Grandfather asked, “And what are those?”
Father volunteered an explanation without looking in Grandfather’s eyes, “I’ve seen them at the homes of my German friends when they are celebrating the last night of the year. It’s a tree that they hang colored lights on, as well as paper bells and other things. Gifts and colored socks.”
The session calmed down after that. Istabraq’s face appeared optimistic and comfortable. We all listened intently to the conversation of the two sheikhs while the aroma of food came to us from a door left ajar. Sheikh Abd al-Shafi spoke at length about the multitude of patients who came to him from all parts of Iraq, as well as from Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Syrian deserts. He would treat them and offer them hospitality as his guests, some of them for a couple days, and he wouldn’t take anything from them in exchange because, as he said, “this is a gift from God, and he is my reward for it.”
Then he counseled Grandfather to treat his diabetes by eating barley bread, reducing his salt consumption, and giving up sugar. “Drink your tea straight, and take a dose of juice pressed from the wormwood tree every day with the morning prayers. It’s bitter, very bitter, like the colocynth, but it will do you good, believe me! You’ll once again be strong as an ox!”
They carried on a long conversation. The two of them spoke while Father and I were content to listen. They continued to speak freely even around the platter of turkey surrounded by bowls of yogurt. The grilled turkey pieces were arranged in a row on a pile of rice mixed with raisins and various types of spices. They spoke about the tobacco fields and the sunflowers in Kurdistan, about sons and grandsons, about the angels and the Prophet’s companions, about the friends they had in common, and about their memories of the days of battle against the English. They cursed the current government.
Following the late afternoon tea, another car stopped in the courtyard of the house, and a Kurdish family of children and an old woman got out. They said that she had been afflicted with the evil eye.
The sheikh said goodbye to us. He and Grandfather embraced, and Grandfather invited him to visit us in our village. The sheikh excused himself, saying that he wouldn’t be able to visit because he didn’t know when God would send him a sick person whom he was duty bound to treat. “But you, come visit me!”
Grandfather gave him a promise. But he would not be able to keep it.
On the road, Grandfather told us more about the memories he shared with his friend, the sheikh. Istabraq was asking for less water. Father wasn’t convinced by what he saw of the treatment, yet he pretended to be satisfied out of deference to Grandfather. All the same, he asked his German friends about it when he returned to Kirkuk. They were dumbfounded and called a friend of theirs, who was a doctor in Berlin. The doctor said, “This treatment for jaundice works too. The powdered pomegranate rinds go through the blood to the worm and drive it out.”
My father was reassured. Meanwhile, I was at a loss about how to get my letters to Aliya during the following two days before Istabraq was able to get up.
At least, I was at loss until we found a hiding place for ourselves in the middle of the forest under the willow trees near the shore. We began to call it our nest. It was there that we knew our first kisses and learned what it was like to suck on fingers and lips that were daubed with dates.
CHAPTER 6
I decided to go to my father’s club that evening too. I had to find a convenient opportunity to talk to him, or else we could agree on a time to meet. At the very least, I hoped that I would get to know him better.
After coming to this decision, I went over to the kitchen window that looked out on the neighboring building. It had a shabby-looking roof on account of the pigeons having taken over its rain spouts for nests. I had tried so many times to destroy these nests with a broom handle, but they were further back than I could reach. So I just swore at the pigeons. They came from Plaza de la Puerta del Sol in the middle of Madrid and from Plaza de España, where there was a statue of Don Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza. I would sit there and stare at them for a long time whenever my longing for Grandfather and my father grew sharp, as though the two of them were in everything I saw. Meanwhile, the pigeons around me would eat from the palms of the elderly retirees relaxing on the benches. They would eat the tourists’ cookies. Then they would come to poop on my clothes, and on the clothes of my Cuban neighbor below me. What’s more, they would even enter the kitchen and poop on my cooking utensils and on top of the refrigerator with the bread crumbs.
When I was with Pilar, she confirmed for me that she had seen them herself. On the morning of the first night that she slept here, just after waking up, a pair of pigeons startled her by taking flight when she first entered the kitchen. She said, “You left the kitchen window open! Why don’t you get a cat? I know a shop with beautiful cats. Beeeeautiful! My God, how beautiful they are!”
I had left her that night sleeping in my bed while I passed the time in the darkness, remembering Aliya and our times alone in the hiding place that we discovered in the middle of the thicket, the place that we called our nest. We found it on the second day after we brought Istabraq back from the house of the Kurdish sheikh who had slit her ears. Mother had prevented her from going out, from housework, and from putting in her earrings until she was on the road to recovery. I was walking around, looking for Aliya in order to give her a new poem that I had written for her, along with a letter. I kept passing by their house and didn’t see the horse. Then I went among the houses, shacks, and reed huts of the village. I wandered around our Qashmar peninsula, going through the forest toward the shore on every side until I found her on the northern end, closest to the mountain.
She was wading in the water, washing her face. Behind her was the head of the horse, taking a long drink. I got confused, and I hesitated as I thought about getting away or hiding. But she turned and saw me, and the surprise stopped her.
“Oh!” she said. “Hello, Saleem.”
She turned around and looked in every direction; I did the same. We didn’t see anyone.
I took the carefully folded piece of paper scented with my mother’s perfume out of my pocket. I said, “I want to give you a letter. Istabraq can’t leave the house. I’d like to talk to you. Are you able?”
“Quick!” she said. “Get into the woods!”
I ran a few yards back and waited at the edge of the forest, keeping my head turned toward her. After waiting until the horse had drunk as much as it wanted, she took a rope out of the saddlebag it was carrying. She put the halter around its head while still turning to look in every direction. She led the horse toward me, its hooves sinking in the sand just as the words which I had prepared in advance sank into the trembling of my heart and were lost. We pressed further into the forest, opening a track for the horse behind us, until we tied it to the trunk of a giant willow tree, where it grazed on the thick grass around it. We explored the area until we found a sandy, circular clearing, shaded by a jumble of poplar branches interlaced in the sky above. There were smaller trees, such as the tamarisk. Reeds went around the clearing, reaching as high as our chests, such that when we sat down on the circle of sand, they were a little higher than us.
We looked at each other. It was the first time that we had been so close. We could hear the racing of our breaths and the beating of our hearts. Aliya asked me how Istabraq was doing, and I began relating to her the details of our journey for her treatment, taking advantage of the narration to regain my voice and my composure. We spoke in low voices that betrayed the pleasure of confiding secrets.
After I finished, I gave her the letter and the poem. I said, “You’ve never told me what you think of the poems I write for you.”
She said, “They are not very precise. Actually, they are one lie after another.”
Her words were a shock, and I found myself placing a hand on my heart and swearing to her the truth of my feelings for her.
She didn’t let me continue
and clarified, “I don’t mean that your feelings aren’t true. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have exchanged letters with you, nor would I have come here with you. What I mean is, your poems aren’t convincing because they are filled with lies. You describe yourself as a knight who, for my sake, cuts off a thousand heads with one blow of his sword. In reality, if you actually killed anyone, I wouldn’t like you in the least. So this isn’t right, Saleem. And you’ve never seen a sword except for your grandfather’s sword that hangs on the front wall in the reception room for guests. Maybe you’ve never even touched it. What’s more, you’ve never ridden a horse in your life.
“Next, you describe my eyes as being as wide as two lakes, whereas you see that they are small, like the rips that rats make in a dress. Even my mother herself compares me to a Chinese girl, saying, ‘Bring me the china tray, my little China girl!’ My sister Salwa describes them as something else entirely when she is mad at me ….”
“What?” I said.
“No, no!” she said, “I’m too embarrassed to say.”
I pleaded with her to tell me. “You must never be embarrassed with me after today.”
“Fine,” she said. “Salwa says that my eyes are like … are like rabbit vaginas!” She said that with a smile, nearly laughing, and I noticed that her small eyes squinted completely to become small lines, which made her even more alluring, like someone beckoning with a wink.
She continued, “Then you say that my walk is what teaches the branches of trees to sway with the wind. You talk about a necklace for me made from stars and the moon, and that I am the mistress of the universe. But I’m just a girl who doesn’t know what goes on outside her own village. There are other things too. I’m talking about all these lies, Saleem. There’s no need for them. Your letters, with their authenticity and sincerity, are enough to convey your feelings for me.”
I felt crushed by the magnitude of this surprise as I contemplated the failure of my efforts and the late nights spent by the light of a candle, squeezing out my soul, tossing and turning in bed as I attempted to compose my poems, which never exceeded a dozen lines. But I sensed Aliya’s earnestness, and I saw that she was right. I didn’t comment but rather changed the subject to other details of daily life, taking care this time to avoid slipping into embellishments and dreams—despite the unreal quality of our encounter and a feeling that my growing love for her was exactly like a constantly expanding dream.
We agreed to meet daily in this place, which we called our nest. I stood up, extending my hand to help her rise. Her palm was soft like a new pillow. I felt that her touch had a flavor too because it left a sweet trace in my soul unlike any of the other hands I had shaken throughout my life.
I walked with her until we reached her horse. I helped her untie its rope, then accompanied her until she left the thicket in the direction of the shore. She brought the horse to a trot with a quick kick and off she went with a wave to me. I stayed where I was, watching her depart until she went out of sight, her hair flying behind her like the wings of a happy bird. Then I went back to the spot where we had sat together. I lay on my back and recalled the details: her breath, her voice, the touch of her hand, how her eyes closed, and what she had said. The delicious coolness of the sand seeped into my body as I stared up at a pair of pigeons sitting on the intertwined branches with the sky behind them.
When the nearby sun went behind the even closer mountain, twilight pervaded the place. I got up and tidied our nest, smoothing out the sand, breaking the branches that extended into it, arranging the stones around the circular edge. Then I returned home.
I didn’t tell Istabraq anything. I was still sobered by what Aliya had said about the lies of my poems. That night, I kept waiting for an opportunity to ask Grandfather about it. I hesitated quite a while, fearing that he’d get angry or rebuke me. It took me a long time to think of the appropriate words to pose the question.
Since I had noticed that his speech never stumbled when reciting poetry, I said, “Grandfather, have you memorized all the poems of Antara?”
“I have memorized many by him and by others,” he replied, “but I don’t know if I’ve memorized all his poetry or not.”
Then, knowing that Grandfather hated lying and considered it “a scourge worse even than murder because it is the first step on the path of every sin,” I asked, “But don’t you think that the poems of these knights have many exaggerations? Or even that they come to the point of lying sometimes?”
I expected his reaction would be violent or that he would be silent for a while in thought, as happened with him whenever someone asked him about matters related to Islamic law. But he answered immediately with one sentence: “The sweetest poetry is the most fabulous.”
Then he resumed the story he had been narrating that night, leaving me stunned by the force of this second surprise, which was no less than the one caused by Aliya’s words.
I wasn’t able to comprehend Grandfather’s expression very well at the time, but I resolved the matter by abandoning the composition of poetry for good in order to be free of the contradiction that it led me into. And why should I write it if Aliya didn’t expect that from me? I read less poetry after that too, and the poetry that I did read from time to time, I began to regard in the light of what both Aliya and Grandfather had said.
I only resumed writing poetry four years ago, here, during moments when a deadly longing for Aliya became unbearable. I wrote a few disconnected fragments. I didn’t publish any of them, and I’m not planning to do so now. My childhood dream of becoming a significant poet, or even a professional writer, had dissolved. The three short stories I published in the Iraqi opposition papers in London were only memories of my army days that I composed for myself in order to put them in context or to be done with them. Or else they were a way to use my free time here in an attempt to understand myself more fully.
We began to meet daily in our nest, which became a little wider, cleaner, neater, and more cozy. The rendezvous was usually during the hour of the midday siesta when our families were sleeping. The better we got to know each other, the deeper we fell in love. I brought Aliya my notebook, in which I had taped pictures of actors and actresses. There were also photos of dream-like scenes where I would talk about bringing her. These were pictures in advertisements which I clipped from the German magazines that my father brought, such as a white, wooden house, surrounded by trees and a garden with colorful flowers, sitting on a lake shore with water of the deepest blue. Behind it was a mountain, whose peaks were white domes of snow touching the other white of the clouds.
But Aliya was less affected than I was by dreams. I learned from her to be satisfied and content. I learned a sense of realism and how to find pleasure in working with the simple but real things around us. From her I also learned self-composure and confidence in the present moment.
In my notebook there were other pictures of women with green eyes and blond hair, for whom I would invent names and say that they were international actresses. I pretended to have a wide knowledge of the world’s celebrities despite never in my life having set foot in a movie theater up to that point.
Because we could think only of each other and would hurry to our rendezvous, we would get up from the family table before eating our fill. I would take a handful of dates with me, wrapping them up in a piece of paper that I would push into my pocket. Aliya was like me, Grandfather, and the majority of the Mutlaq clan: she loved dates. The first time, when the handful of dates was gone, we kept our sticky hands raised in the air, delaying our descent to the shore. I don’t know how, but I got hold of her hand and began sucking her fingers. She liked the idea and grabbed my fingers in turn to suck on them. At first, she laughed. Then we gave in to a delicious daze of obscure shudders which drew our lips together without our hands slipping away from each other’s fingers.
That was the first and sweetest kiss of my life. Aliya’s lips were delicate, like the rest of her body, the details of which I began
to discover later on. Her body was soft and firm at the same time. Not soft like butter, but rather like fresh cheese. Her lips combined the flavors of date and human. I discovered only then that even humans have a particular taste, just as every fruit or creature does.
After the first kiss, we were silent for a long time, staring at each other, shaken up and afraid. For the rest of the meeting, we communicated with our glances, not uttering a single word. We got up and went to the shore, where we washed our hands and faces. After that, she left and I stayed behind alone, as usual. I didn’t return to the nest but stayed on the shore, throwing stones far out in the middle of the river. Then, just as my father used to do, I sat on a rock and hung my feet into the water until the sun set. With a grave expression, I recalled the taste of the kisses and feared God.
I fell asleep late that night after tossing and turning in bed for a long time. I awoke before sunrise, sweaty and terrified from a dream in which I saw myself in the fires of hell. I also saw the angels of hell, whose gigantic size and cruelty Grandfather had described. They were heating iron with which they seared my lips. There was a fearsome sizzle, and the smoke rose up, together with the smell of grilled flesh. Meanwhile, I sensed the presence of God, who was supervising my punishment as it was meted out, watching from a high place that I couldn’t see. The voice of Grandfather was ringing out angrily, “He deserves it! I warned them all! O God, my God, I told them! O God, my God, bear witness!”
I pushed off the covers and looked around. Smoke was rising along with the smell of my mother’s bread from the oven at the edge of the courtyard. I jumped up and hurried over to sate my thirst from the jar I had left by the door. I drank a lot of water, but it wasn’t enough. I felt the dryness of my lips and a stinging sensation.
During our meeting the next day, I hesitated for a long time before kissing Aliya because hell was on my mind, accompanied by Grandfather’s voice and the gaze of God. But I couldn’t resist the temptation of that pleasure. So I decided to ignore those other things, to put off thinking of them, deciding that this sin of mine wasn’t serious like adultery. I justified it to myself, saying, “The sweetness of kissing Aliya in this world is worth the pain of my lips being seared in the world to come.”
Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) Page 7