“In the Name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate.”
The writing was uncertain, but it was hers. Kathmiya began her literate life the way any Muslim should, by invoking the name of God.
Next she wrote her name, which was also the name of one of the holiest Shi’a mosques in Baghdad.
Then she wrote, “Aziza.” Her little bundle.
Finally she wrote, “Thank you, Shafiq.”
The paper nestled in her pocket the next time she went home to the marshes. The blows she suffered there were never physical, so its flimsiness was not a failing. They were strikes against her worth, and literacy was her smashingly powerful weapon to fight back.
“How is everyone?” she asked her sister.
Fatimah was carrying her youngest, a jumpy girl who always seemed to bounce away from her. When Kathmiya brushed the toddler’s arm, she reached up.
“I guess she remembers you, even though you’re gone most of the time,” Fatimah said.
The insults were getting boring. Kathmiya almost wished her sister could come up with a new attack. Every chance she got, Fatimah reminded Kathmiya that she lived in the city, and Kathmiya fought back by flaunting her sophistication and pretending she preferred life there. The crowded streets, foods like watermelon, music on the radio…Kathmiya held up these shiny little trinkets, trying to deflect the fact that only life in the marshes was truly brilliant.
But now she had new tricks. She was beginning to connect the words on signs with the goods in stores. Shafiq would draw pictures, intentionally poor renderings of things she would never guess except that he wrote the words underneath: dam, lamb, swam. Words and pictures she could match. And then letters and words. The little girl Sally and her uncle’s farm might always be a mystery. But then again, maybe Kathmiya would unlock it someday.
“I think,” she began, trying to calm her jumpy little niece, “your life is so much better than mine.”
Fatimah didn’t take the bait so easily. “Well that’s a first! You, who are always talking about how much fun you have in the city, eating weird desserts and making money.”
“Yeah,” Kathmiya said, and the words slid out like gelatin off a spoon, “but I need to get married, have children. You know, it’s scary.”
Fatimah was enjoying this. It was obvious from the way she leaned in, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Tell me what you mean. I don’t understand.”
Kathmiya’s histrionics were impressive. Partly she wanted to satisfy Fatimah’s thirst for dominance, but mostly she was happy to finally get it all off her chest. “…living in the maid’s quarters where no one talks to me, feeling like I’m getting too old to ever marry, wondering what I did to deserve this…”
It felt like a burden was lifted—but a protective shield was also gone.
Except one last bit of armor. There was still the reading and writing. She hadn’t told Fatimah about that, and even if she did, it would still be hers—not so much the ability to read but the confidence that came from confronting such a mass of tangled confusion and straightening it out in her head.
“Well,” Fatimah said. She took the girl back and let her scamper off. Then she put a hand over her sister’s. “I tried, I really did.”
That was unexpected. “Tried what?”
“To find you a husband. I mean, I think I found one, he’s interested, but our parents said no.”
“Our father, you mean.”
“Actually,” Fatimah said, “it was our mother.”
Kathmiya stared. A lifetime of rivalry with Fatimah had taught her to see through a bluff. But this wasn’t one. Jamila was standing in her daughter’s way.
Instead of confronting her mother with tears dripping off of her lonely chin, Kathmiya asked Fatimah for the name of the potential mate-for-life-and-escape-to-stability, paid a local boy two mesh bags of sugar-coated almonds to row them over, and went straight to the home of one Baaqir Zain.
“Tell me everything you know about him,” Kathmiya asked her sister as they glided across the water. She’d had to bring Fatimah’s husband along too, for safety and cover. Even in her willful rebelliousness, Kathmiya wasn’t reckless enough to destroy her already bruised reputation.
“Rich,” Fatimah said.
When her husband saw Kathmiya’s eyes widen in skeptical surprise, he confirmed this. “Wealthy, that one.”
The sisters had almost grown…if not close, at least civil since Kathmiya’s heart-rending confession.
“Are you wondering why he would want to marry you?” Fatimah asked. That was much gentler than she might have put it before, but it still stung. Mostly because Kathmiya really was wondering.
“Guess he has good taste,” she replied, lapsing back into her defensive bravado.
“Guess so,” Fatimah said sweetly. Now that was alarming.
They got out in front of one of those impressively sturdy estates, three separate reed homes grouped around a fire pit. The sisters waited while Fatimah’s husband went in to make the introductions.
“Baaqir Zain,” Kathmiya repeated with fixed determination.
“At least if you marry him,” Fatimah suggested in that undermining way she had perfected over a lifetime of petty jealousy, “that will stop the rumors…”
“Will you drop it?” Kathmiya mumbled.
“…that you are too old to marry and you never will, that you were sent to the city because that was the only way to get some use out of you, that you might carry the danger of—”
“Just stop,” Kathmiya said, trying to regain her composure, trying to put on that gracious face that would win her a home, trying so hard to be likeable she forgot all about her own likes.
Until Baaqir Zain came out to see her. Old like a wrinkled turtle. Worse than that, he was creepy, pinching her arms and shoulders and touching her face.
“Hey,” she started, pulling back before his reptilian paw got any closer.
“If I take another wife I have to make sure she’s good,” he said, smile all gummy and wet.
So other women endured this. Kathmiya wanted to talk to them. For the home, she’d take it. But the husband…“Where are they?” she asked.
“She has questions,” he said to Fatimah’s husband. “But it’s okay.”
“Where are your other wives?” Kathmiya remembered that eerie feeling during the riots—an absence of women. And now again. Besides Fatimah, she felt there was no other female in the whole area.
“She might as well know,” Baaqir Zain said to Fatimah’s husband. “She might as well hear this.” He turned to Kathmiya. “All of them were bad and so they’re gone. One was barren, one was greedy, two lost all their feminine charms and my last—she was just useless. Anyway, you know the law…”
Gone?
“…I’m entitled to a full refund on the bride-price if I send the girl back.”
Not dead at least, but out there, somewhere, in that terrible land of women who had been married and then abandoned.
One level of hell below Kathmiya’s own station in life.
“We’re leaving,” she told the canoe boy, and stepped in, not bothering to check whether Fatimah and her husband would follow.
“Can I keep it?” Shafiq asked Kathmiya when he saw the paper she had written.
“Sure.” She could always write more. Words would come to her. Letters would form on the page. Sentences would emerge. And maybe meaning would follow.