I listened to the noise and yelling, the crying of children, men blowing their noses, and the shouts of the mothers in the corner of the compartment, passing out objects and snacks. They sat on their old suitcases, which were lashed shut with thick, frayed ropes. The women’s heads were covered with black bands, from which twisted threads hung down, new and clean, reaching as far as their eyelids. Some pushed us inside and sat down, crowding near Farida.
Adil and I looked at one another. No face looked like Mahmoud’s. No girl limped like Firdous. No odour from anyone’s mouth was like my mother’s. My grandmother drew out her black prayer beads and began to tell them, paying no attention to her surroundings. My aunt picked at some morsels of food and put the rest in a bag, but Grandmother did not touch even a crust of bread. Her cloak was wound all round her body. She watched Farida, and said, in a soft but firm voice: “Wrap your cloak round your body well.” The men’s and women’s eyes stripped my aunt of her clothing. I looked round at everything about me. The man with the headropes looked like Haj Aziz, but his face was older and less bright. I watched the man sitting far away rolling tobacco in paper, moistening his lips, swallowing, and looking at my aunt, lighting his cigarette, sighing, and then raising his voice in an old southern song, in which he was joined by the soldiers heading home on leave. Most of the women looked like Umm Suturi and Umm Aziz.
A voice sounded, alone, from a woman we could not see in all the confusion: “Whoever has not made the pilgrimage to Lord Hussein has wasted his life!”
Laughter, shouting, and singing. The men’s cloaks, and new trousers and jackets. Men’s trousers, wrinkled, ironed, old, coloured, long enough to touch the floor, short enough to see holes in socks. We smelled the stink of feet and the odour of sweaty armpits. The women shouted with joy and trilled as they recited the names of Ali Ibn-Abi Talib and his children.
Food appeared: skewers of kebab, grilled goat’s testicles, and flat loaves of bread that had become cold and wrinkled. Onions and green tomatoes. The movements of chewing and swallowing in front of me made me join them, and I asked one of them for half a piece of bread and a skewer of kebab. I reached out and took an onion, sat among them and ate. I did not look at my aunt. Everyone was belching.
The boys and girls wore cheap clothes, and their shoes were scruffy. Their socks were uneven – one high, the other low. The girls’ ribbons hung down to their chests, and their necks were bare and spotted with grease. I did not know what to wipe my hands on, so I left them as they were and looked at my fingers. I got up and walked back to my seat. Farida was wrapped up, but left part of her chest visible. I looked at my grandmother. She had said before we left that “You will wear an abaya when we get to Karbala.” I saw my abaya underneath the containers of food; Umm Suturi had brought it. I saw the men above our heads and around us. The young men were smoking, coughing, and staring. I turned my head towards the window.
My father had come from Karbala the previous year. He placed a quarter dinar in my hand and said reluctantly, “Take Adil and go play on the swings. Hold on to him tightly when he’s on it. If anything happens to him, I’ll kill you.”
Iqbal stood silently at the door of the house. She drew another quarter dinar out of her neckline and buried it in my hand, and pushed us outside without a word.
This was the first holy day I had a new dress. It was yellow, and the waist had a shiny belt of delicate satin, a scrap from the cloth of our new quilt. New yellow ribbons adorned my braids. Umm Suturi had stitched my dress in two hours, and Farida finished sewing the back and the sleeves. I was walking, picking off threads and blowing them into the air. Nuriya had sent Adil his new clothes from Karbala.
Firdous and Mahmoud stood in front of the door to their house, Suturi, Hashim, and Nizar waited in the spacious lot behind our houses. That is where the girls and boys of the neighbourhood celebrated.
We walked round the grimy ice cream carts, whose rusty wheels stopped almost as soon as they got rolling, so the ice cream vendor had to hit them to right them. We stood by them. Inside them were large tins surrounded by crushed ice dyed red, yellow, and brown. Small tancoloured plates and old spoons. The man sold us some and we ate it. We crunched the ice between our teeth, turning our lips different colours. We reached in for a second tin of cola in their dark-green bottles. We kept the cold in our mouths and went to see blind Umm Aziz, who had enlarged her palm platter and placed coloured lollipops on it, spun sugar attached to thin sharp sticks, all on another palm fibre platter. We stood in front of her and started our game here. We wrapped scallop-edged five-fils coins in glossy silver-coloured paper; we did this well until we had covered the milled edges, so that when she felt each coin she thought it was a dirham. She was fooled, and we took everything on the trays. A few minutes later, all of a sudden, her voice split the air cursing us and our parents. Adil went back and gave her all his money. Mahmoud, Hashim, Nizar, Firdous, Suturi, and I licked the lollipops and threw the sticks on the ground, putting the candy floss in our mouths, eating and not caring. We went to the fried seed seller and bought dried chickpeas, peanuts, and black and red raisins. We munched them and the ink ran on to our fingers from the words on the old notebook pages in which the nuts were wrapped. The sound of whistles began to lead the way. Paper kites of all colours filled the air. Hands pulled the kite strings and tails, which rose and fell like Euphrates birds as the wind blew. The boys and girls counted their fils and pennies and grasped them tightly. The young men of the neighbourhood stood around in new dishdashas and wide leather belts, keeping their money in linen bags between the waist and stomach. They called out to everyone using the swings. Among the lofty palm trees the heavy ropes waited for our small hands. I placed Adil on one swing and gave him a vigorous push: “Hold the rope tightly, Adouli!” I got on another swing: “Mahmoud, push me as hard as you can – don’t worry about me.”
My feet flew high up into the hot air. I saw the roofs of the houses and the red buses, the laundry lines and the window panes. My braids leaped with me as I pumped myself higher. I saw Firdous, silent and serene. She watched me go up and down. Suturi pushed Adil and I shouted: “Harder, Mahmoud, harder!” The voice of the man holding the rope: “That’s five fils’ worth.” I tottered as I slid from the sky to the ground.
The ground was dirt, pebbles, and broken bricks. We slid along, raising clouds of dust that got into our eyes. Wagons drawn by skinny horses passed before us. The drivers called out, “One ride, ten fils.”
We all got in and stretched our legs out, all crowded in on one another. We all had whistles and brightly coloured paper pinwheels that spun in our hands when we blew on them. Our voices rose in song: “We miss you sweetheart, God we miss you, It’s been a long time since we parted.” We applauded and made jokes, and shouted in one voice: “Hey! For God’s sake speed it up!” The horses looked like Umm Aziz. The cart took us round. The streets had been recently paved and were crowded with people and automobiles. We rode up the dirt dam and went down Royal Cemetery Street. This was where the first Queen of Iraq was buried, the mother of King Faisal II and the sister of the regent. We stood up in school in the morning and the teacher, Miss Nabila, cried in front of us. We all bowed our heads, and they lowered the flags everywhere for forty days. We cried for the Queen, whose photograph we had never seen, and when we went home we were proud to give our families the news: “Queen Alia is dead.”
The sun shone into our ears and eyes. We put our arms around one another’s shoulders, and Mahmoud’s hand went past Firdous’s back and reached mine. I grew hotter; his hand was near my braids. Firdous never opened her mouth or closed her eyes. She was stubborn on the inside and shy on the outside, a little taller than you. Her complexion was wheaten, and a violet green lay deep inside her eyes; they were narrow and bright. Her eyelashes were thick but short, and her teeth were widely spaced, with a layer of plaque. Her lips were dry, as if always parched with thirst. When she spoke, she panted, and when she quarrelled, her voice was a shrill shriek. Her jerky breathing crackled. She charmingly mispronounced the r-sound in the back of her throat. When she laughed, she laid her palm over her mouth. When she walked, she drew her left leg back and heaved it forward. Her pelvis had been malformed from birth. She did not play out in the street until she was seven. They called her Firdous the Lame.
The day they moved to your neighbourhood you stood in front of her. You looked into each other’s eyes. She was prettier than you. Her skin was tender, and she was plump – and quiet. At first neither of you spoke. She held an old, small, ugly, frightening rag doll in her hand; around it were the remnants of scraps of coloured cloth, charcoal, chalk, string, scissors, and pens. She would draw and sew, smudging and re-drawing the lines of the face with the charcoal, changing the angle of the nose. She held a pen and moved quickly across the cloth. She put earrings on the ears, made some of the eyes blind, distorted some of the faces, carved and cut the cloth of the rag dolls. She made the faces look insolent, like monkeys, like beasts, recalling all the animals in her books, the gardens, and streets. Eyebrows disappeared, eyes danced, teeth broke, and blood flowed on to the rags. Hers was a strange toy, one-legged, or with both legs cut off.
You stood, watching, not getting tired, and she did not look at you: “Sit down. Why are you standing up?”
“Why not come out so we can play in the street? I don’t like playing indoors.”
She did not reply. Anything she did not like, she did not reply to. Suddenly she opened up the doll’s mouth as wide as possible, pulled off one leg, and threw it to the floor. “Look, it’s Firdous the Lame, and this is Huda the Shameless.”
“Fine, fine. Come here on the steps, we won’t go far.”
“But stay with me.”
I stayed with her. At first she did not believe it. She did not hate anyone for walking on ahead of her, but she confided in herself, and in everyone around her, that she was Firdous, who never waited for anyone to take her by the hand and walk with her. The days and hours passed but the only thing she worked at was her leg. She lifted her dress in front of you so you could see the thigh with the old flesh. She always listened closely for the voice of her small, delicate cells: “Look, everything’s quiet now, but as soon as I start walking, it’s something else again.”
Firdous was something else again. She was best in the class at school. She was quiet, reasonable, and clever, as immersed in silence as if constantly drunk. She kept her dignity and never relinquished it in front of me, either. In the street, no one ever again dared to call her Firdous the Lame. She abandoned herself to me and I led her, hugged her, and she bore her reputation and mine too. She did not like to make acquaintances or to meet new people. Her curiosity went down to her limbs and stayed there.
Everyone recognized her steps when she came to the house. We went from one class to the next, from secret to secret, and changed. I lifted my arm so she could see the downy hair of my armpit. She looked timidly, then began to count the number of hairs. We stood together, measuring our heights, arms, plumpness or skinniness. The layers of sound and passage of secrets from mouth to mouth. The murmur of breasts, the chastity of speech about the absent children of the neighbourhood. She had time for dreams, and assessed the boys of our street: “Mahmoud is yours. Adil is shy and sweet. Cross-eyed Hashim makes us laugh. Suturi the bird boy is a devil like you. And he is just for me.”
He was Nizar, one year younger than she, but taller, uglier, cleverer, and quieter than everyone else. She had not made approaches to him; she did not know how to reveal the secret. She stirred up her imagination with it at first, then hung around him, not wanting to deny anything. She was jealous of everything and anything, in a way that we did not know how to prepare for. He was hers alone. She talked to herself about him every day, in front of me and when I was not with her. Pretending to be talking about herself, not about him. She tried to quantify his soul syllables through the number of letters in his name; she multiplied them by the number of letters in her name, then added the remainder, and Nizar appeared before her like a treasure. She always said, “Him.” She was terribly benevolent towards him, always saying:
“He’s sensible. I don’t like good-looking boys. It’s almost that good looks are scary. We’re a lot alike.” I said nothing, and she went on: “Sometimes I wake up at night and look at Mahmoud while he’s sleeping. Mahmoud is nice-looking, I know, but I don’t see him that way. Everyone looks nice when they’re sleeping. I only like the quiet ones. Nizar is quiet – as if only I understand him. As if he talks just for me, and is quiet for me. Sometimes Mahmoud is like Nizar, and sometimes he talks a lot.”
“When he talks, what does he say?”
She understood you immediately and replied, “He doesn’t say anything. When your name comes up he goes quiet. Fine – silence is better than saying the wrong thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My mother, for example, doesn’t like you. She says, ‘By God, if Huda were my daughter I would lock her in the house and not even let her see the street.’ ”
“And your father?”
“He says, ‘If God had created Huda in Adil’s place, it would have been better.’ ”
“And you?”
“I’m not ashamed of being lame in front of you.”
This was the first time she used the word that made up her title in front of me. I never saw her tears, but I cried in front of her, in front of Mahmoud, and everybody. She left me as I was, crying until I thought my hair and lashes would fall out. I sweated and trembled but she did not come to me. She did not touch me or dry my tears or wipe my nose. She did not think about me, or laugh when I laughed. She was sceptical and high minded. She stretched her leg out before me, spread her dress out, and covered her knee, moving as if she were feverish. Strangely, she looked like our class teacher, Miss Qadriya. She looked at me and at the other girls as if seeing them for the first time. She laced her fingers together on her chest and did not move. She looked at me as if I were one of her dolls. I did not envy her or hate her, or look at her, or forget her. Before me, behind me, her looks, her breaths, her appearance. Firdous came to me, taking the first step with only her left foot. She showed it to me. She got up, moved, and took her first step with her arm against the wall. When she reached the steps she stood there. She stretched her neck into the lane and took a calm look all round. The neighbours’ houses; muddy streams; the pregnant house cats. Alley cats from other streets. The neighbourhood men walking by. Housewives sitting on their stone steps. The street in front of us was important and confusing, crowded with bodies and ideas, radiating fear and illusions. She stood there, leaning her pelvis against the doorway as I stood beside her, hand in hand. Our hands were touching. She did not clasp my hand, but let me clasp hers. She never hurried for anything or trembled before anything. I never saw her afraid. It was as if she had bent the tree of fear under her arm and torn off its leaves, eaten its branches, still waiting in its shade for something greater than fear.
Firdous. This was the first holy day where I had not taken her in my arms and kissed her. She gave me a present of money, saying, “Spend it – buy everything you want for yourself. Only don’t make me play on the swings.”
“What if we play on them together? Would you do that?”
She did not answer. The five boys pushed us and she clutched the rope in one hand, with her other arm around my waist. She never batted an eyelid. She did not falter, but her face became livid and then went pale. We swung up high, and I only looked at her. She looked only up at the sky. We swung down and flew up. I shouted and sang as I watched her feet in the air in front of me. I knocked my shoes against hers and pinched her leg. She did not hit me or push harder against me. She did not frown at me or see anyone before her. Her eyes were fixed. Her lips were dry, and her voice could not sound, no matter what. When the swing swayed, the boys crowded around us and we slid off. Everyone laughed, everyone but she. Nizar came near her, and they looked into each other’s eyes calmly. She took a cold bottle of drink from his hand and said, “Thank you, Nizar.” She walked alone ahead of us. She stopped but did not turn around. I reached her, panting. She said, as faintly as a voice coming from a well, “I wish Nizar had agreed to ride the swing with us.”
This train looked like the swing. We stopped for a long time, then walked along slowly. They boarded and disembarked at the stations. The voices of the pedlars selling cigarettes, chewing gum, and cold drinks. The stations were ruins, workers’ rooms demolished in the middle. The rail employees in their dark blue clothing boarded the train, checked tickets, coughed, and looked at my aunt. I stared hard at them. I got up several times, and Farida pulled me roughly and pushed me down by the window. Adil had not run out of patience as I had. He was tired and fell asleep on my grandmother’s lap. I watched him and thought him to be more beautiful than the birds flying before me, the low houses painted bright colours, yellow, black, and a dirty shade of turmeric. The trees stood alone, naked, and dry, not moving as we passed them. Shops and garages were halfway open. Old, overturned automobiles, bicycles boys had dragged through the streams. Iraqi flags, limp in the heat and warm air, hung over police stations and official offices.
My grandmother had still not smoked or had anything to eat. I said to her:
“Grandma, I’ll get you a snack. You haven’t eaten anything since last night.”
“We’ll eat kebabs in Karbala, at the shrine. They call them Karbala kebabs.”
“What about my father?”
“What about him?” asked Farida crossly.
“Will we go and see him?”
Grandmother stroked Adil’s hair, not looking at us.
“We’ll bring you and Adil to him, and we’ll go to the holy shrine.”
“And after?”
“And after?” she said severely. “We are not going to his house. If he wants to see us, let him come to the shrine.”
“But we – ”
“What about you? If he takes you to his house, go. Your new brothers are there. One-eyed Nuriya is there. By God, she killed Iqbal.” My grandmother’s voice was clear and decisive: “God took Iqbal. Don’t listen to this talk. Give him our regards. Kiss his hand, and tell him God will bless him if he does honest work. I’m longing to see him and hear his voice. I want him to come to the house. I’d accept it if he got upset, or if he got drunk and the men carried him to the house. I’d accept it if he beat you. Tell him, ‘Your mother wishes you health and happiness and prosperity.’”
She lowered her voice. She removed her spectacles and wiped away her tears. Adil shifted in her lap. He hugged her and sighed deeply on her breast.
“Come here. Where are you going?”
“Let her walk about a little.”
Adil came after me and walked behind me. “Stop a little.”
We jumped over the luggage. Everyone’s eyes were on us. Their faces inspected us. We stood before the window, finding a place among the young men and girls. We stuck our heads out of the window; the hot air blinded us as we staggered and bumped into the others gathered at the window. I saw numbers of flies settling on the glass and on the nostrils of the people around us. I shooed them away but they came back.
“It’s one-eyed Nuriya who killed Iqbal?”
“Are we really going to my father’s house?”
“If you want to go, go.”
“And you?”
“No.”
“But if he takes us, what will we tell him?”
“Grandmother wants to see him, even if just at a distance. We’ll tell him that.”
“He might get cross and not come.”
“He might come with us.”
Iqbal cut my father in two.
The train stopped here, at Sakkat al-Hindiya, for a long time. It was the first time we had visited Karbala and the first time we’d ridden in a train. The call to noon prayer, the figures spreading out rugs and carpets on the floor in front of us, facing Mecca.
“Grandma, we’ll get off for a little while here.”
Farida replied, in her gruff voice, “Stay where we can see you. Don’t go far.”
The air burned us as if it were coming from a furnace. The tall trees around us surrounded the rest stop at Hindiya. Naked youths swam in the deep brooks, and women dangled their feet in the muddy water. Some of them were bent over, washing and rinsing clothes and squeezing them dry. They scrubbed dishes and metal pots with mud, washed them off, and turned them over on the ground.
Sheep, cows, and goats wandered before us, drinking from the other end of the brook, making their sounds and eating the greenyellow grass. The sound of love songs came from the other side of the brook, interrupted by loud cursing. Adil did not move; he was standing underneath the window of the train. He was watching me dipping my hand into the brook, washing my face and looking at the women, who looked back at me and laughed together.
Again the train released its sound. My hair was matted with sweat and my clothes stuck to my skin. I smelled my armpit. My aunt had a disgusting smell, like burning excrement. I would sit far away from her. “We’ll be in Karbala shortly.”
Every time I heard my grandmother’s voice I thought I was hearing it for the first time. Adil left me space next to him. The toilets on the train were far away. My aunt said, “They’re all filthy and full of diseases.”
The sky looked like my father’s face. We all rocked forward and were pitched on top of one another. We were at Karbala Station.
My aunt attacked me with a stinging voice before I disembarked: “Where are you going? Come back. I swear, if your father saw you running round like this he’d kill you in front of everyone. Take this cloak and wrap yourself in it the way you’re supposed to.”
“Hold Adil’s hand tightly.”
“If either of you gets lost, say, ‘We are the children of Officer Jamil al-Maarouf.’ ”
I stumbled and fell, and Adil laughed at me. After a few minutes of walking I began to scratch my head. Every moment I put my cloak in order, it immediately tumbled from my head. My grandmother’s voice was lost amid the clamour of all the automobiles and the holiday noise. There were throngs of innumerable people. A woman who looked like a black cloud moved in front of us on the ground, so all we could see were some of the colours above people’s heads, the children’s white and blue dishdashas as they rode on their mothers’ shoulders.
My grandmother and aunt dropped their veils over their faces. Now we could only distinguish them by their voices. The men in front of the shops wore white clothes and undershirts, and all their wares were spread out: rugs, carpets, fabrics of every colour, gold, swords that glinted whenever the sun caught them, fruits, vegetables, watermelon slices set out in rows on large platters, and glasses of cold laban. There were bookshops and shelves of thick, dark-green books whose titles were written in gold. There were pictures of Imam Ali, behind which forked swords shone. I forgot to draw the cloak around me and one of the women smacked me on the chest and kept walking. We stopped behind them and all got into a horse-drawn carriage, then sat opposite them. My grandmother said, “Take us to Karbala Prison.”
“Yes, today is the holiday visit. Who have you got over there?”
“My father,” said Adil.
“God willing, he’ll be safely released.”
Grandmother, who was praying, replied, “No, he works there.”
“Hmm.”
He lashed the horses vigorously, and they led the carriage at a run through Karbala’s paved lanes, high and bare, filthy and hot. We went a long way and emerged outside the city, where the air was dusty but the sky revealed. There were no plants, no trees, no houses or garages, no cars, no donkeys. The soil was as white as lime, and the fine, delicate dust settled on us. The carriage crushed the pebbles as it ran over them on the long dirt road.
“By God, I’m only taking you there for the children’s sake. No one goes there at this hour.”
“We’ll drop the children off and go back to the shrine with you,” said my grandmother.
“This is the prison. We’re here.”
Adil’s voice: “I’m afraid, Grandma.”
Grandmother took him by the head, hugged and kissed him, and Ipulled at him. We got off. The cloak fell to the ground. I picked it up, brushed it clean, and put it on my head, the tray in my other hand.
“Listen, if you don’t come back soon we’ll leave.”
“But if – ”
“You’ll come with us to the shrine. We’ll spend the night there.”
We took our first step on this ground. We could see the faraway building; it looked like an upside-down lorry and had a high wall the colour of used iodine. All I could see behind it was the sky, with creatures dispersed around it, whose cloaks shone when the sun caught them. Children turned their heads toward the gates which were higher than the gates of our mosque, wide and intimidating, with iron plates in the middle and on the sides and round iron rings from the top to the bottom. The children played with them, poking their fingers inside and pushing their bodies against them. There was a huge hole in the middle in which I saw a key that did not move.
Two jeeps were parked close together in front of the gate. Women were leaning on them and some children were asleep inside. The doors and roofs were open. There was a smell of burning rubbish whenever the wind blew, and the rancid smell spread.
Adil walked in silence, playing with the pebbles and kicking them away. All eyes were on us, and did not leave us. I stood at the gate and placed the tray on the ground, letting the cloak slip down to my shoulders. I looked around me. One of the women asked in a low voice, “Do you have a watch?”
“No.”
“Visiting hours start at three.”
I knocked at the door and the children laughed at me and crowded around me. I looked at the movement of my palms, as if they were the wings of a fly on the verge of death. I lowered my head to the big hole and shouted, “Mister, we are the children of Officer Jamil.”
The children fell silent, and the women turned away from us. A few minutes later the door creaked open sharply and the face of a police officer appeared before us.
Everyone moved towards me in a wave, standing and surrounding us in a circle. They grabbed us by the shoulders and pushed us away, and the man wheeled around, searching for us among the throng. My cloak swept the ground, and I grasped the tray and Adil’s hand. The man drove the people away and walked on, holding our hands and pushing us ahead of him. He turned to them irritably:
“How many times have we said visiting hours start at three?”
Before going in I looked back to see the carriage. My grandmother’s head looked like an eagle’s. I waved to her. We then entered, and the gate closed behind us.