“Did Abu Sarmad want anything?” asked Madiha,
He looked blearily at her. “Who?”
“Abu Sarmad.”
“Who’s he?”
“God please don’t let him lose his mind. Abu Sarmad. The man who used to be your boss.”
“Abu Sarmad? He didn’t want anything. He came to visit me. I told him I was going to write an article about my experience—it could be useful to someone. He said that would be excellent.”
“You mean he didn’t say anything about your job? Nothing at all?”
“Yes, of course he did.” He began tugging at the bristles under his chin, wincing each time he pulled one out.
“What do you mean, of course?”
He paused for a moment. “Just be patient, Madiha dear. Give me time to write the article and publish it, then we’ll see.”
“What article, for goodness’ sake? We want you to get better and go back to work.”
“Never mind. Don’t worry. Be patient please. Everything will be fine. If you could just have a word with the doctors about smoking.” He began stroking Suha’s hair. She smiled shyly and looked at her mother. “The thing is, Madiha,” he went on, “there’s been a change in me. I know now that I’ve been ill and have to get better. I mean, that’s an enormous step. Before I didn’t know what kind of a state I was in. Now—I do.” Then he withdrew into himself again, folding his hands in his lap. “Now I know. The Almighty allowed me to know. After Midhat’s death, God rest his soul, I went for ten days without touching a drop. not a drop. Ten days! I was like a sleepwalker. I had no time to drink or think about drinking. How did it happen? I don’t know. But God be praised!”
He talked sincerely, truthfully, a drunk who’d come to his senses. His haggard face and wild eyes had taken on an inspired look which didn’t suit him. In my view, the Almighty had only intervened to put immense fear in his heart. These days fear was in the air, in the tiniest particles of the air at any time. not his fear or mine, not a personal fear. I had seen it, come right up against it in faces, gestures, voices, and we were weighed down by it. When Husayn came to us, pale and stinking of arak, one Saturday morning when nobody in the house had slept, and told us his story, he was oozing fear. He described how he’d spent the night roaming around the streets and alleyways of Baghdad with some friends and had been unable to get back to where he was staying because the quarter was blockaded. All he could tell us was that Midhat hadn’t been with him and that perhaps he was caught inside the besieged zone. We were clustered round him in the yard by the kitchen door, myself, my mother, Madiha and her mother. Then my father joined us. We had no alternative but to extract whatever information we could from this broken-down creature.
It was no time to reproach or criticize him, but I was afraid that everything he said was a He. As soon as he’d washed his face and had a bite to eat, I made him go out with me. She insisted on accompanying us; she wore her abaya and half her face was covered, leaving her teat-filled, hazel eyes visible. We walked without talking. Husayn hobbled along reluctantly as if he wanted to let us go ahead of him. When Munira asked him if Midhat had answered her note, he nodded but didn’t look at her, and I noticed his mouth twitch and his eyelids quiver.
There was a tremendous uproar in the street and repeated explosions competing with radios turned up loud in the cafés. It was a beautiful day, with a few clouds and brilliant sunshine. We went into the mosque, crossed the courtyard, and stopped by the far door. The blockade was real: we had come face to face with it. We stood for a long time in the same place. I saw her looking unblinkingly past the Café Yas at the entrance to the besieged Kurdish quarter. The people passing, some of them armed, some hurrying, frightened, did not enter her field of vision. For her the world consisted of one person, and there was no sign of him. Eventually the waiting and hunger, and the din and chaos round about, wore us down, and she and I went home without exchanging a word. We had stopped talking to each other weeks before. This idiot Husayn had remained behind, hoping to be able to sneak back into the quarter, and had promised to come and see us later. We would have been stupid to believe him.
“The doctors here say this is a step in the right direction,” Husayn was telling us now “They say you have to want to help yourself. If you want to be cured, you will be. They say, we can help you, but you ...”
“So how long will you be here?” asked Madiha impatiently.
“How do I know? The doctors are the ones who decide when I get out. This isn’t an ordinary hospital, Madiha. I mean, the doctors look at this as an experiment. They say it’s a pioneering venture—in Iraq, I mean. They treat addicts, then let them out to confront the world again. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’m confident. . .” He broke off and went to stand at the window again.
I didn’t want to talk to him. I wanted to remain a bystander. It seemed to me that he was talking to himself in an attempt to repair the damage he had done in the past. I was neither sorry for him, not enthusiastic about his plans to change his life. Perhaps I didn’t see the difference between his past life and the one he was trying to create now I didn’t understand his optimism, since he was surrounded by the ruins of an innocent world. How could someone find life beautiful when death was closing in on the horizon?
That afternoon, as the rain fell after the announcement of Abd al-Karim Qasim’s execution, I had been aware of a strange taste in my mouth and told myself that I would soon be dead. I was sheltering under the olive tree, staring at the main door. Since they had stopped being able to put a brave face on things, my parents stayed in their room. No doubt they were weeping together, hidden away from the rest of us. They must have realized, like Munira and me, that by a deadly coincidence Midhat’s fate was now bound up with the commotion outside, and whether he lived or died depended on matters we had no part in. The rain was pouring down and the leaves whispered cheerfully together.
First I saw my grandmother Umm Hasan coming out of the old ladies’ room alone, then stopping to look up at the sky She went on looking up for some unknown reason, as if she could see a sign in the dense clouds or was talking to someone up there. After a while she went back into a different room. She was muffled in black, her face white and devoid of emotion. Then, amidst the beating of the rain on the olive tree, I heard a door slam somewhere upstairs and noticed another dark shape out of the corner of my eye. Munira was carrying her abaya and hurrying towards the stairs. She paused briefly in front of my door, then walked on. I felt slightly uneasy guessing where she was going and staying where I was. She hesitated at the foot of the stairs. She was wearing a dark blue dress and her face was pale. As she opened out her abaya and was about to drape it over her head, she noticed me. For a moment she stopped what she was doing and looked at me, then she continued wrapping her abaya round her determinedly, There was about ten meters between us, which she covered in short, rapid steps.
“I’m going out again, just in case,” she whispered as she passed.
She walked straight on, her almond-shaped eyes shining above her delicate nose. I followed her. Raindrops fell on my face and hair. I asked her if anyone knew she was going out, and she replied that they were all asleep. We made out way carefully over the muddy ground in silence. Then, without looking at me, she asked if all this would stop now that Abd al-Karim Qasim was dead. Although I meant to tell her that I honestly didn’t know, I said nothing. We stopped at the corner of an alleyway near where we had been before, facing the besieged quarter, and were told that the area was about to be shelled at any moment. Gunfire reverberated constantly from all sides, but she was completely focused on the dark mouth of the entrance to the quarter. She stood against the wall, only her face visible, beautiful despite the tension and fear there. I wished I could inspire such anxiety in a woman like her! Unaware that I was observing her, she sighed and wiped some drops of rain off her forehead. We remained there for some time. I was apprehensive, fearing the worst; around us people were running, jostling on
e another, cursing, and laughing, and the shots were louder and more frequent. I heard the mosque clock striking, but lost count of the number of chimes. I was standing a short distance from her when I noticed someone walking closer to her than was proper. Slowly I moved forward and she turned to look at me. I went up to her and looked into her eyes. The suffering that I saw there seemed too much for the world to contain; she was misery personified. I leaned against the wall beside her in silence.
Then within minutes the atmosphere grew tenser. Groups ran from the direction of Kifah Street and armed individuals moved back towards it. There was an uncommonly loud rumble of machine gun fire and all the bystanders, including us, moved back. Before we had the chance to talk, there was a huge explosion not far away. Someone shouted that the bombardment had begun and they were going to destroy all the houses in the quarter. She looked so horrorstruck, her features pinched, her gaze moving rapidly over the people and objects surrounding her, that I took her arm through her abaya but she pulled it away sharply. Insistently I took hold of it again. I was the one clinging to her, to the symbol which she continued to be for me. She looked at me. Her face was pale, her lips trembling, and I caught a glimpse of her silvery-white neck under some loose strands of hair. Her eyes blazed with anger, demanding to know what I was thinking of, and in the space of a moment, a speck of time, in that wave of noise and death and destruction and infinite fear, as we were pushed to and fro by hands and bodies, the phantom of that other symbol in my life, Fuad, seemed to radiate from her. His once familiar features merged with the soft lines of her lovely face, and before my eyes she was transformed into a creature with a double life. The vision vanished with the sound of shouting and panting and running feet across the square behind us. We were separated in the panic. But I found her again and shared her sense of defeat as we walked disconsolately home. She turned back in horror as another huge explosion reverberated in the distance, as if the shells had struck her in the heart and soul. As she walked along the pavement in the sunset, between day and night, looking thin and fragile with her head bowed, she brought back memories of past anguish. I wondered not why these two had become so closely identified in my mind, but what the effect of this would be on me. Fuad had been snatched away from me before I could get through to him; and here she was, enveloped in mystery, about to slip out of my grasp. Something had been missing since the evening we talked together; I felt unable to be close to her once she was married, given my feelings and hers. But I had not lost the right to suffer beside her, to taste my wounded darling’s blood. However, I had been absolutely deprived, with all the intransigence and stupidity of the absolute, of the right to address a word to her. But she remained deep in my heart and I wanted to believe, with all these rules and regulations weighing me down, that I had also made a personal sacrifice that evening on the roof and that both of us might be able to be happy. I was out of her life, and she regarded that as a permanent state of affairs. As I said, we hadn’t exchanged any meaningful conversation all those months, and I hadn’t objected, because she might have been enjoying her life, and I might eventually have recovered, or shriveled up and died like a plant in the desert.
Then, for no apparent reason and out of the blue, everything went off the rails. Life ceased to have a structure and an order. Bewildered as we were, we would not have been surprised if the sun had fallen on us in the course of the day We were confused because, with the exception of her, we had become a single person, a small child overcome by a desire to burst into tears because the riddle of life was insoluble. When I set out to look for my brother, like a character in a folktale, it was not for anybody else, but so that I could go on living. I failed to find him, but she did not come near me. Even when she lost her color and her eyes clouded over, she remained further away from me than anybody. She would sit listening to me talking to them and the sight of her face would light me up inside, but she never addressed a word to me. Then events unfolded at such a pace that I hardly had time to consider my own fate. But as I walked home behind her with a heavy heart that dark February evening I decided that I didn’t want to survive her.
We climbed aboard the old-fashioned carriage without complaint, tired of waiting fruitlessly in the deserted street. I sat beside Madiha, and Suha and Sana squashed up in the little seat in front, smiling and whispering together. All that remained of the sun was a patch of dark red in the far west. The carriage lumbered along and a cool breeze blew in on us. We had left Husayn when he no longer had anything to say to us and the silence had begun to weigh heavily on us all,
Suha laughed. “Mum, do you know what Sana said about Dad?”
“Karim,” said Madiha, ignoring her, “what’s the point of it? All this fuss, doctors coming and going, and yet I don’t see any change in him so far, any progress. What do you think, Karim?”
“At least he’s better than he was before. I’m sure of that.”
How could you measure a person’s progress and development when you knew that, in the long term, there were no fixed values or opinions? I wanted to say to Madiha that I wasn’t interested in her husband, not at all interested. The whole thing was a mirage. But as long as he was alive she couldn’t live without a mirage of this sort.
“Mum, Mum,” repeated Suha.
“What do you want, for heaven’s sake?”
The carriage danced in a stately fashion over the potholed road.
“Mum, do you know what Sana said about Dad? She said he’s like a scarecrow. Really, Mum. She did.”
The air was refreshing, and stimulated the imagination for some strange reason.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” scolded Madiha. “When you were ill the other day, you couldn’t speak a word of sense. It’s your father you’re talking about.”
Sana looked at her in silence, then said, “Mum. Why’s Dad ill? He doesn’t look as if there’s anything wrong with him to me.”
Sana had become ill when they were all taken up with Midhat’s death, but nobody had paid het any attention until in a dreadful fit of delirium she had woken us up in the middle of the night with her piercing cries. I had run to their room and there she was on their big bed, clutching on to her mother, her short hair on end, her eyes and cheeks as red as blood, shrieking, “No, no. No, Mum, no.”
Her mother held her close, reciting Quranic verses and charms, then my mother and aunt came in and tried to help Madiha calm her down.
“It’s her teeth, dear,” said my aunt. “Don’t worry about it.”
The little girl had broken away from her mother and begun giving the bedcover terrified looks. Her mother tried to take her in her arms again, but Sana resisted instinctively, muttering and grinding her teeth together. At this point Madiha had begun crying and shrieking too, and my mother had rushed over, pushed her aside, and taken the little girl forcibly in her arms.
I had been too miserable to help them calm Sana down, hovering at the edge of the room, my nerves on edge, watching them trying lovingly to restore her to her senses, bring her back to out rational world. My aunt settled down on the bed, repeating her pronouncements about the reasons for Sana’s hysterics, and I heard the child say, “No, no. Come and help me, quickly, Uncle.” Then she gave a loud cry and lost consciousness.
Now here she was in front of me, and all that was left of her first confrontation with the harshness of life was this unmistakable tinge of sorrow on her face. She didn’t keep herself apart from us like Munira and was as enthusiastic as ever about everything that went on in the house, but she had lost a note of joyfulness and spontaneity in her relations with other people. She was more or less the only one to keep Munira company, sit with her, talk to her, even daring to laugh with het sometimes. I had seen her kiss Munira’s hand quickly as we left one gloomy Tuesday—myself, Munira, Husayn, and Sana—to go to the Kurdish quarter in a final attempt to discover what had happened to Midhat. Despite her childish insistence, it wasn’t logical for her to come with us. We knew that we might be seeing some
unpleasant sights and that out mission was serious and difficult enough without the added complication of having a child around. But Sana complained so much to Munira, begged her, hugged her with tears in her eyes, that Munira managed to overcome her mother’s objections, and that was when I saw Sana kissing Munira’s hand as we went up the street, away from the big door.
Days after the events the quarter was still like a paper house which had been trodden underfoot. The alleyways were not as dark as I had pictured them, and I thought we were hurrying more than we needed to. An urgent pulse went driving through me, convincing me that we would find my brother or at least see where he was staying. So I was hugely disappointed when this white-faced old woman opened the door to us and showed us into a dim courtyard, then asked Husayn if he had any news of Midhat. How we were going to find any clues to his whereabouts there if they were asking us about him? The old man, the Hajji, whose mind was obviously confused, saw us and began repeating names and strange stories in Turkish. Then Munira talked with the old woman, who seemed to realize intuitively that she had something to do with Midhat. She took her by the hand, sat her down beside her on the wooden seat, and began talking to her about the last few days. I was upset and sad, and felt that I was crumbling to pieces inside. Munira listened with an expression of desperate curiosity as the old woman told her how Midhat had gone out a few days before, Saturday evening as far as she could remember, when it was raining heavily, and not come back. He had left them on their own with nothing to eat. She said that she had known that he wouldn’t come back and had tried to make him stay indoors, but they had both known in their hearts that his mind was taken up with other matters. She had said goodbye to him and told him to take care, and perhaps after all he was safe and sound somewhere out there. Then she instinctively reached out a hand to Munira and squeezed her arm, telling her not to worry because he was a good man whom nobody would wish to harm.
The Long Way Back Page 34