Your father camped out in his room. He opened the window: “Farida, dear, please bring me tea with your sweet hand.”
He began with the Qu’ran. The tea tray, bread, white cheese, and mint leaves. Your father’s sister waited for these roles. She spun wool winter and summer. Your grandmother was on her bed, a Qu’ran in her hand. You children dared not play.
I did not like school, but even so I passed miserably at the end of the year.
Here I could not bear the silence. There was no coughing, no infected blood, no healthy blood. Even the ants lost their way in this house. No one quarrelled with anyone; no one stammered with anyone else. Adil opened his reading book, and dusk fell as he murdered the letters ba, dal, and dhad. You wandered about among them all. You undid your braids and toyed with them. You struck Adil and knocked the book out of his hand, and you trampled the paste for his paper kites. You wanted to hear screaming or a gunshot; no one had screamed or coughed for months. They said she was getting worse with every passing day; the air of Syria was doing her no good; she wanted to breathe the same air as this man.
Through the little glass window at the top of the house, the sky looked grey and black. Time was bewildering: it did not pass quickly, either to let you grow up or to consummate your despair.
You walked in front of the door to the roof which admitted an icy breeze in winter, and dust as fine as powder in summer. You used to stop up the cracks in it with thick plugs of wool.
You went up the stairs in the blink of an eye, and were in front of the door, and when you opened it the whole house shook. If you had remained standing where you were, you would have gone mad. You held the plugs of wool to stuff between the wall and the lock, and looked like a professional thief. The door had to open once.
You stood on the roof; there were no big clouds here, just the sky, and any deal you made with God had not been kept. You asked Him if you might share that traveller’s coughing and illness, but He agreed only to multiply the quarrels between you and those around you. Your father was number one in this respect, and the sky crowded you and pushed you into war. There was no door before you. Where had your grandmother aimed her prayers?
In those years, your father alone was engrossed in planning for this family, producing his own public and private evil.
He married one-eyed Nuriya, the nurse at the government hospital in Karbala, and moved into her old house, to fight with the screams of her mother and brothers into madness. His visits grew more frequent. Every Thursday he visited us, and sometimes he came in the middle of the week. Debts became drafts drawn on the future as he waited for his seed to grow in the belly of his new wife.
“You have not seen her and you never will.” That was your grandmother’s vow. He had organized his own world, which began with drinking and ended with drunkenness.
They said that she had lowered herself with some of the men of the holy city and submitted to various influential characters. They said your father had fallen under her lethal spell. They talked and spread rumours, and your grandmother did not advance or retreat in her decision: “Listen, Abu Adil, as long as I have breath in my body, Nuriya will not set foot in this house. She is your wife – fine. The past is hers and the present is yours, and what comes after is your own business.” His voice rose in grief and sorrow: “Mama! Are you telling me to divorce her? She’s not a nobody. Her mother used to read prayers for Imam Hussein. Her morals, God forgive me, are like anyone else’s, but she’s a nice girl. I’ve lived with her, and she loves me and is very afraid of me. In a few months she’ll have the baby. For the child’s sake let her come here and kiss your hands. Please, Mama, God bless you.”
She did not reply, or turn around, she only looked down. He went out with his head bowed. He set his table: peeled cucumbers, boiled beans, hummus with sumac and lemon squeezed over it. Three empty glasses. He always put out this number of glasses with a bottle of arak. He looked at them; he liked them empty but wanted them full. He whispered to the arak and joked with it; it waited for him and he waited for it.
Across the table, the father waited for lines of caresses. The policeman’s despotism relaxed, and his official clothes came off. He traded his boots for the bare floor, and his bare toes trod upon it. Here he encountered disorder. He was out of prison, and did not harbour anything but love. He acted lovingly toward you each in turn, starting with Adil, calling him and joking with him. He hugged and kissed him, lifted him up in the air and buried him in his chest, then put him down. He put him on his lap, and they looked at one another. He started to read him a book, spelled out the words, and helped him with the arithmetic. He pinched his cheek, saying, “I can never get enough of you.”
Abu Adil leaned his chair against the wall, spread his legs, drank and drank, nibbled one end of a cucumber. He drooped sleeping on Adil’s plump legs.
“God bless you, Adouli, rub my head. My head always aches when Icome here and when I go to Karbala. I feel as if there is a voice calling me. Every day I hear the voice, and every day the voice changes. It sounds like a voice I’ve heard before. I know it from afar and it frightens me. Adouli, everything tires me out – even sleeping makes me tired. Ah, that’s where it aches, there, behind my ear. Dear God, you know when I hit your sister, I cry later in the train. In prison I remember your tears and her tears when I hear the prisoners screaming and crying. You know, Adouli, sometimes I think you should come to see me, there, in the prison, so you can see how I live. Dirt and black death, flies and lice. Locusts and rats are my only friends there.
“Ah. Every time I want to drink until I’m drunk, but every time wake up more sober than before. Your grandmother says arak is a sin. Yes, there’s a lot of sin in this world, but if she tasted arak just once she’d get used to it like me. Don’t be afraid of me, Adouli. I don’t frighten anyone. I’m always afraid, but I don’t want you to be afraid of anyone. Even God Almighty himself doesn’t want just our fear. Adouli? Is it true, that I’m not frightening? Tell the truth. Don’t be afraid.”
He got up and leaned against the wall. Adil was silent, rubbing his fingers together and then raising them to his mouth. He chewed his nails and swallowed them. “Have you had supper?” He nodded yes.
“Go finish your homework. Come here and let me kiss you.”
The call to evening prayer dispersed the voices, and you were consumed by weeping. You cried alone, and your tears made you laugh. The stars were unruly, and this whole horizon was a lie.
The floor was stained, warped, and uneven. When it rained, the rainwater seeped into the cracks, holes, and hollows in the roof of your room. You put out the buckets and heard the water plopping down.
This frayed laundry rope, that scattered and chaotic room, dusty and deserted, the door scorched, and everything in it old: pillows, blankets, broken chairs, boxes broken apart, copper and silver utensils, spoons and dishes. This was your grandmother’s first dowry. She was in love with anything old; every year she came up here, spread out the contents, and began to clean, rub, and polish them. My mother was with her. We all came up here to see our grandmother’s secrets; everyone in the family had a share of this heritage.
Open the boxes and look. Objects that have never been insulted, never been whipped with a lash. They are united in their dust, sleeping where they lie. They are rusty and faded, yet they cling to their silence and passion. They began to address me, to talk to me, and I asked them to confess. They are more beautiful than the others: my father, his sister, Rasmiya’s husband, and Uncle Munir.
Things had this tremendous quality, of becoming pleasure; sleeping between the palms of my hands. My grandmother’s silver spoon, the one she ate from on the day of her first wedding.
Your father would impose his tyranny on you if he knew you were up here. Your aunt, his sister, would hit you, your grandmother would be silent; your mother would not come.
Search and search well, and restore safety to all these things. Organize the converging paths and clear the way for seeking the pardon of all that remains before you.
You were here, and the only window, with its dusty glass, was before you. The neighbours’ clothes were strung along the clothes-lines on their roof, cheap and dragged down by their wetness, touching the ground. The clothes were like people being hanged, and I was waiting for my father to guillotine me.
My father was the same size as me. Our fear of one another had no mask. He could not bear the loss of me, and it was the same with me. We attacked each other’s walls, and did not confuse anything that passed between us. We plotted together, and publicly: the arena, that place of rancour and celebration, all this sameness. We spread out there and waited for one another.
They said, “Huda was suckled by Satan.”
My mother had nursed me only a few days. I drained her milk; I drank only the khishkhash. There you beat longer and harder. They stood, one of them accompanying me to that tent: my father, and I felt as secure as a highwayman.
Night raised up its new inflection. This roof trained me to count the moths that entered my dreams. They entered the bodies and ate away at everything, as I remove one after the other: first of all my father.
The pistol threatened everyone. He carried it and went up behind me. When his fear exploded, we went limp with fear.
He did not pull the trigger. We encircled his footprint and went up to his waist. He was not heavy but he was tall, his shoulders waited for me and his face changed, he changed, smoothing all the paths for me so I might move toward him. Perspiration gathered between his fine, delicate nose and his pendent lips behind which his saliva was gathering. He sprayed it in my face and spat it out in the air between us, as Umm Suturi did in the baths. Then we touched, and at that moment hugged one another, and I pressed my face against his stomach. I clung to him with both arms, though I could not reach all the way around him. This time he was the one who kicked.
I surrounded him, I held him, I clung tightly to him and turned my face up to his and looked above the first blow and he was carried away to me.
He knew my braids perfectly. My hair ribbons did not defend me. The neighbours came up to the roof, growling. Mahmoud was silently weeping; Adil saw my grandmother not uttering a word, approaching, not resisting, but ready. If he overstepped, she would unleash her voice and her hand. The pistol was in his hand, and he was tapping it on your head. You did not cry. Your eyelids shone, your eyes were clear, and your eyelashes were dry. Curses were aimed at your back, and your head was lifted to the sky – the Baghdad sky seemed to belong to a bygone age. The world was like a round table on which your body was sprawled. Father started with the shoulders and descended to the restive arms, to the belly and buttocks. He brandished his pistol: “I swear to God, if you come here again, I’ll kill you!”
At ten you confronted the first policeman in your life, your father. You summoned up all the sins of ten, the rashness and recklessness, the lies and tempting dreams, the yearning to get sunburned in order to shine more: get all this out of your ribcage and celebrate like the feast of Muharram. There I celebrated with the police and summoned to me the insects, black and red ants, and unknown things. The cavities of the locked boxes, I cut the strings of every fact in two, to see, and see, and see. There I opened up to him a fountain of the spirit and did not consent to kill him. If I killed him, who would straighten out my skull? If he died, who would I fight? If he went mad, who would quarrel with me?
Alone, he followed me to learn that I had surpassed him.
My father.
I turned and turned, and six legs stood observing me, eyes bulging out of their sockets without meaning, without hope, without grace, neither mourning nor laughing, nor shouting.
Under that sky my father took me to the gate of Hell; the future was a flaming ball exhaling hostility, its pores covered with blood, dirt, and fear. His voice soared, frightening enough to remove the hair dye from the neighbours’ heads.
“You whore! What are you doing on the roof at night? Making dates with the neighbourhood boys? Shitty Mahmoud? Suturi the pigeon boy? Cross-eyed Hashim? Speak!”
Speak, Huda, don’t delay. Defile him, hunt him with your wickedness – you have no prey bigger than he.
Between the stairs you used to threaten him. None of them knew him as you do. He was the first inspiration in your life. Open your eyes and look at him well. Hold his breath, and share with him nothing but plans for murder.
For what was the celebration of the scuffle except to make your claws scratch more, your teeth bite more, your muscles attack more?
Steal the food which was hidden for him, sweets and fruit. Damage his books and magazines, read them and scatter their thoughts on him first. Pour out on him this glory from your strong little heart. Go to your mother on your bended knee, open the gates for her and seat her as the queen of death and life; weep for her, for she is dying.
I dried my face, fixed my hair with my hands and pulled it back, looked at my appearance and watched Mahmoud at the opening of the street. You were in the street again, and the children brought me back into their authority.
“Listen, I’m a boy as well. No, I’m not a boy, but I can be like a boy.”
“But I want you to keep on being a girl,” replied Mahmoud.
You hated this admission of his, but loved it too. It was clear from the beginning – you were always this way. But I loved rebellion and the friendship of boys.
I knew that if Mahmoud and I pooled our strength we could utterly convulse this neighbourhood of ours.
“My mother says you’re like the devil.”
“Listen, you give me a headache with everything your mother says.”
I laughed, and he looked directly at me: “You’re prettier when you laugh.”
I look at him, still laughing: “I don’t know anything about the devil, but listen. You’re with me, so that means you’re with the devil. Agreed?”