Mothballs

by Alia Mamadouh

  Chapter 15

  Everyone in our street was stopping by the shop of Hubi the butcher, all stunned by the rumours: “The police have taken Hubi away.” “They say he was circulating anti-government leaflets.”

  “No, they say he cursed the Regent and Nuri al-Said.”

  “God help us and our children. They say he was behind the last demonstration, after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.”

  We had watched the demonstration: my grandmother stood in front of the Friday Mosque with the women of the neighbourhood, praying for the young men as they passed before her holding their banners high. “God protect you, my dears, and bring you safely home to your families.”

  She was bewildered, exclaiming as if she stood in the line of fire. Umm Suturi belted her wool cloak round her waist, stretched, and tightened her black band round her head, trilling. She regulated the water spigots, set up five thick wooden posts and set pots and pails of clean water between them. She filled canvas sacks with loaves of ovenfresh bread. They drank as they passed before her, shouting slogans and munching the fresh bread.

  Rasmiyah had prepared a number of emergency supplies: surgical spirit, dressings, cotton, and iodine. Abu Mahmoud had new types of cheese, which he set out on big plates and left in the care of Umm Mahmoud. He was wearing his new trousers embroidered with silver stripes, a new leather belt, and had a new headcloth fastened round his head. He looked like the mitwalli of the mosque, Haj Aziz, who stood near him. Between them were Abu Hashim, Abu Masoud, Abu Iman, Abu Ghanim, and Muhammad the builder. Blind Umm Aziz brought big holiday plates dotted with sweets, calling out, “Today everything is free for our boys.”

  They all came out: the coppersmiths, carpenters, ironworkers, and builders. Aunt Najiya’s young voice parted the crowds of women and children before her: “Dears, clear the way a little for me. I’m ill and out of breath.”

  Bahija, La’iqa, and Aunt Naima raised their voices in prayer: “God bless the Prophet Muhammad. Protect them, O Lord, and let them be our protection.”

  Aunt Farida went up to the high roof and stood there. Her voice was inaudible and her face was indistinct, but she clapped and chanted. The front of the demonstration appeared at the intersection of the first houses passing down Great Imam Street, and she jumped and skipped, rushing amid the throng. Her clothing was white and her head was covered with a bright veil. She refused to wear her cloak on this day. She stood in front of Abu Mahmoud, who was holding the hands of the boys and girls of the neighbourhood, making us one circle.

  Adil had not chosen a partner or a spot to stand in; he moved in our midst like a sleepwalker. Suturi and Nizar called out and laughed. Hashim was bursting with enthusiasm and played with his voice, wanting to release it. Mahmoud was far, far away, dripping with sweat. His voice erupted like a fit of dry, irritated coughing. “He’s become a communist,” the people said.

  I did not understand what that word meant, though I had heard it as if my father had his pistol out and was chasing me. Mahmoud had changed; his face was harsh and his appearance was different, his luxuriant moustache was thinning, and a strange stillness had slowed his rapid gait. He had changed and become introverted; he was tense, no longer among us. When he stood near me, he used big words and the titles of thick books.

  He came quietly and left secretly, and passed through the neighbourhood as we slept. The family’s former sense of security was gone, and their easy kindness had become wariness. He was careful the way he looked at you, and when he locked eyes with you his eyes were like a threat. When you were with Firdous it was she he spoke to, and when you were alone you beat yourself in his name. Everyone in the neighbourhood bit their tongues and feared for him: grown-ups, family men, important people, all knew that “getting into politics means trouble,” but they knew very little more and kept quiet.

  Mahmoud began to disappear from school and home, from the neighbourhood and his neighbours, his close friends, and you.

  The day he gave me a leaflet I was afraid, trembling and stammering. The first leaflet was like a first forbidden kiss. I could not move; my stomach was upside down and I nearly fainted. I knew that there was something like a bomb inside it, and if I touched it it would blow my hand and head off. I read it but only found Nasser’s name mentioned once carelessly.

  Muddled, I stopped reading and handed it back to him in silence. He vanished before me and left me only the temptation to read. I hardly understood anything; there was hardly anything I didn’t understand.

  We were all Nasserites. When my grandmother heard his voice she said, “I don’t care if his nose is too big. But his voice – it’s as though I’ve heard it before. It’s like Abu Jamil’s voice.”

  My father came into my room when he returned from Karbala, turned on the radio and tuned it to Voice of the Arabs, set down four glasses before him, clinking one against the other. He listened and said:

  “Oh my God, deliver us by his hand from this black death.”

  Rasmiya kept Nasser’s picture in her small work bag, and looked at him whenever she opened it; she kissed it and put it back in with the cotton and surgical spirit.

  Umm Mahmoud, Abu Mahmoud; and blind Umm Aziz told us, “I wish I had my sight just so I could see him.”

  Farida was like quicksilver: when his name came up she paid attention and got excited. When anyone cursed him she kept quiet.

  We pushed into the crowd, taken by his name and his picture, and when the electric current was cut off we spoke to him in the dark, Adil and I, in the name of the Prophet’s household. Faces and bodies on roofs and behind windows cried out and threw sweets and nuts to us. Our voices rose as we saw him, young and warm. Then he went high up into the sky.

  All Baghdad joined the insurrection that day. Cities, villages, and coffee-houses shut down, shops closed up, the universities wrote their banners and the students flew them, green, white, and red. The high schools let out most of their classes; each class covered the rear of the one before it, the faces of the police and their cudgels and sticks wanted even more of these bodies and heads. My father took the day off and came to Baghdad, telling his superior that his mother was ill. He took off his uniform and slipped into the crowd. I didn’t notice him there, but Wafiqa saw him and smiled.

  How often I had raced and skipped, run and strolled down Great Imam Street. I could see him now as he taught me how to fly. Nasser came and infiltrated our vocal cords and set all the secrets free. We entered into the rapture and began to chant: “Curse the English, curse reaction, down with colonialism and the Regent. Say Palestine is Arab. Down with Zionism.” Stop stuttering. Fight. They fought with bare chests, necks small and large, and collars worn out from washing, and swore allegiance to him.

  His voice was like piety, and my grandmother’s shouted along with the rest: Down with the treaties. Down with tyranny. You memorized everything quickly. No one expressed his anger at the King of Iraq. Faisal II was absent from our cries, and stayed far from our voices. All the aunts and women of the neighbourhood loved him:

  “He’s a dear. He’s still young. All the troubles have come from his uncle Abdulilah and the English.”

  The picture of the King of Iraq deceived young and old alike. He was handsome and sad, gloomy, yet fortunate as well.

  Girls dreamed of him, and women worried about him. There was no blow aimed at him, and no wedding for him. Nasser took everything written on the banners and came to us. When he held court in Cairo, prisoners came out into prison yards and wrote his name with coal or their fingernails on the peeling walls.

  When he gave a speech about the Suez Canal, the Arab radio stations divided homes into Nasserites and reactionaries, and the camp of those who did not know anything about it. Shops were closed, and homes were turned upside down in the search for a radio tuned to Voice of the Arabs or a leaflet slipped under old mats.

  The neighbourhood was still in shock. Hubi’s shop had been closed for seven months. We walked by it every morning and said “Good m
orning” to it. We passed by again in the afternoon and touched it with our hands. The dogs and cats licked the crevices of the place and congregated under the stone steps. Hubi was a bachelor, and his mother and sister cried for him; the whole neighbourhood was like a face engraved in acid. Abu Iman was carried home on the men’s shoulders one night and everyone heard his shouting, his punches and curses. Rasmiya made nothing up. She bid a good morning to Abu Mahmoud, whose face was as sour as a squeezed lemon. His head was empty and his face was suddenly old. Mahmoud was nowhere to be found, in the neighbourhood or the school. When he passed it was after dark, and if he slowed his pace he did not offer a greeting. He moved to his uncle’s house in the al-Fadl neighbourhood.

  You still had Firdous, Adil, Nizar, Hashim and Suturi. You did not play with beads, or build mud houses; Mahmoud’s top dug holes in one land and abandoned another. You imagined you were impossible to quantify, and that you would see him all through your life, inside the house and on the high roof. You opened your head and went down to the soul. You smoothed every road for him so he might settle there. You smiled as he helped you wipe away the handprints, your father’s punches and the coarseness of the road. But after Mahmoud’s death you brought him to the other side of the liver. I covered him with a bit of clean, thick cloth, tied him with the first laundry line, and established the place of residence preserved in the box of blood. The brightly coloured beads of childhood scattered – stolen, gilded with light touches, longings, and delegations of tears, and the spongy mud we mashed with our feet as we played sliding down slopes or streams. The first hours of the first meeting and pressure on the lock, and I hurried to hide him among the chapters of a year that would never return. When no one remembered him, I released him in the open deserts of the body. Mahmoud rarely came through that door; Firdous, too, fled from my grasp, raised her fist, which had grown, and loomed at my face, saying, “We’re going to move near my uncle in al-Fadl, as well. The government is going to destroy this neighbourhood. My mother’s looking for a new house for us.”

  You did not heed her words well. Your nose had not picked up the new scent. When you coughed, the dust and trash of your street was coughed up from your lungs. When you stood waiting for Adil at the gate of the school, you entered the race arena with him. Adil moved like a rabbit among the gaps in the lanes and alleys, free of the silence he had maintained since the night in the bath. He was divided on himself, and walked with every part of him wanting more division. When he left the school, he slipped away from me and raced to Khulud and her river banks. There he made the rounds of the street, the neighbourhood, and the school, the stones and the people. He stretched his legs out to the river’s edge and played with his hands in the sand that breathed between his feet, fine and moist. He formed faces, numbers, and features. He looked at the Tigris and threw pebbles into the surface of the water, but did not look at Khulud’s mansion. Looking at it did not do him much good, so he left the mansion to its creature and took her image into his soul. When the breeze blew over his chest, he wrote her name and flew it in the air, and when a wave reached him, it wet his rib that rended itself flesh and muscles. Everything he felt he threw away, and everything he threw away he expected to disappear. When I took him to my room he remained seated, and when I went out he stayed where he was. When we got something he ate, and when he was hungry, he did not utter a sound. I opened his books and read, and he read along with me, never making a mistake, never grumbling or complaining. He revolved around his only star, but never uttered her name.

  That Khulud never went out and was never absent. She stayed in the airy halls of her mansion, going up to the high roof with its floor of many-coloured bricks, throwing him from afar an empty, folded piece of paper, with sticks of birds’ nests, with a small, harmless pebble. She came down to the garden and sat on the wall, jumped and skipped, stuck her head out and disappeared among the rose bushes, emitting her golden laugh and throwing him all sorts of flowers we had never seen before. He scattered the roses on the stones, pebbles, and sand, and they flew into the waves. Adil did not pick them up. He did not turn her way or greet her, nor lift a finger or bow his head. He only gazed at the opposite shore, at the fishermen and their old nets and corroded flat-bottomed boats while Khulud trampled his sand castles, obliterating his features and hopes. She walked behind him, a ribbed white ball in her hand, wearing a white dress and light sandals, her hair loose, with bright, new, yellow ribbons in her other hand. She was quick and boisterous, as pretty as a dove steeped in coquetry. Everything about her was petite: her round face, her eyes and nose, her eyebrows and delicate, blooming, laughing lips. She walked like a soldier, her steps sudden and movements brisk. She skipped after the ball, playing near the river, opposite Adil. She danced and leaped through the air. Her body undulated delicately; her skin was the colour of a flower, and her bones were fine, fed with vegetables and luxury. She fell near Adil and stood behind his back. He did not move. She bounced the ball, making small holes, touching him, passing the ball across his head. You were standing near both of them. You walked along, at a leisurely pace, not looking in their direction.

  “My name is Khulud. What’s yours?”

  He did not turn around. “I know.”

  “What grade are you in?”

  “I passed sixth.”

  “Me, too.”

  She took the ball in her hand and stood in front of him. For the first time he saw her. “Do you know how to braid hair?” She put the ribbons in his hand and turned her back to him. “Go on, braid my hair.” There was nothing left of Adil but his arms. He turned to her and busied himself with her locks of hair, his hands burning with excitement as he felt them, separated and combed them with his fingers. He squinted, ornamented by sweat. His legs trembled and his hands shook. He spread her hair across her back, fondled it, brushed it forward, and got up hurriedly. Her voice stung him from behind his back, trapping him on the river bank.

  “Afraid? Afraid?”

  Adil ran, fell and got up again, his feet barely touching the sand, his arms fleeing her touch. The mud splattered on his clothes, his knees and hands. He raced, shouted, laughed, and did not disappear. The shore guided his steps. No one was there but the three of us. Khulud ran after him, and stopped and waited in the middle of the pebbles and stones, rolled and fell in front of him. She got up and her voice pierced the air: “Afraid! Afraid!”

  She picked up pebbles and big stones and threw them in the air over him, at me, and at her house. Adil ran, remembering Munir’s baldness and the blood on my hand from my wounds, and my aunt’s spitting. He raced and buried his head in the wind. They raced one another; the first time they met each ran in a different direction. The beginning of this river is a drop of blood that moved and released its wailing in the circle of its area of the Mosque of Abu Hanifa as far as the dirt dam, as far as loud Khulud’s light steps; Adil was as far away as the stars in Gemini.

  I bowed my head. Khulud, in front of me, panted beneath Baghdad’s bright sky and the Tigris waves crashing before us. I said, “He’ll come back in a little while. Don’t worry.”

  Chapter 16

  Let us forget fear and put it aside, but it is present and tyrannous.

  Only Farida beat it before her, and did not speak to it without mocking it. She approached her fear with natural muscles and found it work in the end: to make Munir stagger, with the rest looking on. My aunt remained the virgin, lifting up the title and contemplating it day and night. She took off the black dress, washed her dusty skin, and proceeded to put on a seductive nightgown; madness returned to her face.

  She began to beat us, Adil and me, and Grandmother accepted it. She only wanted her: blameless.

  Her voice sounded like a trumpet after months of long muteness. She went into the bath and wept there, shouted, and unleashed her voice upon us. She came out nearly naked, stood in the middle of the house, shouting, while Grandmother stood before her, praying and breathing on her, seizing and pulling her, encircling her w
ith her arms:

  “Dear, I have my voice back. Are you listening or not?”

  She said: “Huda dear, Adouli, come and listen, dears, I’m afraid she’ll go hoarse. I’m afraid so much talk and she’ll lose her voice. Perhaps I should cut back a little and be like you, and talk little. What do you think, dears. Will I lose it?”

  Farida changed. Her voice was a web of heavy-headed pins, and her silence too assaulted us. She took up all my father’s weapons and plunged them into our flesh and our bodies, and we recalled Jamil, gasping. She beat us and we all cried, all four.

  Grandmother held her head: “Please, Farida, my dear. Your voice has come back and it won’t go away. God bless you, my dear, put your clothes on. I’m afraid you’ll get ill.”

  “No, no, I want to go out, I want to walk in the streets and see the neighbours, take a walk, and sing, and say hello to everyone. I want to hear my voice again. I’m afraid of lies.”

  You stood far off.

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you listening to me? Don’t worry, I won’t beat you from now on. This is my voice. Tell me, Huda, have you gone mad?”

  When she began to curse or laugh, when she insulted everyone, when she was cruel or talked nonsense, nothing could deflect her violence.

  My father came several times, looking weary, sallow, and old. His clothes were faded and his shirt wrinkled, his boots dirty, and his face pale, melancholy, and unshaven, as if he had emerged from a shroud.