Let us forget fear and put it aside, but it is present and tyrannous.
Only Farida beat it before her, and did not speak to it without mocking it. She approached her fear with natural muscles and found it work in the end: to make Munir stagger, with the rest looking on. My aunt remained the virgin, lifting up the title and contemplating it day and night. She took off the black dress, washed her dusty skin, and proceeded to put on a seductive nightgown; madness returned to her face.
She began to beat us, Adil and me, and Grandmother accepted it. She only wanted her: blameless.
Her voice sounded like a trumpet after months of long muteness. She went into the bath and wept there, shouted, and unleashed her voice upon us. She came out nearly naked, stood in the middle of the house, shouting, while Grandmother stood before her, praying and breathing on her, seizing and pulling her, encircling her with her arms:
“Dear, I have my voice back. Are you listening or not?”
She said: “Huda dear, Adouli, come and listen, dears, I’m afraid she’ll go hoarse. I’m afraid so much talk and she’ll lose her voice. Perhaps I should cut back a little and be like you, and talk little. What do you think, dears. Will I lose it?”
Farida changed. Her voice was a web of heavy-headed pins, and her silence too assaulted us. She took up all my father’s weapons and plunged them into our flesh and our bodies, and we recalled Jamil, gasping. She beat us and we all cried, all four.
Grandmother held her head: “Please, Farida, my dear. Your voice has come back and it won’t go away. God bless you, my dear, put your clothes on. I’m afraid you’ll get ill.”
“No, no, I want to go out, I want to walk in the streets and see the neighbours, take a walk, and sing, and say hello to everyone. I want to hear my voice again. I’m afraid of lies.”
You stood far off.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you listening to me? Don’t worry, I won’t beat you from now on. This is my voice. Tell me, Huda, have you gone mad?”
When she began to curse or laugh, when she insulted everyone, when she was cruel or talked nonsense, nothing could deflect her violence.
My father came several times, looking weary, sallow, and old. His clothes were faded and his shirt wrinkled, his boots dirty, and his face pale, melancholy, and unshaven, as if he had emerged from a shroud.
He did not shout or curse. He did not strike or torment us. That Jamil had been stolen for good, and we were even more frightened. When we were quiet he was uncomfortable, and when we went somewhere he vanished. When we stood in front of him he looked down at the ground, and entered into obedience to all things.
When he went into his first room in the middle of the house, he wandered. He handled the Qu’ran and stood a long time before it. He opened the closet and touched his best clothes, never looking in the mirror.
His eyes were lifeless, as if exhausted by hatred and rage. He did not take Adil in his arms, or call out to either of us. He was not tender, he was dejected and quiet. He now had other children whose entreaties and shouts he could hear: Saad, Raad, and Ali. He wanted a new goldcoloured star hanging on his shoulder to soothe his grief, so that he could move to Baghdad as an awesome captain. He continued to wait for that star for months and months, wild-eyed and menaced. Wafiqa deluged him with smiles and supplications, but he kept an even greater distance, and we were even more afraid. Grandmother sent for him and he did not come right away. When he went to Baghdad, he came and went at night, and he listened to Wafiqa’s feeble voice:
“Listen well, Abu Adil. This is not the time for blame. Your sister must be divorced. The courts know her predicament, and we don’t want scandals. Anything you say goes.”
He did not raise his head or grumble.
“And so?”
“I sent you the claim the government issued on this house. They want to close off the street and the whole neighbourhood. I found a house in al-Salikh. Near your aunts’ house, old but cheap – they were going to demolish it. The government will give us money, and you have to help us out a little, dear Jamouli. I know your situation; you’ll get that new star, God willing, and hang it on your shoulder. Leave everything to me. What your mother says she does.”
He raised his head to look at her, and said in a barely audible voice, “Is that true, Mama?”
“Your promotion was delayed for a year and a half. Your friends have become police captains. The world has changed and you have to change as well. Jamil, leave off drinking and swearing. How can you be promoted to captain when every day you’re cursing the captain and the cabinet minister? You shout and you’re quarrelsome.”
She was quiet for a moment, watching him.
“Now get up and let’s go and see the new house. As to later on – God will sort Farida out.”
I did not hear the rest of what they said. I went out into the street and Adil followed me. For the first time I heard Adil’s voice sounding coarse:
“It’s true, Huda, we’re going to be thrown out of this house.”
I did not reply. We walked among the people hand in hand. Everything was in its place. The smell of cooking reached my nose, and I heard the voices of women as they dumped out dirty washing water in front of us. We walked along the muddy paths, through the mire and rubbish. Hashim rode an old bicycle, riding and falling. I turned away from him and he from me. We stopped in front of every bench, counting them and never making a mistake. We saw the holes in curtains and I hit them with my hand and moved on. All the residents chatted and exclaimed. We painted our names onto the metal electricity poles. The water pipes were rusty, and water leaked out of them.
The baker’s shop was closed up. Abu Mahmoud sluggishly sold his wares, with crumbs of cheese scattered underneath the trays, and flies swarming over them. He did not shoo them away or cover the cheese with the palm branches which had yellowed and withered while the rest had fallen to the ground. He did not look up at Rasmiya, who was still limping from her beating. She plied her trade sticking needles in people’s thighs and arms. We passed by her house, from which emanated the smell of surgical spirit and dried blood.
I saw Suturi and Nizar and bowed my head down. They watched in silence. Mahmoud was still absent.
There were still long queues in front of the shop of Hubi the butcher. He was back selling his wares looking vexed, neither singing nor joking. The pebbles and bricks of our grandfather’s great house were strewn about.
I touched the walls of the houses, the gaps in the corners and the grains of dirt. I clung to the ample sand, and my dreams ran into the drains. We wailed, and the streets were changed beyond recognition by violence. We wept and comforted ourselves that all this outcry was warmth and that all this dust was roses.
“You’re always quiet, Huda. Where shall we go? Now we’re far from home.”
“If you’re afraid, go home. I want to go farther.”
“No, I’m not afraid. But I want to cry and I can’t.”
Wafiqa said: “They used the last of their tears on the roof the day Iqbal died.”
Blind Umm Aziz gathered her palm leaf tray, counted her coins, put them in a purse, and tucked it into her breast pocket. Abu Masoud the painter remembered that he had forgotten the light in his shop, opened the door and turned the light off, and turned to us. We looked at him. For the first time I saw him seeming dignified and handsome.
“Hello, uncle.”
“Hello, my girl.”
You wanted to throw yourself on his chest and sob into his shirt. The great lock on the door to his shop gleamed, and our eyes gleamed.
“Huda, where are we going? I’m not tired, just tell me where we’re going.”
Walk, Adil. Turn over the new visitors in your hands: doubt, remorse, and our friends who have stayed behind. Everyone walks, sleeps, closes their eyes, restores their bodies, and you alone are a traitor. Walk and don’t be afraid of the muezzin’s voice, or the stories of forgotten friendship. Don’t sigh or move too quickly. Stay beautiful and quiet; stay mournful and afflicted, listen to Suturi’s birds flapping their wings in this bloody sky. Spread your hands out and smell the sandstorm in the spring evenings as you fill your pockets with fragrant orange flowers, and throw them at Khulud’s house. Smile Adil, if the stones gilded with dreams shout, if the concrete immersed in moaning lies, if the tiles laden with fever, fear and pain grow weary. Do not apologize for your nostalgia, Adil. Wafiqa once said that we were all sick. The books are sick. The table and love are sick. Do not bend or turn. Stay where you are. There is no time left in the world, and spending an hour here is uncanny. Laugh, Adil, at your wandering father, your absent mother, your proud grandmother, your diabolical aunt and your sister who did not love only you.
We stood in front of the dirt dam, pointing to the pessimistic Tigris and Khulud’s house behind us. We looked at all the people there: You and Firdous will not meet again. She was the one to leave you. All those whom I loved left me, and all that time retraced its tracks to its original place. It went past my old dress and the ugliness of others and said, ‘This far and no further. Do not turn back to pursue me, and do not look at me.’ The dark mocking Tigris – I never do anything in front of it with ease. I was savage and cursed it with obscenities. But my thoughts turned to my father. I understood fatherhood, and instantly my father became precious. In our street, only my father was real. He never concocted stories or lied, never won or remembered.
Come and let me into your world. Give me the instruments with which you once beat me. Beat me, father, use electricity cables. Beat me, then sew up my wounds. Beat me and leave your marks on my flesh and face. Beat me and I will obey you a little.
We were attacked by pebbles and the fishermen’s nets. The distant houses packed with lies attacked us, but they looked young and pretty.
I learned lying early. I lied as easily as washing my face. Lying consumed me, and I memorized it. In the street we did not examine the truth or have time for it. We only told the truth when we were quarrelling, ill or had failed. When our truthfulness piled up, we agreed to wash it out of our mouths.
After six years or six months, take up the axes and chop up the flesh of memories. Do not shout or resist. Begin the parting now, but do not think of farewells.
They took us to the new house. You did not examine anything, not the guest room or the guests of this pain, not the little dead garden. You looked in silence and spat on the ground. The trees lined the street in a different pattern, “You will grow up anew here,” Grandmother said.
“But I don’t know anyone here to grow up with,” Adil replied.
“Here things will be completely different,” Grandmother said.
“But the fence is low,” said Farida.
“We’ll raise it,” said my father.
Umm Mahmoud struggled like a fish.
“Our new house is bigger. Mahmoud will have his own room and so will Firdous. There will be room for guests and for new neighbours.” She sighed, coughed, and added, “The boy’s school is close by. He’ll graduate from secondary school this year.”
Firdous withdrew, becoming remote and cruel. She did not come or speak. You were the one who went to her. Your first parting was like your first meeting. You did not speak. You did not look at one another. You both fell silent. You did not touch. The suitcases were ready, and I could hardly recognize the house. Mahmoud’s and Firdous’s rooms seemed to me like a slaughterhouse. Everything was tied up, the beds and covers, the carpets, the kitchen utensils. Do not withdraw, do not cry, do not laugh. “Is it possible that I’ll never see Firdous or hear her voice again?” I felt as sour as vinegar that had gone bad. I did not take astep or offer my hand. I did not want to see what was in front of me. I approached her and she stood before me, her head erect as if she had defeated me. I took her by the arms and shook her, but she did not shake. I bowed my head and looked at her legs. She was ready to fall down. I sensed that she was struggling to hide her emotions, then her gratitude towards me surged forward with her tears, without words. We tried to make the time pass quickly by filling it with small talk.
“My mother knows your new house and your aunt knows our new house.”
“Give my regards to Mahmoud, but don’t say any more to him than that.”
My tears did not flow. They found a different way of expressing themselves, and they held themselves back.
I did not stay long. When they left, when they took their suitcases and dreams, when they took all the streets, those things would be the only things that had power over you. I slammed the door behind me and went out.
I went to everyone in his house and told Grandmother:
“We won’t go until everyone else has gone.”
Everything in our house was being packed. The chaos and confusion, and our very bone marrow. You go up to the roof and attack this universe. You put the legacy of the wedding into wooden boxes. You worked slowly, coughed, but did not cry. You looked at what was left in your hands. Anthills and cocoons, the trails of black and grey spiders, and dead locusts. There was no sign of Suturi’s birds in the sky.
My father became effusive with his compassion: he became tender and indulgent. But my imagination had not killed his old cruel self, and my dreams had not conjured up such an honourable gentleman. He got his sister divorced from her cousin, and sorted out the new house. You had never known him to be so weak and in such a state. We feared for him more than before and our spirits were troubled.
Every week they took us to the new house. All the houses there were the same: two storeys, with bright exterior colours and sparkling windows. The children wore long trousers and clean shirts. All the girls walked confidently. I saw no lame children on my way, or any cross-eyed like Hashim. I did not see, on any of the fences of the houses, the title “nurse” scrawled in black coal, or stone steps. The entrances were roofed and the garages were spacious, the gardens were terraces with rose bushes and orange and tangerine trees. Each house was separated from its neighbour by fences painted white and light blue. From outside, the curtains looked very thick, and I could see no one behind them.
When we went home in the evening, we immediately went to bed. When everyone was quiet, I dreamed that I was walking. I turned on the taps and gathered up the soap in Baghdad to wash tongues and intestines. I forgot speech and swallowed its remnants. I shook, and stamped on the floor, and Mahmoud and I ate warm bread fresh from the oven. We divided it in half and watched each other fearlessly. When we saw the aeroplane in the sky, we laughed and smacked one another. Mahmoud thrust his face into mine as he said:
“When we grow up, Huda, we won’t beat our children, and we won’t pull their hair, and we won’t make them run away to the shore in the afternoon. We’ll go and swim with them. We’ll ride the trains, and who knows? Maybe we’ll ride in that aeroplane. Perhaps we won’t see each other much. That’s not important. I will see you when I grow up; I’ll wait for your news from far away. Don’t worry – I won’t change.”
I learned to write those expressions – I won’t change; don’t worry – every day of the week. Every hair on your head enters the race that is life. The runners tremble. The banners are wiped clean of writing: yellow, red and black. You run alone in the public squares. You do not listen to orders, you fall and you get up. You emerge from the crowd a zero, a fraction. Mahmoud was gone in the first round. He never said good morning or goodnight. Between the ‘good’ and the ‘morning’ came this wave of walking crowds. Do not ride it until the sand comes up. Do not befriend it until everyone joins you on top of it. Go in the opposite direction, and stop crying. What you are searching for you lose, and everything that you touch flies away. The neighbours lied to you, so you went to Rasmiya, Abu Masoud, Umm Suturi, Abu Hashim, and Umm Aziz. You went round that whole part of the neighbourhood. I went out into the vast square, skipped among the dirt and dry, fallen dates, and lifted my arms up to the date palms, felt the laughing tree and the beloved fronds, and brandished in my hand the bunches of golden fruit. I did not see anyone I knew. Everyone had gone far away. There was no weary advice or serious threat, no marvels erupting from the box of the world; no wonders poking their head out of ancient sacks. They left you no key and no wisdom to hang on your ears like earrings; on whose breast will you fling yourself? Who will dry your tears?
Your grandmother and Farida getting ready, arranging things and measuring the height of the walls, the ceilings and the roofs. They shopped, changed things, sold, and managed, tired themselves out and came back more delighted. Jamil came off the train, not riding a car or falling off a horse; he comes as blessed as the corpse of a prince, and goes as pure as a hymn.
My grandmother told him:
“Jamouli, why don’t you remarry? Leave Nuriya to her children and come here. There are a thousand girls who’d want you.”
He did not look at her. It was as if he were breathing his last breath:
“You mean Nuriya can’t come into this house either?”
“You know that. Why do you torment yourself and me with you?”
“All that just for the late Iqbal?”
“And the children. Or did you forget your son?”
“No, I didn’t forget. But Nuriya is pregnant now. Mama, shame on you and me. I won’t divorce her.”
“We’ll look round for you first, and when you get the new star and get transferred to Baghdad and become a police captain, all the families will want you.”
My father disappeared. Liquor incubated his torment. His house in al-A‘dhamiyya was gone. He did not resist, or talk about it, or forgive. He was alone before his uniforms: the hated boots, the sad sidara, the silent pistol the olive-green colour of his uniform, and the prisoners’ cells, all stung him.
Sometimes he visited them. He looked into the little peepholes at night and smiled. He called to them, one after the other. He got some names wrong but did not care. He poured it out before them and told them about the star he had been promised. No one knew what to say to him in reply. All that red dust, those gleaming pebbles and interrogations by night and silence by day flew before him as he tried to escape from the family’s talk and the children’s talk, and the unknown words which would lead him he knew not where. He got drunk and chattered and cursed, longing to be heard.
He needed a different mouth and tongue. Everything before him was silent and forbidden, dreadful and different. He knelt on the ground before the closed doors and wanted to eat the dirt. He patrolled the courtyard, his vision confused by the night. Was this Karbala or was it Iqbal’s original sensuous voice and her cheap perfume?
It was his drunkenness driving his mother and his children, his wife and his sister, his illness and his temptation, and he slid down. He stood and probed his body and limbs. The savour of intoxication was strong, and his body was deranged, and smelled, and waited for the moments to come.
He had doubts about the stars as he gazed up at them in the sky, neither shining nor extinguished he scratched his throat, and groaned. He stood in the prison yard, repeating his children’s names one after the other, and the name of the one living in his wife’s belly.
Nuriya was gaunt, pale, and quick to flare up. She loved him and excited him. When she laughed, she looked at his body, which knew nothing but nightly arguments.
He told her: “If it’s another boy we’ll call him Najm – star.”
“And if it’s a girl?”
“I don’t beget girls.”
“But –
“Huda is a boy. She’s not afraid of me or anyone else.”
He looked ahead of him and sunk inwardly. Nuriya’s body gave him vertigo. When he entered it he forgot everything except the star. He had not counted the columns and rooms of this courtyard. Why had he forgotten to? Its surface was like her thigh, and those eyes inside the peepholes followed him; their breathing, their sighs, and their silence. His legs tensed up. He wanted to piss on the ground. Even his urine sounded intoxicated. He walked and pissed, ran and pissed, not screaming or laughing. The sky appeared perforated to him; like Iqbal’s sick chest. Nuriya and Iqbal. He raced as if the clouds were a silken bed, he flew through the air, the prisoners eyes followed him. He did not open the doors or move away from them. The sidara fell from his head, and he bent over to pick it up, and ran with it.
Alone, he dripped with sweat. No one came near him, neither Sergeant Jasim or Master Sergeant Sadiq. He was like a little star, alone and twinkling, which had slipped from the horizon and landed on a waistcoat.
Suddenly he began to scream. A long cry, a frightening snarl, and drawn-out sob. Alone, he ran, smiting his head with his hand, not seeing the wall in front of him. The walls had all been here. The prisoners had been here with him. Where had everyone gone?
He runs to the big faraway store room. He kicks in its door and lifts up the jerry cans of gasoline. He walks with them and puts them in front of him in the middle of the yard. He opens them, and a carnelianred cataract gushes out. Within seconds, it vanishes into the ground, digging little holes that subdue the surrounding earth.
He dipped the sidara into the can and ignited it. He was working like a gravedigger. His hands went to work, undressing himself. His trousers were on the ground, in flames, and he laughed.
“That’s for Adil.”
The fire blazed and flared up into a fountain of light. His jacket was in his hand.
“This is for Iqbal.”
He grasped the three stars in his hand. His hand was in flames. His fingers went into the fire as he pulled the stars from the shoulder of the jacket. He put them in his mouth. His wounds became unintelligible as the fire entered his mouth and burned his cheeks. He threw the gold stars high into the air, one after the other, and screamed:
“Take them! Give them to someone else! Take them and sell them at the public market. Take them and free me from their colour, shape, and weight. Take them, aren’t you listening?”
He put his hand inside the can and stirred up the clothes with the sidara.
“They were too heavy on my shoulder. They were ugly in my neighbours’ eyes. They were— ”
He pulled his boots off and threw them into the rising flames: “And that is for the head of police.”
The flames spread from the neck area down to the blazing sleeves. His undershirt was on the ground, but by the time he began to take off his long linen drawers, columns of men were running toward him. The staff sergeant and policemen clasped him from every side. They took off their clothes and covered him with them. They brought thick blankets and water hoses, and started to put out the flames burning his fingers and his hair. He laughed loudly and rhythmically and wept:
“I want the star. My mother lied. The captain lied. The star li— ”
He wailed and wept. The men encircled him with their arms. They folded him as they would a garment, firmly grasping his arms, legs and body up to the neck.
He laughed as he was bundled off to Baghdad in a government car. Sergeant Jasim stood by his head, with Nuriya and her mother at his side. In their hands was a letter from the department: dismissed from government service for health reasons.
As we rode in the truck it seemed to me my father was driving. My aunt was in the new house. My grandmother sat beside the driver, and we swayed in the back. The sofa poked us with its wooden legs, and the new bride’s boxes jostled us. We piled together, our feet seeking some footing among all the odds and ends. Our bodies cowered inside our clothes. Adil did not look back. I did not know anyone to wave to. Between the new house to which you moved and the ancient government hospital, the trail made by our blood stretched out like a ribbon that had just been unfurled.