Just as Kathmiya started understanding the world around her, it shattered.
Within days of the news about Hitler, all of the living room’s regulars had evacuated, leaving only Salim to pull Kathmiya away from the window when the British warplanes started scraping against the sky.
But not before she saw one of them through the shutters. She watched three bombs that were so far in the distance they looked like grapefruits dropping down.
The quiet of the house was suddenly too loud. Kathmiya wanted to bury herself in the folds of her mother’s layered clothes, but she didn’t even know where Jamila worked.
In her small room, squinting against the light that streamed in through the battened shutters, she tried to find solace in anger against her parents.
How could you leave me here alone like this, in a house full of strangers who use me like a dry broom?
But the war could be in the marshes too, for all she knew. This conflict was bigger than her mean father, her overwhelmed mother—more encompassing than Basra and even Iraq.
Her dresser had a broken leg that made it list to one side, so that the clay vase where she kept the dinars she was saving for her father’s funeral in Najaf, a tiny mausoleum-to-be, leaned precariously.
She crumpled—her body on the bed, her face in a frown—listening to the silence that had replaced the random, improvised song from the street, which she had never before appreciated.
Slowly, she realized that more than her heart was pained. A quiet burning rocked her abdomen. A sign she was a woman. A sign that time was running out.
Her future was as bleak as the broken pavement on the cold city streets. But what could she do?
Draw on her last source of hope.
She felt childish looking at the book, but that was the point. For one short second she was glad to be alone with her thoughts.
Kathmiya studied the drawings of a yellow-haired girl at a farm. She liked the character’s round face but was startled by her blue eyes. The color was dangerously unlucky—anyone who had ever been warned by the old men of the marshes would know that. Kathmiya could almost hear them ordering her to black over the irises.
But she had no pen, no ink and no will to change the image. With so much about her life shrouded in mystery, she didn’t want to deface this one clue.
“My father is the sheikh,” she whispered to the page, endowing the girl with a sweet, soft voice. The sheikh loved this daughter the most, even though she was the youngest. He would never dream of making her work. And he promised she would marry someday.
Jamila had once told her a story about a girl whose father was a king in a faraway land. She had ended it by pretending Kathmiya was the princess, saying, “And so you have a blessed life.”
But that was a long time ago. And now she could only think, Blessed with what? Servitude?
Trying to think of a way out, Kathmiya’s imagination was too impoverished to hope for a wonderful husband. Any man would do.
If only she could learn to ride a bike. It seemed that utterly simple. And that completely impossible.
Shafiq wanted to crawl back in his mind to the moment when he was biking with his new, pretty friend, but there was no escaping the war now.
First came the ludicrous change in tone on Radio Baghdad, with news announcers reversing their coverage of the Allies from craven fawning to sharp derision. Armies that had for so long been “charging bravely toward certain victory” were suddenly mocked for “retreating like cowards destined for defeat.”
The dissonance between the two accounts was nothing compared with the clash between the government’s confident embrace of Germany and the fear that throttled Shafiq’s home. Whichever news account was true, his once-fused identity—Iraqi and Jew—was cleaving apart.
When Ezra observed that the Nazis hated the Arabs by saying, “Hitler says they’re all monkeys,” Shafiq was left to wonder why it wasn’t “Hitler says we’re all monkeys.”
Okay, and then he admitted to himself the simple explanation: it was already obvious that the Jews were reviled.
“The British are fighting for our oil.” Ezra’s cynicism bit hard. “But not for us. Because they think we’re monkeys, too.”
It was “we” again, but Shafiq got no relief. We, the hated people of the Middle East.
Only the Jews were cheering the British. Or so Shafiq thought, until he heard more news from his cousin Yusef. “The Assyrians joined Her Majesty’s Indian soldiers to win back Habbaniya,” he said.
Although the rest of Shafiq’s family looked comforted, he was more distressed than before. Having another minority on their side wouldn’t bring the country back together. He had been taught at school that the Assyrians tried to rebel against the Iraqi government in 1933 and had to be “put down.”
A quiet term for a gruesome massacre.
Everything was starting to shred. It wasn’t inconsistencies in his history lessons that kept Shafiq up during the night; it was the fact that there was no one left to trust.
The British—their great hope—scared the Pro-Axis regime out of Baghdad. In just days, Iraq was brought back to the side of the Allies.
But Shafiq never got the chance to exhale, because right after—moments it seemed—the collective Iraqi wrath about re-occupation was unleashed.
Against the Jews.