Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Muhsin al-Ramli

  Grandfather was thinking of attacking again, and it seemed that the government had learned of these preparations, for they returned my father to Subh the next morning. His hair, beard, and mustache had been shaved, and his left leg was crippled: the foot was twisted and swollen with burns because they had applied electricity so many times. When he had begged them at least to transfer the wire to the right foot, they had put it on his testicles until they burned. The healing took a long time. When Noah did heal, he had become lame, and he never again fathered a child after the six of us. He gave up his dream of having twelve children.

  Grandfather said to him, “He bit you.”

  My father replied, “I will bite him.”

  “How?” Grandfather asked.

  My father took out of his pocket a bullet from the Tikrit boy’s pistol, which he would later make into a keychain. He said, “I’ll stick the remaining bullet in it.” (He said “in it,” and not “in his ass,” because he would never, ever, dare breathe a coarse word in front of Grandfather.) “I will shave his head and his mustache, and I will tattoo or burn ‘Qashmar’ onto his forehead.”

  Grandfather said, “When?”

  “I don’t know. But I will most certainly do it.”

  Grandfather brought him a Qur’an and said,“Swear on this.”

  So my father put his hand on the book and took an oath, feeling satisfied in what he had resolved to do when he heard the satisfaction in Grandfather’s voice. My father added, “The Bedouin man took his vengeance after forty years, and he said, ‘I have made good time.’” My father was trying to show the seriousness of his resolve to fulfill his oath, however long it took.

  Later on, we noticed the other families of the village, those who did not belong to our tribe, had begun to call us by our family nicknames, such as “Father of Saleem,” or “Son of Noah,” and not by our surnames, which was the usual way of things. Moreover, we realized that they did it only in front of us, out of respect for our feelings or else fearing a violent response. Their children, however, openly called our children “Qashmars” whenever there were quarrels, and they themselves, in our absence, used the official surname that the government had registered for us. So Grandfather, who hated hypocrisy, decided we would set off for a place all our own.

  He spent a week thinking over the matter, gazing out the window of his sitting room at the Tigris River and Mount Makhul rising on the opposite bank, and repeating prayers for guidance before going to sleep. Then he said, “There.”

  During the night, we gathered all our belongings and put them in boats. When we reached the middle of the river, Grandfather called out to us, “Throw out every radio and television! Tear up all government documents and cast them in the river!”

  We did so, feeling as though we were being liberated from some obscure burden that had been choking us. A woman trilled in joy when she saw how eagerly the men responded, and when she heard their remarks, such as the man who said, mockingly, “The river will carry our shredded papers down to them, and they can squeeze them out to make their tea!” He laughed, and everyone else did too.

  We were fewer than one hundred people, together with several cats, dogs, chickens, and donkeys, and one horse. When we reached the shore and drew our boats up on the sand to secure them, we all stood under the moonlight and looked around. We were surrounded by the sound of waves, the rustling of trees, the howling of jackals, the croaking of frogs, and the chirping of grasshoppers in the nearby thickets.

  Grandfather proclaimed, “O people of Mutlaq, be united as one! Show each other compassion, care for each other, and tend to your women and your flocks. Watch out for the hypocrites in the government: do not believe them, do not make friends with them, and do not allow any marriage ties with them. Build your world here according to what God wants and what you want. Do not ask the government for any documents or alms or property. As for the fuel and the medicine you need, barter for it with the people of Subh, but do not engage them in conversation, and do not ask them about anything at all.

  “Never forget your vengeance!” (He looked at my father as he said this.) “When the number of your men exceeds seventy—the number of the Prophet’s companions in the Battle of Badr and the number of his grandson Hussein’s companions at Karbala—start blowing up the pillars of government! Strike them with an iron fist, wherever you are able! Bear patiently the disgrace of your surname Qashmar until you take revenge. For I fear you would forget your rightful claim if you forgot the insulting name.

  “Let the Qur’an be your school; let hunting and swimming be your sport; let the truth guide your words; let freedom be your goal; let patience be your mode of life; let honesty be your language; let work be your habit; and let remembrance be your rule! Do not lie down to sleep before you absolutely need to. I declare it unlawful for you to eat food made in factories, to work for the tyrannical government, to wear the uniform of the police, or to spill each other’s blood.

  “Now come! Let us build a village that we will call Qashmars today so that we will not forget. And after the vengeance, we will call it Freedmen, or Dignity, or The Absolute. O God, maintain our love for freedom and for human dignity. Kill us as you want or as we want, not as our enemies want! Amen, O Lord of the worlds!”

  We all responded, according to the ritual, and with all our hearts, “Amen!”

  In the silence of the night, the echo reverberated off the mountain, the forest, and the bend in the river. An “Amen!” swelling like the voice of millions of pilgrims or an army preparing for war. Our fervor and the majesty of the echo intensified Grandfather’s zeal. He continued the prayer, leaving us a space of silence after each phrase for us to give it our “Amen!”

  “O God, we seek your protection from weakness and sloth. (Amen!)

  “We seek your protection from cowardice and greed. (Amen!)

  “We seek your protection from debt and from men triumphing over us. (Amen!)

  “We seek your protection from need, except for you, from lowliness, except before you, and from fear, except of you. (Amen!)

  “We seek your protection from the worst of mankind, from worry for our daily bread, and from wicked ways. (Amen!)

  “We seek your protection from our enemies taking joy in our pain, from the illness that doesn’t go away, and from the crushing of our hopes, O most merciful of all merciful ones, O Lord of the worlds! (Amen! A-a-men!)”

  Then we carried our things and pressed into the forest, everyone seeking a spot upon which to build his new home. And to this day, I still hear the echo of that “Amen,” awesome like nothing else.

  CHAPTER 2

  I loved my father without understanding him. I sensed there was more than one Noah inside of him, but he was able to harmonize them perfectly.

  My mother’s duality, however, was clear. This made it all the easier to love her, even though I only realized the magnitude of my love for her when I was away from her, during my time in the army and now too in my exile. She was always there to absorb our anger, and to share in our pain and our joy. She always took care of preparing our food, washing our clothes, and reminding us of our responsibilities. She passed on the orders of the older children to the younger and prevented the older ones from hitting them. She lulled us to sleep with the narrative rhythms of princesses falling in love, female ghouls, monsters, giants, and Sinbad.

  Meanwhile, it was beyond me to understand my cousin Aliya even for a day. I loved her unconditionally, without any real reason, only that she had loved me without any hard questions. It was from her that I learned how to love—quite the opposite of everyone else, who considered Grandfather Mutlaq to be the only possible teacher. But I now realize that the lessons we learned from him didn’t shape our essential selves nearly as much as having adopted him as our inexorable standard did. He was an adversary who forced us to sculpt our private selves in secret.

  My father was the eldest of his siblings, so the greatest burden fell on him. Not only the burden of work but also o
f Grandfather’s notions about a strict upbringing, that a child should be nourished on the concept of blind obedience to parents: “God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents.”

  Noah never once refused a request or a command from his father. I remember, for example, how he returned at noon one day in July, exhausted from his work at the oil company in Kirkuk. He would usually go to the guest room first to greet Grandfather (who had lived there alone with his books ever since Grandmother died) and then come to the house to kiss us and shake hands with Mother. On that day, Grandfather ordered him to go repair the broken water pump at the farm. So he left his bag and headed out to the field immediately, without stopping at the house on his way to greet us, bathe, rest, and eat his lunch as he usually did. He didn’t return until he had repaired the pump, just as the sun was setting.

  My father never met Grandfather’s eyes and never even looked at his face. He would always stare at the ground, listening intently to Grandfather’s words. He was more than forty years old, yet he said he was ashamed to look into his father’s face. One quiet day, near the banks of the river, he asked me, curious and almost entreating, “How do you look at his face? Have you looked into his eyes? Have you looked into his eyes?”

  I wish that I could ask him now, “Then how could you kill him? And how did you arrive here? When? Why exactly did you come to Spain? Was it that you came looking for me?” But his first embrace had been neutral, not to say cold. As if he hadn’t even wanted to hug me.

  I found my father by chance last Saturday night in Madrid. On weekends, I feel a discontent steal into my soul, and I wander through the dark streets and alleys without any fixed destination. I’ll go into any club or bar. This time, I absolutely couldn’t believe what I saw in a club packed with people of various nationalities—immigrants, tourists, and of course Spaniards—as well as hippies, homosexuals, outcasts, hashish dealers, night owls, pacifists, racists, anti-globalization activists, and skinheads.

  This man with the shaved mustache. A receding hairline. Long hair tied in a ponytail, with two small locks dyed red and green. Three silver loops hung down from his left ear—earrings. Could he possibly be my father?! Was this really my father?! Then he showed me his keychain, which we had gotten used to seeing after our attack on the provincial government building in Tikrit. The keychain was a small revolver bullet. He had emptied out the gunpowder and inserted a ring through the case, to which he attached a chain for his keys. I kept staring doubtfully into his face, so he quickly showed me his lame foot, after which I was certain. We embraced.

  When? How? Why did my father come to Madrid? This chance meeting dazed me for three days. After that, I started to regain my equilibrium as I digested the surprise, content to ignore the incomprehensible. Like how I keep returning to paintings by Salvador Dalí in order to understand reality better.

  After my flight from the confines of Iraq ten years ago, I had reconciled myself to forgetting in order to reconcile myself to life. I didn’t realize I was putting into effect my village’s ultimate decision to detach itself completely. No letters between me and it. No news reaching me, and none of me reaching it. My father was the last person I saw there. Unnoticed, I saw him through the window of the mosque before I left at dawn without a farewell. After that, I saw no one else from my village, and I convinced myself with absolute certainty that I would never see any of them. The village would never see me, and I would never again see it. Even had I wanted to, it would never welcome me back, for I had betrayed it when I abandoned it in secret after the seventeen bodies began to rot and the air became intolerable.

  That was the reason that I began avoiding foul odors, because they would remind me of all the details I was sometimes happy to forget entirely. I would take out the trash before the garbage bags filled up. I chose fifth-floor apartments in order to live far from the putrid sewer lines in the ground. I sprayed air freshener in the bathroom and deodorant in my armpits. I avoided going past police stations and government buildings, and I didn’t follow the news in the media.

  But my father brought it all back with his sudden presence here and his constant repetition of a phrase unlike anything I could have imagined him saying, him being so proper, timid, and religious: “This world is all fucked up.” And when I gave in to this presence of his and asked him about our village, Qashmars, he said, “The whole world is Qashmars.”

  The village of Qashmars began with my father, and at his hands it would later be saved from entering the dungeons of the security forces a second time. With the death—or the murder—of Grandfather, he had put it to an end. Now once again, it began at his hands, here in a dim Madrid club. On its door was written “Club Qashmars.” Below that in a smaller script, “In the beginning was freedom: May it endure till the end!” Below that, in the same size lettering but in blue, “The freer you feel, the greater your welcome here.”

  I wanted to ask my father about many things: Mother, my siblings, my childhood friends, our village after the seventeen corpses, and about my cousin Aliya—no, Aliya drowned in the river. (Why do I not want to believe that despite seeing it with my own eyes?) I wanted to ask him whether he really killed Grandfather.

  But he still didn’t say much, and every time I went to see him at the club in the evening, I found him surrounded by a group of his friends—Spaniards, Dutch, Germans, and English. Most of them had hair that was shaved or combed—messed up, that is—in unusual styles, which they stained with brilliant dyes. Bunches of keys hung from their belts, along with chains like those used to tie up pet dogs. Bits of metal were set into every part of their strange clothing, and loops of silver or plastic hung from their ears and even the noses and navels of some of them.

  My father fit right in. He wore a mesh shirt with vivid camouflage, and he had attached three rings to his left ear, each larger than the previous one. But instead of cutting his hair like the others to resemble a rooster, a lion, or a sheep, he had let grow it long. Mild balding had set in at his forehead, and he tied his hair back in a ponytail, like a schoolgirl, dyeing two locks, one of them green and the other red.

  Was this really my father? The people circling around him, boisterous with laughter, with smoke, and slapping each other’s thighs, were all young, with the exception of a woman in her forties. He embraced her from time to time, and she would kiss him. This woman was very talkative, just the opposite of him, and her laughter rose above everyone else’s. She told me her name was Rosa, and that she was from Barcelona, but she was here in Madrid because she loved my father.

  Three days passed, and I wasn’t able to get him alone. I would invite him to a café or to come over to my place: “I live here, close by, on Fomento Street, about ten minutes away.”

  To which he would reply, “Tomorrow.”

  When I would ask the next day, he would say, “Tomorrow,” and he would apologize for the day before. “I’m very busy, Saleem, as you can see. But I promise you, tomorrow. Tomorrow, for sure.”

  He didn’t call me “son,” and he didn’t say “God willing,” as would be normal for an Arab.

  This kept on until I came one day, and before I could even open my mouth, he said, “Come on, I’ll give you a haircut.”

  Without waiting for my response, he pulled a small stool from one of the corners into the middle of the dance floor, amid the debris of the previous night. I sat down. He called out, “Fatumi, bring me my clippers!”

  The dark-skinned girl behind the bar stopped washing the glasses and took down a box from one of the shelves behind her. She brought it over to him, saying, “Here you are, sir.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and before she moved away he gave her a gentle pat on the butt.

  She returned to the glasses, and I asked, “Is she Arab?”

  He said, “Fatima? Yes, Moroccan. A good girl.”

  The rest of the staff, two Spanish girls, were going back and forth around us, reminding Rosa about the drinks, napkins, and cigarette packs that had run out. Noa
h was giving them directions with gestures and smiles, with the clippers in his hand over my head. His Barcelona girlfriend kept coming in and out, carrying account books. She was calling distribution companies for beer and other drinks, then asked the fruit and nut shop to send her twenty kilograms of olives, another twenty of dried fruit, and ten of sunflower seeds (“And quickly!”). She also called a cigarette distributor to supply her with a carton of each kind, a box of lighters, and a box of gum (“And quickly!”). They did indeed come quickly, and Rosa directed the workers to quit cleaning (“Right away!”) and to stock the deliveries instead. My father stopped cutting my hair to oversee their work.

  When he saw that things were proceeding as he wanted, he asked me, “And how are you doing? What do you do for work?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I work as a driver for a newspaper distribution company. From six till eleven in the morning.”

  He asked, “Do you have a woman?”

  “No,” I replied.

  He called something over to Rosa in a mixture of English and Arabic, and I caught the Arabic word for “tip,” baksheesh. I turned around to see her resisting with a scowl on her face and a wink, so he drew out her name to insist, “Ro-o-osa….”

  She gave in and went to the cash register. We all heard the clink of the coins that she put in the palm of the man who had brought in the cases of beer. Then my father resumed cutting my hair and asked me, “What do you do with your free time?”

  I said, “I read. Sometimes I write. I go to the movies.”

  He asked, “Have you read Lorca and Alberti in Spanish?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t like their poetry very much. I like Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre better.”

  “Unfortunately, I still don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “Only a few words. What do you write, poetry?”

  “A few poems. But I’m better at short stories. I’ve published a few of them in the Iraqi opposition newspapers in London.”