We watched the film to the end without exchanging more than a few words and left with the crowd. He held my arm whenever he got the chance, and I tried to avoid physical contact with him as far as possible. It made me feel uncomfortably tense and apprehensive, and I had never grown used to it, although it had happened repeatedly for over two months. The cool night breeze struck out faces as we emerged into the busy street. He wanted us to take a taxi; I objected, but he insisted. Sana didn’t give us the chance to talk on the way home, and he seemed quite happy to listen to her chatter. I was relieved that the film and the perilous conversations which had accompanied it were over. When we reached the dark turning up to the house and got out of the taxi, I heard the mosque clock chiming slowly and melodiously. Sana went ahead of us with her short, rapid steps. The walls of the dimly lit alley seemed to be swaying. Suddenly he said in a calm voice, “Are you going to give me an answer, Munira?”
He was walking unhurriedly looking at me.
My heart immediately beat taster. “Answer to what?”
“You mean you didn’t understand what I was talking about—in the cinema?”
Fear returned, constricting my breathing. “No. Sorry”
“How about now?”
“What do you mean, Midhat?”
“I mean—would you consider—marrying me?”
He stumbled slightly over the last words. My heartbeat was reverberating in my chest, my mouth, at the ends of my toes. I felt a twinge of pain somewhere in my head and pulled the abaya more closely round me, covering part of my face. We were just a few meters from the house, and Sana was on the doorstep in the dim light, waiting for us. She looked so far away, a speck on the horizon. If only I hadn’t let her go ahead of us, he wouldn’t have been able to talk.
I walked on, silent as a mummy, stumbling a couple of times as we approached the door. Sana called out that she was scared of scorpions and didn’t want to walk along the long passage alone. As I came up to her, she took my hand firmly.
The three of us entered the house in silence. They were waiting impatiently for us, as if we had been away for years. Midhat smiled as he asked me in front of his mother if I was hungry. I said no. I was trembling all over and just wanted to throw myself down on the bed. My mother asked why we were late, but I didn’t reply.
They brought me something light to eat as I lay on my bed in out room. This excessive concern embarrassed me, and I thanked Madiha several times. For no obvious reason, I felt completely numb and had no desire to sleep or change from my outdoor clothes, although I was exhausted. I was told that Abd al-Karim was asking about us. Karim? This person tormented by his fantasies, whom life made ill, who resembled me; would he be able to offer me a word of comfort, a sign, an answer to a question? I got up and went towards his room, my mind blank, just wanting to see him. As if miracles happened on demand!
I remembered a woman in a film I had seen several years before. A wretched creature from a village in Italy, deprived of care and affection all her life, and when she found them in a kind, charming clown, her husband killed him in front of her. I didn’t remember much about the film—its name or even what the main characters looked like—only the state of the woman after the death of the clown. Something snapped inside her, and she looked as if her life had been abruptly snuffed out. She stopped helping her husband in his work and fell ill, and the whole time she moaned gently, like someone dying or refusing to live. She began when she woke up and continued at intervals throughout the day and the following night. I remembered her when I became conscious that I was sighing repeatedly. It happened, regardless of the time or place: on a crowded bus returning from school; on my bed before the afternoon siesta; at tea time as I turned the spoon round endlessly in the little glass; at night, when I first lay down; at midnight and at dawn. In some way it soothed me to make these wordless sounds, but what did they mean? Was it my soul talking?
I was a ghost, shunning the daylight. I didn’t like being alone, but solitude was my last refuge. They were all hounding me. I felt oppressed by their meaningful words, gestures, and looks. They were obsessed by one question alone; it showed on their faces and colored everything they did. Why didn’t I say yes, become another bead on the rosary, live on the same plane as the rest of humanity, agree quickly and come and share their lives?
It was worse than those last bitter days in Baquba, when I was escaping the shadows and looking for obscurity in the sunshine, negotiating to stay alive a little while longer. At the time I was certain that the incident in the orchard meant I didn’t have long to live, that something would suddenly finish me off. The anarchic atmosphere of the big house in Baquba had changed; it seemed to be entirely directed at gathering together reasons to hate me more. It wasn’t clear to me how this son of theirs had managed to convince them that I’d become his mortal enemy overnight, but I took refuge in out miserable, hot room, pretending to be ill. My mother brought my meals up and incarcerated herself with me, forgetting everything but her love for me. When I came back from school to sit hunched up on the edge of the bed in the dark room, running with sweat, and dreading any sound outside, I felt I was losing my mind.
On the fifth or sixth day Adnan confronted me, when my mother had gone out for some reason. I didn’t understand exactly what he wanted from me. He opened the door and stood in the doorway, looking at me silently. I hid my head in my arms, wiping away a few tears. I couldn’t see his face properly. He walked rapidly up to me as if he was going to throw himself off a cliff or kiss the feet of his dead lover. His dark shape and the bloody memory filled me with terror. I was almost crazy, and I screamed at him before he had a chance to blink or catch his breath. He backed away in horror, gabbling incomprehensibly, and left the room, while I stared blankly in front of me through my tears, then began to emit a series of howls worthy of a ravening wolf. Their dislike of me increased. I cut myself off from them and felt my best bet was to concentrate on staying sane and alive. It helped me if I treated them as enemies, persecuted them as they persecuted me, behaved coldly and resentfully to them.
In Baquba, as time went by, I became focused on saving myself. I didn’t sigh day and night as I did now, when I felt I was heading inexorably towards a locked door whose key they had cruelly given to me, Midhat and his mother were the only members of the family who avoided me: they thought they deserved an answer and felt the passing of time put them in an awkward position. But they didn’t say anything. Midhat distanced himself from me a little and pursued me less than before, and I was grateful for that. But his mother—my aunt—continued to express her bitter dissatisfaction through her tired eyes. Her greetings, her conversations, her silence, her rare laughter, and her preoccupied air were all accompanied by looks which said one thing: their precious daughter was treating them badly, with no justification.
Then one day I realized that my thoughts weren’t going anywhere. They were mixed up with my emotions all the time and went round in circles bringing me no nearer to a resolution. I lived within these very precise psychological arid intellectual boundaries that I had set for myself, without profiting from them to help me make a decision. I was indulging my sadness, enjoying going back to lick my wounds, as if I had all the time in the world. It was my mother who made me see this. I was in bed one October night around midnight, not thinking of anything as usual, floating in a sort of invisible sea of gloom and misery My mother lay quietly on her mattress on the floor beside me in the room we shared with my grandmother and Aunt Safiya.
“Why are you sighing such a lot?” she asked suddenly I jumped and held my breath, but she went on talking quietly “You’re sensible, Munira dear. I’ve let you do what you think best. You’re all I’ve got, and you know what makes you happy, what kind of a future you want. But don’t torment yourself like this. We have to be able to recognize out own fates. And the two of us alone are nothing, my dear.”
All around us was quiet, and her hesitant murmuring touched my heart. She had never talked to me
like this before. She was beside me; I leaned against her and she held me, and the warmth of her affection gave me strength. But she couldn’t share the crisis with me. She knew that she could no longer give me advice, that I wouldn’t listen to her opinions. I saw her forcing herself to hold her tongue, and suffering because I was suffering.
I sighed deeply. She was trying to give me signals, on the strength of her intuition.
“Why are we helpless on our own, Mum?” I asked her, as if I was talking to myself. “What’s wrong with the world? I’ve got my salary, and you’ve got your pension. Can’t we live like that, you and I? Will we really die if I don’t get married?”
“No, of course not, dear, God bless you. Why ever would we die? But I’m just saying people are only interested in themselves in this world, and we’re on our own. We only have God. We’re cut off from the tree.”
When she began repeating herself like that, I realized it was pointless to try and discuss anything with her. She only had one idea in her mind, which she repeated again and again, and she still had no effect on me. I felt I would oppose her with all my being if necessary. However, the veiled meaning contained in her pronouncements was reinforced by kind words from an unexpected source. One evening a few days later, they were taken up with entertaining female relatives. I helped Madiha bring them tea and rood from the kitchen, then took a glass of tea and a piece of cake to Midhat’s father in his room. He was sitting by the open door, playing with his prayer beads, and smiled broadly, showing his yellow teeth under his gray moustache. I His unqualified good nature gave him the innocent air of a misunderstood child. He thanked me with an effusiveness which embarrassed me, then, when he saw I was about to go, said affectionately, “Munira, my child, can I have a word with you?”
I stood awkwardly by the door, holding the tray behind my back. I His right eyelid trembled for a moment, and his lower lip twitched before he spoke in his broad Baghdadi accent. “A little thing I haven’t had the chance to tell you before.” He put the beads down and picked up the glass of tea. “I want you to know, to be sure, I mean . . .” He began rotating the spoon in the glass at an extraordinary rate. “This house is your house, and the door is always open to you. Don’t say, ‘It depends what happens.’ Please remember what I’m telling you now. This house will never shut its door in your face.”
Then he smiled his innocent child’s smile, as if he was apologizing. I went out, muttering some vague words of thanks, and stood on my own in the empty alcove. Then I sat down on a chair in a dark corner and sobbed as I hadn’t sobbed for a long time. My tears fell gently through my hands which covered my eyes. I had never felt so miserable, desperate, and alone; it was the painful discovery of my own weakness and insignificance. The road ahead of me was closed, but there was no way back. His words were a continuation of my mother’s message. We, who were rootless, severed from the tree, who could only watch while out destinies were acted out, had no room to choose. We could pretend otherwise but the fact remained: we were isolated from society and despised.
The sunset sky, this sad evening, glowed clear and pure, but the courtyard looked as dark as a bottomless pit to me. My heart was empty. The few tears which I’d shed out of the blue had relieved me. I saw Sana coming from downstairs and asked her to bring me a glass of water. The noise of the guests’ laughter and conversation continued uninterrupted, making my head ache. I sat the little girl down next to me and drank some of the water, then splashed the rest on my face and smoothed my hair down with my wet hand. Sana watched fascinated, and I threw the last few drops of water over her for fun. I asked where her uncles were, and she said they’d gone out before the guests arrived.
It occurred to me that if I dropped a line to my brother Mustafa, letting him know indirectly about out current situation, he could—what? I didn’t have the strength to be scheming and manipulative, even though everybody expected it of me because girls normally were. Anyway, my brother wouldn’t tell me anything new, since he didn’t know the whole story. Nobody in the world could tell me anything I didn’t know already.
I told myself that i should’n to be looking for any new revelations. My view of things had been shattered, and life appeared full of contradictions. What I needed desperately now was a straightforward perspective on the realities of my life, so that I could accept them and also have confidence in them, for God’s sake.
When Sana left me, I had a desire to go up on the empty terrace to enjoy the view of the sky, fling myself into that blue sparkling ocean, and lose myself for a while.
They were coming out of the guest room, still chattering non-stop, five stout women who hadn’t shut up for two hours. They passed me standing in my corner and interrupted themselves briefly to say goodbye to me. As I watched them, and myself face to face with them, against the background of the dark courtyard and the clear sky, I had the overwhelming sensation that I had no fundamental connection with this group of people, these compact mounds of flesh, of which I was supposedly one. I stood apart, hovering between life and death, self-delusion and suffering, weaker than a reed and yet responsible for the rising and setting of the sun. I could neither prevent anything happening, not continue to procrastinate any longer. I was only human. To resolve things, it would be enough to get up one night, instead of lying in bed pretending to sleep, and stand on the gallery screaming into the darkness. Then I would either get peace of mind or go mad. Sometimes I wanted to pray to the Lord to have pity on me. Then I would hesitate: whether out destinies were decided in advance or were in our own hands, any form of hope seemed equally futile.
Then I began to think about him, Abd al-Karim, who was always there, somewhere inside me. I’d been told he’d failed his exams and would have to repeat the year. I knew only too well what such a failure would mean to this creature ruled by his memories and his ghosts. As I considered myself to be close to him, I thought that I should somehow face this setback with him. Besides, he knew about Midhat proposing, and perhaps he understood something which I didn’t understand or saw something which I couldn’t see. He might be able to do something or give me the strength to wait for a last shred of hope or sign of deliverance. So one autumn afternoon, I climbed the worn, unpaved stairs to the terrace. A short time before I had seen him coming out of his room and walking towards the door leading to the staits, supporting himself on the wooden balustrade from time to time. There was an invigorating nip in the air, so I picked up a shawl and followed him.
He didn’t see me at first. All around me was the immensely clear blue sky, splashed with the red of the setting sun. I stood catching my breath, dazzled by the spread of colors. Fie was leaning against the wall, his head bathed in the sun’s last blazing rays. The empty wooden beds were lined up around the terrace like coffins. Suddenly he noticed me, and I went towards him. He seemed wary of me, buttoning up his jacket uneasily and moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue as he looked at me. This made me uncomfortable. I greeted him quietly and asked him why he hadn’t told me about failing his exams. I was shocked by the foolish expression which descended on his face; it was quite unfamiliar to me.
“Sorry. I don’t know. It’s not important,” he said, with his face turned away from me.
He looked thin and bent as he put his hands in the pockets of his wide trousers and wandered aimlessly over to the other wall nearby. He was ill at ease, and I realized I hadn’t chosen a good time to talk to him.
“Only relatively important. Anyway, you can pass with flying colors next year,” I said.
He didn’t answer, making do with a vague grunt and a sarcastic smile, and kicked a small stone without looking at me. Then he raised his eyes to the sunset, where the laughing sun was fading. His nose looked enormous in the middle of his mournful face. I was going to say something more about his passing his exam brilliantly next time but he spoke first. “Don’t comfort me, Munira. You of all people. You talked to me a lot before the exam. I remember everything you said. But I thought it was irrelevant
because it hadn’t crossed my mind that I’d fail.” He stood at some distance from me, prodding the ground with the toe of his shoe. “Why do they want to soften the blow? There’s no need. What’s done’s done. If I’d known it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t have bothered. But now what?”
“What do you mean, now what? What are you planning, Karim?”
“Nothing. What do you expect? I’ve failed and I have to take the consequences. We’re always trying to escape the consequences of out actions. I don’t understand why. I want to take the responsibility and be done with it.”
“Be done with it how?” He had provoked me and I persisted. “It seems to me you’re contradicting yourself, Karim. A few months ago you were saying the exam would be easy. You hardly thought about it. It didn’t interest you. Now you’re regarding failure as a life sentence. How can you? What’s more, accepting the consequences of your actions doesn’t mean giving up. Wouldn’t that be a contradiction? You accept unfortunate consequences in order to progress beyond them, move on, don’t you?”
He continued digging up the earth with his shoe then smoothing it down, again and again. A few of his hairs looked bright red. It was for my own benefit that I was fighting against his weakness, doubt, and confusion.
“I don’t know,” he said in a low, uncertain voice. “I don’t know It’s just that everything has to end. Why don’t we acknowledge it?”
“What do you mean, Karim? I don’t understand.”
He looked up at me suddenly “Sorry, Munira. I’m not saying anything complicated. But. . . .” his voice was cold and firm and didn’t fit with the bitterness on his face. “I’m a failure. I’m no use. I’m weak and incompetent, and I can’t tell you that I’m going to improve. On the contrary, I get worse each day. That’s about it. I’m done for, useless.”
The Long Way Back Page 22