Absent: A Novel

by Betool Khedairi

  At this point, I start losing control over my questions. “And what happened to Randa?”

  “That poor woman doesn’t dare to make contact after what happened. I think she’s waiting for Abu Ghayeb to get in touch with her when he’s released.”

  “And the paintings?”

  As far as I know, the works of art have reached the Dead Sea. They’ve been hung up in the hotel.”

  “And Ilham, what was your involvement in her case?”

  “Believe me, I didn’t mean to harm her. I just informed Jamal that I suspected that she was romantically involved with that butcher.”

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “She’s been moved to a dispensary in the hard labor camp.”

  “You’ve ruined us all.”

  Saad puts his head in his hands and starts to weep bitterly. “Jamal doesn’t know that I was going to confess and tell you everything.”

  He reaches out toward me with his hand. “Please forgive me.”

  As I leave, I don’t know how my legs are able to support me. “Get lost.”

  He continues to weep incessantly, like a child. “Please don’t make my predicament worse.”

  Sheets of herbs start blurring in front of me. “Why did Adel abandon me?”

  “I think he became attached to you; but the duty to one’s country is such a precious thing, Dalal. That’s why Adel, I mean Jamal, works so hard for our sake.”

  “You still defend him even though he’s terminated your service.”

  “There’s nothing for me to defend. I’m a pragmatist. Think along with me—who’ll protect you women in the future?”

  “What?”

  “Listen. During the past thirty years people have been leaving. The communists have fled the country, many Shiite families had to leave, the educated professionals and the scientists emigrated, and the Kurds have become independent. They’re even saying that women now make up more than fifty percent of the population as a result of the wars we’ve been through. So what will you ladies do now, dear sister?”

  “Don’t call me sister! You both tricked me.”

  “Life is hard, Dalal.”

  I scream at the top of my voice, “And you claimed having spiritual vision?”

  He stands there looking at me. I say, “Did you really think that you had a third eye?”

  The pitch of my voice gets higher and higher, “It’s your asshole that’s in the middle of your forehead!”

  After Uncle Sami passes away, we are the only ones left in the building. I find my aunt in the sitting room. I look up at the clock on the wall. It no longer works. The nitric acid has leaked out of the battery. My aunt is standing up on a chair facing the big window. She has covered the windowpane with thin tracing paper from top to bottom. She has a thick charcoal pen in her hand and is tracing out shapes that resemble cauliflower halves. She thinks she’s tracing out the clouds. Since Abu Ghayeb disappeared and we lost all contact with him, she’s been trying to draw the clouds to pass time, as they change from one day to the next. The television is nearly shaking with applause endorsing the success of the elections. The president has won the backing of one hundred percent of the population this time. My aunt is babbling away, “Clap…clap. Monkeys clap, sea lions clap, and the first movement a child would copy is clapping.” Then a program starts about the expected crash that’s likely to affect computer systems throughout Europe with the start of the year 2000. Suddenly, she becomes aware of my presence. She says in a tired voice, “Dalal, you’re back?”

  “Yes, my aunt.”

  Her face has aged several years. “Dalal, what will I draw in the summer?”

  I ask her to climb down off the chair. She does, crumpling into the seat beside me. “Auntie, please stop torturing yourself.”

  She looks at me with eyes that have lost their sparkle. “Have you graduated?”

  “No.”

  I pat her little shoulder without its shoulder pad. “I’ve abandoned my studies.”

  She lifts up her eyebrows with difficulty. “How are we going to survive?”

  “I’ve found a job.”

  She responds with a feeble smile while I explain, “I’ll be working in a warehouse. They separate used and worn out items in order to recycle them. We place the different materials in separate containers. Plastics go into one bin, glass goes into another, metals go somewhere else, cloth is put to one side, wood goes into another bin, and so on.”

  She nods her head as if she’s giving me her consent. She then gets up to pray. She spreads out her prayer mat facing the clouds that hang up in front of her, and starts to kneel.

  After she kneels down for the second time, she suddenly turns toward me and asks distractedly, “Where is this place?”

  “It’s in the building that used to be the toothpick factory.”

  After two years of an exhausting physical routine, I flow into my work like a machine that doesn’t think. I can now differentiate between the different types of wood from their texture. I’m able to identify the different metals from their weights, and the different colors of nylons and plastics from their odors. I feel tired. I remove the mask which has become a part of my face and throw it aside. It lands on a shabby pile of old newspapers. I have to tidy them up and bind them together in bundles. My mask has settled on a picture of George W. Bush’s face taken at his inauguration. A cramp in my neck is troubling me. I hear a commotion that seems to be coming from the building next door. I head toward the window to see what’s going on outside.

  The open space in front of the Laboratory for Analysis of Viral Specimens is filling up with large vehicles. The lab staff open the main gates as jeeps bearing the logo of the United Nations on their sides start to queue up. Groups of foreigners wearing blue caps begin to get out of the cars. They’re carrying bags, instruments, and manuals. They’re followed by a television cameraman. It’s the inspection teams for weapons of mass destruction. They’ve returned.

  I pace up and down the room gazing out of the window. I look around me; nobody. There’s just me, the chair, and seventy kilos of newspapers that have to go for recycling today. I’ve got time for a short break. I drink a cup of black coffee. I turn the cup upside down in search for a sign. I whisper into the cup, “Is there going to be another war?”

  Someone knocks on the door. It must be Hamada. I put out my cigarette and save the stub for later. I open the door for the newspaper boy.

  He comes in exhausted with a bundle of newspapers on his back. He puts them on the floor and sits on them. He takes out two cigarettes he had tucked in his socks. He offers me one. I say, “You’re too young to smoke, Hamada.”

  “I’m not, and don’t call me that. My name is Hamid.”

  “Indeed, you’ve grown so much. How are your parents?”

  “Ill.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I pay him for the stack of newspapers. He kisses the cash and puts it in his pocket. I ask him, “What’s the latest?”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  The thin teenager looks at the burning ember of his cigarette.

  “I didn’t. People are talking.”

  “A boy your age should be able to read a newspaper.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “If you can’t read, how will you know what the world wants from us?”

  “Look outside the window.”

  “I did, more than once.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Nothing is too late. You still have time.”

  “But—”

  “Listen.”

  “What’s the use?”

  “If you let me teach you reading and writing I will pay you double for the newspapers you bring in.”

  “I don’t know—”

  I interrupt, heading toward him, “Come on, I’ll give you your first lesson.”


  I take him by the hand and lead him to the chair.

  “Sit down. This is how we start.”

  I grab a pen and paper. “Repeat after me: alif, baa, taa….”

  Absent

  BETOOL KHEDAIRI

  A READER’S GUIDE

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  BETOOL KHEDAIRI

  In the Iraqi society of my childhood, there was a wide variety of interesting, beautiful, and musical names, and nearly all of them had a meaning or a special significance. My neighbor was called “the beautiful one,” my sister’s name means “the ringing of a bell,” a male friend is named “lightning,” and another is “the servant of God.” Kurdish girls are often named after types of flowers. My Scottish mother, whom I always thought of as the eternal tourist, would often ask me the meanings of my friends’ names. I’d tell her about a Jewish family who called their daughters Iris, Valerine, and Gilda, and a Christian family who called a son Omar—a Muslim name—without hesitation. My name has several meanings. It means “the virgin,” and the encyclopedia lists a Saint Mary the Betool. It also means “the believer in God.” It is a name often attributed to the daughter of the prophet Mohammad, Fatima Al Zahraa Al Betool.

  Many of us at school ended up in the wrong religion class simply because our parents had not told us which religion we had been born into, and therefore which class we belonged in! I remember carrying the Koran and wandering into the church in my Armenian school. One of my friends asked her father if she was Shiu’e (meaning “communist” in Arabic), thinking that this was the word for She’ie (Shiite), because the two words sounded similar to her. He scolded her for being interested in differentiating between Shias and Sunnis, insisting, “We’re all the same.”

  When I started primary school in Baghdad, my mother took me to the jewelry market on River Street. She asked an old bearded man to carve my name in gold. She was doing what most Iraqi mothers did: cherish the name of her child. This was normally done in Roman letters, but my foreign mother, to be different, had my name written out in Arabic. So for my seventh birthday, I got a necklace with my name dangling down from it, read from right to left.

  Iraqi parents take their names seriously. When a male baby is born to them, parents are traditionally renamed after their firstborn son. They take great pride in being called, for example, Abu Hassan (the father of Hassan). If they aren’t lucky enough to have a son, then they will be named after their eldest daughter. It is quite unusual for an Iraqi man not to be named after a son or a daughter. If he has no children, he still has to create a name for the child he lacks. Somehow, long ago everyone agreed to call such a “child” “the absent one.” So childless men automatically become “the father of the absent one,” and this makes them fit in socially and psychologically.

  My foreign-born mother could never understand why people would want to be called after a human being who had not yet been born. Her question lingered with me for many years until I embarked on my second novel. I named the novel Absent to symbolize the dilemma of the Iraqi people. They had been excluded, and were “absent,” from the international scene for decades. The civilization that had invented writing was now slipping into darkness as a result of wars, sanctions, and dictatorship. For thirty-five years Saddam remained the father of the absent Iraqi people. I needed to give birth to their story.

  Though I was born in Baghdad, I have lived in Amman, Jordan, for a number of years, and have traveled quite a bit. And during my travels, while getting to know more Westerners, I realized that they knew little about Iraqis as human beings. Understandably, they were taking their impressions from the Iraq of the headlines. This was another important reason to write my second novel: not to criticize the media, but rather to play the role of a diplomatic host in order to invite readers to share my seven-thousand-year-old culture, which was being destroyed by deprivation. Throughout history, Iraqis have been under the stranglehold of the Ottomans, the British, a local dictator, and now the Americans. Sometimes I can’t believe that in one lifetime I have witnessed three bloody crises: the Iraq-Iran War of 1980–1988, the invasion of Kuwait, in 1990–1991, and the U.S.-led occupation in 2003. These events have been accompanied by battlefield and civilian killings, children’s malnutrition, diseases, starvation, mass graves, an embargo, a forced diaspora, arrests, rape, torture, brain drain, continuous bombings, and the list just goes on. Between the exported nightmare fantasy of weapons of mass destruction and the imported dream of democracy, I concluded that black comedy was the best style for my new novel, and I took it on as a new challenge.

  Absent is about Iraqi families struggling to survive during the sanctions in Baghdad. The events take place in one building; the floors represent the diverse layers of Iraqi society. Since so many Iraqi men died due to war and unstable circumstances, most of the characters are women, and they unveil the story through dialogue, chitchat, and gossip. The story shows the effects of the economic and infrastructure collapse on the social and moral structure of day-to-day Iraqi lives. I feel that when all goes wrong on earth, human beings start searching the sky for solutions, and sometimes they get lost in the labyrinth of creating their own answers. This drew me into researching the hocus-pocus underworld of the coffee-cup reader, Umm Mazin (mother of Mazin). Everybody is searching to make sense amid the chaos. The fortune-teller takes over the destiny of the inhabitants, becoming a sort of psychoanalyst for the distressed women. My novel portrays the less privileged people struggling in the back lines, suffering the toll of the political decisions made in the front lines, yet, in terms of what the world knows of them, they are absent. This is a story that talks about an “old Iraq,” familiar to Iraqis but unknown to the West, and it ends with a “new Iraq,” familiar to the West but unknown to Iraqis.

  Yes, Saddam, the father, is finally gone, but now we have many fathers. Since the liberation/occupation so much has changed, and things are going from bad to worse. My country is actually rocking between facing the challenges of being a preindustrial state and fending off the threat of an impending, vicious civil war. In the past few months, I have received calls from distressed friends in Baghdad: “Help, some groups are threatening me because of my Sunni name,” and on the other line a friend pleads, “Please find me a job; I’m being harassed because I have a Shiite name.” No wonder people are lining up to change their names and have started carrying more than one identity card to avoid being targets.

  Occasionally, in Amman, I order take-out dinners from an Iraqi cook who sells meals from her home. When I place the order, she asks for my name by saying, “And you are the mother of?” I don’t know whether to answer with a smile or a tear, “The mother of the absent one.”

  This brings me back to my late mother, who ended up having three names: Sophia, her registered Christian name when she was baptized; Hazel, her domestic name when she lived in her country; and a Muslim name when she converted to Islam to marry my father. On her wedding day, a friend of hers suggested that she adopt an Arabic name similar to her English name. The friend came up with Hadeel, which means “cooing of the dove.” My mother said, “I like it, it’s peaceful.”

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. On the first page of Absent we learn that Dalal’s uncle “didn’t follow the custom that dictates parents be named after their firstborn child…. Instead, he insisted that he should be called Abu Ghayeb, the father of the absent one.” What motivates this unusual choice, and how does it affect his adopted “daughter” Dalal? What examples of “absence” and “the absent one” can you find in the novel, and what is their significance?

  2. Aspects of Absent are profoundly universal, such as the depiction of the fractious marriage between Dalal’s aunt and uncle, Dalal’s uncertainty as she ponders what to do with her life, and the resilience of her friends and neighbors who manage to stay hopeful and make a living under dire circumstances. What other aspects of the story and the characters did you find yourself identifying with?

  3. Absent is set in th
e 1990s, after the Gulf War, but the exact time period and the conflicts described are intentionally left ambiguous. Why do you think that Betool Khedairi chose to do this, rather than setting it during the war itself, or during a particular postwar event?

  4. How would you characterize Dalal’s and Abu Ghayeb’s relationship, and how does it evolve over the course of the novel?

  5. What role does the fortune-teller, Umm Mazin, serve in the novel? Is she there for comic relief? What else might she represent? Why do so many people take comfort in visiting her? What would you ask her if you had a chance to visit her?

  6. Dalal’s uncle, a former artist, places a high value on aestheticism. When he asks Dalal how she would measure beauty, she responds, “If things aren’t distorted, they may be more beautiful” (chapter five). What does this tell you about Dalal’s feelings toward her facial disfiguration? How do you think her physical appearance shapes her as a character? How does it affect her romantic relationship with Adel?

  7. Unlike many of her friends and neighbors, Dalal and her uncle have spent time in Western countries. How does Dalal’s family feel about the West, and the Allied nations in particular? How does this compare with the impressions of other characters? Were you surprised by their reactions?

  8. Why does Dalal choose to study French literature? Is there special significance in the fact that Dalal is reading Flaubert when she first meets Adel?

  9. The characters in Absent spend a lot of time reminiscing about the Days of Plenty. In what ways are the clashes between the new and old Iraq apparent in the novel?