The crowd of family members ambled down the dusty street toward their home, but Shafiq stayed back, wanting, in the darkness of the calm night, to savor the memory of those black eyes. Leah was marrying Salim, and all of a sudden the captivating maid was back in his thoughts.
He had never forgotten Kathmiya’s instep kicking the stitched soccer ball, the way her hair poked out from her scarf and skimmed his face while they rode the bike, the plan he’d made to see her again.
But then he’d overheard Ezra’s warning. It was enough that one girl had been killed. He didn’t want to be responsible for another bloody stump and dead daughter. So he’d contrived to stay away.
Adolescent longings intensified all of his feelings, but Shafiq’s memories of Kathmiya had faded so much that he figured she once held him in thrall only because they met during the tranquility before the invasion, the riots against the Jews, and the mounting fear as Hitler continued his march across North Africa.
When Shafiq heard the marriage broker had picked Salim Dellal for his sister Leah, he experienced a rising hope—but he pushed it down. You were just dreaming, the teenager told his younger self.
But when he saw her…it was an oasis, not a mirage.
Shafiq suffered a fifteen-year-old’s natural inflammation of desire, and he knew he should go nowhere near a young servant girl, no matter how pretty she was or how much he had sentimentalized their sweet, early encounters.
The family had turned a corner out of sight, but no matter, Shafiq knew the way home.
He strolled casually past an ornate mosque, stopping to look up the tall, narrow minaret. Fighting was distant in Europe. The war had left Iraq almost as quickly as it had come. But the North Africa battles were too close to home.
Shafiq felt a presence behind him. A stray dog. Time to leave. He started forward and the dog loped after him, cautious but still menacing.
“Hey!” Shafiq turned and shouted at the animal, which had a dull brown coat with pink patches of raw flesh along its back. It flinched and turned.
There had been moments of triumph along the way. Shafiq would never forget the jubilation four years before, when Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. The cries of “They will finish him!” The predictions of an end to the Nazis.
Shafiq resumed his walk, still feeling the dog’s lurking presence.
A year after the Nazis entered the Soviet Union, cousin Yusef interpreted more official reports crackling across the BBC. “The British are stalling the German advance towards Alexandria,” he’d explained.
Two years had passed since then, but Shafiq could still feel the relief that traveled the room.
That dog, still there.
The euphoria had evaporated as soon as Yusef added, “But Rommel didn’t retreat.”
Shafiq shouted at the dog. “Yallah! Imshee!” He was telling it to move along, but in a threatening tone: I’ll hurt you if you don’t.
Then came the announcement, back in 1943, that Germany had lost the battle of Al-Alamein deep in Egypt. The Jews cheered, “Allah is with us!” But their relief was whispered behind shuttered windows.
That turning point helped eased the tension that lived in Shafiq’s constricted chest, but the Germans were still fighting hard now, nearly two years later. No way to exhale yet.
The dog was panting. Probably rabid. Shafiq lunged for a sharp rock and hurled it near the animal, which bolted out of sight. But he couldn’t be sure it was gone.
If the Night of Henna was a chance for women to rule, the real party, held just before the wedding, brought the men back on top. Sucking on different tentacles of brass waterpipes, blowing out blue smoke, arguing and laughing and besting each other with ever-more bountiful wishes for the bride and groom.
The whole cast of characters from Shafiq’s life was there: his cousins and friends, his father’s business partners, and Salim’s fellow attorneys, along with the rest of the eclectic mix of opinionated men who constantly streamed in and out of that living room.
Plus one other person whom no one knew very well but everyone would grow to hold in higher esteem than any Emir by the time the night was through: Shant Bargadian, the Armenian caterer who introduced them all for the first time to that revolution in new cuisine: Jell-O.
Omar and Shafiq led the charge in passing out the dancing blobs of clear, sweet, bright-colored dessert: red, yellow, blue and green, like no food they had ever seen, much less tasted. “For you!” Shafiq said with a flourish, handing a plate to his old uncle Dahood, who shook his mystified head much less kinetically than the vibrating dessert.
“For you!” Omar said to Odette, and then he whispered to Shafiq, “It matches her belly.”
With the way it melted with no effort, spread tangy sweetness, held its shape but bent with the elements, Jell-O was more than a food, it was an inspiration. Shafiq had never eaten anything as green as the Iraqi flag, and, buoyed by the magic he ingested, he carefully scooped out a tricolor spread onto a gold-rimmed dish and brought it to the kitchen.
“Hello, Kathmiya,” he said. The maid was as shockingly beautiful as when he was younger, but now everything was amplified by the awakening of adolescence.
“You’re back,” she said simply. She remembers me too, he thought, soaring.
He tried to think of an explanation. He even looked to the dish of yellow, red and blue Jell-O for ideas. In the end, he just went with, “It was my brother who told me to stay away.”
She should understand that, if her men were poised to kill them both.
“Oh,” was all she said. Outside the drumming fortune-teller started performing, beating out rhythms and singing good wishes for tips.
“But…” Shafiq waited for Kathmiya to interrupt, to break the awkwardness of the moment, to let him off the hook. When she didn’t, he tried explaining, “Now I’m the age he was when he told me that, and, you know, I—”
In the distance, they could hear the fortune-teller shout over the drumbeat, “May the bride and groom have children right away!”
“It’s okay.” It wasn’t quite clear if she was forgiving him or saying that everything would be all right, but either was enough. He passed her the plate of Jell-O and she laughed.
A laugh that suddenly overpowered all the fascination of a rubbery treat.
“It tastes like giggles,” he said.
The fortune-teller must have gotten a tip, because now a different chant echoed from the main room: “May you be wealthier than the richest sheikh!”
She swallowed some and laughed more. “It tastes like silly.”
“Like laughing and you can’t stop,” he agreed. Like talking to a girl and you don’t want to stop.
“May you have as many grandchildren as the seeds of a pomegranate,” the performer said as the pounding beat worked up the crowd.
“This one tastes like watermelons,” she slipped the red around her mouth.
“That one tastes like yellow rays of sun,” he said.
“Shh!” She suddenly held up her palm to quiet Shafiq.
“And,” the fortune-teller boomed, “may all of your children get married someday!”
“What?” he asked.
“Here she comes,” Kathmiya mouthed. “Go.”
“Sorry,” he whispered softly.
“No!” she said, starting to sort dishes in the sink.
“May your sons find the most beautiful wives—” Beat, beat, beat.
“I mean,” he said earnestly, “Sorry for not coming back last time but I’d really like to—”
“—who will give them the most magnificent sons!”
Odette stomped in. Shafiq sidled out. Smiling.
“I’m in trouble,” he whispered to Omar the next day at the formal wedding. A letdown from the party, it was held in a rented reception hall with no food, just prayers and ceremony and a chance to say good-bye to Leah before she moved in with Salim.
“Don’t tell me—it’s a dame,” Omar guessed with swagger. No fifteen-year-old Iraqi boy could honestly boast of girl problems, but they had seen enough American movies at the Cinemat Al-Basra to talk like lovelorn cowboys.
“Yep,” said Shafiq. The best part of having Omar as a friend was elevating all confusion into play. “Nothin’ but trouble.”
“Ain’t they all,” Omar drawled, palm where his belt buckle would be if he were an American frontiersman instead of a Sunni boy from Basra.
Their laughter was silenced by a sharp look from one of Shafiq’s aunts as the rabbi intoned prayers in Hebrew. Soon it was time to break the ceremonial glass. Salim held the tumbler in his hand, wound his arm behind his shoulder, and smashed it against the wall.
The teens had mostly outgrown the street sports that used to occupy all of their younger days, but when Omar caught his eye, Shafiq knew both were thinking of starting a glass-throwing contest right then and there.
“Me too,” said Omar.
“You what?”
“Dame problems,” Omar confessed.
But Shafiq only laughed. What “dame problems” could Omar have? “You should be so lucky.”