but by the time he began to take off his long linen drawers, columns of men were running toward him. The staff sergeant and policemen clasped him from every side. They took off their clothes and covered him with them. They brought thick blankets and water hoses, and started to put out the flames burning his fingers and his hair. He laughed loudly and rhythmically and wept: “I want the star. My mother lied. The captain lied. The star li—”
He wailed and wept. The men encircled him with their arms. They folded him as they would a garment, firmly grasping his arms, legs and body up to the neck.
He laughed as he was bundled off to Baghdad in a government car. Sergeant Jasim stood by his head, with Nuriya and her mother at his side. In their hands was a letter from the department: dismissed from government service for health reasons.
As we rode in the truck it seemed to me my father was driving. My aunt was in the new house. My grandmother sat beside the driver, and we swayed in the back. The sofa poked us with its wooden legs, and the new bride’s boxes jostled us. We piled together, our feet seeking some footing among all the odds and ends. Our bodies cowered inside our clothes. Adil did not look back. I did not know anyone to wave to. Betwee
n the new house to which you moved and the ancient government hospital, the trail made by our blood stretched out like a ribbon that had just been unfurled.
AFTERWORD
Like many Iraqi writers, Alia Mamdouh’s literary career began in journalism. Born in Baghdad in 1944, Mamdouh graduated from university in Baghdad in 1971 with a degree in psychology. She began work as a journalist, and became editor-in-chief of a privately owned newspaper, a position she held for several years. It was while working as a journalist that she began writing fiction. She wrote several short stories and published her first novel, Leila and the Wolf, in 1981. Mamdouh feels that this work, like many first novels, has a number of shortcomings (personal communication, January 9, 2005). The novel deals with Palestinian issues, a topic that was de rigueur for Arab writers at that time, and Mamdouh felt obliged to write about what was then in vogue but which she knew little about. Mamdouh left Iraq in 1982, citing personal reasons in a 2002 interview with The Handstand. One reason she gave was that she did not want her only son to be engulfed by a repressive, totalitarian regime. After leaving Iraq, Mamdouh lived in Morocco, Lebanon, and England where she was employed as a journalist and continued to write fiction. She eventually became a full-time writer and settled in Paris, France, where she currently resides.
Mamdouh wrote Naphtalene while living in Rabat, Morocco. It was published in 1986 by a small publishing house in Cairo, Egypt. The novel is original, absorbing, and provocative; yet it hardly caused a stir when it was first published, and remained neglected for years before it was noticed by Jordanian writer and academic Fadia Faqir, who included it among the five novels translated into English and published by Garnet Publishing in the UK under their Arab Women Writers series. Appearing under the title Mothballs, the novel was an immediate success and attracted the attention of many European publishing houses. It subsequently appeared in French, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan translations, placing Mamdouh firmly on the international literary map. The well-known Lebanese publishers Dar Al-Adab reprinted the novel in 2000, and a Portuguese translation will soon be in print.