by Mona Yahia
On the ceiling of his room, Shuli has pinned colourful magazine cut-outs of spaceships revolving in starry nights. A huge leap through history. Yet the distance to heaven has not contracted. And the sky seems nothing but an abyss turned upwards.
My fingernails are pared and clean. The smell of soap wafts from my hand. He might relent and let my fingers run over the white ziggurat and be tickled by the edges of its stairways.
He is reading in his room. I stick my hand under his nose. Only then do I notice. His books, which have always been piled haphazardly against the wall, are now stacked close to each other, in ascending order. They look more like bricks, built into a flight of stairs, which begins at ground level in one corner and ends at the ceiling of the opposite corner. In the sunbeams, motes of dust are dancing up and down the stairs, about to be eaten by the books.
—Mealtime? he mumbles.
—What’s this?
But he has already left the room.
I get a new canary, and we call him Sultan again. Just as Shuli predicted, he too dies one day. Shortly afterwards, Samson, Shuli’s canary, also becomes a carcase and falls down from the swing. We bury Samson between the two Sultans.
To prevent our garden from turning into a bird cemetry, Shuli and I dispense with canaries altogether. Shuli earths up the bottom of the empty cage, and sticks in two stems of cactus.
—Anyway, birds should be buried in the clouds, he murmurs as he fastens the catch.
Milk Teeth
A girl is gazing into the camera, suppressing a smile which would have disclosed her two missing front teeth. A striped hair ribbon, tied in a bow, crowns her head for the studio portrait. A small medallion hangs around her neck, but one can barely see the relief of New York City. She is hugging a teddy bear, squeezing it against her chest. The gesture could be easily read as a sign of affection. Its purpose, however, is to conceal the animal’s missing left leg.
It is a winter afternoon when mother and I have just returned from a stroll, and I suddenly realise Teddy-Pasha is no longer under my arm. Mother, still in her overcoat, walks back the way we came. Twenty minutes later she comes home with a mutilated Pasha. The guard at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier had picked up the single-legged animal from the pavement across the square. I drag mother to the Square of the Unknown Soldier again. We comb the place but fail to find the amputated leg. For the first time I step inside the monument’s parabolic arch and lose myself in the transparent blue and grey tiling, which looks like a mosaic sky. Mother taps me on my shoulder. We should go, it’s getting late, she says. Not before I have saluted the guard who is standing to attention by the commemorative fire.
Teddy’s next mishap took place shortly after.
In one of our frequent rows, Shuli snatches Pasha from my hand and flings him into the toilet bowl. As I scream in distress, he unzips his fly and pees on my teddy’s face. The roar brings mother to the scene. Shuli’s penis is dangling out, dripping, Pasha is floating inside the lavatory, and she still asks what the matter is. I scream, as loud as I can, that I want my Pasha back.
—But you’re not taking him to bed again, she says.
Shuli smugly does up his fly. I start whining. Mother shouts until her voice drowns out mine. She will rescue Teddy-Pasha only after I keep quiet.
I hush and suck my thumb.
She flushes the water – to rinse him she explains. Afraid to lose Pasha to the sewers, I fret and groan and grumble.
—Not another word, she warns between closed teeth.
The speed of my sucking increases. Four or five times, mother pulls the chain. Each time I think that’s it, Teddy-Pasha will be swallowed up by the drains. And each time the water jets, he swerves and somersaults. When it ceases, he makes a headstand, his lone leg rising obliquely in the air. I bite my thumb in mute frenzy. Mother puts on a blue plastic glove and fishes him out at last, only to duck him into a bucket of detergent. His fur immediately falls out, the canvas of his skin bleaches. Mother gives him one last extensive rinse, after which she hangs him by the ears on the washing-line on the balcony. The next morning, a bird shits on his head. Mother claims it will bring good fortune.
The straw of his innards takes a couple of days to dry. Only then is Teddy-Pasha allowed on my pillow again. He gives off an impersonal smell of purity.
A few months separate the studio photograph from the toilet incident. A year at most. A year during which I begin to lose my milk teeth. One after the other, they fall out, leave a gap, and sprout up again. Thank God they do it by turns. I waggle the wobbling tooth with my tongue for hours, waiting for the moment pleasure shifts into pain.
—What happens when the permanent teeth fall out?
—You’ll grow gold teeth, Shuli says.
Together with my milk teeth I am losing my spontaneity. My loyalty to a one-legged teddy bear will falter before the camera. I avoid thumb-sucking in public. I stare longer in the mirror. My neck is too short, my ears are too large, my eyebrows too thick, my smile is too wide.
I avoid speaking to father in the presence of my classmates. His speech is embarrassing me lately. Though his Arabic is impeccable, it has an elusive accent. Neither foreign nor vernacular, neither Jewish nor Moslem, a bit close to the Christian dialect, but not entirely that either.
His accent leads Laila the Wolf to ask me whether my father is Jewish.
—Of course he is, I retort, feigning confidence.
—And why doesn’t he speak like it then?
The question haunts me for a long time. I dare not confront father, for fear of hurting his feelings. Mother, on the other hand, is unreliable. She would say anything just to reassure me. Shuli will not help out either, not with that disdainful look of his, considering whether the issue is worth the effort of answering.
I will find it out all by myself, I decide, and begin to weigh up my father. I examine his looks, study his habits, observe his bearing, and use every bit of information to give me clues about his origins.
He cannot read Hebrew. He cannot recite a prayer either. His Sabbath is on Friday. He eats ham or luncheon meat at supper. We never celebrate the Seder. On Passover, he crunches his toast as if the Children of Israel had never crossed the Red Sea. His closest friend is a Moslem.
Is he Jewish or is he not?
He is a member of the Jewish School Council, which runs the educational programme in our school. He fasts and attends the synagogue on Yom Kippur. All his relatives have long ago emigrated to America. He is sceptical towards each new revolutionary regime, but avoids a political opinion.
Is he Jewish or is he not?
He neither smokes, nor drinks arak, and never stuffs himself to the full. He does not wear a moustache, does not play cards, and never cracks pumpkin seeds. He shaves daily, and wears pyjamas only in bed. Otherwise he is dressed in a suit and a tie. He eats with a knife and fork, even the drumstick, even when we have no guests. He steps aside to let mother pass first. He does not show off, nor raise his voice, not even at us children. He rarely acts on impulse, and is impossible to push over the brink. Though he hardly complains, he is actually very hard to please. He does not say much, but means every word to the letter.
Is he Iraqi or is he not?
His father comes from Damascus, his mother is a Baghdadi. He was born in Turkey. He counts in English. When he is upset, foreign words slip out, as if in spite of himself. His eyes are grey-green, and his skin’s so light that it instantly burns in the sun. His grizzled hair used to be light brown. Physically, I bear no resemblance to him whatsoever.
Is he my father or is he not?
He was educated at a public school in Oxford, or so he says. For four years he rowed, swam, played chess, football, and cricket. They showered in cold water and refrained from celebration, even when their team was winning. Oxford taught him self-discipline, but much about loneliness too. Like the English he sticks to his principles, notwithstanding the changing map of the world. Like them he regularly attended the Sunday serv
ice in church.
Is he Jewish or is he not?
If he is not Jewish, he does not belong to us. And if he is not one of us, will I still be allowed to love him?
Mixed marriages are unheard of in our community, and when they do occur, the wrongdoers are completely shut out from Jewish life. Their families will sit saba’a for them, and no lips, not even their mothers’, will utter their names again.
Contradictory data are confusing me. I would rather give up this investigation, accept the way father speaks, and love him the way he is.
It is Selma who asks next.
After a moment’s hesitation, I open my heart and share my torment with her. Together we delve into the subject, stroll alongside the walls of the school grounds and go over the pros and cons. After six circuits, we are back to square one. Selma suggests asking her father, who is well acquainted with mine.
I anxiously wait for her call in the evening.
—Baba has just burst into laughter. It’s beyond doubt. Your father’s no less a Jew than mine or anyone else’s. Yes, he’s positive about it. Of course you can take Baba’s word, it’s as good as mine.
Her word dissolves my doubts and restores peace to my mind. Nevertheless, one word alone cannot tie all the odd threads in my father’s biography.
One morning I join him in the bathroom. His shaving brush taps the tip of my nose with foam. He is about to shave his armpit when I ask what made him, a Jew, attend church services in Oxford.
When father turns to me, I can see his blush under the lather.
—I wasn’t keen on having the rough time the other Jewish boys were given.
I nod, as if I have understood what he is talking about. What counts is that he did not deny being Jewish, and I am grateful enough for that. In fact, they are already falling into oblivion – his Sunday service, his apology, his anxiety, and the ordeal of the Jewish boys at the public school in Oxford.
School opens in autumn, with tiny children standing like pawns, sobbing before the nursery. Twenty classrooms smell of stale air and fresh whitewash and pristine textbooks. Teachers warn of a tough year ahead, much harder than the preceding one.
Selma and I are sitting on the same bench. By now, she can write with two hands. Sometimes I read out a text, and she jots it down twice, with her right hand and with the left simultaneously. Other times she closes her eyes and her right hand writes Arabic while her left scrawls in English. Nobody knows how she does it. Selma has extraordinary gifts. She wants to be a medium when she grows up.
She is growing so fast that nothing can stand in her way. Beside her I feel as if I am shrinking. Her arms and legs keep extending, challenging the world and testing its boundaries. That is how she finds herself at odds with Laila, the queen of the class.
We were singing “Happy Birthday” at Laila’s party. Laila was taking a deep breath, getting ready to blow out her eight flickering candles. Her red dress reminded me of Little Red Riding Hood, in Arabic Laila and the Wolf. It occured to me that our Laila would make a far better wolf than a sweet innocent girl. I whispered my thoughts in Selma’s ear. She whispered hers back. A nickname was born. Selma blurted it out in the third verse of “Happy Birthday” and raised hysterical laughter. Laila the Wolf started digging out the coloured candles and throwing them, like flaming arrows at Selma. Fortunately in mid-air they went out, and Laila’s mother managed to pull the cake away, scolding her daughter for spoiling the expensive Kashan carpet. But Laila pounced on Selma and the two rolled over each other on the beautiful carpet. The children accompanied them with a local song instead of “Happy Birthday”: a bitter fight has broken out / between the sheikh and the jackals. It took great effort from Laila’s father to disentangle the two girls. Selma had to apologise but the party was ruined all the same. We were sent home without the usual small gifts distributed by the birthday child. The nickname, as well as the war between Selma and Laila, will persist throughout elementary school.
Learning in elementary school means learning by heart. It should flow out of you like water, teachers say. I spend years pacing corridors, a book in my hand, reading, repeating, holding the book against my chest, and reciting. The fifteen provinces of Iraq, the course of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the names of the Arab states and their capitals, the five continents, the multiplication tables in Arabic and English. Somewhere between the degrees of longitude and the degrees of latitude my mind goes astray. I am drawn to the window overlooking the serifa, the squatter huts, erected on the empty plot behind our house. Most of them are one-room huts constructed of reed matting and plastered with mud. Baghdad is surrounded by a wide belt of such serifas, they say, in which dwell shargawis, peasant migrants from the south.
Beside one of the huts, on the ground, is a large basin filled with water. A woman is rinsing thoroughly the bottom of a naked toddler. When he pees into the basin, she giggles and tickles his groin. A girl my age is sitting opposite them and washing dishes in the same basin. First she scours them with earth and then she dips them in the water. A group of smaller children are playing at marbles a few steps away. Boys and girls are clothed in frayed dishdashas of a similar shade of mud.
Two marbles chink. The joyful cry of a winner. I glue my nose to the window, next to a cluster of noseprints.
The naked toddler is creeping towards the children. He is captivated by the bright marbles rolling in the soil. In less than no time, he snatches one and tosses it into his mouth. The children rush to him. He is coughing. The oldest boy grabs him by the feet, lifts him up, and shakes him up and down. Too late, the marble has been swallowed. Now the boy is cursing and banging the toddler’s head on the ground. The latter is screaming for his life. A small girl scampers into the hut, and scampers out again clutching a kitchen-knife longer than her own arm.
Are they determined to retrieve the marble at all costs? I walk away from the window and wish it was only a horror film. The uproar is now joined by the growls of a dog. A sharp female voice soon pierces it with abuse and ululations. The collective yelling pulls me back. An older girl, holding a palm branch, is chasing the children and lashing whoever she can lay her hands on. After they have scattered, she picks up the toddler, who is sobbing but still in one piece. On her way into the hut, she delivers one last blow across the back of the small dappled dog chained at the opening.
Clashes in the serifa often end with the yelps of a dog. I take my nose from the window, leaving an additional print on the pane, and return to my privileged world, pacing and revising the social structure of bees, the grafting of palm trees, the regurgitation of camels, and more material which I will forget soon after the exam.
You’ll be left with a strong memory, mother says. As if reciting is a kind of mental gymnastics, designed to build up a muscular storehouse for the mind.
On the 1st of November, the girls change into winter uniform – ugly black dresses with white collars. The classroom reeks of naphthalene. Unfortunately, not strongly enough to suffocate the boys who, exempted from uniform, take every opportunity to call us nuns and widows, penguins and ravens.
We are having a double Arabic lesson one November the 2nd. Ustad Riad is making the distinction between Sun and Moon letters in the Arabic alphabet. At nine o’clock, he interrupts the lesson and orders us to our feet, upright and silent. He jabbers some words I do not catch. I do not bother to inquire either, I am used by now to doing things that do not necessarily comply with reason. Blue ink stains my fingers. At the age of eight, we shift from pencil to fountain pen.
Forty eight-year-olds get up, stand still, hands behind their backs. A slip of paper is sneaked into my hand. I drop my head briefly, read the two words: Balfour Declaration. The chit is passed on.
Issued by the British on November the 2nd 1917, the Balfour Declaration had promised the Jews a national home in Palestine. Years ago, the Ministry of Education decreed a two-minute silence on that date as a protest against the Declaration. Each year, our teachers tend to overlook the regulation
. Ustad Riad is new at our school. His eyes are fixed on his watch. Dandruff is sprinkled like salt on the lapels of his brown jacket. It has slipped his mind that he might find himself the only Moslem in the classroom, and the only teacher in the country facing the bad guys all by himself.
The big hand completes two full rounds. Ustad Riad beckons us to sit. The lesson continues as if nothing had happened. Nothing but a reminder – at times threatening at times reassuring – that our set-in-stone rules reign only within our school walls. Outside, they crumble and fall to dust.
French lessons start in the second half of elementary school – aggressively, eight hours a week. French starts in French, no word of Arabic is allowed during the lesson. What child’s play English suddenly appears, familiar through the games, children’s books, comics, and cartoons imported from England and the United States. French by contrast is entirely foreign. Its sound seduces me. To be more precise, it is the French teacher’s deep husky voice, with its Parisian accent and melody which captures my heart. Spindlelegged, high-heeled, and hook-nosed, Mlle Capdevielle is austere and demanding. She often punishes laziness or lies, yet she never hits nor humiliates the pupils. Apart from having a car instead of a husband, something else is unusual about our French teacher. She seems to like children. And what wouldn’t they do to meet her demands in return. It is not too late to learn to echo her u, emulate her nasal vocals, and reproduce her slight distinctions between accent aigu and accent grave. Day and night I conjugate regular and irregular verbs, I learn countless exceptions by heart and master spelling. No adjective passes my way without undergoing both a masculin–féminin and a singulier–pluriel modification. Yet Mlle Capdevielle seems to be after more than perfect grammar.