“The full moon in all its radiance was shining directly in front of her, and I found myself saying, ‘At least let her see the moon.’ When she heard me, she thought I was saying your name and cried out, ‘Yes! I want to see Qamar, I want to see Qamar!’ I hurried forward and pressed you up against her veiled face. My head nearly knocked into hers when I stumbled. I kissed her, crying. She was crying too. The mayor yanked my arm, pulling me back several steps, almost dislocating my shoulder, and then pushed me down to the ground as I wept.
“After that, I saw them gathering rocks, and they began stoning her. She screamed as she fell to the ground, knocked flat in the grave. When she raised her voice again, they looked around for the pillow and the rifle, and I knew they were going to shoot her. The last thing I saw was Zahir holding the pillow and the mayor with the gun. I got up, still carrying you, and began to run, fearing what they might do to you. I went down the side of the hill as fast as I could, thorns scratching me and rocks cutting my feet. Down and down, I was nearly flying as I descended in a series of falls. I heard Zakiya’s stifled cries receding in the distance. Then I heard the explosion of a muffled shot. Her voice was cut off and there was silence. Then a second shot, clearer, echoing. I stumbled and fell, pressing you tight against my chest, and rolled for some distance until a boulder standing in the bottom of the deep valley brought me to a stop.
“I don’t know how long I stayed there trying to quiet your crying. I didn’t notice the bruises and cuts I had received. I was resolved either to save your life or to die with you. I kept telling myself that somehow it was all just a nightmare. I implored God’s protection from Satan, beseeching him to end it all and let me wake up. Suddenly, I saw the car moving through the valley with the mayor walking ahead of it. The headlights blinded me as the car drew close. The mayor approached and lifted me to my feet, while Zahir got out and pulled you from my clinging arms. I wasn’t strong enough to stand, so the mayor supported my weight, half leading and half carrying me, until he put me in the car. All this time he kept reproaching me. ‘Are you crazy? What are you doing? Enough! It’s all over now.’
“The mayor took you in his arms for the first time. Zahir, sitting behind the wheel and driving, said to me, ‘This is better for her soul, sister. It’s better to receive punishment for your sin in this transient world than for God’s eternal torment to fall upon you in the hereafter. Believe me, she’ll thank us in the life to come. You are a believer—resign yourself to God’s decree. Be patient and submit to God’s wishes and the fate he bestows.’
“This was their crime. They knew perfectly well that what they had done was not from our religion. I didn’t say anything. My body was shaking. I caught my breath and wiped away my tears as a sharp pain throbbed in various parts of my body. It felt as though my bones had been shattered and my skin torn. My clothes were wet with blood—I could taste it in my mouth.
“When we reached the house, the mayor said, ‘Come on, get out. Go directly to your room. And don’t you dare, don’t you dare raise any commotion. I’ll be back in a little while.’
“Before I got out, I reached over to take you in my arms, and he said, ‘Enough! Forget this child. We’ll provide him with parents to care for him. Come on, get out. Clean yourself. Perform the ritual washing and the prayers so you can calm down and go to sleep. Go!’”
CHAPTER 14
A Childhood Preserved in a Military Chest
Abdullah didn’t interrupt Zaynab with a single word. She had expected he would have questions, but he didn’t, and his silence was as heavy upon her as the weight of her years. She felt this silence and listened to him drawing and exhaling the smoke of his never-ending cigarettes. Having grown accustomed to calculating the time internally, or else by sensing the light, she knew the sun had either set behind the mountain or was just about to. Her intuition was confirmed by the sound of Abu Muhammad’s car horn from the bottom of the hill or possibly halfway up the slope.
Before Zaynab got up, she asked Abdullah again whether he had any questions. Did he want her to show him the cellar and give him the box of his things, including the rooster cap? Did he want her to stand beside him and declare to everyone the truth of his lineage, while she in turn would set aside for him his share of the inheritance?
But Abdullah didn’t say a word. In silence, he helped her up. As she heard the crunch of dried vegetation under their feet, she told him, “I used to come here to tend the flowering shrubs I planted on her grave, but I stopped when I lost my sight.”
He supported her arm with one hand as he handed her the cane with the other. The two of them descended with slow, cautious steps as Abdullah matched his stride to hers. When they got down to the car, he helped her in and sat next to Abu Muhammad in the front seat, not next to Zaynab as before.
After the car set off, Zaynab tried again to break the silence, asking Abu Muhammad about the health of one of his children. Abu Muhammad kept up the conversation with her, describing the harvest that year, mentioning the imminent marriage of his eldest daughter, and going on to recount how one of his cows had broken its tether in the night and eaten so much from the stores of barley that it made itself ill. When they took it to the vet, he told them to give it Pepsi to drink. So they bought an entire case of Pepsi bottles, which they poured into a bucket and forced the cow to drink by plunging its nose in the bucket. The cow had begun mooing out long, gassy burps, which caused the children and the neighbors to collapse in laughter. The two of them laughed as well, while Abdullah’s face remained serious, as though he hadn’t heard a thing.
Zaynab and Abu Muhammad kept talking and laughing until they entered the village. Abu Muhammad asked whether he should take them both to Hajja Zaynab’s house, where he had picked them up, or whether he should take each to their own house. Zaynab asked Abdullah if he would accept her invitation to dinner. “No, thank you,” he said. Her tone hinted at something more, asking whether he wanted to finish the conversation with her, whether he had anything to ask her or a response to her concluding questions. But his answer in the negative made clear to her that volcanoes were bubbling up inside him. She couldn’t divine their exact nature, but she knew without a doubt they were there. So she said to Abu Muhammad, “In that case, take Abdullah to his house first, since it’s closer, and then you and I will go on together.”
As soon as the car stopped in front of the gate of his courtyard, Abdullah got out silently and moved quickly to the house. He went in and shut the door behind him. He sat in a corner, bringing his hands to his head. “I’m unable to cry,” he said aloud to himself, but then he asked, “And why should I cry?” He didn’t turn on the light but remained in darkness, frozen, squeezing his head between his hands. He had no specific thoughts, but the vague impression simmering inside was that he was about to vomit or burst out yelling.
Abdullah lit a cigarette. He smoked one after another until he calmed down a little. Then he got up and turned on the light. His body was tired, but his mind was wide awake. He stood in front of the pictures of his adoptive parents, Salih and Maryam. Looking at them, he said, “You were deceived, just like me. You lived a lie, like me. The sons of bitches tricked you. The murderers!”
He repeated a quotation by a French philosopher, trying to remember his name: Sarir, Sarar, Sarsar, Sarter, Sarsary? Something like that. He smiled, thinking it strange that he wanted to recall a name at a moment like this. He remembered how Tariq would sometimes quote that philosopher: “Hell is other people.” Abdullah took a breath and said, “But no, the two of you were not deceived at all. You needed a son, and just like that one came to you. Why should you care how, who his actual parents were, where he came from, or where he was going? Damn it all! Each of us will believe anything that gives us a reason to keep going, some consolation to help us endure this existence. We all want some illusion to persuade ourselves that life has meaning.”
He headed to the kitchen to make tea. A light passed through the shutters, and a car horn sounded out
side the gate to the courtyard. He opened the window and saw Abu Muhammad get out and open the gate. He called to Abdullah without turning off the car’s engines or lights. Abdullah went out to meet him.
Abu Muhammad gave him a chest and a key and said, “Hajja Umm Jalal sent this to you. Listen, brother Abdullah. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask. You are one of us.”
Abdullah thanked him and went back inside, carrying the box. He took a look at it: a military chest, made of strong wood painted khaki and green. How often he had worked with such boxes during the war! He hated them. Why had one followed him here after all these years? When would he be done with them and everything connected to them? Why were war’s symbols constantly pursuing him?
He put the chest in the middle of the room and brought over the teapot and a cup to sit beside it. He stared at the box, inspecting it. It was the size of a suitcase, with numbers and letters that told him it was an ammunition case for mortar shells. How had it come to this out-of-the-way village? What was it doing here? The lock that had been added was big and old-fashioned, the kind used for shop doors.
He took the key out of his pocket. He had no desire to open it, and for that matter, why should he? What did it matter to him, these useless things from a childhood he didn’t remember, left by a mother he had never known? That person had no place in his life, and suddenly he was told, “You have a mother named Zakiya, and she named you Qamar. Her story goes like this . . . and she was murdered!” He threw the key on the chest and went on sipping tea, ruminating over his cigarettes and his thoughts.
He hated this military chest, and he didn’t want it to stay there with him in the house. He’d smash it or burn it, just like they used to do along the front to cook with the wood, make tea, or feed the fire. He’d destroy it and throw it in the earth crack. And what about the contents? Why had she sent it to him, this grandmother of his? Why had she told him that story? For a moment he felt hatred for her. All the affection she had shown throughout his whole life had been nothing more than an attempt to assuage her feelings of guilt. Yet what was her sin? She was a victim just like him, and she too had suffered greatly. “She waits her whole life to cast the burden of this painful memory from her shoulders onto mine! Do I need more pain? Then she asks me if I want her to reveal my origins and publicly acknowledge me as family, with a share in the inheritance! They deny me when they’re alive, and they recognize me in death? They kept quiet during their lives, covering up their crimes of rape and murder. They didn’t want to recognize their shame or be reminded of it. And now they want me to carry this shame publicly instead of them!”
Zaynab had said, “God punished them in this world, and he will punish them in the hereafter too for what they did.” She had told him how the deaths of the mayor and Zahir had been a true torture. A strange disease had come over them: each began to scratch at his skin, which festered and became mangy; they scratched all the way down to the bone. This went on for a whole year, each one rotting in his bed. Ointments did nothing for them, nor doctors, magic, or dervishes. One of the Iraqi folk doctors told them they had drunk from the same water, and God knows how, or what this water was, and what was in it. The stench became as unbearable as their sufferings, while their flesh stuck to the sheets, and flies swarmed around their festering wounds and peeling skin. Their condition was so disgusting that even their worst enemy would have been pained to see it.
Zaynab had said it was God’s punishment. “And how does this punishment of theirs benefit me?” Abdullah asked himself. “What is my sin that my entire life should be a punishment?” He didn’t know now whether he loved Zaynab or hated her. He didn’t know what was going on inside him. Nor what, exactly, he was supposed to do. He was all the more convinced that his depression and nihilism were justified, and an obscure pain crushed his soul like an iron weight.
He spent that night alone in the company of the military chest. Nothing inside but dead things, accustomed for their part to isolation and darkness. Alone, and nothing to show for the long years of his life’s journey but these dead things. A beginning and an end which now came together . . . in nothing. So what is the meaning of all the suffering in between?
He recalled what his grandmother had told him more than once: “My life is a Hindi movie.” He imagined the details she related. Then he tried to picture a face for his mother from the features of Isma’il the herdsman. What was her voice like? he wondered. Her smell? Her smile? Would his life have taken a different path had she lived? Would he have received the sincere tenderness he needed? And what about his father? Where was he now? Had he married and fathered children in some foreign land? Did he resemble the mayor? When he was young, did he look like the mayor in the picture hanging prominently on the wall of the divan, with all his coarseness and his hawkish expression? Or did he resemble his mother, Zaynab? Why had he not asked her all these details? Yet why should he ask her? What use was it to know all that? Strong emotions gripped him. He kept coming back to imagining his mother, much more so than his father. He felt almost no desire to know anything at all about that man. He felt nothing toward him, for at the end of the day, what was he but a long-gone rapist, the pampered son of a rich father who had turned his lust on a poor simple-minded orphan and then left. What meaning did it have that this person was his father, whether he wanted it or not?
He imagined his mother’s suffering and how everyone had deceived her before going on to kill her, shrouded, bound, and blindfolded. When all she wanted was to see the moon or her child, they struck her down with stones they had blessed and shot her dead in a trench dug to be her grave!
For a moment, he wanted to take revenge on both of them, along with all the offspring and property they had left behind. He would dig them out of their graves. He would smash their bones to piss and shit upon the shards before scattering them in the dung heaps. As for their children and grandchildren, he’d carry off one each night, wrap them in a shroud, tie them up with a thick rope, and tell them the story. After that, he would rape them. Then he would stone them, execute them, and bury them in some unknown place. He would keep going until he had finished them all off. Then he would burn their fields and their houses. He would leave this accursed village and country in search of the principal rapist, Jalal, to do the same to him. Then he would leave. Just leave. He didn’t know where. Perhaps he would leave this bestial world entirely, once and for all, and through his own end put an end to the lineage of this corrupted bloodline.
Such was the cycle of Abdullah’s emotions. When a wave of burning anger rose in his soul, he would quickly shake it back out of his head. That sort of thing was just a passing thought with no root in his nature, nothing he could commit to. He hated cruelty and fled from it. How often he had wondered about the secret behind this impulse to cruelty in men’s hearts and about the hidden pleasures and grim fantasies their cruelty fulfilled. He thought he should try to forget the whole thing, put it behind him, push it into the dark cellar of the past as though he had never seen it or known anything about it. He would treat it as he did his years of captivity. Forgetting it and burying it away as though it hadn’t been, as though he didn’t know the truth of his story . . . But now he knew and it was impossible to erase that knowledge. Then let him pretend not to know! Let him hide it, or leave it behind.
Abdullah couldn’t find his way now to any final decision. His internal dialogue brought more questions than answers. He had been born in an underground prison cell, confined in a cage, and he went on to spend nearly twenty years, the prime of his life, in another captivity even more cruel.
“The prisons of this existence, from its beginning till its end—if it ever ends. What is it all for, oh you who are so free? A prisoner from birth, I am driven from prison to prison. After the freedom of nonbeing, what sin of mine merits this? What right have they over me? Why? Is this what some people, like Ibrahim, are able to call fate? What is fate? And why exactly did my fate have to be like this? What great crime have I committ
ed? Why? Why?”
He wished then he had someone there with him to talk to, someone to help him absorb this swarm of questions, raining down like arrows, someone to provide answers, or even just to echo back his questions. “What might someone else say about this situation? How would they understand it? What would they observe? What questions would they pose? What would their answers and their attitudes be?” But how could he even be thinking like this when he was a refugee, fleeing the company of others? Weren’t other people hell itself? His entire situation was made by their hands!
“I don’t want anyone! I don’t want to know anything about anyone, including those who brought me into this world! Everything outside myself, everything other than myself—it all means nothing to me and doesn’t affect me in the least. Why don’t they just leave me alone? Leave me to my isolation, my depression, to the peace of solitude, which I long for. Is that too much to ask? Why is it that every time I indulge them patiently, hoping they’ll leave me alone, they find new ways to intrude upon my life?”
He calmed down somewhat and lay back on the floor where he was sitting. He struck his forehead with his fist, gently at first and then harder. He stroked his beard. When he closed his eyes, the strain of sleep deprivation made them feel like two stones cutting into his eyelids. He sat up again. He took the key off the chest, examined it, looked at the lock, and then threw the key back down. He lit a cigarette as rage fired up inside him again. His fluctuating, contradictory moods, shifting from one moment to the next, meant he needed to talk to someone instead of just tormenting himself with an inner monologue. He wished Sameeha were with him now so he could tell her everything. All this pain connected to his ancient, lonely love for her, a longing that had taken root and extended vines inside him, so long had he cultivated it within. Root and vine, it had grown within him like the sea urchin in the cemetery.
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