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

by Muhsin al-Ramli

  I said in a stupor, “What is this dump?”

  Fatima said, “This is how it is after every night.”

  “What’s to be done?”

  She smiled, rolling up her sleeves and tying on her apron, and said, “I’ll get to work cleaning it.”

  “But this is a lot for you to do by yourself. Especially when your hand is injured!”

  “It’s not a bad wound. And you’ll see how I can make the place spick-and-span within one hour.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “No. It’s my job, and I know how to do it. You go to Mr. Noah.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  She headed over to her purse and took out a bunch of keys once again, which she began to explain for me: “This is the key for the building’s main door. It’s the one here around the corner to the left. And this is the apartment key, on the third floor. Letter C, which is the one in the middle, with its door exactly opposite the elevator.”

  I remained fixed in place for a moment. It was as though I were wavering between my desire to seize this opportunity to be alone with my father, for which I had been waiting so long, and my reluctance and even fear of being alone with him. Or was my wish to remain in Fatima’s company the strongest?

  I saw her still standing there, leaning on her broom and watching me as though waiting for me to leave. So I left.

  CHAPTER 10

  I stood in front of the door to my father’s apartment, filled with uncertainty. My heart and my breath were both racing. I strained my ears to hear what was going on behind the door. Nothing. Just silence. Should I ring the doorbell? Should I pound on the door with my fist? Should I steal away and escape? Or should I just open the door and go in? Perhaps that was the very reason Fatima had given me the key. But how could I enter a house unannounced? That was not something I had done since leaving our home in the village. Yet wasn’t this my father’s house too?

  I knocked on the door with the backs of my fingers, a light knock that I scarcely heard myself. Perhaps it was just an excuse so that I could say without lying, should I be asked, that I had knocked. I waited a little; then I inserted the key and turned it slowly. I pushed the door carefully, as slowly and quietly as I could, like someone opening an ancient chest. I entered with silent steps and closed the door as quietly as I had opened it. There was only silence, broken by my father’s snoring in some corner.

  The living room was twice as big as the one in my apartment. In the wall opposite the door was a window that looked over a narrow courtyard between the neighboring buildings. There were four other doors. One was closed. Of the three that were open, there was the kitchen, the bathroom, and the snoring of my father, which must have been the bedroom.

  I approached and saw him lying in bed, on his stomach, in his socks and his clothes from the previous night’s concert. I had never before seen my father or anyone in our village sleeping on his stomach that way. I remembered the time Grandfather angrily scolded me when he saw me stretched out like that on a rug in his large sitting room. He had yelled, “Get up! Get out of that position! Don’t ever stretch out on the ground like this again. It’s a wicked way to lie down.”

  I don’t remember who it was that explained the matter to me afterward. Whoever it was had said, “That’s because the earth is our mother. It isn’t right for us to stretch out upon her in this way, like a man having sex with his wife.”

  I advanced with steps so slow and quiet that I almost got cramps in my legs. I sat on the couch that presided over the living room, under the window looking out on the center courtyard. I started looking the place over in the sunlight pouring through the window.

  Lying there on the coffee table in front of me, beside an ashtray and some German newspapers, were my father’s keys. I knew them from the familiar key ring holding them together: a short chain ending in a bullet with a hollow shell. Its copper red had become yellow on account of being handled so much. It was the very one that he had carried with him constantly since the first days after we charged the provincial government building in Tikrit. It had appeared when the name Qashmars first appeared. It was the same bullet that remained in my father’s hand, the one he hadn’t inserted into the anus of the young man harassing Istabraq, the youth whom the market’s beasts of burden had saved that day. I don’t know how my father had hidden it during the torture sessions and kept the very same one with him over the years. And then, how had he brought a bullet here through the airports?

  There were posters of nature scenes on the rest of the walls. The accompanying text indicated that they were German landscapes. There were other large posters of half-naked women in seductive poses, feigning ecstasy. The lips, as usual, were in that form I had started to hate for its vulgar repetition: the half-open and slack-jawed mouth forming a circle, pretending to be ready for a kiss. I don’t know who it was that put into the minds of women that this primitive pose was seductive. I had started casting my first glance at women’s lips whenever I would see them in newspaper photos, advertisements, and calendars. As soon as I saw them adopting this commercialized expression, I sensed their extremely naïve phoniness, and all sense of attraction would evaporate. I would turn the page as a way of refusing to include myself in the herd of consumers who fell for that sort of thing.

  My father’s snoring got louder.

  On the opposite side of the room stood a wooden entertainment center. A television was in the middle, and the rest of its shelves were crowded with books, videotapes, cassette tapes, and several vases made of clay and glass, together with dozens of identical glasses. There was another familiar motif that appeared in many houses, namely, the family photos that stood in the corners of the shelves. In this case, of course, it was my father with Rosa in various places and different cities. Of these, I recognized the Barcelona seashore and Baghdad, in front of the Freedom Monument. The photos were leaning on their stands atop the books, which were all lined up together, spines facing out, with the exception of the Qur’an. It stood on the top shelf, leaning against a multivolume Qur’anic commentary, its cover facing out, decorated with the word “noble” written in gold.

  I continued looking around in this way for about half an hour, during which I got up and walked around with still constrained steps. I checked out the inside of the kitchen and the bathroom, looked over some of the book and movie titles, and took one look from the window into the courtyard and another from the middle of the living room into the room where my father was snoring. The rhythm was variable and some of the snores startled me, as though he were about to choke.

  During this time, I got my breathing under control, my pulse returned to its normal rate, and I became more comfortable with the place. So all that remained was for me to begin the encounter with my father. I approached him softly and put my hand gently on his shoulder. His snoring stopped. I paused, too, before repeating a call that I hadn’t practiced for many long years. I was like someone whose voice was catching on the words, like someone feeling them out and recalling their rhythm, drawn from the secret, unknown places of the spirit. In such a situation, a person feels the words like a physical touch that makes the choking tears flow:

  “Dad. Dad. Dad!”

  He twitched, rolling onto his back and mumbling heavily, “Eh? What?” He opened his eyes with difficulty, and then the surprise widened them. “Oh! Saleem!”

  He sat up right away, rubbing his eyes like a lazy child and trying to hide the effect of the surprise upon him by saying, “Good morning! What time is it?” Then he got out of bed and added, “It must be Fatima who sent you.” He followed that up while looking for each of his shoes beside the bed by saying, “She’s a good kid, a respectable girl.”

  We went out to the living room. His hair was messed up, and traces of gray could be seen at the roots of the dyed locks. He looked around for something: he was looking for cigarettes. He shook the pack that was near the television, opened it, then crushed it with his fist
and threw it on the floor: “Damn! Empty.”

  “I have some cigarettes,” I said.

  “What kind are they?”

  I took my pack out of my pocket and showed them to him.

  He said, “No, these are lights. They don’t do anything for me. Have you eaten breakfast?”

  He had turned toward the refrigerator, opened it, and stuck his head inside, saying, “We need milk.” He followed that up with a joke: “But the cows are out to pasture!”

  He laughed and gave my shoulder a pat that hinted at our connection. I felt then that he was closer to the father I had known in the past. It was as though the phrase about cows, spoken as a clear allusion, was a sign of all that we had shared in our distant village.

  I said, “I’ll go down and get some milk and cigarettes. Which kind do you want?”

  He pointed to the crumpled pack on the floor. “Those. Or just tell the Chinese people in the store across from the club—do you know it?—tell them, ‘I want cigarettes, milk, and German cheese for Mr. Noah.’ They’ll know what you want. In the meantime, I’ll get the coffee ready and take a shower. Okay? Here, take some money.”

  “No. There’s no need. It’s not much at all.” I took a chance with his amiability and added, “And I cordially invite you to breakfast in your own house.”

  We laughed with an affection that brought us closer. I went out with a trace of a smile on my face that lasted until I reached the entrance of the Chinese store. It was true: as soon as I let the Chinese shopkeeper know what Mr. Noah wanted, she brought it to me immediately. I returned, carrying everything back up to the kitchen while my father sang German songs in the shower. I smiled and began preparing breakfast, arranging it on the coffee table after clearing off the pile of newspapers and ashtrays, leaving his bunch of keys, connected to the bullet, in its place on the edge.

  My father came out of the bathroom, revealing his enormous stature and his predominantly gray chest hair. He had wrapped a wide, white towel around his waist. When he saw that the table was ready, he said, “Eat, if you want. I’ll be right there.”

  “No, I’ve already had breakfast. This is for you. I’ll just have a cup of coffee with you.”

  He went into his bedroom and came out after a few minutes in different clothes, clean and elegant. He had combed his hair and tied it back in a ponytail. He gave off a piercing scent of perfume. I knew he liked to go overboard with perfume, to the point of literally pouring it on his body. It was an old habit that he hadn’t given up. He was following the model of Grandfather, who had constantly repeated, “Prophet Muhammad loved three things in this world: perfume, women, and prayer.”

  My father ate with a voracious appetite while I hesitated, uncertain as to how to begin the conversation with him. So it happened that he posed most of the questions at first. As he chewed each mouthful, he asked me about myself: my health, my life, my work. He said he hadn’t known that I was here in Spain, and that nobody from the village had known anything about me. But personally, deep down, he had felt confident that I was fine and in some safe place. He used to reassure Mother whenever she would cry because she missed me, and he would invent stories about how easy life was for those who had emigrated from Iraq. He endeavored to comfort her, while she continued beseeching God on my behalf during her prayers.

  At that point, I started asking my questions about Mother. He said, “She is just as she was: a great woman who bottles up her sorrow and keeps on slaving away. Now she takes joy in raising her grandchildren. Istabraq lives with her in our house. Istabraq got married to your cousin Ibrahim. She wanted to name her first son Sirat, but Ibrahim refused. He was right to do so, for reasons you well know!”

  We laughed, and I learned for the first time that my father knew the story of Istabraq’s love for Sirat.

  He continued, “And so she resorted to the Qur’an for a name, like all the rest of our family. Her health has gotten much better. She now has three children, and I left her pregnant with a fourth. She has become much fatter, and she is not that skinny ‘Reed’ that you knew her as. By the way, she hung a large picture of you in the front of her room, and every day she lifts her children up to it, saying, ‘This is your Uncle Saleem. He is going to return, bringing you lots of gifts.’ The result is that they spoke your name before they spoke the name of their father.”

  My father finished eating his breakfast. He reclined next to me against the backrest of the couch and began to smoke with pleasure. He seemed to be more focused, livelier, and more prepared to talk. So I followed his lead and started smoking and asking questions, even frank ones.

  I asked about nearly everything apart from the two essential questions that I didn’t dare broach: Was he the one who killed Grandfather at dawn that day? Or had he exploded in Grandfather’s face, just as I had seen before leaving, after making sure that Grandfather had already died? Secondly, where did this passion for women come from? For that matter, how did he make love to Rosa, who loved him and was so intensely jealous of him, given that they had ruined his manhood and his testicles in that electric torture session?

  So I circled around these two questions like a butterfly hovering around a flame, taking care not to be burned. Among other detailed questions, I touched on the village, the family, and how things were going there. He answered me at length and sometimes with his own commentary.

  We talked together and smoked for more than three hours, during which my father would get up and move around the room waving his arms whenever he was affected by the force of what he was narrating. He would sometimes clench his fists and grind cigarette butts between his teeth, looking like someone acting out a tense scene in a play.

  I know I’m incapable of recording here everything that was said, and of describing his movements and his pauses in detail, given that my surprise at his words completely overpowered me. So I’ll summarize the main events he told me, beginning with the day in which I journeyed from the village, the same day in which Grandfather journeyed from this world.

  “Everything changed, Saleem. It changed utterly.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The village buried its sons’ bodies. Then it submitted to the orders of the government, whose institutions applied the pressure necessary to rapidly transform it into a normal village like all other Iraqi villages.

  “There was some satisfaction in burying Grandfather at the highest point of the cemetery. They put green banners above his tomb, as well as jars of salt for visitors seeking a blessing to lick. The sick would cut strips from the banners at his grave to tie around their necks or forearms, like consecrated amulets. The people were satisfied as to Grandfather’s heavenly reward, he who was considered a blessed man and one of God’s pious saints.

  “Relations with Subh were restored in the traditional way. Its people stopped winking to each other at our surname of Qashmar, not out of respect for us but out of fear of the government, which had imposed the name Faris on our village, and which possessed eyes and ears that spied into every corner: on both banks of the river, on both sides of the mountain, on the dry land and the water, in the air and in the mud.

  “An atmosphere of war pervaded the entire country. The television, the schools, the party organizations, and the police were all instruments of the government for mobilizing and exercising control. There was iron and fire. There was fear and repression. We gave ourselves over to waiting and to a faint hope in an obscure salvation. It felt like our hope hung by a thread.”

  “The people gradually disengaged from Mullah Mutlaq’s domination after his passing. They were brought into submission by the government’s vicious authority. The sessions for religious studies in the mosque were dissolved, as well as the meetings to solve social problems, which were transferred to the city courtrooms. The number of people who prayed got smaller, and no one talked any more about avenging our honor, which they had pledged to the mullah. I didn’t do anything about that. But inside, I held fast to my covenant, which I had pledged by my soul and swo
rn in front of my father. It was only I who kept living under the authority of the venerable Mutlaq, eagerly maintaining my obedience to that authority, no matter what the cost.

  “As far as I was concerned, Saleem, my father was everything to me, everything: the absolute authority in this life and the next. You, yourself, saw my relationship with him, how sacred he was to me. He was history, religion, values, the absolute, and the single existing truth, or else the source of these things. In my eyes, he was the strong, knowledgeable, and completely correct man. Disobeying him was out of the question. He raised me that way from the moment I became conscious. Engraved into my emotions and my makeup was the dictum that ‘God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents,’ so his contentment was my greatest goal. Actually, in my eyes, my father was God’s sole deputy on earth. And I confess now, to you alone and for the first time in my life, that I would often see the Lord incarnated in him. He represented direct divinity for me, according to what his upbringing established in me. I never once, in all the days of my life, dared to look into his eyes.

  “One thing alone interfered with that assurance of mine regarding his divinity; one thing broke it. And that was regret. Yes, for regret is a human characteristic, and a god cannot regret anything he does since he is omniscient in his knowledge, his perception, his control, and his desire. When I say regret, I mean that your grandfather, my father …. My mother informed me one day at noon during a harvest season long ago that the only thing my father had done and regretted—something he had regretted having done throughout his entire life, even to the point that it sometimes made him cry in her lap in moments of weakness—was having cut off part of his first wife’s finger when she had pointed it menacingly in his face. Everyone knew about the incident and used it as an example, but what no one knew—apart from my mother and me, and now you—was that my father regretted it, and that references to this incident continued to torment him. Meanwhile, it helped me by stripping him of that quality of divinity.