It wasn’t new dresses, smooth clay pots, her own thatched roof, or even so much a husband she envied as it was the freedom to stay home in the marshes, Kathmiya thought as she watched her sister Fatimah prepare for the wedding.
Well, maybe she did want one dress. Fatimah’s was made from delicate cotton and it swayed when she moved and had been dyed in so many red berries it glowed deep burgundy.
“Isn’t it perfect?” the older girl asked.
“I’ve seen better in the city,” Kathmiya answered. It had only been one week since she’d started work, but she had already figured out how to exaggerate her own sophistication.
“Right, in the stinky home you have to clean.”
“It is ten times bigger than any home here.” Why are you so jealous? Kathmiya wanted to shriek. You are the one he always favored. “Not that you would know. And I have my own bed with a big mattress and soft sheets.”
“That reminds me,” Fatimah sang. “Just because I’m moving out, you can’t have my bed. I’ll be around more than you ever will anyway.”
Kathmiya hadn’t even thought about the slightly larger mattress on the drier side of their simple, sweet, ten-times-smaller home, but in that moment, she had to have it.
Stepping outside, she found her mother pounding rice for the day’s bread. “I want a dress like Fatimah’s.” Kathmiya pouted.
“You are lucky then,” Jamila said in a singsong, soothing tone.
Kathmiya stared.
“Because you work, so you can buy one,” her mother finished the thought.
“I’m saving for Abuyah’s burial at Najaf,” Kathmiya announced.
A pious declaration, but—how morbid!
Kathmiya knew it sounded twisted. It was twisted. Ali, named for the martyred son-in-law of the Blessed Prophet, wanted to be laid to rest near him in Najaf like any other Shi’a. By the sad calculus of Kathmiya’s circumstances, if she stayed a maid long enough, she’d be able to bury her father there, and then maybe he would finally appreciate her.
The poor thirteen-year-old started crying at the thought.
“He’s not dead,” Jamila tried with exasperation.
“By the time he is, I’ll be an old lady scrubbing floors.” Kathmiya’s tone curdled like old buffalo milk.
Jamila shook her head. “Come on, my sweet.”
“Yeah, I’m so sweet I get to clean up someone else’s stinky home.” Fatimah was right. “Big lonely place where no one ever talks to me.”
Jamila gasped as though she had been physically cut by her daughter’s words and not just hurt in the loose, diffuse, emotional sense. She was living with a widow who barely even barked commands to the maid, enduring the deafening blows of quiet abuse daily—but she was thirty, not thirteen.
“Aren’t there any friends there you could play with?”
Now Kathmiya sighed. “One.”
“What’s her name?” Jamila asked.
“I don’t even know.”
“Well, maybe you could find out.”
“And it’s not a ‘her.’”
It took less than a second for Jamila to smack her daughter. No one was around to notice. Only Kathmiya felt the sting.
“I told you I don’t even know his name,” she said, and felt Jamila grab her hair and twist. Kathmiya screamed, exaggerating the pain to make her mother stop, but when Jamila did, Kathmiya felt lower than the wetlands.
“Don’t,” Jamila said.
“I won’t,” Kathmiya promised, staring at her furious mother and wondering what had corrupted them all, the way pure water turned cloudy when her father added it to his alcoholic drink.
Kathmiya didn’t know what made her father care about his bottles of arak more than any person, but she was starting to understand that the most dangerous feeling anyone could indulge was longing. Not pure like hope, which left the future open, longing was the pain of hunger combined with the delusion that it could be sated. Maybe that’s what made her father so thirsty. She couldn’t understand doing anything as stupid as wasting life in the false cheer of inebriation, but she knew well enough how stupid a person could be when they thought their longing might be fulfilled.
That boy who had asked if she was okay was the only person in Basra to really look at Kathmiya, to see beyond whether or not she could iron shirts. Her longing, she told herself, was not for the forbidden friendship that scared Jamila into violence but just for the simple chance to have a conversation.
All she had managed when they’d met was a single word and a stream of tears. Next time, it would be different. The awkward maid from the marshes—even if she had never seen a movie, eaten at a table or switched on a light in her life—would shimmer with poise.
He showed up again on a day when, as usual, the house was crowded with the visitors who came at all hours to argue about politics.
Kathmiya noticed him sitting on the arm of a couch with his hands on his skinny thighs, looking around, maybe for a better seat. But actually no, he was staring at the room’s arched doorway; he was searching for her.
She bit her lower lip and watched as he caught her eye. She had prepared for a scare, but the warmth that lit his face melted her fright and she smiled back.
Just that. Nothing else.
A week later she was in the courtyard sweeping below a wooden cage where the family kept a singing bird—gray, black and white, not as colorful as the wild birds of the marshes, or as free, but its little melody reminded her of home.
There were sparrows, too, nesting in the vine-laced trellis that stood at the back of a plot of blooming plants and scarlet-dotted pomegranate trees.
When he stepped into the courtyard, she remembered with shame her mother’s pleading, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from aching for a short conversation. The flames of hell were too far underground to reheat Jamila’s warning.
The boy was dribbling a soccer ball, showing off. He smiled and gently passed the ball to her. Although she was barefoot, she managed to stop it awkwardly with her instep.
“It’s easy,” he said, demonstrating how to punt. When she kicked it in the air and it sailed toward him, Kathmiya felt so happy it was dizzying.
“You’re a natural!” he shouted, enthusiasm making him sparkle like the burnt-brown patterns that the sun printed on his hair.
Her cheeks flushed and she relished the feeling.
Their short game was interrupted when his older brother appeared. “We’re leaving,” said the teen, who kicked the ball straight up and caught it in one fluid move.
The younger boy didn’t say good-bye, but his eyes did, sweetly enough that Kathmiya felt reassured, until, in a smack that hurt more than her mother’s hand against her face, Odette shouted from the entrance, “I TOLD YOU TO SWEEP THE MESS UNDER THE BIRDCAGE!”
Then she turned to the younger boy and said sternly, “Go—Allah is with you, Shafiq.”
Shafiq. Just when she had learned his name, Kathmiya had no choice but to hope he would leave forever, so he would never again see her dressed down for anything as wretched as being a kid trying to have fun.