Kathmiya rubbed the hot tears off of her face with a stained dish towel, but instead of soothing her sadness, its smell of moldy cooking oil only reminded her that she was stuck working as a maid.
At thirteen, with budding breasts and hormone-drenched emotions, she should have been ushered to the protection of a new home under the guard of a stern husband in the dewy marshlands north of Basra, where she had spent life since she remembered. Instead, she had been exiled to the city to earn wages as a live-in servant.
Tears blurred her vision, but Kathmiya could clearly picture the afternoon she had overheard her parents make the terrible decision to banish her to Basra.
Like all other reed homes in Iraq’s storied marshes, hers sat on land that was scarcely solid, and seemed to ease off from earth to water with no clear separation between the elements. Her family’s small canoe was so close to the woven walls of their reed home she could hear her mother’s soft voice and her father’s slurred one inside, as she rested her bare feet on the ribs at the boat’s base.
Kathmiya liked to play a game of holding so still she might cause the least possible movement in the worn canoe, watching the ripples in the river and challenging herself to minimize them. This was the same way she tiptoed through life, trying not to leave an impression.
A hopeless attempt.
Anyone who laid eyes on Kathmiya was, like Shafiq, immediately mesmerized not only by her unusual beauty—the chiaroscuro effect of her glowing face and raven hair—but also by the range of emotions animating her features with such wrenching passion. A searching gleam in her oversized eyes seemed to accommodate both severe pain and vast wonder.
The boat remained still, Kathmiya easily staying as calm as the river until, at the sound of her father’s voice, she flinched.
“Fatimah will marry soon,” Ali declared.
A sour premonition gurgled in Kathmiya’s gut, but she fought it by telling herself she’d be next.
“Yes, and then Kathmiya.” Her mother, Jamila, read her thoughts.
“Kathmiya?” her father asked with disgust, as though his wife had just suggested that they marry off the neighborhood goat. “No.”
NO? Among all of her dozens of cousins, not one had remained single.
Kathmiya watched a marbled duck lead four chicks in a zigzag path through the sun-faded reeds. Gliding so easily, in place in nature.
“How can you say that?” Jamila challenged. Kathmiya appreciated the defense, but what she really yearned for was a father who cared for her without any urging. “She’s becoming a woman,” her mother continued ominously, as though Kathmiya were catching cholera instead of entering adolescence.
“She can work. You like it so much.”
Jamila was silent, so Ali taunted, “What?”
It was as if Kathmiya could hear her father glaring from under his dark eyebrows.
I can’t go to work, she thought. No single girl is sent to the city. Her mother only left the marshes after she was married with a baby—and then only because their home had been washed away in a flood of water while Ali’s sense of duty drowned in a river of alcohol.
“She is good, stable, devoted…” Jamila’s voice was rising with mounting distress.
Maybe I’m too stupid and ugly, Kathmiya guessed with a young teen’s utter blindness to her own charms.
“Ask your brother. His son has the first right to marry her, and I’m sure he will insist,” Jamila pressed.
The mention of Uncle Haider gave Kathmiya a jolt of hope so palpable it registered in a strong ripple on the river. He was always warm where her father was cold. Tall where her father was slumped. Near, somehow, even comforting, when her father had always been irretrievably distant.
“You want me to ask my brother?” sneered Ali. “Kathmiya has to work for money.” He swished out words between sips. “With her sister getting engaged, we need even more.”
“But—” Jamila began.
“It’s a double win,” Ali interrupted with cruel glee. “We get Kathmiya’s salary, and we don’t have to feed her because she works as a sleep-in maid.”
There was a long silence. The boat did not move. In the distance, a cooking fire sent gray puffs of smoke up to the sky, where they merged with the colorless expanse. Kathmiya waited.
“Yes,” Jamila sighed with a resignation that was as familiar to the doomed beauty as the dried reeds that formed the walls in her home. “A double win.”
During her first week, the only person who spoke to Kathmiya besides the strange boy who caught her crying was Salim Dellal’s bossy mother, Odette, who just barked commands. She had already warned Kathmiya twice that she would have to sweep more often when the dust storms started.
Finally the weekend came, Kathmiya’s chance to meet her mother at the port and go home for two days. She searched every woman wearing a flowing black cloak, hoping it was Jamila, but their walk or their height or their indifference proved her wrong.
“Are you ready?” a soothing voice asked from behind.
Kathmiya relaxed immediately, taking her time to turn around.
“My sweet,” Jamila said tenderly.
“Don’t leave me,” Kathmiya blurted out, even though her mother had only just arrived. Grown now, nearly too old for irrational fears, she still carried the anxiety that she had endured since her father first branded her with his cold touch.
“What are you talking about?” Jamila asked, sounding surprised by the question. “I’m always with you.”
“You are not,” Kathmiya bit back, her child’s hopefulness fighting against her teenaged skepticism.
Jamila crinkled her eyes. “Some mothers are with their daughters night and day, but they are not so close, because they never really talk. You and I will be different, tamam?” Okay? “Whatever is on your mind you can always tell me. You have to tell me.”
Kathmiya just followed her mother onto the steaming ferry that would take them up the river toward home.
“I learned so much in this big city,” Jamila was saying. “You are living with a rich family. You’re going to taste the most delicious food—like flaky, sweet pastries—and even hear music on the radio!”
Kathmiya brooded.
“Look,” Jamila pressed on. “If anything ever worries you—anything at all: your heart, your mind, your body, anything—you tell me right away. And I’ll tell you. By sharing our sufferings, we can break them into little tiny pieces so they just scatter away.”
“Tamam,” Kathmiya said. “And we’ll share our happiness, too.”
“Especially that,” Jamila answered, but her smile was more nervous than convincing.
“I was terrified when I first saw the motorcars they drive,” she added, changing the subject as she took a seat on one of the damp trunks that served as benches for the poorest passengers.
Smiling, Kathmiya confessed that she had been stumped at the sight of an icebox. “And their sinks!” she said. In the marshes, there was no machine that made water come out, only an abundance of rivers and rainfall and wetness.
“Well,” Jamila said with a conspiratorial smile, “they need those things because they don’t have what we have, right?”
Kathmiya smiled with pride. She had not been in the city long enough to realize that Marsh Arabs were vilified as backward in Basra.
When they switched from the noisy ferry to the placid canoe that would shuttle them home, Jamila gave Kathmiya a turquoise dress she had secretly retrieved after her own employer put it in the rag bin. In truth, the color was not flattering on Kathmiya, who looked better in the dark purple and henna shades that brought out her raven-haired beauty, but Jamila was smiling.
“You can wear it at Fatimah’s wedding.”
At the mention of her sister, Kathmiya looked down. Maybe I’ll be next, she told herself. “Thanks,” she mustered. But even she could see the color was all wrong.