Absent: A Novel

by Betool Khedairi

  She reaches out with a smile and takes the bag of shopping he brought back with him. She knows that he’ll comment about the way she stores things in the fridge. He used to argue with her at length about her purchases. He’d accuse her of being an unenlightened consumer because she only bought pretty looking items with shiny packaging, without checking the quality or the price. He also used to complain that she had no sense of order and that she piled up her shopping in a haphazard way. He said to her, “Don’t you sense the importance of empty space and filled space?”

  Today, the fridge doesn’t get filled, not even halfway, and the car is no longer in the garage.

  She’s no longer bothered with her husband’s return or his absence; she’s busy polishing her unusual collection of buttons. Her present concern is to acquire a varied selection of buttons that she can apply in an artistic way to the dresses she makes for customers. She has run out of polishing liquid, so she steals some of the ointment that Abu Ghayeb uses for his psoriasis. She reads the label, “Does not leave a greasy residue.” She squeezes out a bean-sized globule saying to herself, “This’ll do.”

  She no longer chills fruit juice for him. Nowadays, when there are two oranges in the house and she has to share their juice with him, she squeezes them both and then divides the juice in half rather than squeezing each one into a separate glass. This way she shares the good and the bad fruit with him saying to herself, “If I do it like this, no one can tell the fresh from the old orange!”

  Everything has been tampered with these days, from building materials to tomato paste that turns out to be a mixture of old potatoes and red coloring of indeterminate origin. Two days ago, the bathtub fell down from the flat above us. The dampness had eroded their bathroom floor, and because of the exorbitant price of repair, they were unable to deal with it properly. They used poor quality materials that didn’t support the weight of the bathtub. Now half of it is still in their bathroom; half dangles over our dining room table. Our ceiling forms their unstable floor. My aunt is about to have a nervous breakdown.

  After several attempts, we managed to get hold of Aziz, the Kurdish repairman. He promises to come straight away to return the bathtub to its rightful owners. Kaka Aziz cuts off the water supply to the entire building. He’s a large man, gentle and hardworking. He refuses to eat his lunch until he’s finished his work. He mispronounces his own name with a Kurdish accent, calling himself Kaka Asees.

  During the several days it takes to make the repairs, our water supply is cut off. My aunt refuses to go to our neighbors’ flat to use their toilet. She prefers to use a large tin can that she empties every evening when all the building’s residents are asleep. She creeps stealthily down to the ground floor and spreads it over the plants.

  A young woman has come down with blood poisoning and was admitted to hospital last week. I will accompany my aunt to visit her family. We don’t take a taxi; we worry that the driver might ask for a thousand dinars. They say that a lizard had crawled inside a sanitary pad at a small shop where the shopkeeper had started selling them individually. The small reptile had entered the young woman’s body and she fell ill. Officials from the Ministry of Health closed down his shop and sealed it with red wax. The shopkeeper is in prison, and the girl’s mother is seeking compensation. Pretty Lady Tampons, Cinderella Sanitary Pads, Virgin Tampons, and now Lizard Sanitary Pads!

  We sit down in the living room. The poisoned girl is in her bedroom. Her mother offers us a glass of water. She looks down at her tray as she serves the water, apologizing because she has nothing better to offer. As she moves away, I grow aware of the painting hanging in front of me.

  The woman in the painting appears coarse, like a solid figure decorated with a grainy coat. There are purple, pink, and blue squares. There’s a breast in one square; the other breast is in another square. A face is in one square, and the rest of the body is in another. The woman is distributed in squares.

  As we leave, I drag my hand along the gypsum wall surrounding their house. The artist would’ve enjoyed painting on these surfaces. I ring a front door bell that is out of order, I press down on the nipple of one of his ladies with my finger.

  I have no wish to return to our apartment. My aunt will give me a headache with her tales of buttons and shoulder pads. In days gone by, our block used to be known as “the teachers’ flats,” as we lived in a building that was allocated to teachers. Now my aunt collects buttons, immerses herself in her fabrics and threads; and I’m being labeled as the seamstress’s daughter. As for Abu Ghayeb, the former Mr. Tourism, he will become the seamstress’s husband.

  She has a huge number of square, see-through plastic boxes, where she keeps her precious buttons. No one is allowed to approach her possessions. Each box has a small sticker indicating its contents. Plastic buttons, wooden buttons, metal buttons. She has an unusual collection of ivory buttons, and another set made out of compressed cork. Sometimes she writes on the box the type of button it contains: teardrop, circular, cuboid, reed. On others she writes in a clear hand the occasion the type of button would suit: wedding, graduation, mourning.

  She became more attached to the boxes when people started buying old clothes. They can no longer afford to buy new items, so we’ve now entered the age of darning, patching, and mending what we already have. Trading in secondhand clothes has become an everyday occurrence. Some families only do it in the evening, away from prying eyes. They hide under the cover of darkness as they rummage through the racks of secondhand clothes.

  Younger people head out to the used clothes market after sundown. The items are piled on top of each other. Odors of people who once had homes emanate from between their folds. They are laid out on a metal bed frame in the “rummaging section.” The other clothes are in the “hanging section.” A weak light from a battered lamp gives off the resigned smell of kerosene. The faint beam filters through the little holes in the dangling clothes. A man shouts at the top of his voice, “A curse on all this poverty; come and get it for next to nothing.”

  My aunt insists that need is the mother of invention as she attaches buttons to her clients’ worn-out clothes, announcing proudly that the clothes are now as good as new. Her husband gets fed up with her prattle on one occasion, and thrusts a handful of melon seeds at her saying, “Here you are; dry them, paint them, and make buttons out of them!”

  My aunt takes offense very readily from Abu Ghayeb’s comments. Her shoulders tense underneath her shoulder pads. The spongy pillows become inflated and protrude upward. When his teasing oversteps the limit, especially when he calls her “Little Beady,” she throws a box of buttons at him, one that might contain colored glass penguins or little ceramic fishes. If one of them breaks, she pretends not to be bothered, but the tone of her voice rises until it sounds like the hum of a helicopter engine that’s hovering in the distance above our block of flats.

  He says to her, “We’re drowning in a sea of beads, buttons, and thread.”

  She replies, “It’s better than drowning in the sea of scales that you shed regularly every three hours; like the timetable of the power cuts.”

  My aunt laughs, “Ha, ha, ha” then her laugh deepens within a few seconds to become, “Hu, hu, hu.”

  I slide toward the kitchen to make myself a cup of Nescafé. I am looking forward to a few moments of clearheadedness. I was unable to sleep well last night. I always sleep on my left side. I hope that my cheek will dangle down as I sleep and maybe that will help straighten the crooked angle of my mouth, even if only a fraction. When I was taught at school that the center of the earth was the source of tremendous gravitational force, I imagined it as a huge magnet in the form of a horseshoe. How I wished that magnet could pull my mouth back to its proper shape.

  I bought the jar of coffee a month ago from the nurse, Ilham, who lives on the second floor. We did an exchange. I gave her two tins of sliced mushrooms that were close to their expiry date.

  I plunge the spoon into the coffee jar and scoop
out a generous spoonful. An errant breath of wind blows in through the open window near me. The coffee granules become dislodged, landing on the wet tabletop by my cup. They fall onto the shiny surface and melt like instant brown teardrops. I watch them spreading out in an irregular fashion on the table. I wipe them away and close the window. I spoon out a smaller scoop.

  I sit down to relax as I drink. My aunt and her husband are still angrily exchanging buttons and scales.

  I pick up the telephone to check once again whether our faulty lines have been fixed. We hear a lot of weird and wonderful tales from the crossed lines. Some people say that it’s the cheapest way to pass time.

  A woman is telling her friend, “My son has managed to emigrate.”

  “Where’s he gone to?”

  “He’s arrived safely in New Zealand.”

  The woman listening at the end of the line gasps, “What? How could you send him to New Zealand? What about the hole in the ozone layer? Don’t you care about his well-being?”

  “My dear, if you manage to get out of Saddam Hussein’s hole, who cares about the hole in the ozone?”

  I replace the receiver. End of conversation.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Between 16 January and 27 February [1991] some 88,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq, an explosive tonnage judged equivalent to seven Hiroshima-size atomic bombs. Thus for a period of the war Iraq was subjected to the equivalent of one atomic bomb a week, a scale of destruction that has no parallels in the history of warfare.

  —Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice, 4–5

  THE ECONOMIC BLOCKADE seeps into our block of flats. The building overlooks the Mosque of the Unknown Soldier in one direction, and the tennis courts belonging to the Alwiya Club in the other. When I was a child, a Jewish family lived in the top floor of our building. They had three daughters—Gilda, Iris, and Valerine. I adored Iris because she would meet me on the balcony at night with magic sparklers that she’d smuggled out for me. We’d light them and wave to each other with the little suns that hissed delightfully, smelling of gunpowder.

  They called their grandmother “Grumma.” Her big toe had a large corny growth that got bigger every day until she was unable to walk. Iris’s father Moshi had a mole on the back of his neck. Three hairs grew out of it and Grumma would cut them off for him every month. I remember going over to their flat every Saturday to turn on the lights for them or to light their cooker. Her mother had told Iris that when their God finished creating the world, he sat down on the Saturday and put his feet up. That’s why they don’t do any work from sundown on Friday till Saturday evening. They don’t even switch on the lights because they avoid anything resembling lighting a fire. Grumma, with hair like white cotton wisps, used to say to me in broken Arabic, “Thank you, thank you. May the Lord switch off your light just like you do for us.”

  I once played with Iris underneath the bed. We found an open tin of effervescent Vitamin C. We managed to salvage a few tablets soiled with dust. We placed them in our mouths; they tasted like solid rounds of a medicated orange mixture that had dried up in a solution of 7UP. They boiled on our tongues releasing a bitter tang with a fizz.

  The family’s departure left an aftertaste like those Vitamin C tablets. Unexpectedly, they emigrated, leaving their flat, which was taken by an instructor at the military academy. Iris whispered in my ear, “Mama is very upset, she doesn’t want to go. They’re sending us to a country called Israel.”

  I saved the last magic sparkler in the drawer beside my parents’ death certificate.

  I remember Iris whenever I go past the old calendar that still hangs in the corridor. It’s a promotional agenda for Iraqi Airways. Their emblem is a trendy design of a white airplane, like the side view of a chunky fork. The pretty air hostess in the picture swallows to bring down the pressure in her delicate ears. The vomit bags are on her right; the instructions for the oxygen masks are on her left.

  Today our airplanes are stranded, distributed at random in the airfields of various Arab countries. Most of the pilots have emigrated. Those who were unable to go are working in the airline’s kitchens, which now prepare pre-packed meals, with compliments of the airline, in green and white.

  The military instructor had no daughters. He lived alone without a wife. He had two thick bushy eyebrows with tapered hairs. They remind me of sprouts from chicory seeds sown together and planted carefully underneath the skin in two graceful arcs above his eyes. He was a dark-skinned man, almost completely bald. The skin of his scalp shone through between the tufts of hair scattered across the top of his head. It looked as though he’d covered it with small mounds of crushed coal here and there. He never spoke to anyone; he read a lot, even in the lift—when it was working. One of his jobs had been to accompany the Jewish family to the door of their plane, but his civilian duties also included reminding everyone to hang up shiny decorations in the corridors to commemorate anniversaries of national political events, and to light a candle outside each flat when the president’s birthday came around in April.

  That was a while before he sold his flat to Umm Mazin.

  In time, people stopped calling our building the teachers’ block. It came to be known as Umm Mazin’s building. We met her for the first time as she was coming up the stairs, with some difficulty. She was a short, stout woman. Her head was covered with a black veil that blended into a black dishdasha and from her shoulders dropped a black abaya. She looked like a dark seal moving heavily under layers of matte material. In her right hand she held a bundle of papers; in her left she was carrying a large see-through carrier bag containing a number of plastic ablution jugs. They had handles like large ears and spouts like rigid rods. Some of them had perforated the bag. Halfway up the stairs, the bag could no longer tolerate the pressure of the jugs inside and it burst.

  The colored jugs tumbled out, bouncing from one step to the other on their way down. Tick, tack, tack, tock, tick. They ended their descent unharmed. Umm Mazin called out at the top of her voice in a rural southern accent to a woman at the bottom of the stairway, “Badriya, gather the jugs on your way up.”

  We assumed she was a trader in plastic goods.

  My aunt’s husband refuses to let me work at the nearby private hospital run by the nuns. They were advertising for cleaners. He said, “You will not be a cleaner while I’m around to provide for you.”

  I would have walked there, passing by the statue of Kahramana, the heroine in Ali Baba’s tale. This lady-shaped fountain had dried up since the imposition of sanctions. The jars containing the forty thieves were now covered by a layer of greenish rust. I remember when I was a little girl, Abu Ghayeb took me to meet his friend, assistant to the sculptor. He was working on another sculpture at that time, of Shahrazad. She was in two halves; he hadn’t yet welded her torso to her lower half. The assistant received us in the studio and greeted Abu Ghayeb by saying, “Welcome to the friend of all artists.” He was too polite to greet him as “Our friend, the failed artist.”

  I climbed a spiral staircase made of black metal. I paused halfway up, and found myself standing beside Shahrazad’s body. Her extended hand was by my side. Her enormous eyes were next to mine. They took a photograph of me standing there. I wanted to climb into her, to wander around inside her chest and abdomen. My lollipop fell into the gaping hole that was her eye.

  If my aunt’s husband had allowed me to work at the hospital, I would have made my way back along Abu Nuwas Street by the Tigris River. It would have taken me past the statues of Shahrazad and Shahrayar whispering to each other. I could have stopped for a few moments to admire them and wonder to myself if my lollipop stick was still inside Shahrazad. Then I’d leave them behind to their privacy, and walk along bombed-out pavements that resembled dislocated shoulders.

  Why does everything remind me of my aunt’s shoulders? Last week an old woman said to her, “For God’s sake, Umm Ghayeb, can you put the padding in the chest rather than the should
ers? Some of us need the enlargement at the front!”

  Umm Ghayeb answered her, “I don’t think I’ll have the time. I have to complete two shrouds, may God preserve you. I have to finish them straight away.”

  She was talking about a father and son who’d committed suicide together. They had fallen on hard times, finally giving up when they were both unable to get any work after three years of trying.

  I imagined that family a few days before they perished looking like a small painting on our wall: men made of cloth, a sun of worn-out threads, an acidic background, a large void.

  We learned at school that sound travels faster through solid objects. I place my head against the wooden edge of my bed. I bite into a carrot and try to listen out for the echo of the crunching inside my skull. I’m the opposite of Abu Ghayeb who has a loathing of all noises.

  Our street has become truly unbearable. In the Days of Plenty we had the Electronic and Miniature Instruments Sales Center, which is now a garage for car repairs. The young workmen drive the customers’ cars at top speed then slam on the brakes to check them. Because our building is almost at the end of the street, the brake testing usually takes place outside our front door. The sign that reads WARNING—SPEED RAMPS is now useless.

  The noises from the street drive my aunt’s husband crazy. Screech or dummm, from the workshops nearby. He goes down to the street with a can of black paint and a paintbrush in his hand. He crosses out the word WARNING and writes instead, CURSES—NOISY BUMPS. When he comes back up, the fireworks that I imagined inside his head settle down. We are then both startled together. Crash. One of the mechanics has crashed straight into the entrance of the building.