The President's Gardens

by Muhsin al-Ramli

  She decided, therefore, to agree, and she began to imagine herself as Tariq’s wife. She smiled as she connected this decision to that childhood memory. After all these years, she deserved to realize her old childhood desire of sitting in his lap. “Glory to God in the highest!” she said to herself.

  And with the first light of dawn, Qisma approached her fat neighbor, Amira, who was baking bread in her oven, which abutted the low mud wall that ran between their houses. Amira was the person in the village with whom Qisma interacted the most. She was the one who retaught Qisma how to care for and milk the two cows, how to bake in the red mud oven, and it was from Amira that Qisma drew all the news of the village. She considered Amira to be a friend, to a certain degree, and Amira had shared with her in the tragedy that had befallen their loved ones. Amira was the only one who agreed with her regarding the necessity of searching for the bodies. Indeed, Amira had gone even further in that she wanted to preserve her husband’s head in the freezer or else have it salted, but the men of the village had forcibly prevented her from doing so.

  Qisma asked Amira to send one of her young sons to the house of Sheikh Tariq to tell him to come to Qisma’s house because she wanted to talk with him about an important matter. Within an hour, Tariq arrived in all his finery, his fragrant cologne leading the way. Qisma led him into the living room and prepared tea for him, trying hard to behave like any village woman—good, hospitable, welcoming, refined, and submissive. She appeared exceedingly, and uncharacteristically, pliant.

  They discussed the matter from just about every angle, and each of them agreed graciously to the requests and the conditions of the other. Together they decided to announce their engagement that evening in the presence of the most prominent relatives of both parties. But they wouldn’t get married until three or four months had passed—or else they would choose the date at a later time—on the condition that they would not put on a large reception but would be content with a dinner banquet with glasses of juice and tea for a small group of the people closest to them.

  Afterward, they agreed to start their search for Ibrahim’s body the following day, saying that this journey would also be an occasion for getting to know each other better and discussing their forthcoming wedding.

  Tariq was delighted when he left her, elated, feeling years younger than he had when he left his home. He bid her farewell with the sweetest smile he could muster, and when it was time to shake hands, he squeezed hers in an intimate way. As soon as he was gone, Amira came in to see her neighbor, and Qisma told her everything. It was natural that the news should spread in the village from one end to the other before the sun went down, and even people who were not invited came to the engagement dinner. In that village, just as in every other, people would invite themselves anywhere they wished and the owner of the house had no choice but to welcome them.

  The next morning, Tariq parked his car in the courtyard of her house. He was an elegant traveler with his beard trimmed, dressed in his finest clothes, and wearing his cologne. He had told his younger children to clean the car and stock it with everything they would need. Then he sprayed the interior with cologne. (He had bottles of it stashed all over the place: the bedroom, the living room, his office at the school, his prayer niche at the mosque, and the glove compartment of his car.)

  Qisma and her son were in the back seat, and Tariq studied her face in the rearview mirror. No sooner had he turned the car around and guided it from her house into the first side alley, than fat Amira stopped him, standing in front of the gate to her courtyard with a big suitcase in one hand and a thick book in the other. She told them she too wanted to go with them to search for the body of her husband. After Tariq absorbed this surprise and thought it through, he told her that the journey might last days or even weeks, and that it would be arduous, requiring them to go back and forth between hospitals, police departments, volunteer organizations, government agencies, and even the new cemeteries. Amira had a house and a flock of dependents who needed her care. Since her husband had been killed with Ibrahim in the same incident on the same day, they would undertake to ask about him and the other murdered sons of the village. Certainly, coming across one of them would mean locating them all.

  Amira reflected a little and then stepped away from the car, either satisfied or still thinking, and Tariq pulled away without waiting for her answer. There was nothing for her to do but bid them farewell with invocations for God’s blessing. When the car had turned from the alley and begun its course through the main street and arrived in front of the café in the middle of the village, Tariq and Qisma saw Abdullah Kafka stretch out his arm in front of them, motioning for them to stop, which they did. He peered in through Tariq’s window and said, “I want to go with you.”

  Qisma and Tariq looked at each other in surprise; then Qisma looked at Abdullah in even greater surprise. He said to her, “I want to be helpful in some way, even if only to watch over the child.”

  Qisma smiled at him, realizing that he was referring to what she had said during that angry exchange in his house. Meanwhile, Tariq replied by saying, “But you would be harmful, not helpful.”

  “Why?”

  “We have a child with us, and you’re a smoker. You can’t drop the cigarettes from your hand even for a minute.”

  “Ah, true. But I won’t smoke in the car. Stop two minutes for me every hour, or every half hour, say, so I can smoke outside.”

  Tariq was silent for a moment. Then he glanced at the child and saw an indication on Qisma’s face that he should agree, so he said, “Come on. Trust in the Lord.”

  So Abdullah threw away the cigarette from between his fingers and got in, sitting beside Tariq at the front.

  The three of them together experienced a feeling of the union that the two men had felt together at other times. Due to the intensity of the emotion, Qisma cried silently. Seeing her tears in the mirror, Tariq asked what was wrong, and she said, “If only my father were here with you two now so that your eternal trinity, the sons of the earth crack, would be just like it always was, like people knew it.” She sobbed as she said, “I will take the place of my father. Consider me to be him. I don’t like to see your triad lacking. I want you to speak to me like you spoke to him. And I want you to tell me everything about him. Everything.”

  At this, they found themselves speaking words imbued with wisdom, revealing the maturity they had gained from each new stage of life. They recited such axioms as: it is better to be joined together than to be apart; a single hand cannot clap; four eyes see better than two; an illness in one part of the body will hurt and disable the whole.

  Abdullah indicated to Tariq that he should stop the car, even though they hadn’t even left the village. He quickly got out and lit a cigarette while Tariq scolded him jokingly, “You said every hour or half hour, man!”

  Abdullah muttered as he sucked greedily at his cigarette. “It’s okay, it’s okay! Bear with me just this little bit, man.”

  He quickly gulped down what he could of the smoke. Then he threw aside the cigarette, only half consumed, and got back in the car.

  They traveled a few more minutes, passing out of the village and into the outskirts. Tariq said, “I’m convinced our mission will be a success.” When he didn’t hear a response, he added, “I have a surprise for you both there in Baghdad.”

  He gazed at Qisma’s face in the mirror to read the effect of his words; then he turned to Abdullah beside him. When he saw that they were looking at him and waiting for him to finish, he went on: “I know an important person in the new government.”

  Tariq kept pausing his narrative in this way, taking pleasure in the sense that he was stoking their curiosity. He enjoyed how their glances were directed toward him in anticipation.

  “He’s an agent in the ministry of national security, responsible for the security side of the purification commission.”

  Qisma said, “Yes, someone like that would be able to save us a lot of hardship in our search.
That is, if he really agrees to help us.”

  Tariq was quick to reply in a loud and vaunting voice, “He most certainly will help us! He’s not just a superficial acquaintance but rather a son of our village, and this is the surprise I have for you.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s Jalal, the son of the mayor, may he rest in peace. Our families told us stories about Jalal and his journey abroad before we were born, before all news of him was cut off.”

  Abdullah felt a thunderbolt pass through his body and spirit. In a single moment he felt himself contracting to the size of a pebble. His heart nearly stopped beating, and his throat constricted to the point of choking.

  Meanwhile, Tariq continued his discourse with enthusiasm: “He had changed his name to Jalal al-Din, Sayyid Jalal al-Din. But with my skills and special connections, I was able to identify him. Indeed, I’ve met with him, and we agreed to keep in touch and revive the intimate ties of friendship that had existed between our fathers.”

  They had come alongside the cemetery, and Abdullah said, “Stop, stop! I want to smoke. You were right—I will be more trouble than I’m worth. If we keep stopping like this, it will be like we’re traveling to China and not to Baghdad.”

  They laughed.

  “I can’t. I can’t!” He got out, adding with more seriousness and a sad, gentle tone, “I’ll stay here, with Ibrahim’s head. You two take charge of the search for the rest of him.” Then he closed the door, lit a cigarette, and set off, going up the side of the cemetery hill without looking back.

  Shock, apprehension, words, and questions began boiling inside him, mixing together and gushing forth like a destructive volcano. He realized he was talking out loud to himself, and his hands were gesticulating wildly: “Here’s my mother’s rapist returning under the title of Sayyid to rape the village and the country. Here they are, back once again. The alliance of criminal murderers. History repeats itself. Shit repeats itself. What’s the point? What should I do? I have to do something!”

  He saw in the bottom of the valley that dogs had gathered to fight over some carrion. He spat at them, continuing his ascent and his questions.

  Tariq and Qisma stayed there for a moment, watching him in silence as he moved away. Then they kept going, but there was a dryness in Tariq’s throat and tears were forming in Qisma’s eyes.

  Later, when they were on the road again, Qisma told Tariq that Abdullah was a very good man, very much afflicted and wronged. He was extremely like her father, and she loved him on account of the strength of her father’s love for him. They were alike in their silence, their endurance, their goodness, and their misfortune, which hadn’t vouchsafed them to take a single breath in freedom nor determine for themselves the course their lives took.

  “We are all alike,” Tariq commented. “We resemble each other. And at the same time, we are all different from one another. The solution is that we are alike in our acceptance of our differences.”

  Qisma said she was thinking about Abdullah a lot and wanted to do something for his sake so he would live the rest of his life in a better way and taste some pleasure or happiness. She was thinking of getting him married, for example. “And you have to help me persuade him!”

  Tariq told her the story of Abdullah’s love for his sister Sameeha, and he confessed to her details that her father hadn’t mentioned. He told her, “I will confess something to you alone. This is the first time I’ve spoken of this matter out loud, even though it never ceases to resound painfully within me, making me feel bitterness and guilt toward Abdullah and my sister Sameeha. I’m the one who convinced my father to refuse their marriage. Yes, I, and don’t ask me why. I was young. I was an ignorant child.” He didn’t tell her, of course, about his psychological motive at that time, which he had never forgotten on account of the betrayal it led him to commit.

  It pleased them that they were in complete agreement and they decided that their first goal, as soon as they returned from Baghdad, would be to arrange the marriage of Abdullah and Sameeha. Tariq even suggested that they put on one large joint wedding for the four of them. They found themselves more eagerly committed to sharing each other’s thoughts, and they agreed on most things. Among other things, they said, “Yes, life must go on—patching the cracks, mending tears, gathering what has been parted, and putting in order, as far as is possible, what has been scattered. Life must go on.”

  During their conversations, which continued for long stretches of the road, at petrol stations, in roadside restaurants and through inspection checkpoints, Qisma informed Tariq of another matter she had resolved within herself, and she asked him to go with her as she took care of it during their time in Baghdad. “I want to change my son’s name,” she said.

  “And what will you name him?”

  “Ibrahim.”

  Tariq was silent, as though taking a long drink of water. Then he commented with an enormous satisfaction, “My God! Despite all the conflagrations and wars. How many Ibrahims have walked and will walk this land of the two rivers, ever since the original Ibrahim, the forefather of us all!”

  Somehow, this optimistic positivity that Tariq always expressed in his thoughts and attitude made Qisma’s spirit nervous. It was as though he didn’t feel what she felt, or didn’t see what she saw: this complete destruction up and down both sides of the road; skeletons of cars and smashed military equipment; collapsed buildings and houses; these dejected military checkpoints that punctuated the road every half hour with sandbags, blocks of concrete, and rusty fences; the unwashed faces of policemen and soldiers, fear and control mixed in their eyes, their baggy clothes inspiring pity, transforming them into animate clothes racks draped in rifles, pistols, and bayonets; columns of American military vehicles, their weapons aimed at the civilian cars passing by them at a distance; neglected fields on all sides, wrapped in their thirst and a dejected withering; and columns of smoke rising in every direction.

  Nothing but destruction, and if Qisma turned her gaze inward, she came across a destruction that was equally severe. Didn’t Tariq see all of this? Didn’t he feel it? How was it possible for him to turn everything into an advantage? Specifically, to his own advantage? It was something that troubled her and shook something of the confidence she felt inside, especially when her thoughts came back to her father, the sacrificing and sacrificed Ibrahim.

  She touched the head of her child, sleeping in her lap, as a drumbeat of questions began rattling in her head: Which drop of sperm produced him? Who will he be like? Like his father, her husband? Like the insane President? Like herself? Like her father? Or like this Tariq, in whose protection this little one will flourish?

  They were halfway to Baghdad when she felt all these thoughts combine into a chaotic jumble, a mix of salty, sour, sweet, and bitter. Stones ground together in a kettle of pus that boiled in her belly. Dust, blood, and smoke clouded her vision and constricted her breath to the point of fainting. A wave of nausea rose from her stomach. She felt such a violent desire to vomit that she suddenly cried out, “Stop. Stop! I want to get out!”

  MUHSIN AL-RAMLI is an Iraqi writer, poet, academic, and the translator from Spanish to Arabic of many literary classics. He was born in northern Iraq in 1967 and has lived in Madrid since 1995. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy and Letters from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2003 with his thesis The Traces of Islamic Culture in Don Quixote. Now he works as a professor at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus. He writes in both Arabic and Spanish, and is a well-known figure in the world of Arabic literature.

  His novels Dates on My Fingers and The President’s Gardens were longlisted for the IPAF, known as the “Arabic Booker,” in 2010 and 2013, and he was a finalist for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2016 with his novel The She-Wolf of Love and Books.

  Much of his writing is based on his own personal experiences, including his service as a tank commander in the Iraqi army during the Gulf War. His brother, the writer Hassan Mutlak, was hanged in 1990 at the age of tw
enty-nine for an attempted coup d’état, and he is considered by many in his country to be the Lorca of Iraq.

  LUKE LEAFGREN received his PhD in Comparative Literature in 2012 from Harvard University, where he teaches Arabic and serves as the Allston Burr Resident Dean of Mather House. He has translated several Arabic novels into English, including Dates on My Fingers, also by Al-Ramli. Beyond his academic interests, Leafgren is an avid sailor and inventor of StandStand, a portable standing desk.