Beyond Love (Middle East Literature in Translation)

by Hadiyya Hussein

  "Didn't I tell you it would be a daughter?"

  Mazloom didn't answer; he was like someone who had fallen into a dark well. The midwife was about to hand him the little one when she heard the mother's voice. She returned to Juri and was surprised by the sight of another head. She guided it out. This one was smaller, and she didn't need to separate the baby's legs this time-they were open. She immediately called to Mazloom al-Sa'idi: "It is the son you were waiting for!"

  He felt such strength that he almost fainted. The midwife cleaned the baby's body, and when she had finished, she wrapped him in a soft fabric and handed him to Mazloom al-Sa'idi. As soon as he held his son, he broke into tears. At that moment, Juri was quiet from exhaustion. Lamia started cleaning her forehead and sprinkled her face with rose water, moaning verses from the Holy Qur'an. Juri slowly opened her eyes and looked at Mazloom, who was breathless as he hugged the child. Meanwhile, the other lump of flesh was quiet, as if she hadn't come to life or as if she already realized that from that moment on she was surplus.

  Looking at the male child, Mazloom al-Sa'idi said, "His name is Nadir."

  "What about the girl?" the midwife asked him, and, as if remembering a forgotten thing, he said, "The girl? I leave it to you. Choose the name you want."

  Without hesitation, the midwife said, "Her name is Nadia. After my daughter."

  When my father had been struggling in the mud holding the midwife's hand, he had thought that every female birth was equivalent to death. He was sure that if there had been a male baby among the four births, that son would have held on to life. But the days deceived my father, for he himself died a year after our birth. I survived, and a male in the family died.

  WHAT COULD I DO with the lengthening hours? Time had slowed down. I had nothing to do. My days in Amman were quiet, like still water. But Nadia stirred it after her death, nailing me down in front of her memories. I wondered what came after this difficult birth.

  My existence began there in that forgotten village of just a few hundred houses in Abu al-Khasib. From the first cry of my birth, my life was marked by neglect in favor of Nadir. Our house was small, with a courtyard separating its two rooms, and behind one of the rooms was a storage area. Our beds were made out of palm branches. In front of my mother's bed was a pile of blankets, pillows, and sheets. The floor was covered with woolen rugs on top of mats of palm leaves. The roofs were made of palm trunks and fronds covered with layers of dried mud; the walls were washed with gypsum. When we had just learned to walk, the government decided to build a grain-storage facility in the village. The compensation that my mother obtained allowed her to move to the center of the town. There I went to school and learned my first letters. Years later we heard that the storage facility was converted into a chemical factory, which would be destroyed in the Gulf War.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO us? How did we cross those terrifying desert distances, fleeing to save our tortured souls? Why did Nadia have to die before she found a country that would shelter her? And why did the embassy refuse to repatriate her body to Iraq? Don't we have the right to be buried on the land of our ancestors? Does the president have the right to retain his grip even on the dead after having deprived them of joy during their lives? What can a powerless corpse do? It can't claim compensation for years burned out by the wars. Yet the president fears even corpses that are unable to object or resist. What about me? How am I going to end and in which land? I'm the one who dared to say "No." I then found myself adrift, leaving behind everything-my house, my memories, my grandmother, and Youssef, my childhood's dream. They planted him as a husband in my head, and I loved him. Or perhaps I only thought I loved him because there was no one else in my life. The last thing he said to me when he was handing me the passport was, "Don t waste time. Be ready at 8:oo p.m. Your permanent identity papers will reach you later on." He gave me a piece of paper. "Here is Hani's address. Do you remember him?" Yes, I remembered him. He was a Palestinian guy who had been in college with Youssef. I had met him a couple of times.

  "Don't forget your new name, Samia Shahine Hassan. Remember your birth date-we had to make you forty-five years old to avoid the requirement for a male chaperone."

  I took with me just a small clothing bag and another handbag with only a notebook, tissues, a pen, the passport, and a few aspirin. I wrapped my head in a black shawl and wore glasses so that I looked older. Youssef said good-bye to me quickly; he was still upset with meor at least that was how it seemed to me.

  On the wide desert road across thousands of miles, the car devoured the road and stole away my calm. I was in the backseat, sitting next to a woman with her child. Her husband was in the front, next to the driver. Some drivers were willing to report any suspicious behavior to the government, so I felt apprehensive about our driver. Drivers would first start by pulling a passenger into conversation about living conditions and the state of the country and then casually ask about the passenger's reasons for travel. I avoided taking part in the conversation. I feigned sleep, but I couldn't spend twenty exhausting hours sleeping. After the driver had gossiped enough with the man and his wife and knew about their motives, he turned to me.

  "I'm about to have surgery, and my father is waiting for me in Amman, where he has made arrangements for a hospital room," I told him. The woman wanted to know about my disease. I improvised the phrase "removing a growth near the liver," but I didn't take part in the followup comments about the diseases ravaging Iraqis, the scarcity of medication, and the high rates of cancer after the Gulf War. Every time we had to halt at checkpoints, my heart stopped, but I had to be patient and contain myself.

  The wheels of the car were crushing my ribs, anxiety and fear overwhelming my dreams and expectations. Youssef's face was following me; he looked upset, insisting, "Remember the new name, Sarnia Shahine Hassan. I will join you after three or four months, as soon as I finish my training." (I knew military training never ended. It devoured the lives of youths, eating their dreams, until they suddenly found themselves in their forties.)

  My grandmother's face took the place of Youssef's, insisting, "You are lying. You are not headed to Najaf." As I had held her hands, she had been certain that we would never meet again; if I hadn't been in such a hurry, she would have sewn me a talisman and hidden it in my breast. But there hadn't been that much time, so she had offered me a camel-bone necklace, placing it around my neck while saying, "It will bring you patience and luck."

  In the car, I anxiously tried to be patient. Through the fogged glass, I saw a star sparkling in the dark night. A small window opened before me, and so I returned again to my grandmother. I entered her distinctive room. It was a special world. As soon as you crossed the threshold, you would notice the change in the atmosphere, a mixture of scents-henna, incense, and mastic. Her mattress was on the floor, for she had refused to sleep on the bed since the death of her husband. In the corner across from her mattress was a thick woolen carpet that she had made herself, placed on mats, and surrounded by soft woolen pillows. On top of a small wooden table near the bed was a copy of the Holy Qur'an. My grandmother was educated and literate, which was uncommon because females of her generation and even the generation that came right after hers were usually illiterate. She says that she completed the reading of the Qur'an when she was nine. Her father was one of the students of the Islamic learning center in Najaf, but he never finished because he died from malaria. In her closet were a number of dresses, and in the lowest drawer she still kept her wedding dress, a faded pistachio color embroidered with white glittering beads. Next to it were a few objects left by my grandfather: a rosary from al-Hussein, a silver cigarette box, and an oak cane with a serpent head. Although my grandmother had not been preoccupied with the past and wouldn't cry over it, she nevertheless missed those days. She always used to repeat, "How is it possible for life to go on without me? I lived it fully, a simple, safe, and sweet life. Now wars have disfigured life's beautiful face. The present doesn't mean much to me; it just confuses me. Som
etimes as an escape from it, I think about the past, and that's enough."

  I used to envy her. I envied the strength with which she fought the hardships of life. The bright memories of the past and her sense of humor never left her. She used to have difficulties with modern names, still calling the pillow lulah, the chair sakmali, and the medicine cabinet sandagja, and oftentimes she would finish her stories with the expression, "It was back then, in the days of plenty."

  Someone was snoring in the car, and the image of my grandmother disappeared. I looked at the woman sitting next to me; she was deep in sleep. Fear of the unknown overwhelmed me. Time was slow; it weighed on my chest and suffocated me. My patience disintegrated even though the necklace my grandmother had given me encircled my neck. I swerved away to the furthest skies of the past, to where I had played in that wide street. I had snatched the sunflower seeds from al-Zayir Jabr's store, and then I had run away with the small black grains, holding them like a treasure. I had been flooded with pleasure when I succeeded in distracting al-Zayir Jabr and grabbed a handful. But the pleasure had disappeared when I realized that al-Zayir Jabr had turned a blind eye. I threw the small grains on the side of the street and hid under the blankets in my bed, ignoring my mother's calls to help her string beans. Hoping that she would stop calling, I feigned sleep, but she called me again and again. I suddenly felt her near my head. I refrained from moving or making noise to fool her, and the taste of the small stolen grains came back into my mouth. Then I needed to urinate but waited a little bit lest my mother called me again. Time pressured my bladder. I shriveled under the blankets and then did it in my bed.

  The cold crept into my bones, and time was still slow. I plunged into distant memories to avoid my confused feelings. My mother's serene voice sprang up from the past, telling me on one of the afternoons during a forgotten year, "I threw your umbilical cord in the Tigris; you fell on the sand of its bank because I couldn't wait until I arrived back home." I had placed my chin between my palms while listening to her with clear eyes.

  "I was with my neighbors washing clothes and dishes on the verge of the river. We had been laughing and joking when all of a sudden I cried out for help. My friends rushed to me, repeating prayers. They tried to take me back home, but you didn't wait, and you fell like a limp worm. Suddenly, the place turned into a festival of joyful cries. One of the women wrapped you in her woolen robe after she cut the umbilical cord and gave it to me. I threw it into the river. Then they took me home. This is how you came to life, easily and conveniently. I was hoping you would live with ease and comfort. But the river that witnessed your birth and preserved you from its treacherous currents took your father two months later. He was a skilled fisherman, and I just couldn't believe that he had drowned. They said that the strong current swept him away after his fishing boat capsized, but I still don't believe it. No one ever tried to find out the truth. The police were convinced by the witnesses, but the witnesses' motives were suspicious; they might have wanted to get rid of him because he was their only rival in the fish-marketing trade."

  I knew my father only through photographs. Most of them were taken on the river among fishermen-he was usually holding a fish he had just caught, stretching the fishing net, standing on the shore. In some of the photos, he was with my mother. I wasn't nostalgic about him, for he was simply a picture in my imagination. But sweeping nostalgic emotions still drew me to my mother. I was still pressed by the desire to touch her fingers, to listen to her voice, to follow in her footsteps as I used to do in my childhood. She was a strong woman. She patiently faced the difficulties of raising me, and after my father's death, she refused to remarry, although she was still young. She lived under my uncle's protection for two years, and when he got married, she lived independently in a small house with my paternal grandmother, with whom I had been much closer. My mother was very busy securing our living, working until she died in a vegetable oil factory. When she died, I was in my second year of college in the Faculty of Arts.

  My nostalgia was interrupted when the car stopped at a checkpoint. A soldier who couldnt have been more than twenty appeared at the window; he stared at our faces and looked at me. I forced a smile. He didn't search our belongings and didn't ask for anything. He gave his signal to the driver to move on. As the car crept forward, I shuddered. The checkpoint's lights retreated; once again we were plunged into the night's darkness. I stuck my face to the window glass. Nothing. The night was endless, and the sky distant-no moon, not a single star. I felt as though we were in a dark tunnel with no end in sight. My soul flew ahead of me and over the border blockades, fleeing as though pursued by a hunter's bullet, going as high as it could in hopes that the bullet would miss the mark. Suddenly I was shaking, and my teeth were chattering. I pulled myself together, searching for strength. The checkpoints were endless: rapid questions and strange looks ... cold ... fear ... heavy hours ... until we reached Tribil, the last station.

  When the driver asked me to get out of the car there, I was terrified, and my fear felt like sharp canine teeth. My throat dried up, and my lips hardened. I gripped the beads of the camel necklace, hoping that they would bring me good fortune. But my throbbing heart continued its agitated leaps, one after another. The most horrible moment was when I stood before the passport officer. He ordered me to wait after he took my passport. I looked around me; there was no place to sit. Passengers from other cars had taken all the chairs, and some remained standing. Exhausted, I leaned against the wall. I tried in vain to push away the black ideas devouring my spirit, sinking their talons deep into my heart. I could see the officers dragging me into a small room and taking turns interrogating me in the nastiest way. They would drive me back to the dark face of Baghdad. Then anonymous hands would grab me and drag me into a basement, where they would strip me of my clothes and fall upon me with whips and blows. Before I could scream from the horror of the anticipated pain, the passport officer yelled, "Samia Shahine Hassan!"

  My heart stopped beating, and I couldn't make a sound. The call was repeated twice. My heart started beating again. I panicked as I ran to the window. The officer looked at me angrily. "Are you deaf?"

  I couldn't believe it when he handed me the passport. I wasn't sure when or how I left that office. I was torn between joy and sorrow as the car continued on its way to the Jordanian border. I poked my face into the glass. Dawn had begun to steal in, and although I was out of danger, horrible thoughts still lay in wait for me. What if, as often happens, the security officers followed us and stopped the car out of suspicion? What if they found out about the false passport? Wouldnt it have been better to flee with a passport in my real name? Were things really as dangerous as Youssef thought when he had arranged for this passport? Perhaps. Anything was possible when our rights were lost and the state devoured our lives little by little.

  The morning became brighter, but the beating of my heart and my breathing didn't return to normal until after the car finally crossed the al-Rouwaychid checkpoint. It was early morning, and a light rain drizzled on the window. I glanced at the black stone fields along the road and saw skeletons of old cars among the scattered vegetation. The land started waving up and down, and I recorded my first day in exile.

  WHEN I SET FOOT IN AMMAN, I stretched to my full length and felt alive. Only a few hours earlier I'd been shrunken and scared, horrified, overcome by black thoughts. Getting out of the car was like a new birth, and I was taking my first steps. I took my bag to the nearest telephone booth and called Hani. His brother answered and said that Hani was in Naplouse, but that Youssef had called from Baghdad about me. After almost twenty minutes, a thin young man arrived, and I went to meet him.

  "Are you looking for me?"

  "Are you Huda?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm Hussam, Hani's brother."

  We walked to his house. Umm Hani welcomed me with open arms as though she had always known me. She was a slightly plump woman in her fifties, elegant and with a silver tongue. She offered me
a lemonade and then led me to another room. "You need to rest after the fatigue of the road."

  I slept most of the day, but when I got up, my body was still exhausted; fear and the journey's length had sapped all of my strength. Over lunch, Hussam told me that he'd visited Baghdad twice, found it beautiful, and intended to study medicine there.

  I stayed three days in Hani's home. With his mother's help, I then rented a small room above a carpentry workshop. I had to climb 12o steps to reach it, and it overlooked a street crowded with government offices and trade buildings.

  On my first night there, I had insomnia. The landlady, Umm Ayman, had told me that before me, an Iraqi man and his wife had rented the place for more than a year. I tried in vain to forget the two bodies that had shared the same bed I was sleeping on now-this feeling was to become part of my exile. As soon as I pulled the blanket to my body, I would smell a strange odor, a mixture of old sweat and something like an old, rotten peach. Although Umm Ayman vowed that she'd washed and sterilized the blankets, I couldn't help thinking about the breath and odors of previous bodies. I had been accustomed to perfuming my bed with incense from Najaf every night before I went to sleep. It's a habit I had picked up from my grandmother; I would burn sticks of incense along with grains of clove. Holding the censer, I would walk around my bed so that I could sleep with a serene soul and body. Now, however, I needed time to get used to the new smells, the moist walls, the low ceiling, the small window overlooking the street. I came here with a ruined soul and broken hopes, so I had no choice but to adapt. From the first week of my arrival, I applied myself to exploring the city-its alleys and streets, its people and markets, its kiosks and bookstores. During the first three days, Hussam showed me the chief spots in Amman. Later I found the city's main library, where I would spend an hour or two reading. I had to resist the desire to buy books because I had to save what little money I had until Youssef's arrival in three months or four or five-I didnt know.