Leah was swelling up. The only thing bigger than her belly was her outsized anxiety over the sex of the child.
“Odette insists on a boy,” she reminded Kathmiya when they were alone in the hallway.
“Tell her she’ll be lucky for any healthy grandchild,” Kathmiya grumbled. Didn’t Leah see that her “problems” were an embarrassment of riches? She would be ecstatic to have her own little sweet-smelling, soft-to-the-touch, warm and dependent girl. The dream was as vivid and as unattainable as the moon in the sky.
It was bad enough to have no husband or home, but caring for Leah was just one more reminder of how excluded Kathmiya was.
“Don’t leave me,” Leah begged when the midwives arrived. The three women dressed all in black presented a stark tableau. The only garnish of color came from the few branches of some green herb one held in a clutched fist.
Kathmiya wondered what the dried weeds were for. They didn’t feed Leah the branches or burn them like incense, they just stuck them in a bowl for her to look at, as if that would relieve the pain she was screaming through.
It fell to Kathmiya to swab cool towels at Leah’s temples while the midwives circled each other manically, waiting for something to happen.
Each time Leah convulsed with contractions, the old women told her to look at the branches. Or they yelled one incessant command.
“Push!” shouted the brusque women, holding Leah down by her wrists and ankles. “PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!”
As the hours dragged on and the blood drained from Leah’s face, it seemed that death stalked the room as much as birth. All Kathmiya could do was slide out the sheets Leah had wet and bloodied and soiled and replace them with fresh ones.
Leah’s face was swollen to three times its normal size, her wrists and ankles were badly bruised by the midwives’ manual shackles, and she looked dangerously spent. Finally, the oldest attendant, a severe woman with her face pinched like a dried fig, went into the kitchen and returned with a knife.
“We have no choice,” she hissed. “We have to cut you.” The other midwife gestured for Leah to look at the withered branches.
What was the use? To see a bit of nature before she was murdered?
Kathmiya couldn’t let it happen. She rushed to Leah’s side and started shouting at her. “Leah, they have a knife, please, please try one more time. It’s a butcher knife they want to use to get the baby out…” Kathmiya was shaking and sweating. That hatchet was for chopping meat, not opening a woman’s body. The midwife was wiping it on her sleeve.
“Leah, they are going to cut you if he doesn’t come out now!”
Suddenly, Leah screamed like the fear had broken her daze. “NOOOO!” she cried, tears, blood and perspiration streaming from her battered body.
The midwives were startled back to their poses, holding down her straining limbs and ordering her to push. “Your beautiful boy, your baby, he’s coming out!” shouted one, and Kathmiya could see the crown of the head, slick and dark.
There, in the middle of this swirling storm of excrement and blood, a new person. Life.
“PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!” they urged, but their hoarse croaking was wasted because the baby was slipping out on his own. “God is great,” they cried, and Kathmiya looked down to catch a glimpse of the newborn boy.
But beheld instead a tiny baby girl.
The midwives had left behind one last item from their arsenal: a small, triangular fabric decorated with shells. Kathmiya had never seen the amulet before, but she knew the type: designed to ward off the evil eye. That malicious force was everywhere—in the marshes, in the Jewish tribes, in Iraq and beyond. Everyone had a charm to fight off the jinn.
“If he were a boy, who would have gotten a dowry at marriage instead of costing one, they would have cheered, ‘May he be a sign of seven,’” Leah said while she nursed her baby through a trance of pain and joy.
“Seven?” Kathmiya handed Leah a glass of water. She had also brought a little amulet, the same one her parents had given each of Fatimah’s children. With colored threads woven around two sticks at perpendicular angles, it looked like a kite made of string.
“‘Seven’ for seven more boys. Instead, all they could say was, ‘May she be followed by sons.’”
“Really?” Kathmiya wasn’t paying much attention; she was wondering how to tell Leah about her gift.
“Well, there is another expression,” Leah said, flopping back on the sweaty pillow. “But even Odette wouldn’t have said that to me.”
“What?”
“‘Thank God for the health of the mother.’ It’s supposed to give you hope that you can get a boy next time but they couldn’t—”
“Hey,” Kathmiya interrupted. With Leah looking as though she had barely survived a stampede of buffalo, “Thank God for the health of the mother” would have been more of a wish than an affirmation. “I brought you this,” she said. “It’s supposed to keep away the evil eye.”
Leah’s eyes were only half open, but she rested Kathmiya’s amulet on her newborn’s tiny shirt next to the other charm.
“Thanks,” she said, lolling off.
Kathmiya got up and dumped out the pointless herbs. Even though the branches had done nothing to alleviate Leah’s pain, she couldn’t help but hope the good luck pieces would keep the jinn away.
Leah’s sadness evaporated. Or maybe it just got washed out, like all the blood and dirt on her sheets, by Kathmiya. In her best moments, Kathmiya behaved toward Leah like the nice big sister Fatimah had never been to her. At her worst, she was bound up in a ball of anger.
When she met her mother at the port that week in Basra, she was ready for a fight.
“My sweet,” Jamila said. But the cloying term just made Kathmiya squirm.
“I’m too old for pet names,” she complained.
“You’ll always be sweet to me, my little one,” Jamila said wistfully.
“Oh, I’m so special, that’s why you look out for me, right?” Kathmiya narrowed her large eyes so much her face almost looked ugly.
Jamila just huffed.
The docked boat was swaying in the river near where they stood. “Why should I even go back home?” Kathmiya was too bright and loud, irrationally blind to the people around them.
Jamila grabbed her daughter by the shoulder and pinched. “I risked my life for you,” she growled. “You don’t even know.”
It sounded too dramatic to be true, but with the sounds of Leah’s agonized screams still ringing in her ears, Kathmiya softened.
“I just want what everyone else has,” she said quietly, following her mother up the small path to the long deck, slick with water.
They sat, as usual, at the back, watching the modern city fade from sight as the houses became more sparse, the palm trees more dense.
“Please,” said Kathmiya, trying to extract a promise. “He hates me, he always has.”
“Who?” Jamila asked without a trace of irony.
“You KNOW!” Kathmiya exploded. “You’re married to him!”
Jamila just pressed her fingers against her eyes.
Kathmiya seethed quietly as the sturdy brick buildings gave way to small farms in the distance.
Finally, when the sky turned a purplish gray, Jamila spoke. “Don’t blame yourself, my sweet.”
“Then it’s your fault,” Kathmiya shot back bitterly.
“Do you think I want you to work?” Jamila’s voice flared. “Do you think I care whether you save money for Ali’s funeral?”
“Stop,” Kathmiya said, trying to hide in piety. “That’s sacred.”
“Of course I want you married,” Jamila murmured. “Of course I have been trying. Ali has his reasons, trust me—”
“Will you at least speak to him?” Kathmiya just wanted to change her circumstances, not unravel her past and her mother in the process.
“When the time is right.”
Tonight, Kathmiya decided. And if she won’t, then I will.
In their straw hut, she almost lost her nerve. But there was Fatimah, preening to cover up the fact that she was fascinated by Kathmiya’s life in Basra. “How can you stand the city?” she asked.
“You’d understand,” Kathmiya said, “if you’d ever been there.”
She waited until Fatimah and her children left and then poured her father a good cloudy glass of arak and water.
“So,” she said once he’d smiled that here’s-my-best-friend look he got when he saw his drink. “Don’t you think it’s time to arrange a marriage for me?”
Jamila was across the room or she would have pinched Kathmiya’s shoulder black and blue.
“Marry? You?”
No, the sheikh’s daughter, thought Kathmiya. All she said was, “Yes.”
“You sound like your mother,” Ali grumbled. Kathmiya looked over at Jamila. “‘She’s getting older,’” he went on in a nagging mock-wife voice. “‘Time to go to Haider.’”
Uncle Haider. Kathmiya couldn’t help it—she smiled.
Jamila joined in, “We should see your brother. Haider has first rights for his son to marry Kathmiya.”
“Oh, is that what you want?” Ali asked Jamila, ready to ruin the moment. But she stood her ground.
“Yeah,” Kathmiya said, trying to reinforce the chances. “That’s what we want.”
Ali stared. Took a long sip of his drink. Looked up at the ceiling. And then answered: “Fine.”
“Really?” Kathmiya asked. She couldn’t believe it had been so simple. He’s not such a bad father, she decided. It took a while, but now he was going to let her marry, and pretty soon she’d be able to replace the balled-up rags in her pockets with soft wraps for her baby. “Abuyah,” she cooed, “that’s great! I mean…thank you. Thank you so much.”
Ali’s wide smile showed his brown teeth. “Don’t thank me yet,” he said.
Kathmiya basked. She was even tempted to hug him.