Kathmiya might be just a single girl, but she was learning to think like a woman. And she knew well enough that Shafiq was relieved that day she had told him the old marriage broker didn’t come through with a match. She saw two expressions from most people in the world: pity in the marshes, and pity in the city. But Shafiq—she could make him admire and laugh and wonder and worry.
Nearly all of her clothes had washed out colors like dark gray and pale black, but when she pushed around a teenaged boy’s emotions she felt for a second like they were threaded with gold.
“My sister found a husband for me, finally,” she told Shafiq the next time Leah brought her to his house. Lying forced Kathmiya to strain against images of the man-turtle in her mind. The hardest part was forgetting his slippery hand against her skin.
“That’s nice,” Shafiq said. “I hope he’s good.”
“There could be, you know…others, so it’s still being decided,” Kathmiya said, trying to draw out the charade, but Shafiq’s once-responsive moods had gone limp.
“You need the security, right?” he asked. “That’s important. Listen to your sister. Keep close to the family.”
He was completely impassive. It was enough to make her long for pity. “Won’t you miss me?”
Shafiq shrugged. “You can write me a message.”
That sentence, just months or even weeks before, would have elevated Kathmiya to the tops of the heavens, but now it sounded dismissive. “So where do I send it?” she challenged.
“My friend and I used to do this all the time,” he said, walking over to a crevice in the back wall. “I’ll go first.”
After jotting down a few words on a scrap of paper, he folded it up and stuck it in the hole. She went along and pulled it out. “‘Write me, not a kaf—’” She didn’t much like the game and didn’t feel like puzzling out the meaning.
“Write me messages, don’t just tell me to ask for you at some café,” he recited without even bothering to look at the paper.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Keep your family and your friends close.”
At least he wants me close.
“But especially your family,” he added.
Or maybe not.
Alone with her thoughts later, Kathmiya felt an unfamiliar hunger. She had never consciously wanted Shafiq’s attention before, but now she realized how much it meant to her. She could barely admit it to herself, but a dream was starting to take root in her mind involving them together as a way out of her lonely life.
It was a delicious fantasy, but completely forbidden, and she vowed to never to act on it.
That evening, after Aziza was safely asleep, Kathmiya wrapped herself in a black abaya and slipped out of the house. She had never been to the port so late and when she got there she was rewarded by a restful sight: men reeling ropes up into boats, donkeys sitting on their hind legs, porters who’d spent the day carrying groceries for other people finally eating their own meals of kebab and long-grain rice.
Jamila had given her the address—no, more precisely, the directions, but only from the water’s edge: walk down the ramp toward the big warehouse, past the corner coffee house, up to the edge of the street with the lead-colored building, through the narrow alley, across the open market to the area where goats were sold, then two estuary crossings over, look for the third house with a brown door.
Along with the directions was this warning: “Don’t tell the old widow anything.” According to Jamila, her employer was ten times as nosy as the Iraqi police, and twenty times as merciless.
Kathmiya thought about knocking on the front door and drowning the woman in so many questions she wouldn’t have a chance to ask any of her own. “What would you do without my mother? Wear smelly clothes and wash in a moldy bathtub and eat off of dirty plates?”
If it got Jamila fired, so much the better. Kathmiya didn’t care how angry her father would be if she unlocked the gate that kept her mother inside.
But she had to save her spiteful energy for her own cause, so instead of banging on the front door as stuffed with attitude as an onion filled with spicy meat, Kathmiya took measure of the building, saw the lace curtains on all the windows but one, and threw a pebble up to hit it.
She missed, and missed again, and a couple more times after that until the old widow screeched, “What is going on out there?” Kathmiya almost screamed, “It’s me!” but just then she saw Jamila peeking out from behind one of the lace curtains.
“Over here!” she shouted. Jamila held up a hand to make her stop, and seconds later she was at her disruptive daughter’s side.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jamila demanded. “She nearly caught you.”
“Really?” Kathmiya asked boldly. “Because I’d like to meet her, finally, ask a few questions, like why she can’t let you see me more.”
Jamila pinched Kathmiya’s arm but it didn’t work, those little hurts that used to keep her in line.
“Well, I tried to find my own way out of this life,” Kathmiya announced.
“I heard. Baaqir Zain has been asking about you. I made Ali tell him you moved away.”
Kathmiya had been enjoying her bitterness like the last drops of thick coffee, but that ruined it. “Thanks,” she mumbled.
“Please,” Jamila said with the profound push of her convictions, “trust me. I’m trying.”
This unassailable affection just reminded Kathmiya of everything that was missing. “But why?” she asked. “Why is it always so hard?”
“Go,” Jamila said, as always cleaning everything up when Kathmiya needed her to spill.
“No,” Kathmiya said. “Not until you answer me.”
“Shh,” her mother hushed. “This weekend. I promise.”
“Now.”
“Not here,” Jamila insisted. “At home.”
But Kathmiya didn’t wait until they got home. They were back on the same boat that had taken her to and from work since she was thirteen, but now her feet didn’t dangle off the edge of the trunk; they planted squarely on the wet wooden floor.
“So?”
“Here…?” Jamila asked.
“…and now.”
It all came back to that book. Jamila explained that years before, she had brought Kathmiya as a baby to her job in the city. “We lived with the American missionaries until you were three. They read to you and indulged you and doted on you. You were even learning words in English! No wonder Ali didn’t feel close to you, but I just couldn’t leave you at home, I loved you so much I took you along.”
“What are ‘missionaries’?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is you should be glad. I brought you because you were my baby. But your father didn’t see you so much…so, well.” As if that was an explanation.
“I want to know what missionaries are. And don’t tell me he won’t let me marry because I was away when I wasn’t even old enough to help out around the house. Like he even would have missed me then!”
“They are people who spread the Christian faith,” was Jamila’s partial and useless answer.
“So why does he make sure all the matchmakers and even his brother are afraid to arrange a marriage for me?”
Jamila’s eyes looked anxious, but Kathmiya felt lulled by her mother’s clear tone, as even as the voice of an announcer on the radio.
“You picked up some customs, back there in that foreign household. Asking a lot of questions and expecting lots of attention. Getting your way all the time because they spoiled you. You were—”
Kathmiya recognized her toddler self, wanting a little attention, some answers, the attention she deserved. “I was spoiled? Are you saying I’m so wretched now because people used to answer my questions?”
“There! You just did it again! I was only saying you were different. Ali never got used to it. Eventually, he made me leave that job. The old widow I work for now, at least she’s Iraqi. She had a husband back then, but she was already mean; she wouldn’t let me bring you.”
“So the missionaries ruined me but the mean Iraqi woman didn’t help?”
“Oh, Kathmiya. It wasn’t the job. It was the way they fussed. Let you ask questions and be in everybody’s business and have the run of the whole huge house. They didn’t have their own children, and so you were it. You were the little princess.”
It almost would have been a pleasant story if only Jamila could have stopped right there.
“When I took you home, you weren’t used to our life, never wanted to do chores or keep quiet or know your place. Ali finally swore that as soon as you were old enough, he’d send you back to the city, where you belonged.”
There was only one other person who might help piece together some of this wayward history, and the spoiled, willful, determined girl that Kathmiya was would never get anywhere with her, so she came at Fatimah from a completely different angle.
“You have no idea what it is like to be out and alone while everyone else is embraced by their family,” she began.
It seemed so simple and surefire, like catching a chicken, all squawk and pride when it was really at the mercy of its butchers, but Kathmiya drew only a confused stare.
“Me?”
This wasn’t coy Fatimah, wanting Kathmiya to follow up with, “Of course you, the one who is so much more lucky and cared for than I ever could be.” This was a whole new type of sister than any Kathmiya ever had: hurt and wondering.
“But you’re the one…” Fatimah began.
“I’m the one?” Kathmiya couldn’t even muster a hollow laugh.
“…who our mother worries about and fusses over and always did.”
“Our mother? Our father watches over you and let you marry. Who cares what she does…it makes no difference in a person’s life.” If Fatimah couldn’t understand that, she was worse than a squawking chicken—she was about as smart as the shell of an egg.
“That’s just because he has to make up for, you know, the way she treats me.”
Kathmiya covered her face in her hands before looking up again. “How can I explain this?” she asked. It was like trying to make little Aziza stop from crawling under a bus, the consequences were that enormous and clear to Kathmiya but invisible to her sister. “You got married on the first try. I have a choice between becoming an old maid now or having Baaqir Zain use me up and then send me out to the land of old maids later!”
“I never really thought of it that way,” Fatimah confessed.
If Kathmiya didn’t need information from this woman, she might have smacked her ignorant face. Of course you thought of it that way—you never stopped rubbing it in.
“I mean,” Kathmiya said slowly, “you always, well, bring up the fact that I have to work in the city and sometimes”—sometimes I think you are twisting the dagger that our father stabbed me with—“sometimes I think you know how painful that is. It’s tough being single and working all the time.”
“Yeah, but besides all that—”
“That’s all there is! Don’t you understand? Nothing else matters!”
“—you and our mother talk, you are so close, she fusses about you constantly…I’m back here with crying children and you two are in the city riding horse-drawn carriages and everything.”
“You two talk just as much!”
“Not hardly.” Fatimah sniffed.
Kathmiya threw her head back and stared at the open sky. Had she made watermelon and taxicabs sound that fun?
“Fatimah, I’m so sorry it’s been horrible for you. The truth is, we are very close and we talk a lot.”
“I know!” Fatimah gurgled, trying to evolve up from egg to chicken.
“But there’s one thing she’s never told me, and I was hoping you might know.”
Silence.
“Because you see the world so clearly, you’re my big sister and you understand so much.”
“About the book, right?”
Thanks be to Allah, finally. “Exactly that. What do you know?”
Fatimah shrugged. “Unlucky blue eyes, did you notice?”
Kathmiya remembered Shafiq—the recent Shafiq, who didn’t seem moved by her anymore. The last time they’d said good-bye, she was pouting, and he said, “Don’t worry, there’s nothing in life that can’t be cured with a bit of blue china, or so my mother says.”
“Blue?” she’d blinked. “That brings the jinn.”
“Takes it away,” he corrected with all the conviction of an oarsman who was too tired to row but went through the motions of trying to get a passenger anyway.
“Brings,” she said.
“Whatever,” he’d conceded.
“Whatever,” she’d agreed.
But she couldn’t explain this to Fatimah, so she just asked, “Where did it come from?”
“Those people, those missionaries. I guess they wanted to get rid of the bad luck.”
If blue was good luck in Basra, orange and green paisley might as well be lucky in their land, Kathmiya knew, but try explaining that to her never-left-the-marshes older sis.
“And the bottle?”
“Must have come from someone else—she hated it,” said Fatimah. Kathmiya remembered the sound as it smashed against a rock. So many splinters later, no clues left.
“But don’t lose that dinar,” said Fatimah. “She’s very attached to that.”
Except one. Kathmiya waited.
“She told me it was the ‘only thing she has now.’”
“When did she say that?” Kathmiya asked. And then, before she could stop herself, the words escaped. “And why did she tell you?”
“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Fatimah’s indignation was lit. “One thing she told me that you don’t know, and that’s too much.”
“Sorry—sorry—all I meant was—”
“And that’s all I have to say,” Fatimah announced petulantly.
“Right,” Kathmiya replied, giving up. “I guess we’re even now.”
“Not quite,” her sister huffed.
Kathmiya might be able to read numbers, but she’d never be able to add that one up.