Ibrahim advised him to marry right away, and not to count on the end of the war, “for it might never end. Or you might die before it’s over. Here I am, waiting and expecting a baby, as you know, so that if I die I’ll at least have left behind a descendant.”
He was speaking of his daughter, Qisma, who was born after the first year of the war had passed and was already two months old when he first saw her, because the war prevented him from taking his regular leave. When he came home, he was surprised to find a baby smiling up at his face. They laid her in his arms and said, “This is your daughter, and she still doesn’t have a name. We call her ‘baby,’ waiting for you to name her.”
“Qisma,” he said.
He didn’t indicate whether he was merely repeating his habitual expression, “fate,” or whether he was naming her. But they quickly seized upon the word and considered it her name even without waiting to confirm what Ibrahim meant. The name stuck. Apart from how closely it matched his vision of reality and how he approached life, this name made the one by which Ibrahim had been known in jest since childhood come true. In all truth and earnestness they could now call him Abu Qisma, “father of Qisma,” having long called him Ibrahim Qisma, which could literally mean “Ibrahim, son of fate.”
As for Abdullah, the refusal of Sameeha’s father to grant her to him in marriage fell upon his soul as a blow equal to the war itself. Without warning, a firebomb had fallen upon the threshing floor of his dreams, and he turned to Zaynab for the help she had promised. Zaynab assured Abdullah she would take the matter on her own shoulders. She spoke with Sameeha secretly to be sure of her wishes, discovering that Sameeha’s passion for Abdullah was no less than his for her, and that Sameeha had long been waiting for the moment of their union. Zaynab then spoke to her husband, the mayor, and the mayor spoke to his friend Zahir, Sameeha’s father, when the three of them were alone in the reception room, as usual, after the rest of those attending the night’s festivities had departed.
“I can’t,” Zahir said, “and you two alone know why.”
Zaynab said to him, “But he’s our grandson, as you well know.”
“It doesn’t matter. And in any case, he’s a bastard.”
After a surge of anger, Zaynab wept and pleaded with him. She sought the mayor’s help in persuading his companion. But the mayor didn’t insist on the matter. He understood his friend’s position, and deep down he agreed with Zahir, thinking that he would have done the same. He wouldn’t have married any daughter of his to a bastard. In the end, after secretly reaching an agreement with the mayor through a glance, Zahir sought to soothe Zaynab’s anger and tears by saying, “Give me a couple days to think it over.”
When news of this disappointment reached Abdullah, he thought he might strengthen his position by speaking with his friend Tariq and asking him to use influence to persuade his father. What Abdullah didn’t know—no one but Zahir did—is that when Tariq took his father aside, he urged Zahir to hold fast to his refusal, requesting he never marry Sameeha to Abdullah.
Zahir was surprised and asked about the reason, given that Abdullah was his son’s closest friend. Tariq replied, “Exactly. I know him better than anybody else. He is a depressed and lazy person who doesn’t like to work. It’s true that he’s a good man, and he owns a house and a field that he inherited from his adoptive parents. But we cannot rely upon him such that we’d feel secure regarding the future of my sister and her children by him. What’s more, we are from a respected family lineage, while his origins are unknown. Even though I have loved Abdullah as a friend, I love my sister more.”
Tariq went on at length to urge other justifications as his father listened. But the real motivation for his position was something entirely different, a private and personal reason, which he kept to himself. Something petty, which he couldn’t reveal to anyone. In this, he was not the only member of the human race to defend a position with justifications that differed from their true motives. Not unlike wars supported with placards proclaiming weighty, moralistic words when the true, shameful reasons are very different.
“They’ve broken the boy’s heart,” Zaynab said. “May God break their hearts, the wicked bastards!”
She wept as she tried to persuade Abdullah to choose someone other than Sameeha, any girl he wanted, but he just bowed his head in refusal and returned to a renewed depression and sorrow. His isolation and loneliness only increased when military orders separated him from Ibrahim, sending each to a different sector of the front: a different unit, a different battalion, and a different fate. They parted in tears, hanging on to each other’s neck until the officer scolded them and ordered them to stop: “Quit bawling like women! You’re men! How can you cry like this? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Come on, let’s go. Come on!”
In May 1982, at the Battle of Khorramshahr, Iranian forces took thousands of Iraqi soldiers prisoner, including Abdullah Kafka. Of course, no one in the village knew anything about the battle or what happened to Abdullah. Just that he didn’t return for his scheduled leave. Meanwhile, the government broadcasts spoke only of victories, and the official television stations showed only enemy corpses, enemy prisoners, and demolished enemy vehicles. What is more, there was no news or notification letter to be sent to his family since Abdullah didn’t actually have any parents.
Zaynab pleaded with Ibrahim to make inquiries, which he was already intending to do on his own. He had to cut short his leave to search out Abdullah’s military unit. When he found it, Ibrahim learned that the entire unit had been wiped out in the Battle of Khorramshahr, every last man killed or taken prisoner. They didn’t know the fate of any individual soldier since the bodies were left there on the battlefield. So they gave Ibrahim a piece of paper indicating Abdullah’s status as “missing in action.”
Ibrahim gave this paper to Zaynab, who took it as a confirmation of what her heart told her: that Abdullah had not died but was still alive. She pleaded with the mayor to listen secretly to the Iranian broadcasts in the middle of the night, to a special program in which Iraqi prisoners introduced themselves and offered a short greeting to their loved ones, followed by further statements praising the Islamic Republic of Iran. They didn’t hear Abdullah’s voice, even though they listened to hundreds of jumbled iterations of this program over hundreds of sleepless nights. Zaynab began visiting fortune-tellers, showering them with gifts so they would reveal the unknown to her. She never heard about a famous fortune-teller in the surrounding villages without going to see her. All these women would assure her that Abdullah was alive. Indeed, they even claimed to be able to see him, saying, “He has a beard now. Very sad, locked up in a raw prison with hard conditions. But his health is good, and he hasn’t been injured.”
Zaynab didn’t stop her regular trips to Abdullah’s house to clean it, even though her visits became less frequent as time went on. But she continued to cry for him in his house, or in hers, or under the sea-urchin tree in the cemetery.
As for Sameeha, her parents forced her to marry a cousin. She didn’t love him, but they ignored her objections. Forty days after the wedding she fled, but her parents sent her back after beating her until she was bedridden. After a year, Sameeha gave birth to his daughter. Ten days after giving birth, she fled a second time, leaving her daughter behind. So they beat her and returned her once again, wrapped up and carried in a blanket. But she repeated her flight as soon as she had recovered her strength. Yet again they beat her and were going to bring her back, but shortly before doing so, they were met by a delegation that delivered Sameeha’s daughter along with the divorce papers. Sameeha’s husband would no longer put up with the scandal of a wife who was always running away from him: he couldn’t bear the disgrace in the eyes of the people.
Sameeha sighed with relief and remained in her father’s house. She raised her daughter, content to endure all the hostility of her family’s behavior toward her, which she preferred to life with a husband whose very breathing disgusted her to the p
oint of loathing. Yet she failed in the long struggle to submit to her lot like so many women and forget Abdullah. She could never forget him.
Over time Sameeha’s family became used to her and her child’s presence, and her relationship with her brother Tariq gradually began to resume its former warmth. She would borrow novels from his library, even though she didn’t read any of them through to the end.
Ibrahim urged his wife to treat Sameeha well and keep her company, particularly in the first years of her isolation, when she was besieged by her family’s censure and mistreatment. He sometimes bought clothes and gifts for the two children, his daughter, Qisma, and Sameeha’s daughter, which he would secretly send along to her with his wife. He would also provide her with some financial assistance. His wife said that Sameeha’s daughter looked exactly like her mother: “It’s as though she were a miniature copy of her in everything, Ibrahim!”
It cut Ibrahim to the core—patient Ibrahim, submissive in war and peace—that he didn’t beget any children besides Qisma. This led his father to hasten the marriages of Ibrahim’s siblings, who began bringing him grandsons whose names he forgot over time because there were so many of them—and because he was getting old, because illnesses racked his body, and because too much smoking had ruined his lungs.
In order to conceive again, Ibrahim’s wife sought recourse with the old women and their folk remedies, either medical or magical. Ibrahim secretly visited the city doctors. They all confirmed that the cause was with him, and that his sterility resulted from the different weapons used during the war: nerve gas, biological agents, chemical weapons. He had been transferred up and down the long front over eight years of war, witnessing the deaths of hundreds whom he had known, the ruin of cities, humanity, livestock, and plants, the madness of fire and iron. He submitted to his destiny, obeying his commanding officers, never going AWOL even for a single day, never shirking in the performance of any task assigned to him. Thanks to this diligent service and his good behavior, he rose to the rank of master sergeant and acquired an expertise in weapons, hunger, fear, bloodletting, and death. But he became yet more expert in his ability to adapt and be patient and endure. Submission to his destiny, no matter what came his way, filled his spirit with a remarkable equanimity and strength.
After hearing what the doctors told him, Ibrahim remembered soldiers telling stories about rumors of sterility caused by chemical weapons or by walking in front of the night-vision equipment used by lookout posts, tanks, and armored vehicles, all of which emitted radiation called infraviolet or ultraviolet—he no longer recalled the exact terminology—that was invisible to the naked eye. Of course, he informed no one, not even his wife, about all that, nor about his repeated trips to the doctors. He kept refusing appeals from his brother and father to marry a different woman whom fate and chance might bring his way. He always replied by pointing to his daughter: “I have my Qisma, and she is enough for me.”
When the war ended, Ibrahim was released from his service. He got out in one piece, without any physical wound, just the horrors he had seen and lived through. But he looked older, tired. He allowed himself to treat the first month of his freedom as a holiday, during which he did nothing but eat, sleep, and bathe. “I’m dirty and sleep-deprived,” he said, “with a weariness that has been stored up for years.”
He had no desire to talk about the war. He wanted to forget the details, or at least set them apart from his life. He would pile them up in some corner of his mind, at least for a time. But he occasionally told his wife love stories he had heard from other soldiers, often when urging her to keep in touch with Sameeha. He himself had never tasted the love they described. His relationship with his wife, whom he had only met on their wedding night, was a relationship of affectionate coexistence and companionship, something different from the anguish he saw in the faces and words of lovers. He felt he was in the presence of something significant, something he had to work out. When he saw how much they suffered, he was relieved that he didn’t feel passion like that. But when they reminisced about an untroubled hour or a meeting, or about small, happy details that were transformed in their souls and their words to the critical moments of life and gave their poems and songs an enormous significance: just in those moments, he wished he had experienced love like that, at least for a day. And thanks to the romantic stories of the soldiers, he was better able to comprehend the anguish of his friend Abdullah. Indeed, he came to understand it fully, just as he came to feel Sameeha’s pain, even though he had never spoken with her.
He witnessed soldiers crying as they stared at pictures of a sweetheart taken out of their wallets, hidden among their money and ID cards. Love helped some find courage and survive the perils of war. Love led some to place themselves in the line of fire when their beloved betrayed them or they quarreled. They lost themselves when they lost their love, and by means of the war they would find a cheap and easy path to suicide. He saw some soldiers who, after experiencing life at the front, would obtain freedom from the army by exposing an arm or leg to the enemy lookout so it might be pierced by a sniper’s bullet or blown off by a shell. Some of them would search with their feet for a landmine, and when the foot was blown off, you would see them screaming in pain and smiling at the same time.
Among those whom Ibrahim knew and developed a close friendship with was Ahmad al-Najafi, a veteran of many years in the trenches. They shared their dry bread, their blankets, and cups of tea in the cold. Ibrahim went with Ahmad to visit his family in Najaf. Ahmad’s father was dead, and his mother ran the household in the absence of her three sons, all caught up in the war. Ahmad was the youngest, and his two older brothers were both married and had children. They all lived together in one house sheltered under the mother’s care. At night, she would stay up late to pray and intercede with the Lord to preserve her sons, and during the day she labored in the house and looked after her grandchildren.
Ever since he was young, Ahmad had loved a neighbor’s daughter, who grew up to become a beautiful university student. As Abdullah had done, Ahmad made an agreement with her to put off their marriage for a while, and then longer still, in the hopes that the war might end, or until she finished her studies. But the death of his brothers in the war suddenly placed him in a bitter situation when his mother implored him, sobbing, to do what so many others had done and marry his brothers’ widows. She was afraid they would remarry, as was their right, and the family would disperse, with the children lost. Taking him by the hands, his mother cried and said, “Please, my son! The preservation of the family and the house is in your hands alone.”
Ahmad resisted. He ran off and wept, but the eyes of his brothers’ small children, the sorrow of the two widows, his mother’s listlessness and her beseeching, and pressure from society’s system of values forced him to give in. It wasn’t easy at first since he thought of his brothers’ wives as his own sisters. They were older than him, and living together in the same house meant they had taken care of him: feeding him, washing his clothes, cleaning his room. But he got used to his new situation by force of habit in their new roles and through the children they bore him. Yet he had lost his beloved, who, along with her family, had refused Ahmad’s marriage proposal. In this way Ahmad ended up with two wives and responsibility for a large family. He cried on the breast of Ibrahim, and Ibrahim comforted him, saying, “It’s your fate and your destiny, brother. Every creature has its own inescapable lot and portion in life.”
Ibrahim used to imagine that true love could only be like the love he felt toward Qisma. When he came to understand what lovers felt, he empathized with their anguish and told his wife, “It’s a remarkable thing, Umm Qisma, this love. May God hold every lover close to his heart!”
When his wife asked him about his friend Tariq’s numerous romantic escapades, he commented, “Tariq makes this kind of relationship a profession, not a deep, true love. You remember what I told you about the first of them, the Bedouin girl.”
They laughed, and
Ibrahim went on to tell her about Ahmad al-Najafi: “One afternoon, we were taking our rest in the bunker. We woke up in terror when we heard a bullet go through the ceiling. We found Ahmad screaming, holding one hand with the other. Blood and bits of flesh and bone were splattered across the tin roof ceiling and on our faces. The hole where the bullet had passed through the palm of his hand was small, and the exit wound on the back of the hand was bigger. We could smell gunpowder and smoke was coming out of the muzzle of his rifle. We knew at once that he had shot his own hand. He was crying as he said, ‘My mother is sick, and two of my children as well. My family has nothing. I have to go back to them.’”
The investigation determined, of course, that Ahmad had done it to himself. They were used to this sort of thing, and it was something that the military code punished. So they treated his hand and put him in prison for six months. Fortunately, the bullet hadn’t severed any nerves or done any lasting damage. It was just a hole that quickly healed and left a scar. Ahmad submitted once again to the injustice of his military life until the end of the war, when he and Ibrahim were set free from the same unit on the same day.
At the end of his month of rest, Ibrahim began thinking about how to organize his life afresh, or rather, to start living. The field was the obvious place to start. He joined in working it with his brothers and their families, some of whom lived on their own in new houses. By force of tradition and custom, the first house, called “the Old Home,” was set aside for the eldest brother.
Very soon a broader scope of work was opened to him when a letter from Abdullah arrived, delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Like most such letters, it was succinct and carefully worded. Abdullah explained that he was still alive and was being held prisoner in Iran. His health was good, and the only thing he lacked was cigarettes. He granted Ibrahim the right to profit from his house and field in whatever way he saw fit, and if it happened that he should die, he left everything he owned to Ibrahim’s daughter, Qisma.
The President's Gardens Page 5