Mothballs

by Alia Mamadouh

  The day they left for the capital, she carried the box next to her chest. She distributed all the things to the people of that area. They rode in a taxi. Her children were silent, and in her hands she held the missing man’s only remaining words.

  My grandmother’s family had a large crypt. It was clean and spacious, with several levels, located near the entrance to the cemetery. It was surrounded by a thicket of oleander trees, dusty from hanging in front of the large opening on to the main street. The family tree was hung at the entrance, all the boughs and branches, going down to the earliest roots. My grandmother’s forebears came from the Hejaz, and my grandfather’s from central Iraq. This crypt belonged to my grandmother’s tribe’s kinsfolk, and no strangers were to be buried here.

  My grandmother chose a spot behind the crypt. She called for Muhammad the builder, and he opened a new grave, surrounded by a cheap metal barrier painted white. Trees of a sort I was not familiar with were planted flanking it; they had short but plentiful branches, and a mysterious, penetrating smell on hot summer nights, a smell like laughter and tears. The hat was buried there, and every year the grave was repainted, the stones and mud were rearranged, the boughs were trimmed, and the plants were watered. She stood, tall, pale-skinned and sobbing, blotting him out with supplications and sending him prayers.

  Farida stood this whole time, looking waxen and rigid, as if venturing into a trap. She did not lament or cry, sob or wail. Her lips moved slowly, and her face showed the shock of terrible sorrow. Grandfather had loved her so much, Mr Jamil had isolated her for a long time. That Munir had vanished and not come back anywhere near her. She stayed inside the house for three days. She struck her head and her voice sounded with all its hoarseness and power, echoing through the rooms, even reaching other houses.

  All the voices lamented and fell silent, and Farida never grew weary. Iqbal was before her and Munir and Jamil behind her. The neighbours; the women; the rumours whispered from mouth to mouth:

  “Munir is never coming back.”

  “They say he knew a week before the wedding the news of the deceased.”

  “Why didn’t he say so?”

  “By God, we don’t know.”

  “Every day he and Abu Iman get drunk. They set up a table in the bar then Munir would bid Abu Iman farewell on the street and disappear.”

  “No, Abu Iman says he’ll get married when he’s past forty.”

  “They say Umm Jamil has fallen apart completely, with Iqbal and now with Farida. Abu Adil has deserted them – this new woman and the children have taken him.”

  Grandmother went down into the crypt. Farida hesitated, then followed her down. Adil touched the dirt under the oleander, pulled off some leaves, and threw them on the ground. Behind the window, I looked at my grandmother as she offered her prayers to the dead.

  It was the first holy day with Iqbal absent. We waited at the door to the crypt. The women of the neighbourhood, aunts and sisters, their faces slack, their complexions changed, eyelids dewy, eyes meek, their cloaks dusty; but they stood on tiptoe. Their hands clutched the arms of their little sons and daughters. The poor sayyids waited for their holy day donations holding out their hands and murmuring prayers as they waited for the sacrificial meat of the feast. The sun did not keep Adil waiting; it rose swiftly and was hot. The sky dispersed its clouds. Umm Suturi stood before us, a palm leaf tray in her hand:

  “Here is brick oven bread, eggs, and boiled potatoes. Eat them in the train, and remember us when you pray to the Lord of Martyrs. May the sorrow be lifted from all our souls. God be with you.”

  I carried the tray on my shoulder. We took the bus to the station at Bab al-Muazzam. The trains stood there, rusty and peeling. People were smiling. The pedlars shouted. The boys and girls boarding before us wore colourful holiday clothes. There were brief goodbyes and stifled weeping, and then we went up the steps. We sat facing one another.

  Adil and Grandmother, and Farida beside me. The train filled up with soldiers and luggage and the smell of food. My aunt pulled her bags in. We had our first bite, and the sound of the train as it began to move relaxed my bones and made everything I was experiencing seem small. From the wide iron window which was spattered with grease and the remnants of dried snot, I saw creatures – creatures whose double faces, and faces stripped of features, passed before me. I waved to them with a morsel of bread in my hand, knowing that I would never see them again.

  Chapter 12

  I listened to the noise and yelling, the crying of children, men blowing their noses, and the shouts of the mothers in the corner of the compartment, passing out objects and snacks. They sat on their old suitcases, which were lashed shut with thick, frayed ropes. The women’s heads were covered with black bands, from which twisted threads hung down, new and clean, reaching as far as their eyelids. Some pushed us inside and sat down, crowding near Farida.

  Adil and I looked at one another. No face looked like Mahmoud’s. No girl limped like Firdous. No odour from anyone’s mouth was like my mother’s. My grandmother drew out her black prayer beads and began to tell them, paying no attention to her surroundings. My aunt picked at some morsels of food and put the rest in a bag, but Grandmother did not touch even a crust of bread. Her cloak was wound all round her body. She watched Farida, and said, in a soft but firm voice: “Wrap your cloak round your body well.” The men’s and women’s eyes stripped my aunt of her clothing. I looked round at everything about me. The man with the headropes looked like Haj Aziz, but his face was older and less bright. I watched the man sitting far away rolling tobacco in paper, moistening his lips, swallowing, and looking at my aunt, lighting his cigarette, sighing, and then raising his voice in an old southern song, in which he was joined by the soldiers heading home on leave. Most of the women looked like Umm Suturi and Umm Aziz.

  A voice sounded, alone, from a woman we could not see in all the confusion: “Whoever has not made the pilgrimage to Lord Hussein has wasted his life!”

  Laughter, shouting, and singing. The men’s cloaks, and new trousers and jackets. Men’s trousers, wrinkled, ironed, old, coloured, long enough to touch the floor, short enough to see holes in socks. We smelled the stink of feet and the odour of sweaty armpits. The women shouted with joy and trilled as they recited the names of Ali Ibn-Abi Talib and his children.

  Food appeared: skewers of kebab, grilled goat’s testicles, and flat loaves of bread that had become cold and wrinkled. Onions and green tomatoes. The movements of chewing and swallowing in front of me made me join them, and I asked one of them for half a piece of bread and a skewer of kebab. I reached out and took an onion, sat among them and ate. I did not look at my aunt. Everyone was belching.

  The boys and girls wore cheap clothes, and their shoes were scruffy. Their socks were uneven – one high, the other low. The girls’ ribbons hung down to their chests, and their necks were bare and spotted with grease. I did not know what to wipe my hands on, so I left them as they were and looked at my fingers. I got up and walked back to my seat. Farida was wrapped up, but left part of her chest visible. I looked at my grandmother. She had said before we left that “You will wear an abaya when we get to Karbala.” I saw my abaya underneath the containers of food; Umm Suturi had brought it. I saw the men above our heads and around us. The young men were smoking, coughing, and staring. I turned my head towards the window.

  My father had come from Karbala the previous year. He placed a quarter dinar in my hand and said reluctantly, “Take Adil and go play on the swings. Hold on to him tightly when he’s on it. If anything happens to him, I’ll kill you.”

  Iqbal stood silently at the door of the house. She drew another quarter dinar out of her neckline and buried it in my hand, and pushed us outside without a word.

  This was the first holy day I had a new dress. It was yellow, and the waist had a shiny belt of delicate satin, a scrap from the cloth of our new quilt. New yellow ribbons adorned my braids. Umm Suturi had stitched my dress in two hours, and Farida finishe
d sewing the back and the sleeves. I was walking, picking off threads and blowing them into the air. Nuriya had sent Adil his new clothes from Karbala.

  Firdous and Mahmoud stood in front of the door to their house, Suturi, Hashim, and Nizar waited in the spacious lot behind our houses. That is where the girls and boys of the neighbourhood celebrated.

  We walked round the grimy ice cream carts, whose rusty wheels stopped almost as soon as they got rolling, so the ice cream vendor had to hit them to right them. We stood by them. Inside them were large tins surrounded by crushed ice dyed red, yellow, and brown. Small tancoloured plates and old spoons. The man sold us some and we ate it. We crunched the ice between our teeth, turning our lips different colours. We reached in for a second tin of cola in their dark-green bottles. We kept the cold in our mouths and went to see blind Umm Aziz, who had enlarged her palm platter and placed coloured lollipops on it, spun sugar attached to thin sharp sticks, all on another palm fibre platter. We stood in front of her and started our game here. We wrapped scallop-edged five-fils coins in glossy silver-coloured paper; we did this well until we had covered the milled edges, so that when she felt each coin she thought it was a dirham. She was fooled, and we took everything on the trays. A few minutes later, all of a sudden, her voice split the air cursing us and our parents. Adil went back and gave her all his money. Mahmoud, Hashim, Nizar, Firdous, Suturi, and I licked the lollipops and threw the sticks on the ground, putting the candy floss in our mouths, eating and not caring. We went to the fried seed seller and bought dried chickpeas, peanuts, and black and red raisins. We munched them and the ink ran on to our fingers from the words on the old notebook pages in which the nuts were wrapped. The sound of whistles began to lead the way. Paper kites of all colours filled the air. Hands pulled the kite strings and tails, which rose and fell like Euphrates birds as the wind blew. The boys and girls counted their fils and pennies and grasped them tightly. The young men of the neighbourhood stood around in new dishdashas and wide leather belts, keeping their money in linen bags between the waist and stomach. They called out to everyone using the swings. Among the lofty palm trees the heavy ropes waited for our small hands. I placed Adil on one swing and gave him a vigorous push: “Hold the rope tightly, Adouli!” I got on another swing: “Mahmoud, push me as hard as you can – don’t worry about me.”

  My feet flew high up into the hot air. I saw the roofs of the houses and the red buses, the laundry lines and the window panes. My braids leaped with me as I pumped myself higher. I saw Firdous, silent and serene. She watched me go up and down. Suturi pushed Adil and I shouted: “Harder, Mahmoud, harder!” The voice of the man holding the rope: “That’s five fils’ worth.” I tottered as I slid from the sky to the ground.

  The ground was dirt, pebbles, and broken bricks. We slid along, raising clouds of dust that got into our eyes. Wagons drawn by skinny horses passed before us. The drivers called out, “One ride, ten fils.”

  We all got in and stretched our legs out, all crowded in on one another. We all had whistles and brightly coloured paper pinwheels that spun in our hands when we blew on them. Our voices rose in song: “We miss you sweetheart, God we miss you, It’s been a long time since we parted.” We applauded and made jokes, and shouted in one voice: “Hey! For God’s sake speed it up!” The horses looked like Umm Aziz. The cart took us round. The streets had been recently paved and were crowded with people and automobiles. We rode up the dirt dam and went down Royal Cemetery Street. This was where the first Queen of Iraq was buried, the mother of King Faisal II and the sister of the regent. We stood up in school in the morning and the teacher, Miss Nabila, cried in front of us. We all bowed our heads, and they lowered the flags everywhere for forty days. We cried for the Queen, whose photograph we had never seen, and when we went home we were proud to give our families the news: “Queen Alia is dead.”

  The sun shone into our ears and eyes. We put our arms around one another’s shoulders, and Mahmoud’s hand went past Firdous’s back and reached mine. I grew hotter; his hand was near my braids. Firdous never opened her mouth or closed her eyes. She was stubborn on the inside and shy on the outside, a little taller than you. Her complexion was wheaten, and a violet green lay deep inside her eyes; they were narrow and bright. Her eyelashes were thick but short, and her teeth were widely spaced, with a layer of plaque. Her lips were dry, as if always parched with thirst. When she spoke, she panted, and when she quarrelled, her voice was a shrill shriek. Her jerky breathing crackled. She charmingly mispronounced the r-sound in the back of her throat. When she laughed, she laid her palm over her mouth. When she walked, she drew her left leg back and heaved it forward. Her pelvis had been malformed from birth. She did not play out in the street until she was seven. They called her Firdous the Lame.

  The day they moved to your neighbourhood you stood in front of her. You looked into each other’s eyes. She was prettier than you. Her skin was tender, and she was plump – and quiet. At first neither of you spoke. She held an old, small, ugly, frightening rag doll in her hand; around it were the remnants of scraps of coloured cloth, charcoal, chalk, string, scissors, and pens. She would draw and sew, smudging and re-drawing the lines of the face with the charcoal, changing the angle of the nose. She held a pen and moved quickly across the cloth. She put earrings on the ears, made some of the eyes blind, distorted some of the faces, carved and cut the cloth of the rag dolls. She made the faces look insolent, like monkeys, like beasts, recalling all the animals in her books, the gardens, and streets. Eyebrows disappeared, eyes danced, teeth broke, and blood flowed on to the rags. Hers was a strange toy, one-legged, or with both legs cut off.

  You stood, watching, not getting tired, and she did not look at you: “Sit down. Why are you standing up?”

  “Why not come out so we can play in the street? I don’t like playing indoors.”

  She did not reply. Anything she did not like, she did not reply to. Suddenly she opened up the doll’s mouth as wide as possible, pulled off one leg, and threw it to the floor. “Look, it’s Firdous the Lame, and this is Huda the Shameless.”

  “Fine, fine. Come here on the steps, we won’t go far.”

  “But stay with me.”

  I stayed with her. At first she did not believe it. She did not hate anyone for walking on ahead of her, but she confided in herself, and in everyone around her, that she was Firdous, who never waited for anyone to take her by the hand and walk with her. The days and hours passed but the only thing she worked at was her leg. She lifted her dress in front of you so you could see the thigh with the old flesh. She always listened closely for the voice of her small, delicate cells: “Look, everything’s quiet now, but as soon as I start walking, it’s something else again.”

  Firdous was something else again. She was best in the class at school. She was quiet, reasonable, and clever, as immersed in silence as if constantly drunk. She kept her dignity and never relinquished it in front of me, either. In the street, no one ever again dared to call her Firdous the Lame. She abandoned herself to me and I led her, hugged her, and she bore her reputation and mine too. She did not like to make acquaintances or to meet new people. Her curiosity went down to her limbs and stayed there.

  Everyone recognized her steps when she came to the house. We went from one class to the next, from secret to secret, and changed. I lifted my arm so she could see the downy hair of my armpit. She looked timidly, then began to count the number of hairs. We stood together, measuring our heights, arms, plumpness or skinniness. The layers of sound and passage of secrets from mouth to mouth. The murmur of breasts, the chastity of speech about the absent children of the neighbourhood. She had time for dreams, and assessed the boys of our street: “Mahmoud is yours. Adil is shy and sweet. Cross-eyed Hashim makes us laugh. Suturi the bird boy is a devil like you. And he is just for me.”

  He was Nizar, one year younger than she, but taller, uglier, cleverer, and quieter than everyone else. She had not made approaches to him; she did not know how to reveal the
secret. She stirred up her imagination with it at first, then hung around him, not wanting to deny anything. She was jealous of everything and anything, in a way that we did not know how to prepare for. He was hers alone. She talked to herself about him every day, in front of me and when I was not with her. Pretending to be talking about herself, not about him. She tried to quantify his soul syllables through the number of letters in his name; she multiplied them by the number of letters in her name, then added the remainder, and Nizar appeared before her like a treasure. She always said, “Him.” She was terribly benevolent towards him, always saying:

  “He’s sensible. I don’t like good-looking boys. It’s almost that good looks are scary. We’re a lot alike.” I said nothing, and she went on: “Sometimes I wake up at night and look at Mahmoud while he’s sleeping. Mahmoud is nice-looking, I know, but I don’t see him that way. Everyone looks nice when they’re sleeping. I only like the quiet ones. Nizar is quiet – as if only I understand him. As if he talks just for me, and is quiet for me. Sometimes Mahmoud is like Nizar, and sometimes he talks a lot.”

  “When he talks, what does he say?”

  She understood you immediately and replied, “He doesn’t say anything. When your name comes up he goes quiet. Fine – silence is better than saying the wrong thing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother, for example, doesn’t like you. She says, ‘By God, if Huda were my daughter I would lock her in the house and not even let her see the street.’ ”