The women answer her from every direction, “Certainly.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Umm Mazin repositions herself once again, rearranging her folds of fat, and says, “I can also read people’s palms, but I only do that until midday. I beg of you, don’t ask me for that service too often, because I don’t condone foretelling the future. ‘The soothsayers have lied even when they have been truthful.’”
And all the women respond, unthinkingly, with one voice, “Verily spoke God Almighty.”
Had she looked at her own palm this morning? Her lifeline would tell her that life expectancy has dropped by twenty years for men and eleven years for women due to environmental contamination by radiation after the Atomic Energy Center was bombed.
It is now our turn. My aunt becomes a little agitated for a few moments, then says, “I’m sorry to disturb you. We simply came here to get to know you. We live on the third floor.”
Umm Mazin asked her, “And why not? There’s no reason why my guests from the third floor can’t join me for coffee, and now I can tell you your fortune.”
My aunt has no choice but to whisper into her cup. Umm Mazin gazes at me intently all the while. I am eager to find out what she will see in my aunt’s cup.
She says, “So many spots, and colors flying about in the air.”
I almost burst out laughing, but I do not dare. My aunt’s face becomes as small as the saucer she’s holding. Umm Mazin carries on, “You’ve waited many years to achieve something you’ve longed for, but it hasn’t happened.”
I was thinking to myself, in total secrecy, “Well done Umm Mazin, you’re getting warmer…. I’ll give you a clue. Scales. Singular: a scale. The coverings of a pearl or similar. Crustaceans. Small creatures that have no bones and live in the sea, they have a thick muscular coat. Psoriasis: the illness. The patient is afflicted with a skin disease. I am afflicted with this visit today. Come on now, dear aunt of mine, I want to get out of this place right now.”
But Umm Mazin will elaborate no further in her analysis other than to say, “Anyway, your cup is drowning in a big sea pulling down its symbols and images. Come to visit me once again sometime soon and I’ll reread the signs in your coffee cup for you.”
She then announces to the seated ladies, “By the way, I don’t accept visits from men, nor will I receive any Christian or other non-Muslim women; so please don’t embarrass me.”
Before she has even finished her sentence, I find myself by her front door, tugging on my aunt’s hand. A blue ceramic palm hanging in the entrance attracts my attention. A number of small eyes swim around within the palm, and in its center are seven perforations. Underneath it is a strip of protruding writing, “May you be protected from all evil eyes, mine, your parents’, and from your closest neighbor’s.”
CHAPTER FOUR
MY AUNT SIGHS, “Where are we now from the good old days?”
This is her usual introduction to a new phase of whining. I learned that from her husband who can predict the onset of another one of those episodes that he calls ‘her nagging routine.’ He’s convinced that she’s a person who can’t adapt to new circumstances and insists on living in the past. I learned from him how to understand her moods. I also learned from him a little bit about paintings. He classifies his wife as ‘an expressionist’ when he feels like a witty critic. She can see no justification for his teaching sessions about art, as she wants me to be her assistant, to sew shoulder pads.
I hold a piece of colored cellophane up to my eyes. I look over at my aunt through the wrapper of an extinct Macintosh toffee, “My aunt, you’re pistachio-colored in my eyes.” Her gaze flits between me and the piece of cloth that one of her customers has left behind. She’s been asked to embroider some Arabic calligraphy on it.
She rarely changes her seat when she works. She always sits underneath a painting of a man who resembles a Buddha; he’s bald and his eyes are closed. A builder’s plumb line hangs down over the priest. When she lifts up her face to look toward me, the Buddha appears to be sitting on her head.
I say to her, “Ilham, the nurse from the second floor, will ask you to make a dress for her.”
“Does she still live alone, or has she now got somebody with her?”
“What does that have to do with the dress?”
“So that I can decide whether to put the buttons at the side or at the back.”
I gaze down at the ground beneath my feet. My aunt’s words make their way toward me navigating around the strangely shaped outlines etched on the floor tiles. I imagine them to be creatures from another planet. I see the outline of an apple in the tiles, and that of a fish. This spot resembles a face; that one looks like a canary. If I borrow those two circles from that nearby tile and merge them with the rectangular shape on this tile, I’d end up with a funny-looking car.
“Solitude is such a difficult thing, Dalal. The wars have snatched away so many of the men. My customers keep telling me that. One of the women told me that sometimes when she feels lonely, she likes to listen to her bedroom curtain, billowing in a gentle breeze as it makes a soft rustling sound. She closes her eyes and imagines it’s the sound of her husband’s dishdasha as he approaches her bed in the darkened room; yet her husband died a few years ago.”
As we chat, I feel a sudden yearning for Amjad. We used to play together when we were in second year at primary school. After the midterm holidays, I decided that he could be my fiancé. I can’t stop thinking about him since Abu Ghayeb put up that bronze sculpture on the pillar outside the sitting room.
Amjad and I used to look out at the world through the bottom of a glass. We would drink rosewater juice that his beautiful mother Nawal made for us. Then we’d use the glasses as telescopes to see each other as deformed images: disfigured, with huge crooked noses. When we looked at his twin brothers, we’d laugh even harder. Yasir and Nadir weren’t yet three; milky white creatures. They smiled at us placidly from the other side of the glasses: two pairs of hazelnut eyes gleamed as they waved to us. Then we’d go out to ride on his bike in their garden.
Amjad was no longer there when we started our third year at primary school. His mother wasn’t around either, nor were the twins. The news was reported in Al-Jumhuriya—the Republic newspaper. The plane heading from Vienna to Baghdad had exploded when it crashed into a mountain in Syria. The older students in the senior classes were dismissive of the newspaper article. They whispered to each other saying, “The plane didn’t crash into the mountainside; it was a planned assassination to take out Amjad’s father because he worked for the Palestinian resistance.” The news item was followed by a list of passengers unaccounted for in the explosion. I read their names, then I got a glass and read the report a second time, then a third time, through the bottom of the glass. The first set of twins I’d known in my life had been blown up. Yasir—boom…Nadir—boom….
I remember how Miss Suhaila, the Arabic teacher hit me one day for fooling around in the classroom with Amjad. Now he was dead, along with his beautiful mother and his two brothers. I wanted to be the one who hits her this time. Miss Suhaila wouldn’t explain the word ‘assassination’ to me, and told me to stop asking too many questions. She never stopped fiddling with her ugly breast underneath her shirt during Arabic lessons. She talked about the rules of grammar, tugging at her chest. That was in the 1970s.
The sculpture is still, yet animated. An angel floats in a space made of bronze. It’s carrying two children. The angel is a lady, embracing the heads of the two children to her chest like breasts. Each breast is one of the children’s heads. Her hair of bronze billows in the breeze. Her shoulders are bronzed; and behind each shoulder, a wing glints. When she reaches her destination, she’ll give back to each child its head and remain breastless. Soon after that, she’ll snap off her wings and give one to each child. The twins will then fly. They’ll soar away leaving their mother behind, dying on the bronze mountain.
I wish
that Amjad would get on his bike and cycle off; far away from my memories.
My aunt’s voice brings me back to where we’re sitting, “As for the woman who sells me the embroidery threads, she’s so afraid of being alone that she won’t place her slippers underneath her bed.”
“Why?”
“She worries that she’ll start imagining there might be someone under her bed, and that it’s this person’s feet sticking out from underneath the bed’s edge. She says that it’s the bit of the slipper sticking out that frightens her.”
“Why doesn’t she leave them outside her door when she goes to bed?”
“Because she worries they might get stolen.”
A moment later she resumes her conversation. “I have another customer who repeatedly hugs her pillow with all her might before she goes to sleep to warm it up. She then leaves the room to get herself a glass of water. When she gets back into bed again, she cuddles her warmed up pillow and says to it, ‘Goodnight, darling.’”
“Who’s her darling?”
“Her husband, missing in action, lost on the battlefield.”
I say jokingly, “Why don’t we take these problems to Umm Mazin, maybe she’ll have a solution or a cure for them?”
The embroidery needle slips from my aunt’s fingers and dangles from the red thread on her lap. Her eyes gleam as she says, “By God, that’s a good idea, my dear niece.”
It seems that my aunt didn’t get a good night’s sleep last night. She’s usually a very light sleeper, and the slightest movement in the house can wake her. She’s so sensitive that she synchronizes her breaths with her husband’s breathing. She tries to breathe in with his inhalation and breathe out when he expires. She tries to harmonize their breathing so that she can drift off to sleep. The other reason is to avoid having to breathe in his expired breath that smells like a fig that has ripened on the bough for too long then fallen from the tree onto decomposing soil.
Her husband is well aware of her sensitive nature. He reminds her laughingly how her weak body was struck down with a cold the previous winter because she opened the freezer door in December without putting a camisole on. On another occasion, her husband had opened the door of the little fridge in their bedroom at night. The gentle light woke her and she was unable to get back to sleep till the morning.
She has strange moody habits. She places the box of tissue paper inside the drawer, insisting that it’s too ugly to leave lying about. Sometimes, she’ll place the phone behind the sofa because she’s convinced that its presence distorts the harmony of colors in the sitting room. When it rings, she tells it harshly, “Be quiet, you annoying thing.”
But what really drives her mad is her husband’s scales, which fly about in all the rooms. She shakes her head, which is out of proportion to her shoulders, in fury. Sometimes I think it’s her head that is too large, at other times, I’m sure it’s her shoulders that are too narrow. Even her nightdress has thick shoulder pads.
We don’t resemble each other in this family. The only hereditary connection to my aunt is her little toe. She can’t bend it; its joint has been absent since birth. Before I go to sleep, I lift my leg up, and stretch out my right foot. I bend it forward and backward, but just like her’s, my little toe doesn’t bend.
As for Abu Ghayeb, he has huge broad shoulders, like a champion swimmer. He attempts to paint, and that’s when his wife will try to provoke him. As he is getting ready to paint, she starts stripping the hair from her legs using a homemade sugar paste. Nevertheless, he does his best to enjoy listening to The Four Seasons. He ignores her movements for a while, then says to her, “I met Umm Mazin at the entrance of the building. What a gross creature! We barely know each other, yet she had the insolence to tell me that she’d send me her cure for my condition.”
My aunt replies, “Yes, it seems that she’s very capable in what she does. We heard that she treats large numbers of women in her flat.”
“I’m not happy about you visiting this woman. She makes me feel uneasy.”
I ask my aunt’s husband, “Did you hear anything about the boy who lived in the house next to our block of flats?”
“No, why?”
“They say he died. He choked on his chewing gum as he laughed. He was joshing with his friends and fell onto his back. The gum ended up in his windpipe. It was too late by the time the ambulance got there.”
“What a horrifying tale!”
“Is it true what the other kids say, that it takes the gut four years to digest chewing gum?”
“Maybe that’s so, Dalal; I’m not sure.”
“And is it true what they’re saying about his mother? That she was so overcome by her emotions, all the freckles fell off her face?”
My aunt’s husband strokes his forehead with his hands. I continue, “His father is in prison because his friend informed the authorities that he had a satellite dish hidden away on his rooftop. He installed it late at night, under cover of darkness, so that he could watch the news from around the world on the satellite channels. They say that the informer was given a reward when the dish and its cables were confiscated.”
“Where do you get these stories? Wouldn’t it be better if you spent your time learning how to paint?”
My aunt gets up to turn off the television. The image of the president bestowing medals for bravery to a number of army officers vanishes from the screen, and the sound of applause that was emanating from it ceases abruptly.
She adds her suggestion, “Or you could do some embroidery.”
Badriya knocks on our door. In her hand is a letter from Umm Mazin. I ask myself, “How could she possibly call her son Mazin? Isn’t she aware that the dictionary’s definition of Mazin is ants’ eggs?”
My aunt reads out loud, “For the skin and its diseases. Take a handful of the green fleshy layer that covers the wooden shell of ripe walnuts. Slice it, and then boil it in a liter of water until half of it is gone. Filter it through a fine cloth, and then add two large spoons of honey to it. Stir until it dissolves totally in the water. The resulting ointment is used to treat a variety of skin conditions including ulcers, scabies, patchy hair loss, and bleeding gums.”
They both stand there in stunned amazement. Badriya is thunderstruck by the sight of the paintings that surround her in every direction while my aunt is overwhelmed by the contents of the letter. Badriya is standing underneath a pen and ink study of two women. The woman on the right bears a large platter on her head shaped like half a crescent. The woman beside her wears a veil that is simply a collection of half crescents cascading down from just below her brown face. The two peasant women are exchanging gossip that tumbles from their chins. It trickles downward filling in the crevices between the crescents that make up their veils.
Badriya exclaims, “I’m merely the messenger bearing these tidings.”
Her barefoot voice accompanies her on the stairway up to the last floor.
Abu Ghayeb opens up a shiny poster and spreads it out on the table, there’s an apprehensive girl in her bedroom bearing on her shoulders an old woman’s head. A yellow snake is insinuating its way from underneath the doorway. Numerous eyes, like glass globes, are scattered around the segments of the painting. Oil pipelines extend toward infinity. A soldier is shouting out numbers, his lips are rounder mouthing “NO.” The other parts of the painting are celebrations of depression and plucked doves.
He looks up at me and says, “It’s titled The Blockade.”
The edge of the poster slips from beneath his fingertips once again and reverts to its natural state. It wraps itself up into a long cylindrical shape. My aunt’s husband picks up a sewing basket and places it on one end of the poster. At the other end, he places a small sculpture. At that moment, the electricity is cut off. Abu Ghayeb lights a candle and leaves it beside the poster. I remain in my seat, and gaze at the wall in front of me. The cars pass by in the street. Their headlights brighten up the wall. I entertain myself by watching the areas of light sweeping
across the wall every now and then as the cars go by. I glance at my aunt, who’s peering through the darkness. She gathers her threads and disappears out of sight.
I approach the candle. I decide to be different by putting it out. I trap my breath within my lungs and contract my chest muscles. My breath spouts out forcefully from my nostrils rather than from my mouth and the candle goes out.
The darkness spreads out until the dawn.
My aunt’s husband cries out from the bathroom, “Attaaack!”
I run to where he is standing. He examines his body from every angle and says, “What’s happening? My ears have been affected.”
I stand there watching. As he rubs his ears and ruffles his hair, he says, “From now on I’ll have to wear light-colored clothes so that these scales don’t show up on them when they fall.”
Suddenly, he bursts out laughing. I see a demonic gleam in his eyes reflected in the mirror. He asks, “Dalal, what happened to the chicken that used ‘Head & Shoulders’ shampoo?”
“What?”
“It started laying eggs without shells!”
He gives me a medical report, and asks me to read out its appendix for him. I put the toilet seat down and sit on it, “The cause of this disease is not known. It is a unique condition that is related to the individual’s genetic makeup. However, some doctors have postulated that high daily stress levels are a significant contributing factor. It is usually not possible to eradicate this illness completely.”
We do not stay long. He kicks the door open and takes me by the hand, saying, “I can’t stand it anymore. Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“We’re going to buy a queen!”
We go out into the street and head toward Karrada Dakhil. He walks as if he’s in a race. He doesn’t stop for any reason, as if he’s trying to reach his destination before anyone else. He leads me, still clasping my hand tightly. I observe the people passing by. I wonder, “Why do cats and women wearing abayas behave in the same way? They start to cross the road without looking. When they get halfway across, they decide to look in the other direction to see if a car is coming. They’re then surprised to realize that there’s indeed a car coming toward them. Instead of hurrying quickly across the road, for some strange reason, these two creatures start heading back to the pavement, and quite often get run over.”
Absent: A Novel Page 5