by Sarah Cleave
‘So, you’ve already met?’ she asks enigmatically, her gaze impassive. I stammer, unsteady, the child tightens her grip on my shoulders, her little snow-white hands on my black skin.
Investigations conducted thus far are not sufficient to track down any direct relative of the client either in Europe or in the US. [Interpreter’s note]
•
I watch as the cart carrying Mama and my little sister disappears behind the dunes. Mama turns her head back every few minutes, waving frantically until she is out of sight. The horizon is bathed in blood red; black lines sharp as knives radiate from the last slice of sun. It gets dark quickly, the neighbour looks out from the doorway and invites me to join her, but I tell her I can’t leave, I have to watch over the house while Mama is away. She brings me a small plate of meat stew with a bit of rice. I eat alone, outside on the wicker mat, waiting for them to return. To calm my nerves, I grab one of the few jujubes left, they have a musky scent. I hold the pit in my mouth, roll it around with my tongue and then swallow it whole.
The lanterns agitate the shadows of passers-by and I hear quiet voices through the thin walls made of branches and dung. I pick up the hand-shaped comb and undo my braids, my hair is so long it almost touches the ground. The sky fills with white stars and I can see the Southern Cross next to the figure of a camel. Mama often tells us the story of a time when there was a terrible famine in a village in the North and the men decided to kill the camel of the sky and feed on its meat. So, they climbed a tall mountain and, as they still couldn’t reach it, got on one another’s shoulders until they were able to cut off its tail. In pain, the camel fled towards the South and then sat itself down, exactly as I see it now, ashamed of its lacking backside. Its large body comforts me, keeps me company. The camel saved itself from the greediness and cruelty of men and left a luminous wake in its flight, that of the Milky Way.
It’s night when I’m wakened by a metallic noise like that of frenzied cicadas. I look through the cracks in the wall and quickly recoil: nearby houses are on fire. I rush outside and see women ruffled like wild birds, I see adult men falling like ripe fruit, I see the neighbourhood stormed by men meaner than stray dogs, abnormal creatures, with agate-like eyes blacker than the bottom of hell. The air is saturated with sulphur and dirty water; I move past the flames as lightly as a yellow butterfly.
A pack of ferocious dogs is at my heels, my already worn-out clothes have been reduced to rags. Thin streaks of blood line my legs. I arrive at the burial ground of my mother’s temple. The jujube’s burnt trunk is still smoking. I hug it, although certain it won’t be enough to hide me. And suddenly I see a florescent wake envelope me completely. My hair takes the form of the jujube’s spiky branches, it grows abundantly, hanging down towards the ground until covering me completely. My hair sprouts jagged and luminescent leaves and little white flowers in the shape of stars. The dogs howl around the base of the jujube, but they can no longer see me.
Numerous are the omissions and incongruences of the events described in the course of the hearing for a request for asylum. The client exhibits signs of torture and abuse. [Interpreter’s note]
It’s spring. The child and I follow the Signora through the garden encircling the villa. She removes dead leaves with a rake and piles them up on the side. She carefully clears the area at the foot of the willow tree. I tell her that the branches of the tree hang down like those of the jujube and I almost feel tempted to tell her about my metamorphosis. She nods sympathetically: I don’t know the jujube tree, she replies, but you are quite right about the willow, that’s why here we say it’s weeping. Her face is motionless in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. The child toddles unsteadily, attaching herself to my skirt; with her little hands, she picks dry hydrangea flowers, sits down in the grass and reduces them to dust. We help the Signora plant hyacinth bulbs around the cypresses. Clusters of wisteria with its intense aroma dangle from the fence. The Signora sings with an almost deranged joy about the first blooms. The child has her same milk-white skin tone; I protect her with a thick layer of sunscreen and follow her with a little umbrella: by now her curls go far past her shoulders. The Signora knows of my passion for hair, and yet she doesn’t understand why I comb it with such care, why I coat it with regenerative creams, why I protect it from the wind and sun. The Signora’s hair blazes like a flow of lava. She walks, dirtying her clothes with the rich soil and the orange pollen from the lilies. I wonder if her garden has a corner for medicinal plants too, and she responds coldly that she has no real reason to garden, no purpose other than beauty.
When it’s time for a snack we go back inside, the child and I play with wooden blocks on a sand-coloured Persian rug. The Signora brings a silver platter, two cups of jasmine tea and a box of butter cookies. I take a container of fruit yoghurt out of the fridge for the child. While I feed her, she sticks her longest locks into her mouth, getting them all sticky. The Signora sips her tea and invites me to sip mine as well. Then, calmly, very calmly, she announces that soon she and the child will be leaving on a long trip to the United States that she can no longer delay. She knows that I dream of joining my mother and my little sister there, but, despite all her attempts, it’s impossible for her to bring me with them; the laws don’t allow it. But I can stay in her house if I like: the time will fly, it’ll feel as though only a few minutes have passed by the time they’re back.
Then she goes to the child, gathers her hair in her hands and adds, in her icy voice, that she’ll have to cut it before leaving, because she won’t know how to brush it in my absence. I stay silent, I leave my tea untouched. The Signora retires to her quarters. I decide I won’t allow her to leave with the child, I won’t allow her to cut her hair either. I’ll wait for the Signora to fall asleep and escape out the gate with the child in my arms. I don’t want them to disappear behind the hills, just like my Mama and little sister behind the dunes; I don’t want to lose them to America too.
•
There is a reasonable amount of evidence to conclude that the mother and sister of the client had lost their lives during the massacre in the village of origin. [Interpreter’s note]
Translated from the Italian by Hope Campbell Gustafson
STORYTELLER
Anoud
Iraq
‘IN 1991, I EXPERIENCED my very first air raid,’ Jamela said in between gulps of rice and curry. She wiped the side of her mouth with her dirty sleeve, once white, now the colour of soot. ‘It rumbled in my guts. I was certain we wouldn’t live to see daylight.’ The two men behind the counter of an Indian take-away in east London let her prattle away while she ate at a single corner table they’d set for her.
My parents had been preparing for it. They stuck crosses of duct tape on the windows and piled sandbags outside, covering the lower half of the windows. They figured that the pantry was structurally the safest place in the house if the roof collapsed, so they cleared everything out and converted the metal shelves on the walls into bunk beds for us to use when the bombs hit.
My sister and I were super excited about our new play room. We spent almost all of our time in there that week, doing our homework, playing Uno and gossiping about what the adults might be doing and saying.
‘I want a pink gas mask,’ I told my sister.
‘When I die, I want my coffin to look like a race car,’ she replied. We thought war was some kind of game, like the Arabic-dubbed G.I. Joe cartoon on TV, and we were excited for it to start.
But when the first night of bombing began, I was petrified, crying hysterically and shaking so violently I had to clench my fists to regain some control of my fingers. I could hear the sound of bombs outside slicing through the air with a piercing ‘voom’. It felt like I was about to fall off a cliff. ‘Mommy!’ I screamed with every blast. My mother reached up from the floor where she and my father were laying, and tapped the back of my hand to calm me down. My sister was curled up in a ball not making a squeak. Immediately after each ‘voom’ came a �
�boboom’ that sucked me deep into the mattress; then came the ‘tatatat’ of anti-aircraft guns. That loosened me up a little.
In between the vooms, bobooms and tatatas came the voice of George Bush over the radio transistor which my parents were glued to: ‘We care about the Iraqi people and we pray for their safety.’
In 1996, I felt hunger for the first time in my life. The economic sanctions were hard.
‘Mom, I want more eggs,’ I asked one day. ‘Have some bread instead,’ she replied.
‘But why can’t I have more eggs?’
My mother stormed from the room, ‘All I do is cook and clean in this house and no-one appreciates it! If you can’t make yourself useful, then get out of my kitchen.’
I sat down and chewed quietly on half a flat bread, keeping an eye on my baby brother in his highchair, squeezing a piece of orange to mush with his stubby little fingers.
My mother turned her attention to a giant pot of mashed orange peel mixed with pungent chemicals. She was trying to make liquid soap for the dishes because there had been none in the local market in Baghdad since 1993. Along with all other imported goods, it was effectively banned. My brother started to cry so I pulled him out of his highchair and sat him down on my lap. He picked up a wooden spoon and banged on the table with it, while I stared at the rotating movement of my mother’s wrist over the pot.
Suddenly, a tin bowl flew through the air at us. I screamed and we both fell backwards along with the chair. My brother had grabbed the tin bowl full of cooking ghee and accidentally tipped it over. The ghee was now in a puddle on the kitchen floor. I was on my back and my baby brother was trapped under the back of the chair. And where did my mother’s priorities lie first? With the cooking ghee, of course! She quickly poured flour on the ghee to keep it from spreading. She then pummelled the dough with a snap of her wrists, completely ignoring my baby brother who was now panicked and crying.
Mother turned to me, ‘What are you looking at? Pick up your brother!’ We had floor food for dinner that night.
In 2003, I took shelter in my first bunker. My father decided that the safest place during an air raid was not the pantry after all, but a two-metre deep tunnel in the back garden. My mother resented my father passionately for ruining her flower beds. My parents fought with each other constantly. My brother and father laboured away with shovels for two weeks, digging an L shaped tunnel which they padded with thick rubber sheets to keep the damp out. We were miserable in that bunker. The grooved tin sheets layered on top didn’t keep the rain from trickling in. The bunker was damp and cold, and the smell clung to the back of your throat. During the second air raid, my brother let out a giant fart. ‘You’re disgusting!’ my mother, sister and I yelled as we climbed out of the bunker, in the midst of an air raid, to go back inside where it was dry, clean and warm. My father and brother gave in shortly after. We waited out the bombing with tea and sweets, watching a dubbed Brazilian soap opera.
In 2005, my best friend Farah was killed. She was a television reporter. I found out about her death at work when I was reading the daily news clippings that were circulated every morning to all staff. I didn’t believe it at first, so frantically searched online for news. Images of her appeared on my screen. She was laying in an open coffin carried over the heads of tens of men, dry blood smeared on her cheeks and eyes closed. There were other images of her face down on the side of a road with a stain of blood in the centre of her back.
Some websites wrote that Farah’s death was a conspiracy to kill all the elite Sunni Muslims. Others dubbed her a Shia martyr. Farah’s mother was Shia, her father Sunni. I rushed to the bathroom with my head lowered, tears burning behind my eyes. People said good morning to me, but I ignored them. I locked myself in a cubicle for half an hour and cried. I splashed cold water on my face, and reapplied my make-up before sitting back down at my desk to catch up with my to-do list.
In 2006, I lost my cousin. I had never seen my auntie so sad; she looked like a burnt and half-melted lump of clay. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, hunched over her lap, wrapped in swaths of black fabric. My cousin, her son, Anwar got 16 bullets to the chest and died earlier that morning. He’d called me just two days before to offer me a job with the news bureau he worked for. His wife yelled in the background as he made the offer. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s stupid. Make him quit his job.’ Her voice got louder. I could hear them tussle for the phone.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Think about it. It’s much better pay.’ The last I heard before he hung up was him and his wife laughing as she tried to grab the phone from him.
When I visited the family house, the living room, where the mourners had gathered was too much for me, so I hid in the bedroom where Anwar’s wife and children were.
‘I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!’ she said. ‘This is all his fault. I told him to quit but he wouldn’t listen.’
Her five-year-old son walked towards her with arms outstretched. He looked confused. She swung her arm at him and flung him towards the wall. Stunned and afraid, he let out a muffled cry. I quickly picked him up, held him close to my chest. The smell of him reminded me of Anwar. Recovering from the shock, he began to let out a stream of tears and snot on my shoulder. I carried him away from his mother and walked back to the living room. He reached out to his grandmother, but she didn’t notice him or me or anyone else that day. The news bureau called a week later to offer me a job.
‘Absolutely not,’ said my father.
In 2007, I came face to face with a murderer. Farah’s killer came to see me. He came to brag. I asked him if he had killed Anwar too. He told me that he’d never heard of him. He was a businessman with a bald head, round belly and a thick mustache. His suit looked expensive but he smelled of cheap cologne.
He said, ‘We don’t like Shia women walking into our mosques with film crews. So my cousins and I decided to put them in their place.’
I wanted to tell him she was half Sunni but I didn’t think it mattered to him. He told me how he had hiked up her skirt and raped her. He confused me with his conflicting stories and I couldn’t understand if he had murdered her himself or ordered others to. Farah’s hair colour kept changing in his story from black to blonde to red. He spoke about how he enjoyed pulling her nails out and peeling the skin from her arms with his knife. I wanted to say, ‘We buried Farah with her skin and nails intact,’ but my tongue was tied. I caught myself faking a smile, quietly waiting for him to finish talking. I even shook his hand when he stood up to leave. That day was the first time I lost my appetite for food. It was also the first time I tried to masturbate and felt nothing.
In 2011, I had my first close encounter with a car bomb. I was with a colleague from work driving home when it went off. Our car flew up into the air and came crashing back down again, front tyres first. We reached out for one another, finding our way through the airbags. I was shaking from head to toe like during my first air raid.
We got out of the car to see the carnage—10 or so cars ahead, dead bodies riddled with holes. They looked like old and torn up sandbags. Pools of blood were mixed with mud and covered by a thin surface of soot. It was extremely hot. Flies stormed in by the hundreds for the feast. My knees and shins felt like they were melting underneath me. I can’t explain it. They felt like they were turning into liquid. He helped me back to the car. I was shaking, so was he. He squeezed me tightly, told me I was beautiful then kissed me hard. I bit his lower lip. He dug his nails into my sides. I felt my insides come back to life. That was not me on the side of the road, lifeless, covered in dust and riddled with holes like a torn-up sandbag. I lost my virginity in 2011.