Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  Dr Williams remained standing during the applause. He lifted a hand and gestured towards Emmanuel. ‘I must make mention of the role played by one of our number here tonight, a young man who persuaded the club trustees to bring me down here from Damascus. Emmanuel Delli!’

  The audience applauded Emmanuel. The man in the orange shirt wrote rapidly in his notebook.

  Spirits and wine were served with no expectation of offence to the Muslims in the audience; Khomeini’s revolution across the border in Iran had so monopolised abstinence that Saddam was taking puritanism as a symptom of treachery. Emmanuel chatted happily with Dr Williams while Daanya stood contemplatively with a gin and tonic at the big arched window overlooking Narsi Street.

  ‘Daanya, come and meet Peter!’

  Peter Williams offered his hand to Daanya and made a bow. His gaze became busy, Daanya in her blue jeans and ankle boots and short-sleeved black top too alluring a sight in a land like Iraq to escape some sort of reaction. ‘What an extraordinarily handsome couple you and your husband make, if I may say so!’

  The smile on Daanya’s face stiffened. Peter Williams took a step back and in his embarrassment let out a tiny gasp.

  ‘A little premature!’ said Emmanuel. ‘We only met here for the first time!’

  ‘Oh, God! You dolt, Williams! I’m so sorry, I…’

  ‘No, no, don’t be sorry, don’t be sorry. You will join Daanya and me for a bite to eat down on the river?’

  ‘Oh, are we having dinner?’ said Daanya. The decision had been taken by Emmanuel. ‘I will have to make a telephone call.’

  Emmanuel went on chatting while Daanya phoned her father from the club’s billiard room. ‘Papa, I’m going to have dinner with some people I met. You won’t mind if I’m late?’ As usual, he thanked his daughter for her courtesy and told her that it hadn’t been necessary to ask for his approval, which wasn’t entirely true.

  Peter, walking between Daanya and Emmanuel down Narsi, spoke of his delight as he bounced through the Middle East. ‘The tour was proposed by the British Council and I thought, “Oh, very likely, English romantic poetry in the Middle East! Very likely!” But do you know, the audiences can’t get enough of it! Imagine!’

  The cafe Emmanuel chose, The White Wall, had been opened only a year earlier by a Kurdish woman who’d returned to Basra from Sydney. The flair of its owner had made it a favourite of the city’s foreign community in that short time. Its walls were now crimson, since a Ba’athist goblin from a ministry with no jurisdiction over building codes had demanded a ‘white wall tax’.

  ‘Imala repainted. She wouldn’t pay,’ Emmanuel explained. ‘The Ba’athists detest her, naturally. And I must concede, she goads them.’

  They were seated almost on the street, ramshackle motorcycles weaving by. A deft little waiter fitted small wooden wedges under the legs of the table to steady it. Not much of the river was visible from any of the cafes along the strip, and this close to the wharves, the river was no great spectacle in any case. A breeze from Al Kut downriver brought in the reek of the wharf market: raw oil and diesel, rotted fruit, nutmeg, roasted kid. Imala sat with them for a few minutes, a greying woman in her forties risking a gala display of cleavage. The apron she wore tied at the waist featured a cartoon of a lady kangaroo in hijab.

  ‘So much nonsense in Basra,’ she said. ‘I like it. In Australia, you miss the chaos. They’ll shoot me, I have no doubt.’ She gave a chuckle. ‘Be it on their heads!’

  The black hairs on Emmanuel’s wrists growing upwards as if striving against the current of his arm roused in Daanya the mixture of excitement and disgust that she felt when her father’s dog Gessem stuck his wet muzzle into her neck and closed his huge jaws over her throat. It was Gessem’s joke; he never snapped his jaws but was content to let her see the power she could control. But Gessem’s power was one thing; Emmanuel’s power continued to disturb her.

  Peter Williams allowed Emmanuel to order for him; Daanya accepted Emmanuel’s suggestion of barka and tomui. Imala made a gift of a bottle of Australian shiraz from Rushworth.

  ‘Tell me, Emmanuel, how is it that I’ve struck such a rich vein with my poets in the Middle East?’ said Peter. ‘What appeal can a group of hypersensitive Englishmen have for crowds of hardy desert dwellers?’

  ‘It’s the greenery,’ said Emmanuel. ‘Islam is a sentimental faith. Muslims imagine Paradise to be very like the Lake District. Allah dwells in streams and pastures.’

  It was on the tip of Daanya’s tongue to object, since she had a great need to contradict Emmanuel in something, but she was baulked by her agreement. The walls of her father’s house were covered in pictures of waterfalls and dappled glades. In the lovingly attended courtyard garden, he watched for larks, bulbuls, scrub robins. ‘My angels’, he called them.

  ‘And what of you, Daanya?’ asked Peter Williams.

  ‘Of me?’ said Daanya. ‘I have no such theory as Emmanuel. My high school English teacher gave me Wordsworth to read. But I thought you were harsh, Peter. Poor Mister Wordsworth did more than most young men would in the circumstances, I think.’

  ‘Oh, I do agree! I’m repeating the rubbishing of Willy Words that prevails at the moment, merely that. Willy did go to seed but I doubt it had anything to do with his French girlfriend.’

  Emmanuel leaned forward, frowning, with his forearms on the round table top. ‘Went to seed?’ he said.

  ‘Wordsworth in his boyhood was a pagan of the hills,’ said Peter Williams. ‘Don’t we all wish he’d carried that gleam into his adult years?’

  ‘You don’t think he did so?’

  Peter Williams leaned back and spread his hands in the air. ‘Passions die,’ he said. ‘I think we might have appreciated less wisdom from Willy Words—less wisdom, more zest. But wisdom is our destiny, we can’t help ourselves, a cross we carry. His sister, you know, Dorothy, she’s the one who spurned that cross. And what was her reward? Madness.’

  Emmanuel shook his head. To Daanya, he seemed all at once unhappy. ‘I am behind the times,’ he said. ‘I love Wordsworth.’

  ‘And who would not?’ said Peter Williams. He lifted a finger to signal that he had more to say, but first finished his wine. ‘Who would not! Only he is remote, now. Greenery is not what it once was. Mention nature now, the first response of the learned is a tract on pollution. It’s down to science, my darlings! Nature is a thing we measure. Quantify its decline, rejoice in some bosky rejuvenation sponsored by an enlightened shire. Two elms saved from the bulldozer, hurrah! To Wordsworth nature was the nurse; to us, it’s the patient. Oh, we are a world long ruined, Emmanuel! Our soul is sick!’

  Beaming, Peter Williams topped up the wine glasses of Daanya and Emmanuel and refilled his own.

  =

  Emmanuel still seemed unhappy in the taxi on the way back to Daanya’s father’s house in El Khaled. When Daanya, worried that she’d upset him in some way, enquired he told her in English that he was fine. Then he confessed in Kurdish that Peter had made him feel ridiculous. ‘I am a foolish figure, a Kurd not of the faith of Kurds, a lover of English poetry, the son of a Kurdish father who admires Englishmen. I truly belong nowhere. When I was a boy, my father took all of us to Windermere each year for two weeks. He hired a hotel. We walked every day, we made picnics. My sisters and brothers and I myself recited Wordsworth, Keats, also Matthew Arnold, another of my father’s favourites. I suppose the English laughed at us. Peter makes me see what there was to laugh about.’

  ‘Yes, but to me that is charming,’ said Daanya. ‘I see no cause for feeling foolish. It is Peter who belongs nowhere. It is not you.’

  ‘No, Peter belongs in England. You can be many things if you are British and still belong.’

  ‘You can be many things if you are a Kurd, just the same as the English.’

  Emmanuel looked at Daanya’s face in the back of the taxi. It was a tender look.

  ‘But what is that, Daanya, to be a Kurd? What is it?’

  Daany
a watched the lights of Narsi passing over Emmanuel’s face. No greater contrast to his cocky expression at the Mesopotamia Club could be imagined. Daanya rested her hand on Emmanuel’s cheek. ‘I have never been to Windermere,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’

  chapter 11

  Kalal Barzinji

  DAANYA WAS content to be courted in whatever fashion appealed to Emmanuel, as long as he courted fast. Her father watched with interest. ‘Now what?’ he asked his daughter. ‘Another dinner?’

  ‘A walk by the river.’

  ‘Why? The river is unpleasant.’

  ‘There are pleasant parts.’

  ‘Hand-holding?’

  ‘Certainly!’

  ‘Has he written a sonnet for you?’

  ‘More than one!’

  Daanya’s father chuckled and clapped his hands. ‘What silliness!’

  But Kalal Barzinji liked Emmanuel. He recognised his brilliance. Only there was the problem of Emmanuel’s views on Kurdish statehood. Kalal Barzinji hoped for a home that Kurds could call their own, conceding that his grandchildren might live to see it, not he. Emmanuel, it seemed, thought a Kurdish state a Kurdish fantasy. Kalal Barzinji kept an afternoon clear one day early in the courtship to hear Emmanuel out. They sat in the garden on a bench below a huge blue gum planted decades past by a Barzinji visionary with big plans for the reforestation of Iraq. The tree attracted parrots in the summer and ravens in the autumn, to Kalal Barzinji’s delight.

  Daanya’s sister Zarah served tea. Daanya herself went to the movies with another sister, Sabet. She didn’t want to sit around as if something were contingent on a happy outcome to the interview. She knew what Emmanuel thought, knew that his views contradicted her father’s hopes; she was going to marry Emmanuel anyway.

  Grease and Superman were the only Hollywood movies on offer. Sabet decided on Grease, with dialogue dubbed in Arabic and the songs played at a whispery volume. A short way into the movie, Sabet untied her headscarf and folded it on her lap. On the way home she asked Daanya if any of her Manchester girlfriends were like the girls in the movie.

  ‘All of them,’ said Daanya, but only to please Sabet. She had amazed Daanya once already this holiday by asking if she ‘put out’.

  ‘If you wish to know my favourite, I would have to say Sandy,’ said Sabet. ‘And you?’

  ‘None of them. Maybe Frenchy. I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re worried about things?’

  ‘Yes, darling, a little.’

  ‘Emmanuel is not one of the hopeful?’

  ‘No, not one of the hopeful.’

  ‘You think Papa will be hurt?’

  ‘Hurt? Yes. Disappointed in me.’

  ‘Disappointed in you? Disappointed in the sky and the sun? Only God comes before Daanya!’

  ‘Darling, shush!’

  ‘It’s true! Listen to me. Your guy is a Christian, Papa doesn’t say a word. What wrong can you do?’

  Daanya smiled at her sister. ‘‘‘Your guy”?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at my English!’

  Daanya kissed her sister’s cheek. ‘I would never laugh at your English, my love!’

  Emmanuel had returned to his little apartment on the campus when Daanya and Sabet arrived home. Kalal Barzinji was still in the garden.

  ‘You didn’t argue?’ Daanya asked. She pulled a chair up to her father under the blue gum and let him take her hands. ‘Please God!’

  ‘Not in the least! He’s a good fellow.’ Her father kissed her hands. ‘Marry him and have some babies. Some little Christians.’

  ‘Really?’

  Colour came into Daanya’s face. She wanted to kiss her father. If he had argued with Emmanuel, Daanya would have wept. Then she would have gone to Emmanuel and said: ‘Take me to the altar.’ But it would be a sorrow to disappoint her father.

  ‘Really. Of course, you know his father is that old bandit Ransun. But this is a land of rogues, Christian, Muslim, God knows!’

  ‘You didn’t tell Emmanuel his father is a rogue?’

  ‘Daughter, please! No. But the whole world knows.’

  ‘You respect Emmanuel?’

  ‘With all of my heart! Political science he’s studying. Good. Let him bring some science to this absurd land!’

  Daanya’s father watched Daanya slyly. He’d set her on a path and would not call her back. It was a taxing experiment. He knew that his daughter’s love for Emmanuel was many times too powerful for her to strive against. He almost wished that Emmanuel had disgusted him just so he could see the passion in Daanya’s heart drawn in opposite directions. The foolishness of romantic love fascinated him. He had read Romeo and Juliet more than once and each time he wanted to tell the Montague boy: ‘She’s a girl. Find another.’ But the Montague boy would rather die. Juliet would rather die. Passion of that sort, had he ever known it? For Daanya perhaps. And now he was giving her away. It put him in a mood to tease the girl. If he was to be thrown aside, let it be at the cost to his daughter of some amusement.

  ‘Marry the fellow,’ he said. And he added: ‘But I insist on a long engagement.’

  Daanya frowned. This was nonsense. She waited for her father to add something. When he didn’t, she said: ‘How long?’

  ‘Five years. To test your love. To test both of you.’

  Daanya had been holding her father’s hand against her heart. Now she cast the hand aside, threw herself back in her chair and let out a long howl. ‘Papa, I can’t live on this earth without him!’

  Kalal Barzinji’s baritone chuckle became a cough. He pulled a yellow handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and covered his lips. He held the handkerchief on his lap and renewed his chuckle. Daanya, perplexed, leaned forward in her chair the better to read her father’s thoughts.

  Kalal Barzinji attempted the high register of his daughter’s voice: ‘Oh Papa, I will die!’

  Daanya lowered her head. She was sobbing. Kalal Barzinji took his daughter’s face in his hands and kissed her lips. ‘But what is this? What is this? This is foolishness! Be brave! Did I say five years? Five days.’

  Daanya dried her eyes. She brushed the grey hair on her father’s temples with her fingers. ‘You see how I love him? It’s almost too much. Where will we live, Papa?’ she said. ‘Where in this world? Neither of us has a god. Emmanuel jokes about his father’s faith, even as he tells me I must become a Christian. And Emmanuel is not of the hopeful. What will we believe? You should have raised me like my sisters.’

  Kalal Barzinji leaned forward quickly to study a kingfisher of orange and blue that had landed on the wall of the fountain. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘A wanderer from the river.’ The kingfisher glanced rapidly left and right then shot upwards into the foliage of the blue gum.

  ‘My darling,’ said Kalal Barzinji, feeling in his coat pocket for his Turkish cigarettes, ‘I made two daughters for the Prophet. But you I made for the world.’

  Daanya took her father’s Yeni Harmans from his hand, put a cigarette to his lips and lit it. He smoked for a short time before speaking again.

  ‘Your mother, of course, has a say in all things. But in this matter, I did not consult her. So be brave.’

  Daanya said: ‘You say, “marry him”. But did he ask? Did he say, “I must marry Daanya”?’

  ‘My darling, Emmanuel asked me for your hand, like an Englishman in a book. I have given you to him.’

  ‘You have given me to him?’

  ‘I have.’

  Daanya lifted her head and laughed for joy.

  ‘I am to marry Emmanuel?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Papa thank you! Dear God thank you!’

  She couldn’t remember her agony of a minute before. There was only joy, ever.

  =

  Any marriage that has survived for a decade or two has its archive of precious schemes that never quite got up. Lovely things, some of these drafts, more like origami than formal blueprints; in their early life, they rose and dipped on thermals with the
motion of butterflies. In the months following their marriage, Emmanuel and Daanya, crazed with happiness, hatched a marvellous plan to translate the collected poetry of William Wordsworth into Kurdish. If Emmanuel couldn’t embrace his father-in-law’s hopes for a Kurdish state, he could at least give the world’s Kurds William Wordsworth in their own tongue. Kalal Barzinji thought the idea absurd but was kind enough to feign great delight.

  ‘All the poems in Kurdish?’ he said. ‘Arabic script, I imagine?’

  ‘Sorani, yes,’ said Emmanuel.

  ‘What an excellent idea! But it will take a very long time, surely?’

  ‘Many years.’

  It was usually difficult for Kalal Barzinji to get away with a lie when Daanya was watching, but in her tipsy state she was less attentive, less intuitive. His daughter’s ecstatic babble was of far more interest to him than anyone’s poetry. Romantic love! Nonsense, yes, but charming! Daanya’s joy engaged him now at a deeper level than anything else in his life, more than medicine, more than science itself. When in the world had this beloved daughter laughed so much, smiled so often? She had served her term of notice at the Manchester hospital and was now employed at the hospital in Ali Marzi, so she and Emmanuel were able to visit each day. They sat like a pair of monkeys with their noses almost touching and their fingers entwined. Kalal Barzinji watched smiling under the blue gum with his chin in his hand as Daanya and Emmanuel lost track of the conversation and gave themselves over to caresses. It was almost indecent (Daanya’s mother slapped her daughter lightly on the arm when she kissed her husband’s cheek at dinner) but that in itself was enthralling, such a brutishly expedient business as sex made so tender and silly. Kalal Barzinji had to stifle the hoot of affectionate scorn that rose to his throat when Daanya confessed (with such gravity!) that she had lived in ignorance of the world until she woke beside Emmanuel on the first day of her married life. Kalal Barzinji thought, ‘Well, they’ll age! But William Wordsworth in Kurdish? What a grand day for Kurds when this foolishness is published!’