Daughters of Iraq

by Revital Shiri-Horowitz

  My belly was next. At the sight of the sagging pouches of skin resting on my abdomen, my eyes filled with tears and fury. Where is my body, once so fresh and young, so muscular and vital? “What’s left of me?” I whispered. “What remains?” I didn’t know how to answer. I turned from the mirror and leaned back in the chair, wrapping my arms around myself. I cried for a long time. My nose ran and my eyes dripped, but I didn’t wipe the tears away. I let them stream down my face until they dried. I have to get back to my reflection, I commanded myself. I have to know exactly who I am, what I am, inside and out, from every corner and every angle. Be brave, I instructed myself, and I turned to face the mirror. This time I would scan myself in reverse: I’d start at the top and work my way down. I don’t want to give in, I thought, I don’t want to take pity on myself. The truth, that’s what I’m after, the truth, right here, right now!

  I looked directly at the mirror; my eyes met themselves. Dark irises ringed with grayish-black circles stared back at me. I looked for a long time, evaluating every wrinkle, every hue. There were no lashes above my eyes, no eyebrows on my forehead; only my two naked pupils staring at me. Eyes at once fearless and compassionate. Compassionate toward what? I wondered, and I knew the answer: toward myself. Maybe my body was tired and slack, embarrassing, offensive, maybe even treacherous, but in my eyes I saw life, light, strength, emotion, and a trace of wisdom. I smiled. Even my sunken cheeks no longer bothered me. I am here, I am alive and breathing. The body is just an envelope, an outer layer. Myself, my essence, my soul, these cannot be taken from me. Not by time or sickness or even death.

  This is who I am, at times of peace and at times of war. The war for my life. Now I knew. I had to look at myself in the mirror and see the whole picture, from my feet to my head. It took courage to do this I balked, but I persisted, and I am proud of that. I had already looked at every part of my body. Now, if truth is what I was after, I had to look at my body as a whole. I stood opposite the mirror, erect and unyielding, looking not for war but for peace. I wanted to make peace with my body, with my God, with my destiny. The short woman standing across from me was flawed and weak, but she was whole both inside and out.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Violet

  Wednesday, April 8, 1987

  Three weeks after they arrived in Israel, Eddie and Ima sent me and Farida a letter that changed the course of our lives. We had a double tent near the Ramle intersection, Ima wrote, at the outskirts of the city. We had neighbors on only one side. We were given this prime piece of property because of Eddie’s work in the Resistance, and now that we had, thank God, a tent, now that everyone had left Iraq, it was time for the family to reunite. On the following Tuesday, with God’s help, Eddie would come with one of his friends, they would load us and our meager possessions onto a truck, and take us to the Ramle intersection.

  The letter was matter-of-fact, aside from the inclusion of copious religious expressions, phrases that would eventually disappear from our family’s vocabulary. With the exception of Aba, who stayed religious until his dying day, the rest of us including Ima became secular. The letter did not contain a single expression of love, nor did it mention what awaited us in the future. Farida and I had only three days to get organized, say goodbye, come to terms with the idea that, once again, our lives were about to undergo a drastic change.

  I spent the three days with Chanan. We roamed the hills of Jerusalem, stopped for a picnic in the afternoon, talked at length about the future, imagining what it held in store for us. The day before my departure, we went for an early morning hike so that we could take advantage of the entire day, and in the afternoon we stopped to rest on the banks of the Achziv Stream. Chanan said it wasn’t so bad, my leaving the kibbutz. He promised to visit, but I told him he might as well forget about being a couple, because in my culture that wasn’t acceptable. If Ima found out about our courtship, her heart would break. And Aba? He would have been furious. “What was was,” I told him, as if I were the more mature one. Chanan couldn’t understand these cultural mores, and he tried to convince me that here, in Israel, my parents would surely change, they would surely understand that their new home was more progressive than Iraq, that here girls could go out with boys and not marry right away. But then he grew silent and thoughtful.

  I kept my thoughts which were dismal to myself. What kind of future awaited me without Chanan? I wondered. What awaited him? It would be best for him to forget about me and find himself another girlfriend. I’d be okay. I was completely unprepared for what happened next. Chanan took my hand, kissed it gently, looked straight into my eyes, and said: “What if we got married?”

  His words stunned me. “What are you talking about, getting married?” I sputtered. “I’m only nineteen!” As much as I loved Chanan, I wasn’t ready to think about marriage. We had just migrated to Israel. I had experienced only a small taste of freedom. My whole life was before me. How could I explain to Chanan that it wasn’t even up for discussion? He released my hand; he was hurt. “If that’s the case,” he said, “then maybe it is a good thing you’re leaving.” These words cut me. My eyes filled with tears. All I wanted was to return to my room and never see Chanan again. We were silent as we walked back to the kibbutz. Chanan didn’t say goodbye to me when Eddie arrived, and I didn’t say goodbye to him. I left my broken heart at the kibbutz and set off for my new life.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Noa

  The life you have

  is the life you lived

  look back with understanding

  find the point of genesis

  the creation

  create yourself

  it’s the best world

  the only one

  you could create

  all this is found in you

  discover it

  begin from the beginning . . .

  (Translated by Linda Stern Zisquit

  Let the Words: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach)

  Noa sat at her desk in her room and wrote: In her poem “The Life you Have,” from the book Appearance, Yona Wallach writes about creation, renewal, disintegration, reconstruction, and ultimately acceptance. We must accept what is, she says, because this is all that we have. Before we can start anew, we must be strong, and that strength comes from stripping away the outer layers and delving into the deepest level of understanding. “Make amends,” says Wallach, implying that we have no choice but to repair, to search, to reveal, to understand. This is our mission, our job, our destiny.

  Noa put down her pen and took a moment to think about what she had read and what she had written so far. She thought about her discussion with Aunt Farida and about what her mother was trying to tell her. Violet had tried to stare down the truth, to experience revelation and recognition. She was trying to create herself; that was the purpose of the diary. Maybe that was what Noa herself had to do. Did she have to create herself, by herself? To start from the beginning? To make amends? She gazed out the window of her room at the dark skies. Autumn had arrived, with its sweet smell of falling leaves and dry parched earth, and she saw a few tiny raindrops hit the glass. Not the real rain of winter, but enough to make her feel that a new wind was blowing. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. This evening she would see her old lover, Ehud. She wouldn’t be seeing him alone, but she knew he’d be at the youth movement’s reunion at the Yarkon Park.

  She wondered if what she was feeling was excitement or fear. Anxiety gnawed at her stomach. She had asked Ofir to accompany her, but he was on duty that evening; she would have to deal with this alone. She lay in her bed, stretched out her body, spread her arms wide. She let the thoughts sneak in quietly. Maybe if she concentrated very hard, she could prepare herself for this meeting. She wouldn’t let him slip away again. It was the truth she was after, and she would demand the truth from him, too. She wanted to move on, and the feeling buried deep inside her refused to recede. She looked at the clock; she had one more hour. How would she get him to speak to her? What could she say to
keep him from ignoring her? She rose from the bed, moved to the bathroom to take a shower. When she returned to her room there was a note taped to her bedroom door. “I’m leaving, Noa. I didn’t want to bother you. I’ll be back at midnight. Wait up for me.”

  She looked at the familiar handwriting and smiled to herself. But then a feeling of guilt swept over her. Was there room in her heart for Ofir’s love? Maybe it was time to work on her own “repairing.” She was piecing together the fragments of her life; she was closing circles. Perhaps later, after she had closed all the circles, she would have the strength to start a new one.

  Noa grabbed a pair of jeans draped over the chair and put them on. She pulled a shirt from the open closet and slipped into it. She donned a denim jacket and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t want Ehud to pay attention to her because of her appearance. She wanted to go beyond the surface. She slammed the door behind her and headed down the steps to the street.

  Chapter Forty: Farida

  Friday was a very slow day; the hands of the clock refused to budge. Farida had cooked for Shabbat; she had cleaned the house; and now time stood still. Oren had told her at the last possible minute that he and his family couldn’t make it: his son had come down with chicken pox. This weekend, there would be no guests for Shabbat dinner. Sigali’s children were with their father, and Sigali wanted to rest.

  Dora had been over that morning, taking a little break from her husband. He was driving her crazy, sitting in front of the TV all day and not saying a word. If only he were working, she complained, and then at least she could talk to the walls. When he was home, she had confided to her dear friend, she was too embarrassed to talk to the walls. The two of them sat together for a long time, drinking Turkish coffee, talking about the past, and their families, and their neighbor, Carmella, who’d had a heart attack a few days ago, when she was home alone. She’d barely managed to crawl to the phone and call an ambulance. She was at Hillel Yaffe Hospital. Everyone was there with her: all her children, and her sisters, who had hardly spoken to her for the last five years, but now apparently remembered they had a sister. They were all gathered around her bed, waiting on her. All those years she was alone, and nobody cared because she never complained. Everything was always okay; she was always smiling, even though her children almost never came to visit, and she visited them even less. And suddenly they remembered her. “Maybe they’re worried about their inheritance,” Dora suggested. Whatever the case, Carmella was in the hospital, sighing and groaning and letting her relatives tend to her, even though she’d admitted to Farida and Dora that she felt fine. She just didn’t want to go back to an empty house.

  In the afternoon, Farida tried to take a nap, but she writhed sleepless in her bed. She got up and turned on the TV. Every now and then she would venture out on the porch to check on the outside world. In her neighborhood, Fridays were special. You could see all the families walking to synagogue; hear the clanking of the pots from the kitchens. You could even hear people singing zemirot. There were almost no cars on the road. The hands of the clock weren’t moving.

  When she’d told Victor to call at eight, she never imagined she’d sit and wait for the phone to ring. Why was she feeling like this? She didn’t even know what he looked like. Not only that, she knew almost nothing about him. And would she even want to know about him? When it was almost eight o’clock, she began pacing around the phone impatiently. And then, at eight precisely, the phone rang. She pounced on it and plopped down in her armchair. When she heard the familiar voice, she breathed a sigh of relief. Her sigh was so loud, so nasal, that Victor wasn’t certain he’d dialed the right number.

  “It’s me, Farida! Of course it’s me,” she reassured him. “How are you, Victor?” She tried to mask her excitement.

  “Great, great, everything’s great.” He didn’t elaborate.

  Desperate to fill the silence, Farida told him that her children weren’t coming for Shabbat dinner because her little nephew was sick. So she had all this food. Victor told her that his twin grandsons were spending Shabbat on the army base, that they were both in combat units. “May God protect them,” Farida said. Then she tried to steer the conversation to what interested her the most: Victor himself.

  “I have one son and three grandchildren: a twenty-three-year-old girl and nineteen-year-old twins,” Victor told her. “When I moved to Israel, I met my wife at the transit camp in B’nei Brak. We got married, and we were lucky: my business did very well. Little by little, we built a good life for ourselves. We bought a house in an old neighborhood in Ramat Gan, and we lived there for thirty-eight years. She was a good woman, my wife, and one day, when I wasn’t home, she had a stroke. She deteriorated quickly and died two months later. All my life, she had taken care of me, and in the end she wouldn’t even let me take care of her.” Victor stopped speaking. Farida suspected he was on the verge of tears.

  “Good for you,” Farida said. “You’re a good man. Show me another husband who wants to take care of his wife. Really, I admire you.”

  “You took care of your husband, right?”

  “Yes, of course I took care of him, but there’s a difference between a wife looking after her husband and a husband looking after his wife. Maybe my views are outdated, but that’s how it seems to me. But you, you should be proud of yourself. You’re a good man,” she repeated. She could feel her heart beating and the sweat emanating from her body. This man impressed her more and more.

  “Walla, what can I tell you?” said Victor. “That’s life—you never know what’s coming. But if you don’t mind telling me,” he said, “what was it like for you, living here in Israel?”

  “Oh!” Farida was caught off guard. “You want to know about my life? It was life, that’s all. Things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would. I was in love with Eddie, the Eddie that you knew.”

  “Eddie?” Victor was surprised. “But wasn’t he your sister’s son?”

  “He was my sister’s son, but he was quite a bit older than me,” she answered, trying to justify herself. She smiled to herself and lit a cigarette, preparing for a long conversation. “I think I loved him for as long as I could remember, and I dreamed of marrying him. It never even crossed my mind that we wouldn’t get married. I had my heart set on him. Him alone.”

  “May his soul rest in peace,” Victor said, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then Victor asked quietly, “How did Eddie die? I swear on the Torah, Farida, I don’t want to upset you, but if it’s not too hard for you to talk about . . . I would really like to know what happened.”

  “It’s alright, Victor,” Farida said sadly. “Many years have passed since then. For a long time, I couldn’t even speak his name, because my heart ached so much, and even now, my heart still weeps for him. But at least I can say his name, and I can even tell you what happened.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Victor. She wondered if he regretted asking the question.

  Farida sighed. She extinguished her first cigarette, lit another, and began her story. “In Iraq, Eddie was a member of the Resistance, and we stockpiled ammunition in our house. In a storage area we used to call a slick. We all lived together, you know, along with other members that the Iraqis, may their name be cursed, were searching for. Once a Kurdish boy came to us, one of the people the Iraqis were after. We were trying to smuggle him into Israel. He lived with us for a month before the Resistance finally got him out of the country.”

  “I knew Eddie was in the Resistance,” Victor said, “but I didn’t know there was a slick in your house. Or that you hid people.”

  “We hid people; we hid arms; we did everything that had to be done,” Farida said. She thought about how many children there were in the house, and how her parents and her older brothers had agreed to help the underground movement, even though they knew that if the Iraqis ever found out, they would murder everyone in the house, children as well as adults.

  “Good for you, really, good for all of you,” Victor
murmured.

  “When we got to Israel,” Farida continued, “we lived in a transit camp in Ramle for almost two years. What can I tell you? It wasn’t much of a life. There were snakes in the summer and floods in the winter; the summers were sweltering and the winters were freezing. What kind of life is that? In the end, my mother, allah yirchama, went to the housing office and banged her fist on the table, and after a lot of screaming and yelling they agreed to give us an apartment in Lod. Provided, that is, we gave them a deposit of three hundred lirot.”

  “Three hundred lirot?” Victor gasped. “That was a fortune back then! Did you have it?”

  “No,” Farida said. “But there was this boy, a friend of Eddie’s, the one who had hidden in our house. He lived in a settlement near Ramle, and when Eddie asked him to lend us the money, he agreed immediately. He said he would do anything for our family, because we had saved his life. He promised to get the money and bring it to the camp by bicycle. All the money, he said, in cash. Thanks to him we got our apartment in Lod.”

  “Anyway,” Farida continued, engrossed in her narrative, “they were good friends, this boy and Eddie. They used to get together, either at our house or at his moshav, his settlement. One night Eddie biked to this boy’s house, and he didn’t come home. It wasn’t like him to stay out without letting us know. In the middle of the night, we all went searching for him. We even called the police. Some Arab shepherds found him the next morning, lying in the road, dead. He’d fallen off his bicycle and injured himself on a boulder, and that was it. No more Eddie.” Farida sighed, and a heavy silence fell.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Victor said finally. “Walla, I’m so sorry.”

  “What a life,” Farida said, wiping away her tears. “One minute someone’s there, the next minute he’s gone. God gives and God takes, what can you do? Everything is in God’s hands.”