It didn’t take Kathmiya long to find the flag. Although the reproduction in her book was crude to begin with and had faded over time, those stars and stripes were still unmistakably waving on the red, white and blue banner hanging from one of the largest buildings in the Margeel neighborhood. She had put on her burgundy dress, hoping it might convey respectability, and approached the door hugging the flat children’s book.
Although she had already crossed so many lines, Kathmiya still had to steel herself before knocking on the front door. A broad-shouldered man older than her father opened it and boomed mysterious words she guessed were English. Her large eyes widened as she wondered: Is he the one, the one who gave this to my mother so many years before, who she said loved me?
Kathmiya smiled and held up the book. The man didn’t bother to speak even a greeting in Arabic, just harassed her in his language with gestures anyone would understand to mean “get lost.” Pointing to the book’s inscription made no difference; he wouldn’t even acknowledge it with a tilt of his head, instead saying a few more foreign words before turning away.
In desperation, she pulled out the U.S. dinar, hoping to buy some attention. The older, foreign man took the bill and folded it before tucking it back in Kathmiya’s pocket.
The jinn! She ran off with a queasy guilt that it was her fault he had violated her with that frightful touch.
Not the kind man who had helped her mother years before; he couldn’t be.
And then Kathmiya realized all too clearly that she would never find that person now.
She walked along the streets where she once enjoyed some solitude feeling nothing but emptiness. What next?
Her pocket money was running out but if she dipped into the vase, she would be violating her pact with Allah. She should have handed it over to Fatimah when she had the chance.
Worse, no one—not a soul in the world—knew where she was.
The only place for a lone Marsh Arab girl at that hour was the market, and Kathmiya doubled back to the busy street near the diplomatic neighborhood where there were three kinds of yoghurt and four kinds of feta cheese and more camel-themed trinkets than any real Iraqi would ever need. She was no longer stunned, as she had been when she first arrived in Basra so many years before, by the ostentatious variety of the displays, just relieved that amid all the bustle, she could blend in.
But even on the busiest, most cosmopolitan street in Basra, Kathmiya stood out, her unusually large eyes even more stunning against the dark wine dress that she had cut to fit her petite frame. And then there was the vivid emotion etched on her young face, that hurt imbuing her with vulnerable beauty, like an actress whose star shines brighter after she’s lived through real drama in life.
Sitting next to a carpet salesman with her book in her lap, Kathmiya soon felt the strangers watching her, most of them white-skinned like the broad-shouldered man. These were the same looks she had received all of her life: some pitying, some judgmental, but none respectful, none that regarded her as a person. In that moment, as a parade of people looked at the forlorn but pretty Midaan girl sitting near a pile of freshly combed carpets with an incongruous English children’s book at her feet, Kathmiya remembered Shafiq. Only he—he and her mother, but that was different—ever seemed to really see her.
People began offering to buy her book, but Kathmiya just pointed to the inscription and asked, “Wain?”—where?—in response. Where was this benefactor from so long ago?
Finally, one of the women came over with a servant. Kathmiya explained in Arabic that she was not selling the book but looking for the people who had given it to her. The servant then translated to the freckled white woman, who responded in English.
“She asks about your ring,” said the servant in a disinterested tone, glad to lord it over someone even lower on the social ladder.
Kathmiya instinctively touched the stone and shook her head. “Please,” she asked again in Arabic, “can you just show her this?”
When the servant held the book up for the freckled woman to read, Kathmiya covered the ring with her other hand. Everyday sapphires, she had learned from Shafiq, were blue—the most feared color in the marshes, filled with bad luck. But this one was special because it was pink.
The freckled woman had called over a friend, short and round, who read the inscription and then spoke to Kathmiya in crude but serviceable Arabic.
“These people lived here, but they’re long gone.”
Kathmiya remembered nothing of the couple, and knew only the barest facts about their time in Basra, but the grief she felt was overwhelming.
“Where are they now?” she managed to ask.
“Amrika,” came the response.
Of course. America. Just like Shafiq—lost to America. Kathmiya closed the book and was ready to go who-knew-where, when the round woman spoke. “I can show you their home,” she offered kindly.
The house was modest—smaller than Leah and Salim’s—but there, in the doorway, were the two signs Kathmiya had been searching for: the flag and the cross.
A mother, also American, greeted them holding a writhing baby while trying to calm a wailing toddler. She smiled when she saw the book and, using her friend as an interpreter, invited Kathmiya in, telling her the people who had given her the keepsake had been missionaries in Iraq years before.
“Missionaries?” Kathmiya remembered Jamila using that strange word.
“Here to spread the Word of our God. That’s what I’m doing too.”
The baby started to fuss, and Kathmiya, with absolutely no plan for her distant future, knew exactly what to do in that instant. Leaning in to take the child from the exhausted mother, she placed it on her hip and began fluffing pillows while soothing the baby.
Soon the two American women were drinking sweetened black tea that Kathmiya had brewed. They were chattering in English while she lulled the baby to sleep, bathed the toddler, and polished the silverware. And before the plump woman departed without her, Kathmiya was hired.
Leah and Salim’s house had never felt so much like a home to Kathmiya as it did in the two weeks since she had left there for this stone-quiet existence. The new family was unnaturally small, with no relatives and few visitors, but worse than that, their language was so different she was shut out of all conversation. Even her primitive reading skills were useless in a home literate only in English.
But the isolation had its benefits; here she could forget the past. It was as though there were no girl called Kathmiya Mahmoud, with such a complicated history or even a burgundy dress; there was just an anonymous Marsh Arab maid, known only to the two little children who would leave soon and never remember her after. As startling as it was to have lost all of the features of her previous life, she also left behind the parts that shamed her most.
But then the smells became unbearable.
And she felt perpetually sick.
And she realized the bleeding would never come back.
And she remembered Leah’s conversation with Reema and knew, just knew, that one encounter, one terrible mistake, one impossible dream had engendered a human life.
The American missionaries she worked for paid three times as much as Leah and Salim, but they had never even learned Kathmiya’s name, and she left without a look back.
Kathmiya had for too, too long been struggling by herself, and although her throat felt thick as she headed out to see her mother, she also couldn’t wait to confess so that it might finally unblock and let her breathe again.
Jamila, who didn’t even know her daughter had changed jobs, smiled when she saw Kathmiya. “You look well.” After a pause, she asked, “Is there good news?”
Kathmiya thought for a moment. Against her better judgment, she had enjoyed an unfamiliar but unmistakable sense of peace since discovering she was pregnant. It was a muffled happiness but it was there all the same: a certain power.
“I think I’m having a baby.”
The piercing pain was instant. Kathmiya looked down to see Jamila’s nails digging into her wrist. Her mother’s face was steaming with fury, and she drew blood as she pulled her daughter inside, her fingers cutting like stigmata.
Words were gasped out only once they were alone: “How could you have damaged our HONOR?”
Kathmiya had already felt weak from the pregnancy, and now she was stung to the core. There was nothing to say, nothing to do, no way to explain that it was only one lapse—a colossal one—but just one. Because that would not even be true. When did she begin to love Shafiq? As guilty as Kathmiya felt, she also knew that her life would have been different if…
“If only Abuyah would have let me marry,” she protested through the pain.
Jamila’s eyes flashed and she tightened her grip, so that the blood started to drip. The more Kathmiya tried to wrest free, the deeper her mother’s nails dragged into her skin.
“So you tried to find someone yourself? You stupid donkey! You stupid ass of a girl!” She twisted the bleeding arm backward. Kathmiya swallowed her cries back into her packed throat.
“The boy,” she croaked defiantly, “wanted to marry me, but I ran away.”
Jamila laughed maniacally, pulling Kathmiya’s arm at an even more unnatural angle so that the pain stretched from her bleeding wrist to her neck. “He wanted to marry the maid? Ha! And don’t try to tell me you slept with a Midaan; it was someone in Basra. Because one of our tribe would not be good enough for you, would they?”
That pushed Kathmiya straight into the calm eye of the storm. “He would be good enough,” she enunciated like a knife cutting through rope. “He WOULD!” The pain grew worse as her body tensed, sending stinging arrows through her shoulders and neck. But this was nothing compared to the blows her mother’s words struck at her tender, battered heart. “HE WOULD BUT YOU NEVER FOUND ME A MIDAAN!”
Jamila let her nails out of Kathmiya’s flesh but her eyes shot daggers as she spoke. “That. Does. Not. Give. You. Any. Right. To. Sin!”
It was true. And it broke Kathmiya. She finally let the tears out, but her head was bent so low they streamed into her hair. She was beaten, not playing dead to avoid more punishment, but really finished.
“Where is he?”
“In Basra,” Kathmiya said, but through the cloud of her self-abrogation she realized she could be sentencing Shafiq to death if she confessed too much, so she added, “but not for long. He’s going to America.”
It was true, as far as she knew, but saying it to someone else made it real. Shafiq was abandoning her to travel across oceans and learn English and probably forget all of his Arabic and all about her and the baby he would never know.
Kathmiya was so blurred by sadness she didn’t notice the shock on Jamila’s face or the fact that her mother’s questions had suddenly stopped.
The daze started to lift only moments later when she realized Jamila was asking in a foreign, gentle tone, “How far along are you?” When Kathmiya said just a few weeks, her mother nodded.
“Let’s go,” said Jamila, standing. “But no eating—you have to stay thin.”
“Where are we…?”
“To Salwa. Quickly.”
“But…?” Kathmiya held up her arm, where four red stripes trickled from the cuts.
“Cover them, but don’t let them heal,” Jamila advised sternly. “If we’re lucky, you’ll need a handy source of blood.”
Both mother and daughter had no faith in legitimate marriage brokers, but this one, Salwa assured them, was as dishonest as could be. “Every match she gets a commission, and she doesn’t try for much besides forming as many couples as she can before anyone can change their mind.”
The place looked like a tent, sea-green fabrics from India hanging from the center of the ceiling and pinned to its walls. Kathmiya felt like she was in the folds of a belly dancer’s skirt. There were even little bits of shining mirror on the fabric. The dark-purple floor rug was dotted with round yellow and turquoise pillows scattered around. The colors clashed and the overall effect was dizzying.
Salwa was in costume too. “Pay no attention to the maid,” she said when they sat down across from the old woman with tarnished, twisted rings on every finger. “She helps me out since my husband died.”
Jamila sat playing her familiar role: the lowly servant. An insult, but Kathmiya was past the point of pride.
“What a fine young girl!” the old lady said. Her eyes were cloudy with cataracts, almost blue in color, and she stretched out a lumpy finger to pull Kathmiya’s hair off of her face. Used to being exhibited in her search for a husband, Kathmiya didn’t flinch. She was like every camel in the market being judged on its hump.
“Cooks, cleans, sews—and of course she can read and write,” Salwa said, the perfect proud mother.
When Kathmiya and Jamila had gone to Salwa to confess everything, except of course the identity of the lover, she had just listened, nodding with her chin on her fist. Finally she said, “If we have to lie, we will. There’s a life at stake—no, two.”
I’m two, Kathmiya had thought, more amazed than afraid.
Under the sweeping green canopy, she squeezed Salwa’s hand with unaffected emotion that would have convinced anyone they were mother and daughter. But the broker wasn’t paying attention. She was calculating on those misshapen, fat fingers. “I can think of a match immediately,” she said, a small well of foam gathering in the corner of her mouth. “Well off, too—a military man from a good family.”
“And his character?” Salwa asked, like any mother would.
“Oh, he’s good-hearted, very kind, I assure you. Either way, your daughter will have it easy; she’ll be his fourth wife. Three times less work, I always say.”
The woman looked directly into Kathmiya’s beautiful eyes and smiled. Like no marriage broker ever had before.
Still, it could fall through at any second…
“He’s been asking,” said the matchmaker, “for an educated young girl, and he specifically said she must have large, dark eyes…”
They say the same about the camels, thought Kathmiya. In that moment, she couldn’t help but think of Shafiq, who admired her beauty but also saw her intelligence, her spirit, her heart.
“…and just look at your daughter! Perfect.”
“I’m not sure that her father will approve,” said Salwa with manufactured hesitation. Just like with the camels, just like with every transaction in this unregulated, price-free economy, the buyer pretended to be disgruntled. The matchmaker played her part, insisting that the man was rare and good. Salwa kept up the act until the old woman said, “We can set the wedding right away—this week if you like—provided her honor is intact.”
In the split second that passed before anyone spoke, Kathmiya saw it all collapsing—again.
Her future shot—again.
Her hope completely lost—for good.
“Of course,” replied Salwa, and the deal was struck.
It was the moment Kathmiya had been waiting for all of her rushed adult life. And now that it had finally arrived, she felt numb.